Many philosophers of the enlightenment, inspired by the scientific revolution, thought of nature as a vast machine rather than a living organism. For example, Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) opens his masterpiece Leviathan (1651) with some startling claims that reduce life to a series… Read more ›
Those of us who believe in the truth typically accept contingent truths or, to use possible worlds semantics, truths that are true in some worlds and false in others. For example, the sentence ‘Dwight Goodyear was born in 1970’ expresses a… Read more ›
Our experiences of beauty and duty appear to be very different. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), in his book Critique of Judgment, argued that judgments of the beautiful must be “disinterested.” This means that we make these judgments (1) without concern for the truth; (2) without… Read more ›
Obviously one of the most important general and fundamental questions is: What is truth? This is a difficult question—if only because we tend to assume a certain conception of the truth as we look for the truth about the truth!… Read more ›
The American philosopher John Dewey (1859-1952) offered a groundbreaking account of art in his Art as Experience (1934). This account, which reorients our understanding of art towards aesthetic experience, forges profound connections with education, democracy, and evolution. In what follows,… Read more ›
Determinism is the view that, given the laws of nature, all events are the necessary effects of previous events. When applying this to systems, one can say that a system is deterministic if there is only one way the system… Read more ›
In an earlier post (go here) I gave a brief overview of St. Augustine’s (354-430 C.E.) argument for God’s existence from eternal truth in his dialogue On Free Choice of the Will (Macmillan, 1964). Augustine argues that our minds can know truths… Read more ›
Thanatos, death, has swallowed many things into oblivion. It undoes and thwarts so much growth in the world. It may ultimately prevail…but Eros, love, isn’t going to make it easy. Plato, in his dialogue on love Symposium, does a lot… Read more ›
The American philosopher John Dewey (1859-1952) was often accused of being too optimistic about the potentials of science and democracy. Some claimed he lacked a tragic sense of life which is necessary to truly understand the world in which we… Read more ›
Substance dualists believe that humans are comprised of two radically different types of substances that interact but can, in principle, exist independently from each other. One popular version of substance dualism maintains that the mind is a non-physical, simple (not… Read more ›
Enjoy this beautiful musical analogue of death and resurrection from Franz Liszt: At the Grave of Richard Wagner (1883) performed by the Kronos Quartet and Aki Takahashi on piano. Happy Easter!
R.D. Laing In his book The Divided Self (Penguin: 1969) the Scottish psychiatrist R. D. Laing (1927-1989) attempts to existentially and phenomenologically, rather than biologically and clinically, understand “the schizoid individual” or “an individual the totality of whose experience is split… Read more ›
Memory can be defined as “the faculty of the brain by which information is encoded, stored, and retrieved when needed” (Wikipedia). Here you see the brain is included in the definition. Is this inclusion necessary? After all, one could say that “memory is… Read more ›
Lloyd Alexander Lloyd Alexander (1924-2007) was one the greatest authors of novels for young people. His five book series Chronicles of Prydain is one of the most entertaining and profound fantasy epics of all time. Before becoming an author of… Read more ›
Albert Camus, in chapter two of his profound novel The Fall, has his character Jean-Baptiste Clamence present us with the following troubling, yet certainly applicable in some cases, observations: “Have you ever noticed that death alone awakens our feelings? How… Read more ›