Explorations and Excerpts of a Philosophical Nature
Time and the Ordering of Self-Motion
What is time? Many a philosopher has wrestled with this question, resulting in rather diverse results. Famous is Aristotle’s definition, which can be stated most simply as, “the measure of motion” (though, in truth, his claims are more complex than this). Famous also are the struggles to understand time in Book XI of Augustine’s Confessions and the posit of time as the unlimited and infinite a priori pure intuition grounding the possibility of all appearances by Immanuel Kant. Most people, however, simply take “time” for granted. Primarily, this taking-for-granted comes…
What is Philosophical Habit?
What are habits? And what does it mean to have a philosophical habit? As I discuss in the above, it is a way of inquisitively holding ourselves towards the world—and with an attitude of genuine humility before the object. Or to put this otherwise: how often do we find not only others but also ourselves presuming a certitude and a knowledge about the world in which we live? Often; and if we had better practices of reflection upon our own thinking and behavior, we would discover that we do it…
The Habit of Conversation
Distracted from distraction by distractionFilled with fancies and empty of meaningTumid apathy with no concentration-T.S. Eliot 1935: “Burnt Norton” (first of the Four Quartets), III. Few poets ever have and likely ever will attain the prescience of T.S. Eliot. I find myself repeating, with increasing frequency, the lines quoted above: not only so that I might recall myself to focus, but to name the phenomena seen in others. We find ourselves struggling to hold meaningful conversations, dismayed either by others inattentiveness or ensnared by our own distractions. But without conversation,…
On Architecture and Order
What is architecture? How can we define it? As a human art, it seems that we cannot conceive of what it is fully or properly without efficient and final causes: certainly it is by human beings, and somehow for human beings. But for human beings to do… what? What benefit does the architect render human beings in the production of his buildings? It seems that we need a good definition—a more precise definition—if we are to say whether the products of architecture are good or bad themselves. Integral to architecture…
Falling in Love with an Easy Life
An excerpt from the concluding pages of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, Part II, recollecting time spent in the Butyrki transit prison of central Moscow. In particular, he here notes a contrast with the prisoners of his own generation—most of whom fought in the Second World War with some pride in their service for the Motherland—and the younger prisoners. This younger generation, while their peers were busy “falling in love with an easy life”, saw through the falsehoods of socialism. Dawn of the Great Truth Knowledge and History We must remind ourselves,…
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The Peripatetic
The school of thought founded by Aristotle can be referred to in two ways: one, the Lyceum, signified the physical locale in which the Master and his students congregated. Two, the Peripatetics, was used to identify the adherents to Aristotle’s principles. This name was derived from their habit of having discussions while walking. Here, our thoughts meander in exploration, too.