The LEGO Movie is an animated film that brings the plastic construction toy to life. Like so many others, I found the film to be a delight. I also found it to be a delightful …
Excellence Is Fueled By Philosophy
Why does philosophy matter? It is a question I think about all the time. I know that some people think it doesn’t really matter that much, if at all. It might be because people think …
Did Modernism Isolate Us from the World?
The world doesn’t just exist, it shows up for us. It appears as the pure experience of the present moment. And one of the most amazing things about the world is that it changes – …
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 …
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 …
Why is Barack Obama the President of the United States?
I want to continue the discussion of how the social world is created by posing the question, “Why is Barack Obama the President of the United States?” The most popular answer to that question would …
Reality or Social Reality
I am currently beginning to study the work of the philosopher John R. Searle especially his work on how social reality is created. He starts from the fact that there are many things that are …
How do we know what we know?
I was very interested in the discussion that occurred around my post about belief and fact and I agree with Chuck that it is our interpretation of our experience that must be questioned. I have …
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 …
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 …
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 …