The leap that occurred in human consciousness from the time known as The Middle Ages to the Age of Enlightenment is nothing short of miraculous. Imagine being alive during The Middle Ages. Your entire understanding …
Truth, Knowing and Human Activity according to William James
William James tied the expereince of knowing directly to human activity. His version of Pragmatism was largely based on this “integral” (if I may use the term so loosely) connection between mind and matter. In …
Plato, Aristotle and William James
Before continuing to examine the ideas of William James lets look at the origins of metaphysical dualisms in Western thought by comparing the two big thinkers of ancient Greece, Plato and Aristotle. Plato was in …
The Self-consciousness flow of William James
To understand the thinking of William James I have tried to see the world as I believe he saw it – as one continuous unfolding flow. In my own contemplation of James I have followed …
The Birth of Integral Theory
In this blog I have attempted to create a snapshot of the American philosophy of Pragmatism. In doing this I have emphasized how ideas are developed as part of, and in response to, larger cultural …
Cosmos, Consciousness and Culture
It was almost exactly one year ago today that I started this blog so I guess this is my first anniversary post. I started the blog because I wanted to explore the relationship between classical …
John Dewey and Cultural Evolution
What I see in John Dewey’s Instrumentalism is a compelling theory of how the evolution of culture can be consciously guided. Dewey’s ideas about directing the further development of culture rest squarely on his understanding of objects …
Ideas and Education
Now back to John Dewey who felt that his instrumental view of reality did away with the philosophical problem of mind and matter. Prior to communication reality is an unending stream of events that are …
Our Discussion in a College Course
I wanted to tell my readers that I am planning to bring the discussions that we have been having on this blog to a course at a local community college in Western Massachusetts. If any …
Rational Mechanics and the Mind
I want to post one more time before getting back to a few last words on John Dewey and conscious evolution. I have been doing a little research into the development of modern physics because …
Does anything like a mind exist?
I still have a few more posts on Dewey that I want to put up that lead to an exciting model of cultural evolution, but Carl’s comment to my last post inspired me to write …
Riding the Currents on the Ocean of Mind
I can describe the beautiful image that built in my mind as I read John Dewey’s book “Experience and Nature” by describing a vision of reality as currents in the ocean of mind. Think of …
Communication and the Mind
I still have a few more thoughts about John Dewey’s profound book “Experience and Nature” to develop in this post and the next before I get to explain what hit me while I was reading …
Embracing Constant Flux
I am on a roll with John Dewey. I was reading through his book “Experience and Nature” for the second time and something finally clicked and I started to see what he was getting at. …
John Dewey and the “ends” of the Universe
The third of the founding American Pragmatists was John Dewey. In the early 1870’s while Charles Sanders Peirce and William James were busy brewing the original conceptions of what would become Pragmatism; John Dewey was …
Charles Sanders Peirce and Integral Evolution
The reason I find it interesting to think about different dimensions is because the distinction between one dimension and the next is uniquely…well…distinct. We are all very familiar with distinctions between one thing and the …
Multi-dimensional Fun
Let’s continue our thought about dimensionality in the upbeat spirit of the holidays by visiting one of the great books about multiple dimensions, Edwin Abbott’s 1884 novella “Flatland, A Romance of Many Dimensions.” If you …
Multiple Dimensional Reality
I want to take up this matter of non-duality and the split of mind and matter. Brian has accused me of being a dualist – a Cartesian (gasp) – and I must defend myself for …
What World Are We Talking About?
I have taken in a great deal of information over the past month or so and seemed time to step back and take yet another stab at my own current best-guess assimilation of this investigation. …
The Emergence of the Universe
In my last two posts I introduced Peirce’s phenomenology of thirdness. The American Pragmatists were exploring a perspective of unified emergence that was taking the implications of Darwin’s evolutionary theory into the realm of metaphysics. …