What is Philosophy For? (5 points)

5 points from lifehacker.com

1. We don't ask big questions: We may think about the big questions of life from time to time, but philosophers dedicate their lives to pursuing answers so that our lives in general can become safer, easier, and more fulfilling.
2. We often lack common sense: Philosophers try to find whether something is actually logical, as opposed to assuming something is right just because it's popular and long-established.
3. We tend to be mentally confused: We get emotional at things and we don't always know why. Philosophers pursue self-knowledge, and believe one of the first steps to a good life is knowing yourself well.
4. We don't know what makes us happy: We overrate things that we think will make us happy and we underestimate how simple things can contribute to our mental well-being. Philosophers try to be precise about the activities and attitudes that actually can make our lives better.
5. We sometimes lose perspective: So many things in our world are much bigger than we are. We spend our days concerned with what we have and what we want, but philosophy helps us gain perspective and see the big picture.

Study Finds Blame Now Fastest Human Reflex

WALTHAM, MA—According to a study published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine, blame has now surpassed instinctive responses such as blinking and flinching as the fastest human reflex. “Our research shows that assigning fault to another person for a negative or unintended outcome is now the human body’s quickest involuntary action,” said lead author Dr. John Wittsack, adding that changes to the brain’s neural pathways over time have allowed for a nearly instantaneous transition between perceiving a problem and condemning someone else for causing it. “In the time it takes for a single sneeze or for the pupil to contract once, an average human can blame dozens, if not hundreds of individuals. In fact, the blame reflex may soon be too rapid to be measured even by our most sensitive instruments.” By contrast, Wittsack added that accepting responsibility had degenerated into a purely vestigial reflex and would eventually exit the human race altogether.

From the Onion 

Procrastination in the 21st Century...

"The Apologist and Atheist in an Improbable Bond"

From the New York Times

"So commenced the unlikely friendship and intellectual partnership of the atheist and the apologist. Since then, their relationship has transpired through private emails and chats. Two months ago, though, it became public with the release of Professor Skeel’s book “True Paradox: How Christianity Makes Sense of Our Complex World.” 

Not only is Dr. Arsenault acknowledged in the book, and not only is he quoted in it as a “materialist friend of mine,” but the true paradox of “True Paradox” is that the volume might not have existed at all, or certainly would not exist in its present shape and voice, without the secular scientist as its midwife. And that odd reality is testament to a rare brand of mutual civility in the culture wars, with their countervailing trends of religious fundamentalism and dogmatic atheism... 

...“The thing that really sticks out with me,” Dr. Arsenault said, “is that in the culture wars, the rhetoric is acerbic on both sides. On the humanist side, there’s this tendency to view people of faith as not rational. And David is clearly rational. He’s just looked at the same evidence as me and come to a different conclusion.”

Description of the Great White Whale, Moby Dick

"But not yet have we solved the incantation of this whiteness, and learned why it appeals with such power to the soul; and more strange and far more portentous—why, as we have seen, it is at once the most meaning symbol of spiritual things, nay, the very veil of the Christian’s Deity; and yet should be as it is, the intensifying agent in things the most appalling to mankind. Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky way? Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a colour as the visible absence of colour; and at the same time the concrete of all colours; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows—a colourless, all-colour of atheism from which we shrink? . . . And of all these things, the albino whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?"