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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
Are we just Thinking Things in a World?
What do we really know about the relationship between the world and our experience of it? That is an important question and there are at least three things that we can be sure of. We …
Cartesian Dualism and Brains In Vats
If you could put your brain in a nutrient bath so that it could keep on functioning outside of your body what would it (or would it still be you) experience? Would it still have …
The Ego Tunnel and the Nature of Reality
Thomas Metzinger’s new book The Ego Tunnel weaves research in out-of-body experiences, lucid dreaming, phantom limbs and other extraordinary human occurrences with leading edge neuroscience to create a convincing picture of how neural activity constantly …
Society and the True Self, Part 4: Up from Inside the Matrix
In my last post I described how many of us awaken to find ourselves in the middle of a life that is more a reflection of social mores than our own autonomous choices. We look …
Society and the True Self, Part 3: Waking Up in the Matrix
In my recent posts I have been developing the idea that individual human beings might be more accurately seen as individual expressions of social preferences, attitudes and beliefs than as separate autonomous individuals. We live …
Experience and Understanding
There are two kinds of knowing – experience and understanding – and the confusion between them is the cause of all sorts of trouble for any thinking person. Experience is the knowing of things. It …
Are Relationships Real Things?
Our sense of reality is dominated by things. Things feel real to us. We live in a universe that we experience as empty space filled with things. And some things have relationships between them. But …
Is a Dog Really a Dog?
One of the great philosophical dividing lines has always been the line that separates the particular from the universal – the unique from the general. We live in a world of both particulars and universals …