We take worlds for granted. Science reduces them; literature shrinks them and philosophy ignores them. And yet, without the world we would be nothing. The weltist returns to the world from the universe. They are more worm than eagle.
Horizontal epistemology is the norm in the age of big data. It’s not enough to perform one experiment but to have uniform standards for a family of experiments.
Why stick to linear arguments thick with text? Can we make sense of the world by skipping from word to song to figure? Why not connect the new when the old world is collapsing of its own contradictions?
Every era of quickening change has its existential worries, when solid ground becomes quicksand. Here I use ‘demons’ to probe the shifting ground of knowledge.
What poetry is to language, philosophy is to thought, a craft that brings new concepts and ways of thinking into the scholarly disciplines.
Photographer: Tadeusz Lakota | Source: Unsplash Philosophy has a vision bias. The Sanskrit name for philosophical activity, ‘Darsana’ means ‘vision.’ Intriguingly, across Indo-European cultures, knowledge at a distance is closely related to blindness. Homer was supposedly blind and the great war in the Mahabharata was relayed to a blind king by an assistant given divine vision […]
Photographer: David Clode | Source: Unsplash I am taking a step back from writing about contentious topics — authoritarian politics, climate change, approaching extinction and animal rights. Not for ever, but for a few weeks. It feels like every conversation about those topics increases the fear and anxiety of everyone in the room and tilts the scales in […]
Photographer: Andrew Seaman | Source: Unsplash MeMe and YouMe The Buddha, peace be unto him, is famous for declaring there’s no self. Strictly speaking, he denied the existence of an abiding, permanent self, especially the metaphysical Atman of Brahmanical Hinduism. We are born, we grow into adulthood and then we pass away. Some think we restart that […]