[How Brains Make Up Their Minds, Walter J. Freeman, Columbia University Press, 2000] Professor Freeman and his students made an important discovery in the late 1970s: the brain response to what is seemingly the same stimulus is not always the same. They trained rabbits respond to various odors, using sawdust twice in the experiments, once … [Read more…]
[How Brains Make Up Their Minds, Walter J. Freeman, Columbia University Press, 2000] Intentionality in the doctrine of Aquinas does not require consciousness, but it does require acting to create meaning instead of just thinking. This view is shared by the philosophers Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, J.J. Gibson, and the pragmatists. We sniff, move our … [Read more…]
[How Brains Make Up Their Minds, Walter J. Freeman, Columbia University Press, 2000] In “Meaning and Representation”, Chapter 2 of the referenced book, Professor Freeman has a perceptive and intelligent discussion of the materialist, cognitive, and pragmatic views of the mind and most especially the mind of the self-aware human being. (It’s a matter of … [Read more…]
I’m thinking my way towards the sort of intentional view of moral nature pioneered by St. Thomas Aquinas. There is a clear explanation of intentionality, a biological concept to match our biological natures, in How Brains Make Up Their Minds by the neuroscientist Walter J. Freeman. Sticking strictly to the empirical aspects of this concept, … [Read more…]
A silly question in a way, but also a serious one. In fact, it’s a question forced upon us by the importance of cosmological physics as popularized by the so-called Big Bang model of cosmological physics. Live in the Big Bang world, die in the Big Bang world. Even be resurrected in a world part … [Read more…]
Henri Bergson provides an interesting discussion where he tells us: Why, in other words, is not everything given at once, as on the film of a cinematograph? The more I consider this point, the more it seems to me that, if the future is bound to succeed the present instead of given alongside of it, … [Read more…]
Christ is ever present in all that exists, along with His Father and their Spirit. Yet, the traditional Christian belief is that He becomes truly present in the consecrated bread and wine during a proper Eucharistic Rite. See John 6:53 for one of Christ’s own rather blunt statements on the issue. Yet again, even many … [Read more…]
I have read a lot of vague arguments that claim to shoot down scientistic attacks upon Christianity. I have read a smaller number of very good arguments of that sort. From a certain viewpoint, those arguments — good or vague — are beside the point. We can divide human knowledge in various basic ways, and … [Read more…]
There are actually three crises which concern me: The attacks upon Christianity as being the cause of the decay of the Roman Empire — which Gibbon and some other modern scholars revived. I believe these attacks in their original form peaked sometime before the theological career of St. Augustine, Bishop of Hippo in North Africa, … [Read more…]
I discovered an interesting article on the Internet, Praxeology, War, Democracy, and the State by Roderick T. Long of Auburn University. See Roderick T. Long’s Home Page or Wikipedia article on praxeology for a definition of ‘praxeology’. If you can’t read a DOC formatted file, do a google search and you’ll be offered an html … [Read more…]