Hyper-Weirdness by World Wide Web
Philosophy
Table of Contents
See Also:
Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science,
Divers Strange Sects,
Electronic Books,
The Fringes of Reason,
Language and Literature,
Minds and Brains,
Politics and Activism,
Religion and Spirituality,
Weird Politics and Conspiracy
An alphabetically organized list, with pictures (!), capsule biographies, and links to such Internet resources as are available. Very nice, and rather more diplomatic than this.
i.e., a site which accumulates bibliographies for philosophers who were (or are) women; anyone can submit data. Links to on-line resources, where available; sometimes (e.g. Aspasia) it just gives the dates of birth and death. [My suspicion is that female philosophers have no more in common than, say, philosophers whose names include the letter S; but there's no way to test that suspicion until this (or something like it) is reasonably complete. CRS]
Usenet
Ancient and Medieval Philosophers
Which is to say, everyone up to about 1600.
is often an excellent resource on the philosophers of classical antiquity, as is the
which reviews books about classical antiquity and the study thereof.
Confucius did not write fortune cookies. Few competent scholars today think he wrote anything at all, at least nothing which has come down to us. What we do have are the Analects, a collection of his sayings and ancedotes about the Master, some tips on etiquette, and later passages interpolated to give the support of Confucius to some fad, like the I Ching; and some later works from the Confucian school, like the Ta Hsueh, or ``Great Learning'', a little ``Discourse on Method'' (Hu Shih's phrase). Nonetheless, Confucius is probably the single most influential political thinker ever.
Parts of the Analects are considered a Great Book by the University of Chicago; where this leaves the rest, I am not competent to say. [CRS]
This seems to be all the dialogues; certainly it's all the major ones. Read the Timaeus, and tell me that Plato does not belong in any catalog of weird things. He is, of course, a University of Chicago-certified Great Author. [CRS]
Was the student of Plato; therefore he never fails to split hairs and magnify trivial differences between them. Unlike Plato, his surviving writings are massively, monumentally, unspeakably dull; they are widely speculated to be his lecture notes. Still, he's been enormously influential in the last 2,300 years... University of Chicago-certified Great Books, down to the assertion that women have fewer teeth than men. [CRS]
Whether the Taoists are listed under philosophy or religion is a matter of ``four in the morning and three in the evening''; so Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu share a section.
Stoicism was a strictly materialist and determinist philosophy, and so naturally enough pantheistic and exceedingly moral --- deathly cold fishes, to be frank. How a fatalistic philosophy of indifference and self-control came to become the creed of the rulers of the Roman Empire is not clear to me, but happen it did, as one may see in the works of Marcus Aurelius. (Seneca, being a hypocrite, is no puzzle.) The appeal to slaves, like Epictetus, is more obvious.
Prof. William Connolly has written a brief introduction to the school, discussing their logic, cosmology, and especially their ethics. (Curiously, he does not mention the infamous belief that a virtuous man would be happy, even while being tortured.) [CRS]
gets his own section.
Last of the great Antonine Emperors of Rome, who had the rather thankless task of holding the empire together in the face of war, pestilence, incompetence and general mess, long enough to hand it over to his worthless son, who ruined it. In the meanwhile he wrote his
Meditations for philosophical comfort --- and damn cold comfort it is. A University of Chicago-certified Great Book. [CRS]
Would the person with the translation of Aurelius to put on-line please mail me again? The disk with your address was accidentally annointed in hot coffee.
A Roman patrician and (if memory serves) senator; the last of the classical philosophers, before the dark ages closed, and the nearest resemblance to intellect in Europe would be found in the Church. In his time (+480--524) Italy was no longer part of the Empire, but ruled by independent Ostrogoth Kings. The Goths were actually quite civilized, as barbarians went, and sensibly employed the Italian ruling class to do their ruling for them. Boethius rose to be consul under King Theodoric, before falling out of favor and into prison; after languishing a while he was executed. The Dark Ages claimed him as a Christian, acquired much of what little intellectual culture they had from his books, seem to have canonized him as St. Severinus, and attributed a number of theological books to him: all of which is disputed by scholars.
