Alejandro Jodorowsky’s 82 Commandments For Living

in Film, Life, Philosophy | May 16th, 2016

Creative Commons photo by Lionel Allorge

If you’re a fan of science fiction or the films of David Lynch, you’ve surely seen the 1984 film adaptation of Frank Herbert’s cult classic sci-fi novel, Dune (though Lynch himself may prefer that you didn’t). And indeed, it’s very likely that, by now, you’ve heard the incredible story of what Dune might have been, had it been directed ten years earlier by psychedelic Chilean filmmaker, writer, composer, and psychotherapist Alejandro Jodorowsky. Perhaps you even caught Jonathan Crow’s post on this site featuring Jodorowsky’s proposed storyboards—drawn by French artist Moebius—for what would most certainly would have been “a mind-bogglingly grand epic” of a movie. Alas, Jodorowsky’s Dune never came about, though it did later lead to the documentary Jodorowsky’s Dune, which Matt Zoller Seitz pronounced “a call to arms for dreamers everywhere.”

That description applies not only to the film about a film that could have been, but also to the entirety of Jodorowsky’s work, including his—thoroughly bizarre and captivating—early features, El Topo and The Holy Mountain, and the creation of a comic book universe like no other. Called “The Jodoverse,” the world of his comic books is, as writer Warren Ellis says, “astonishingly beautiful and totally mad”—again, a succinct description of Jodorowsky’s every artistic endeavor. Witness below, for example, the stunning trailer for his most recent feature film, 2014’s The Dance of Reality. You may find the visual excesses so overwhelming that you only half-hear the narration.

Listen (or read) carefully, however. Jodorowsky has as much to tell us with his cryptically poetic pronouncements as he does with his visionary imagery. Do you find his epigrams platitudinous, sententious, Pollyannaish, or naïve? Jodorowsky doesn’t mind. He calls, remember, to the dreamers, not the hard-bitten, cynical realists. And if you’re one of the dreamers who hears that call, you’ll find much to love in the list below of Jodorowsky’s 82 Commandments for living. But so too, I think, will the realists. These come from Jodorowsky’s memoir The Spiritual Journey of Alejandro Jodorowsky, and the list comes via Dangerous Minds, who adapted it from “the better part of three pages” of text.

As Jodorowsky frames these maxims in his book, they originated with influential Russian mystic George Gurdjieff, and were told to him by Gurdjieff’s daughter, Reyna d’Assia. Perhaps that’s so. But you’ll note, if you know Jodorowsky’s writing—or simply took a couple minutes time to watch the trailer above—that they sound enough like the author’s own words to have been brought forth from his personal storehouse of accumulated wisdom. In any case, Jodorowsky has always been quick to acknowledge his spiritual teachers, and whether these are his second-hand accounts of Gurdjieff or his own inventions has no bearing on the substance therein.

Often sounding very much like Biblical proverbs or Buddhist precepts, the commandments are intended, d’Assia says in Jodorowsky’s account, to help us “change [our] habits, conquer laziness, and become… morally sound human being[s].” As she remarks in the book, before she delivers the below in a lengthy monologue, “to be strong in the great things, we must also be strong in the small ones.” Therefore…

