“Consciousness flickers; and even at its brightest, there is a small focal region of clear illumination, and a large penumbral region which tells of intense experience in dim apprehension.” –Whitehead, Process and Reality “An exemplar can exemplify only some of its properties. It brings those properties to the fore by marginalizing, downplaying, or ignoring other…
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catherine elgin
Hours Spent Lost in Their Minds: Brief Thoughts on Daydreaming, Thought Experiments, and Aloofness
“The funny thing is that stories of such brilliant insights spurring out of deep thought aren’t unique. Throughout history, luminaries ranging from Charles Darwin to Friedrich Nietzsche have attributed much of their genius to the many hours they spent lost in their mind. Darwin had a “thinking path” that he would walk down to ruminate,…
Thought Experiments and Taking a Strong Stand: Two Ingredients
Here are two things I’ve been thinking about that would be really good ingredients for a tasty theological dish. Ingredient #1: This interview with Yale Philosopher Keith DeRose. In it he basically says two things that caught my interest: 1) Neither atheists nor believers know (at all) whether God exists. I agree. 2) there’s still…
Is it possible to find out about the world by making things up? Catherine Elgin, Exemplification and Understanding
“One attractive answer is that works of fiction are thought experiments. Like literary fictions, thought experiments neither are nor purport to be physically realized. Nevertheless, they evidently enhance understanding of the phenomena they pertain to. If fictions are thought experiments, they advance understanding of the world in the same way that (other) thought experiments do.”…