In my soon-to-be updated collection of weblog writings, Acts of Being: Selected Weblog Writings From 2006 to 2011, I separated those essays into seven categories including Love and Stuff and, the largest of the seven by a good margin, The Narrative We Know as a World. I’ll not slight the other five sections in their … [Read more…]
In Cosmology: A First Course, Marc Lachieze-Rey writes: The best definition of the cosmos is possibly the ensemble of relations between the constituent parts of the cosmos. First of all, I’ll point out that the larger context, the entirety of the introductory chapter, makes it clear that the cosmos is the parts as well as … [Read more…]
Can we derive the properties of complex entities from the particles or lesser entities from which they are built or from which they grow? The modern man tends to answer, “Yes,” even when he’s an accomplished thinker in a field which involves higher level analysis of empirical or abstract knowledge. This idea, underlying various sorts … [Read more…]
In, Bangs, Crunches, Whimpers, and Shrieks: Singularities and Acausalities in Relativistic Spacetimes, John Earman, a philosopher of science, warns believers of some errors in efforts to localize God in spacetime. The first warning has to do with causation: So for Craig [W.L. Craig, a theistic philosopher apparently attempting to use the Big Bang to prove … [Read more…]
I’ve written of the desirability of using tensor-type thinking in qualitative fields where there is, even in principle, no way of particularizing the tensor equations to equations which could actually be used to calculate numbers. A reminder: by intelligent use of tensors (call it reasoning in more abstract spaces by way of differential geometry if … [Read more…]
In a short essay recently published on the Web, the political thinker Ken Masugi tells us about political scientists needing to recognize the validity of philosophical modes of thought. They’ve drifted away from reality as a result of their efforts to become quantitative empirical scientists. In that essay, Political Scientists Bow to the Laws of … [Read more…]
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…]
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…]
I’m re-reading Leisure: The Basis of Culture by Josef Pieper. As Pieper plausibly, and I think correctly, discusses matters, the loss of leisure and the consequent loss of culture is bound up, at least in this age of men, with the process of proletarianization, that is, the limitation of men to their laboring aspects. Pieper … [Read more…]
I’ve written in the past that we can think, with proper qualifications and definitions, of physical matter including our bodies as being frozen soul: see Frozen Soul and Other Delicacies for a recent essay discussing that claim. This language of “frozen soul” is another way of thinking about the spectrum of created being: God manifested … [Read more…]