Philosophy

“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.”

“The ultimate pattern of events is determined, while the specific events that form that pattern are entirely undetermined.”

“Writing at the same time as Kierkegaard, 10 years before Nietzsche, and 50 years before Heidegger and Sartre, Bakunin got it right.”

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?

The world in which we seem to live might not be the only world there is…or all there is to this world. 

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

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.”

The hidden grammar censor in our Euro-brains whispers inaudibly, “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire. Why did the speaker place ‘tall’ and ‘basketball’ in the same sentence, unless they are somehow connected?” A major fallacy that comes with a huge price tag.

Who says there was no Facebook before Zuckerberg? It was just called ‘philosophy.’

If a tiny thread had the power to ruin a movie, what in my own life, deep in the background, bears such importance to my bigger picture? And if it’s so important, why isn’t it front and center?

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!

For Aristotle, there is a real distinction between what a thing is and what a thing is like.

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?