I often see Ernest Hemingway quoted for a definition of courage, or "guts," as "grace under pressure." Too lazy to research the specific source, I asked Yahoo!Answers, and received the following. Hemingway used it in a profile piece written by Dorothy Parker. Parker asked Hemingway: "Exactly what do you mean by 'guts'?" Hemingway replied: "I mean, grace under pressure." The profile is titled, "The Artist's Reward" and it appeared in The New Yorker on November 30, 1929. The first published use of the phrase, however, was in an April 20, 1926 letter Hemingway wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald. The letter is reprinted in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917-1961 edited by Carlos Baker, pages 199-201. Thank you, Yahoo!
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In response to a question in Yahoo!Answers that seems to be from a newcomer to philosophy, I suggested the following books. "If you're looking to get your feet wet, I suggest a classic by Will Durant, THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY (1924). "When you're ready to go a little deeper, and incorporate in your thinking some philosophers whose work is more recent than Durant's survey, I suggest Roger Scruton, MODERN PHILOSOPHY (1994). "Then leap right in! Some quite recent books of worth include: Jesse J. Prinz, GUT REACTIONS (2006) ; Robert Kane, A CONTEMPORARY INTRODUCTION TO FREE WILL (2005); Doug Erlandson, THE THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE (2013). Enjoy the struggle." I ended it that way because philosophy when engaged properly is a struggle. If you don't feel yourself to be torn in multiple directions by good arguments all around -- you're doing it wrong. Yet this struggle, like many struggles, contains its own variety of enjoyment.
Below is my response to the question "is the teleological argument strong enough to convince an atheist?" within Yahoo!Answers: [The regular reader of the blog, or even someone who has just glimpsed at the title of this blog, will be unsurprised to see that the bulk of it consists of a quotation from the works of William James.] Obviously, if someone is an atheist, it is because that person has not been convinced by such arguments (all adult atheists have heard such arguments). So in a sense the answer is trivially "no." But you may want to know whether the argument has sufficient force to persuade an ideally rational atheist. I have to say that in its usual forms anyway, the argument seems to me rather week. William James put his finger on one of the weaknesses of the argument when he wrote (in a footnote to lecture 18 of VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE), " When one views the world with no definite theological bias one way or the other, one sees th...