Blog
What philosophy has done for me–and I with it!
March 18, 2015
My passion for philosophy germinated during high school, when I was on the debate team and began to think about political issues. Then in college I took courses in ethics and logic, and learned how to analyze arguments and how to reduce professors to silence with a few questions asking what they meant by key words they would use. The results of my interactions taught me to use my new critical power sparingly, and I… Read More
A philosophy of living. Why?
March 11, 2015
A friend of mine went to the tenth reunion of his high school class, and in response to the standard question, “What have you been doing since high school?” the good-looking gymnast answered, “I’ve created a philosophy of living.” People were impressed. When you think of the effort many organizations go through to form their statements of vision and values, or wonder how many person-hours have been invested in committee meetings to create this or… Read More
Charm, Warmth, and the Touch of Spirit in “Pied Beauty” by Gerard Manley Hopkins
March 7, 2015
The harmony of contrasts is a leading theme in the aesthetics of nature and of the arts. Watch the harmonies unfold in this 1877 poem by English poet and Roman Catholic priest Gerard Manley Hopkins. Pied Beauty Glory be to God for dappled things— For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow; For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings; Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough; And áll trádes,… Read More
Philosophies of history and the role of religions in the so-called “clash of civilizations”
March 4, 2015
As these blogposts circle through a variety of topics, they explore limits. This philosophy of living does not allow its religious core to be upstaged by getting entangled in social, economic, and political controversies; the comments on such topics are therefore few and quite general. In commenting on world politics, this paper from 2004 represents as far as I’m willing to go. Some of us still cherish the political idea of a new world order,… Read More
Prayer for healing, Isaiah 11:2, and religion and health research
February 28, 2015
I am not a healer. I have seen three healers work: as they began, the engine in each of them went into high rpm, their energies whirring with activation; they used spiritual power, and the changes produced were immediate and palpable. Although I believe that we each have some degree of capacity for healing and should develop what we have, I am especially interested in healing in the loose, vague, contemporary sense of trying to… Read More
Ideas of incarnation and works of harmony
February 25, 2015
Christianity uses the word “incarnation” mainly to refer to Jesus of Nazareth understood as the Word of God, come down from heaven and made flesh, a person in whom divine and human natures were mysteriously and gloriously united. Hinduism and Buddhism regard us all as having had previous incarnations. And Hinduism speaks of “avatars,” deities who have incarnated in this world, perhaps including Jesus and Buddha as well as Krishna. Buddhism regards Buddha as having… Read More
Shamanist ideas about integrating mind, body, and soul with spirit and nature
February 19, 2015
A tangent is something that touches. Stephen’s comment on the previous blogpost touched the theme integrating body, mind, and soul with spirit. Stephen referred to shamanism, a topic worth pursuing. For all its errors, shamanism sometimes has intuitions that are worth re-theorizing, in other words, worth transplanting into a more philosophically and religiously satisfying garden. I was inspired to start the re-theorizing by Ed Tick, a poet and psychologist who visited Kent State University and… Read More
Humanism, the mind-body problem, Antonio Damascio, and the center of gravity in a human life
February 16, 2015
The conclusion of Descartes’ Error by Antonio Damascio reveals the mind of a humanist neuroscientist who nobly struggles to affirm soul and spirit while holding to the view that these higher realities are products of the mind, which is a product of the brain. “Mind comes from the brain.” (251) “The mind as a function of the organism . . . .” (255). “No one can say how the brain goes about the business of… Read More
Body, emotion, reason, soul, and Antonio Damascio
February 12, 2015
Antonio Damascio is one of the top neuroscientists whose work directly touches on philosophical questions, and his clear and elegant writing is seasoned with relevant references to the arts. His blockbuster 1994 book, Descartes’ Error, explains that if the parts of our brain that support reason were not neurologically connected to the parts of our brain that support emotion, our reason would not be able to function. Reason requires that certain data are presented… Read More