In addition to the questionable ones on theology, his books included translations of Aristotle, a text on geometry, and the work for which he is most famous, The Consolations of Philosophy, an imaginary conversation, in mixed poetry and prose, with a personified Philosophy, written while he was in jail awaiting execution. (That this book, written under such circumstances, has no specifically Christian content at all is a good reason to think Boethius was not deeply Christian.) This is, and deserves to be, a Great Book: but the Webbing leaves much to be desired. [CRS]
I know businessmen and at least one Army officier who read The Prince religiously. I would too, if I ever wanted to seize absolute power in a Renassiance city-state. (I didn't say they were very good businessmen.) Still, it's probably the second best-written book on politics ever. [CRS]
One of the brighter lights of the Renaissance, by all accounts, and something of an enfant terrible when, 1486, at the age of twenty-three, he proposed to defend 900 theses on religion, philosophy, natural philosophy and magic against all comers, and wrote the famous Oration on the Dignity of Man in defense of this audacious project. (Thirteen of the theses were found heretical, and he was forced to flee to France.) He wrote other works of philosophy in a Platonist vein, and a refutation of astrology, which is supposed to be cogent (I haven't read it). Alas, he fell into extreme piety at the end of his life, under the influence of Savonarola, and died in 1494 as he was preparing to set out on a penitential pilgrimage --- of malaria, if memory serves. (He is also important as a proof of the superiority of education over inheritance: despite being an aristocrat, he was intelligent, cultured, enlightened, and a genuine scholar, if somewhat given to twisting quotations.)
The Oration is certified a Great Book, though I can imagine what Adler would think of my footnotes.
[CRS]
Is everything since circa 1600. Schools and systems since around 1900 are in the next sections, either in the academic mainstream or strange eddies and stagnant pools.
A skeptical and delightful writer of the French Renaissance, inventor of the
modern essay. The philosophers no longer number him among their tribe, and
no wonder: he's too clear, too pleasant and above all, too sensible. [CRS. Exception: Stephen Toulmin in Cosmopolis (no relation) does take Montaigne seriously as a philosopher; but I'm not sure how seriously to take Cosmopolis.]
The Praise of Folly.
Perhaps the only lawyer to ever become a saint. His Utopia introduced the word, but not the idea. His own attitude towards it may be gauged from the fact that the word means ``No-where''.
His
Discourse on Method.
a.k.a. Benedict. There is a mailing list for ``slow reading'' of his works, spinoza@world.std.com (subscriptions, mod. Lance Fletcher), and Part I of the Ethics has been scanned in by Prof. Edward Beach. [Which means I can give up typing Part I and skip ahead to Part II. CRS]
The Essays are graceful, formerly classic and still deserve to be read. I cannot fathom why his deathly-dull Utopia, The New Atlantis, is on-line, but his rather more interesting writings on what we now call the philosophy of science are not.
Was another one of those great seventeenth century cranks who spent their days running around Europe, starting the scientific revolution. He wrote an Apology for Galileo, ``though for that and other heresies, religious, and political, he seven times underwent torture.'' He also wrote a Utopia, the City
of the Sun.
There's also an HTML copy of The Monadology.
While reading A Treatise Concering The Principles of Human Knowledge, keep your stone handy.
Candide is
currently the only work available on-line, from The Voltaire Foundation (plaintext copy at the ERIS project). The Foundation is working on a French edition of the Dictionnaire philosophique.
It's appalling that I can't find any of his general writings (e.g. Rameau's Nephew) on-line, though whether the flaw is with my searching skills or the literary quality of the Web is debatable. You can, however, search part of the Encyclopédie (in French, of course).
The ERIS project has a rather extensive collection of texts, including the Meiklejohn translation of both Critiques of Reason. These are however plain text files, and huge --- the Critique of Pure Reason is about one meg. Fortunately the Chinese University of Hong Kong hosts a copy of the Norman Kemp Smith translation Critique of Pure Reason, which gives me a chance to be prissy about different editions. With its right hand, that from CUHK gives us files broken down to a reasonable length, and a search engine by Tze-wan Kwan, so we can find what we're looking for, freeing us from the tyranny and obtuseness of indexers; with its left hand, it takes away (among other niceties of format) obvious distinctions between footnotes and the body of the text. (They say this will be fixed.)
Last in the way of texts, we have that curious paean to intellectual emancipation and Ferderick the Great, ``What is Enlightenment?''
There is also
KANT-L.
Subscriptions to LISTSERV@CORAL.BUCKNELL.EDU.The Co-Managers of the List are
- Frank Wilson
- Department of Philosophy, Bucknell University, Lewisburg, Pennsylvania
17837; (717) 524-3461 and
- Ted Chappen
- P. O. Box 442, New Berlin, Pennsylvania 17855; (717) 966-1778
Has been summarized for the edification of the net. Hegel being a walking intellectual plague, I doubt even the summary was strictly necessary. [CRS]
Despite some effort in looking, I have been unable to locate anything by Schopenhauer, or even about him, on the net. There is however a handsome portrait, and I am pleased to present the following physiognomic interpretation of the painting, specially written for Hyper-Weirdness:
See that brow? That's a deterministic brow.
