Bernie or Bust is just Bonkers by Charles Blow in NYT on 3/31/16

Bernie Sanders’s surrogate Susan Sarandon went on MSNBC’s “All in With Chris Hayes” earlier this week and said something that made folks’ jaws drop.

When Hayes asked Sarandon whether Sanders’s supporters would vote for Hillary Clinton if Clinton won the Democratic nomination, this exchange followed:

SARANDON: I think Bernie probably would encourage people because he doesn’t have any ego. I think a lot of people are, sorry, I can’t bring myself to do that.

HAYES: How about you personally?

SARANDON: I don’t know. I’m going to see what happens.

HAYES: Really?

SARANDON: Really.

HAYES: I cannot believe as you’re watching the, if Donald Trump…

SARANDON: Some people feel Donald Trump will bring the revolution immediately if he gets in then things will really, you know, explode.

HAYES: You’re saying the Leninist model of…

SARANDON: Some people feel that.

(I don’t generally use the Republican front-runner’s name in my columns, but I must present the quote as transcribed. Sorry.)

What was Sarandon talking about with her coy language? “Bring the revolution”? Exactly what kind of revolution? “Explode”? Was the purpose to present this as a difficult but ultimately positive development?

The comments smacked of petulance and privilege.

No member of an American minority group — whether ethnic, racial, queer-identified, immigrant, refugee or poor — would (or should) assume the luxury of uttering such a imbecilic phrase, filled with lust for doom.

But I don’t doubt that she has met “some people” with a Bernie-or-bust, scorched-earth electoral portentousness. As The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this month, “A new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll indicates one third of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders’ supporters cannot see themselves voting for Hillary Clinton in November.”

Be absolutely clear: While there are meaningful differences between Clinton and Sanders, either would be a far better choice for president than any of the remaining Republican contenders, especially the demagogic real estate developer. Assisting or allowing his ascendance by electoral abstinence in order to force a “revolution” is heretical.

This position is dangerous, shortsighted and self-immolating.

If Sanders wins the nomination, liberals should rally round him. Conversely, if Clinton does, they should rally round her.

This is not a game. The presidency, particularly the next one, matters, and elections can be decided by relatively small margins. No president has won the popular vote by more than 10 percentage points since Ronald Reagan in 1984.

When Al Gore ran against George W. Bush in 2000, some claimed that a vote for Gore was almost the same as a vote for Bush and encouraged people to cast protest votes for Ralph Nader. Sarandon supported Nader during that election. Bush became president, and what did we get? Two incredibly young, incredibly conservative justices, John G. Roberts Jr. and Samuel A. Alito Jr., who will be on the court for decades, and two wars — in Afghanistan and Iraq — that, together, lasted over a decade.

In addition to setting the tone and direction of the country, the president has some constitutional duties that are profound and consequential. They include being commander in chief, making treaties and appointing judges, including, most importantly, justices to the Supreme Court. Bush demonstrated the consequences of that.

The real estate developer is now talking carelessly about promoting nuclear proliferation and torture (then there’s Ted Cruz’s talk of carpet bombing and glowing sand).

And, there is a vacancy on the Supreme Court. Not only that, but as of Tuesday, there were also 84 federal judiciary vacancies with 49 pending nominees.

The question of who makes those appointments matters immensely.

As Jeffrey Toobin pointed out in The New Yorker in 2014:

“When Obama took office, Republican appointees controlled ten of the thirteen circuit courts of appeals; Democratic appointees now constitute a majority in nine circuits. Because federal judges have life tenure, nearly all of Obama’s judges will continue serving well after he leaves office.”

Furthermore, Toobin laid out the diversity of the Obama transformation, writing:

“Sheldon Goldman, a professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and a scholar of judicial appointments, said, ‘The majority of Obama’s appointments are women and nonwhite males.’ Forty-two percent of his judgeships have gone to women. Twenty-two percent of George W. Bush’s judges and 29 percent of Bill Clinton’s were women. Thirty-six percent of President Obama’s judges have been minorities, compared with 18 percent for Bush and 24 percent for Clinton.”

And beyond war and courts, there is the issue of inclusion.

Take Obama’s legacy on gay rights. He signed the bill repealing “don’t ask, don’t tell.” And in 2012, Obama became the first sitting president to support same-sex marriage. Last year, Obama became the first president to say “lesbian,” “transgender” and “bisexual” in a State of the Union speech.

Of more substance, according to the Gay & Lesbian Victory Institute:

“To date, the Obama-Biden Administration has appointed more than 250 openly LGBT professionals to full-time and advisory positions in the executive branch; more than all known LGBT appointments of other presidential administrations combined.”

There is no reason to believe that this level of acceptance would continue under the real estate developer’s administration. In fact, the Huffington Post Queer Voices editor at large Michelangelo Signorile wrote an article in February titled, “No, LGBT People Aren’t Exempt from Donald Trump’s Blatant Bigotry,” responding to a trending idea that the Republican front-runner wasn’t as bad for queer people as other Republican candidates:

“It’s absolutely false — he’s as extreme as Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, and will do nothing for LGBT rights — and it’s time to disabuse the media and everyone else of this notion once and for all.”

Then there are all the other promises — threats? — the real estate developer has made. He has said he would deport all undocumented immigrants, build a border wall between the United States and Mexico, end birthright citizenship, dismantle Obamacare and replace it with something “terrific” (whatever that means), defund Planned Parenthood and temporarily ban most foreign Muslims from coming to this country, among other things.

There is no true equivalency between either of the Democratic candidates and this man, and anyone who make such a claim is engaging in a repugnant, dishonorable scare tactic not worth our respect.

It is unfortunate for Sanders, who seems infinitely sober and sensible, that some of his surrogates and supporters present themselves as absolutist and doctrinaire. As Sanders himself has said, “on her worst day, Hillary Clinton will be an infinitely better candidate and president than the Republican candidate on his best day.”

The New York Times Upshot even pointed out last May that Sanders and Clinton “voted the same way 93 percent of the time in the two years they shared in the Senate” and in many of the cases in which Clinton voted differently from Sanders, “she voted with an overwhelming majority of her colleagues, including Republicans.”

That doesn’t mean that those differing votes weren’t significant. They were. As the Upshot put it, the 31 times they disagreed “happened to be” on some of “the biggest issues of the day, including measures on continuing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, an immigration reform bill and bank bailouts during the depths of the Great Recession.”

And yet those differences hardly bring either candidate anywhere close to being as frightening as the specter of the real estate developer assuming the office of president of the United States.

Elections are about choices, not always between a dream candidate and a dreaded one, but sometimes between common sense and catastrophe. Progressives had better remember this come November, no matter who the Democratic nominee is.

I invite you to join me on Facebook and follow me on Twitter, or e-mail me at chblow@nytimes.com.

Alexander Alter wrote about the author of "Luckiest Girl Alive" in NYT

By every conventional measure, Jessica Knoll’s thriller, “Luckiest Girl Alive,” was a wildly successful literary debut. It sold more than 450,000 copies and spent four months on the best-seller lists. Foreign rights sold in more than 30 countries. The actress Reese Witherspoon optioned the film rights, and Ms. Knoll wrote the screenplay.

