Centred on the lives of the employees at a Manhattan advertising firm, the television series Mad Men touches on the advertising world's unique interests in consumerist culture, materialistic desire, and the role of deception in Western capitalism. While this essay collection has a decidedly socio-historical focus, the authors use this as the starting point for philosophical, religious, and theological reflection, showing how Mad Men reveals deep truths concerning the social trends of the 1960s and deserves a significant amount of scholarly consideration. Going beyond mere reflection, the authors make deeper inquiries into what these trends say about American cultural habits, the business world within Western capitalism, and the rapid social changes that occurred during this period. From the staid and conventional early seasons to the war, assassinations, riots, and counterculture of later seasons, The Universe is Indifferent shows how social change underpins the interpersonal dramas of the characters in Mad Men.
"History often provides insight into the present. Consider the American South one hundred and fifty years ago, for example. There, human rights and economic servitude were compressed onto a single domain for black Americans. They became a means of production that could be bought and sold as a commodity. In many parts of the South, it was forbidden to teach blacks to read. Control by law of education, part of culture, was found necessary to subordinate human rights to economics. The domain of rights and economics thus also engulfed culture." -- Joseph Weizenbaum (from the foreword) Culture, politics, economics--these are the three core activities of society; the health of any society depends on a harmonious interaction among these three activities. And, according to Rudolf Steiner, this is impossible unless they are autonomous to the degree that they can each find their own essential character. In his foreword, Joseph Weizenbaum observes that those who framed the United States Constitution understood this--at least partially--when they developed the doctrine of a separate church and state. These essays cover a range of subjects--money, the division of labor, human motivation, and education. They offer refreshing insights into the nature of modern society as well as guidance for solving today's pressing social problems. This book is a translation from German of articles contained in Aufsätze über die Dreigliederung des sozialen Organismus und zur Zeitlage 1915-1921 (GA 24).
Tests the views and metaphor of 19th-century utilitarian philosopher Henry Sidgwick against a variety of contemporary views on ethics, determining that they are defensible and thus providing a defense of objectivism in ethics and of hedonistic utilitarianism.
Robert Lanza is one of the most respected scientists in the world a US News and World Report cover story called him a genius and a renegade thinker, even likening him to Einstein. Lanza has teamed with Bob Berman, the most widely read astronomer in the world, to produce Biocentrism, a revolutionary new view of the universe. Every now and then a simple yet radical idea shakes the very foundations of knowledge. The startling discovery that the world was not flat challenged and ultimately changed the way people perceived themselves and their relationship with the world. For most humans of the 15th century, the notion of Earth as ball of rock was nonsense. The whole of Western, natural philosophy is undergoing a sea change again, increasingly being forced upon us by the experimental findings of quantum theory, and at the same time, toward doubt and uncertainty in the physical explanations of the universes genesis and structure. Biocentrism completes this shift in worldview, turning the planet upside down again with the revolutionary view that life creates the universe instead of the other way around. In this paradigm, life is not an accidental byproduct of the laws of physics. Biocentrism takes the reader on a seemingly improbable but ultimately inescapable journey through a foreign universe our own from the viewpoints of an acclaimed biologist and a leading astronomer. Switching perspective from physics to biology unlocks the cages in which Western science has unwittingly managed to confine itself. Biocentrism will shatter the readers ideas of life--time and space, and even death. At the same time it will release us from the dull worldview of life being merely the activity of an admixture of carbon and a few other elements; it suggests the exhilarating possibility that life is fundamentally immortal. The 21st century is predicted to be the Century of Biology, a shift from the previous century dominated by physics. It seems fitting, then, to begin the century by turning the universe outside-in and unifying the foundations of science with a simple idea discovered by one of the leading life-scientists of our age. Biocentrism awakens in readers a new sense of possibility, and is full of so many shocking new perspectives that the reader will never see reality the same way again.
One Bible, Many Answers In God's Problem, the New York Times bestselling author of Misquoting Jesus challenges the contradictory biblical explanations for why an all-powerful God allows us to suffer.
"There has been a breakdown in American public life that no election can fix. Americans cannot even converse about politics. All the usual explanations for our condition have failed to make things better. Bruce Ledewitz shows that America is living with the consequences of the Death of God, which Friedrich Nietzsche knew would be momentous and irreversible. God was this culture's story of the meaning of our lives. Even atheists had substitutes for God, like inevitable progress. Now we have no story and do not even think about the nature of reality. That is why we are angry and despairing. America's future requires that we begin a new story by each of us asking a question posed by theologian Bernard Lonergan: Is the universe on our side? When we commit to live honestly and fully by our answer to that question, even if our immediate answer is no, America will begin to heal. Beyond that, pondering the question of the universe will allow us to see that there is more to the universe than blind forces and dead matter. Guided by the naturalism of Alfred North Whitehead's process philosophy, and the historical faith of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., we can learn to trust that the universe bends toward justice and our welfare. That conclusion will complete our healing and restore faith in American public life. We can live without God, but not without thinking about holiness in the universe"--
If the physical constants, initial conditions, or laws of nature in our universe had been even slightly different, then the evolution of life would have been impossible. This observation has led many philosophers and scientists to ask the natural next question: why is our universe so "fine-tuned" for life? The debates around this question are wide-ranging, multi-disciplinary, complicated, technical, and (at times) heated. This study is a comprehensive investigation of these debates and the many metaphysical and epistemological questions raised by cosmological fine-tuning. Waller’s study reaches two significant and controversial conclusions. First, he concludes that the criticisms directed at the "multiverse hypothesis" by theists and at the "theistic hypothesis" by naturalists are largely unsuccessful. Neither of these options can plausibly be excluded. Choosing between them seems to turn on primitive (and so hard to justify) metaphysical intuitions. Second, in order to break the philosophical deadlock, Waller moves the debate from the level of universes to the level of possible worlds. Arguing that possible worlds are also "fine-tuned" in an important and interesting sense, Waller concludes that the only plausible explanation for the fine-tuning of the actual world is to posit the existence of some kind of "God-like-thing."
What do we all know? What can we all agree upon as common objective fact as we gaze out at a beautiful sunset, and then turn to observe one animal devouring another? Surely, it's the fact that there is a universe, of some kind. What we postulate and hypothesize beyond that simple fact is where we differ and where the facts become less clear. I have written this book to challenge what appears to me the deeply unjustified faith of the majority around me, Christianity, and to express an alternative that I will argue actually is a justified faith to hold in this world, taking account of all of its facts, which is secular humanism (a belief in the potential of humanity, achieved through reason, science, and compassion). Given the fact that faith in Christianity is still so pervasive, despite its centuries long humbling decline, it will be necessary to spend the majority of this book laying out just how unjustified this faith is. The reasons range from moral to factual, from the content of the history and scripture of the religion to issues of science and the nature of the universe we observe. Throughout my analysis, I will conversely support my contention of the far greater justifiability of the "faith" that I hold, and I will conclude the work by laying it out in full detail. This is my contribution to the dialogue and to progress, and an expression of years of learning and reflection.
Earth. The Final Frontier Contrary to popular belief, Earth is not an insignificant blip on the universe’s radar. Our world proves anything but average in Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay W. Richards’ The Privileged Planet: How Our Place in the Cosmos Is Designed for Discovery. But what exactly does Earth bring to the table? How does it prove its worth among numerous planets and constellations in the vastness of the Milky Way? In The Privileged Planet, you’ll learn about the world’s life-sustaining capabilities, water and its miraculous makeup, protection by the planetary giants, and how our planet came into existence in the first place.
