| | Life and Philosophy: A Nexus by Emanuel L. Paparella Lately we have had in the pages of this very magazine a rather lengthy diatribe on the issue of abortion. Unfortunately, it ended up producing much heat but little light. Let’s now try presenting the issue under the cooler light of reason an | |
| | The Wisdom of G.K. Chesterton by Emanuel L. Paparella I just finished rereading G.K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy. It is uncanny how a book that was written some eighty years ago is as much relevant today as it was then, if not more. In it Chesterton, among other things argues about material | |
| | The Vichian Poetics of William Blake and Karl Marx by Emanuel L. Paparella
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| | Constitution or Treaty? by Emanuel L. Paparella
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| | C.S. Lewis' Abolition of Man and the Natural Law by Emanuel L. Paparella
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| | Marcus Aurelius' Meditations on Natural Law and Divine Providence by Emanuel L. Paparella In The Republic Plato postulates that the best way to achieve a near perfect polity is to have a philosopher-king as its head. That is of course an ideal that has rarely been achieved in world history and many have branded Plato as too id | |
| | The Five Ways to God's Existence of Thomas Aquinas by Emanuel L. Paparella Thomas Aquinas has become the official favored philosopher/theologian of the Catholic Church. That was not always so. In fact while he was still alive he was suspected of heresy by the archbishop of Paris. His sin was that of basing his philosophy | |
| | Aristotle, Avicenna, Aquinas on God's Existence by Emanuel L. Paparella As already elaborated in previous articles, there is little doubt in the mind of any educated and fair person that the medieval monks deserve much credit for their enormous contribution to the preservation of Western | |
| | The Politics of Philosophy within Neo-Conservatism in the US by Emanuel L. Paparella To even begin to understand the mind-set of neo-conservatism in America, one needs to examine the origins of the classical, rationalistic, esoteric philosophy of the school of Le | |
| | Our Global Societies' Philosopher's Stone by Leah Sellers The Philosopher’s Stone. The mystical, magical, seemingly unattainable Philosopher’s Stone. Throughout the ages alchemists secretly mixed up and cooked up innumerable chemicals attempting to create the Philosopher’s Stone. Some a | |
| | 100 Acorns - 100 Days of Conceptual Instructions by Yoko Ono by Alexandra Pereira Grapefruit, the book of conceptual instructions by Yoko Ono, was first published in 1964, 44 years ago. Grapefruit was an incredibly humoristic, provocative, refreshing | |
| | Life Undercover #77 by Thanos K & Asa B It is time to change the sheets... our inquisitive duvet-loving hero has some female company now asking the great questions of life, religion and the universe. | |
| | Philo of Alexandria on the Soul and Universal Truth by Emanuel L. Paparella Philo of Alexandria, also known as Philo Judaeus or Philo Alexandrinus, is perhaps the most intriguing of the classical philosophers, for he is something of a maverick comparable in modern times to Emmanuel Levinas. Li | |
| | Richard Rorty's Unflinching Critique of Modern Western Philosophy by Emanuel L. Paparella While writing a Ph.D. dissertation at Yale University on immanence and transcendence in Giambattista Vico’s concept of Providence I serendipitously discovered the late Richard Rorty’s Philosophy and t | |
| | Life Undercover #76 by Thanos K & Asa B It is time to change the sheets... our inquisitive duvet-loving hero has some female company now asking the great questions of life, religion and the universe. | |
| | Alfred North Whitehead's Critique of Modern Materialism by Emanuel L. Paparella Alfred North Whitehead is widely considered one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century. He quipped once that “the whole of Western philosophy is a footnote to Plato,” which may soun | |
| | Claude Levi-Strauss and the Timelessness of Myth by Emanuel L. Paparella Claude Levi-Strauss, a Belgian born anthropologist (1908-) like Carl Gustav Jung does not consider himself a professional philosopher but he too, via anthropology, arrived at the fundamental insight that myths across | |
| | Lev Semenovich Vygotsky: Thought, Language, and Children at Play by Emanuel L. Paparella In 1958 an Italian translation of a novel written in the Soviet Union and suppressed there appeared in the West winning its author instant fame and recognition and the Nobel Prize for literature besides. The novel | |
| | Life Undercover #734 by Thanos K & Asa B It is time to change the sheets... our inquisitive duvet-loving hero has some female company now asking the great questions of life, religion and the universe. | |
| | Soren Kierkegaard as Father of Existentialism by Emanuel L. Paparella I’d be willing to wager that most educated persons if asked to name the father of existentialism would mention Jean-Paul Sartre. That my be true technically since it was he who coined and popularized the existe | |
