PhilosopherEagle

Act I of Joss Whedon's new musical is up: http://www.drhorrible.com/

You'll love Nathan Fillion's entrance!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/wales/7489457.stm

http://crookedtimber.org/2007/12/08/kant-attack-ad/

This is interesting: http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,22556281-661,00.html

I can only see the dancer turning clockwise.

I would love to give someone this thing as a birthday present: Toilet Throne

According to a recent news story, life expectancy in the US is still on the rise, but many other countries are now surpassing us. Two decades ago we ranked 11th in life expectancy; now we rank 42nd. What explains this slip? This story reports: "Researchers said several factors have contributed to the United States falling behind other industrialized nations. A major one is that 45 million Americans lack health insurance, while Canada and many European countries have universal health care, they say."

What a load of BS. Someone, whether a researcher or a journalist, is clearly just trying to push his own propaganda through every news story possible. If Americans took care of their own bodies, I wager that we would easily rank in the top ten in life expectancy. Most people don't need expensive prescription drugs or life-saving operations in order to live into their 80s--not if they eat right and exercise. The problem is that they don't. Health insurance has nothing to do with it. Putting obese people on drugs won't do much to improve our standings in the rankings.

If I were a communist, I would suggest that we socialize gym memberships before socializing medicine.

But I'm not a communist.

"The Great Global Warming Swindle" on Google Video

If you have about an hour to spare, this documentary is worth watching in full. It's a mixed bag scientifically, I think, so I would suggest reading a response to it, available at http://www.cpi.cam.ac.uk/gore/pdf/GWS%20Scientific%20Responses3.pdf.

I uploaded my two term papers for this quarter to my website at http://philosophereagle.googlepages.com/workinprogress. I think they're good papers, overall. They were written in a hurry, though, so there are sure to be problems with them. With the Kant paper, in fact, I basically went from selecting a topic to turning in the paper in the span of about 48 hours (during which I spent about five hours sleeping, four hours with softball and a picnic, and just about the remaining 39 hours all at my desk working).

"Ron Paul on dissent in a time of war." on Google Video
Ron Paul's speech in the House of Representatives on 5/22/07.

This just in: Fox is going to show the final two episodes of Drive back to back on July 4 beginning at 8 pm.

Drive is available for download from iTunes now.

The first episodes of Drive are now available for download from Amazon Unbox. Give the show a try! It looks very promising so far.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000PH2DTE/ref=atv_dp_ep_series/103-1056304-3310207?ie=UTF8&season=1

I've found a blog that is amazingly fun and useful: http://www.typetive.com/candyblog/ .

My Nietzsche paper is coming along better than I feared it would. Well, I only have two paragraphs, but at least I feel like I have something to say. (I have a brief outline.) When I woke up this morning, I didn't feel that way. Anyway, here are my first two paragraphs:

The injunction to become who or what one is appears in several places throughout Nietzsche’s corpus , and the subtitle to Ecce Homo—“How One Becomes What One Is”—even suggests that the work is a guidebook of sorts for those who want to live up to the Nietzschean injunction. While the phrase has an inspiring sound to it, it is not obvious what it means. Alexander Nehamas complicates matters, whether rightly or wrongly, by suggesting that two of the most tempting readings—the Freudian and the Aristotelian—simply cannot be right, because they would contradict the fundamentals of Nietzsche’s philosophy. According to his alternative reading, self-creation—the process of becoming who one is—is simply the “identif[ication of] oneself with all of his one’s actions.” To become who one is to accept all of one’s actions as one’s own, to want nothing to be different.
After a consideration of Nehamas’ arguments, I will argue that he fails to offer adequate support for his reading. The Freudian and the Aristotelian readings can be rendered such that they are consistent with Nietzsche’s philosophy. Nehamas’ reading, on the other hand, does contradict Nietzsche’s philosophy: it contradicts his account of human psychology as well as his account of his own self-creation which he offers in Ecce Homo. For these reasons, I will suggest that the simpler, more obvious reading may, after all, be the superior one.

My paper on Berkeley is somewhat rough (I wrote 14 pages in two and a half days...how could it not be?), so I'm just going to post the first paragraph. If for some reason you're interested, I can e-mail you the rest.

Thomas Reid observed that Berkeley deserves some credit, for his "conclusions are justly drawn from the doctrine of ideas, which has been so universally received.” In this paper, I will defend this evaluation of Berkeley. I take his arguments for idealism and immaterialism to be much more successful than generally thought. Muehlmann, for instance, argues that Berkeley is able to refute naïve materialism, but has to resort to ridicule when discussing the more sophisticated materialism of the representational realist. I will argue, to the contrary, that Berkley has valid arguments for idealism and immaterialism which depend only on premises that were (and still are) nearly universally accepted among philosophers, including Locke and the representational realists. I will join Reid in drawing the lesson from this fact that, assuming idealism and immaterialism are themselves false, at least one of those premises must be false. In particular, we should question the premise—call it the immediacy premise—that the only immediate objects of perception are ideas, and we should replace this premise with some kind of direct realism.

Here is a perceptive article which argues that the government ought not to mandate that evolution be taught in schools. I agree with much of the article. Unfortunately, it doesn't mention the solution to the problem: we have to eliminate public education. (As long as public schools do exist, we have to allow the voters to determine their course, subject to constitutional limitations.)

Joss Whedon no longer involved with Wonder Woman movie.

Go here to see a preview of season eight of Buffy, written by Joss Whedon.

Okay, so it's a comic book, but it's still season eight of Buffy and written by Joss Whedon.

Also, I stopped to see the new Edward Norton movie, The Painted Veil, on my way home from the university today. Great film.

The new Rocky movie is wonderfully written. I highly recommend it.

I wrote this paper in a hurry, and it needs some polishing. I like it as is, though, so I'm posting it.
( Karl Popper's Defense of Science )</font>
</span></p></div></div>