Creatively Advancing into Novelty
Einar Gerhardsen, Prime Minister of Norway for most of the period between 1945 and 1965, once claimed there were two principal lessons he had learned from his time in government. …there will always be conflicts in a democratic society: between workers and employers, between the majority and groups who view themselves as marginalized, or between…
…We exist simultaneously in cultural and natural ways that are inextricably tangled. We are always already situated in an intersubjective (and thereby already cultural), spatiotemporal, fleshy (and thereby already natural) world before we creatively adopt a personal position in it. Moreover, nothing determines us from the outside or inside, precisely because we are from the…
Measurements of human brain signals on the level of neurons and synapses have long shown that acts of will are preceded by a buildup of neural activity in the brain. These signals can begin up to seconds before a person is consciously aware of the exercise of volition, according to the weight of data, Tse…
“Let us suppose that everyone in the world wakes up today and tries to Write a poem. It is impossible to know what will happen next but certainly we may be assured that the world will not be made Worse. I believe in the divinity of profligacy. The creation of art, okay, just the attempt…
An individual entity is that which acts and feels as one. To feel in this context means to take account of the environment such that the individual is, at least in part, constituted by such taking account. An electron is an example of an individual entity. An electron at one end of the universe is…
There is therefore no stable and essential distinction, for Whitehead, between mind and matter, or between subject and object. There is also no stable and essential distinction between human and non-human, or even between living and non-living. It’s not that such distinctions are unimportant; often they are of the greatest pragmatic importance. I should not…
“Darwin saw every reason to predict that this evolution of human cooperation would, after the nineteenth century, continue to even higher levels. “Looking to future generations,” he predicted in the Descent of Man, “there is no cause to fear that the social instincts will grow weaker, and we may expect that virtuous habits will grow…
This is a comment I left on Tony Jones’ blog a while back when he posed the questions: what is a “person?” Warning: I quote John Cobb (no surprise there). What is a “person?” Well, let’s start small. Multicellular organisms can loosely be divided into two categories: One type establishes order among cells through their…
“We critique far too soon, we must first seek understanding.” – Marshal McLuhan I come from the art world. Critiquing is something I do often so I’m very familiar with the term. However, lately I’ve been reading a lot of theoretical, academic essays dealing with the “critique” of various theological/philosophical/sociological ideas and/or movements. I’m finding…
The rhetoric of Americans being the good guys and of all the bad guys being out there made me suspicious. I grew suspicious, not only by the irony of Christian calls to war, but by studying. Studying sociology, I learned of the startling Zimbardo prison experiment at Stanford, wherin a dozen students, prescreened for mental…