The word ‘philosophy’ literally means ‘love of wisdom’ (philia=love and sophia=wisdom). Thus a philosopher can be understood as someone who loves wisdom and who seeks it via the activity of philosophy which asks general and fundamental questions and seeks to… Read more ›
We often bemoan just how incredibly, well, unwise people in politics are. And we often bemoan how this lack of political wisdom leads to a variety of vices, such as ignorance, cowardice, injustice, and immoderation, which cause so much suffering,… Read more ›
The instrumental approach to art emphasizes art’s functionality. Art can certainly have many functions. But many argue its ability to help us understand things is among its most important (perhaps the most important). Such people usually embrace aesthetic cognitivism or… 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 ›
When we try to diagnose the many social ills we have in our country it is easy to get bogged down with specifics that lead us to treat symptoms rather than causes. One way to gain some vision is to… Read more ›
In his writings the American philosopher John Dewey (1859-1952) presents some very interesting thoughts on the imagination that connect it to creativity, art, consciousness, perception, mind, and the projections of wholes that offer context for everything from navigating our local… Read more ›
In his book The Wanderer and His Shadow (aphorism #204), Friedrich Nietzsche wrote: “End and Goal: Not every end is a goal. The end of a melody is not its goal; but nonetheless, if the melody had not reached its… Read more ›
Ernest Becker, in his Pulitzer Prize winning book The Denial of Death (New York: Free Press, 1973), argues that “the problem of heroics is the central one of human life, that it goes deeper into human nature than anything else… Read more ›
The Greek tragic playwright Sophocles presented a truly terrifying image of man: he is the species whose ability to master nature is paralleled only by his failure to master himself (cf. Antigone, 368ff). J. Peter Euben elaborates: “Humans are, at… Read more ›
The last two posts I looked at the interactive models of education proposed by Socrates (470-399) and John Dewey (1859-1952). Now it is time to briefly compare the two models and draw some conclusions for individual and political growth. Similarities… Read more ›
Anyone who studies the philosophy of education will quickly discover that there are two central models of how knowledge comes to be acquired: on one hand, we have an ignorant and passive pupil who receives information from an active and… Read more ›
In the last post I noted the following virtues that John Dewey thought accompany intelligent action: Being conscientious or being interested in finding out what the actual good of a certain situation is Maintaining a bias toward fairness and objectivity… Read more ›
In the last post I noted the following virtues that John Dewey thought accompany intelligent action: Being conscientious or being interested in finding out what the actual good of a certain situation is Maintaining a bias toward fairness and objectivity… Read more ›
In the last post, I defined tragic conflict and suggested three reasons why we should take it seriously. Now, let us ask: How Can We Address Tragic Conflict? In 1960 Sidney Hook wrote an essay entitled “Pragmatism and the Tragic… Read more ›
Many Enlightenment philosophers, such as G.W. Leibniz (1646-1716) and Christian Wolff (1679-1754), had argued aesthetic experience was potentially intellectual. They argued that the sole difference between sensation and thought is that thought is distinct and sensation is confused. In order… Read more ›