Still, Ms. Knoll couldn’t escape the nagging feeling that she had let her readers down. Even though her book was fiction, she felt she hadn’t fully told the truth.

The white lie she told over and over, at readings and book signings and in interviews, was complicated and hard to untangle. She assured fans that some of the darker elements of her novel, which centers on a successful young woman who struggles with the lingering trauma of a sexual assault, were purely fiction. She deflected questions from readers who wanted to know how she had managed to portray a rape and its aftermath so vividly and realistically, saying she had heard stories from friends and classmates.

She is no longer dodging those questions. On Tuesday, Ms. Knoll published a raw and chilling essay describing how the gang rape depicted in her novel was drawn from her own experience in high school, when she was sexually assaulted by three boys at a party, and then tormented by classmates who labeled her a slut.

“I was so conditioned to not talk about it that it didn’t even occur to me to be forthcoming,” Ms. Knoll said during a recent interview at her publisher’s office in Midtown Manhattan. “I want to make people feel like they can talk about it, like they don’t have to be ashamed of it.”

In the essay, published on Lenny, a newsletter and website for young women, Ms. Knoll described how some of the most harrowing and horrific scenes in her novel came from her fragmented memories of a party that went devastatingly wrong: blacking out and then regaining consciousness when a boy was assaulting her; waking up later in a bathroom, seeing a toilet bowl of blood-tinged water, and not understanding where it came from; finding herself in a strange bed the next morning beside a different boy, who laughed it off as a wild night; going to a clinic for emergency contraception and asking the doctor if what happened to her counted as rape, and feeling stunned when the doctor said she wasn’t qualified to answer the question.

The essay sparked a flood of supportive messages on social media from readers who thanked Ms. Knoll for coming forward.

It wasn’t until she was in her early 20s and in counseling that her therapist helped define what had happened. “I was so young that it was very hard to make sense of it,’’ she said, adding: “I didn’t want to talk about it. I didn’t want to deal with it.’’

Ms. Knoll, 32, grew up in a Roman Catholic family in the Philadelphia suburbs, and attended the Shipley School, a prestigious prep institution. She read Sylvia Plath and Flannery O’Connor and dreamed of becoming a writer.

Before she was assaulted, Ms. Knoll was a happy, social 15-year-old who played sports and was on the dance team. Afterward, she said, she shut down and felt crushingly isolated, unable to connect even with friends. Some classmates taunted her and scrawled “trash slut” inside her locker.

“No one was treating me like a victim; they were treating me like I was a perpetrator, like I was getting what I deserved,” she said.

She added: “The message I internalized was that nothing bad happened; you did something wrong.”

Ms. Knoll said that she took no action against her attackers, who never suffered any consequences. She does not name them in the essay. Shaming them is not the point, she said.

“It’s not directed at them,” she said. “It’s more like, ‘I’m going to tell the story this time.’ This is a very empowering thing for me to be able to say, actually, this is what happened to me, and to take ownership of my own narrative.”

In college, as an English major at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, N.Y., she tried to reinvent herself. Still, she could never bring herself to let loose at parties the way her friends and classmates did. She was too scared.

After graduating, she moved to New York City and took an internship at Parenting magazine, then worked as an editorial assistant at Popular Science. From there, she moved to Cosmopolitan, where she rose through the ranks to become a senior editor.

While at Cosmo, Ms. Knoll began writing “Luckiest Girl Alive.” She decided to use fiction to address her high school trauma.

“I knew I wanted to write about that in some way, because it was such a visceral experience that stayed with me my whole life,” she said.

“Luckiest Girl Alive” is narrated by TifAni FaNelli, an ambitious 28-year-old editor at a women’s magazine who writes sex columns and is obsessed with projecting a perfect image. Her life is derailed when she participates in a documentary about her high school, and is forced to confront the rage she has carried with her since she was raped as a teenager. The novel toggles between past and present, and takes a shocking, violent turn in the middle when a second crime devastates the school.

After Simon & Schuster published “Luckiest Girl Alive” last May, Ms. Knoll was flooded with messages from women who said they had endured traumas similar to TifAni’s. Many said they were comforted by the dedication page of the book, which reads: “To all the TifAni FaNellis of the world. I know.”

Those messages prompted Ms. Knoll to wonder why she had kept silent.

With another big book tour on the horizon — she is traveling to 16 cities to promote the paperback this spring — she decided to stop hiding behind her fictional creation. In January, she contacted Jessica Grose, editor of Lenny, the email newsletter and website started by the actress and writer Lena Dunham and “Girls” showrunner Jenni Konner, and pitched an essay about how she drew on her experience for her novel.

In an email, Ms. Dunham said that she was “honored” to publish the essay. “This word is overused but the piece is the definition of brave,” she said.

There have been hard moments for Ms. Knoll, both in reliving that awful night and in the painful conversations with friends and family that have followed. Her younger brother never knew what happened to her until he read about it in her novel, she said.

In her professional life, Ms. Knoll had been discreet about the autobiographical threads of her novel.

“We were all shocked and moved by what we read,” Jonathan Karp, president and publisher of Simon & Schuster, said in response to the essay. “It’s a little bit like finding out something about a friend that you never knew, and it makes you respect them even more for their strength and their character.”

There is also relief. A few months ago, Ms. Knoll attended a book event in New Jersey, where a woman asked her if she had interviewed rape victims while researching the novel. For the first time, Ms. Knoll answered honestly.

“I said, ‘Yeah, that happened to me,’” Ms. Knoll said. “It was kind of like, ‘Why have I waited so long to say that? What was so hard about that?’”

Words of Wisdom

Un homme sage a dit peu, écouter beaucoup, 
Chambres duplique, regardez, il demanda. 
Avant la voie de la sagesse douce 
Fabriqué sur une étape, l'accès routier large 
Les histoires de gens, ne disent pas faire à 
Son histoire, donc il sait la nouvelle sagesse.

Sexual Politics by David Brooks of the NYT 3/30/16

In the middle of the Civil War a colonel named Robert McAllister from the 11th Regiment of New Jersey tried to improve the moral fiber of his men. A Presbyterian railroad contractor in private life, he lobbied and preached against profanity, drinking, prostitution and gambling. Some of the line officers in the regiment, from less genteel backgrounds, rebelled.

They formed an organization called the Independent Order of Trumps. In sort of a mischievous, laddie way, the Trumps championed boozing and whoring, cursing and card-playing.

In her book “The Gentlemen and the Roughs,” Lorien Foote notes that this wasn’t just a battle over pleasure. It was a contest between two different ideals of masculinity. McAllister’s was based on gentlemanly chivalry and self-restraint. Trumpian masculinity was based on physical domination and sexual conquest. “Perceptions of manliness were deeply intertwined with perceptions of social status,” Foote writes.

And so it is today.

These days we’re living through another great redefinition of masculinity. Today, both men and women are called upon to live up to the traditional ideals of both genders. So the ideal man, at least in polite society, gracefully achieves a series of balances. He is steady and strong, but also verbal and vulnerable. He is emotionally open and willing to cry, but also restrained and resilient. He is physical, and also intellectual.

Today’s ideal man honors the women in his life in whatever they want to do. He treats them with respect in the workplace and romance in the bedroom. He is successful in the competitive world of the marketplace but enthusiastic in the kitchen and gentle during kids’ bath time.

