The American Philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce did not see the universe as collection of separate but interconnected things that evolved together. He saw a continuous whole universe with three essential characteristics that co-emerge. All of …
The Source of Creativity in the Universe
The American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce believed that the universe was evolving – the whole universe, not just the things in it. He believed that the universe itself, including the seemingly immutable laws of time, …
Everything Exists in Relationship
Things do not exist unless they exist in relationship with something else. In fact, things do not exist at all. Relationships exist. There are no individual things. The existence of anything is always contingent upon …
Everything Exists in Relationship
Things do not exist unless they exist in relationship with something else. In fact, things do not exist at all. Relationships exist. There are no individual things. The existence of anything is always contingent upon …
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 …
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? …
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 …
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 …
“To Thing”: A New Verb
Thing (v). to thing, thinging. 1. To create an object by defining a boundary around some portion of reality separating it from everything else and then labeling that portion of reality with a name. One …
The Reality of the Immediately Present – William James and Rudolf Steiner
Some things in reality force themselves upon us immediately. They appear spontaneously without provocation and they impress themselves upon our senses in ways that we cannot withstand. These things surely must be real. Direct sense …
Do we ever Know Anything for Sure? – The Fallibalism of Charles Sanders Peirce
When we say something is true, what we usually mean is that the words that we are using or the idea that we are holding in our head corresponds to some actual event or thing …
Integral Emergence vs. Co-evolution
Integral Emergence is a term you might hear used to describe how multiple aspects of reality arise simultaneously. This idea is important to any understanding of Pragmatism; and it is also central to Ken …
Nothing Exists Independently
One of the foundational insights of Pragmatism is that reality only exists in relationship. Nothing that is absolutely independent is real. Absolute Oneness is identical with absolute nothingness. Any concept of oneness that exists can …
Charles Sanders Peirce’s Nonduality
Here are some final thougts about my topic for the science and nonduality conference next week. If anyone who reads this blog happens to come to that event please introduce yourself to me. Peirce’s inquiry …
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