Those eyes? Strained by expressing covert mystical agendas in a manner consistent with empiricism.
That mouth? Clenched by prudery.
---mbird
[CRS]
See also his Subjection of Women. Mill was not your father's straight dead white European male.
In an earlier version I wrote that everything besides the Communist Manifesto was too long, boring and badly written to make it on-line. I underestimated the faith and diligence of Uncle Karl's followers, which was silly, since half my family is or was Marxist. I am happy to say the Opera Omnia (or very nearly Omnia --- where is The German Ideology?) can be had by gopher in English translation. This includes Karl's love poems to Jenny. [CRS]
There's a Web paga from USC, with links to the mailing list, the North American Nietzsche Society, etc.
Only the Zarathustra to date, and in the notorious first
translation at that, and an assortment of ``Mixed Opinions and Maxims''. [CRS]
Peirce was a respected experimental physicists and one of the pioneers of mathematical logic and semiotics (the so-called ``science of signs''), a man of tremendous originality and subtlety, who seems to have taken no pains whatsoever to make his thought comprehensible to lesser mortals. Thus, while William James called him the founder of pragmatism, and considered ``How to Make Our Ideas Clear'' the first pragmatist work (itself debtable; see Marx's ``Theses on Feuerbach''), Peirce professed himself very upset with the pragmatists, and took to calling his own position ``pragmaticism,'' on the grounds that that name was so ugly no one would be tempted to steal it. My personal recommendation is to read Feibleman's An Introduction to the Philosophy of Charles S. Peirce, Interpreted as a System, and his shorter, more popular, on-line articles. [CRS]
was an American physiologist, psychologist, philosopher and all-around genius. His magnum opus, The Principles of Psychology, is public domain, and the sort of thing which ought to be on the net, since 107 years after publication it is still better than most psychology texts. For a long time, the only book by him on the net was Essays in Radical Empiricism, (far less technical than it sounds, but transcribed in a rather ugly way --- I'd give a lot for a scanner). Recently, however, The Varities of Religious Experience has been put on-line as a plaintext (cf. this set of notes to it). There is also the complete text of ``Great Men and their Environment'', a paper anticipating the idea of memes by the better part of a century.
The pages of Jamesian links by Frank Pajares seems to catch everything.
The Principles is a University of Chicago certified Great Book. [CRS]
was, during the course of a long (1872-1970) life, the grandson of the Prime Minister of England, Lord John Russell, the godson of John Stuart Mill, a profound mathematician whose Principia Mathematica, written with Alfred North Whitehead is still at the center of modern debate about the basis of mathematics, an agnostic bordering on atheism, something of a mystic, a friendly philosophical antagonist of William James, an expert on the philosophy of Leibniz , a libertarian socialist, jailed for opposing the First World War, the friend and mentor of Ludwig Wittgenstein, a profoundly repulsed visitor to the Soviet Union in 1920, lecturer in Japan and China, the premier philosopher in the English-speaking part of the world, perhaps the whole world, judicially declared unfit to teach at the City College of New York, after a campgain of villification by the press and the Catholic Church, on the grounds that his mere presence on campus would corrupt the students and that, in any case, he ``was not a philosopher in any normally accepted meaning of the word,'' a supporter of the Second World War, a Cold War hawk while only America had the Bomb and a dove afterwards, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature (1950), jailed for disarmament protests, and frankly a bit dotty towards the end.
They don't make them like that any more.
His archives were obtained by McMaster University in Canada. There is an associated mailing list for discussion of Russell's life and works, which is itself archived. The Bertrand Russell Society has an annual essay competition, announcements of which are posted to the philosophy newsgroups.
A number of works by Russell are on-line: ``Why I Am Not a Christian,'' (self-explanatory); an article for the Encyclopædia Britannica on ``Philosophical Consequences of Relativity'' (i.e. Einstein's relativity); ``Knowledge and Wisdom''; a portion of the transcript of a television interview, under the title ``What is an Agnostic'', where he explains his (ir)religious views; ``What Is the Soul,'' a sort of witty ten-minute summary of his metaphysics as of 1928; ``On Denoting''; and the short book Icarus,
or the Future of Science.