This new masculine ideal is an unalloyed improvement on all the earlier masculine ideals. It’s a great achievement of our culture. But it is demanding and involves reconciling a difficult series of tensions. And it has sparked a bad-boy protest movement and counterculture, currently led by a group we might once again call the Independent Order of Trumps.

Donald Trump’s presidential campaign is a revolution in manners, a rejection of the civility codes of the educated class. As part of this, he rejects the new and balanced masculine/feminine ideal that has emerged over the past generation. Trump embraces a masculine identity — old in some ways, new in others — built upon unvarnished misogyny.

Trump’s misogyny is not the historical moralistic misogyny. Traditional misogyny blames women for the lustful, licentious and powerful urges that men sometimes feel in their presence. In this misogyny, women are the powerful, disgusting corrupters — the vixens, sirens and monsters. This gynophobic misogyny demands that women be surrounded with taboos and purgation rituals, along with severe restrictions on behavior and dress.

Trump’s misogyny, on the other hand, has a commercial flavor. The central arena of life is male competition. Women are objects men use to win points in that competition. The purpose of a woman’s body is to reflect status on a man. One way to emasculate a rival man is to insult or conquer his woman.

Writing for Slate, Frank Foer has one of the best (and most disgusting) compilations of Donald Trump’s history with women. Most of the episodes are pure dominance display.

For example, A. J. Benza was a writer who confessed that his girlfriend had left him for Trump. Trump called into a radio show he was appearing on to brag: “I’ve been successful with your girlfriend, I’ll tell you that,” Trump said. “While you were getting onto the plane to go to California thinking she was your girlfriend, she was some place that you wouldn’t have been very happy with.”

When the commentator Tucker Carlson criticized him, Trump left voice mail bragging about how much more sex he gets. He told an interviewer that you have to treat women like dirt.

It’s not quite right to say that Trump is a throwback to midcentury sexism. At least in those days negative behavior toward women and family members was restrained by the chivalry code. Political candidates didn’t go attacking their rivals’ wives based on their looks. Trump’s objectification is uncontrolled. It’s pure ego competition with a pornogrified flavor.

In this way, Trump represents the spread of something brutal. He takes economic anxiety and turns it into sexual hostility. He effectively tells men: You may be struggling, but at least you’re better than women, Mexicans and Muslims.

I’ve grappled with determining how much to blame Trump’s supporters for his rise. Many of them are victims of economic dislocation and it is hard to fault them for seeking a change, of course, even if it is simplistic and ignorant.

But in the realm of cultural politics, Trump voters do need to be held to account. They are participating in a descent into darkness. They are supporting a degrading wrong. This is the world your daughters are going to grow up in.

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A Lesson about Economics relating to Trade Deficit by Neil Irwin

Donald Trump believes that a half-trillion-dollar trade deficit with the rest of the world makes the United States a loser and countries with trade surpluses like China and Mexico winners.

“They’re beating us so badly,” he has said. “Every country we lose money with.”

The reality is different. Trade deficits are not inherently good or bad; they can be either, depending on circumstances. The trade deficit is not a scorecard.

What’s more, eliminating the trade deficit would not, on its own, make America great again, as Mr. Trump promises. And in isolation, the fact that the United States has a trade deficit does not prove that trade agreements are bad for Americans, a staple of Bernie Sanders’s campaign in the Democratic presidential primary. In fact, trying to eliminate the trade deficit could mean giving up some of the key levers of power that allow the United States to get its way in international politics.

Getting rid of the trade deficit could very well make America less great. The reasons have to do with the global reserve currency, economic diplomacy and something called the Triffin dilemma.

What is the trade deficit?

Imagine a world where there are only two countries, and only two products. One country makes cars; the other grows bananas.

People in CarNation want bananas, so they buy $1 million worth from people in BananaLand. Residents of BananaLand want cars, so they buy $2 million of them from CarNation.

That difference is the trade deficit: BananaLand has a $1 million trade deficit; CarNation has a $1 million trade surplus.

But this does not mean that BananaLand is “losing” to CarNation. Cars are really useful, and BananaLandites got a lot of them in exchange for their money.

Similarly, it’s true that the United States has a $58 billion trade deficit with Mexico, for example. But it’s not as if Americans were just flinging money across the Rio Grande out of charity. Americans get a lot of good stuff for that: avocados, for example, and Cancún vacations.

If you want to think of it in terms of winners and losers, in fact, you could justifiably reverse Mr. Trump’s preferred framing: “Those losers in Mexico gave us $58 billion more stuff than we gave them last year. Ha, ha, ha. We’re winners.”

But don’t trade deficits mean fewer jobs?

Maybe.

It is true that a trade deficit subtracts from a country’s gross domestic product. G.D.P. measures the value of goods and services produced within a country’s borders, so when a country is selling less stuff abroad than it buys from abroad, the country is making less stuff, and as a result there are fewer jobs. This piece of the Trump theory of trade is true.

But when a country runs a trade deficit, as the United States does, there is a countervailing force. Think back to our pretend countries. BananaLand has a $1 million trade deficit with CarNation. But that means that car producers in CarNation are sitting on an extra $1 million a year in income.

Something has to happen with that $1 million, and both of the two options have consequences.

One option is to keep that money at home. But keeping that money inside CarNation will push the value of its currency upward. And as its currency goes up, cars will become more expensive in BananaLand — causing people there to buy fewer of them until eventually the trade deficit is eliminated.

If CarNation doesn’t want its currency to rise, it has to take that $1 million trade surplus and plow it back into BananaLand. There are different ways it could do that. People in CarNation could buy stocks or bonds in BananaLand, or companies in CarNation could invest in factories in BananaLand, or the government of CarNation could buy assets directly.

The choice is stark: A country running a trade surplus must either let its currency rise or let money flow back to its trading partners.

This isn’t just an abstraction. It’s what has happened between the United States and China for the last couple of decades. China has had consistent trade surpluses, but it did not want its currency to rise in a way that would undermine its exporters. So money has flowed from China into the United States — both from the Chinese government’s purchases of United States Treasury bonds and more recently in the form of direct investment from Chinese companies into the United States.

When you see a headline about a Chinese company buying an American hotel group for $13 billion, you’re seeing the flip side of the trade deficit Mr. Trump bemoans. (The same when a citizen of China buys a luxury apartment in a Trump tower.) Money flowing into a country is usually considered a good thing. It makes borrowing money cheaper, drives up stock prices and can mean more investment in new businesses.

So does a trade deficit mean fewer jobs? It depends on which force is more economically powerful: fewer jobs creating exports or investment dollars flowing into the country.

So which is it?

It depends on what the country does with the investment that comes in.

In theory, that money could go toward long-lasting investments with positive economic returns: new factories and equipment; education for the work force; and new roads and bridges, or repairs and improvements to existing ones.

Unfortunately, how countries use these capital inflows is not always so good. In the United States, the influx of foreign capital in the mid-2000s went in large part to fuel an unsustainable housing and mortgage bubble. Greece’s capital inflows in the same time period went to fund bloated public spending.

