Philosophy Phridays is a series where each Friday, I go to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, click on “random entry,” and then write about whatever comes up. This week’s random entry is Pantheism. The word Pantheism is credited to John Toland, an Irish thinker, from 1705. But the basic ideas of pantheism have been around…
Philosophy Phridays is a series where each Friday, I go to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, click on “random entry,” and then write about whatever comes up. This week’s random entry is Kant’s Transcendental Idealism. Immanuel Kant is a weird figure for me. He is huge in the field of philosophy. It’s hard to overstate…
Philosophy Phridays is a series where each Friday, I go to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, click on “random entry,” and then write about whatever comes up. This week’s random entry is Feminist Metaphysics. Metaphysics, broadly speaking, is the study of what exists, what those existent things are like, and how they came to exist….
Philosophy Phridays is a series where each Friday, I go to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, click on “random entry,” and then write about whatever comes up. This week’s random entry is the Repugnant Conclusion. Today’s topic is from the realm of population ethics. Population ethics poses questions such as, “Should we procreate?” “Is there…
Philosophy Phridays is a series where each Friday, I go to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, click on “random entry,” and then write about whatever comes up. This week’s random entry is about abilities. Abilities are probably not the sort of thing that most people think of as a topic for philosophy. Most of us…
Philosophy Phridays is a series where each Friday, I go to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, click on “random entry,” and then write about whatever comes up. This week’s random entry is about Nicolaus Taurellus. Nicolaus Taurellus was a sixteenth century German philosopher in the Lutheran tradition. He is also proof that I’m doing random…
Philosophy Phridays is a series where each Friday, I go to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, click on “random entry,” and then write about whatever comes up. This week’s random entry is about Lady Anne Conway. Lady Anne Conway was a seventeenth century, English philosopher. Philosophy, in general, is very male (and very white). It…
This morning, I used a snow blower to clear my driveway instead of a shovel. Afterwards, I commented that using a snow blower isn’t nearly as satisfying as using a shovel. It’s a true statement, but, for some reason, struck me as a little odd after I’d said it. A snow blower and a shovel…
Before I start, I want to acknowledge Anne Peterson’s piece How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation and Tiana Clark’s piece This is What Black Burnout Feels Like. This essay isn’t exactly a response to those writers, but reading their works helped me to finally focus this essay, which I’ve tried to write many times with…
Sometime around twenty years ago when I was in my early twenties, I read a book called “Truth: A History and a Guide for the Perplexed” by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto. I can’t seem to put my hands on it now, but I remember the preface opened with a bit about Santa Claus. The author was wondering…
