I’ve been delayed in my reading program, but I’m getting slowly back to work on Hans Reichenbach’s The Direction of Time. I’ve also gotten behind on my writing though I’ve already posted on some preliminary issues after reading Hilary Putnam’s preface for this the reprinting by the University of California Press: Why Does Time Move … [Read more…]
I’ve just started to read Hans Reichenbach’s The Direction of Time and lines of thought came to life before I’d even finished Hilary Putnam’s foreword for the 1991 reprinting of an English translation by the University of California Press. I’ll probably write multiple essays on this subject of the direction of time, though it doesn’t … [Read more…]
There is likely a tendency for scientifically literate laymen, such as myself, to think of quantum effects in terms of the forces and particles of interaction, of potential, rather than in terms of what some might label `brute matter’. Miracles of scientific measurement and experimentation are almost to be expected nowadays and, lo and behold, … [Read more…]
Call it traditionalism or conservatism if you wish — though I refer to an attitude and a body of thought far from the comic-book views of the mass-media commentators and the ideologues they serve. What is it? One of my favorite, perhaps overused, quotations is from the historian Carroll Quigley: The truth unfolds in time … [Read more…]
Since 2006, I’ve been writing books and essays, nearly all of which are available for free downloading on the Internet. My main theme is simply the need to see our world as being the universe in light of God’s purposes for this concrete realm of Creation, which includes the need to see the entirety of … [Read more…]
I have uploaded a small sampler of sorts, a collection of essays from my weblog writings. This small collection deals with the subject of our need to accept empirical reality as the source of even those concepts which seem to be absolute truths. The short book can be downloaded at Making Peace with Empirical Reality.
Respect for empirical knowledge doesn’t determine if one believes or disbelieves in God, though it has generally forced any believers, pagan and pantheist and Christians and others, to see a God of reason. After all, the very term `empirical knowledge’ is meaningful only if it refers to something, some realm of being subject to perception … [Read more…]
What do you do with a frozen soul? You could lick it because, speaking in general terms, a Popsicle is as much a piece of frozen soul as a human being is. And so are rattlesnakes and monkeys and rocks hurtling through space. You can also saw frozen soul, beginning the process of making a … [Read more…]
I’ve written several times about my opinion that William James held back from the full implications of his teachings or, at least, held back from a viewpoint that would have led him to a plausible conjecture of some sort of fullness of knowledge, however impossible the complete realization of that full knowledge. James saw how … [Read more…]
In The End of the Twentieth Century, the Hungarian-American — and Catholic — historian John Lukacs points out: [A]t the end of the twentieth century, many people respect religion as well as science, together; but the respect is faint. (This has to do with the fact that we have descended to a stage lower than … [Read more…]