Archive for May, 2009

Wrongful Formation of Minds: Killing the Sense of Wonder

Friday, May 29th, 2009

We need to develop a healthy fear of what passes for education in the current age because that form of mental development is, in fact, little more than deformation of the pliable student into a trained monkey. To speak first of abstract thought, book-centered learning is best done by minimal years spent on basic reading [...]

Knowing Truth in a World Where We Perceive What is Useful

Friday, May 22nd, 2009

Ten years ago, I’d read a book about the modern understanding of human color vision: A Vision of the Brain by Semir Zeki, a prominent neuroscientist. This book also provides a summary of the history of theories of color vision. Recently, I realized this subject provides a good example of why there is no knowledge [...]

Wrongful Formation of Minds: William James and the Loss of a World

Saturday, May 16th, 2009

More than a year ago, I wrote some articles on the relationship between Thomistic existentialism and Jamesian pragmatism as developed by William James himself and further developed in recent years by two neuroscientists, Gerald Edelman and Walter J. Freeman. There is a great overlap between Thomistic existentialism and Jamesian pragmatism in the initial steps of [...]

Wrongful Formation of Minds: A Case Study of Traditionalist Catholics

Monday, May 11th, 2009

Americans who claim to be traditionalist Catholics are fighting on two sides holding irreconcilable views on the most fundamental of questions, such as “What is man?” and “What is truth?”. Most seem oblivious to the battle though they stand in the middle, one sword in their right hands to slash at their own left sides [...]

So What if the Human Mind is a Product of Evolution?

Tuesday, May 5th, 2009

Why do we resist changes in our beliefs about our selves, the world around us, and our relationship to God? Americans in particular, for all our claims to honesty about facts and our claims to have a hardheaded respect for reality, find it difficult to accept empirical evidence that we’re not quite the creatures we [...]