| | Memoire Du Surreal by Christopher Wilkinson The ages of tranquillity fade, like watercolor matchsticks into the Aurora. A boar quietly stood near the station. That and this stood with him, in adept concentration. Life as a watercolor montage slammed into reality like stone on soup. | |
| | Carl Gustav Jung and "Modern Man in Search of a Soul" by Emanuel L. Paparella Freud’s materialistic psychoanalysis divided the self into the id, the ego and the super-ego. Jung (1875-1961), who was his disciple for a while, would depart from its materialism and without wholly abandoning | |
| | Noam Chomsky on the Politics of the Essence of the Human Mind by Emanuel L. Paparella Noam Chomsky is considered one of the pivotal linguists of our time. He follows a long heritage on the nature of language which begins with the ancient Greeks and continues with Giambattista Vico in the 18th century. | |
| | The Medieval Monks as Preservers of Western Civilization by Emanuel L. Paparella The term “Dark Ages” was once erroneously applied to the entire millennium separating late antiquity from the Italian Renaissance (500-1500 AD). Today scholars know better. There is a widespread acknowled | |
| | An Alternative to a Dehumanized Civilization by Emanuel L. Paparella In his 1924 book on The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science, Edwin Arthur Burtt wrote this perceptive passage: “An adequate cosmology will only begin to be written when an adequate philosophy of | |
| | Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn's Influence on the Philosophy of Science by Emanuel L. Paparella It is hard to think of two thinkers who have had a greater influence on contemporary philosophy of science. Their main insight is that it is impossible to investigate the nature of reality without operating with some | |
| | Saul Kripke's Philosophy of Language by Emanuel L. Paparella The natural follow-up to Tarski’s logic and philosophy of language is Saul Kripke. He is best known for a series of lectures he gave at Princeton University in 1970 under the name of Naming and Necessity | |
| | Alfred Tarski on Truth, Language, and Logic by Emanuel L. Paparella Many scholars consider Alfred Tarski (1902-1983) the greatest logician of the 20th century; his work is fundamental to modern philosophy of language and philosophical logic. From the start of his career he became fam | |
| | The Principle of Complementarity in Bohr's Quantum Mechanics and Vico's Historicism by Emanuel L. Paparella “The concrete without the universal becomes trivial. The universal without the concrete becomes irrelevant” - Alfred N. Whitehead Vico was | |
| | Vico's Poetic Philosophy: between Descartes and Nietzsche by Emanuel L. Paparella “I cannot understand how our minds, which have been formed by responses to the emergencies of a small corner of space and time, could possibly comprehend a revelation of the total universe, even if it were granted | |
| | Charles Sanders Peirce and the Presuppositions of Science by Emanuel L. Paparella One of the great influences on American philosophy was Charles Sanders Peirce’s pragmaticism. His interest in philosophy began as a hobby but has had wide international repercussion. Pierce’s intellectual | |
| | World Peace Model # 1: Oughtopian peace model by Akli Hadid "Oughtopia" is a term coined by Korean philosopher Choue Young Seek. It is a philosophy that leads to a society that ought to be realized, a society that is spiritually beautiful, materially affluent and humanly rewarding. | |
| | Vico's Conception of Mytho-Poetic Wisdom by Emanuel L. Paparella Abstract: Vico insists throughout his opus that in order for Man to understand himself and avoid the danger of scientific objectification, he needs to attempt a re-creation of the origins of human | |
| | John Searle on the Human Mind and the Nature of Intelligence by Emanuel L. Paparella Modern rationalists whose paradigm of reality is Descartes’ philosophy and its idea that we are nothing but so much matter extended into space and complicated biological machines are fond of pointing out that o | |
| | Back to the Future: Musings on Time and Utopia 1/3 by Emanuel L. Paparella Abstract: While Jacques Derrida teaches that deconstruction is immanent within time, Henry David Thoreau believed that the genius that is the chil | |
| | The Wrong World by Jan Sand There is an old story of a scientist who invented a machine to transfer consciousness. When his apparatus was complete he had no convenient subject but spotted a centipede on the floor and scooped it up and dropped it into the receiver section. He | |
| | A Different Tibetan Book of the Dead by Christopher Wilkinson The following is a translation of a set of Tibetan texts, intended to be used in hospice work. They lay out the process of dying with full awareness: what the dying person can do, and what those attendi | |
| | Why? by Alexandra Pereira Why do these things happen, why is life so unfair, why do people we love and ourselves do shit, why we can't cover it, why it hurts, why, why, why? Why we can't help that our loved ones suffer, why we hurt them ourselv | |
| | Statement of Faith by Matt Williamson Why is it hard for many people to accept miracles in a religion other than theirs? Very normal, logical and sane people accept that Jesus walked on water, changed water to wine, healed the sick, brought Lazarus back | |
