I scored a 40% but when I read the explanations on why the two ideas are at odds with each other, the reasoning only covered a few possible views that someone might have had when answering. For example, the one with the "all loving god" and the children. It argues that some harmful acts are done due to natural causes but the way I looked at them (and it's important to note that this is how I see it because it's my tension), is the harm that befalls them natural causes? I would say no because of how I view it.

So it's interesting to read and may help you sort out what you believe but keep in mind that this is only a few ways to look at the "tensions".

Hey I did the test and scored a 7% as well, but I'm still not sure if that is bad or not

Does'nt a high tension score mean you contradict yourself too much?

i had a score of 7 as well. fair and balanced?

20%--I'm quite surprised that it's still below the average of 29%, since I've got tension up the wazoo. And yet much of the "tension" which many people have in their beliefs is simply a result of holding contradictory, unreflective views.

I tend to be a Hegelian on the issue of tension or contradiction--truth itself has tensions in it which can only be resolved with monumental struggle, very hard philosophical work, and the long, extended history of human development. The truth is like a drunken party. Which, I think, is the sense of Heidegger's quote, "every mere -ism is the death of history": ideology masks over the tensions by positing a self-consistent, applied credo that reinforces its own plausibility.

40% here as well. Apparently one can not believe in Michealangelo as an all loving homosexual who should walk when he can instead of driving and not be in tension with one's other beliefs.

Tension, schmension! Walt Whitman said: "Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself."

I scored 40% but I feel that some of my responces were not mutualy exclusive due to the imprecise wording of the questions, though some were in fact exclusive.

Its outrageous what they are doing to bobby fisher. Free Bobby Fisher!

Screw Bobby Fischer. The guy is an anti-semite and an all around hateful bastard.

Thanks for the al-Jazeera article link, Norm.
So many people in the US believes the demonization put forth by the Bush administration, that they fail to recognize that not only is Al-Jazeera the station most progressive and critical of authoritarian regimes in the Middle East, but that most of its journalists trained with BBC, and has achieved a legitimacy in the ME, that many US news channels would wish for themselves (i.e. FOX in US, al-Hurra in ME).

What baffles me though, is that al-Jazeera has always played by the book with the Americans, going as far as giving the Command Center the coordinates of their offices in Afghanistan and Iraq, only to have the US turn around and use that very information to bomb their offices on both locations, killing innocent journalists, and getting off scott free, shrugging off while saying "they were not embedded, war is war".

Out in the world, we know who is committing war crimes, and it's not al-Jazeera.

I had 7% tension. The creator of the test realizes that having lots of tension in your view is not necessarily a bad view. It just takes more sophisticated reasoning to reconcile the tensions in your views. Nothing wrong with sophisticated reasoning. On the other hand lots of tension in your view can reflect that you haven't thought these things through carefully and simply hold contradictory opinions. Either way, it is a fun little test that gets you to think more philosophically.

Dende I am no expert on Hegel, but his ideal is no tension isn't it? Thats what stages of thesis, anti-thesis, and synthesis lead too. Hegel's view is to reconcile tensions until the absolute is reached. I take your point though, on the way to the absolute, tensions in one's view will be inevitable.

Dende quick question. I run into a lot of political theorists and political philosophers these days who have an enthusiam for Hegel. I don't think this has always been the case. Do have any insight into this new excitement over Hegel?

It'll be a cold day in hell before the Japanese Detention Authorities "Expedite" anything. They could give a rats ass whether or not he has documents, flights, sanctuary awaiting him elsewhere. They put bureaucrats in India to shame with the measures of "fill these forms out in triplicate with signatures in the appropriate sections indicating that you initialed your signature rather than signing. Oh, we don't have those forms here, you should have been issued those when you asked for them at immigration. It's not our fault you didn't ask for them, then sign was clearly posted (In Japanese). Maybe you should write a series of 'Gomen-nasai' ("I apologize") letters, until we accept your grovelling..."

He ain't goin' nowhere...

Chris--yes one of the great themes of Hegel's system is reconciliation, as in reconciliation of contradictions, antitheses, etc. But in the reconciliation the two opposed positions are "preserved and cancelled". For example, some people read the introduction to the Philosophy of Right as setting up an opposition between Hobbesian and Kantian freedom--Hegel's version of freedom purports to synthesize these two views but preserve both of them within itself.

The reason I mentioned Hegel with the tension test is that I think that many Hegelian positions maintain a certain tension between traditional alternatives. M. Inwood has a great short essay on Hegel where he discusses this. For example Hegel was almost certainly a kind of theist--but his was a theism which gives atheism its due to such an extent that it becomes a very strange theism. Another example: his epistemology and ethics are both very coherentist, and yet he tries to combine this coherentism with foundationalism. It's hard to tell what camp one ought to put him in.