When the world is flinging money at you, it’s important to use it for something productive. It’s not that trade deficits (and the capital inflows that are their flip side) don’t matter — but just knowing the numbers doesn’t tell you much about whether they are good, bad or indifferent.

Wouldn’t it be better if the U.S. didn’t run a deficit?

It’s not clear that that’s even an option, because the dollar isn’t used just in trade between the United States and other countries.

The dollar is a global reserve currency, meaning that it is used around the world in transactions that have nothing to do with the United States. When a Malaysian company does business with a German company, in many cases it will do business in dollars; when wealthy people in Dubai or Singapore’s government investment fund want to sock away money, they do so in large part in dollar assets.

That creates upward pressure on the dollar for reasons unrelated to trade flows between the United States and its partners. That, in turn, makes the dollar stronger, and American exporters less competitive, than they would be in a world where nobody used the dollar for anything except commerce involving the United States.

The roughly $500 billion trade deficit that the United States runs each year isn’t just about poorly negotiated trade deals and currency manipulation by this or that country. It’s also, to some degree, a byproduct of the central role the United States plays in the global financial system.

There’s even a name for this: the Triffin dilemma. In the mid-20th century, the economist Robert Triffin warned that the provider of the global reserve currency would need to run perpetual trade deficits to keep the world financial system from freezing, with those trade deficits potentially fueling domestic booms and busts.

The key idea is that if a President Trump or any other future leader really wants to reduce our trade deficits in a major way, that leader is going to have to rethink the very underpinnings of global finance.

If having the global reserve currency means bleeding jobs overseas, why keep it?

Be careful what you wish for.

There’s no doubt that maintaining the global reserve currency creates costs for the United States, namely a less competitive export industry.

But it also creates a lot of advantages. Lower interest rates and higher stock prices are among them (though they have the downside of also feeding debt-driven booms and busts). Even more important is what the dollar’s prominence in global finance does for America’s place in the world.

It helps ensure that the United States can afford to finance wars, and it gives the government greater ability to fight recessions and panics. A country experiencing a banking panic will see money sent out of the country, causing its currency to fall and its interest rates to rise. All that limits a government’s options for fixing the problem. In 2008, when the United States experienced a near collapse of the banking system, the opposite happened.

But it’s not just economics. “A lot of the benefits of having the reserve currency are more on the foreign policy side than the economic,” said Jennifer M. Harris, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of a coming book, “War by Other Means,” on the use of economic tools in foreign policy.

The centrality of the dollar to global finance gives the United States power on the global stage that no other country can match. It has enforced sanctions on Iran, Russia, North Korea and terrorist groups with the implicit threat of cutting off access to the dollar payments system for any bank in the world that does not cooperate with American foreign policy.

Part of what makes the United States powerful is the great importance of the dollar to global finance. And part of the price the United States pays for that status is a stronger currency and higher trade deficits than would be the case otherwise.

The debate over the trade deficit is about more than Mexico and China, cars and bananas, or winning and losing. It’s about what makes America great, and which of the country’s priorities should come first.

The Upshot provides news, analysis and graphics about politics, policy and everyday life. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter. Sign up for our newsletter.

God is a Question, not an Answer by William Irwin

Introduction by Wissai:

I have read Camus's "The Stranger" both in the original and the English translation several times. And I have also read Camus´s "Le Myth de Sisyphe". Camus is one of the writers that deeply influenced me, both in style and thinking. 

I have meditated on the subject of "God" for a long time. The below essay by a philosopher resonated with me. To me, one must truly live with one's belief or disbelief in God. One must not pay lip service to such an entity. One must be absolutely sincere as a theist or atheist. And yet, paradoxically, one can have doubts, as Mother Teresa professed. 

I have several friends who are genuinely religious. And their religiosity has done them good. One of them, a Catholic with a beautiful and generous heart, once said to me the following words after she almost had had a mortal accident with a city bus in Rome, "Roberto, I've been a good girl. I've been nice with people. I know God looks after me." Her words have stayed with me ever since. 

It does not really matter whether you are a theist or secular humanist. What matters is that you adhere to the moral principles your Faith entails. You cannot call yourself a Christian when you routinely tell lies, knowingly spread false rumors, and malign other people. That makes you a goddamned hypocrite, a scumbag, a douche bag, a piece of garbage, and a croak of shit. Trần Bá Đờm is that kind of creature. He "ain't no" Christian. He has no right to call himself as one. 

Wissai

The Essay: 

Near the end of Albert Camus’s existentialist novel “The Stranger,” Meursault, the protagonist, is visited by a priest who offers him comfort in the face of his impending execution. Meursault, who has not cared about anything up to this point, wants none of it. He is an atheist in a foxhole. He certainly has not been a strident atheist, but he claims to have no time for the priest and his talk of God. For him, God is not the answer.

Some 70 years later, Kamel Daoud, in his 2013 novel “The Meursault Investigation,” picks up the thread of Camus’s story. In one scene late in the that novel, an imam hounds Harun, the brother of the unnamed Arab who was killed in “The ouStranger.” In response, Harun gives a litany of his own impieties, culminating in the declaration that “God is a question, not an answer.” Harun’s declaration resonates with me as a teacher and student of philosophy. The question is permanent; answers are temporary. I live in the question.

Any honest atheist must admit that he has his doubts, that occasionally he thinks he might be wrong, that there could be a God after all — if not the God of the Judeo-Christian tradition, then a God of some kind. Nathaniel Hawthorne said of Herman Melville, “He can neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief; and he is too honest and courageous not to try to do one or the other.” Dwelling in a state of doubt, uncertainty and openness about the existence of God marks an honest approach to the question.

There is no easy answer. Indeed, the question may be fundamentally unanswerable. Still, there are potentially unpleasant consequences that can arise from decisions or conclusions, and one must take responsibility for them.

Anyone who does not occasionally worry that he may be a fraud almost certainly is. Nor does the worry absolve one from the charge; one may still be a fraud, just one who rightly worries about it on occasion. Likewise, anyone who does not occasionally worry that she is wrong about the existence or nonexistence of God most likely has a fraudulent belief. Worry can make the belief or unbelief genuine, but it cannot make it correct.

People who claim certainty about God worry me, both those who believe and those who don’t believe. They do not really listen to the other side of conversations, and they are too ready to impose their views on others. It is impossible to be certain about God.

Bertrand Russell was once asked what he would say to God if it turned out there was one and he met him at judgment. Russell’s reply: “You gave us insufficient evidence.” Even believers can appreciate Russell’s response. God does not make it easy. God, if he exists, is “deus absconditus,” the hidden God. He does not show himself unambiguously to all people, and people disagree about his existence. We should all feel and express humility in the face of the question even if we think the odds are tilted heavily in favor of a particular answer. Indeed, the open-minded search for truth can unite believers and nonbelievers.

In a previous essay in The Stone, Gary Gutting re-conceived Pascal’s wager. Rather than consider it as a bet on whether God exists, which has tremendous consequences on one side and relatively trivial consequences on the other, we should consider it as a bet on whether to embrace a “doubt of indifference” or a “doubt of desire.” A doubt of indifference is simply a matter of not caring, and it has no clear benefits. By contrast, a doubt of desire approaches the question with the hope that a higher power could be found that would provide greater meaning and value to human existence. As Gutting sees it, the choice is obvious.

