Thinking about Thinking
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Getting it Right; Getting it Wrong
One of the big questions for me over the last six years has been how could so many smart, talented people get things so wrong. And one of my basic answers has been that reason is not reasonable; reason serves irrational purposes. People, sometimes for the better or more often for the worse, are driven
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The Certainty Fetish
Our relationship to the truth becomes perverse whenever we think we possess it. I have written before that we only truly know what we truly love, and the quality of our knowing and loving is a function of the qualities of the soul who knows and loves. To be concerned about whether something is true
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Subjects and Objects
It has often been pointed out that Westerners differ from other cultures in their sense of separation from the world around them–we are subjects over here and there are objects over there–but I don't think this is primarily a Western/non-Western difference, but a Modern/premodern difference. It's Western to the degree that Modernity is something given
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Mental Templates
The argument between the left and right is not about the dots; it's about how we connect them. A big part of the problem, of course, is that in matters of public policy the dots themselves are pretty slippery, and you can argue endlessly about whether a dot is really a dot. So it's easy
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Believing I
We take for granted the solidity of world around us, and yet we also understand, even if only abstractly, that the way we experience it is profoundly shaped by our acculturation. The world we see is a social construction, and while this doesn’t mean that the world is arbitrary, it does mean that it is