We live in a universe of discourse – a flowing ever-adjusting transfer of information. If you want to see the world the way that George Herbert Mead and the other American Pragmatists saw it you …
Martin Heidegger and The Worlds of Sense and Purpose
I am still thinking about Heidegger’s three ways of being. The first two of these he called ‘presence-to-hand’ and ‘ready-to-hand.’ Both of these are defined in what could be seen as human terms and I …
To be or not to be: What is Ontology?
What does it mean ‘to be’? When I say “I am…” or “It is…” what am I saying? What does it mean to exist – or to not exist, to be or not to be? …
Substance, Utility, Existence: Heidegger’s Modes of Being
Martin Heidegger, the 20th century German philosopher, believed that for thousands of years human beings had misidentified the nature of what it means ‘to be.” From the time of the great Greek thinkers the fundamental …
Alfred North Whitehead: And the Three Components of Knowledge
This week I wanted to share a quote from the English philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. Whitehead is the originator of what is commonly known as Process Theology. And many of his ideas follow closely in …
The Essence of Being First
What is the quality of being first? This was a question that Charles Sanders Peirce thought deeply about because he felt that the quality of being first, or ‘firstness’ as he called it, was an …
Scientific Evidence for Indeterminism
The advantage of being a materialist is that so much of our experience seems to point to a material basis for reality. Idealists usually have to appeal to some inner knowing as the justification of …
A Field of Pure Knowing
What is the human soul? Is it some phantom-like part of us or is it a living dimension of the universe from which all life flows? The later is what Samuel Taylor Coleridge taught and …
Breaking the Bonds of Language
Have you ever tried to have an original thought – or worse – had a truly original thought that you tried to put into language? That is when you realize that you are trapped in …
Are We Intelligent Matter or Incarnate Spirit?
One of the most confounding philosophical questions involves our understanding of who we really are. Are we intelligent matter – stuff that got smart – or are we incarnate spirit – smarts that grew stuff …
Swimming is to Water as Knowing is to Language
When we think about knowing and not knowing, the known and the unknown, sooner or later we have to start thinking about language. Language is the currency of knowing. Realizing this is like swimming for …
Vicious Intellectualism and the Reality of the Unknown
There are things that we know. And there are things that we know that we don’t know. And there are things that we don’t know that we don’t know. These last are the “unknown unknowns” …
Interpreting the Signs of Reality
The concept of signs is so common to us that we hardly think about it. (Of course many of the most profound ideas are disguised as common ones that we don’t need to think about.) …
The Many Layers of Reality or “Is a Fire Truck Really a Fire Truck?”
Is a fire truck really a fire truck? Is a truck really a truck? Is anything really what it is? We assume that things really are what they appear to us to be. This assumption …
Escape From The Myth of the Given
One way to think about the existential dilemma of postmodernism is that we began to realize that our perception of reality is a hopeless tangle of sensation and interpretation. What we assume to be reality as we …
The Myth of the Given – or – Marooned on Mount Assumption
We all believe in an outdated myth. It is the unconscious belief that something is given – that we are standing on some solid ground of truth from which the rest of our understanding of …
The Assumption of Reality
When we think about reality or talk about reality the big assumption we almost always make is that there is a reality to think and talk about. When Rene Descartes drew an astonishingly original distinction …
Belief and Fact
The worst speculative Skeptic ever I knew, was a much better Man than the best superstitious Devotee & Bigot. —David Hume (Letter to Gilbert Elliot of Minto, March 10, 1751) Before I go on to …
My Initial Encounter with the Radical Inquiry of Charles Sanders Peirce (Part II)
What I was confronted with in myfirst encounter with Peirce was not the skepticism of Descartes that assumes everything is untrue and then builds from there. It was a more evolutionary skepticism that assumes that …
The Radical Inquiry of Charles Sanders Peirce (Part I)
I first encountered the radical inquiry of Charles Sanders Peirce while reading his essay entitled, “Design and Chance,” a paper Peirce used as the basis for a lecture he gave on January 17, 1884 to …