Modern

"Looking to science for deliverance from the tragicomedy of history is part of what it means to be modern."
-- John Gray (The New Republic, April 20, 2012)

Competing for the Same Space

The atheistic cosmology is only the extreme state of the religious belief that the creator of the universe is separate, a thing we supplicate at a distance. These two viewpoints prompt such contention because they are both on the same side of the equation, and competing for the same mental space.

Stories of Ourselves

Art loses its way when what is right and wrong cease to matter, when our views become no more than stories of ourselves.
N.N. Scott

Fallacies of Neuroscience

"This is pseudoscience of the first order, and owes what scant plausibility it possesses to the fact that it simply repeats the matter that it fails to explain. It perfectly illustrates the prevailing academic disorder, which is the loss of questions."
Roger Scruton, Spectator.co.uk., 17 March 2012

We are Always Resolving to Live

"'We are always resolving to live, and yet never set about life in good earnest.' Archimedes was not singular in his fate; but a great part of mankind die unexpectedly, while they are poring upon the figures they have described in the sand."
Robert Leighton (1611-1684), quot in S.T. Coleridge, Aids to Reflection (1825)

Divide in Order to Distinguish

"It is a dull and obtuse mind, that must divide in order to distinguish; but it is a still worse, that distinguishes in order to divide. In the former, we may contemplate the source of superstition and idolatry; in the latter, of schism, heresy, and a seditious and sectarian spirit."
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Aids to Reflection aphorism XXVI

Panpsychism

"Over the course of universal evolution, how and when did mind come to be? It seems clear that either mind in the most general sense has always been present in the universe or else it came into being (suddenly or gradually). The first view is panpsychism; the second is emergentism. Nearly all present-day philosophers of mind are emergentists, who assume that mind emerged at some point in evolution. Usually, however, they do not address the question of how such emergence is conceivable, and they do not acknowledge that one need not assume this.... They seem to know that a clear and comprehensible theory of emergence is extremely problematic, but they cannot bring themselves to adopt the only viable alternative."
-- David Skrbina