Of course, nonbelievers will object that there are various secular alternatives for finding meaning and value in life. Additionally, there is an assumption built into Pascal’s wager that we are talking about the God of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Nonbelievers may see no reason to favor that particular deity. So Gutting’s “doubt of desire” needs to be more explicitly conceived as an openness to the question in which the nonbeliever explores what various religious traditions have to offer. The nonbeliever might embrace the ethical teachings of Christianity, the yogic practices of Hinduism, the meditative techniques of Zen Buddhism, or any of the vast array of teachings and practices that the world’s religions have to offer. Such embrace may lead the nonbeliever to belief in God, or it may not.

This proposal should be taken in the other direction as well: There should be no dogmatic belief. The believer should concede that she does not know with certainty that God exists. There is no faith without doubt. The Trappist monk Thomas Merton wrote that faith “is a decision, a judgment that is fully and deliberately taken in the light of a truth that cannot be proven — it is not merely the acceptance of a decision that has been made by somebody else.”

Indeed, belief without doubt would not be required by an all-loving God, and it should not be worn as a badge of honor. As nonbelievers should have a doubt of desire, so, too believers should have a faith inflected by doubt. Such doubt can enliven belief by putting it at risk and compelling it to renew itself, taking it from the mundane to the transcendent, as when a Christian takes the leap of faith to believe in the resurrection.

We can all exist along a continuum of doubt. Some of us will approach religious certainty at one extreme and others will approach atheistic certainty at the other extreme. Many of us will slide back and forth over time.

What is important is the common ground of the question, not an answer. Surely, we can respect anyone who approaches the question honestly and with an open mind. Ecumenical and interfaith religious dialogue has increased substantially in our age. We can and should expand that dialogue to include atheists and agnostics, to recognize our common humanity and to stop seeing one another as enemy combatants in a spiritual or intellectual war. Rather than seeking the security of an answer, perhaps we should collectively celebrate the uncertainty of the question.

This is not to say that we should cease attempts to convince others of our views. Far from it. We should try to unsettle others as we remain open to being unsettled ourselves. In a spirit of tolerance and intellectual humility, we should see ourselves as partners in a continuing conversation, addressing an enduring question.

William Irwin is a professor of philosophy at King’s College, the author of “The Free Market Existentialist: Capitalism Without Consumerism” and the general editor of the Blackwell Philosophy and Pop Culture Series.

Materialism

For the desire to accumulate material goods, see Economic materialism. For the Marxist and other meanings, see Materialism (disambiguation).

Materialism is a form of philosophical monism which holds that matter is the fundamental substance in nature, and that all phenomena, including mental phenomena and consciousness, are the results material interactions.

Materialism is closely related to physicalism, the view that all that exists is ultimately physical. Philosophical physicalism has evolved from materialism with the discoveries of the physical sciences to incorporate more sophisticated notions of physicality than mere ordinary matter, such as: spacetime, physical energies and forces, dark matter, and so on. Thus the term "physicalism" is preferred over "materialism" by some, while others use the terms as if they are synonymous.

Philosophies contradictory to materialism or physicalism include idealism, pluralism, dualism, and other forms of monism.

Contents

• Overview
• History
  • Axial Age
  • Common Era
  • Modern era
  • New materialism
• Scientific materialists
• Defining matter
• Physicalism
• Criticism and alternatives
  • Scientific objections
  • Religious and spiritual views
  • Philosophical objections
    • Idealisms
  • Materialism as methodology
• See also
• Notes
• References
• Further reading
• External links

OverviewEdit

Materialism belongs to the class of monist ontology. As such, it is different from ontological theories based on dualism or pluralism. For singular explanations of the phenomenal reality, materialism would be in contrast to idealism, neutral monism, and spiritualism.

Despite the large number of philosophical schools and subtle nuances between many,^[1][2][3] all philosophies are said to fall into one of two primary categories, which are defined in contrast to each other: Idealism, and materialism.^[a] The basic proposition of these two categories pertains to the nature of reality, and the primary distinction between them is the way they answer two fundamental questions: "what does reality consist of?" and "how does it originate?" To idealists, spirit or mind or the objects of mind (ideas) are primary, and matter secondary. To materialists, matter is primary, and mind or spirit or ideas are secondary, the product of matter acting upon matter.^[3]

The materialist view is perhaps best understood in its opposition to the doctrines of immaterial substance applied to the mind historically, famously by René Descartes. However, by itself materialism says nothing about how material substance should be characterized. In practice, it is frequently assimilated to one variety of physicalism or another.

Materialism is often associated with reductionism, according to which the objects or phenomena individuated at one level of description, if they are genuine, must be explicable in terms of the objects or phenomena at some other level of description — typically, at a more reduced level. Non-reductive materialism explicitly rejects this notion, however, taking the material constitution of all particulars to be consistent with the existence of real objects, properties, or phenomena not explicable in the terms canonically used for the basic material constituents. Jerry Fodor influentially argues this view, according to which empirical laws and explanations in "special sciences" like psychology or geology are invisible from the perspective of basic physics. A lot of vigorous literature has grown up around the relation between these views.

Modern philosophical materialists extend the definition of other scientifically observable entities such as energy, forces, and the curvature of space. However philosophers such as Mary Midgley suggest that the concept of "matter" is elusive and poorly defined.^[4]

Materialism typically contrasts with dualism, phenomenalism, idealism, vitalism, and dual-aspect monism. Its materiality can, in some ways, be linked to the concept of Determinism, as espoused by Enlightenment thinkers.

During the 19th century, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels extended the concept of materialism to elaborate a materialist conception of history centered on the roughly empirical world of human activity (practice, including labor) and the institutionscreated, reproduced, or destroyed by that activity (see materialist conception of history). Later Marxists developed the notion of dialectical materialism which characterized later Marxist philosophy and method.

HistoryEdit

Axial AgeEdit

Materialism developed, possibly independently, in several geographically separated regions of Eurasia during what Karl Jaspers termed the Axial Age (approximately 800 to 200 BC).

In Ancient Indian philosophy, materialism developed around 600 BC with the works of Ajita Kesakambali, Payasi, Kanada, and the proponents of the Cārvāka school of philosophy. Kanada became one of the early proponents of atomism. The Nyaya–Vaisesika school (600 BC - 100 BC) developed one of the earliest forms of atomism, though their proofs of God and their positing that the consciousness was not material precludes labelling them as materialists. Buddhist atomism and the Jaina school continued the atomic tradition.

Xunzi (ca. 312–230 BC) developed a Confucian doctrine centered on realism and materialism in Ancient China.^{[citation needed]}

Ancient Greek philosophers like Thales, Anaxagoras (ca. 500 BC – 428 BC), Epicurus and Democritus prefigure later materialists. The Latin poem De Rerum Natura by Lucretius (ca. 99 BC – ca. 55 BC) reflects the mechanistic philosophy of Democritus and Epicurus. According to this view, all that exists is matter and void, and all phenomena result from different motions and conglomerations of base material particles called "atoms" (literally: "indivisibles"). De Rerum Natura provides mechanistic explanations for phenomena such as erosion, evaporation, wind, and sound. Famous principles like "nothing can touch body but body" first appeared in the works of Lucretius. Democritus and Epicurus however did not hold to a monist ontology since they held to the ontological separation of matter and space i.e. space being "another kind" of being, indicating that the definition of "materialism" is wider than given scope for in this article.