Ground your attention on yourself. Be conscious at every moment of what you are thinking, sensing, feeling, desiring, and doing.
Always finish what you have begun.
Whatever you are doing, do it as well as possible.
Do not become attached to anything that can destroy you in the course of time.
Develop your generosity ‒ but secretly.
Treat everyone as if he or she was a close relative.
Organize what you have disorganized.
Learn to receive and give thanks for every gift.
Stop defining yourself.
Do not lie or steal, for you lie to yourself and steal from yourself.
Help your neighbor, but do not make him dependent.
Do not encourage others to imitate you.
Make work plans and accomplish them.
Do not take up too much space.
Make no useless movements or sounds.
If you lack faith, pretend to have it.
Do not allow yourself to be impressed by strong personalities.
Do not regard anyone or anything as your possession.
Share fairly.
Do not seduce.
Sleep and eat only as much as necessary.
Do not speak of your personal problems.
Do not express judgment or criticism when you are ignorant of most of the factors involved.
Do not establish useless friendships.
Do not follow fashions.
Do not sell yourself.
Respect contracts you have signed.
Be on time.
Never envy the luck or success of anyone.
Say no more than necessary.
Do not think of the profits your work will engender.
Never threaten anyone.
Keep your promises.
In any discussion, put yourself in the other person’s place.
Admit that someone else may be superior to you.
Do not eliminate, but transmute.
Conquer your fears, for each of them represents a camouflaged desire.
Help others to help themselves.
Conquer your aversions and come closer to those who inspire rejection in you.
Do not react to what others say about you, whether praise or blame.
Transform your pride into dignity.
Transform your anger into creativity.
Transform your greed into respect for beauty.
Transform your envy into admiration for the values of the other.
Transform your hate into charity.
Neither praise nor insult yourself.
Regard what does not belong to you as if it did belong to you.
Do not complain.
Develop your imagination.
Never give orders to gain the satisfaction of being obeyed.
Pay for services performed for you.
Do not proselytize your work or ideas.
Do not try to make others feel for you emotions such as pity, admiration, sympathy, or complicity.
Do not try to distinguish yourself by your appearance.
Never contradict; instead, be silent.
Do not contract debts; acquire and pay immediately.
If you offend someone, ask his or her pardon; if you have offended a person publicly, apologize publicly.
When you realize you have said something that is mistaken, do not persist in error through pride; instead, immediately retract it.
Never defend your old ideas simply because you are the one who expressed them.
Do not keep useless objects.
Do not adorn yourself with exotic ideas.
Do not have your photograph taken with famous people.
Justify yourself to no one, and keep your own counsel.
Never define yourself by what you possess.
Never speak of yourself without considering that you might change.
Accept that nothing belongs to you.
When someone asks your opinion about something or someone, speak only of his or her qualities.
When you become ill, regard your illness as your teacher, not as something to be hated.
Look directly, and do not hide yourself.
Do not forget your dead, but accord them a limited place and do not allow them to invade your life.
Wherever you live, always find a space that you devote to the sacred.
When you perform a service, make your effort inconspicuous.
If you decide to work to help others, do it with pleasure.
If you are hesitating between doing and not doing, take the risk of doing.
Do not try to be everything to your spouse; accept that there are things that you cannot give him or her but which others can.
When someone is speaking to an interested audience, do not contradict that person and steal his or her audience.
Live on money you have earned.
Never brag about amorous adventures.
Never glorify your weaknesses.
Never visit someone only to pass the time.
Obtain things in order to share them.
If you are meditating and a devil appears, make the devil meditate too.

via Dangerous Minds

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 6 ) |

170 Renowned Academics Talk About Why They Disbelieve, or Believe, in God

in Philosophy, Physics, Religion, Science | May 11th, 2016

Whether we choose to affiliate with any sort of atheist movement or not, many people raised in theistic religions came over time to see God as a literary character in ancient mythologies and historical fictions, as a placeholder for human ignorance, or as a personification of humanity’s greatest fears and desires. The notion that such a personal super-being actually exists has become for many of us, in William James’ terms, a “dead hypothesis.” As physicist Lawrence Krauss puts it in the video above, “there’s absolutely no evidence that we need the supernatural hand of God” to explain the universe. Religions give us fanciful stories, illustrate ethical (and unethical) principles, and enforce tribal loyalties, but they do not describe reality as it is.

We all come to hold our beliefs, or lack thereof, about religious claims for an irreducibly complex variety of reasons that are intellectual as well as moral, political, and emotional. Can we demonstrate, however, that “the more scientifically literate, intellectually honest and objectively sceptical a person is, the more likely they are to disbelieve in anything supernatural, including god”? Such is the thesis of Dr. Jonathan Pararajasignham’s documentary 50 Renowned Academics Speaking About God, which consists of edited clips from interviews with “elite academics and professors at top institutions, many of whom are also Nobel Laureates.” The claim appears on the screen in each of the three videos above and below, framing the interview clips as mounting evidence for the convincing case that disbelief is strongly correlated with, if not necessarily caused by, scientific literacy, intellectual honesty, and skepticism.

