One of the greatest human skills is the ability to thing. We are thinging beings. We thing all the time. We thing the natural world into pieces. We saw a tall plant and we defined …
William James, The Stream of Consciousness and Freewill
William James was trained as a medical doctor at Harvard University and became generally recognized as the first psychologist in America and his first and arguably most significant written work was “The Principles of Psychology” published …
How do you read philosophy?
As I have been reading through some of the works of the great American philosophers I have found myself having to think about “how” to read them. When you read Ralph Waldo Emerson or …
The Non-Dual Awakening of Ralph Waldo Emerson
One of the themes that I intend to develop in this blog is the understanding of non-duality. Non-duality is a term that means literally – “not two.” It is used in philosophy, but even more …
The Evolutionary Ethics of John Dewey
The American philosopher John Dewey wrote another of my favorite philosophy passages in the last paragraph of his 1898 essay Evolution and Ethics. Dewey articulates in this paragraph what he sees as a monumental leap …
Is Time Real?
The experience of the passage of time is one of the most foundational experiences of being human. We remember the past, we experience the immediacy of the present, and we imagine the possibilities of the …
What does it feel like to evolve?
Evolutionary Ethics has been a topic of discussion ever since there has been discussion about evolution. In the early 20th century Eugenics was seriously studied at universities. Eugenics is the practice of controlled human breeding for evolutionary purposes. …
Art, Culture and Alfred North Whitehead
The art scene in New York in the fifties was a living hotbed for a new way of thinking and new conceptions about reality. Avant-garde painters, writers, musicians and more, were infused with a new …
Staying Inside Our Relationships
This is my final post in a series exploring what it means to “stay on the inside of life.” What we are exploring is some of the philosophical/psychological challenges of extreme objectification. When the world …
The American Philosophical Experiment
Nations and cultures embody ideas. The individuals and institutions of a nation are reflections of the ideas and values held in common within it. In order to deeply understand a culture, or the people in …
The Philosophical Roots of Socialism and the Free Market Economy
It is common knowledge that among developed western countries the two leading socioeconomic systems are socialism and capitalism. The former is often associated more closely with European systems of governance and the latter with the …
The Trouble with Worldviews
I have been thinking about how challenging philosophical discussion can be and I think that part of that difficulty comes about when we are not discussing ideas within a single worldview, but are actually clashing …
Why Does the World Exist?
We are here. That much seems clear. We can’t deny our own existence. Well actually great philosophers have denied our existence. What we can’t deny I suppose is that something exists. There is an experience …
Excellence Is Fueled By Philosophy
Why does philosophy matter? It is a question I think about all the time. I know that some people think it doesn’t really matter that much, if at all. It might be because people think …
The Universal and the Particular
I don’t think I will ever contemplate enough the mysteries of the distinction between the universal and the particular, the general and the specific, the ideal and the actual. This contemplation brings you into living …
Pluralism and Relativism
There are two other terms that many of us have heard which are good to look at more closely, because they are often misused – or only used partially for what they are. The terms are pluralism and …
Is there One World or Many?
Our spontaneously arising experience of the present moment is a miraculous event that we are constantly in the middle of. In my last couple of posts I described the depth and majesty of all that …
Experience and Existence
The present moment as we experience it is “thick” said William James. It is bursting with layers of sensation, perception, conceptualization, interpretation, feeling, intention – you name it. Everything we experience, we experience as part …
The Transformation of the Present Moment
Generally we assume that the world just exists – sitting there dead and meaningless – the object of our perceptions. The world doesn’t just exist – it shows up. It presents itself to us through …
William James and the Flow of Pure Experience –or– Why are two experiences better than one?
What you are experiencing right now is all there is – at least that is one of the implications of William James’ radical views on reality. William James was the first great American psychologist and …