Most of us know Samuel Taylor Coleridge as the English Romantic poet and author of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. We may not be aware that he was also an important English theologian who …
The Integral Assumption of American Philosophy
Mind cannot exist without matter; matter cannot exist without mind. This is what I have come to see as perhaps the most essential theme that runs through American philosophy. In the modern western world it …
The Holistic Vision of Ralph Waldo Emerson
I am sorry that I missed a post this week due to travel, but I am excited to share more from Ralph Waldo Emerson. As we understand more how Emerson’s thought developed we see the …
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 …
Test Drive a Worldview
To respond to Andy, I knew that I was getting myself into some trouble by oversimplifying and over-generalizing philosophy and breaking it down into metaphysics, epistemology and ethics. I was lumping things, like logic into epistemology …
Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Conception of Nature
The Pragmatic definition of truth may have deep roots in American thought, but to uncover the metaphysical conception that is the ground under Pragmatism’s feet we should look one generation earlier into the mind of …