Tag: philosophy
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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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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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God hath given you one face, and you make yourself another.
I’ve never been much on religion; my mother, an immigrant from Britain, was once an Anglican, and my Canadian father a Baptist. The compromise they settled on for my upbringing was the United Church of Canada for some reason. It was a religious choice that, unlike my father’s, allowed dancing, although it still seemed a…
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Experience is of no practical value; it is merely the name we give to our mistakes
We’re curious creatures, we humans; in our Western society at least, it is a common conceit to think we are so unique that we’ve each taken a different route to end up where we are; we’ve followed unexpected detours, braved gravel roads that wound through thick, unnamed forests; got lost innumerable times until we found…
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In action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god
Is Philosophy gendered? I don’t mean in terms of the number of men who, until very recently, considered themselves the only able arbiters of the discipline. And I’m not sure I could even comment on whether being married could make a difference in the field one way or another. And yet… I was an obstetrician…
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Doubt thou the stars are fire
What am I doing, thinking about love at my age? And don’t get all shmaltzy about that; don’t remind me that without love, there is no hope, no future, no point in going on… It’s not that I’ve never considered those arguments, but I’ve lived through them all, and am at peace with myself and…
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The Colour of Questions
Do you remember being a teenager, and asking questions about reality: those late night discussions in the dorm at university, or the endless questions that kept throwing sparks around the campfire as you sat with your friends through the night by the lake in summer? Things like ‘What is the colour red?’ And, ‘How do…
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Is anything an island entire of itself?
For some reason, I find it interesting that we feel compelled to wrap ourselves in our own unique identity. I assume I am my named island, and forget -or don’t realize- that I am actually ‘a piece of the continent, a part of the main’ as John Donne opined in his famous Meditation (XVII). I…
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