We’re told that David Hume proved that values can’t be drawn from facts. Most recently, I read of this alleged proof in an interesting and mostly unobjectionable book about the relationship between Protestant ways of reading texts and the origins of science: The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science by Peter Harrison [Cambridge [...]
I saw this quote on the Internet recently: I keep the subject of my inquiry constantly before me, and wait till the first dawning opens gradually, by little and little, into a full and clear light. [Sir Isaac Newton] Newton knew how to think. In Thomistic terms, serious thinking is an intentional process, that is [...]
I’ve come to the position that created being exists across a spectrum going from abstract to concrete or particular. A thing, a particularized form of being, still has its abstract being in it the way that a vase has still the raw materials of its clay and glazing. In fact, as you penetrate the stuff [...]
God has shaped a thing-like world out of more basic stuff. I’ve discussed this in various ways, especially in the category: Christian in the Universe of Einstein. We human beings form our minds by responding actively to that world and by penetrating to understandings of that more basic stuff. A particular thing is a manifestation [...]
Those who’ve read some of the writings on my blogs, Acts of Being and To See a World in a Grain of Sand, will likely realize I’ve been dealing with this project of creating a worldview on a somewhat disorganized basis, that is, I was writing as ideas came to me, sometimes addressing a few [...]
Human knowledge is embodied knowledge, embodied in the relationships of brain-cells to one another and groups of brain-cells to one another as well as being embodied in the habits of our muscles and peripheral nerves and also in our clothing and our houses and our tools and machines, in our ways of making our livings [...]
I’m slowly reading Hume’s A Treatise on Human Nature and trying to determine why I’m sympathetic to his general train of thought though I’m in opposition to some of his most important lines of thought. Maybe. It’s hard to say because he was trying hard to respond to empirical reality but he was somewhat entangled [...]
The policy analysts, Right and Left, are working hard to assign blame for the problems of modern economies and polities. In the United States, they examine taxation and regulation policies of governments from Washington’s administration right to that of Obama. They also examine the strong dislike Americans have for taxes along with the longing they [...]
Mind over matter. Willpower. Free-will. Those sound good when you wish to think of yourself as being in charge. The problem is that ‘yourself’ then becomes some entity which is an agent separate from the human organism and somehow in control over that organism. As I’ve argued repeatedly in my various writings, we are organisms [...]
In this article, I’m continuing my efforts to deepen and enrich my moral self-understanding as an American born in the middle of the 20th century. These efforts run parallel to my studies of modern empirical knowledge, including the seemingly arcane mathematics used in physics, and my assumption is that normal processes of mind-shaping will result [...]