The return to Hegel recently in political philosophy may have to do with the fact that people have looked over the last 170 years of political philosophy and realized that historically speaking much of it sucks. In logic, philosophy of language and mind, even in ethics you have more exciting things going on than in political philosophy. I'm in a political theory program and it seems like most of the recent thinkers students are interested in are scarcely political thinkers (Heidegger, Nietzsche, even Derrida!). This seems to me to be a sign that pickin's are slim nowadays. No offense to Rawls or Arendt.

Of course that's not a great answer. A better answer might be that much of analytic philosophy has gone through a kind of Kantian phase--for example the work of Strawson and others. But as Anglo-American philosophy has begun to come to terms with some of the problems in Kant, Hegel has been a natural source, since he had some great criticisms and adjustments of Kant. You also have certain well-known figures like Rorty and W. Sellars who are big fans of Hegel. In political philosophy specficially, much of the communitarian response to Rawls and Nozick follows broadly Hegelian lines, and eventually some people discovered that Hegel was saying many of the things Sandel and MacIntyre were saying, only Hegel was saying it much better. That's my best guess.

As for Continental philosophy, they haven't always read Hegel enthusiastically or well, but they have been doing so for many decades, since at least Marcuse's Reason and Revolution.

As you know some people in philosophy programs (Leiter) like to dismiss the work of us political theorists, but in Hegel studies some really nice books have been written by political theorists--P. Steinberger's Logic and Politics, S. Smith's Hegel's Critique of Liberalism, and Franco's Hegel's Philosophy of Freedom. M. Gillespe who wrote Hegel, Heidegger and the Ground of History is also in political science at Duke.

"For some people, the Holocaust is a fact"?

I took the Philosophical Health Check, and I read the question carefully and then read my results carefully up to a point.

I ranked 40%, having mediumish tension because of my many contradictory beliefs.

One of my contradictory beliefs is that the Holocaust really happened and that millions of Jews, gypsies, homosexuals and handicapped people were annihilated.

Apparently this is only true in a relative sense: "For some people, the Holocaust is a fact."

Presumably those would be the people who got gassed, victims of their own perceptions of truth?

There was more about my contradictory beliefs but I have to confess that I did not feel like reading any further.

Am I missing a perfectly reasonable explanation for the "for some people"?

There are many problems with that quiz. For example "11. The second world war was a just war" hmmmm.... imho it was a just war after it started but it was also entirely avoidable which ultimately makes it unjust - so what to choose what to choose. Orthis one "29. Governments should be allowed to increase taxes sharply to save lives in the developing world." It would be a good thing if it actually played out that way but we all know how incompetent the gov't would actually be at accomplishingh the goal and how much corruption would be involved in the spending of those tax dollars so no , it might not be a good thing.

The problem is the quiz demands a yes/no response but the world is not such a dichotomous place. fwiw - I scored 13%

Babe perhaps you answered in the positive to the question that there are no objective truths about matters of fact; "truth" is always relative to particular cultures and individuals.

Y'know, I don't think I did, 'cause that wouldn't be in keeping with my beliefs. Was there maybe some other question about "truth"?

It does seem like the "truth" of the Holocaust was a particularly insensitive choice of examples. If it was a chance choice.

Thanks dende.

I want to emphasize that "tension" doesn't mean contradiction. It just means the appearance of contradiction on the face of it. One cannot infer from the fact of tension of ones views to the idea that there are contradictions. If you read what the authors of the test say about tension it should clear this up for you.

Doug you are right that these issues are complex, but there is a way to read them that should allow you to give a yes/no answer. Take your comments about WWII for example. The question was written by British authors, so isn't reasonable to assume that they are asking whether it was just for the allies to enter the war? It certainly wasn't asking whether it was just that Germany invaded Poland. As for the question about taxation. It seems reasonable to assume there is an implicit ceteris paribus clause to the question. This means all other things being equal if governments could implement the aid using sharp taxation would it be a good idea.

Well my tension quotient was zero so evidently I was channelling the Saguaros' personae at the time. Anyway I wanted to suggest to anyone who hasn't already done so that they follow the link on this page to the other games at TPM. "Battleground God" is great fun and "Staying Alive" is about where you think your "I" resides. IIRC they are all about becoming aware of internal contradictions in your philosophy.

the test was so crude...as are most..

Its like doing brain surgery with spoons

I'm a seven percenter right now, after rationalizing that environmental damage was okay if I could drive my SUV over to my next door neighbor's house through the patch of endangered wildflowers and crushing the blandings tortoise's nest.

Here's where they got me...

"You agreed that: Severe brain-damage can rob a person of all consciousness and selfhood And also that: On bodily death, a person continues to exist in a non-physical form"

See, I'm kind of a heisenbergian that way. After you die, I hope you will live on in my mind or vice versa. I have no delusions of afterlife, so I think I misinterpreted what they meant by a person continuing to exist in a non-physical form.

Oh, and free Bobby Fischer, free all political prisoners.