Fear of death and the metaphysical mystery of conscious states — Original Philosophy A space on Medium for serious philosophers to post their research and thinking for a broader audience.medium.com By consent across the centuries, one of the greatest mysteries is the nature of consciousness. How could the most subjective thing there is be in a universe of objective, material things? Granted, those physical things are all energized and thus animated in that they react to what happens to them…

Thomism, religious analogies, and the Church’s bait-and-switch — How would one of the leading Christian communicators explain what God’s supposed to be? Bishop Robert Baron provides his answer in a popular podcast, turning to Thomas Aquinas’s metaphysical abstraction of a necessary being to set God apart from everything in the universe. Christianity and the philosopher’s metaphysical deity “Anything in the world,” Baron says, “would…

And how Ayodeji Awosika’s writing advice traps new writers with a bait-and-switch tactic — Ayodeji Awosika is a self-described “writing guru” with roughly a hundred thousand followers on Medium. But the advice he offers uses a bait-and-switch tactic, and reflecting on that tactic can illuminate how his market works. Ordinarily, sorting through a writer’s submission guidelines and business tactics would be none of my…

The Church’s Orwellian propaganda and Pope Francis’s lame attempt to tame secularism — The hallmark of Catholic discourse is casuistry: “specious, deceptive, or oversubtle reasoning, especially in questions of morality; fallacious or dishonest application of general principles; sophistry.” Catholic casuistry, though, extends far beyond morality, into matters of history and theology. The reason for the Catholic’s resort to specious reasoning is clear: Catholics…

Tracking, mapping, understanding, and life’s role in the greater evolution of nonlife — Original Philosophy A space on Medium for serious philosophers to post their research and thinking for a broader audience.medium.com Commonsense tells us that philosophers are merely impudent in questioning the standard conception of truth. Whether they’re skeptics, idealists, or pragmatists, their insistence that there isn’t a real world of facts out there that we can make true or false statements about seems like an extravagant case of self-deception. …

To those who are snubbed for seeing too deeply — Here’s to those who know enough to be quiet once in awhile. Here’s to the shy, sensitive, awkward losers in life who are overlooked because they prefer signal to noise. Three cheers for the introverts! Your senses, introverts, are like industrial vacuum cleaners, inhaling the universe down to the studs…

And how Peterson ignores two elephants in the room — In a revealing interview/debate with Kyle Kulinski, the progressive liberal commentator on YouTube, Jordan Peterson ends up discussing his view of Donald Trump’s presidency. This is revealing not just because the issue of Trump’s status in American politics is a litmus test for anyone, but because Peterson’s answer (in which…

Explaining the oddities of Peterson’s seething rage and his plentiful tears — Jordan Peterson is a world-famous clinical psychologist, self-help guru, and alt-right ideologue. Luck and charisma put him in the global spotlight when one of his YouTube videos went viral. …

Pragmatism, objectivity, and the spectrum of stories we tell — Original Philosophy A space on Medium for serious philosophers to post their research and thinking for a broader audience.medium.com All the world’s a stage. I’m the good shepherd and I lay down my life for my sheep. Words are just crumbs that fall from the feast of the mind. The conscience is a compass. Those are some famous metaphors. But why don’t we think of metaphors as mere lies?