Philosophy

“It is the very mark of a perverse desire that it seeks what is not to be had… As long as you are governed by that desire, you will never get what you want.”

"Advances in neurotechnology do raise important privacy concerns. However, I believe these debates can overlook more fundamental threats to privacy."

“Boka, is it true you used to drive 10 miles to see a doctor once a year and called that healthcare?”

“I…propose…that we make this the test, not Turing’s, of whether a bot is conscious."

“Value-based judgments assume a transcendent point of view and sooner or later, that way of thinking leads to God-talk and any such talk is strictly verboten.”

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

“Popular music after World War II is a treasure trove for the philosophically curious… Paraphrasing Ecclesiastes, there’s a time to wind and a time to unravel, and now is the time to unravel.”

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

“Of course, I have no name, no face, no identity; I belong nowhere.”

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

“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.”

“Failure to appreciate the comic elements in Job has resulted in an almost universal misreading of the text.”

“I need have no fear of time, that ‘great eraser’. I don’t live because of the past or for the future. I live by and for the present.”

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

“Don’t our morals reflect our values?... Yes, they are related…they are antonyms!”

“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.”

“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?