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The Mystery School

The Objective Reality of Language

Jeff Carreira October 13, 2011 Blog Posts, Philosophical Inquiry 3 Comments

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 …

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George Herbert Mead

Martin Heidegger and The Worlds of Sense and Purpose

Jeff Carreira September 8, 2011 Blog Posts, Philosophical Inquiry 3 Comments

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 …

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Martin Heidegger

To be or not to be: What is Ontology?

Jeff Carreira September 2, 2011 Blog Posts, Philosophical Inquiry 8 Comments

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? …

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Charles Sanders PeirceMartin Heidegger

Substance, Utility, Existence: Heidegger’s Modes of Being

Jeff Carreira August 25, 2011 Blog Posts, Philosophical Inquiry 7 Comments

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 …

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Martin Heidegger

Alfred North Whitehead: And the Three Components of Knowledge

Jeff Carreira July 28, 2011 Blog Posts, Philosophical Inquiry 4 Comments

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 …

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Alfred North WhiteheadCharles Sanders PeirceWilliam James

The Essence of Being First

Jeff Carreira July 7, 2011 Awakening, Blog Posts, Philosophical Inquiry 6 Comments

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 …

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Charles Sanders Peirce

Scientific Evidence for Indeterminism

Jeff Carreira June 23, 2011 Blog Posts, Philosophical Inquiry 10 Comments

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 …

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Charles Sanders Peirce

A Field of Pure Knowing

Jeff Carreira June 2, 2011 Blog Posts, Philosophical Inquiry 6 Comments

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 …

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Charles Sanders PeirceRalph Waldo EmersonSamuel Taylor ColeridgeWilliam James

Breaking the Bonds of Language

Jeff Carreira May 26, 2011 Blog Posts, Philosophical Inquiry 11 Comments

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 …

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Charles Sanders PeirceRalph Waldo EmersonSamuel Taylor ColeridgeWilliam James

Are We Intelligent Matter or Incarnate Spirit?

Jeff Carreira May 5, 2011 Blog Posts, Philosophical Inquiry 11 Comments

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 …

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Ralph Waldo EmersonSamuel Taylor Coleridge

Swimming is to Water as Knowing is to Language

Jeff Carreira April 28, 2011 Blog Posts, Philosophical Inquiry 33 Comments

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 …

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Vicious Intellectualism and the Reality of the Unknown

Jeff Carreira April 21, 2011 Blog Posts, Philosophical Inquiry 21 Comments

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” …

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Charles Sanders PeirceWilfred SellersWilliam James

Interpreting the Signs of Reality

Jeff Carreira April 7, 2011 Blog Posts, Philosophical Inquiry 4 Comments

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.) …

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Charles Sanders Peirce

The Many Layers of Reality or “Is a Fire Truck Really a Fire Truck?”

Jeff Carreira March 31, 2011 Blog Posts, Philosophical Inquiry 6 Comments

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 …

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Charles Sanders Peirce

Escape From The Myth of the Given

Jeff Carreira March 24, 2011 Blog Posts, Philosophical Inquiry 14 Comments

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 …

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David HumeWilfred Sellers

The Myth of the Given – or – Marooned on Mount Assumption

Jeff Carreira March 17, 2011 Blog Posts, Philosophical Inquiry 5 Comments

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 …

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Wilfred Sellers

The Assumption of Reality

Jeff Carreira March 10, 2011 Blog Posts, Philosophical Inquiry 10 Comments

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 …

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Georg Wilhelm Friedrich HegelImmanuel KantRene Descartes

Belief and Fact

Jeff Carreira May 20, 2010 Blog Posts, Philosophical Inquiry 44 Comments

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 …

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David HumeWilliam James

My Initial Encounter with the Radical Inquiry of Charles Sanders Peirce (Part II)

Jeff Carreira April 27, 2010 Blog Posts, Philosophical Inquiry 5 Comments

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 …

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Charles Sanders Peirce

The Radical Inquiry of Charles Sanders Peirce (Part I)

Jeff Carreira April 10, 2010 Blog Posts, Philosophical Inquiry 6 Comments

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 …

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Charles Sanders Peirce
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