Philosophy

Everyone is Waiting For You to Make a Mistake: Neoliberalism and Socially Prescribed Perfectionism

February 9, 2018 culture, Current Events, Economics, Philosophy, Politics, Psychology

“Self-oriented perfectionism is the tendency to hold oneself to an unrealistically high standard, while other-oriented perfectionism means having unrealistic expectations of others. But “socially prescribed perfectionism is the most debilitating of the three dimensions of perfectionism,” Curran and Hall contend. It describes the feeling of paranoia and anxiety engendered by the persistent — and not…

Everybody is Their Own Galaxy

February 1, 2018 Art, Christianity, Current Events, Philosophy, Poetry, Theory

“All tribes unite at the Godhead and then walk away with their differing tribal missions: that is the aim of the 21st century, to achieve that realization and walk from the whole toward infinite fracturing into communities that reflect what its members actually believe. It is the only way to purge ourselves of guilt and…

Philosophy of Orgasm: Whitehead and Eros as the Desire for Fulfillment

January 26, 2018 humanities, Philosophy, Psychology, Science, Theology, Theory

“In Adventures of Ideas, which I found to be the most accessible read of Whitehead’s works, he discusses in more detail his thoughts of eros and its relationship to God. Eros is the power in the universe urging toward the realization of ideals, and as such it plays a major role in his later work….

Anyone Can Get Rich in America: The Polka King, Capitalism, and the American Dream

January 22, 2018 Economics, humanities, Philosophy, Theory, Thoughts

I watched a really funny movie on Netflix over the weekend called The Polka King. (**SPOILERS AHEAD!!**) Beside the fact that the movie takes place in the town where I went to high school (Hazleton, Pennsylvania) and the fact that it has lots of polka music (which I fondly remember my grandmother listening to…

My Dreams Do Not Belong Only to Myself

January 12, 2018 Art, Ecology, Philosophy, Psychology, Theory

“To put this into the context of a life narrative, my dreams do not belong only to myself but to all of the people and non-human things and processes with which I share this earth. The earth flows through me, and my vision of the world, in turn, reverberates back out into my surroundings. Strictly…

At least some form of continuity between mind and nature…

January 10, 2018 Current Events, Ecology, humanities, Philosophy, Science, Theology, Theory

“A central feature of any naturalism is that there is at least some form of continuity between mind and nature – or, that mind “stretches” to meet nature (in the words of John Dewey). But, what is “mind” within a naturalistic register? A basic premise for naturalists such as Charles S. Peirce, John Dewey, George…

The Organic Restlessness of The Whole Body of Creation: Process Theology and Ontotheology

January 5, 2018 Christianity, Philosophy, Theology, Thoughts

I may certainly be misunderstanding the concept (or understanding it incompletely) but for me, as a process-relational thinker, the pejorative ontotheological criticism/dismissal has never bothered me much in the first place, and as a panpsychically-oriented, panentheistic religious naturalist I again don’t care. A) in the process-relational conception of things the “ontic” category isn’t really meaningful,…

Artists and Authors aren’t geniuses or gods.

November 29, 2017 Art, Current Events, Philosophy, Theory

“Roman Polanski, Woody Allen, Bill Cosby, William Burroughs, Richard Wagner, Sid Vicious, V. S. Naipaul, John Galliano, Norman Mailer, Ezra Pound, Caravaggio, Floyd Mayweather, though if we start listing athletes we’ll never stop…They did or said something awful, and made something great. The awful thing disrupts the great work; we can’t watch or listen to…

There is no view from nowhere, but there is something viewed!

November 13, 2017 Philosophy, Science, Theory

“The point, for Hilary Putnam (HP), is that neither James, nor pragmatism generally speaking, is committed to anti-realism, if that means a rejection of a reality that is external to agents, or committed to truth as subjective or mere expediency (or “whatever works”). Rather, for HP (and James), truth is not a dyadic relation between…

Guns & Crack (WARNING: WHITE GUY GUN RANT)

November 13, 2017 Current Events, Philosophy, Politics, Thoughts

In all of my conversations with men who own guns for “self-defense” (the vast majority of them being white men, btw) every single one of them comes out at some point trying to save face (presumably not wanting to sound like a complete monster) by saying something like, “I’d never want to kill anyone, it’s…