Tag Archives: definition

How Science is Like a Dating Website

What is science? Here’s my definition: Concerning the past and present, science seeks to match the most coherent, simple, and plausible theories to the existing evidence; with regard to the future, it attempts to match predictions to evidence. Put more … Continue reading

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What the Lightning Said: My Definition of Art

Art, by my definition, is a report of what the lightning said. It’s bound up with the ontological mystery (the mystery of being itself); an artist’s attempt to represent to others an experience of that mystery (what it feels like … Continue reading

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Why Atheism is Not Just Disbelief in the Existence of Gods

Atheists typically assert that atheism is just disbelief in the existence of gods, and when they say this it is usually to insist that little, or even nothing, follows from this definition (or has ever followed from it). On this line … Continue reading

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St Paul Meets Jehu: Is Quran Burner Terry Jones a Blasphemer or an Iconoclast?

I’m not sure blasphemy (a word from the Greek blasphemos, meaning “evil speaking”) is the right word for what Florida pastor Terry Jones did. To my mind, blasphemy has two levels. The first is honest and conscientious expression of non-Orthodox opinion. If I … Continue reading

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What is a Human, Really? Thinking about Definition via Aristotle

If your definition of a word is to be any good, Aristotle was the first to notice that it should say something general and something specific. Aristotle designated these two components the genus and species of a definition. Thus you might … Continue reading

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The Thorny Problem of Defining What a Book Is (It’s Not as Easy as You Might Think)

I like this definition of a book (which I found in a Times Literary Supplement essay): I. A. Richards called the book “a machine to think with” . . . Notice that the definition has the two elements that Aristotle … Continue reading

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