What is the state of belief of an atheist? An atheist is often defined as someone who does not believe in God. It is quite true that an atheist does not believe in God, but that is insufficient to define the state of belief of an atheist. A tree or a rock or a lizard […]

It had been dawning on me that it was a defect in my tennis game that I wasn’t getting to the ball early  enough, in time to set up properly and hit with control (the strokes themselves were okay). Watching Melanie Oudin play brought this home to me: she uses her feet to fine-tune her […]

Our new president has literary and athletic skills. Not only can he write and speak eloquently and grammatically (his inauguration speech was meticulously crafted); he is also a fluent mover on the basketball court, with good coordination and ball sense. His predecessor was notoriously clumsy around language; he spoke as if language were a disease […]

I’ve just finished reading Rose George’s The Big Necessity, about toilets and human waste (euphemism alert!)–as part of my interest in the emotion of disgust. I’d strongly recommend Aurel Kolnai’s monograph “On Disgust” as a philosophical treatment of the subject; it contains some excellent phenomenological work with some important conceptual distinctions (far better than most of what passes […]