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Tag Archives: philosophy

A Radical Openness to Persuasion

Friday, January 22, 2016

Though the artist has beliefs, like other people, he realizes that a salient characteristic of art is a radical openness to persuasion. Even those beliefs he’s surest of, the artist puts under pressure to see if they will stand. He may have a pretty clear idea where his experiment will lead, as Dostoevsky did when […]

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Lenses on the Non-Human World

Wednesday, January 13, 2016

The contemporary cynic – which on many days describes myself – might respond that we still live by all of these [historical] interpretive frameworks, and that only their outer shell has changed – the mythological has become the stuff of the culture industries, spinning out big-budget, computer-generated films and merchandise; the theological has diffused into […]

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Secure Means of Building

Wednesday, February 25, 2015

The pragmatist Charles Peirce held, against Descartes, that nothing was indubitable. Each thing was open to doubt, although not all things at once. Each thing could be doubted on the basis of other propositions that were, at that particular moment, not actually in doubt. Their turn could come later. Otto Neurath, followed by W.V. Quine, […]

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Being’s Poem, Just Begun, is Man

Monday, October 18, 2010

When the evening light, slanting into the woods somewhere bathes the tree trunks in gold…      Singing and thinking are the stems neighbor to poetry.      They grow out of Being and reach into its truth.      Their relationship makes us think of what Hölderlin sings of the trees of the woods:           â€œAnd to each other they remain […]

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