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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
Evolutionary Ethics and Karma
A continuous view of the universe seems to inherently evoke an ethical compulsion. When the boundaries between self and other, individual and society, inner and outer begin to dissolve into a single universe of continuous …
More thoughts on the freedom of so called “Freewill”
“Spinoza says that if a stone which has been projected through the air had consciousness, it would believe that it was moving of its own will . I add to this only that the stone …
What is Evolution?
Before getting back to the issue of freewill I wanted to write a post or two about the general topic of evolution and the less general topic of “conscious evolution.” My interest in freewill falls …
Pragmatism – The Western Law of Karma
It occurred to me that now would be as good a time as any to talk a little bit about truth and inquiry. I am reading Charles Sanders Peirce right now so that has given …
Freewill and Human Bubbles
When you begin to ask questions like, “Do human beings have free will?” as we have done in my last few posts, you enter into thorny philosophical territory. My understanding of Charles Sanders Peirce logic …
Peirce and James: Beyond the Metaphysical
The Pragmatists in America were modernists coming of age at the height of science’s rise to intellectual supremacy in the west. As such they were biased toward the idea that reason was supreme and that …
Characteristics of an Evolving Universe
Before continuing with my thoughts about free will, I thought it would be good to take a step back and take a wide angle look at what evolution and more specifically conscious evolution is all …
Conscious Evolution and Free Will?
Part of the controversy over Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution has always been its deterministic tone. Darwin saw evolution as happening through the combination of chance variation and natural selection. The theory goes something like …
The Curious Case of John Elof Boodin vs. Charles Darwin
The American philosophy of Pragmatism was in many ways a direct response to Darwin’s publication of “On the Origin of Species.” The early Pragmatists were trying to apply the same logic to philosophy that Darwin …
Two Generations of American Philosophy: Part 4
In the fourth instalment of my talk on the roots of American Philosophy I give a brief biographical account of the birth of the American philosophy known as Pragmatism and the contributions of its main …
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 …