The Orthodox and Catholic Christian patriarchs of Syria have made a plea to Western countries and their citizens, especially to their fellow Christians in the West. This statement, follows on similar pleas over the years by Christians, including Orthodox and Catholic bishops, from various countries in Southwest Asia, a region which we Westerners, especially Americans, … [Read more…]
We should be very careful in how we reason from even the best of facts by way of the most sincere respect for empirical reality even if we have proper respect for plausibly conjectured abstract realms of being. We all carry in our heads and hearts and even in our ways of behavior something that … [Read more…]
Some write down scales or perhaps compose etudes. Some write simple tunes or even multi-part tunes. Others compose concertos and sonatas and symphonies which can’t be fully understood unless fully held in mind, if only for an instant. A section in the third movement might well play off a section in the first movement. Of … [Read more…]
By most standards, I have a funny definition of creativity. We shape our minds, our entire persons, by responding actively and properly to what lies around us, below us, above us, and in us, where all prepositions — `around’, `below’, `above’, and `in’ — should be understood in both spatial-temporal terms and also metaphysical terms. … [Read more…]
Not one to accept the mishmash of ideas which is the modern worldview, Professor Minogue reminds us: A free State is one in which there is a strong resistance to professionalization; it is marked by that “versatility” which Pericles claimed for Athens. [page 150] This is not to argue that professionalization is bad. Minogue was … [Read more…]
The talents and skills of accurate perception and memory formation are very much higher-level properties of the human being, giving the appearance in past ages that ‘soul-stuff’ or ‘mind-stuff’ is necessary for such acts tied so tightly even to what we would label as virtues, such as honesty. In more recent years, dualists with the … [Read more…]
We need some creative solutions to our problems, so long as those solutions are the right kind of creative solutions. You know which solutions I mean, the ones we already know about but we just need to try again and do it better this time. Yeah, we need creative solutions, like the ones we already … [Read more…]
In a prior weblog posting, Intentionality as the Guide to Philosophical Thinking, I discussed this quote: I keep the subject of my inquiry constantly before me, and wait till the first dawning opens gradually, by little and little, into a full and clear light. [Sir Isaac Newton] I write often about my efforts to find … [Read more…]
Americans, perhaps most human beings of the Modern Age, don’t perceive what’s inconvenient to their desired worldview. This is hardly a new observation — Tocqueville was puzzled by this trait back in the 1830s and others since, including Hawthorne and Melville and Solzhenitsyn and Ray Bradbury have at least spoken of this problem. Perhaps Tocqueville … [Read more…]