We have to accept that we live on a ‘Spaceship Earth’ responsible and accountable for its conditions. Earth is no longer the impenetrable background/horizon of our productive activities. It emerges as another finite object that we can inadvertently destroy or transform to make it livable. This means that the very moment we become powerful…
It is my turn. Having read and discussed a number of paragraphs submitted by readers of Philosophy Now Magazine my appreciation grows for the effort put forth by these readers to formulate their ideas on a philosophically interesting question. The variety of approaches is stimulating, a reminder of the suppleness of our minds. No…
Seated in Starbucks this morning, marveling at the blue sky outside my window. Sunlight streams into the room whenever someone opens the front door entering or departing. I have more leaves to rake from the grass, and I am thankful to have yet another opportunity before the frost comes. The frost will come hard…
Just finished my lunch, which was a large Macintosh apple sliced and a generous dollop of peanut butter on a paper plate. I have reason to believe this is a well loved menu option for older guys. My friend Mike, at Starbucks this morning conveyed to me his satisfaction with making peanut butter the…
Couldn’t settle on an idea earlier in the day. I decided to just read. Sometime another’s words give birth to my own. To be human is not a given. It’s an achievement, a task of a life time, worthwhile but imperfectly accomplished. Old Heraclitus once observed that the majority never awaken to their opportunity/responsibility…
We are on the cusp of the holidays. Thanksgiving comes first, then Christmas, and as an after thought, New Years. Thanksgiving is a harvest festival with a focus upon bonds between family and friends. Christmas is complicated. There’s the commercial dimension, which already has emerged a week before Thanksgiving, and there is the religious…
I do not know much about gods; but I think that the riverIs a strong brown god—sullen, untamed and intractable,Patient to some degree, at first recognized as a frontier;Useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce;Then only a problem confronting the builder of bridges.The problem once solved, the brown god is almost forgottenBy the dwellers…
Starbucks is a hubbub of background voices, like the breaking of waves on a sandy lake shore. Interlaced with indistinct conversations is the voice of a smooth jazz singer in the background. All this serves as sonic context for some reading and writing. Do we not read and write for ourselves with others? What…
Theodor Adorno was no fan of pop culture. He thought it was a guilty pleasure. Hardly. Pleasure contaminated by guilt, a cold glass of milk on a hot summer day, with a gnat floating on the surface…. That’s the picture I get. Regret, a price is to be paid as life unfolds. Guilt is…
What is the robbing of a bank compared to the founding of a new bank? — Bertholdt Brecht What is the brutality of Trump’s racist and sexist outbursts compared to the brutality and violence of today’s global capitalism? — Slavoj Zizek