Since his first video, Pararajasingham has expanded his series to include 100 more “Renowned Academics Speaking About God.” (See Parts Two and Three of the series above.) On the videos’ Youtube pages, he anticipates a ready objection, writing, “I do not claim that this video demonstrates there is no God. It is not an argument against God in itself, so there is no argument from popularity and authority.” If you’ve already arrived at the conclusion, you’ll find it confirmed many times over by a cast that includes physicists like Krauss, Richard Feynman, and Steven Weinberg, philosophers like A.C. Graying, Bertrand Russell, and John Searle, and far too many more illustrious thinkers to name. (See a complete list on the Youtube pages of each video.) In addition to well-known atheist writers like Daniel Dennett, the series also features academics like anthropologist Pascal Boyer, whose book Religion Explained makes a novel and very persuasive naturalistic argument for why humans have believed in the supernatural for thousands of years.

Believers may counter with their own list of smart people who do believe in God, and who also work in the hard sciences and academic philosophy, including renowned figures like Human Genome Project director Francis Collins and physicist Freeman Dyson. Whether or not they’d wish to claim failed presidential candidate Ben Carson or religious apologists Dinesh D’Souza and Ravi Zacharias as examples of “intellectual honesty and scientific literacy” I couldn’t say, but all of those people and more are included in the video above, 20 Christian Academics Speaking About God, which Pararajasingham produced as a counterpoint to his 50 Academics series. Find the complete list of names for this video, along with links to complete interviews, on Youtube.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 5 ) |

Monty Python’s Philosopher’s Football Match: The Epic Showdown Between the Greeks & Germans (1972)

in Comedy, Philosophy | May 10th, 2016

Last year, we witnessed a very tense, unpleasant showdown between Germany and Greece as the topmost nation in the European Union drove its most indebted country to make painful, perhaps punishing compromises. In one analysis of this hard-to-watch economic humiliation—for Greece, that is—The Washington Post made use of a much more lighthearted contest between the two countries, one in which Greece emerged the victor after scoring the only goal of the match.

The soccer match, that is, or, if you must, football—played between German and Greek philosophers in 1972 and staged by Monty Python. On one side, Hegel, Leibniz, Kant, Marx, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, and more (including actual footballer Franz Beckenbauer, a “surprise inclusion”)… on the other, Socrates, Archimedes, Heraclitus, Plato, Democritus, Epictetus, etc…. On the sidelines of this showdown between Western schools of thought, Confucius served as the referee. Even after that single goal, scored after two full halves of meandering, the two teams came into conflict—in heated arguments about the nature of existence….

I won’t continue to bore you by explaining the gags—watch the sketch above. It’s great fun, if by some chance you haven’t seen it, and great fun to watch again if you have.

Filmed at the Grünwalder Stadion in Munich (presumably giving the Germans home field advantage), the sketch, Terry Jones recalled many years later, is about the “clash of opposites.” No, not the two European countries, but the opposites of sports and intellectual exercise. “You can’t think about football too much,” said Jones, “you just have to do it.” This proves challenging for our deep thinkers.

Why football? Because it’s “a team activity,” Jones answered, “which philosophy, as a general rule, isn’t.” Well, mostly. The Pythons weren’t the first to make the “incongruous” connection. Albert Camus played the game, as a goalkeeper, and played it quite well by all accounts. He once wrote, “all I know most surely about morality and obligations, I owe to football.”

The injunction to “just do it” wouldn’t present too much of a challenge for an existentialist, one would think. Philosopher Julian Baggini puts the Pythons firmly in that school of thought, their take on it a “coherent, Anglo-Saxon” one. Indeed, like Camus, the British comedians recognized the absurdity of life, and showed us that “the right response is to laugh at it.” They also showed us that philosophy could be hilarious, and made a classic sketch academics could use to refute charges they’re a dour, humorless lot.

It should come as no surprise that the Python “most interested in the subject” of philosophy and comedy was John Cleese—whom we’ve featured here many times for his talents in combining the two. Cleese, writes Baggini, is “on record as saying that comedy and deep thought can go hand in hand. ‘You and I could talk about the meaning of life, or education, or marriage,’ Cleese once told a journalist, ‘and we could be laughing a lot, and it doesn’t mean that what we’re talking about isn’t serious.’”

Inspired by the Pythons’ serio-comic love of learning, Baggini, and other philosophers like A.C. Grayling and Nigel Warburton, along with comedians, historians, and journalists, decided to restage the Germany-Greek match in 2010. Where the Pythons indirectly boosted intellectual pursuits in the course of mocking them, the participants in this “game”—such as it was—explicitly sought to promote “Reasoning,” the “fourth R” in “Reading, W®iting, and A®ithmetic.”

