Yes! While I am not myself an atheist, the idea of "spirituality" or "being spiritual" can describe someone who approaches life with reverence and reflective care regardless of whether they recognize the reality of God. While the idea of "spirituality" emerged with the idea of "spirit" and thus conjures up a background of the supernatural (as in the idea of there being a "Holy Spirit" as part of the Trinity in Christian theology), someone may engage in many of the better or ideal practices we associate with religious tradition (meditation, compassion...) without belonging to any religion. On philosophers who are what I would call spiritual and atheists, you might look at the volume Louise Antony edited: Philosophers without God. Also, see work by Owen Flannagen and Robert Solomon. Keep in mind, too, that most forms of Buddhism are readily recognized as "spiritual" and yet are non-theistic. If you are open to the theistic side of the fence, you might check out Stewart Goetz's latest book with...

Very interesting observation and question! The first amendment is (I believe) customarily treated as what some philosophers call a "negative right." That is, the amendment refers to the duty of government and private citizens to REFRAIN from outlawing or unjustly silencing "voices" that are licit (that is, the people speaking / publishing are not breaking some other precept of justice, e.g. a newspaper uses its prestige to make baseless claims about the outbreak of an epidemic that does not exist causing a mass population to a panic that leads to many preventable deaths). So, initially, it seems the first amendment does not involve a positive right, a right that would entail duties on behalf of people to insure that all voices be heard/ made public. So, in the case you bring up: if a wealthy corporation has broken no laws and (let us imagine) has acquired its wealth justly (from a moral point of view), it seems that the second amendment would not be a sound basis for objecting to their...

Interesting! Your focus on a college may well be more complex than your last example involving the entitlements of taxpayers concerning their government. Concerning the latter, it seems that, at least in a democracy, the taxpayer can join forces with others and control the government through voting. Presumably in most colleges students do not elect their administrators, staff, and faculty, but they can do a vote of no-confidence in the administration through their student governing body (usually a senate), and often student evaluations are taken seriously in the hiring and tenuring of faculty. Concerning your specific example, you refer to "a group of students" contending that their petition for divesting the college's funds from (for example) supporting arms manufacturing based on the grounds that the funds themselves are generated by the students. In that case, I think you make a good point about cases of when the funding is not tuition-driven. But I suggest that students do not always or often...

Good question. There have been at least two lines of reasoning that have some following among philosophers. The first consists of seeking to object to the positive reasons that are advanced for vegetarianism and against raising animals for food. So, Peter Singer initially built his case for vegetarianism on a utilitarian foundation to the effect that raising animals and killing them causes undeserved suffering. Arguably, however, it seems that he would not have a strong reason to object to painless killing. And if you breed animals who have happy lives, there might even be a utilitarian reason for having large numbers of animals that then meet a painless end. A second kind of argument has been launched by R.G. Frey (who, sadly, died last year), Peter Carruthers, and others that animals lack morally relevant interests. Frey and Carruthers argue for this on the grounds that animals lack language. The argument is quite controversial as it is based on the view that there cannot be non-linguistic...

Good question and set of concerns. I gather you are dismayed by how some persons' faith may seem irresistible to counter-evidence. I suppose an analogy would be a case when I continue to trust my husband is a good man on the grounds that he sometimes demonstrably cares for me and I explain the times that he neglects or seems to injure me on the grounds that he must be so very wise that his action or inaction is actually good for me. That's a problem. When it comes to reflecting on God in response to your concerns, perhaps three points are worth considering. First, according to the major theistic traditions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, God is a reality that is omnipresent and immanent to creation, but also the transcendent creator and sustainer of the cosmos. So the concept of God seems vastly to outstrip any ordinary, finite agent. So, when reflecting on God we should think not of the ethical ways of finite creatures but, as it were, the values that would be in play if there is a Creator...

Thank you for this request for connections or routes into philosophy as a practice! The first thing I suggest is engaging in philosophy with a friend --whether this is someone who is just starting out or someone who has been practicing philosophy for many years (either on their own or professionally or in connection with others, whether this involves a formal institution like a university or not). If you do connect with another person on this entryway you may only shift in your question or request from "I have tried..." and "I get..." and "I'm missing..." to "We have tried..." and "We get.." and "We're missing..." but the practice of philosophy is (I suggest) enhanced when it involves more than one person (unless the other person is immensely arrogant and closed minded!). Dialogue, after all, was the format of the majority of Plato's work, and today most philosophers (professional or otherwise) see themselves as part of a community of inquiry. Perhaps a "community" that includes both the living...

Very compelling question. I see your point, but will try my best in response. Probably a panelist should reply who has more first-hand experience in this area (I have not yet killed anyone with chemical agents, wooden sticks, iron bars, and such), but I suspect that what makes some weapons such as chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons of special concern is that they are both more difficult to control (and hence more likely than conventional weapons for indiscriminate damage / harm) and they are part of a family of weapons that puts one on a slippery slope. So, for example, if North Korea launched a preemptive strike against the South, and the USA and South Korea in response used a small, contained nuclear bomb launched with great precision against the invaders and avoided any civilian casualties, this would open the door for the North to use a not-so-small nuclear weapon, perhaps going after civilian as well as military targets. There is another reason that may come into play: as odd as it may...

Greetings to you. For the last decade, you might want to logon to the British Journal of Aesthetics and the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. The latest topics seem to be a continuation of the classical questions: what is beauty? what is the meaning of a work of art (does the intention of the artist bear on this question)? The difference between art and non-art continues to be vexing, there is new work on the theory of the meaning of music (on this point, I highly recommend the work of Lydia Goehr at Columbia University--perhaps check out her home page for references). Noel Carroll continues to do brilliant work exploring almost every area of the art world and experimenting with what might be called beyond aesthetics in terms of works of art. There is an interesting cross-over in philosophy of art and philosophy of religion in such books as The Image in Mind and Turning Images, and in the work of David Brown, Mark Wynn, and Douglas Hedley. Pragmatism in art has made something of a come-back...

Hello Jude! To begin with your last question, some argue the persons have a right to take their own life or allowed to die (when this might be prevented if there was medical intervention) based on the idea that a person owns her or himself or, more specifically, a person owns his or her body. I suppose this might involve an appeal to bodily integrity insofar as this line of reasoning appeals to the notion that a person has a wholeness or an unimpeded right to do what she wants with her body. In many and perhaps most countries we do not legally allow persons to do anything at all with their bodies, even if no harm comes to others. In the USA, there are limits even when use of the body would benefit others. I cannot go to a hospital in my country and offer to donate all my organs to those in need. Well, I physically can do this, but if I demonstrate to a hospital that I am sane and a free agent and request "Please harvest all my organs now!" I will be politely turned down lest the hospital be...

Great question. The logical positivists (A.J. Ayer is the most well known in this camp or movement) advanced a principle of meaning according to which for a statement to be meaningful it had to be (in principle) verifiable. There were a number of variations of this principle, including the thesis that a statement is meaningful if and only if it was falsifiable. They also allowed that analytic statements (squares are rectangles) statements are meaningful. The verification or falsification was presumed to involve empirical experience and, for many logical positivists like Moritz Schlick, this meant essentially scientific observations and inference. Logical positivists claimed that theistic religious language (God created and sustains the cosmos in being) do not meet this test of meaningfulness. Several problems arose: first it seems that some apparently meaningful scientific statements about cosmology and unobservable particles would not meet this test of meaningfulness. Second, it was not clear that...