[Draft as of 2016/10/03. Hoping for publication on Internet before end of 2016.] Human being isn’t merely quantifiable but many components or aspects of human being are quantifiable. Other components are more describable by the term `qualitative’, but this shouldn’t be taken as connoting `irrational’ or `mystical’. Our understanding of the qualitative aspects of being, … [Read more…]
[Draft as of 2016/10/03. Hoping for publication on Internet before end of 2016.] Is a man a unity or is he a collection of warring fragments? Or is something else true, perhaps an intermediate view, or—my favorite—some sort of complex being not describable in current terms of discourse? I should qualify my statement of the … [Read more…]
I’ve claimed that “Created Being is Created Being is Created Being” some number of times, but there it’s a little more complicated than that. Those who’ve read some of my metaphysical writings might have some ideas on the topic. “Some ideas” is really all that I have. The basic situation is this: As a Christian, … [Read more…]
Let me start by discussing war, a situation in which leaders of states often try to impose their will by wreaking havoc and unleashing forces of disorder, all the while thinking they can keep matters under control. Anthropologists, working with archaeologists and other pre-historians, now have strong evidence that the average level of violent killing … [Read more…]
For background, I’ll make these three claims without trying to justify them: Human beings don’t come together just to be together or for any other sentimental reason; human beings come together to do things and because they are dependent upon each other, perhaps as a result of doing things together. Most moral behavior is learned … [Read more…]
As I move forward on my project to make sense of human being as both individual and community, I’m reading in certain areas of mathematics (topology and differential geometry and abstract algebra and others) and also trying to keep up my readings in history and literature. The project threatens to swallow me at times, but … [Read more…]
We of the modern West can’t deal with the complexity of human communities nor with the complex world implied by our modern empirical knowledge. We can’t produce proper `global’ understandings of human being, individual and communal, nor of this world with all its realms only partly reconciled and made coherent at even the `purely physical’ … [Read more…]
Let’s do a Plato-update. Mathematics is the key, as it was for that heavyweight wrestler (according to some rumors which even hint at championships). Very roughly speaking, philosophy to Plato was a generalization of the thinking done in geometry and arithmetic. It may not be true that Plato’s school (the Platonic Academy Academy) had a … [Read more…]
What is truth? Where is truth to be found? There are a few starting points for a Christian willing to consider the opinions of Thomas Aquinas and all the great thinkers before him as well as opinions derived directly from the works of the modern scientists including sometimes just their empirical or mathematical findings and … [Read more…]
I’ve pondered a problem for years. How is it that premodern thinkers, such as the 4 A’s: Aristocles (`Plato’ is a nickname which might mean `Chubby’) and Aristotle and Augustine and Aquinas, produced so many true insights into the nature of reality, the nature of contingent being and even of the empirical and concrete realms … [Read more…]