See them bumble around on the pitch here and generally have a good time making philosophical fools of themselves to the strains of Monty Python’s rowdy anthem “The Philosopher’s Song.”

John Cleese Touts the Value of Philosophy in 22 Public Service Announcements for the American Philosophical Association

Monty Python and the Holy Grail Re-Imagined as an Epic, Mainstream Hollywood Film

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Hermeneutics of Toilets by Slavoj Žižek: An Animation About Finding Ideology in Unlikely Places

in Animation, Philosophy, Politics | May 4th, 2016

It’s been part of Slavoj Žižek’s schtick for years. He’s mentioned it in talks about Donald Rumsfeld and America’s misadventures in Iraq. In lectures about architecture in Spain. In English-language talks. And other languages too. Maybe you’ve never heard Žižek’s spiel about finding ideology in the unlikeliest of places. Yes, toilets. If you’ve missed out, this new animation has you covered.

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via Philosophy Matters

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by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 5 ) |

Watch Animated Introductions to 35 Philosophers by The School of Life: From Plato to Kant and Foucault

in Philosophy | April 29th, 2016

Philosophy as an academic subject is regularly maligned in popular discourse. Philosophy majors get told that their studies are useless. Philosophy professors find their budgets cut, their courses scrutinized, and their character grossly impeached in propagandistic religious feature films. It’s enough to make one despair over the turgid air of anti-intellectualism that stifles conversation.

But before we start pining for bygone golden ages of rigorous critical thought, let us remember that philosophers have been a thorn in the side of the powerful since the inception of Western philosophy. After all, Socrates, the ancient Greek whose name we associate with philosophy’s most basic maxims and methods, was supposedly put to death for the crime of which today’s professorate so often stand accused: corrupting the youth.

We mostly know of Socrates’ life and death through the written dialogues of his star pupil, Plato, whom Alain de Botton calls in the first video above, “the world’s first true, and perhaps greatest, philosopher.” De Botton quickly explains in his animated School of Life introduction that the core of Plato’s philosophy constitutes a “special kind of therapy” geared toward Eudaimonia, or human fulfillment and well-being. From Plato, De Botton’s series of quick takes on famous philosophers continues, moving through the Enlightenment and the 19th and 20th centuries.

Key to Plato’s thought is the critical examination of Doxa, or the conventional values and “popular opinions” that reveal themselves as “riddled with errors, prejudice, and superstition.” Plato’s most famous illustration of the profound state of ignorance in which most of us live goes by the name “The Allegory of the Cave,” and receives a retelling with commentary by De Botton just above. The parable doesn’t only illustrate the utility of philosophy, as De Botton says; it also serves as a vivid introduction to Plato’s theory of the Forms—an ideal realm of which our phenomenal reality is only a debased copy.

The dualism between the real and the ideal long governed philosophical thought, though many competing schools like the Stoics expressed a healthy degree of skepticism. But we might say that it wasn’t until Immanuel Kant, whom you can learn about above, that Plato really met his match. Along with his famous ethical dictum of the “categorical imperative,” Kant also posited two distinct realms—the noumenal and the phenomenal. And yet, unlike Plato, Kant did not believe we can make any assertions about the properties or existence of the ideal. Whatever lies outside the cave, we cannot access it through our faulty senses.

These central questions about the nature of knowledge and mind not only make philosophy an immanently fascinating discipline—they also make it an increasingly necessary endeavor, as we move further into the realm of constructing artificial minds. Software engineers and video game developers are tasked with philosophical problems related to consciousness, identity, and the possibility of ethical free choice. And at the cutting edge of cognitive science—where evolutionary biology and quantum mechanics rub elbows—we may find that Plato and Kant both intuited some of the most basic problems of consciousness: what we take for reality may be nothing of the kind, and we may have no way of genuinely knowing what the world is like outside our senses.

As 17th century French philosopher and mathematician Rene Descartes feared, but found impossible to believe, our perception of the world may in fact be a deceptive, if useful, illusion. Learn more about Descartes above, and see De Botton’s full School of Life philosophy series at the top of the post. Or watch the series on Youtube.

