* Harrison points to this interesting piece by George Friedman on the importance of New Orleans as a port city.
* Lee discusses Athanasius on the atonement. I think Athanasius somewhere denies (and rightly so) that we can exhaustively describe the good things that Christ has done for us. So I think he would be entirely happy to meet that more can be said, and needs to be said, than he was able to say.
* PZ Myers points out a problem with one of Kurzweil's graphs at "Pharyngula".
* Gyula Klima has another awesome paper: Putting Skeptics in Their Place vs. Stopping Them in Their Tracks: Two Anti-Skeptical Strategies (PDF), which discusses two responses to skepticism, one of which is represented by Buridan and Reid, and another of which is represented by Aquinas and those who, like him, accept the strong Aristotelian thesis that our cognitive abilities cannot be deceived about their proper objects. (Although Klima puts him on the skeptical side, I think Berkeley's positive view of the world falls into the second group. After all, Berkeley is explicitly building an anti-skeptical argument himself. To do so he identifies what he thinks is the source of a type of external world skepticism, namely, a particular view of matter; he then argues against this view. That's his negative response to skepticism, which is often taken as a sort of skepticism itself. His positive response to skepticism, however, takes the mind to be undeceivable with regard to its ideas. These ideas are the proper objects of the senses. Berkeley, of course, is not an Aristotelian, but a Platonist trying to argue against skepticism about the senses. As he insists in later works like Siris, however, his view is closer to Aristotle's on some points than, say, Locke's, despite Locke's more obvious borrowings from Aristotle. As Berkeley notes, for instance, Aristotle would reject Locke's account of matter just as surely as Berkeley did; so, if Berkeley is right -- as I think he is -- in his diagnosis of the source of much early modern skepticism about the external world, it is perhaps not surprising that Berkeley's response to this brand of skepticism has some similarities to an Aristotelian response.)
* Since I'm linking Gyula Klima, I'll also link to his On whether id quo nihil maius cogitari potest is in the understanding and his Saint Anselm's Proof. I've linked to them both before -- more than once, in fact -- but since they are far and away my favorite discussions of Anselm's argument, I never get tired of linking to them.
UPDATE:
* Laurence Thomas has a good discussion of Judith Jarvis Thomson's famous and interesting argument, "A Defense of Abortion". Thomson's argument, of course, is that in some cases abortion may be morally defensible even assuming the fetus to have a right to life. Thomas discusses the oft-forgotten self-imposed limits of Thomson's argument. Thomson's argument is often considered the most important, or at least the most influential, philosophical argument for the defensibility of certain kinds of abortions. (HT: Parableman) Jeremy also links to Frederica Matthewes-Green's Seeking Abortion's Middle Ground.
* The Third Poetry Carnival will be held the 26th at danweasel.com; follow the link for information on submission. Which reminds me that I still need to pick something suitable.
