12 Claims of the Verstehen Position

January 21, 2015

“However, not all philosophers agree with the ideal of unified science. They argue that the actions of human beings comprise a unique and ultimate category of events, and that therefore such fields as social psychology, sociology, anthropology, economics, and political science cannot be studied by the methods of the natural sciences (by which they usually mean physics).”

http://www.amyscott.com/Claims%20of%20the%20Verstehen%20Position.pdf

MSNBC’s Maddow Shows ‘Piss Christ’ But Not Latest ‘Charlie Hebdo’

January 21, 2015

“On April 18, 2011 Maddow and her network had no difficulty showing and discussing the “Piss Christ” photo by Andres Serrano after it was destroyed in a museum in France by protestors upset with the image of a crucifix submerged in urine.”

http://cnsnews.com/blog/eric-scheiner/msnbcs-maddow-shows-piss-christ-not-latest-charlie-hebdo

John Lewis tells his truth about ‘Selma’

January 21, 2015

la-oe-lewis-selma-movie-20150119-002“The role of art in our society is not to reenact history but to offer an interpretation of human experience as seen through the eyes of the artist. The philosopher Aristotle says it best: ‘The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inner significance.'”

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-lewis-selma-movie-20150119-story.html

The real American Sniper was a hate-filled killer. Why are simplistic patriots treating him as a hero?

January 21, 2015

“There is no room for the idea that Kyle might have been a good soldier but a bad guy; or a mediocre guy doing a difficult job badly; or a complex guy in a bad war who convinced himself he loved killing to cope with an impossible situation; or a straight-up serial killer exploiting an oppressive system that, yes, also employs lots of well-meaning, often impoverished, non-serial-killer people to do oppressive things over which they have no control. Or that Iraqis might be fully realised human beings with complex inner lives who find joy in food and sunshine and family, and anguish in the murders of their children. Or that you can support your country while thinking critically about its actions and its citizenry. Or that many truths can be true at once.”

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jan/06/real-american-sniper-hate-filled-killer-why-patriots-calling-hero-chris-kyle

Five tough ethics issues in Bergdahl swap

January 21, 2015

“When Obama approved the release of dangerous, top-value Guantanamo prisoners in exchange for an American soldier captured under mysterious circumstances, he negotiated a tangle of competing moral principles. If it were possible to wrestle with these issues in a nonpartisan way, the country might gain from this difficult experience.

The Bergdahl-Taliban trade will be discussed in ethics classes for years to come.”

http://www.cnn.com/2014/06/04/opinion/ghitis-bergdahl-swap/index.html

Charlie Hebdo hypocrisy: offensive speech demands scrutiny, not censorship

January 21, 2015

“We also believe that with free speech comes great responsibility not to gratuitously offend. But that responsibility belongs to the individual, not the government, and the consequences for breaching it should be social, not governmental. Yet we see an ominous trend toward government restrictions on speech in the very places speech freedoms were born.”

http://www.smh.com.au/comment/charlie-hebdo-hypocrisy-offensive-speech-demands-scrutiny-not-censorship-20150119-12t5m4.html

The Attack on Charlie Hebdo

January 21, 2015

“France, it will be said in the next days, has failed, in a profound way, when it comes to making sense of its own diversity. What will be strongly debated is the nature of that failure, and what its opposite might look like. Marine Le Pen, the leader of the National Front, will, inevitably, offer one set of answers, with her characteristic, glossy coat on her much uglier injunctions that often add up to the same thing. Who in France, and in other countries, whose policies and commitment to a free press were, again, targeted in the attack on Charlie Hebdo, is going to come forward with other, better answers? This is a dangerous moment for France, both in the frighteningly immediate sense—there are armed terrorists loose in the capital—and because the decisions that a nation makes at a time of terror are not always the best ones, for anybody.”

http://www.newyorker.com/news/amy-davidson/attack-charlie-hebdo