A radically secularized society will make it tough to engage in any sort of religious practices. This happens in a particularly intense way if the majority of parents simply turn their children over to the school systems or to modern American culture as a whole. And so it is that I’ll retreat from philosophical or … [Read more…]
As I noted in a previous entry, I believe that Pope Benedict is open to respectful and meaningful criticism of the sort which might be given by one competent scholar to the work of another or by one devout Christian thinker to the thoughts of another — else why would he go out of his … [Read more…]
[How Brains Make Up Their Minds, Walter J. Freeman, Columbia University Press, 2000] Professor Freeman and his students made an important discovery in the late 1970s: the brain response to what is seemingly the same stimulus is not always the same. They trained rabbits respond to various odors, using sawdust twice in the experiments, once … [Read more…]
[How Brains Make Up Their Minds, Walter J. Freeman, Columbia University Press, 2000] Intentionality in the doctrine of Aquinas does not require consciousness, but it does require acting to create meaning instead of just thinking. This view is shared by the philosophers Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, J.J. Gibson, and the pragmatists. We sniff, move our … [Read more…]
[How Brains Make Up Their Minds, Walter J. Freeman, Columbia University Press, 2000] In “Meaning and Representation”, Chapter 2 of the referenced book, Professor Freeman has a perceptive and intelligent discussion of the materialist, cognitive, and pragmatic views of the mind and most especially the mind of the self-aware human being. (It’s a matter of … [Read more…]
I’m thinking my way towards the sort of intentional view of moral nature pioneered by St. Thomas Aquinas. There is a clear explanation of intentionality, a biological concept to match our biological natures, in How Brains Make Up Their Minds by the neuroscientist Walter J. Freeman. Sticking strictly to the empirical aspects of this concept, … [Read more…]
A silly question in a way, but also a serious one. In fact, it’s a question forced upon us by the importance of cosmological physics as popularized by the so-called Big Bang model of cosmological physics. Live in the Big Bang world, die in the Big Bang world. Even be resurrected in a world part … [Read more…]
Henri Bergson provides an interesting discussion where he tells us: Why, in other words, is not everything given at once, as on the film of a cinematograph? The more I consider this point, the more it seems to me that, if the future is bound to succeed the present instead of given alongside of it, … [Read more…]
I discovered an interesting article on the Internet, Praxeology, War, Democracy, and the State by Roderick T. Long of Auburn University. See Roderick T. Long’s Home Page or Wikipedia article on praxeology for a definition of ‘praxeology’. If you can’t read a DOC formatted file, do a google search and you’ll be offered an html … [Read more…]
I’ve published a short, spiritual book about achieving peace in a restless world. See Synopsis for The Peace of Christ for information or go directly to the publisher’s order page, The Peace of Christ. The book should appear on major internet bookseller sites before long.