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With any discipline or line of enquiry, patience is a virtue. We must have patience regarding the amount we will ever be able to know about a given topic. Whether your ‘-ology’ is of ‘bios’, ‘theos’, or ‘cosmos’, it’s essential to remember that there will always be more questions. For some, this is an enquiry-stopper. ”Heck, if we can’t know . . . → Read More: patience… Epistemology is the most foundational of topics in philosophy. How trustworthy is human knowledge? Or worded another way: How much ‘faith’ (Greek ‘pistis’ for ‘trust’) can we put in what we think we know? At one end of the spectrum, you have narrow, ‘verificationist’ epistemologies (such as: logical positivism & naive realism) that only trust knowledge that can be ‘verified’ by . . . → Read More: a trinity of ‘knowledge-lights’… A delicious quote: Knowledge involves the encounter of the probing and projecting subject with the object of its investigation, but it is true knowledge, not when the object is conformed to the imaginative activity of the subject, but when the imaginative activity of the subject is conformed to the reality of the object, when our thinking becomes, in some sense, . . . → Read More: true knowledge Humans don’t ‘know’ everything – and that is true for even the person with the most inclusive epistemic position. . . . → Read More: non-omniscience Whether we are looking through a microscope or a telescope, everything we see points beyond itself… …and that’s just for descriptive modes of analysis. To demonstrate not only the difference between scientific/descriptive knowledge and metaphysical/prescriptive knowledge, but also the greater degree of both accessibility and authority in the latter, consider the following: There are scientific experiments which everyone knows (accessibility: tick) without question (authority: tick) simply should not (prescriptive: tick) be performed1. EDIT: lest it need to be said, the previous post makes no . . . → Read More: moral truth Just watched The Changeling with my wife (‘endured’ would be the term she’d use!), and really enjoyed it. There are some real gut-wrenching moments in there, which I won’t elaborate on here. One thing I found interesting was the particular (and familiar) feeling of deep satisfaction and relief I (and my wife – and anyone with a pulse) when the . . . → Read More: true feeling Definition: Let us take ‘cosmos’ as a term denoting ‘the universe’, the ‘world’, or ‘everything that we see’, etc. Statement 1: The cosmos was created and is sustained by an ‘other’. Statement 2: The cosmos is all that there is (and ever has been and ever will be). Both statements assume the above conceptual definition of ‘cosmos’ (‘everything that we . . . → Read More: ‘other’ -you can’t say something is ‘evil’ if you’re not already assuming some concept of ‘goodness’ -you can’t say something is ‘poorly designed’ unless you’re assuming what ‘good design’ looks like -you can’t say something is ‘chaotic’ unless you know what ‘order’ is -and you don’t have goodness, design or order without some idea of teleology There are at least two kinds of ‘value’ – a) the kind science can measure, and b) the kind that science cannot. . . . → Read More: measuring value |
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