New to philosophy? www.philosophyclass.com has a good beginners-level introduction. You may also want to take a look at Ayn Rand's 'Philosophy: Who Needs It' speech, which she presented to the US Military Academy at West Point. I'm not a fan of Ayn Rand (the last 13 paragraphs of this speech are particularly horrible), but she touches on some important issues here. I suggest you Google any ideas or terms that catch your eye, and/or browse through the dmoz.org directory of philosophy sites. You may also be interested in this excerpt from Stephen Law's The Philosophy Gym, 'Is Morality Like A Pair of Spectacles?'.
Atheism - absence of a belief in a God or Gods. See www.infidels.org, www.atheists.org,
www.positiveatheism.org, www.atheistalliance.org, www.infidelguy.com.
www.adherents.com is a growing collection of religious adherent statistics.
"If God does not exist, everything is permitted" -- Ivan Karamazov, The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky.
'Nihilism is the belief that all values are baseless and that nothing can be known or communicated. It is often associated with extreme pessimism and a radical skepticism that condemns existence. A true nihilist would believe in nothing, have no loyalties, and no purpose other than, perhaps, an impulse to destroy. While few philosophers would claim to be nihilists, nihilism is most often associated with Friedrich Nietzsche who argued that its corrosive effects would eventually destroy all moral, religious, and metaphysical convictions and precipitate the greatest crisis in human history. In the 20th century, nihilistic themes--epistemological failure, value destruction, and cosmic purposelessness--have preoccupied artists, social critics, and philosophers. Mid-century, for example, the existentialists helped popularize tenets of nihilism in their attempts to blunt its destructive potential. By the end of the century, existential despair as a response to nihilism gave way to an attitude of indifference, often associated with antifoundationalism.' -- Internet Encyclopaedia of Philosophy. See also moral nihilism.
Existentialism - free will, individualism, choice, absurdity, anguish, dread, nothingness, death, alienation or estrangement, nihilism. See also the comic strip - The Parking Lot is Full. See also Thom Yorke on 'Street Spirit (Fade Out)'.
Friedrich Nietzsche 'Nietzsche was greatly concerned with basic problems he discerned in contemporary Western culture and society, which he believed were becoming increasingly acute, and for which he considered it imperative to try to find new solutions. He prophesied the advent of a period of nihilism, with the death of God and the demise of metaphysics, and the discovery of the inability of science to yield anything like absolute knowledge; but this prospect deeply worried him. He was firmly convinced of the untenability of the 'God-hypothesis' and associated religious interpretations of the world and our existence, and likewise of their metaphysical variants. Having also become persuaded of the fundamentally non-rational character of the world, life, and history, Nietzsche took the basic challenge of philosophy to be that of overcoming both these ways of thinking and the nihilism resulting from their abandonment. This led him to undertake to reinterpret ourselves and the world along lines which would be more tenable, and would also be more conducive to the flourishing and enhancement of life. The 'de-deification of nature', the tracing of the 'genealogy of morals' and their critique, and the elaboration of 'naturalistic' accounts of knowledge, value, morality, and our entire 'spiritual' nature thus came to be among the main tasks with which he took himself and the 'new philosophers' he called for be confronted.' -- Oxford Companion to Philosophy
'Much of epistemology has arisen in defense or in opposition to various forms of skepticism. Indeed, one could classify various theories of knowledge by their responses to skepticism. For example, rationalists could be viewed as skeptical about the possibility of empirical knowledge while not being skeptical with regard to a priori knowledge and empiricists could be seen as skeptical about the possibility of a priori knowledge but not so with regard to empirical knowledge. In addition, many traditional problems, for example the problem of other minds or the problem of our knowledge of God's existence, can be seen as restricted forms of skepticism which hold that we cannot have knowledge of any propositions in some particular domain thought to be within our ken.' -- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
"With all the passion of a religious crusader, Robert Anton Wilson is out to destroy all personal belief systems, to force every one of his readers to seriously question any and all thoughts they hold dear." -- Michael Dare.