Common EraEdit

Chinese thinkers of the early common era said to be materialists include Yang Xiong (53 BC – AD 18) and Wang Chong (c AD 27 – AD 100).

Later Indian materialist Jayaraashi Bhatta (6th century) in his work Tattvopaplavasimha ("The upsetting of all principles") refuted the Nyaya Sutra epistemology. The materialistic Cārvāka philosophy appears to have died out some time after 1400. When Madhavacharya compiled Sarva-darśana-samgraha (a digest of all philosophies) in the 14th century, he had no Cārvāka/Lokāyata text to quote from, or even refer to.^[5]

In early 12th-century al-Andalus, the Arabian philosopher, Ibn Tufail (Abubacer), wrote discussions on materialism in his philosophical novel, Hayy ibn Yaqdhan (Philosophus Autodidactus), while vaguely foreshadowing the idea of a historical materialism.^[6]

Modern eraEdit

The French cleric Pierre Gassendi (1592–1665) represented the materialist tradition in opposition to the attempts of René Descartes (1596–1650) to provide the natural sciences with dualist foundations. There followed the materialist and atheistabbé Jean Meslier (1664–1729), Julien Offray de La Mettrie, the German-French Paul-Henri Thiry Baron d'Holbach (1723–1789), the Encyclopedist Denis Diderot (1713–1784), and other French Enlightenment thinkers; as well as (in England) John "Walking" Stewart (1747–1822), whose insistence in seeing matter as endowed with a moral dimension had a major impact on the philosophical poetry of William Wordsworth (1770–1850).

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) wrote that "...materialism is the philosophy of the subject who forgets to take account of himself".^[7] He claimed that an observing subject can only know material objects through the mediation of the brain and its particular organization. That is, the brain itself is the "determiner" of how material objects will be experienced or perceived:

"Everything objective, extended, active, and hence everything material, is regarded by materialism as so solid a basis for its explanations that a reduction to this (especially if it should ultimately result in thrust and counter-thrust) can leave nothing to be desired. But all this is something that is given only very indirectly and conditionally, and is therefore only relatively present, for it has passed through the machinery and fabrication of the brain, and hence has entered the forms of time, space, and causality, by virtue of which it is first of all presented as extended in space and operating in time."^[8]

The German materialist and atheist anthropologist Ludwig Feuerbach would signal a new turn in materialism through his book, The Essence of Christianity (1841), which provided a humanist account of religion as the outward projection of man's inward nature. Feuerbach's materialism would later heavily influence Karl Marx.

More recently thinkers such as Gilles Deleuze have attempted to rework and strengthen classical materialist ideas. ^[9]Contemporary theorists such as Manuel DeLanda, working with this reinvigorated materialism have come to be classifies as 'new materialist' in persuasion. ^[10]

New materialismEdit

“New materialism” has now become its own specialized subfield of knowledge, with courses being offered on the topic at major universities, as well as numerous conferences, edited collections, and monographs devoted to it. Jane Bennett’s book Vibrant Matter (Duke UP, 2010) has been particularly instrumental in bringing theories of monist ontology and vitalism back into a critical theoretical fold dominated by poststructuralist theories of language and discourse.^[11] Scholars such as Mel Y. Chen and Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, however, have critiqued this body of new materialist literature for its neglect in considering the materiality of race and gender in particular. ^[12] [13] Other scholars such as Hélene Vosters have questioned whether there is anything particularly “new” about this so-called “new materialism,” as Indigenous and other animist ontologies have attested to what might be called the “vibrancy of matter” for centuries. ^[14]

Scientific materialistsEdit

See also: Physicalism

Many current and recent philosophers—e.g., Daniel Dennett, Willard Van Orman Quine, Donald Davidson, and Jerry Fodor—operate within a broadly physicalist or materialist framework, producing rival accounts of how best to accommodate mind, including functionalism, anomalous monism, identity theory, and so on.^[15]

Scientific "Materialism" is often synonymous with, and has so far been described, as being a reductive materialism. In recent years, Paul and Patricia Churchland have advocated a radically contrasting position (at least, in regards to certain hypotheses); eliminativist materialism holds that some mental phenomena simply do not exist at all, and that talk of those mental phenomena reflects a totally spurious "folk psychology" and introspection illusion. That is, an eliminative materialist might suggest that a concept like "belief" simply has no basis in fact - the way folk science speaks of demon-caused illnesses. Reductive materialism being at one end of a continuum (our theories will reduce to facts) and eliminative materialism on the other (certain theories will need to be eliminated in light of new facts), Revisionary materialism is somewhere in the middle.^[15]

Some scientific materialists have been criticized, for example by Noam Chomsky, for failing to provide clear definitions for what constitutes matter, leaving the term "materialism" without any definite meaning. Chomsky also states that since the concept of matter may be affected by new scientific discoveries, as has happened in the past, scientific materialists are being dogmatic in assuming the opposite.^[16]

Defining matterEdit

The nature and definition of matter - like other key concepts in science and philosophy - have occasioned much debate.^[17]Is there a single kind of matter (hyle) which everything is made of, or multiple kinds? Is matter a continuous substance capable of expressing multiple forms (hylomorphism),^[18] or a number of discrete, unchanging constituents (atomism)?^[19]Does it have intrinsic properties (substance theory),^[20][21] or is it lacking them (prima materia)?

One challenge to the traditional concept of matter as tangible "stuff" came with the rise of field physics in the 19th century. Relativity shows that matter and energy (including the spatially distributed energy of fields) are interchangeable. This enables the ontological view that energy is prima materia and matter is one of its forms. On the other hand, the Standard Model of Particle physics uses quantum field theory to describe all interactions. On this view it could be said that fields are prima materia and the energy is a property of the field.

According to the dominant cosmological model, the Lambda-CDM model, less than 5% of the universe's energy density is made up of the "matter" described by the Standard Model of Particle Physics, and the majority of the universe is composed of dark matter and dark energy - with little agreement amongst scientists about what these are made of.^[22]

With the advent of quantum physics, some scientists believed the concept of matter had merely changed, while others believed the conventional position could no longer be maintained. For instance Werner Heisenberg said "The ontology of materialism rested upon the illusion that the kind of existence, the direct 'actuality' of the world around us, can be extrapolated into the atomic range. This extrapolation, however, is impossible... atoms are not things." Likewise, some philosophers^[which?] feel that these dichotomies necessitate a switch from materialism to physicalism. Others use the terms "materialism" and "physicalism" interchangeably.^[23]

The concept of matter has changed in response to new scientific discoveries. Thus materialism has no definite content independent of the particular theory of matter on which it is based. According to Noam Chomsky, any property can be considered material, if one defines matter such that it has that property.^[16]

PhysicalismEdit

George Stack distinguishes between materialism and physicalism:

In the twentieth century, physicalism has emerged out of positivism. Physicalism restricts meaningful statements to physical bodies or processes that are verifiable or in principle verifiable. It is an empirical hypothesis that is subject to revision and, hence, lacks the dogmatic stance of classical materialism. Herbert Feigl defended physicalism in the United States and consistently held that mental states are brain states and that mental terms have the same referent as physical terms. The twentieth century has witnessed many materialist theories of the mental, and much debate surrounding them.^[24]