There are 35 videos in total, which let you become acquainted with, and perhaps corrupted by, a range of thinkers who question orthodoxy and common sense, including Aristotle, Epicurus, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Friedrich Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, Arthur Schopenhauer, Albert Camus, Soren Kierkegaard, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Baruch Spinoza. Watch all of the videos in the playlist right below.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

In Search of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Secluded Hut in Norway: A Short Travel Film

in Philosophy, Travel | April 25th, 2016

If you like philosophy and road tripping, then you’ll want to put Wittgenstein in Norway in your YouTube queue. Posted this month by Kirsten Dirksen, the short film takes through the beautiful countryside of Norway, in search of the hut where Ludwig Wittgenstein exiled himself from society from time to time, first starting in 1913. Dirksen gives this preface to the film:

Over 100 years ago, philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein went to the fjords of Norway to escape the scholarly world of Cambridge. His former teacher Bertrand Russell wrote, “I said it would be lonely, and he said he prostituted his mind talking to intelligent people.”

Not content with simply moving to the isolation of rural Norway- at the end of the Sognefjord (the deepest and second longest fjord)- Wittgenstein built his hut across the lake and halfway up a mountain from the nearest town (Skjolden). Measuring just 7 by 8 meters, the small cabin dubbed “Little Austria” (his native country) became his home on and off throughout his life (his longest stay here was 13 months).

Wittgenstein was fleeing the distractions and interruptions of a more social lifestyle and hoping to confront only his own thoughts. “Whoever is unwilling to descend into himself,” he wrote, “because it is too painful, will of course remain superficial in his writing.’” He wrote some of his most important work here (a precursor to his “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus” and some of his “Philosophical Investigations”).

Today all that remains of his hut are its stone foundation and a very faint hikers trail up the mountain, though some Norwegians are trying to change this. Artists Marianne Bredesen, Sebastian Makonnen Kjølaas and Siri Hjorth (in collaborations with the Wittgenstein Society in Skjolden and funded by Public Art Norway) threw an all-expenses-paid vacation to bring fellow Oslo residents to the ruin. Inspired by Wittgenstein’s argument that “philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday”, they are calling their art holiday “Wittgenstein on Vacation”. For part one, they entertained their guests with a weekend of lectures, meals and a Wittgenstein interpretation at the site of his cabin. We captured some of the show on our own journey to this disappearing piece of history.

Other videos about simple living, self-sufficiency, small homes, and philosophies of life can be found on Dirksen’s YouTube channel.

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by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Hear What It Sounds Like When Philosopher Daniel Dennett’s Brain Activity Gets Turned into Music

in Music, Neuroscience, Philosophy | April 15th, 2016

The refinements of medical imaging technologies like fMRI have given neuroscientists, psychologists, and philosophers better tools with which to study how the brain responds to all sorts of stimuli. We’ve seen studies of the brain on Jane Austen, the brain on LSD, the brain on jazz improv…. Music, it seems, offers an especially rich field for brain research, what with its connection to language, bodily coordination, mathematics, and virtually every other area of human intelligence. Scientists at MIT have even discovered which specific regions of the brain respond to music.

And yet, though we might think of music as a discrete phenomenon that stimulates isolated parts of the brain, Brownell professor of philosophy Dan Lloyd has a much more radical hypothesis, “that brain dynamics resemble the dynamics of music.”

He restates the idea in more poetic terms in an article for Trinity College: “All brains are musical—you and I are symphonies.” Plenty of people who can barely whistle on key or clap to a beat might disagree. But Lloyd doesn’t mean to suggest that we all have musical talent, but that—as he says in his talk below—“everything that goes on in the brain can be interpreted as having musical form.”

To demonstrate his theory, Lloyd chose not a musician or composer as a test subject, but another philosopher—and one whose brain he particularly admires—Daniel Dennett. And instead of giving us yet more colorful but baffling brain images to look at, he chose to convert fMRI scans of Dennett’s brain—“12 gigabytes of 3‑d snapshots of his cranium”—into music, turning data into sound through a process called “sonification.” You can hear the result at the top of the post—the music of Dennett’s brain, which is apparently, writes Daily Nous, “a huge Eno fan.”

