Philosophy

“Who is Peter Thiel? Conservative, libertarian, or 21st century Marxist?”

“Western philosophy is the history of our effort to understand the silence of Parmenides, or to break it.”

“Chaos is not an absence of causality, as is generally supposed, but an excess.”

“Achilles is still sulking, humiliated by a…tortoise; but at least we have a universe and…we can be assured that its ultimate trajectory is toward Good.”

“The secret life of things is nothing less than the life of God.”

“Divinity is a language unto itself, or as a five-year-old grandchild once explained to me, ‘God is outside the numbers’.”

“Waiter, bring me one order of everything on the menu and when I’ve finished, I’ll pay for whichever dish I liked the best.”

“Hamlet was right: you either are…or you are not. There is no disembodied ‘being’ walking abroad, seeking an ‘identity’. King Hamlet’s ghost is not real!”

“Your Destiny is the Fate of others; the Destiny of others is your Fate.”

“The moral value of an event lies in the act itself, not in its conformity to a set of norms and not in its consequentiality…every event is its own end!”

“The most important thing we’ve learned is that we know so much less than we thought we knew.”

“1,500 years ago, we didn’t have these problems. We knew all that we needed to know about life.”

“In the absence of God, or any transcendent reality, the meaning of life can only be death, oblivion, and the total absence of meaning – aka the Absurd.”

“Yellow Submarine did for the Divine Comedy what West Side Story did for Romeo & Juliet…but I very much doubt the Beatles had any idea what they’d done!”

“Things are the way they are simply because they are the way they are.”

“Some folks are ‘happy’ living their lives on a beach; others need a boardroom; some need a bar.”

“Our so-called World is a reflection without an object; it is the sound made by one hand clapping.”

“I am what the Universe sees when it looks in the mirror.”

“Take Vegas! The casino’s ‘edge’ is as little as 1% on some bets. At those odds, I should be able to play forever…but probability is not actuality.”

“Anyone can go for a walk in the woods but only Frost can walk this way.”

Ask any English teacher. The Road Not Taken is a perennial favorite, especially among young readers, who often understand it as an anthem of adventure and non-conformity - Jack Kerouac in verse. But is this really what the poem is about?

“I am my own great-grandmother (‘Eve’). Eerie…not to mention incestuous.”

“Does the idea of a Supreme Being make you uncomfortable? No problem; just will it away!”

“Following the science, LP assumes that the same act, performed under the same conditions, will always produce the same result…it’s true, precisely 0% of the time!”

“How new wealth is to be distributed is just as important as how old wealth has been distributed.”

“…When your identity is indefinitely plastic, when events are no longer ‘orientable’, when relations are neither transitive nor commutative, that’s Love…actually.”

“Because every event is sui generis, no event causes any other event! That said, every event contributes to the Actual World of every subsequent event.”

“What You See Is What You Get! Right…or wrong?”

“Turns out, I am the Worldwide Wrinkle…and so are you!”

“Popular music is a treasure trove for the philosophically curious.”

“There is only one I am, shared by YHWH and Jesus…and me…and you…and Rene Descartes (…ergo sum).”

“Either death is ultimately subjected to something greater and more general than itself (Being) or death ultimately subjects everything to itself and then nothing else has any meaning or value.”

“Mythology is common to all ages. There is no theology, philosophy, or science without it.”

“Don’t our morals reflect our values? Surely the concepts are at least related. Yes, they are related…they are antonyms. A value is the opposite of a moral.” 

“My so-called inner world, the ‘I’, contains nothing; it is simple. It admits no change…there is no inner world.”

“Eat or be eaten, kill or be killed. It’s a terrible way to live! But we’re living it…(but) it wasn’t always this way, and it doesn’t…have to be this way.”

“It is the uniqueness of events that 'creates' spacetime; it is not spacetime that makes events unique.”

“The first known application of Occam’s Razor occurred 50,000 years ago, not in 14th century England as is generally supposed.”

I’ll take the wisdom of Yogi Berra over that of Bill Clinton any day: Whatever is, is!

Every day is Halloween…Every day I get to make the decision anew: who am I going to be today?

Some people's search takes them to Fatima or Lhasa or into Outer Space. Mine took me to the dentist.

If Zeno can defeat his teacher, the whole class wins! Zeno today, me tomorrow!

You may be thinking, “WHAAAT? That’s impossible! Who could live without numbers? If they don’t have them, then they must invent them, right?” But you would be wrong.

Ecbatan may share the seven-ringed pattern of the solar system, but Paradise shares the seven-ringed pattern of Ecbatan!

“John’s Utopia is a 20th century version of Friedrich Nietzsche’s flat universe.”

“Parmenides anticipated Trinitarian theology and 19th century German dialectics (Hegel, Marx). May we refer to his cosmology as Monothreeism™?”

Editor’s note: It’s that time of year when many readers attend ‘summer theater.’ If Shakespeare is on the bill, you may find this essay relevant. Don’t leave home for the theater without reading this first!

One of life’s great ironies is that people who live near water are not always very good swimmers, if they are swimmers at all. And this is how it was on this island.

The purpose of this essay is not to resolve, or even rehash, the Problem of Evil, but rather to situate the Problem of Evil in the context of an even broader problem that I call, ‘the Problem of Good’.

Do our lives have meaning? You bet they do! But what is that meaning, and from where does it come?