Philosophy Posts

Words to Ink

March, 2020

I'm designing a tattoo sleeve of quotes. These quotes both represent and have shaped my life in various ways. I thought I'd share.

There is grandeur in this view of life…

plant sequoias.

Eventually, all things merge into one,
and a river runs through it.

Consider again that dot. That's us, on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

...by the better angels of our nature.

You are a god, and never have I heard anything more divine.

But let there be spaces in your togetherness...

The Destroyer of Worlds

August, 2015

One of the years I was studying at Florida State, I taught a History and Philosophy of Science class based around film. Each week we would discuss how a certain film portrays science and its relationship to the rest of human life. This course was one of the more rewarding courses I've taught, and one film stands out as the most thought provoking and revealing: The Day After Trinity. Released in 1981, The Day After Trinity, explores the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb...

Love Thy Neighbor

May, 2015

It seems so strange: how did we forgot how to talk to one another? How did we lose our sense of community, of belonging, of neighborly care? When did we start generalizing, bifurcating, and stereotyping to such a degree that only two, infinitely pliable and immensely dangerous categories remain: us and them? We now speak in nothing but glittering generalities, afraid to say or hear hard lessons built on hard evidence: "there is no insult like the truth."

Nietzsche has a great aphorism in Beyond Good and Evil: "'Our 'neighbors' are not the ones next door to us, but ...

Grandeur

March, 2015

I am currently reading Barbara Kingsolver's collection of essays Small Wonder (which as been refreshing so far, and I recommend it!). The epigraph is a quote from Wendell Berry which reads, "To treat life as less than a miracle is to give up on it." This is a theme about which I've often wondered, especially since I no longer count myself among those who believe in miracles...

The Limits of Knowledge

May, 2014

Over dinner the other night, a close friend, my family, and I got into a discussion about the nature of different questions. As I tend to do my thinking on paper, I thought I'd write about my position here.

One of the defining characteristics of modern society is the distinction between "science" and "religion". I've written about this before (here and here)...

Confusing Economies

March, 2014

At FSU, my professor proposed this question: what if you were invited to a dinner party and brought a relatively nice bottle of wine, something in the $25 dollar range—not too pricey but not too cheap. Then, a few weeks later, when you in turn have the couple over for dinner to your place, they bring the same bottle of wine. Why does that strike us as odd? A gift for a gift right? Or what if they bring a bottle which costs $70 instead? Or $4.99? If your return gift is too expensive, then it can be perceived as showing off or as communicating some kind dissatisfaction with the received gift...

Practicing Utopia

January, 2014

I finally managed to get some reading done over the Thanksgiving break. A good friend of mine lent me Richard Rorty's Achieving our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth Century America, and it turned out to be one of the most interesting and rewarding books I've read in awhile. It's a serious of lectures delivered in 1998, and it's less than a hundred pages. But A little background is necessary to appreciate some of the details.

Rorty was trained as an analytic philosopher...

The Times They Are A Changin'

November, 2013

A lot of different people mean a lot of different things when they use the word "postmodern." When I use it, I tend to mean something like what Nietzsche meant by "God is dead." That is, objective Truth, perfection, utopia, or the realization of an ideal are no longer our goals in science or society. It means that there is not one answer to life's questions, not one ring to rule them all, not one all-knowing perspective, no "knowledge without a knower." Thinking along these lines has pervaded most of the liberal arts since the 1970s...

Disillusionment

October, 2013

It's that moment when you realize that you're naked, that moment when you start looking around for some leaves to cover up your shame, or when you first read Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States and discover that Columbus isn't worthy of the regard which our elementary school teachers held for him, or when you wake up one morning as an adult, knowing full well and too late that not all adults know what the hell's going on.

It's when you first learn that the earliest manuscripts of the Bible are copies of copies of copies of copies, transcribed not my professionals, but ...

Dignity and Reduction

May, 2013

In Finding Neverland (2004), there's great little scene where Johnny Depp's character, P.M. Barrie, the author of Peter Pan, is performing for some children in a park. He pretends to be a fearless bear trainer, and his furry friend, Porthos, plays the part of the bear. But before he begins, Peter, the young realist, played by Freddie Highmore, says "But this is absurd...

Atlas Shrugged

May, 2013

I am no literary critic, but I see the difference between a utopia and a dystopia as this: a dystopia generally takes a particular feature of the actual world which the author finds ominous and extrapolates it into the future, predicting just what society might look like should that feature be allowed to continue its present course. Fahrenheit 451 is about censorship and the freedom of ideas, the film Equilibrium is about the desire to rid humanity of the emotional (and therefore the uncontrollable) side of human nature, and 1984 was about the dangers of totalitarianism...