We’re told that David Hume proved that values can’t be drawn from facts. Most recently, I read of this alleged proof in an interesting and mostly unobjectionable book about the relationship between Protestant ways of reading texts and the origins of science: The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science by Peter Harrison [Cambridge … [Read more…]
Truth unfolds in time through communal processes. I’ve realized there is possibly a very clear example of what this means in an area where I’ve perhaps misspoken a little. Maybe I’ve simply been in error. In any case, I’m also willing to claim that new truths might emerge in time through various processes, new truths … [Read more…]
I’m stumbling along with my project to enlarge and enrich our moral discourse by drawing upon the modern mountains of partially processed empirical knowledge, including some disturbing information about our inability to anticipate or prevent the development of evil in our own societies. I’m learning or relearning — at an elementary level — some of … [Read more…]
The policy analysts, Right and Left, are working hard to assign blame for the problems of modern economies and polities. In the United States, they examine taxation and regulation policies of governments from Washington’s administration right to that of Obama. They also examine the strong dislike Americans have for taxes along with the longing they … [Read more…]
This short article, Conformists may kill civilizations is about an effort to find, in archaeological and evolutionary biological terms, a way of speaking of the odd fact that the residents of a once successful but collapsing civilization will go on acting the same way they, or their ancestors, did when that civilization was prosperous and … [Read more…]
Mind over matter. Willpower. Free-will. Those sound good when you wish to think of yourself as being in charge. The problem is that ‘yourself’ then becomes some entity which is an agent separate from the human organism and somehow in control over that organism. As I’ve argued repeatedly in my various writings, we are organisms … [Read more…]
We need to develop a healthy fear of what passes for education in the current age because that form of mental development is, in fact, little more than deformation of the pliable student into a trained monkey. To speak first of abstract thought, book-centered learning is best done by minimal years spent on basic reading … [Read more…]
We have no choice but to use mathematical analogies in even our most subtle thoughts about moral and spiritual issues since mathematics, by definition, is the proper way in this universe to describe paths. We move over paths even in the events of our innermost lives, we develop over paths. Our current moral talk and … [Read more…]
This entry is a supplement to Not Monism and Not Dualism but Unity of Creation. One form of dualism, strongly supported by Aristotle, is particularly attractive at first contact: the idea that things come into being when form is impressed upon substance. What’s wrong about this, and perhaps the real error underlying all dualisms, is … [Read more…]
Pilgrims travel paths, journeying from one location on earth to another, sometimes those places are fictional but usually quite concrete. To be sure, Dante’s pilgrim found (as some of the more recent translations of The Inferno attest) that the path could wander away from him, a strange event from a fully concrete view of paths. … [Read more…]