Nikolai Berdyaev God is mystery, beyond all truth, beauty, and goodness that we can comprehend. God eternally chose/chooses to be a person, to relate with other persons. Personality is a mystery, too. Year after year, we go through changes, and yet we are the same person. No matter how well you know someone, you could … Read more
Viktor Frankl Just as science has its philosophical component, philosophy has its scientific component. And when a psychiatrist speaks of meaning in life we see meaning as shared territory between science and philosophy. Psychiatrist Viktor Frankl observed during his years as a prisoner in Nazi concentration camps that meaning in life is a vital human … Read more
One of the persisting problems of philosophy is how to bring together the idea of universal truth with the idea of personal truth. At their extremes, each idea tries to eliminate any room for the other. At one extreme, the idea of universal truth excludes those who do not accept a particular doctrine. The intolerant, … Read more
Alfred North Whitehead Wisdom combines truths of science, philosophy, and spiritual experience. Excellent thinking flourishes on the basis of intuition. On that basis, reason draws inferences. Then wisdom integrates reason’s diverse array of such lines of reasoning into an ever more comprehensive synthesis. (In practice, each phase of this model depends on the other phases.) … Read more
Notre Dame, Paris In commercial and political messages, when we see any reasoning at all, most of it is one-sided. The conclusion may be true, but there is no attempt to be fair to other points of view. By contrast, an editorial I once read distinguished itself: at the beginning, the writer fully stated the … Read more
A point raised in Dr. McCoy’s comment on the previous post, “Descartes and intuition,” deserves a fresh post in reply. There is no silver bullet when it comes to knowledge, wisdom, and insight. We have to work at it. We gain the truths of science by experiment, the truths of philosophy by interpretation, and the … Read more
The method of thinking proposed by René Descartes is instructive. He proposed intuition and reason (deduction) as the way to wisdom. “Concerning the objects presented to us we should investigate, not what others have thought nor what we ourselves conjecture, but what we can intuit clearly and evidently or deduce with certainty, since knowledge is … Read more
Dostoevsky Aristotle Living at our best, we go forth upon the field of experience, and in various kinds of interaction we cope in a way that is grounded, poised, and intuitive. Aristotle saw that we need a kind of courage to establish intuition (or is there a kind of intuition at the root of courage?): … Read more
Socrates Philosophical decision-making clarifies the truth–or meaning–of the facts and specific value most relevant to the situation. Socrates’ reasoning about whether to escape or to remain in prison is presented in Plato’s dialogue, the Crito. After some preliminaries, Socrates expresses the premise for all that follows, his supreme commitment to goodness. He asks whether what … Read more