In his paper “Mind as Music,” Lloyd argues that the so-called “language of thought” is, in fact, music. As he puts it, “the lingua franca of cognition is not a lingua at all,” an idea that has “aftershocks for semantics, method, and more.” Several questions arise: I, for one, am wondering if all our brains sound like Dennett’s abstract ambient score, or if some play waltzes, some operas, some psychedelic blues.…

You can learn much more about Lloyd’s fascinating research in his talk, which simplifies the technical language of his paper. Lloyd’s work goes much further, as he says, than studying “the brain on music”; instead he makes a sweepingly bold case for “the brain as music.”

via Daily Nous

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

Carl Sagan Presents His “Baloney Detection Kit”: 8 Tools for Skeptical Thinking

in Philosophy, Science | April 11th, 2016

Photo by NASA via Wikimedia Commons

It is sometimes said that science and philosophy have grown so far apart that they no longer recognize each other. Perhaps they no longer need each other. And yet some of the most thoughtful scientists of modernity—those who most dedicated their lives not only to discovering nature’s mysteries, but to communicating those discoveries with the rest of us—have been fully steeped in a philosophical tradition. This especially goes for Carl Sagan, perhaps the greatest science communicator of the past century or so.

Sagan wrote a number of popular books for layfolk in which he indulged not only his tendencies as a “hopeless romantic,” writes Maria Popova, but also as a “brilliant philosopher.” He did not fear to venture into the realms of spiritual desire, and did not mock those who did likewise; and yet Sagan also did not hesitate to defend reason against “society’s most shameless untruths and outrageous propaganda.” These undertakings best come together in Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World, a book in which he very patiently explains how and why to think scientifically, against the very human compulsion to do anything but.

In one chapter of his book, “The Fine Art of Baloney Detection,” Sagan laid out his method, proposing what he called “A Baloney Detection Kit,” a set of intellectual tools that scientists use to separate wishful thinking from genuine probability. Sagan presents the contents of his kit as “tools for skeptical thinking,” which he defines as “the means to construct, and to understand, a reasoned argument and—especially important—to recognize a fallacious or fraudulent argument.” You can see his list of all eight tools, slightly abridged, below. These are all in Sagan’s words:

Wherever possible there must be independent confirmation of the “facts.”
Encourage substantive debate on the evidence by knowledgeable proponents of all points of view.
Arguments from authority carry little weight — “authorities” have made mistakes in the past. They will do so again in the future. Perhaps a better way to say it is that in science there are no authorities; at most, there are experts.
Spin more than one hypothesis. If there’s something to be explained, think of all the different ways in which it could be explained. Then think of tests by which you might systematically disprove each of the alternatives.
Try not to get overly attached to a hypothesis just because it’s yours. It’s only a way station in the pursuit of knowledge. Ask yourself why you like the idea. Compare it fairly with the alternatives. See if you can find reasons for rejecting it. If you don’t, others will.
If whatever it is you’re explaining has some measure, some numerical quantity attached to it, you’ll be much better able to discriminate among competing hypotheses. What is vague and qualitative is open to many explanations.
If there’s a chain of argument, every link in the chain must work (including the premise) — not just most of them.
Occam’s Razor. This convenient rule-of-thumb urges us when faced with two hypotheses that explain the data equally well to choose the simpler. Always ask whether the hypothesis can be, at least in principle, falsified…. You must be able to check assertions out. Inveterate skeptics must be given the chance to follow your reasoning, to duplicate your experiments and see if they get the same result.

See the unabridged list at Brain Pickings, or read Sagan’s full chapter, ideally by getting a copy of The Demon-Haunted World. As Popova notes, Sagan not only gives us succinct instructions for critical thinking, but he also makes a thorough list, with definitions, of the ways reason fails us through “the most common and perilous fallacies of logic and rhetoric.” Sagan’s chapter on “Baloney Detection” is, like the rest of the book, a highly literary, personal, engagement with the most pressing scientific considerations in our everyday life. And it is also an informal yet rigorous restatement of Aristotle’s classical logic and rhetoric and Francis Bacon’s natural philosophy.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Alejandro Jodorowsky’s 82 Commandments For Living

170 Renowned Academics Talk About Why They Disbelieve, or Believe, in God

Monty Python’s Philosopher’s Football Match: The Epic Showdown Between the Greeks & Germans (1972)

Hermeneutics of Toilets by Slavoj Žižek: An Animation About Finding Ideology in Unlikely Places

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Carl Sagan Presents His “Baloney Detection Kit”: 8 Tools for Skeptical Thinking

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