What moves us? Why do we keep going, always striving to better ourselves, our circumstances and the conditions of others? It isn’t completely rational. We all die in the end anyway so why does it seem so important for us to be here and give more and more? Why do we take life so seriously [...]
All posts tagged Charles Sanders Peirce
The Evolution of Dissatisfaction
Posted by Jeff Carreira on December 22, 2011
http://evolutionaryphilosophy.com/2011/12/22/the-evolution-of-dissatisfaction/
Everything Exists in Relationship
Things do not exist unless they exist in relationship with something else. In fact, things do not exist at all. Relationships exist. There are no individual things. The existence of anything is always contingent upon something else. When I was an undergraduate student I studied physics, but my favorite course in four years was one [...]
Posted by Jeff Carreira on December 15, 2011
http://evolutionaryphilosophy.com/2011/12/15/nothing-exists-except-in-relationship/
Evolutionary Love
“The movement of love is circular, at one and the same impulse projecting creations into independency and drawing them into harmony.” Charles Sanders Peirce In 1893 a publication called The Monist printed an article by Charles Sanders Peirce called Evolutionary Love. It was the last in a series of five articles that outlined Peirce’s evolutionary [...]
Posted by Jeff Carreira on December 8, 2011
http://evolutionaryphilosophy.com/2011/12/08/evolutionary-love/
We don’t create time – we freeze it in its tracks.
We have learned to see time as if it appears in chunks – minutes, hours, days, and years. But if time comes in chunks how do we experience past memories in the present? How does the previous moment’s chunk of time connect to the chunk of the present moment? Wait a minute. It will take [...]
Posted by Jeff Carreira on December 1, 2011
http://evolutionaryphilosophy.com/2011/12/01/we-dont-create-time-we-freeze-it-in-its-tracks/
Experience and Understanding
There are two kinds of knowing – experience and understanding – and the confusion between them is the cause of all sorts of trouble for any thinking person. Experience is the knowing of things. It appears to our senses simply as what is there without us doing anything. It is immediately and directly present to awareness with [...]
Posted by Jeff Carreira on November 17, 2011
http://evolutionaryphilosophy.com/2011/11/17/experience-and-understanding/
American Common Sense – or – How to Change the Truth
The American mind has been constructed on a few obvious attitudes and assumptions about life. One is a pronounced idealistic streak. The Europeans that settled in this land believed that they were creating a new world and – for better or worse – they became infused with an almost unshakeable belief in the assumption that progress [...]
Posted by Jeff Carreira on October 27, 2011
http://evolutionaryphilosophy.com/2011/10/27/american-common-sense-or-how-to-change-the-truth/
To be or not to be: What is Ontology?
What does it mean ‘to be’? When I say “I am…” or “It is…” what am I saying? What does it mean to exist – or to not exist, to be or not to be? That is the question of ontology? Ontology is the discipline of philosophy that deals with the fundamental essences of existence. [...]
Posted by Jeff Carreira on September 2, 2011
http://evolutionaryphilosophy.com/2011/09/02/to-be-or-not-to-be-what-is-ontology/
Alfred North Whitehead: And the Three Components of Knowledge
This week I wanted to share a quote from the English philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. Whitehead is the originator of what is commonly known as Process Theology. And many of his ideas follow closely in a line that was drawn earlier by William James and Charles Sanders Peirce. Whitehead in a series of lectures collectively [...]
Posted by Jeff Carreira on July 28, 2011
http://evolutionaryphilosophy.com/2011/07/28/alfred-north-whitehead-and-the-three-components-of-knowledge/
The Essence of Being First
What is the quality of being first? This was a question that Charles Sanders Peirce thought deeply about because he felt that the quality of being first, or ‘firstness’ as he called it, was an essential element of the universe. Peirce’s conception of firstness is abstract, penetrating, profound and well worth giving yourself some time [...]
Posted by Jeff Carreira on July 7, 2011
http://evolutionaryphilosophy.com/2011/07/07/the-essence-of-being-first/
Where has all the novelty gone?
Is spontaneity real? Is novelty possible? These are profound philosophical questions for all of us to think about. Does anything really new happen? A determinist might say no. The doctrine of determinism is often interpreted to mean that everything is caused. The state of everything is predetermined by its past state and the next state [...]
Posted by Jeff Carreira on June 29, 2011
http://evolutionaryphilosophy.com/2011/06/29/where-has-all-the-novelty-gone/