The complete text of The Problems of Philosophy (1912) is on-line, courtesy of Dr. Pseudocryptonym's Book Knowledge. (Two warnings are in order: the entire book is a single HTML file 258k in length; and, according to the transcriber, the only country where he knows it is public domain is the United States.) Other texts are gradually appearing here and at the Watchful Eye Bertrand Russell Page. [CRS]
There is a Wittgenstein Homepage, but none of his works is, as such, on the net. The
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus was on-line, but has been removed at the request of the publishers. You can however get a random proposition from the Tractatus of the Day server.
Part of the Tractatus has been set to music, in the original German. [CRS]
Or rather, his Revolt of the Masses.
Until recently, the most influential living philosopher of science; since December 1994, the most influential recently deceased philosopher of science. (Even scientists read and agreed with him, which is almost unheard-of.) Juan C. Garelli is the owner of POPPER, a moderated mailing list
meant for scholars engaged in any kind of scientific or philosophical endeavour deeply concerned with, and committed to, the defence and fostering of the Scientific Method, Rationalism and Humanitarianism. Discussion on this list is intended to reflect Sir Karl R. Popper's main concerns: his attachment to Critical Rationalism, and his commitment to Democratic Humanitarianism, both inextricably imbricated to the extent that the feeling of Reason above individualism implies the ethical decision to believe in the Unity of Mankind and the radical rejection of any kind of authoritarianism.
To subscribe, send SUBSCRIBE POPPER yourfirstname yourlastname to Listserv@sjuvm.stjohns.edu.
Is the late 20th century's answer to William James. Alright, so that's an exaggeration, but they both focus on the mind, both are devout Darwinians, both abandoned careers in art, both write very well and reach (comparatively) large popular audiences, and both teach in the Boston area. Coincidence? Send SUB DENNETT <your first name> <your last name> to LISTSERV@THINK.NET and see for yourself.
The ``abstracts and annotations of Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained'' consists of the table of contents, and a summary and mild critique of the first section of the first chapter.
[CRS, who recently finished Darwin's Dangerous Idea after firmly telling himself he couldn't afford it for all of, oh, five or six minutes.]
No Dogs or Philosophers Allowed
A North American call-in philosophy TV show, whose host asked that they be listed. (Mr. Knisely wasn't sure this was weird enough to be included, but I am.) Owing to my scruples about suckling at the glass teat, I haven't seen it, but Responsible Persons think well of it, and the Web page is good. [CRS]
has a gopher with oodles of files and links, such as Philosophical Images (pictures of philosophers) and Make Tenure Fast.
and its collection of paradoxes.
is a ``guide to Philosophy-Related Resources on the Internet'', by Dey Alexander.
which ``seeks to provide a forum for electronically mediated scholarly discussion of philosophical works.'' The current list of topics (e.g., theories of pictorial representation) seems both very heavy and very analytical. [CRS]
by David Chalmers, whose Toward a Theory of Consciousness I ought to finish soon.
In their own words:
``Brown Electronic Article Review Service (BEARS) in Moral and Political Philosophy publishes very short refereed reviews of recent articles in moral and political philsophy.''
analytic is a mailing list for discussing analytic philosophy, open to anyone with some familiarity to it. In its own words,
Analytic Philosophy is commonly considered to be a methodology for pursuing answers to traditional philosophical questions which focuses on the analysis of language. Its roots are in the writings of Gottlob Frege, G. E. Moore, and Bertrand Russell and it is often remarked that it is the dominant philosophical tradition of the English-speaking world in this century.
Nicely Webbed but very technical. A few of the articles do repay reading by Mere Mortals. [CRS]
Mailing Lists --- Mostly Continental Incomprehensibles
``...a number of philosophy lists [are] available through Kent Palmer (palmer@think.net), including: autopoesis and its spinoffs, deleuze, baudrillard, lyotard, adorno, nietzsche, husserl, heidegger, emptiness (buddhist philosophy),myth, etc. etc.
See the homepage of DialogNet, or send "HELP" to listserv@think.net.
[After reading that list, I cannot resist the temptation to quote William James, Principles of Psychology:
``Conversely, if words do belong to the same vocabulary [as opposed to mixing those of different languages], and if the grammatical structure is correct, sentences with absolutely no meaning may be uttered in good faith and pass unchallenged. Discourses at prayer-meetings, reshuffling the same collection of cant phrases, and the whole genus of penny-a-line-isms and newspaper-reporter's flourishes give illustrations of this. `The birds filled the tree-tops with their morning song, making the air moist, cool and pleasant,' is a sentence I remember reading once in a report of some athletic exercise in Jerome Park. It was probably written unconsciously by the hurried reporter, and read uncritically by many readers. An entire volume of 784 pages lately published in Boston is composed of stuff like this passage picked out at random:
`` `The flow of the efferent fluids of all these vessels from their outlets at the terminal loop of each culminate link on the surface of the nuclear organism is continous as their respective atmospheric fruitage up to the altitudinal limit of their expansibility whence, when atmosphered by like but coalescing essences from higher altitudes --- those sensibly expressed as the essential qualities of external forms, --- they descend, and become assimilated by the afferents of the nuclear organisms.'
