I have uploaded A Modern Understanding of Human Being, a book about human being from a viewpoint of a Christian accepting and making some sense of modern empirical knowledge. In this book, I lay a foundation by advocating respect for empirical reality, the reality into which we are born and in which we develop. Moreover, … [Read more…]
I’m going to take a quotation from Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals somewhat out of context: The bad conscience is an illness, there is no doubt about that, but an illness as pregnancy is an illness. [second essay, section 19 from the translation by Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale, Vintage Books, 1989] What is … [Read more…]
What happens when someone loses a body part or use of and feeling in that body part? How completely can a human being adapt to a prosthetic device? In a recent article, Human Brain Treats Prosthetic Devices as Part of the Body, we can read: People with spinal cord injuries show strong association of wheelchairs … [Read more…]
I’m rereading Jerome Kagan’s Galen’s Prophecy about the struggle to make sense of such matters as temperament vs. character and the very nature of temperament. This is part of an effort to gear myself up to write the sections on heart in my upcoming book on human nature (mind and heart and hands). Since our … [Read more…]
A Little Background I haven’t been posting much over recent weeks because of a mild cold or sinus infection followed by a volunteer project at my parish. I’ve returned to serious reading and have started to write again, beginning with this brief introduction to what will be a series of essays describing my Christian understanding … [Read more…]
The Death of Plato The town was on edge that fateful day when stepped from the train a frightening sight. Qualities had arrived without a man for they were traveling fast and light. Intelligent and diligent, steadfast and true, successful and loyal, honest and brave, they were every good how but not quite a who. … [Read more…]
Human beings think and feel and act and do so in response to what lies around them. As various communities have advanced in the way of civilization, they’ve done so—thought and felt and acted—in response to some more or less plausible worldview covering created being in its abstract realms as well as this concrete realm. … [Read more…]
We’re born with certain physical characteristics, some good and some bad, some allowing us to excel and some limiting our possible accomplishments. Modern psychologists have shown that the physician Galen was largely right in his general principles which he taught nearly 2,000 years ago. We are born with relatively well-defined temperaments and with other relatively … [Read more…]
The blog at The Independent Institute has been running short essays by John C. Goodman, the author of a recent book, Priceless: Curing the Healthcare Crisis. The latest essay is Can Entrepreneurship Be Copied? where we can read Dr. Goodman’s claim: In mathematics, Gödel’s Theorem says that no complex, axiomatic system can be both consistent … [Read more…]
I’ve been delayed in my reading program, but I’m getting slowly back to work on Hans Reichenbach’s The Direction of Time. I’ve also gotten behind on my writing though I’ve already posted on some preliminary issues after reading Hilary Putnam’s preface for this the reprinting by the University of California Press: Why Does Time Move … [Read more…]