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 … [Read more…]
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 … [Read more…]
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 … [Read more…]
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 … [Read more…]
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 … [Read more…]