``There are every year works published whose contents show them to be by real lunatics. To the reader, the book quoted from seems pure nonsense from beginning to end. It is impossible to divine, in such a case, just what sort of feeling of rational relation between the words may have appeared to the author's mind. The border line between objective sense and nonsense is hard to draw; that between subjective sense and nonsense, impossible. Subjectively, any collocation of words may make sense --- even the wildest words in a dream --- if one only does not doubt their belonging together. Take the obscurer passages in Hegel: it is a fair question whether the rationality included in them be anything more than the fact that the words all belong to a common vocabulary, and are strung together on a scheme of predication and relation --- immediacy, self-relation, and what not, --- which has habitually recurred. Yet there seems no reason to doubt that the subjective feeling of rationality of these sentences was strong in the writer as he penned them, or even that some readers by straining may have reproduced it in themselves.''
CRS]
Heidegger and Cyberspace
One Mr. Antony Dugdale is forming a mailing list to discuss them. [Or was, some months ago. CRS]
Not seen by us. In their own words,
``This list is for the discussion of personal idealogies [sic] and beliefs. Recent topics have included astrology, astral travel, and past lives.''
Moderator: David B. O'Donnell.
Subscriptions (send the message Subscribe belief-l <your name>.
This listserv may also offer, under the name DOUBTS.NAPOLEON, an 1819 article explaining why Napoleon might not have existed. [If you're really desperate to find this, I suggest asking sci.skeptic. --- MP] [I saw saw this in a bookstore recently, but can't for the life of me recall the author. CRS]
Is it an on-line archive of cutting-edge post-structuralist discourse? Or text pseudorandomly generated by a computer? Is there a difference? Would it make a difference if I told you that professors of communication have thought it was the former, even after accessing it more than ten times? [CRS]
a brief guide to Derrida & co by RU Sirius. [MP] [Suitable for cocktail parties or undemanding graduate seminars. CRS]
DERRIDA list
(%cfrvm.bitnet@uga.cc.uga.edu)
Standard listserv commands
is a pukka academic journal which just happens to be fully Webbed. Covers, among other things, ``poetry, postmodern ecology, `stemmatics', James Joyce, mail art, Gulf War, concepts of time, everyday aesthetics,'' etc.
Frankly these are all fairly tame; lunatic, but tame. If you want really strange
beliefs, go visit the Kooks Museum.
Is a philosopher (or poet or essayist or borderline lunatic) in whose writings some find every sign of genius, and other incomprehensible murk. Your humble narrator, alas, falls into the second category: but in an effort to overcome his prejudice, gives you the Hakim Bey home-page. [CRS]
Celia Green
The complete text of her remarkable short book The Human Evasion. [``Remarkable'' is Mitchell's word; I too found it remarkable --- remarkably bad. Ms. Green appears to believe that (for instance) nothing is impossible except self-contradiction (I don't see why she makes this exception), and that therefore we can do anything. There is a hideous passage denouncing concentration-camp survivors for wanting restitution or forgetfulness or revenge; instead, she thinks, they should call for making humans ``infinite''. And so on. I find her repulsive, and reading her book ruined a perfectly good evening for me; in the words of the poet, ``your mileage may vary.'' CRS]
Discoursing on ``new maps of hyperspace.'' [Yes, I know there's a lot of other McKenna stuff on the net. Patience, and I'll try to organize it into something coherent --- no help from his fans. CRS]
Aleph
This is the best place I can think of to mention the ALEPH mailing list: mail majordomo@pyramid.com, "subscribe aleph your_name" in
the message body.
