In his classic work On Liberty (1859), John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) claimed that the freedom of thought and discussion was indispensable to a free society. Mill’s argument in defense of this freedom revolves around fallibilism or the view that no… Read more ›
Plato’s (427-347 B.C.) Republic is primarily a book, despite its many themes and topics, about justice in the soul and the state. Socrates’ analysis of justice is undertaken to justify the claim that we should all be virtuous even if we… Read more ›
In his book On Dialogue (Routledge, 1996), the late theoretical physicist David Bohm wrote: “On the whole, you could say that if you are defending your opinions you are not serious” (48). Bohm argues that real dialogue is marked by… Read more ›
In Plato’s Symposium we learn that love is the desire for the continued possession of the Good (206a-b) and that the Good is ultimately eternal Being that is timeless and always “the same in every way” (208b). Thus the goal… Read more ›
How is it that we can experience incoming data from the five senses as coherent, rather than incoherent, perceptions of objects and people? This issue, often referred to as “the binding problem” in neuroscience, has been a concern of philosophers… Read more ›
In Plato’s dialogue Phaedrus there is an interesting exchange between Theuth, the old God who invented writing, and King Thamus, the man who is critical of it: “But when it came to writing, This, said Theuth, will make the Egyptians… Read more ›
In his essay “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings” William James (1842-1910) argues that our ideals and ideas are intimately associated with our feelings. This can be a good thing since feelings both enable our ideas about things to… Read more ›
Shakespeare’s Richard III, although fairly simple in structure, is rich in philosophical insights. In this series of posts I will explore many of these insights. Let’s begin by looking at how the play illustrates stages of tyranny that can be… Read more ›
In the last two posts I considered Plato’s argument for the immortality of the soul that appears in book X of his dialogue Republic. Now I would like to say a few words about how the theme of immortality can… Read more ›
In his book The Courage to Teach,[1] Parker J. Palmer claims that objectivism is false and that a new conception of truth needs to be put in its place. Without this new conception we will perpetuate “disconnections between teachers, their… Read more ›
A student recently declared that philosophy and science, while interesting, simply can’t get very far given the “fragility” of our minds which, after all, are beset by all kinds of things, such as emotions, neuroses, defense mechanisms, fallacious reasoning, limited… Read more ›
In post #55 (go here) I explored, with reference to Freud, the dynamics of eros (love) and thanatos (death). Here I would like to continue these reflections with reference to Plato. In his dialogue Symposium, Plato has his character Socrates… Read more ›
Wassily Kadinsky, Several Circles (1926) In his essay The Poet, Ralph Waldo Emerson tells us that “we stand before the secret of the world, there where Being passes into Appearance, and Unity into Variety”. For a deeper insight into this secret… Read more ›
Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer wasn’t allowed to join in those reindeer games. The games, that is, of the normal reindeer, the ones that looked like each other. He was shunned as a misfit who wasn’t worth much. After all, worth… Read more ›
In 1897 Bram Stoker wrote his novel Dracula and, in doing so, set the archetype for the modern vampire. Vampire legends had been around since at least the ancient world[1] and the term ‘vampire’ was in circulation since at least… Read more ›