voice-of-reason/philosophy

I am intollerant of mispeling, though I do enjoy mind maps.

"Gods Don't Kill People, People With Gods Kill People"
Logically, the statement does not say anything about people without Gods. It's a spoof of the NRA's slogan about gun control. If you really insisted on being inclusive about this, you could indeed posit "{absence of gods} doesn't kill people, people with {absence of gods} kill people". But that would tend to overcook the gag, which is mainly aimed at yer caricaturised gun-totin', god-fearin', NRA redneck.

From the page: "Engineers are the unacknowledged philosophers of the postmodern world. What is distinctive about the material base of postmodernity is that it is an engineered materiality." Helpful intro to the philosophy of engineering, but say the word "playful" one more time and I'll scream. Give me gravitas or give me ... something a little more final.

Blackburn deals to Eco...
From the page: "Eco is deft on truth in fiction:

'It has been said that narrative worlds are always little worlds, because they do not constitute a maximal and complete state of things...In this sense narrative worlds are parasitical, because, if the alternative properties are not specified, we take for granted the properties that hold good in the real world. In Moby Dick it is not expressly stated that all the sailors aboard the Pequod have two legs, but the reader ought to take it as implicit, given that the sailors are human beings. On the other hand the account takes care to inform us that Ahab had only one leg, but, as far as I remember, it does not say which, leaving us free to use our imagination, because such a specification has no bearing on the story.'"

Blackburn deals to post-modernists...
From the page: "... nobody would want to erase Truth, Reason, and the rest, would they? Richard Rorty would. Like Nietzsche more than a century ago, he believes that these words have inherited the same illusory magic that once hovered around the idea of a deity. "