This is CNN

The current headline on the CNN website reads, "Giant lizards kill unsuspecting fishermen."

By contrast, the current headline on BBC - which, I will remind you, is a British news agency - is, "US to boost Mexico border defence."

I've had it with CNN. They limit their headlines almost exclusively to US news, no matter how trivial - except, of course, when they hear of a couple Komodo dragon attacks in Indonesia, which they parlay into a banner headline exaggerating the phenomenon to Godzilla proportions.

Philosophy Quotations Explained: "I think, therefore I am"

"The proposition, I am, I exist, is necessarily true whenever it is put forward by me or conceived in my mind."
- Rene Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, II.

"Ego cogito, ergo sum..."
- Rene Descartes, Principles of Philosophy, Part 1, Article 7

"I think, therefore I am," is perhaps the most famous quote from all of modern philosophy. When the quote is taken out of context, however, it may seem that Descartes is magically thinking himself into existence, or that he's making some snooty statement about the philosopher's raison d'etre - that the meaning of life is to think.

This latter misinterpretation is spread further by witty slogans on t-shirts and bumper stickers advertising all sorts of hobbies - e.g., "I ski, therefore I am."

But Descartes wasn't talking about how much he liked thinking. He was actually trying to establish the foundations of knowledge - what we can know with certainty.

In his Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes's project is to find some fundamental proposition that is beyond doubt, and then use it as a starting point from which to derive everything that we know. Descartes writes:

All that I have, up to this moment, accepted as possessed of the highest truth and certainty, I received either from or through the senses. I observed, however, that these sometimes misled us; and it is the part of prudence not to place absolute confidence in that by which we have even once been deceived. (Meditations, I.)

Descartes goes on to point out that everything we perceive is subject to doubt, because we could be dreaming, or our thoughts could even be subject to the manipulations of an evil demon (think a 17th-century version of the Matrix).

So given that our senses always can be deceiving us, can we know anything with certainty? Yes, Descartes says: we know, with certainty, that we are thinking. Even if we are dreaming - even if we're trapped in the Matrix and don't know it - we at least know that we are thinking. And because we know we are thinking, we know that we - in some manner or form - exist. I think, therefore I am. Cogito ergo sum.

Philosophers since his day have split a lot of epistemological hairs over the Cogito and whether it actually proves what Descartes wants it to prove. But his radical project of doubting everything, and applying mathematical logic to problems of knowledge and reality, still makes Descartes the father of modern philosophy.

A Sad Case

BBC: Vatican backs abortion row bishop

A senior Vatican cleric has defended the excommunication in Brazil of the mother and doctors of a young girl who had an abortion with their help.

The nine-year-old had conceived twins after alleged abuse by her stepfather.

"It is a sad case but the real problem is that the twins conceived were two innocent persons, who had the right to live and could not be eliminated," [a Cardinal of the Church] said.

"Life must always be protected."

And the nine-year-old girl? Is she not an innocent person? Why doesn't her life deserve protection?

This girl was raped, and trying to carry the pregnancy to term clearly would have threatened her life and compounded her psychological trauma.

And yet, the Catholic Church, that model of moral probity, insists that the right thing to do - the will of a just and beneficent God - would have been to force the nine-year-old girl to risk her life birthing the fruit of her rape.

Where in the Bible does it say that a person's life should be subordinated to the preservation of a fetus? For that matter, where in the Bible does it talk about the 'rights' of the unborn at all? Oh, right - Thou Shalt Not Kill. Even though the Man Upstairs Himself likes to kill people according to divine whim.

This is why religion is dangerous. It takes faith to consider oneself an ethical role model while arguing that a raped nine-year-old should die giving birth to her stepfather's child.

Philosophy Quotations Explained: "God is Dead"

After Buddha was dead, his shadow was still shown for centuries in a cave—a tremendous, gruesome shadow. God is dead; but given the way of men, there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown.— And we—we still have to vanquish his shadow, too!
- Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Book III

God is dead. - Nietzsche
Nietzsche is dead. - God
- Bumper Sticker

This is one of the best-known of Nietzsche's aphorisms, and is one of the strongest statements of atheism in history. Nietzsche's contempt for religion is infamous, and this is simply the most pithy among many atheistic statements he made in his writings.

But pronouncing the death of God seems like a contradictory way to assert atheism. After all, if God is dead, that means that he used to be alive, doesn't it? And therefore Nietzsche seems to be shooting himself in the foot - in declaring God's death, isn't he implicitly acknowledging God's existence?

It's this mistaken reading that's reflected in the bumper sticker above. (Although Nietzsche himself probably would have gotten a kick out of that joke, he probably would have retorted with something like, "How convenient to believe in someone who doesn't exist - you can put whatever words in his mouth you like!")

The problem with the popular interpretation of "God is dead" is that it takes Nietzsche's aggressive rhetoric literally. Nietzsche is as famous for his rhetorical flourishes as he is for his atheism, and although this makes him enormous fun to read, it also can lead to misunderstandings like this.

By "God is dead," Nietzsche means to call attention to a cultural fact: that like the gods of ancient Greece, the Judeo-Christian God has lost his ethical power and philosophical importance. Since the Enlightenment, science has replaced religion as the only responsible way to explain worldly phenomena, and ethical systems have become less and less dependent on religious imperatives. Although Nietzsche criticized the Enlightenment values too, he was firm in asserting that the vestigial worldviews of religion are an obstruction to personal, intellectual, and cultural growth.

In another section of the Gay Science, Nietzsche tells the story of a madman who proclaims that "God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him!" We have killed God, because we have rejected - or perhaps outgrown - the worldview into which God and religion fit. Now that God is dead, our challenge is to replace him with a worldly, human ideal, and to supplant religion's conventional morality with a new, personal ethic that makes no claim to objectivity.

So "God is dead" should be understood as a powerful metaphor, not a literal claim about theological mortality. And although Nietzsche is physically dead, it's he who has the last laugh: in the world of ideas, he remains as relevant as ever.

Philosophy Quotations Explained: Introduction

Because most people do not read philosophy, a philosopher's popular reputation - if he or she has one at all - is usually based upon one or two famous aphorisms. Too often, those aphorisms are torn from context, and the original ideas behind them come to be distilled or distorted.

In this series of posts I will reexamine some well-known but frequently misunderstood philosophy quotations, using careful reading and consideration of context to explore what the philosopher really meant.

For starters, here's an incomplete list of quotations on which I plan to post.

Aristotle: "Man is by nature a political animal."
Descartes: "I think, therefore I am."
Rousseau: "Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains."
Hegel: "What is real is rational."
Hegel: "The owl of Minerva spreads her wings only with the falling of dusk."
Darwin: "To suppose that the eye... could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree."
Marx: "Religion is the opiate of the people."
Marx: "Workers of the world, unite!"
Nietzsche: "God is dead."
Nietzsche: "What does not kill me makes me stronger."
Sartre: "Hell is other people."
Sartre: "Everyone gets the war that he deserves."

Recommendations for additional quotes are welcome!