Search results

"When I was a child I spoke as a child I understood as a child I thought as a child; but when I became a man I put away childish things." I Cor. xiii. 11 Children go out to play but adults must accept the responsibiliy of citizenship in a democracy.

Dogbrain Do we perceive it because it is meaningful? Yes! However meaningfulness grows parallel with comprehension. We can comprehend only what we are prepared to comprehend. First we must be aware of a matter. Then we must become conscious of this awareness. Next we can begin to gain...

China incline USA decline? America now has an open society but few Americans have the Critical Thinking skills and intellectual sophistication required to maintain that status. The question becomes: "can a democracy survive in a world where technology is driving change at a very rapid pace?”...

Acquiring a database versus creation of understanding The success of our production and consumption society is structured upon our highly rationalized capacity to develop, organize and utilize knowledge designed to encourage individuals to become highly specialized experts in narrow...

I suspect that the Internet will act as a negative force on intellectual sophistication rather than a positive force. The problem we have is the old bootstrap problem. How does an unsophisticated individual become sophisticated enough to recognize their naive world view?

Ignorance and Ideology in an Open Society Karl Popper argues, in his book The Open Society and Its Enemies, that all ideology shares a common characteristic; a belief in infallibility. The concept Popper illustrates in this book sounds much like the concept of a liberal democracy but his...

Humans seek to transcend nature via culture But Love has pitched his mansion in The place of excrement.--Yates “What will come of my whole life…Is there any meaning in my life that the inevitable death awaiting me does not destroy?”—Tolstoy In his Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Denial of...

How can we create a personality we desire? Personal heroism by means of individualism is a task requiring courage and self-confidence. Courage and self-confidence are characteristics of few sapiens, young or old. It is a path less traveled because it imposes terrifying burdens; these...

Can experimentalism loosen the grasp of tradition? I remember watching the movie Fiddler on the Roof. In this movie there was much talk, and singing and dancing about tradition. The story of the movie is, I think, about what happens when a people steeped in tradition are forced to deal with...

Exactly, the hero must create a motivation to go beyond the herd. The well being of the herd might be such a motivation. Most people think only of their own self-interest most of the time. A heroic life might be one of preparing one's self, beginning at an early age, to become an individual...

How can a young person become a hero/ine? “Not in that he leaves something behind him, but in that he works and enjoys and stirs others to work and enjoyment, does man’s importance lie.” Goethe A hero (heroine in female), “in Greek mythology and folklore, was originally a demigod, their cult...

We perceive our self as an object ‘Object is container’ is, I think, a useful metaphor. The object has an inside and an outside with a boundary separating the two. It is possibly the reason we think of the existence of souls and spirits. Humans think about them self as an object. We see an...

Can’t be simple/absolute for DickandJane! Those who control public policy in the United States, and I suspect elsewhere, try desperately to keep things simple so that DickandJane do not have to trouble themselves with complex problems. If DickandJane can handle the problems of production and...

Humans as objects of commerce McLuhan was, I guess, the first to express the insight that technology is an extension of the human body. These hand-held gadgets for communication might very well represent the end of ‘understanding’ for almost all citizens by 2050. I can see it already on the...

Vision: the creative apprehension of reality Wilhelm Worringer author of Abstraction and Empathy informs me that “Aesthetic enjoyment is objectified self-enjoyment”. Aesthetics is that which is pleasing in appearance, i.e. that which we find to be attractive. What do we do when we objectify...

Can we create a New Age of Enlightenment? If one half of one percent of the population acquires the hobby that I call the ‘intellectual life’ such a group could be the foundation for a new Age of Enlightenment. The original Age of Enlightenment occurred in Europe during the eighteenth...

Tradition of Change: an oxymoron? Thales, who lived around 625 BC, is called the ‘first philosopher and the first scientist’. He is considered to be the first thinker to propose a single universal principle of the material universe, “a unique substratum that, itself unchanging, underlay all...

Why are corporations a present danger? As a corporation grows older its power and wealth generally increases and its life has no obvious termination. As a human grows older s/he generally loses power to the final end when all power disappears. Do humans control corporations or do...

Mind/Body dichotomy: Our great nemises? Theology and philosophy are guardians of the human urge to separate itself as much as possible from its animal heritage and to move closer toward being god-like. The overt effort of theology is to accentuate the misconceived mind/body dichotomy while...

Hey! Get an Intellectual Hobby My experience leads me to conclude that there is a world of difference in picking up a fragment of knowledge here and there versus seeking knowledge for an answer to a question of significance. There is a world of difference between taking a stroll in the woods...