www.rawilson.com (official website) and RAW's dossier at disinfo.com and deoxy.org entry and Discordianism. '"I do not believe anything." This remark was made, in these very words, by John Gribbin, physics editor of New Scientist magazine, in a BBC-TV debate with Malcolm Muggeridge, and it provoked incredulity on the part of most viewers. It seems to be a hangover of the medieval Catholic era that causes most people, even the educated, to think that everybody must "believe" something or other, that if one is not a theist, one must be a dogmatic atheist, and if one does not think Capitalism is perfect, one must believe fervently in Socialism, and if one does not have blind faith in X, one must alternatively have blind faith in not-X or the reverse of X. My own opinion is that belief is the death of intelligence. As soon as one believes a doctrine of any sort, or assumes certitude, one stops thinking about that aspect of existence.' Jargon file entry: "The veneration of Eris, a.k.a. Discordia; widely popular among hackers. Discordianism was popularized by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson's novel "Illuminatus!" as a sort of self-subverting Dada-Zen for Westerners -- it should on no account be taken seriously but is far more serious than most jokes. Consider, for example, the Fifth Commandment of the Pentabarf, from "Principia Discordia": "A Discordian is Prohibited of Believing What he Reads." Discordianism is usually connected with an elaborate conspiracy theory/joke involving millennia-long warfare between the anarcho-surrealist partisans of Eris and a malevolent, authoritarian secret society called the Illuminati."
(nonserviam.com). "He has been variously interpreted as an anarcho-egoist, an early existentialist, a protofascist who influenced the thought of Mussolini, a frontrunner of Nietzsche and as a nihilist maniac whose thirst for blood could never be quenched... an iconoclast who aimed to live above society, untramelled by moral conventions... In his defence of the sovereignty of the individual will, Max Stirner launches a brutal and uncompromising assault on the state, society, religion, the family. Also one of the most potent criticisms of humanism, liberalism and communism put forward, Stirner was one of the first to accurately prophesy the tyranny that communism would engender once established. Stylistically, it ranges from cutting aphoristic precision to opaqueness,self-contradiction and repetition, but nonetheless a profound, stimulating presentation of a highly eccentric position of political thought" -- T.M.O(tomer@essex.ac.uk)
'Transhumanism is a radical new approach to future-oriented thinking that is based on the premise that the human species in its current form does not represent the end our development but its beginning. ' It has been defined as 'The intellectual and cultural movement that affirms the possibility and desirability of fundamentally improving the human condition through applied reason, especially by developing and making widely available technologies to eliminate aging and greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities.' Transhumanists 'encourage study and discussion of emerging technologies which overcome the limitations of the human body, and the consequences of those technologies. We also seek to expand technological opportunities for people to live longer and healthier lives and to enhance their intellectual, physical, and emotional capacities.' See www.transhumanism.org, the Transhumanist declaration and their FAQ. See also the Extropians. 'An Extropian is defined as one who seeks to overcome human limits, live indefinitely long, become more intelligent, and more self-creating. An Extropian is a transhumanist who affirms the values and attitudes codified and expressed in The Extropian Principles. The term was derived from the term "extropy" by Max More in 1988 ... The Extropian philosophy is a transhumanist philosophy based upon the Extropian Principles. The Extropian Principles define a specific version or "brand" of transhumanist thinking. Like humanists, transhumanists favor reason, progress, and values centered on our well being rather than on an external religious authority. Transhumanists take humanism further by challenging human limits by means of science and technology combined with critical and creative thinking. We challenge the inevitability of aging and death, and we seek continuing enhancements to our intellectual abilities, our physical capacities, and our emotional development. We see humanity as a transitory stage in the evolutionary development of intelligence. We advocate using science to accelerate our move from human to a transhuman or Posthuman condition. As physicist Freeman Dyson has said: "Humanity looks to me like a magnificent beginning but not the final word."'
What Minority Report, Bladerunner, Impostor and Total Recall have in common is that they are all based on novels by Philip Dick. Dick has been described by John Brunner as 'The most consistently brilliant SF [science fiction] writer in the world' and by Norman Spinrad as 'The greatest American novelist of the second half of the twentieth century'. 'No other writer of his generation had such a powerful intellectual presence. He has stamped himself not only on our memories but in our imaginations' says Brian Aldiss. 'The fact that what Dick was entertaining us about is reality and madness, time and death, sin and salvation - this has escaped most critics' claims Ursula Le Guin. 'In "The Android and the Human," Dick suggests that the young sociopaths with whom he was in those days spending all his time had provided him with an answer. Their criminal perversity and willfulness, he writes, are guarantors that they will never be "unplugged," because they'd never allow themselves to become plugged-in in the first place. "If, as it seems, we are in the process of becoming a totalitarian society," he concludes, "the thing would be: cheat, lie, evade, fake it, be elsewhere, forge documents, build improved electronic gadgets in your garage that'll outwit the gadgets used by the authorities." Why? Because "even the most base schemes of human beings are preferable to the most exalted tropisms of machines" (which substitute means for ends), and because "we can tell and tell [people like that] what to do, but when the time comes for him to perform, all the subliminal instruction, all the ideological briefing, all the tranquilizing drugs, all the psychotherapy are a waste. He just plain will not jump when the whip is cracked." This, for Dick, is what passes for a vision of the Good.' -- Hermenaut of the Month - Philip K Dick. "The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words." - Philip K Dick
www.chuckpalahniuk.net official website
Edward Norton Yale Interview on Fight Club
"The idea of the fighting in this is not about the suggestion that violence directed outward toward other people is a solution to your frustrations," Norton says quite firmly. "It's very much a metaphor for self transforming radicalism for the idea of directing violence inward at your own presumptions. (My character) doesn't walk out of the bar and say 'Can I hit you,' he says 'Will you hit me?' It's this idea that you need to get shaken out of your own cocoon. The fighting is a metaphor for stripping yourself of received notions and value systems that have been applied to you that aren't your own. And freeing yourself to discover who you actually are."
