Philosophy

What I Learned About That Difficult Childhood

On a changing—and perhaps transcending—perspective on pain.

Published on November 17, 2024, filed under and .

Everyone Can Set You Up for Failure, Not Everyone Sets You Up for Success

On a conscious choice that we can make, and that we best make sure others make.

Published on November 2, 2024, filed under and .

Not Knowable

Casual appreciation about our dealing with knowledge.

Published on September 29, 2024, filed under .

The Assessment Paradox

For any individual or group we may think that it can assess itself best because it knows itself best. Yet this is not reliable. We may then think it’s other individuals or groups interacting with that first individual or group who may be able to assess it. This is not so, either.

Published on September 14, 2024, filed under and .

Exploitation

What and who is easiest to take advantage of and exploit, how is that being justified, and what can be done about it? On one piece of the puzzle what the fewest things are that need changing, to change everything.

Published on March 30, 2024, filed under and .

Julia and Sybil

The early manuscript of a novel I started in 2015, and that will still take a few years to be finished.

Published on March 24, 2024, filed under and .

Why Online Communication Is So Not-Great

Why is online communication so, meh? An approach that considers context, training, and world views, for a much more complicated topic.

Published on November 26, 2023, filed under and .

Existence and Experience

How can something-exists experience itself?

Published on October 22, 2023, filed under .

The Good Things About All the Problems

On things we cannot meaningfully discuss, and the sequel to The Problems With All the Good Things that may never be.

Published on September 24, 2023, filed under .

The cover of “The Problems With All the Good Things.”

New Book: “The Problems With All the Good Things”

When good is considered unproblematic, and everything can be shown to be problematic, then—partner up with AI.

Published on July 11, 2023, filed under .

Give

On one-things and lack.

Published on July 9, 2023, filed under and .

Highlights From “The Social Contract” (Jean-Jacques Rousseau)

“The strongest is never strong enough to be always the master, unless he transforms strength into right, and obedience into duty.”

Published on April 14, 2023, filed under .

Highlights From “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism” (Max Weber)

“The modern rational organization of the capitalistic enterprise would not have been possible without two other important factors in its development: the separation of business from the household, which completely dominates modern economic life, and closely connected with it, rational book-keeping.”

Published on April 12, 2023, filed under and .

“The One With the Biggest Hammer Wins”

On a game we could stop playing.

Published on May 24, 2022, filed under and .

3 Books for Working With Reality

With or without The Complete Conversations With God, The Nature of Personal Reality, and Loving What Is?

Published on April 22, 2022, filed under .

The Choice to F Up

On the things we are doing and not doing, how these things are not and cannot be accidents, and how it all revolves around choice.

Published on March 6, 2021, filed under and .

Highlights From “An Introduction to Psychology” (Wilhelm Wundt)

“There cannot be the least contradiction in the idea that physical and psychical phenomena follow different laws, as long as these laws are not irreconcilable with the actual unity of the psycho-physical individual.”

Published on February 27, 2020, filed under and .

Counter the Happiness Assumption

It may be rather clear that life is not all about being happy.

Published on April 16, 2019, filed under .

Highlights From “Free Thought and Official Propaganda” (Bertrand Russell)

“Our system of education turns young people out of the schools able to read, but for the most part unable to weigh evidence or to form an independent opinion.”

Published on March 15, 2019, filed under .

What Happened on Google+, the Philosophy Archives

Google+ is shutting down, pulling everything with it. I’ve used Google+. And although I’ve changed and would put a few things differently now, I decided to archive a few of the somewhat philosophical Google+ posts.

Published on March 8, 2019, filed under and .

Survival of the Primitive

Is ours a highly evolved culture?

Published on December 16, 2018, filed under and .

Highlights From “Flatland” (Edwin Abbott Abbott)

“Yet I exist in the hope that these memoirs, in some manner, I know not how, may find their way to the minds of humanity in Some Dimension, and may stir up a race of rebels who shall refuse to be confined to limited Dimensionality.”

Published on November 19, 2018, filed under and .

The One Thing We May Really Want to Research

My back-burner philosophical work revolves around one idea: that what creates and makes for our reality, in quite practical terms, is what we believe. That idea is profound and requires more: research.

Published on October 4, 2018, filed under .

Highlights From “The Communist Manifesto” (Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels)

“This organisation of the proletarians into a class, and consequently into a political party, is continually being upset again by the competition between the workers themselves.”

Published on October 1, 2018, filed under .

What We Know

On some days, if you asked me about what we know, with absolute certainty, I’d respond with “only that something exists.” And if you asked me what that meant, then I’d add “to appreciate and work with what exists.”

Published on December 24, 2017, filed under .

If you like what you see here, check out How to Work on Oneself for a lightweight look at personal growth and development, or The Problems With All the Good Things for an AI-supported perspective on—problems.