Creatively Advancing into Novelty
“It’s what I like to call ‘retrospective induction.’ Working backward from your experience all the way down in nature. So [the question is] can you find dimensions of your experience spread out through the natural world all the way down to the lowest level of things, whatever they are? […] And the answer is, yes,…
“The basic outline of Hartshorne’s aesthetic theory is the first task…The basic insight is that beauty is a mean among four intersecting poles of relation. On the x axis is the relation of depth, sublimity at one extreme and superficiality at the other, while on the y axis the relations of total unity and utter…
If I were to quickly describe to someone what I thought good, healthy religion was I would say this: religion is one part art, one part play, and one part contemplation. So, religion is art in the sense that it taps into that same, beautiful, liminal space that good art taps into; I like the…
“The future is big with every possibility of Achievement and of Tragedy” —A.N. Whitehead I recently had a brief, small-talk type conversation with someone who asked me what it was like to be a parent. Not having adequate time to prepare and deliver a profound and wise thought (as I wish I could always do!)…
Episode 2 of Increased Capacity is here! Dan and I are back talking about all things that have to do with beauty, truth and goodness. In this episode we talk about cilantro, quantum theory, and web comics (among other things…). Enjoy! This week’s picks: Jesse’s Beauty pick Jesse’s Truth pick Jesse’s Goodness pick Dan’s…
So I’m doing a new podcsast and the first episode is now out! The show is a talk-show format and, full disclosure: I’ve never done a talk show before. I wasn’t as prepared as I should have been, plus I was nervous because we were broadcasting live, so It’s a little shaky in places,…
“The most constructive response to the crisis in moral theory has been the revival of virtue ethics, an ethics that has the advantages of being personal, contextual, and, as I will argue, normative as well. In this paper I will also propose that the best way to refound virtue ethics is to return to the …
Recently I was attempting to discern the differences between a generic panentheism and a Whiteheadian, process-relational panentheism (as I understand it). I kept coming across little diagrams online and I quickly realized that the panentheism diagram I kept seeing did not come close to the process-relational type I was familiar with. So, I created my…
“When I ask my students, ‘What is the opposite of beauty?’ they very quickly respond, ‘ugly.’ That’s what society tells us. But what if I say it’s glamour? We start seeing that glamour is the most dangerous thing because it disguises itself as beautiful, attracts us to it, ensnares us in false hopes and superficiality,…
When Bertrand Russell was eleven he craved certainty. Because he had heard that geometry proved things beyond doubt, he asked his brother to teach him Euclid. His brother began with the usual self-evident axioms but young Bertrand quite properly refused to accept them. He demanded to know their proofs. His brother firmly told him that…