I’ve started reading some of the works of John Dahlberg, Lord Acton, sometimes given honorary titles such as “the historian of liberty.” Being largely cash-free, I downloaded pdf files of some of his works from Liberty Fund which has made available for free a good number of classic books on history, political theory, philosophy, science, … [Read more…]
There is an important point raised by the research discussed in this article, We Are What We Experience. I’ll quote a good part of this short article because of its importance, regardless of how well or poorly this particular study stands up to efforts to verify or explicate its results: Our life experiences — the … [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…]
In an earlier posting, The Liberal Mind: What is politics?, I addressed the obvious question, “What is Politics?”. I covered a lot of ground to start off a line of reasoning tightly tied to my current goal of enriching our store of words and concepts for discussing our moral and social lives. While it’s true … [Read more…]
I don’t mean by ‘adult’ the sorts of stuff once restricted to the combat zones of major cities, the sorts of stuff which wasn’t to be found in most small towns but for back closets of certain stores also dealing in numbers and sports bets, the sorts of stuff once hidden in boxes under the … [Read more…]
We shape our minds by active responses to our immediate environments and maybe to greater realms of Creation. Even without active responses, something like a flabby mind takes shape. The flabby mind of a modern man is invincibly ignorant in the sense that it’s shaped to what’s pushed into it by the public school system … [Read more…]
Not long ago, I posted an essay, Is Power for the Sake of Power the Same as Power Earned by Productive Achievements? where I responded to a study which found: [T]hat individuals in roles that possess power but lack status have a tendency to engage in activities that demean others. According to the study, “The … [Read more…]
I stretch the truth when I sometimes talk as if I were the only one who sees being as a spectrum from the abstract to the concrete. Clearly, there is a sense in which Platonic and Neoplatonic Realists see being in two forms, abstract being (what they call the Real) and concrete being (the real … [Read more…]