* "21st Century Reformation" has a great post on the dangers of fault-finding.
* I am currently reading Michael Rea's The Metaphysics of Original Sin (PDF). I have an interest in this sort of subject in part because of my study of Malebranche. In fact, my thesis, The External World and the Fall from Reason: Malebranche's Account of our Knowledge of the Existence of Bodies (horrible title, but most thesis titles are), discusses the role played by Malebranche's philosophical account of original sin in his theory of the external world. (Malebranche thinks of the Fall as a falling away from universal Reason, and the doctrine of original sin becomes important because he says seemingly contradictory things about whether and how we can know with certainty that bodies exist -- but you can see that these statements aren't really contradictory when you see that sometimes he is talking about our ideal state and sometimes he is talking about our actual current state under original sin.) Rea's paper, though, is primarily about inherited guilt. Malebranche says almost nothing on this subject, but as I read him his view is this. We inherit a disorder (what Rea calls corruption). Possession of that disorder is itself culpable, because it is not something merely passively possessed but a feature of one's own action. What makes it culpable is that for the disorder to be actively expressed requires an active violation of Reason by failing to love things according to the order Reason tells everyone to love them. Thus we are guilty for our own action. Culpable sin, however, is the very fact of not loving according to Reason; Malebranche denies MR, if understood to be the claim that we can't be guilty except for completely voluntary actions. (On Malebranche's view, I think, all that is required for P to be guilty for S is for P to be such that Reason considers P to be an improper object of love insofar as P is involved in S.)
* PZ Myers at "Pharyngula" recently had an excellent post on PT-141, the potential aphrodesiac that has been making some news recently.
* There was also recently a good discussion at "Mormon Philosophy and Theology" on deification in Mormonism vs. deificiation in the Church Fathers.
* A rather cool site for those who like logical proofs: the Metamath Proof Explorer. (HT: Arborescence)
* The Online Philosophy Conference starts tomorrow (April 30th). Most of it is on things that don't interest me much (which is odd, given how broad my interests are), but I'm looking forward to Hurka's paper on friendship in week 2, Levy's paper on Frankfurt-style cases in week 3, and Duff's paper on virtue jurisprudence in week 4. Perhaps a few others. I'll keep an eye out for papers that turn out more interesting than their titles, as well.
* A lot of people have been discussing or mentioning Caleb McDaniel's The case for abolishing nuclear weapons, for good reason.
* The University of Michigan Life Sciences department has a tutorial on stem cells. They also have a list of other online tutorials. Link to it. As I've noted before, one of the problems with the stem cell debate is that it is very difficult for most people to find out what is actually going on in stem cell work. Given such a dearth of information, more accessible information means a better discussion.
* The Logic Museum has Bonaventure's Prologue to the Second Book of the Sentences online. It gives a good sense of what serious scholars in medieval philosophy deal with all the time.
* At "The Lectures of Mortimer Shy" has a great poet discussing poetry and the literal, developing some ideas from Owen Barfield, in The Writer's Imperative.
