Category: Philosophy
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Theological ‘Lock In’ | I Am Not A Gadget | Bad Faith [1]
One of my favourite podcasts is Material World – a science review from the BBC. In a recent episode, Jaron Lanier discussed his recently published manifesto: You Are Not A Gadget. I’ve ordered it, but not read it yet, but was very much taken by one line of thought he introduced in the interview –…
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Alan Turing: Can Machines Think? | Third Way
I’ve a short piece on Alan Turing in this month’s Third Way. If you don’t already subscribe, you should. One of the key strands of Turing’s thinking was on whether a machine could think like a human. After World War 1, where men had been treated like disposable fighting machines, and World War 2, where…
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How to be Happy [2] | Out of the ashes of Communism and Christianity
Thanks for the comments on the post about happiness the other day. I’ve been mulling over the idea of happiness, and why we are perhaps the most unhappy society ever, and linking it to a new direction my thinking seems to be being drawn in. As I’ve written before, I’m really interested in the charred…
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New Year, New Focus | Red Apple, Green Apple
Last year was about writing the book, due out in June. There’ll be more of that here in good time. But I think it’s clearer now what this year’s focus could be. From some of the embers of Vaux a few of us began Apple, a series of conversations around ideas of technology and theology.…
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Befriending Hitler
I’m currently enjoying one of Zizek’s new books, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce – an allusion to Marx’s introduction to his Eighteenth Brumaire in which he wrote: “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great events and characters of world history occur, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the…
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Advent[ures] in #Incarnation [4] | God Looks From the Distorting Human Perspective
Whenever we engage ‘the other’ we have to overcome our fear of doing so. Engagement that holds no such fear is not engagement with an ‘other’; it is easy to love what is lovely – we are called to overcome our fear and love that which is not. As we consider the grounds of the…