The American Philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce did not see the universe as collection of separate but interconnected things that evolved together. He saw a continuous whole universe with three essential characteristics that co-emerge. All of …
The Source of Creativity in the Universe
The American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce believed that the universe was evolving – the whole universe, not just the things in it. He believed that the universe itself, including the seemingly immutable laws of time, …
Nature Mystics and Scientific Progressives
The European Enlightenment produced two responses; Scientific Rationalism and Romanticism. The Scientific Rationalism represented in the science of Sir Isaac Newton and the philosophy of John Locke. Romanticism produced the writing of Goethe in Germany …
The Evolution of Dissatisfaction
What moves us? Why do we keep going, always striving to better ourselves, our circumstances and the conditions of others? It isn’t completely rational. We all die in the end anyway so why does it …
Everything Exists in Relationship
Things do not exist unless they exist in relationship with something else. In fact, things do not exist at all. Relationships exist. There are no individual things. The existence of anything is always contingent upon …
Evolutionary Love
“The movement of love is circular, at one and the same impulse projecting creations into independency and drawing them into harmony.” Charles Sanders Peirce In 1893 a publication called The Monist printed an article by …
We don’t create time – we freeze it in its tracks.
We have learned to see time as if it appears in chunks – minutes, hours, days, and years. But if time comes in chunks how do we experience past memories in the present? How does …
Experience and Understanding
There are two kinds of knowing – experience and understanding – and the confusion between them is the cause of all sorts of trouble for any thinking person. Experience is the knowing of things. It …
American Common Sense – or – How to Change the Truth
The American mind has been constructed on a few obvious attitudes and assumptions about life. One is a pronounced idealistic streak. The Europeans that settled in this land believed that they were creating a new world …
To be or not to be: What is Ontology?
What does it mean ‘to be’? When I say “I am…” or “It is…” what am I saying? What does it mean to exist – or to not exist, to be or not to be? …
Alfred North Whitehead: And the Three Components of Knowledge
This week I wanted to share a quote from the English philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. Whitehead is the originator of what is commonly known as Process Theology. And many of his ideas follow closely in …
The Essence of Being First
What is the quality of being first? This was a question that Charles Sanders Peirce thought deeply about because he felt that the quality of being first, or ‘firstness’ as he called it, was an …
Where has all the novelty gone?
Is spontaneity real? Is novelty possible? These are profound philosophical questions for all of us to think about. Does anything really new happen? A determinist might say no. The doctrine of determinism is often interpreted …
Scientific Evidence for Indeterminism
The advantage of being a materialist is that so much of our experience seems to point to a material basis for reality. Idealists usually have to appeal to some inner knowing as the justification of …
A Field of Pure Knowing
What is the human soul? Is it some phantom-like part of us or is it a living dimension of the universe from which all life flows? The later is what Samuel Taylor Coleridge taught and …
Breaking the Bonds of Language
Have you ever tried to have an original thought – or worse – had a truly original thought that you tried to put into language? That is when you realize that you are trapped in …
The Bible, Poetry and Mental Sensations
By the early part of the nineteenth century the Age of Reason had made it increasingly difficult for progressive religious thinkers to accept a literal interpretation of the Bible. It was clear that many passages of …
Vicious Intellectualism and the Reality of the Unknown
There are things that we know. And there are things that we know that we don’t know. And there are things that we don’t know that we don’t know. These last are the “unknown unknowns” …
The Truth is Out There: Pragmatism and The X-files
It occurred to me the other day that the American Philosophy of Pragmatism shares some remarkable similarities with the television series The X-files. Let’s start with the TV show’s moto – “the truth is out …
Interpreting the Signs of Reality
The concept of signs is so common to us that we hardly think about it. (Of course many of the most profound ideas are disguised as common ones that we don’t need to think about.) …