Adding philosophical depth to anything and everything
Do you remember Pet Rocks? You need to be older to remember them, but here’s a good history of them. The Pet Rock was the ultimate triumph of marketing over substance. The Pet Rock was a rock, just a plain rock, in a plain cardboard box labeled “Pet Rock.” I […]
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It’s a simple hypothesis: I have the ability to choose freely what actions I will take. Whether that hypothesis is correct — or its opposite is correct, that our choices are determined by external forces — is impossible to prove by reason. Or is it? William James observed that generating […]
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Okay, that headline is unfair because “Buddhism” is not a discrete entity but has many forms. However, that is part of my point. Read on, please. I saw a video address using a Hollywood celebrity to promote a particular school of Buddhism. “I realized all my thoughts are illusions,” said […]
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Philosopher for Hire Every now and then I am contacted by someone who wants to hire me to help them write a paper or book. I’ve had rewarding collaborations over the years, helping people form their ideas and polish their writing, and it’s been a nice income supplement (being a […]
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Few philosophers can be said to have founded a new branch of philosophy. The Moravian philosopher Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) is one. He is the founder of phenomenology, which is exactly what it sounds like: the study of phenomena. In Husserl’s case, it is the study of the phenomena in our […]
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My personal very nonmedical advice on dealing with this real fear. I don’t remember exactly when I first heard of someone being afraid of success, but I remember scoffing at the idea. How could someone feel anything but happiness about their successes? Growing up in a family in which silent misery […]
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How much can you change your life? How much can you change who and what you are? It’s complicated. Let’s insert some philosophy into this topic. Reality Exists Between Extreme Viewpoints On the one hand, I get crap from some of my professor colleagues because I acknowledge human free will. […]
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My parents taught me that everything in life is a struggle. An odd song from the 1990s is teaching me to overcome it. In my childhood family, under the thin veneer of suburban tranquility, was my parents’ constant tension from their unhappy marriage. Their frustration permeated everything and I picked […]
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Space for difference “The test of faith is whether I can make space for difference. Can I recognize God’s image in someone who is not in my image, whose language, faith, ideals, are different from mine? If I cannot, then I have made God in my image instead of allowing […]
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“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in he universe.” – John Muir It’s said that no person is an island. This is true of everything, though. Nothing is isolated. Nothing is without connections to other things and by extension to […]
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