— George J. Stack, Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Criticism and alternativesEdit

Scientific objectionsEdit

Some modern day physicists and science writers—such as Paul Davies and John Gribbin—have argued that materialism has been disproven by certain scientific findings in physics, such as quantum mechanics and chaos theory. In 1991, Gribbin and Davies released their book The Matter Myth, the first chapter of which, "The Death of Materialism", contained the following passage:

Then came our Quantum theory, which totally transformed our image of matter. The old assumption that the microscopic world of atoms was simply a scaled-down version of the everyday world had to be abandoned. Newton's deterministic machine was replaced by a shadowy and paradoxical conjunction of waves and particles, governed by the laws of chance, rather than the rigid rules of causality. An extension of the quantum theory goes beyond even this; it paints a picture in which solid matter dissolves away, to be replaced by weird excitations and vibrations of invisible field energy. Quantum physics undermines materialism because it reveals that matter has far less "substance" than we might believe. But another development goes even further by demolishing Newton's image of matter as inert lumps. This development is the theory of chaos, which has recently gained widespread attention.

— Paul Davies and John Gribbin, The Matter Myth, Chapter 1

Davies' and Gribbin's objections are shared by proponents of digital physics who view information rather than matter to be fundamental. Their objections were also shared by some founders of quantum theory, such as Max Planck, who wrote:

As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clear headed science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about atoms this much: There is no matter as such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent Mind. This Mind is the matrix of all matter.

— Max Planck, Das Wesen der Materie, 1944

Religious and spiritual viewsEdit

According to the Catholic Encyclopedia of 1907–1912, materialism, defined as "a philosophical system which regards matter as the only reality in the world [...] denies the existence of God and the soul".^[25] Materialism, in this view, therefore becomes incompatible with most world religions, including Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. In such a context one can conflate materialism with atheism.^[26] Most of Hinduism and transcendentalism regards all matter as an illusion called Maya, blinding humans from knowing "the truth". Maya is the limited, purely physical and mental reality in which our everyday consciousness has become entangled. Maya gets destroyed for a person when s/he perceives Brahman with transcendental knowledge.

In contrast, Joseph Smith, the founder of the Latter Day Saint movement, taught: "There is no such thing as immaterial matter. All spirit is matter, but it is more fine or pure, and can only be discerned by purer eyes; We cannot see it; but when our bodies are purified we shall see that it is all matter."^[27] This spirit element has always existed; it is co-eternal with God.^[28]It is also called "intelligence" or "the light of truth", which like all observable matter "was not created or made, neither indeed can be".^[29] Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints view the revelations of Joseph Smith as a restoration of original Christian doctrine, which they believe post-apostolic theologians began to corrupt in the centuries after Christ. The writings of many^[quantify] of these theologians indicate a clear influence of Greek metaphysical philosophies such as Neoplatonism, which characterized divinity as an utterly simple, immaterial, formless, substance/essence (ousia) that transcended all that was physical.^[30] Despite strong opposition from many Christians,^[31] this metaphysical depiction of God eventually became incorporated into the doctrine of the Christian church, displacing the original Judeo-Christian concept of a physical, corporeal God who created humans in His image and likeness.^[32]

Philosophical objectionsEdit

Kant argued against all three forms of materialism, subjective idealism (which he contrasts with his "transcendental idealism"^[33]) and dualism.^[34] However, Kant also argues that change and time require an enduring substrate,^[35] and does so in connection with his Refutation of Idealism.^[36] Postmodern/poststructuralist thinkers also express a skepticism about any all-encompassing metaphysical scheme. Philosopher Mary Midgley,^[37] among others,^{[38][39][40][41]} argues that materialism is a self-refuting idea, at least in its eliminative form.

IdealismsEdit

An argument for idealism, such as those of Hegel and Berkeley, is ipso facto an argument against materialism. Matter can be argued to be redundant, as in bundle theory, and mind-independent properties can in turn be reduced to subjective percepts. Berkeley presents an example of the latter by pointing out that it is impossible to gather direct evidence of matter, as there is no direct experience of matter; all that is experienced is perception, whether internal or external. As such, the existence of matter can only be assumed from the apparent (perceived) stability of perceptions; it finds absolutely no evidence in direct experience.

If matter and energy are seen as necessary to explain the physical world, but incapable of explaining mind, dualism results. Emergence, holism, and process philosophy seek to ameliorate the perceived shortcomings of traditional (especially mechanistic) materialism without abandoning materialism entirely.

Materialism as methodologyEdit

Some critics object to materialism as part of an overly skeptical, narrow or reductivist approach to theorizing, rather than to the ontological claim that matter is the only substance. Particle physicist and Anglican theologian John Polkinghorne objects to what he calls promissory materialism — claims that materialistic science will eventually succeed in explaining phenomena it has not so far been able to explain.^[42] Polkinghorne prefers "dual-aspect monism" to faith in materialism.^[43]

See alsoEdit

Cārvāka Christian materialism Critical realism Cultural materialism Dialectical materialism Economic materialism Eliminative materialism Existence

French materialism Grotesque body Historical materialism Hyle Immaterialism Madhyamaka - a philosophy of middle way Material feminism Materialistic Marxist philosophy of nature

Metaphysical naturalism Model-dependent realism Naturalism (philosophy) Postmaterialism Physical ontology Philosophy of mind Quantum energy Rational egoism Reality in Buddhism Substance theory Transcendence (religion)

NotesEdit

a. ^{^} Indeed, it has been noted it is difficult if not impossible to define one category without contrasting it with the other.^[2][3]

