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 …
Are Relationships Real Things?
Our sense of reality is dominated by things. Things feel real to us. We live in a universe that we experience as empty space filled with things. And some things have relationships between them. But …
Mind is not Brain
What is the mind? Most of us think about it as a storehouse of ideas and memories. It is the place where we experience the world. Sometimes we think about it as a movie screen …
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 …
Is a Dog Really a Dog?
One of the great philosophical dividing lines has always been the line that separates the particular from the universal – the unique from the general. We live in a world of both particulars and universals …
The Objective Reality of Language
We live in a universe of discourse – a flowing ever-adjusting transfer of information. If you want to see the world the way that George Herbert Mead and the other American Pragmatists saw it you …
Learning to be a Self
George Herbert Mead said a self is a subject that is an object to itself. A subject is a perceiving thing and a self is a perceiving thing that can perceive itself. Human beings are …
Into The Human Flow
I am currently completely captivated by the image of a Human Flow. The American Pragmatist philosophers developed a view of humanity as a constant flow of activity and society was a flow of flows. There …
Worldviews and Ways of Being
Immanuel Kant, the great German philosopher of the 18th Century, presented the radical idea that the world is not the way it appears to be. What we see as the world is not a real …
Mead, Mind and World
George Herbert Mead is the fourth major figure in Classical American Pragmatism. Mead studied philosophy at Harvard while William James chaired the department. He taught with John Dewey at the University of Michigan before they …
Martin Heidegger and The Worlds of Sense and Purpose
I am still thinking about Heidegger’s three ways of being. The first two of these he called ‘presence-to-hand’ and ‘ready-to-hand.’ Both of these are defined in what could be seen as human terms and I …
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? …
Substance, Utility, Existence: Heidegger’s Modes of Being
Martin Heidegger, the 20th century German philosopher, believed that for thousands of years human beings had misidentified the nature of what it means ‘to be.” From the time of the great Greek thinkers the fundamental …
Nothingness and Firstness
Once, on a retreat in Italy, the teacher spoke about something that immediately made me think of the philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce. On this retreat we were all meditating on and contemplating the nature …
What Evolves?
Recently I heard a recording of a talk given in London by my friend and colleague Carter Phipps. Carter is the author of the forth coming book Evolutionaries: The People, Passions, and Perspectives that are …
Why Philosophy is Still not a Luxury
I am about to go on retreat to withdraw from the world for a time an let go of thought and sink into the experience of pure being. The experience of deep meditation is probably …
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 Subjective World of William James
My last post inspired me to want to do a series of posts in which I share some of my favorite philosophy passages, and this week a passage from William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience compels me. …
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 …