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 William James
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/
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/
Are Relationships Real Things?
Our sense of reality is dominated by things. Things feel real to us. We live in a universe that we experience as empty space filled with things. And some things have relationships between them. But what is a relationship? Is a relationship a thing? Is it real, or is it just a connection between two [...]
Posted by Jeff Carreira on November 10, 2011
http://evolutionaryphilosophy.com/2011/11/10/are-relationships-real-things/
Into The Human Flow
I am currently completely captivated by the image of a Human Flow. The American Pragmatist philosophers developed a view of humanity as a constant flow of activity and society was a flow of flows. There is always a flow that organizes what people do, say and think. And there are local flows that flow into [...]
Posted by Jeff Carreira on September 29, 2011
http://evolutionaryphilosophy.com/2011/09/29/into-the-human-flow/
Mead, Mind and World
George Herbert Mead is the fourth major figure in Classical American Pragmatism. Mead studied philosophy at Harvard while William James chaired the department. He taught with John Dewey at the University of Michigan before they both left there to teach at the University of Chicago. Mead is known more as a sociologist than a philosopher [...]
Posted by Jeff Carreira on September 16, 2011
http://evolutionaryphilosophy.com/2011/09/16/mead-mind-and-world/
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 Subjective World of William James
My last post inspired me to want to do a series of posts in which I share some of my favorite philosophy passages, and this week a passage from William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience compels me. James was on fire with a materialistic vision of subjective experience. He felt that while our experience of outer reality [...]
Posted by Jeff Carreira on July 15, 2011
http://evolutionaryphilosophy.com/2011/07/15/the-subjective-world-of-william-james/
A Field of Pure Knowing
What is the human soul? Is it some phantom-like part of us or is it a living dimension of the universe from which all life flows? The later is what Samuel Taylor Coleridge taught and his brilliant description of this living soul was so powerful that it ignited a vision that entranced the American Transcendentalists [...]
Posted by Jeff Carreira on June 2, 2011
http://evolutionaryphilosophy.com/2011/06/02/a-field-of-pure-knowing/
