Enjoying the view from Limbo
A serious student whose enthusiasm for classic literature decidedly tends toward Jane Austen and Plato — toward a reality in which life’s dark shadows eventually give way to the bright sunlight of understanding, or at least to the enlightening glow of irony — wrote to me to express her frustration at being unable to find the greatness in Dostoevsky, in spite of having...
In honor of the passing of Daniel Dennett, I offer the following foray into my misspent youth, in which I assess Dennett’s materialist critique of consciousness in some detail. Read at your own risk. Daniel C. Dennett’s Sweet Dreams, though concluding with some positive suggestions regarding avenues of future consciousness research, exists primarily as a clearing house for his most developed efforts to...
Daniel C. Dennett, one of the most famous and accomplished philosophy professors of the past fifty years, has died. I choose my words carefully, though I confess somewhat (certainly without intention) disrespectfully. Dennett was not a philosopher; he was a philosophy professor, a very different entity. And in saying that he died, I know that I am insulting his thought and that of...
The French New Wave filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard once said of a famous American director (I quote from ancient memory), “He points the camera somewhere, I suppose, but he doesn’t see anything.” Today, four billion would-be cinéma vérité auteurs are pointing their own cameras “somewhere,” as we may suppose, but the assumption that all this pointing and shooting constitutes seeing, or revealing, anything —...
When the alternative to being what they hate is being what you hate, you must ask yourself which of those alternatives you would prefer to avoid. All and Some.– If you want any of your life, you must accept all of it. Coming to terms with that fact and its deepest implications is perhaps the greatest challenge of the serious life, and its...
The modern materialist insists he is right because his explanations obviously work. In this case, “to work” entails (and more than just incidentally) sucking all the sense of meaning out of human life as such. But to say that something works is to assume a specific goal in accordance with which “working” may be judged. Materialism works, therefore, if one’s goals are unrelated...
Without the body, nothing else is possible. That is to say, the body is the necessary condition of all earthly existence. Does it follow from this that the body is the essence of life, to which we must look for all our understanding of ourselves and our choices? If you answer yes, then you are a materialist. Without the feelings, which are rooted...
Many people walk regularly, but we do not all walk for the same reasons. If you walk primarily for your bodily health, or to “get your blood flowing,” then your walking is not similiar to mine. I walk every day, as much as possible, and often for hours. And I do so, in the final analysis and in ultimate effect, for one reason...
As much as our modern temperament is inclined to demand simple reductions of everything — simple reductions being the wisdom of the common man, suitable for an egalitarian age that has elevated commonness to an ideal — there is in truth no single question that defines or epitomizes philosophical investigation. Rather, the essential questions of the philosophic pursuit may be represented as manifestations...
Elon Musk, a multi-billionaire who has devoted his whole adult life to getting as rich as possible, often by selling out all free market principles to gain government protections and special government contracts, and an overgrown baby who flirts with libertarianism in the post-Ayn-Rand-follower sense, i.e., freedom redefined as license to indulge in recreational drugs and have all the mindless fun you want...
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