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Showing posts from July, 2019

Arthur C. Clarke, Logical Positivism and the Myth of Moral Naturalism

" The greatest tragedy in mankind's entire history may be the hijacking of morality by religion. "  - Arthur C. Clarke One of the most acclaimed and influential science fiction authors of the twentieth century, Arthur C. Clarke's magnum opus was the novel 2001: A Space Odyssey , which was translated into a groundbreaking film by Stanley Kubrick. As also was his contemporary titan of speculative fiction Isaac Asimov, Clarke was a devoted humanist who championed a vision of an atheistic utopia, free from the pollutant of religious belief. Clarke self-identified as a "logical positivist" - a philosophical position that asserts that only statements that are verifiable through empirical observation can contain any meaning. Other than the rather curious, self-refuting consequence of logical positivism (that the theory itself cannot be given any meaning by its own parameters) eventually relegating it to the dustbin of discarded philosophical ideas, aspects of

Derrida, Foucault and Van Til

A brief blog entry, but I'd like to take a moment to recommend an excellent lecture series by Christopher Watkin, a professor at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia as well as a Van Tillian presuppositionalist. In this series he interacts with two of the most influential French postmodernist philosophers of the twentieth century, Jacques Derrida and Michael Foucault, and compares their philosophy with the revelational epistemology of Cornelius Van Til. Well worth your time. https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/course/derrida-foucault-bible/#course-introduction