Author: gozzter
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What if the homunculus forgets?
Do you ever wonder who runs what? Who is actually in charge of things? If the workers in a large factory decided to lay down their tools and all production stopped, would the boss, or the foreman still be in charge -and in charge of what: a non-functioning business? Hierarchy only works until it doesn’t……
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If your heart is a volcano, how shall you expect flowers to bloom?
It seems like years ago now when I first read the thought experiment about the drowning child posed by the philosopher Peter Singer. I don’t remember the exact wording but the gist of it was: on seeing a child unable to escape from a shallow pond, you decide not to wade in to rescue it…
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I wear my rue with a difference
I have so many questions about things nowadays; maybe I always have, but perhaps the questions were held down, drowned beneath the sea that encircled my working life. In the days when I worked in a big city hospital, my life was hectic, so maybe my mind was hectic then as well. Retrospect is difficult…
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If to do were as easy as to know what were good to do, chapels had been churches, and poor men’s cottages, princes’ palaces.
The older I get, the more I realize that knowing that is not the same as knowing how. When I attempt to describe knowledge in those terms the deficit is embarrassing. Surely one of the most important components of knowledge is not to be stored like a book on a shelf in another room. Years…
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You taught me language, and my profit on it is I know how to curse
I’ve been thinking about the theory of knowledge lately –epistemology. Well, perhaps more about epistemic harm, actually. Sometimes I wonder if it is more one of overthinking than anything else; even if it is a widely held belief, in retrospect the longer you consider it the less valid it might begin to seem; more exceptions…
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Madness in great ones must not unwatched go.
When I was young and growing up in a 1950ies Winnipeg school, it didn’t occur to me to categorize the unusual people I encountered there. There were those who seemed to behave themselves in class, and those who didn’t. I suppose there were variations among the disruptors: some -those who usually sat at the back…
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Why do we insist on asking Why…?
Now that I am retired and have been consigned to the less productive part of society, it has occurred to me to ask why we find it so important to question things -even things we think we already understand; even things which might be better left alone; even the value of the questions themselves… I suppose…
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What, can the Devil speak true?
There are times when riding in a bus can be like overhearing the goings-on in a Confessional Booth; I am not a Catholic, I hasten to add, but I’ve seen enough movies about Confessionals to feel I should have been. It’s not the priest’s advice for redemption that intrigues me as much as the similarity…
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Can a flower be a weed in disguise?
Over the years, I have learned to depend on many things I have never seen; I have to do that, I suppose, because not everything needs to be noticed, wants to be publicly accountable. Unlike, say, red Lamborghinis or Brioni suits, some things are offended by the light and manage quite nicely behind the scenes.…
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‘Oh, how this spring of love resembleth the uncertain glory of an April day which now shows all beauty of the Sun, and by and by a cloud takes all away’
Can we really speak from places where we are not; from times we have visited and then been forced to leave; pretend we still understand how it felt to be young? What truth can memories tell us of our lives…? Do we only remember the sharp edges of things: the significant comings and goings of…