Tag: Aeon.com
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There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.
If I’m brutally honest with myself, I suspect I side with Goldilocks in her preference for the just-right-baby-bear stance: not too hard, not too soft. I have always been more comfortable in the middle of the Bell Curve with lots of wiggle room on either side; I’m not really cut out to be an extremist. […]
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They did make love to this employment
I never dreamed I would ever seriously consider the opinions of the 19th century philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. Indeed, spelling his name was a challenge, let alone dissecting his contention that desire is futile: even if you succeed in achieving a long hoped for goal, then what do you do? Once the objective is realized, you […]
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The Me of Science
This is going to sound trite, but have you ever wondered about your role in Science? Really. I mean that of your consciousness in apprehending and interpreting that which is measured: the ‘Me’-ness which separates each of us from whatever we’re doing -or, rather, which joins us to it: joins us to the other? I […]
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The expense of spirit in a waste of shame
Why do we always think of our era as special, or at least particularly enlightened? Are we really so advanced that all other times are primitive in comparison? Are we actually different from those on whose shoulders we stand? Did the peasants in the Middle Ages have dissimilar genes? Unrecognizable urges? Hormones that were unlike […]
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Let it not be so, lest child, child’s children, cry against you woe.
I was recently reminded of a seldom-heard song from years ago. Not only is the distance from the immense responsibility of parenting a melody of the past, but so too are the subtle layers of guilt: the silt that accumulates from the leaking floodgates of those early years. I’m not sure why I failed to […]
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Is Everybody a Petard?
Sociology is certainly interesting; it turns out that none of us are normal -well, perhaps more revealingly, there is no normal ‘us’. We are, at best, data points spread out on a rather amorphous Bell curve, vaguely generalizable depending on the homogeneity of the group chosen, but often unrepresentative of populations further afield. And yet, […]