What, Why & How do we Know ?
Mentioned Matt Segall (Footnotes2Plato / @ThouArtThat) in an aside note to this recent post on Rudolf Steiner. and I have acknowledged him before here. (He’s a Whitehead scholar with whom I’ve engaged once or twice on questions of process philosophy and McGilchrist space (?) – in comments and tweet threads, but I realise I probably … Continue reading “Defining Concepts – Not”
Rudolf Steiner divides opinion but his thinking is undoubtedly valuable. Think Anthroposophy/Theosophy and Steiner/Waldorf Schools, whether as intended by Steiner or interpreted ideologically by his disciples ever since, but the value in what he actually said and wrote remains. [Feels a bit like Jordan Peterson for a 21st C example – undoubtedly guilty of association … Continue reading “The Boundaries of (Natural) Science”
Quite a few of my recent posts have been focussed on the idealism <> realism relationship – from the original reality and appearances saga, where we discover truth vs seeming goes back as far as pre-Socratic Parmenides – to Hegel/Bradley vs Russell/Moore in the late 19th C / early 20th C. One reason for it … Continue reading “Taking Idealism for a Spin”
Part of my slow working through Mumford’s “Russell on Metaphysics“, I have flipped back to recap the first 5 chapters. Having been left with even deeper nagging doubts that I was right to leave Russell behind after all, I need to check my thinking by capturing the key thoughts. A sanity check. To be clear, … Continue reading “Idealism & Russell’s Metaphysics”
Below is the introductory section taken from Bobby Matherne’s web pages on “Doyletics” the would-be science he named after Doyle Henderson. Doyletic’s focus is the processes of learned behaviour – and a self-help therapy called “speed tracing” to unlearn perceived problems – with little effort spent on defining the objects of our attention. These objects … Continue reading “Introduction to Doyletics”
There are so many points at which David Lavery’s sources on thinking and writing touch mine, that I need to remind myself that it might be no coincidence. I suspect I picked-up a lot of references from reading an on-line draft of his “Evil Genius” back in 2004, though I know a lot more about … Continue reading “The Fate of Evil Genius?”
Apart form all the other excellent reasons to recommend Anthony Gottlieb’s “Dream of Enlightenment“ it was fair to say, as I predicted, that the content of the chapter on Leibnitz was largely new to me. Apart from the mythologised legacies of Voltaire vs Leibnitz and Newton vs Leibnitz I really was pretty ignorant of his … Continue reading “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life – Leibnitz in the Pythonesque Style of Gottlieb”
Arthur Koestler’s (1959) “The Sleepwalkers“ proved to be an excellent read to the end. A slightly odd epilogue on the evolution of intelligence and knowledge; odd because it majors on the paradoxical thought that human mental brain power is too great for our current state of biological evolution. We have brains much bigger than we … Continue reading “Brain the size of the cosmos – is it too big?”
(Editorial Note : This paper was originally prepared for the 2005 Liverpool Conference on Robert Pirsig and his Metaphysics of Quality (MoQ). It is a personal non-technical view of the MoQ, and indeed the first part of paper is an entirely subjective and naive account of the author’s “thought journey” that led to reading Pirsig … Continue reading “It’s Evolutionary Psychology Stupid”
Received and already skimmed the introductory chapters (and index and references) of Ernst Mach – The Analysis of Sensations, and the Relation of the Physical to the Psychical. (1914 translation of the 1906 5th edition of the 1885 original), and – Space and Geometry, in the Light of Physiological, Psychological and Physical Inquiry. (1906 edition, 1901, … Continue reading “Already Love Mach”