Free will is the ability to choose between different possible courses of action. It is closely linked to the concepts of responsibility, praise, guilt, sin, and other judgments that apply only to actions that are freely chosen. Traditionally, only actions that are freely willed are seen as deserving credit or blame. PEL Citizens Justin Modra, Alexander Roth, and Brian Wise Continue Reading …
Not School Update: August 2016
Summer, do your worst! Light your tinsel moon, and call on Your performing stars to fall on Headlong through your paper sky –August, Dorothy Parker As the heat of summer is causing me to spend as much time trying to stay cool as is humanly possible (and hopefully you as well, dear reader), we want to let you know about some of the upcoming Not School seminars that you can Continue Reading …
B.K.S. Iyengar: A Model for Living Philosophically
At some point, western philosophy became alienated from its original intention: to help people live well. Pierre Hadot, a historian of philosophy, pointed out the difference between philosophy practiced, on the one hand, as a way of life (as Socrates, Aristotle, the Stoics, and the Epicureans did) and, on the other hand, philosophy practiced as mere discourse. Much Continue Reading …
October Not School Group, Communicating with Habermas
[An update from Hillary on Not School Goings On] We've been handling a lot of hard science the past few months and I'd like to move in a different direction for October with Jürgen Habermas' The Theory of Communicative Action. As Habermas is a strong proponent of argumentation I hope it will encourage all involved to chime in with thoughts, feelings or comments on the Continue Reading …
Wittgenstein’s Tractatus for Not School
Hello Hello! It's the beginning of the new month already. This is Hillary, continuing leader for the Not School Intro Philosophy Readings group. For those of you who have been following the Tao Te Ching discussion, hold on to your hats, because we're drifting a one eighty and dropping into Wittgenstein's Tractatus. For those of you who haven't, you missed something Continue Reading …
Not School Fiction Talks about Blood Meridian
This June I met with Jordan Payne, Fiction-group regular, and Dylan Casey, of PEL-fame, to discuss Cormac McCarthy's novel Blood Meridian. We discussed the Judge, the kid, the landscape, the language, the title and touched on the same author's No Country for Old Men, The Road and The Crossing in just under two great hours. Here's the conversation. We cover a lot of ground Continue Reading …
The Not School Discussion of Heidegger’s Letter on Humanism
Last week Being spoke through me in the saying of Martin Heidegger's Letter on Humanism as part of a PEL Not School study group. Joining me were Marilynn, Daniel, Rian and Alyson. We worked through Heidegger's idea that Humanism as a concept was inextricably tied to the history of western metaphysics that sees man as a animal rationale, language as techne and understands Continue Reading …
Rick Roderick and The Self Under Siege
A complaint I often hear from people averse to the subject of philosophy is that, as interesting as it can often be, it's really sort of irrelevant to our daily lives. In such conversations Rick Roderick is always the guy who comes to my mind. It's a criticism he himself made of certain philosophers from time to time, but not one likely to find much ground against his own Continue Reading …
Not-School Group on Emergence
There's lots of cool things going on in the PEL Not School discussion groups. To entice those of you that are interested in emergence to come check things out, I've proposed reading and discussing a short, interesting essay by the physicist P. W. Anderson called “More is Different: Broken Symmetry and the Hierarchical Nature of Science”. The essay itself is was originally Continue Reading …