| | Hidden Agenda by Matt Williamson We all have a hidden agenda. Whether we want to admit it or not we are trying to make our life in our own image. Sometimes we are honest and we tell people that we seek a certain outcome within a given situation; som | |
| | "space" by Bohdan Yuri a space can go nowhere and find a place anywhere, it can travel inside a box, or stay outside the sky. yet, fill it with: things, people, dreams, t | |
| | Democracy as the Common Sense of the People: Confronting the Ancient to the Modern View 2/2 by Emanuel L. Paparella At this point one may ask: is Plato’s critique still valid today, and if so, what are the practical consequences of ignoring it? Let us try to apply this critique to an overarching prob | |
| | Democracy as the Common Sense of the People: Confronting the Ancient to the Modern View 1/2 by Emanuel L. Paparella In a relativistic age which beliefs in functional truths but not in Truth, when consequently many sing the praises of democracy but precious few can pin down its essence, a revisiting of Plat | |
| | Meditation and Mindfulness by Matt Williamson I am not a good practitioner of meditation. My mind races, wild and erratic thoughts pop in and out of my head in rapid and seemingly random procession. Did I feed the cat, why did I say that to her, how long until I calm down, when am I supposed | |
| | The equation of life by Akli Hadid There is no universal definition for life. Yet life can equate as follows: life= the universe – death. Further explanation will be given to this equation.Defining life should be kept simple. There are conventional forms | |
| | Vaclav Havel: Authentic Humanist and Cultural Hero for our Times 1/3 by Emanuel L. Paparella Václav Havel’s humanistic philosophy is a powerfully heroic voice of the post-cold War political landscape, advocating that Europe recover its own soul; urging a global revolution | |
| | The Perfumed Bed by Linda Lane Every night one of my married friends visits and sleeps on my living room sofa. Sure they are travelers for one reason or another but what gets me is that when I was rich before the dotcom crash I bought a special so | |
| | The Rational and the Mytho-poetic in Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago: 1/2 by Emanuel L. Paparella Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago is a sterling example of characte | |
| | Jane of Thought: A teeny-tiny feeling by Jane Eagle Every now and then I’m seized with an overwhelming urge to write, so I sit before my laptop screen, take a sip of my hot tea, my refreshing juice, my anything, set my fingers in motion and that’s when it hits me: I can’t think of | |
| | Life and luck by Jan Sand War is not an aberration of existence. Peace is an illusion. Every living complex from the individual cell to entire civilizations must, to exist, continually adjust itself to maintain its sustainable dynamic against the multiple assaults of a flu | |
| | Killing by Jan Sand One of the fundamental capabilities of a living organism is the power to kill. Each living thing is a neat package of tasty edibles. Life either takes its energy directly from solar radiation and its substance from the soil and the air or appropri | |
| | Staring into the magician's eyes by Asa Butcher "I finally finished Sophie's Choice, err I mean, Sophie's World!" I exclaimed to Thanos, after four weeks of steady progress through its 480-pages. Thanos smiled and asked, "So, did it ma | |
| | The burnt pig and the cat's behind by Jan Sand Charles Lamb, in his Dissertation on Roast Pig, tells of the discovery of cooking when somebody's house burns down with his pig inside. After the flames have subsided, the bereaved owner discovers the po | |
| | Jane of Thought: Back and forward by Jane Eagle I’ m asking myself how unbelievable are all these anachronisms that our eye catches all around. I mean, you turn on TV and bam… there’s a love story in action that should have taken tele-place decades before. Who gets touched by | |
| | Unconditional love by F. A. Hutchison Sex! Three letters, 'S-E-X!' These three letters get more than their share of attention! We think we understand the meaning of these three letters, the word 'sex,' but what about its companion, the word, 'sexuality?' What a | |
| | On 'Promises!' by F. A. Hutchison 'The woods are lovely, dark, and deep, but I have PROMISES to keep, and miles to go before I sleep!' Henry David ThoreauAnd what are the 'promises' Thoreau is talking about? The 'promises' to himself to | |
| | $1 million lesson! by F. A. Hutchison A recent title to an editorial in 'China Daily,' probably the most widely read English-speaking publication in China: 'As we get wealthier, do we get happier?' I read the editorial (in the February 11-12th edi | |
| | The True Meaning by F. A. Hutchison Isn’t it interesting how questions go unanswered for years, if answered at all? But, it seems to me that questions are always more important than answers anyway! Take for example one question which was asked of me at the Hindu Vi | |
| | Postmodernism deconstructed by John Ray I rarely read philosophy these days. I went into the basic philosophical questions in my student days and shortly thereafter had published my conclusions about the nature of mind, the nature of ethics, the nature of cause and | |
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