I always say that humans are not all that creative; even our most fantastical creations are nothing more than rehashes of things that we experience from the world around us. A unicorn is simply a horse with a horn attached to it. That being said, it should be noted that the faculty of creativity is…
I am often fascinated by the ebb and flow of traffic. Specifically, it’s amazing how often a heavy traffic jam simply ends without any visible cause in the vicinity. In most cases some accident or obstruction jammed the road and caused a slowdown which then grew as other cars responded. This slowdown then lasted for…
Whitehead and others have argued that traditional metaphysics fails precisely because of its obsession with language. Since it assumes the subject-verb-object mold of language, so also does it conform philosophical thought to this same mold. The attempt by Heidegger and others to escape into the poetry of the pre-Socratics is another essay at escape from…
When Leibniz coined the term theodicy, he also effectively inaugurated a fundamental shift in the way in which this fundamental question is prosecuted.
If you pick up the biography that the third-century Neoplatonist philosopher Porphyry wrote about his teacher Plotinus, you may be struck by just how slight it is on actual facts and details. It’s less a biography and more a few personal notes.Porphyry explains that because Plotinus despised his own bodily existence–true to his philosophy–he was…
An insightful essay by Joe D. Burchfield entitled “The Age of the Earth and the Invention of Geological Time” discusses the concepts of “geological time” and “deep time”, tracing their usage back to the influential work of Charles Lyell at the start of the nineteenth century. “Geological time” occurs frequently in works having to do…