Margaret Fuller’s “A Credo,” composed as a letter to a friend in 1842

Introduction to the text Margaret Fuller is fairly well-known as an American Transcendentalist thinker who was the friend and contemporary of both Emerson and Thoreau. In some ways she was the necessary philosophical mediatrix between these two men, and in a larger sense, she served to close an essential link in the chain of American…

Miscellany: stereotypes, statistics, scapegoats and so on

It occurs to me, as I think it occured to you, that you have hit upon an extremely timely difficulty. I am thinking of the problem of stereotype. One the one hand, generalizations often neglect important individual differences and they can, moreover, serve to foster unwarranted discriminatory behavior, which is a topic you have broached…

Miscellany: (1) lying, (2) Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, (3) Corona lockdowns, (4) “a house divided,” (5) the concept a health

Thank you for placing the issue of lying before us. In order to properly consider it, we would have to establish what exactly we mean by “the truth” and what this has to do with the propositions and grammars by which it is communicated, on the one hand, and with the speaker’s intention on the…

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…