David Hazony, editor of Azure Magazine, writes an interesting critique of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ in light Gibson’s other religiously-themed moves. The article’s two years old but worth reading anyway.
In other news, I’m in Israel for my vacation from school. Normal blogging should resume next week; that is, if law school doesn’t get in the way… again.
Multiple Selves and A-Theoretic Time
This week’s NYTimes Magazine has an interesting article about soft paternalism. In the course of offering a few different approaches, writer Jim Holt explains the theory of “multiple selves”.
You might naïvely imagine that you are one person, the same entity from day to day. To the 18th-century philosopher David Hume, however, the idea of a permanent “I” was a fiction. Our mind, Hume wrote, “is nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement.” According to this way of thinking, the self that inhabits your body today is only similar to, not identical with, the self that is going to inhabit your body tomorrow. And the self that will inhabit your body decades hence? A virtual stranger.
The implication here is that my current self has no right to restrict the behavior of my future self and use the law to help me. It’s an interesting approach that I have to think more about before passing judgment. But the article follows with a flawed argument to support it. (more…)
Torah, philosophy, etc.:
A blog, by David Fryman