I’m largely skeptical of placing George Santayana in the same category as other American pragmatists, but he does have his moments. I stumbled across this great little nugget, which mirrors the late 20th century American pragmatic thinkers (and, in some ways, post-moderns): [W]e are human beings thinking in moral terms, and we give the name […]
John Dewey was born on this day (20 October, 1859). Celebrate by trying to develop a creative new solution to an old problem. We thus reach a technical definition of education: It is that reconstruction or reorganization of experience which adds to the meaning of experience, and which increases ability to direct the course of […]
Short film #2 in Phillip McReynolds‘s American Philosopher series offers a few pieces of information that divide up into histories of the early lives of contemporary American philosophers and the early life of philosophy in historic America. The former, tales about the temptations of philosophy in the early lives of modern thinkers, makes up the […]
There are a couple of nice little nuggets I’d like to pull out of this second video of American Philosopher. First, I was excited to see the late John E. Smith join the video as an interviewee, though he seemed not to be mentioned in the teaser. Smith was a great distiller of good […]
There’s a new film (or series of eight rather short films, I guess) by Phillip McReynolds called American Philosopher. You can watch the whole thing online, and it’s a pleasure that I recommend taking. Quite frankly, it seems mostly to be a bunch of spliced-together interviews with a few major living (or recently living) academic […]
Disclaimer: these thoughts are a bit raw and not well explained here, but I need to start posting to develop my thoughts more. Disclaimer 2: yes, x can be 0. Okay, admittedly, the title of this post sounds like a dumb question. And while I know that in most cases, the former answer is the […]
A close friend recently pointed me to this list of books on Augustana College’s website. As part of the celebration of the college’s Sesquicentennial, they have published a list of 150 faculty recommendations for books to read in your lifetime. I thought it would be fun to do a quick rundown of the books I […]
It’s been far too long since I have posted anything. I have not had time to put any real articles together 1, but I figured that my private journal could be sustained with a post or two with my random, private thoughts and life events from time to time 2. Now it’s nearly spring, and […]
In order to get the ball rolling, open up a terminal…we’ll do all our work from there: wget http://omicron.homeip.net/projects/easy_e17/easy_e17.sh That command will provide us with easy_e17.sh, the handy script which will make updating e17 easier. Now we’ll make it able to run: sudo chmod +x easy_e17.sh Now let’s install the basic tools to get easy_e17.sh […]
Everyone you know that has watched a commercial for Bob’s NewWidget purchases Bob’s NewWidget and thinks that it is the greatest invention. You are given the opportunity to watch the commercial. Do you take it? Everyone you know that has taken a certain drug BNW purchases Bob’s NewWidget and thinks that it is the greatest […]