The Aleph archives live here. This list has a rather erratic history, having covered esoterica, memetics, collaborative fiction-writing (spawning the FIXION list), ecofeminist revolution through the Internet, you name it. [MP]
fnord-l@UBVM.bitnet
New Ways of Thinking List - created as forum to discuss the ideas of
Wilson, Leary, Alli and the like - "the lunatic asylum of the Internet.'' [MP]
Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP)
To join send the command JOIN NLP to server@momad.li.ny.us
... if you have an interest in NLP, please use the mailing list, rather
than wasting bandwidth on Alt.Hypnosis (which is *NOT* for NLP)
and from a sci.math .sig:
An archive of NLP articles, primarily by me, can be obtained by anonymous
ftp from the server ftp.hawaii.edu, in the directory outgoing/lady.
The file README in this directory contains a listing of the contents.
lady@uhunix.uhcc.hawaii.edu
pkd-list
Contact: pkd-list-request@wang.com
Purpose: The discussion of the works and life of Philip K. Dick
- this list is frequently inert. [MP]
Objectivism
Is a philosophical system founded by the late novelist Ayn Rand. Doubtless many of its devotees will be offended by my listing it here, with what they will regard as some most dubious life-forms. To which I can only reply, ``Too bad. Objectivism is a contemporary philosophy, and by any objective standard, not part of the academic mainstream. It belongs here.'' I think my comments above make it clear that I do not hold academic approval per se in very high regard.
Very broadly, Objectivism is rationalist (instead of intuitist or mystic), realist (as opposed to solipsist or idealist), morally absolutist, extremely individualistic (not even altruism is allowed), scientistic, and attaches a peculiar ethical value to unfettered capitalism. Objectivism on the Web is run by a devotee. This is a critical history and overview, by Mr. Michael Shermer.
There is a general Objectivism list called "objectivism" (see Paul Vixie for details), a more technically philosophical list, "objectivism-philosophy" (mail T. William Wells) and a newsgroup, alt.philosophy.objectivism. To the best of my knowledge, none of Ms. Rand's writings are available on the net.
[CRS]
Nexialism
is a word stolen from science-fiction writer A.E. van Vogt, used in his "Null-A" books (which were in turn inspired by Korzybski's General Semantics), by DSchnei@aol.com to denote his philosophy. You can probably find out what it is by mailing him. [MP]
As explicated by Onar Aam, is
``about effortlessly wandering from one perspective to another depending on what the situation requires. The grand contention of perspectivism is that a gestalt emerges from this restless wandering, namely the meaning of a greater whole. Meaning is seen as a fragmented unity.''
and seems to be a sort of Nietzsche Lite. [CRS]
R.B.Fuller fans? Painfully obscure in places. Their listing of key words is probably the most useful interface. [MP]
WHOLESYS-L@netcom.com
The WHOLESYS-L Whole Systems list is for the discussion of:
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[Mitchell just sent that. CRS]
Is the author of an 80k book called, modestly, The Truth, which he and his publisher, something called ``Advanced Research Concepts'', have put on-line. Progessive evolutionism reminiscent of Herbert Spencer, plus pantheism and evolving towards God, not unlike Teilhard de Chardin. (Actually, some of it, e.g., ``A hormone is a learning,'' is not that far from some more-or-less respectable biologists; cf. Henry Plotkin, Darwin Machines and the Nature of Knowledge.) Each sentence gets a line to itself, in large type.
Today we are still only semi-consciously designing Humankind.
We are participants in the transition from nurturing an individual consciousness to produce a sovereign, to the rapid development of an organism of humans in which individual consciousness contributes according to its capability but is subject to control by a newly developing collective consciousness.
Our present lack of awareness of the total consequences of our collective decisions sometimes creates oppressive environments.
Seeking to become more, we act....
The universe has always been the means to the creation of a God.
Existence was the means to life.
Life was the means to consciousness.
Consciousness is the means to Godliness.
Our story is the history of a growing God.
The universe is a God growing up.
We are living the life of a growing God.
Our reality is a developing organism that is only becoming a God.
[CRS]
[Follow that link!]
To Do: separate the sheep from the goats, i.e. the analytic and Continental parts of contemporary academic philosophy. Observe that archetypal analytic school, Logical Postivism, was in fact at the very center of the Continent: but no one ever said philosophy was logical. [Mitchell suggests ``speculative'' is a better name than ``Continental.'']
To Do: Cross-link to theologians; write-up McKenna; write-up Thompson; properly organize contemporary bizarre philosophy.
Keep looking for: Seneca, Indian philosophy, Pre-Socratics, Erasmus, Keirkegaard, Scholastics, Islamic philosophy, Husserl, Bergson
Believe it or not, pointcom.com thinks that this page is ``among the top 5% of all sites on the Internet''. We find this incredible, but it produces a warm glow within nonetheless. (``Badges? We don' need no estinkin' badges!'')
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