Category: meditation

• May 21, 2014

  The emotions accompanying our mental activities

  It is time to put to rest the Platonic assumption that emotions are one kind of activity (or faculty) and reasoning another kind of activity (or faculty). They are not two forces vying against each other, and it is not that one is the ‘slave’ or the ‘master’ of the other: Hume holding that reason…
• May 19, 2014

  Trying to understand mental activities

  Last time, I wrote about the common category mistakes we make. We are in error when we think of minding as it if were like the body or some bodily organ. It is not. Since minding is not only not the body but also not like the body, it follows that minding cannot be healthy or…
• May 16, 2014

  Category mistake: Mental illness

  Today, I begin to inquire into this strange, fascinating, and mistaken argument: 5.) Because the human mind, like the human body, tends to be sickly and ill, it seeks healing or cures. Here, we have a classic example of what the late philosopher Gilbert Ryle called a ‘category mistake’: the misattribution of the properties that…
• May 14, 2014

  Our modern moral metaphysic: My basic set of questions

  In the past weeks, I have been investigating the main assumptions that underlie our modern moral metaphysic. So far, I have examined arguments 4 and 3 (in that order). 1.) Because the world is lost and fallen, it needs to be changed or ultimately saved. 2.) Because the world is broken or out-of-order, it needs…
• May 13, 2014

  Putting problems in their place

  The major purpose of reigning in the use of the word ‘problem’ is to clear a path to the thesis that the world is good and, beyond this, beautiful. The minor purpose is to return the concept ‘problem’ to its proper linguistic settings. Certain concepts are ‘at home’ in certain linguistic contexts. Yet for social, historical, metaphysical, and political reasons, some…