The Human Question

Aristotle says that friendship involves a kind of equality between the friends.  I propose that our talk of equality in other contexts, such as ethics or politics, must, in order not to be vacuous, have its roots in the experience of friendship.

A humorist is one who enables us to take delight in our limitations, and to share that delight with others through laughter.

The Fifth Way of arguing for the existence of God, according to Thomas Aquinas, is taken from the fact that non-cognizant things act for a purpose.  He believes that this shows that an intelligent being is directing things now to a goal.  This argument is not an intelligent design argument inasmuch as it does not argue from the present existence of purposive activity in a thing to a previous event in which the thing so acting was engineered to act in that manner.  Rather, Aquinas argues that the fact that a thing acts now to attain a goal implies that it is now being directed by an intelligent being toward that goal. To a contemporary reductionist, this argument must seem quaintly mistaken, for what passes as purposive activity is really a mechanical process.  The sunflower's turning toward the sun is the result of the flower's components acting essentially like levers in a machine.  The same is true for all other things, both living and non-living. One...