What, Why & How do we Know ?
Mentioned I was doing a good deal of retro-reading these days. I’m currently reading Joe McCabe’s The New Science and the Story of Evolution. Joe was one of the big movers and shakers in the UK “Freethought Movement”. This particular book is a 1931-ish combination of early woks and essays including The Story of Evolution … Continue reading “The Meeting of Northrop and McCabe”
Another one of those “the plot thickens” links. Read and blogged about both F.S.C. Northrop (The Meeting of East and West) and Werner Heisenberg (Physics and Philosophy), but didn’t notice the the US edition of the latter (1958 Great Minds series, published by Prometheus) had an introduction by the former. I read the UK Penguin … Continue reading “Northrop and Heisenberg”
I’m that close to finishing Northrop – 20 pages maybe (Post note – Completed Northrop BTW) – so I’ve got some more reading material lined-up, already despatched from Amazon. Richard Rorty – Philosophy and Social HopeRichard Rorty – Contingency, Irony, and SolidarityOwen Barfield – Poetic Diction: A Study in MeaningOwen Barfield – History in English … Continue reading “Northrop, Barfield and Rorty”
The library in his house “Finca Vigia” in Cuba includes F S C Northrop’s “The Meeting of East and West“. This image from the site by Hilary Justice. Northrop is the red one in the middle. The brown one to the left of it is “The Good Soldier Schweik” by Hasek, which is a longer … Continue reading “Hemingway read Northrop”
This is a 2023 Annotation of a 2005 paper prepared originally for the Liverpool Conference on Robert Pirsig and his Metaphysics of Quality (MoQ). The text is unchanged except for correcting a few obvious typos and formatting errors, and to keep me honest the original “It’s Evolutionary Psychology Stupid” remains here complete with old broken … Continue reading “Zero to Pirsig”
Posting to capture this link to presentations from the 2022 “Tucson” science of consciousness conference – in particular this one on various “dual-aspect monisms” by Harald Atmanspacher. I think what I’m proposing is similar to his psychophysically neutral monism involving a third neutral layer underlying both the mental and physical. He calls it Unus Mundus. … Continue reading “Unus Mundus”
In this dialogue Bernardo Kastrup gives us his working definition of “consciousness: That whose excitations are the experiences we have. (Independent of our experiencing of them.) The sine qua non of experience. Raw subjectivity Raw basic experience. This is Pirsigian quality. He doesn’t use the formulation above in his book “The Idea of the World”, … Continue reading “Kastrup’s “Definition” of Consciousness”
Watched all 6 parts of Ken Burns “Hemingway” documentary. Despite finding his legend intriguing and having previously noticed his crossing of paths with Pirsig via Northrop here in Finca Vigia, Cuba, I think I’ve only read first hand his “Old Man and the Sea”. And I say that as someone who has visited the Key … Continue reading “Hemingway”