Adding philosophical depth to anything and everything
Philosophy in the real world.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one . . . “Philosophy began with the ancient Greeks.” Actually, let’s stop and talk about this. Let’s dig into deeper truths buried in history and beneath revisionist history. Bigger picture — let’s save learning in general and philosophy in particular. About Those Greeks Were there philosophers in Ancient Greece? […]
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(Public domain image) Beware of common wisdom. You, me, and pretty much everyone else for several centuries has been taught two untruths about the philosophy of René Descartes. Teaching and talking about philosophers’ ideas need to be connected with what the philosophers actually thought rather than repeating what commentators have said. […]
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Since the time of Francis Bacon in the 1500s, science had been defined by inductive reasoning. This inductive scientific method — still largely in use today — gathers observational data, develops hypotheses that match patterns in the data, verifies the hypotheses through more observation, and then settles on a theory from which science can […]
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William James (1842-1910), brother of novelist Henry James (1843-1916), was a medical doctor turned philosopher. William James literally wrote the book on psychology—The Principles of Psychology (1890)—establishing the field as a bona fide science. On philosophy, he was a pragmatist who followed Peirce and built on his work, bringing pragmatism […]
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Partner article to my honest analysis and appraisal of Christianity. This is a subject on which one cannot say anything without receiving hatred in return. Indeed, a number of people haven’t even read this far, already so full of anger at me for daring to touch on this issue. Atheism […]
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Mikhail Bakunin This is a difficult conversation to have, especially because it is so laden with emotions and misperceptions. These are not detached, academic topics— these two ideologies are woven into the fabric of politics today. My discussion here, a product of years of research and comparative politics, is to […]
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Bigot, misogynist, and antisocial cynic, Jean-Paul Sartre is an unlikely hero. Yet, Sartre is a hero to some, and not just to bigots, misogynists, and antisocial cynics. He was brave in speaking openly about what few have the courage to even contemplate. For what he contributed to philosophy, he deserves […]
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Seriously . . . It’s Monday night. I’ve finished teaching my ethics class. We covered Kant this week - he who said that acts of kindness performed because one finds an inner satisfaction in spreading joy have no true moral worth. No, Kant said, the only acts that have genuine moral worth are those […]
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Ah, the humble search engine. A set of algorithms designed to facilitate human efforts to find information. The search engine is not intelligent, and neither is its overhyped child, ChatGPT, but it can tell us a lot about being human. The Ghost Is in Us, not the Machine Imagine this scenario. […]
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David Hume was a Scottish philosopher in the mid 1700s. His philosophy was a culmination of British empiricism. This was a tradition that began with Francis Bacon and continued through Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and then was critiqued rather effectively by George Berkeley. Berkeley had said that it is […]
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