Issue 35: March/April 2002

EDITORIAL

News: March/April 2002

Chomsky to the Rescue • French Philo Sent to Kabul • What’s Bugging Jeremy Bentham? • Iran Hosts Human Rights Conference

HERESY

Cutting God in Half

Nicholas Maxwell on the urgent need to dissect the Deity.

Pluralism: The Many Maps Model

Mary Midgley says that branches of knowledge are like maps – each answers a different set of questions so they can’t necessarily all be ‘reduced’ to physics.

Taming the Skeptical Dragon

Toni Vogel Carey on a misunderstanding between her Aunt Polly and René Descartes.

The Blasphemy of Saint Augustine

James Hale argues that the Holy Spirit is feminine and that the Trinity is a mirror of the nuclear human family.

The Meaning of Life

Daniel Hill argues that without God, life would be meaningless.

Why Spinoza?

Richard Mason on a thinker who stood at the intersection of many histories and traditions.

ARTICLES

Can Philosophy Rescue the Art World?

When you cut up a work of art, do you destroy it or create lots of smaller works of art? Michael Philips investigates.

Cherchez la Femme?

Not in France’s Fortress Philosophy, says Jacqueline Swartz.

The Uses and Abuses of Philosophical Biographies

Tim Madigan on the Lives of the Great Saints (not!).

OBITUARIES

After a decade teaching philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Simon Blackburn recently returned to Britain, to a professorship at Cambridge University. Filiz Peach caught up with him in London to ask him about his ideas and his priorities.

LETTERS

Letters

The Conversion of Lewis • Heaven and Earth • Disgusted of SE14 • What Do Women Know? • Virtuous Thoughts • An Acrobat Writes • SF: Two Gurus Write • SF: A Body Snatcher Writes • Darwinian Politics? • The Moon Illusion • Does Science Close Philosophical Doors?

COLUMNS

Dear Socrates

Having returned from the turn of the Fourth Century B.C. to the turn of the Twenty-First A.D., Socrates has eagerly signed on as a Philosophy Now columnist so that he may continue to carry out his divinely-inspired dialogic mission.

Pons Asinorum

by Joel Marks

REVIEWS

Simone Weil by Francine du Plessix Gray

When the brilliant, tragic Simone Weil died in 1943, she was only 34, but her ideas still inspire. Martin Andic ponders a new biography by Francine du Plessix Gray.

Nosferatu

What dark secrets can vampires reveal to us about German Romanticism? Behind the rows of screaming teenagers sits Scott O’Reilly, with a bag of popcorn and the collected works of Friedrich Schelling.

FICTION

Religious Guidance

Radio personality Dr Laura Schlessinger is a chat show phenomenon, dispensing advice to the thousands of callers and millions of regular listeners to her show. She recently ran into controversy for her outspoken Biblically-based criticisms of homosexuality. The following open letter to Dr Laura appeared on the internet…

Kant’s Day Off

A short story about the Sage of Königsberg by Heather Reyes.

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