The Human Condition
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Democracy and the Classical Tradition
I’ve been using terms like “original”, “Deep Real”, “Neoplatonism” in ways that I’m sure many readers here find obscure, if not objectionable. When I talk about Neoplatonism or about Aristotle, I’m really talking about the classical tradition, which is Neoplatonic through and through. I thought it might be helpful to excerpt from a post entitled
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Toward a Participative Ontology and Epistemology
Q: What’s the question this post is attempting to answer? A: Why has our late modern experience for more and more people become so flat, one-dimensional, and with each passing decade so much more meaningless? Q: Do you have a short answer? A: Yes. It’s because the way we use language—and other symbolic representations—has come
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And Now for Something Completely Different. Please.
After a bizarre couple of weeks of Trump thuggery, flip-floppery, and phantasmagoria coupled with anti-Trump protests, where are we? I have no idea. Am I alone in feeling that nothing real has happened? That it’s all theater—as much so on the Left as it is on the Right? No Kings? Okay. Sure. But does that
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Whoever Tells the Best Story Wins
In our hyperindividualized age, a lot of us are searching for a storyteller: someone or something to tell us what our lives mean. Compared with the sense of purpose and identity that past generations found in sturdy communities, now “it’s very difficult to tell the story of who you are and what you’re doing,” Dr.
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AGI, Hope, and the Human Future 1: What Is Human Flourishing?
[This is a transcription of the talk I gave at St. James Cathedral on 2/8/24. I’ll be posting the Lectures 2 and 3 in the next two weeks.] Before we dig into the topic tonight, I’d like to frame it by identifying two critical issues. Both have a lot to do with our current social
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The Argument I’m Making: Resisting the Techno-Capitalist Matrix
I just gave a series of three talks at St. James Cathedral in Seattle entitled AGI, Hope, and the Human Future. Here is a succinct summary of the argument that I made: One. Humans, especially with the prospect of developments in AI that may lead to AGI, are developing technologies that are likely to create
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Why Nobody Cares about the Humanities
As a humanist — someone who reads, teaches and researches primarily philosophy but also, on the side, novels and poems and plays and movies — I am prepared to come out and admit that I do not know what the value of the humanities is. I do not know whether the study of the humanities
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Taboo and Ontological Dizziness
Some years ago, I saw a very good student production of Edward Albee's The Goat or Who Is Silvia? It's the story of Martin Gray, a successful architect and gentle, loving husband and father, someone that typifies the kind of educated, cosmopolitan person who would go and see an Edward Albee play in Blue America.