There are dozens or hundreds of blogs on the web to reflect any interest, and there is only so much time in the day to keep up on any set of them. So my bookmarked list of sites to check each day or every few days is constantly in flux. There are bloggers whom I endorse 100% — their opinions reflect my own — but for that very reason I don’t necessarily need to keep on on them. I am not looking merely for validation; I am looking for sites that are not hostile to my philosophical stance and that at the same time provide thoughts and inputs I may not have already considered.
So, among the ‘atheist’ sites and bloggers I follow is one I’ve just come across in the past few days, called The A-Unicornist, whose title indicates my interest; ‘atheism’ is a bothersome word because it’s a negative, much like (a notion captured in some other site and blog titles) being a non-stamp collector. Not believing in ‘god’ is precisely the same as not believing in unicorns. Or faeries.
Anyway, my gateway into this guy’s site was this post: Eight totally non-polemic books you should read to be a better atheist (or to learn about atheism). Note that these are not books about atheism (Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris). I’ve read several of the titles on his list, have heard of several others, but have not heard of two or three. I’ve been browsing a book on basic philosophy recently, and I’m most notably interested in Lakoff title, because it addresses the obvious observations about the ancient Greek philosophers that most of their ideas have been demonstrated wrong (by science), as the description here notes.
…while the great philosophers often correctly identified important conundrums, they lacked the means to properly test their theses. The Cartesian person of dualistic natures, the Kantian autonomous person, the utilitarian and phenomenological persons, the Chomskyan syntactic person – are all non-existent. The mind is inherently embodied, abstractions are metaphorical constructs arising from the mind (contra Platonic realism), and much of reasoning is unconscious – rendering a priori introspection a futile model for understanding the self and reality.
The blogger, Mike D, points to Neil Degrasse Tyson’s list of 8 Books Every Intelligent Person Should Read.
Lots of good stuff on this blog; he’s been at it for five years or so, and seems very well-read (especially as an amateur; he’s a personal trainer by trade).
