There are things that we know. And there are things that we know that we don’t know. And there are things that we don’t know that we don’t know. These last are the “unknown unknowns” made famous in a comment by former US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. The two originators of the philosophy of […]
Tag Archives: Wilfred Sellers
Escape From The Myth of the Given
posted by Jeff Carreira
One way to think about the existential dilemma of postmodernism is that we began to realize that our perception of reality is a hopeless tangle of sensation and interpretation. What we assume to be reality as we look out at the world is not objectively real. It is a perspective on reality that is constructed through a […]
The Myth of the Given – or – Marooned on Mount Assumption
posted by Jeff Carreira
We all believe in an outdated myth. It is the unconscious belief that something is given – that we are standing on some solid ground of truth from which the rest of our understanding of reality is built. This belief gives us a sense of security in what we think, because underneath it we believe […]
“To Thing”: A New Verb
posted by Jeff Carreira
Thing (v). to thing, thinging. 1. To create an object by defining a boundary around some portion of reality separating it from everything else and then labeling that portion of reality with a name. One of the greatest human skills is the ability to thing. We are thinging beings. We thing all the time. We […]