Many people make resolutions on New Year’s Day. It is a day of beginnings and endings and is often accompanied by faith and hope in the new. But can there ever really be a new beginning? Well, resolutions are often… Read more ›
I just came across an interesting and, as far as I know, original argument why matter is infinite from Edgar Allan Poe. The argument takes place in the course of a very philosophical and haunting dialogue he wrote called “The… Read more ›
It is easy to lose our sense of wonder for things around us. Of course, we may wonder when confronted with things out of the ordinary. But shouldn’t it be more common to wonder about, well, everything? Perhaps not. After… Read more ›
Edgar Allan Poe, 1809-1849 It is March 21, 2020 and the coronavirus is a pandemic threatening everyone on Earth. In my relative isolation of social distancing, I have had more time to read and I was drawn to a tale… Read more ›
In earlier posts I briefly presented both St. Augustine’s (see here) and Leibniz’s (see here) arguments for God from eternal truth. Since I find this underrepresented approach to demonstrating God’s existence both fascinating and promising, I decided to present my… Read more ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
In this post I want to take a look at some interesting comments by G.W. Leibniz (1646-1716) about the nature of propositions and how their ability to combine the way they do makes them different from physical objects. His insights… Read more ›