Philosophical Speculations

If you haven't read any Sartre, Ashvin, I suspect you would like "Existentialism Is a Humanism." Existentialism has been one of my more important streams of influence, and when you say: Also keep in mind a fundamental premise of my view is that we all are being 'asked' [by the Cosmos, what...

I agree and disagree with you. I agree that I think that if the consequences of totalizing world narratives have been, on the whole, terrible, then that should prompt a hard look at the tree the fruit is growing from. I’m open to the possibility that the hard look will reveal something about the Ba...

No problem! I actually ended up writing several different posts in response, sorry for that... I know that makes it much harder to respond. If Dana could take the time to consolidate them into one post, if it's not too much of a hassle... that would be really great! I can no longer edit them. Oh, i...

Unfortunately, I'm not going to have time to give detailed responses to your replies to me, Ashvin, until tonight sometime, but you indicated that you weren't quite done anyway, so I look forward to seeing where you go with it.

As someone with a deep-seated Continental bent in my thought, I think I'd say something like "All is form/less."

My position is that neither the One nor the Many is fundamental -- the One is really the Many and the Many are really the One. This is an area where I find fault with most ontologies: they try to subsume one of those categories into the other. Ultimately that’s what I mean by “monism”: the belief t...

Also, a touch off-topic, but do you ever imagine showing your current thoughts to your past self? I can't imagine what Rebecca of 2005 would've thought of the ideas of Rebecca of 2021, but I can only imagine that she would not have liked them (this thought was, itself, prompted by the discussion on ...

We should keep in mind that these things are put forth in so many forms and have such staying power because they reflect something we intuitively understand about the nature of the Cosmos. I suspect that they pop up over and over again because we resent that we will die, and we fear death, and we c...

Yeah not surprising at all. I never read the book Stone-Age Economics, but it said the same thing: that hunter-gatherer societies worked a helluva lot less than modern society does. I'm surprised no one in this thread (from what I've read) has mentioned Peter Kropotkin's Mutual Aid book. Kropotkin ...

I think I share your concern with that general idea, especially as it is expressed in fundamentalist theology of "escaping from the world" into the "afterlife". Right, that’s definitely one manifestation of it, but not the only one. McKenna’s Transcendental Object at the End of ...