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. …
The Thirdness of Peirce, the Worlds of Heidegger and Conscious Evolution
I want to go in a little deeper into Peirce’s conception of the three modes of being, Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness. By Firstness Peirce is referring to pure being. Firstness is the unseen, imperceptible essence …
Charles Sanders Peirce’s Integrally Evolving Universe
To continue this discussion and approach the evolutionary metaphysics of Charles Sanders Peirce, I first want to return to Kant. As I wrote about earlier, Kant’s big insight was that the world as we perceive …
Scientific Fundamentalism
To finish (at least for the time being) with this idea of Scientism vs. Science. I want to take it a little further so that I hope I am able to make clear what I …
Religion, Science and Perspective: Let the Games Begin
I actually had a different post in my queue, but this conversation got so interesting that I thought that I would throw my two cents in and bring it front and center before continuing with …
Science vs. Scientism
I spent my last post explaining how the philosophy of Pragmatism was shaped by hard science and now I am going to explain how one of the ironies of Pragmatism is that although it was …
Chauncey Wright and the Strong Arm of Science
Over my last two posts I have been reflecting on some of the ideas of Kant and Hegel and how they were picked up by the early Pragmatists. The German Idealism of Kant and Hegel …
The Individual and Society
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770 –1831) was a leading figure in the movement of German Idealism initiated by Immanuel Kant and Hegel’s philosophy expanded on Kant’s theory of knowledge by adding a social and historical …
Commitment and Reality: From Kant to Peirce
There was more implied in Kant’s theory of knowledge than the fact that what we see is not an objective world in itself, but rather a picture that is created by us based on sense …
The Purpose of Philosophy and Science
The existence of God, the nature of freewill – we just seem to keep running into some of the same BIG questions that have orbited around Western philosophy for centuries. I thought it might be …
Evolutionary Enlightenment and American Philosophy
Before continuing with our fascinating discussion I wanted, in the interest of transparency, to tell a little more about my interest in American Philosophy. The last decades of the 20th century saw a resurgence of …
Cosmic Evolution
I have been thinking about something that came up in the discussion around my last post. It was something that Carl had said early on when he remarked about how a large part of the …
Our Evolutionary Crisis
I certainly want to continue with our discussion and I want to explore the profound ideas of Charles Sanders Peirce further, but first I wanted to say a few words in general that I have been …
Evolutionary Duality and the Limits of Science
Next week I will be giving an afternoon lecture in Philadelphia about the relationship between philosophical inquiry and the challenges of our time, and the roots of Integral Theory and Evolutionary Enlightenment in Classic American …
A Brief Stop at the Human Intersection
If you think about the Universe as a vast unknown then you can think about human knowledge and understanding about the universe as the “human intersection with the universe.” Our knowledge about, and understanding of, …