Even an armchair historian can tell you that a good general prepares for his retreat as soon as he sees the need for it. He tries to arrange an orderly retreat to minimize casualties and loss of equipment and other materiel. He knows not to try to hold ground which is indefensible, being well aware … [Read more…]
As-if is a strange and wonderful language that we all speak inside our normal language — whether English or French or Japanese. Even an Enlightenment rationalist like Adam Smith spoke of the Invisible Hand when he found himself not able to speak directly about what might now be called a self-organizing system. This is not … [Read more…]
I’ve been reading Karl Barth’s Epistle to the Romans, a book surprisingly oft-read decades ago. [For the scholars out there, I’m using the paperback edition published by Oxford University Press in 1968.] Barth’s writing and thinking style is still more discursive than mine, and he is probably still more intense than I am at my … [Read more…]
I’ve argued that the human mind is shaped by its immediate environments, including social relationships starting with that between infant and mother. From there, we expand out into larger sections of those immediate environments and may begin to interact with other environments. In this expansion into other environments, we’re like other opportunistic animals — bears … [Read more…]
I’ve been thinking about Principalities, Powers, and Invisible Hands for a good decade or so, not every day but often. My academic background is in mathematics and I’ve read fairly broadly in ‘chaos theory’ and related specialities. I’ve even read some of the works of John Casti and Stuart Kaufmann, two experts in self-organizing systems. … [Read more…]
I want to enlarge upon what I’ve said in a prior posting, What is a Conservative?: Most modern politicians or thinkers who call themselves ‘conservative’ are better described as ‘right-wing liberals’. By definition, conservatives conserve, but those — Rush Limbaugh is a good example — who call themselves conservatives are mostly concerned with the marketplaces. … [Read more…]
Einstein gave a great gift to rational thinkers, Christian and non-Christian. He gave us a universe, that is, a coherent definition of a universe. And the definition is proving to be quite a bit different from the traditional metaphysical definitions. In fact, the simplest way to think of Einsteinian Universes as a class is to … [Read more…]
So, what is man? He’s intentional in his moral nature. He’s born to acquire certain moral behaviors towards mother and father and brethren but mostly towards his mother because of the special bond. He’ll recognize her very smell and her body is changing in certain ways to adapt itself to the care of a baby … [Read more…]
I’ve started a series of Lenten meditations on my other blog at To See a World in a Grain of Sand. Those mediations will be used to display some of the spiritual aspects of my worldview, my way of looking at the world in the light of my Catholic Christian faith. Come journey along the … [Read more…]
There may be some glitches in links after an update of WordPress. The PHP variable used to id posts has changed and I have a bad feeling about the stability of some other parts of this software. I think I patched up the latest entries but I don’t know if there will be a ‘fix’ … [Read more…]