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PHILOSOPHY

Sincerity Is Not Always a Virtue

Sincerity, though valued, can harm relationships and is often confused with spontaneity. True virtue requires balance and consideration of other virtues.

Bertrand Russell

Bertrand Russsell: The Fear of Death

Some old people are oppressed by the fear of death. In the young there is justification for this feeling. But in an old man the fear of death is somewhat abject and ignoble.

Bertrand Russell

Russell’s Moral Theories

Bertrand Russell has consistently advocated ideals and expressed beliefs which have made him, along with Shaw and Wells, if not quite with Marx and Freud, one of the formative influences on the modem mind.

Bertrand Russell

Can Men Be Rational?

In these days rationality has received many hard knocks, so that it is difficult to know what one means by it, or whether, if that were known, it is something which human beings can achieve.

Bertrand Russell

Machines and the Emotions

Will machines destroy emotions, or will emotions destroy machines? This question was suggested long ago by Samuel Butler in Erewhon, but it is growing more and more actual as the empire of machinery is enlarged.

Bertrand Russell

“Useless” Knowledge

Knowledge, everywhere, is coming to be regarded not as a good in itself, or as a means of creating a broad and humane outlook on life in general, but as merely an ingredient in technical skill.

C. E. M. Joad

C. E. M. JOAD: THE ORIGIN AND EVOLUTION OF RELIGION

In discussing the need for religion, I use the words “origin and nature” deliberately, because the conjunction of these two words seems to me to mask a fallacy which it is important to bring to light. The fallacy is to assume that to lay bare the origins of a thing is tantamount to describing its present nature.

Morris R. Cohen - Reason and Nature

MORRIS R. COHEN: WHAT IS THE TRUE BASIS OF MORALS?

Can science be applied to the whole art of living? It is easy to see that the problems of law themselves involve assumptions as to the ultimate good of human life, and ancient Semitic jurists suggested that he who would deal with the law must meditate on life and death.

Henry David Thoreau

HENRY DAVID THOREAU: ON THE DUTY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

Thoreau argues that individuals should not permit governments to overrule or atrophy their consciences, and that they have a duty to avoid allowing such acquiescence to enable the government to make them the agents of injustice.

Bertrand Russell

Bertrand Russell: A Free Man’s Worship

In the celebrated essay “A Free Man’s Worship,” Bertrand Russel maintains that a new and deeper faith can be constructed, not faith in a theological sense but faith in the power of reason; his faith in man’s capacity to create his own world through his own effort.

Bertrand Russell

Bertrand Russell: What Shall We Educate For?

A community of men and women possessing vitality, courage, sensitiveness, and intelligence, in the highest degree that education can produce, would be very different from anything that has hitherto existed. Very few people would be unhappy.

Walter Lippmann

WALTER LIPPMANN: THE MORALIST IN AN UNBELIEVING WORLD

Whilst admitting that such as he could no longer feign belief in the Christian God, Walter Lippmann sought to provide a means to deal with the spiritual rawness left by such agnosticity without succumbing to nihilism or receding into reaction

Bertrand Russell: Can Religion Cure Our Troubles?

Mankind is in mortal peril, and fear now, as in the past, is inclining men to seek refuge in God. Throughout the West there is a very general revival of religion. Nazis and Communists dismissed Christianity and did things which we deplore. It is easy to conclude that the repudiation of Christianity by Hitler and the Soviet Government is at least in part the cause of our troubles…

Alan Watts

Alan Watts: Philosophy Of Nature

Drawing from the philosophies of the Eastern and Western world Watts brings us a uniquely balanced way of finding out who we really are.

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