ReferencesEdit

1. ^ Edwards, Paul (Editor-in-chief) (1972. First published 1967), The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vols.1-4, ISBN 0-02-894950-1(Originally published 1967 in 8 volumes) Check date values in: |date= (help) Alternative ISBN 978-0-02-894950-5
2. ^ ^a b Priest, Stephen (1991), Theories of the Mind, London: Penguin Books, ISBN 0-14-013069-1 Alternative ISBN 978-0-14-013069-0
3. ^ ^a b c Novack, George (1979), The Origins of Materialism, New York: Pathfinder Press, ISBN 0-87348-022-8
4. ^ Mary Midgley The Myths We Live By.
5. ^ History of Indian Materialism, Ramakrishna Bhattacharya
6. ^ Dominique Urvoy, "The Rationality of Everyday Life: The Andalusian Tradition? (Aropos of Hayy's First Experiences)", in Lawrence I. Conrad (1996), The World of Ibn Tufayl: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Ḥayy Ibn Yaqẓān, pp. 38-46, Brill Publishers, ISBN 90-04-09300-1.
7. ^ The World as Will and Representation, II, Ch. 1
8. ^ The World as Will and Representation, I, §7
9. ^ http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/deleuze/
10. ^ http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/new-materialism/
11. ^ https://books.google.com/books/about/Vibrant_Matter.html?id=OcUcmAEACAAJ
12. ^ https://www.academia.edu/6169668/Animal_New_Directions_in_the_Theorization_of_Race_and_Posthumanism
13. ^ https://books.google.com/books/about/Animacies.html?id=Y793tgAACAAJ
14. ^ https://books.google.com/books?id=MEJvBAAAQBAJ&dq=performing+things+schweitzer&source=gbs_navlinks_s
15. ^ ^a b http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/materialism-eliminative/#SpeProFolPsy, by William Ramsey
16. ^ ^a b Chomsky, Noam (2000) New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind
17. ^  Herbermann, Charles, ed. (1913). "Matter". Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company.
18. ^ "Hylomorphism" Concise Britannica
19. ^ "Atomism: Antiquity to the Seventeenth Century" Dictionary of the History of Ideas
    "Atomism in the Seventeenth Century" Dictionary of the History of Ideas
    Article by a philosopher who opposes atomism
    Information on Buddhist atomism
    Article on traditional Greek atomism
    "Atomism from the 17th to the 20th Century" Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
20. ^ "''Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy'' on substance theory". Plato.stanford.edu. Retrieved 2013-06-24.
21. ^ "The Friesian School on Substance and Essence". Friesian.com. Retrieved 2013-06-24.
22. ^ Bernard Sadoulet "Particle Dark Matter in the Universe: At the Brink of Discovery?" Science 5 January 2007: Vol. 315. no. 5808, pp. 61 - 63
23. ^ "Many philosophers and scientists now use the terms `material' and `physical' interchangeably" Dictionary of the Philosophy of Mind
24. ^ stack, George J. (1998), "Materialism", in Craig, E., Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Luther to Nifo (v. 6), Routledge, pp. 171–172, ISBN 978-0-415-18714-5
25. ^  Herbermann, Charles, ed. (1913). "Materialism". Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company.
26. ^ Compare: Lange, Friedrich Albert (1892). History of Materialism and Criticism of Its Present Importance. English and foreign philosophical library. 2: History of materialism until Kant (4 ed.). K. Paul, Trench, Trübner, & Company, Limited. pp. 25–26. Retrieved 2015-08-01. [...] Diderot has not always in the Encyclopaedia expressed his own individual opinion, but it is just as true that at its commencement he had not yet got as far as Atheism and Materialism.
27. ^ Doctrine and Covenants 131:7-8
28. ^ Smith, Joseph (1938). Smith, Joseph Fielding, ed. Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith. Salt Lake City: Deseret Book. pp. 352–354. OCLC 718055..
29. ^ Doctrine and Covenants 93:29
30. ^ Nielsen, William O. (July 1987), "Is the LDS View of God Consistent With the Bible?", Ensign
31. ^ The wording of the Council of Constantinople (360) prohibited use of the terms "substance", "essence", and ousiabecause they were not included in the scriptures. http://www.earlychurchtexts.com/public/creed_homoian_of_constantinople_360.htm
32. ^ Draper, Richard D. (April 1994), "The Reality of the Resurrection", Ensign
33. ^ see Critique of Pure Reason where he gives a "refutation of idealism" in pp345-52 (1st Ed) and pp 244-7 (2nd Ed) in the Norman Kemp Smith edition
34. ^ Critique of Pure Reason (A379, p352 NKS translation). "If, however, as commonly happens, we seek to extend the concept of dualism, and take it in the transcendental sense, neither it nor the two counter-alternatives — pneumatism [idealism] on the one hand, materialism on the other — would have any sort of basis [...] Neither the transcendental object which underlies outer appearances nor that which underlies inner intuition, is in itself either matter or a thinking being, but a ground (to us unknown)..."
35. ^ "Kant argues that we can determine that there has been a change in the objects of our perception, not merely a change in our perceptions themselves, only by conceiving of what we perceive as successive states of enduring substances (see Substance)".Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy
36. ^ "All determination of time presupposes something permanent in perception. This permanent cannot, however, be something in me [...]" Critique of Pure Reason, B274, P245 (NKS translation)
37. ^ see Mary Midgley The Myths we Live by
38. ^ Baker, L. (1987). Saving Belief Princeton, Princeton University Press
39. ^ Reppert, V. (1992). "Eliminative Materialism, Cognitive Suicide, and Begging the Question". Metaphilosophy 23: 378-92.
40. ^ Seidner, Stanley S. (June 10, 2009) "A Trojan Horse: Logotherapeutic Transcendence and its Secular Implications for Theology". Mater Dei Institute. p 5.
41. ^ Boghossian, P. (1990). "The Status of Content" Philosophical Review 99: 157-84. and (1991) "The Status of Content Revisited". Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 71: 264-78.
42. ^ However, critics of materialism are equally guilty of prognosticating that it will never be able to explain certain phenomena. "Over a hundred years ago William James saw clearly that science would never resolve the mind-body problem." Are We Spiritual Machines? Dembski, W.
43. ^ "Interview with John Polkinghorne". Crosscurrents.org. Retrieved 2013-06-24.

Further readingEdit

• Buchner, L. (1920). [books.google.com/books?id=tw8OuwAACAAJ Force and Matter]. New York, Peter Eckler Publishing Co.
• Churchland, Paul (1981). Eliminative Materialism and the Propositional Attitudes. The Philosophy of Science. Boyd, Richard; P. Gasper; J. D. Trout. Cambridge, Massachusetts, MIT Press.
• Field, Hartry H. (1981), "Mental representation", in Block, Ned Joel, Readings in Philosophy of Psychology 2, Taylor & Francis, ISBN 9780416746006
• Owen J. Flanagan (1991). Science of the Mind 2e. MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-56056-6. Retrieved 19 December 2012.
• Fodor, J.A. (1974). Special Sciences, Synthese, Vol.28.
• Gunasekara, Victor A. (2001). "Buddhism and the Modern World". Basic Buddhism: A Modern Introduction to the Buddha's Teaching". 18 January 2008
• Kim, J. (1994) Multiple Realization and the Metaphysics of Reduction, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 52.
• La Mettrie, La Mettrie, Julien Offray de (1748). L'Homme Machine (Man a Machine)
• Lange, Friedrich A.,(1925) The History of Materialism. New York, Harcourt, Brace, & Co.
• Moser, Paul K.; Trout, J. D. (1995). Contemporary Materialism: A Reader. Psychology Press. ISBN 978-0-415-10863-8. Retrieved 19 December 2012.
• Priest, Stephen (1991), Theories of the Mind, London: Penguin Books, ISBN 0-14-013069-1 Alternative ISBN 978-0-14-013069-0
• Schopenhauer, Arthur (1969). The World as Will and Representation. New York, Dover Publications, Inc.
• Seidner, Stanley S. (June 10, 2009). "A Trojan Horse: Logotherapeutic Transcendence and its Secular Implications for Theology". Mater Dei Institute
• Turner, MS (Jan 5, 2007). "Quarks and the cosmos". Science 315 (5808): 59–61. doi:10.1126/science.1136276. PMID 17204637.
• Vitzthum, Richard C. (1995) Materialism: An Affirmative History and Definition. Amherst, New York, Prometheus Books.

External linksEdit

• Stanford Encyclopedia:
  • Physicalism
  • Eliminative Materialism
• Philosophical Materialism (by Richard C. Vitzthum) from infidels.org
• Dictionary of the Philosophy of Mind on Materialism from the University of Waterloo

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