Archive for the ‘Philosophy’ Category

Three Poorly Formed Concepts

Thursday, July 2nd, 2026

A standard justification for the approach of Analytic philosophy is that no real progress can be made on philosophical problems until the concepts with which it deals are made properly clear, and until we have determined that the concepts are in fact well formed. That this is not always the ...

On Supposed ‘Indigenous Ways of Knowing’

Sunday, June 28th, 2026

What are these ‘indigenous ways of knowing’ (henceforth, IWK)? Let’s ignore the term ‘indigenous’ for the moment: we will see that it has its own problems. An unsystematic review of many of the official and semi-official resources available online is extremely confusing, since there seems to be no consistent distinction ...

On the Platonic Frenzies

Saturday, June 27th, 2026

Plato is not now generally thought of as being overly sympathetic to the mystical path to knowledge – the later position of the Academy notwithstanding – yet in the Phaedrus 244a-245c, 265b and Symposium 210e-211b, Plato makes claims that seem to amount to an acknowledgement that there are paths to ...

Three Thoughts on the Trinity

Thursday, June 25th, 2026

Powers aren’t Persons The status of the Holy Spirit has often been a bone of contention amongst sectarians and is central to many of the heresies that the Church had had to fight off. it seems to have been a hypostatization of the Divine Presence or the Divine inspiration that ...

The Triad of Plotinus

Tuesday, June 23rd, 2026



Thoughts on Beginning Reading E. Moore’s ‘Neoplatonism’ in the IEP

Saturday, June 20th, 2026

It’s remarkable the amount of incoherence there is in this merely speculative cosmology. One that struck me in the first paragraphs is that the Neoplatonists do not succeed in supporting the consistency of their claims that ‘The One’ (το ‘εν) is absolutely united and singular and perfect and also that ...

Towards a ‘Virtue Theory’ for Literature (1)

Sunday, May 31st, 2026

It is often asked why we should read; more specifically, why we should read the classics or ‘fine literature,’ by which is meant generally poetry, plays, and prose narratives of various kinds – these days especially, ‘serious’ novels. The question is motivated by the fact that reading this literature is ...

Two Questions about the Truths We Can Know

Thursday, May 28th, 2026

1. Are there any truths that are just inaccessible to the human mind – that just could not be thought by the human mind? I’m not wondering about truths that are incomprehensible because of some gross physical limit, like the names of every person on Earth (or choose your own ...

Observations on Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’

Sunday, May 24th, 2026

You might think that such a widely cited and referenced work had something significant to say about the nature and significance of reproduction, but I find that what is said is mostly trivial or just wrong-headed. In particular, I note that Benjamin is aware that mechanical production is not the ...

Against AI Art

Sunday, May 24th, 2026

There was recent kerfuffle online when a blogger posted an image of a real Monet and said that he had generated it using AI.  Could his readers tell him, he asked, why it was inferior to this other image that was of a real Monet? Of course, his replies were filled with ...