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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
I think we should embrace what many philosophers take to be a plausible view regarding truth if we are committed to propositions as truth bearers, namely, its omnitemporality: If a proposition is true it is omnitemporally true: it always was,… Read more ›
Jacques Ellul, in his book Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes (Vintage, 1965), defines propaganda as follows: “Propaganda is a set of methods employed by an organized group that wants to bring about the active or passive participation in its… Read more ›
The great Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499) was, among other things, an Italian renaissance scholar, Catholic priest, humanist philosopher, astrologer, doctor, musician, reviver of Platonism, and the first translator of Plato’s complete extant works into Latin. He was also the head of… Read more ›
Here are some notes on Jean-Paul Sartre’s (1905-1980) existentialism that continue, on some level, to apply to the world around me more than any other set of philosophical propositions (for a more in-depth overview of the man and his many… Read more ›
Umberto Eco, in his book On Ugliness (Rizzoli, 2007), provides a helpful way to categorize our experience of ugliness. There is (1) Ugliness in itself which gives rise to a visceral, negative reaction. Here we can think of feces, a rotting animal,… Read more ›