"What really drew my attention was the underlying theme that you have to break yourself apart to build something new. It is only when you realize that you're not your lousy hair or your bad debts or your fears that you're not good enough that you can actually create a new life for yourself. What was exciting and dramatic about the book is that one character forcibly brings about this awareness in the other by wilfully destroying everything to which the unenlightened character is attached. ...
I really thought the film would change the world. It shocks you into looking at who really controls your life - you or your own fears. Once you make that distinction, you then have the choice to take control or not. It is better to have options than to be eternally bemoaning your lot in life." -- Ross Grayson Bell (Fight Club Producer)
Beyond blown eyes on 'Fight Club' a column by John Shirley
"It’s about consumerism—about realizing we’re sheep, we’re trained for this life so we can sustain the power structure; that we’re living in a community that we have not built, as in former times, but that has, for a while now, been imposed on us. The metaphor is even more starkly played out in The Matrix where people literally find that in their sleep they’re power sources for a society run by robots. The same message: Wake up and shake off the shackles—and the wires. Only, we don’t know how we’re going to get free once we wake up. The movies can’t tell us that. They can only tell us to wake up. It’s in the air."
"I was stunned when the movie was about to come out and I started reading about Susan Faludi and Stiffed. I thought it was so amazing that she had been working on this for 6 years while Chuck Palahniuk was under a diesel truck in Portland writing, in his brilliantly hyperbolic way, about the very same things Susan was researching." -- Laura Ziskin (President of Production, Fox 2000 Pictures). Check out the final passage from Stiffed.
"It's really easy, you can spend your life criticizing and tearing down the culture, but at some point, you've got to pull your guts up and actually create something in the culture and stand for something. And I saw Trent [Reznor of Nine Inch Nails] doing that with that song [The Fragile]. That's what I wanted to do with Choke, was risk losing all of my readers who liked the nihilist stuff, because you've got to move on at some point and actually stand for something. Even if it's putting one rock on top of another rock, it still has to end on something positive like that, something constructive, rather than continually destructive." -- Chuck Palahniuk in Turtleneck.net interview [404?]
Articles written by Chuck Palahniuk
www.ishmael.org 'In 1989 Ted Turner created a fellowship to be awarded to a work of fiction offering positive solutions to global problems. The winner, chosen from 2500 entries worldwide, was a work of startling clarity and depth: Daniel Quinn's Ishmael, a Socratic journey that explores the most challenging problem humankind has ever faced: How to save the world from ourselves.
The book opens with a deceptively ordinary personals ad: "Teacher seeks pupil. Must have an earnest desire to save the world." Seeking a direction for his life, a young man answers the ad and is startled to find that the teacher is a lowland gorilla named Ishmael, a creature uniquely placed to vision anew the human story.
Ishmael's paradigm of history is startlingly different from the one wired into our cultural consciousness. For Ishmael, our agricultural revolution was not a technological event but a moral one, a rebellion against an ethical structure inherent in the community of life since its foundation four billion years ago. Having escaped the restraints of this ethical structure, humankind made itself a global tyrant, wielding deadly force over all other species while lacking the wisdom to make its tyranny a beneficial one or even a sustainable one.
That tyranny is now hurtling us toward a planetary disaster of pollution and overpopulation. If we want to avoid that catastrophe, we need to work our way back to some fundamental truths: that we weren't born a menace to the world and that no irresistible fate compels us to go on being a menace to the world.
Since Bantam first published Daniel Quinn's utterly unique novel Ishmael in 1992, the novel has grown into a bestseller. Ishmael has garnered rave reviews and has been adopted for classroom use in schools coast-to-coast, including Dartmouth, the Naval Academy and Stanford University. Along the way, Ishmael gathered a devoted following as thousands upon thousands of readers have written to Quinn to express how the book has changed their lives.'