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 …
Concepts and struggle
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 …
Alfred North Whitehead and wisdom
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 …
Thomas Aquinas and reasoning
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 …
Intuition and mistakes
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 …
Descartes and intuition
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 …
