New Publication: The Redemption of Thinking

The Redemption of Thinking: A Study in Truth, Meaning, and the Evolution of Consciousness, 2020. Truth and meaning: what is their relation? Shall ever the twain be one? This dissertation attempts to show how the ascendancy of a particular method of inquiry since the seventeenth century has forfeit meaning in the pursuit of truth. At…

New publication: Scattered Leaves

I have published a collection of poetry called Scattered Leaves that is now available in Kindle and in print. “Anthology” means “collection of flowers” or “bouquet” in Greek and this is how I saw this volume. Together with my philosophical work, I have always written poetry as another mode of striving to articulate the truth…

Miscellany: mind in science, Genesis, deontology & utilitarianism, etc.

On the limits of the scientific method and the imminent paradigm shift: Francis Bacon’s elimination of formal causality (eide, logoi) from the purview of science leads to a sort of “blindsight” amongst scientists, and by extension, most of us living today, who defer to such scientists to establish our theory of reality. In the same…

Miscellany: Left & Right, the Euthyphro dilemma, the scapegoat mechanism, etc.

On the philosophical underpinnings of the political Left and Right: The topic is complicated by the fact that “Left” and “Right” are political designations and thus subject to all of the capriciousness of ideological fashion. That being said, I think a few points can be worth considering.  Historically, RIGHT is meant to refer to the…

A Brief Reflection on the “Placebo Effect”

“Placebo effect” has become a term of tacit dismissal today. The word is largely invoked in a context that contrasts it with “active” or “effective” treatment, the implication being that the placebo effect exerts none of these influences. Of course, the claim is empirically false—as the existence of the term “placebo effect” in the first…

Miscellany: involution, evolution, and “the experience machine”

On the twice two-fold of evolution; “casting off,” “enfolding,” ontogeny, and phylogeny: Evolution seems to be a two-fold movement: at once (1) “casting off” and also (2) “enfolding.”  The first is demonstrated in the human phylogeny in the human being having successfully “shed” all other forms of life—icthyoid, saurian, mammalian, hominoid—before finally incarnating into human…

Elements of an Ethics Textbook (6): Self, Society, Nature

In this final section, I have included a diversity of readings that are intended to encourage both a concentration, a synthesis, and an expansion of the view of ethics that we have developed to this point. From the utilitarian outlook, measuring morality as it did by evaluating the consequence of a given action, we proceeded…

Elements of an Ethics Textbook (3.1): Seven Reservations with Utilitarianism

An introduction to the project is here.An introduction to the utilitarianism chapter is here. Utilitarianism has a straightforward and immediate appeal to many people; after all, why wouldn’t we wish to reduce suffering and maximise pleasure? In fact, there are a number of reasons to harbor reservations against the utilitarian doctrine. These include, but are…

Miscellany: On beauty, science, and revolution

On Beauty: Beauty is a revelation of the soul to the senses. The sky can be seen with the eyes but the beauty of the sky can only be seen with the heart.  Beauty is not something subjective, but the approach of the essence of things in the form of sensory appearance. The soul is…

Miscellany: on education, art, science, music, and the Tower of Babel

On music: Music is among the great spring of joy among this vale of tears. The German philosopher Freidrich Nietzsche famously asserted that “without music, life would be a mistake.” You seemed somewhat tentative in your designation of music as art. On the contrary, some of Nietzsche’s earlier contemporaries considered music to be the purest…

Miscellany: On “The Danger of Fact-ist Politics” and other topics

On “The Danger of Fact-ist Politics”: You observed that many public are treating beliefs as evidence and conflating certainty with truth. Naturally, I share your exasperation with this sort of posturing and ostentatious displays of conviction that is misplaced at best and likely often altogether feigned. Moreover, I couldn’t agree more with your identification of…

Miscellany: “Science,” “citizens,” “consumers,” and other topics

Is science exclusively abstract and reductionistic in principle or could it also be integral and creative?  I have treated this topic much more thoroughly in my dissertation but here are a few brief remarks. Any answer will depend on our theory of science, which is itself subject to transformation. It will also depend on which branch…