I read a column by Eileen Flynn recently about the problem of interspirituality. A recent book by Stephen Prothero, God is Not One, challenges the idea of unity in religion, and of course he’s right on one level, but mistaken on another level. It has to do with levels of abstraction, essence. And what is […]
In the early 1970s a major shift occurred politically regarding the status of the acute and chronically severely mentally ill—especially those with active uncontrolled schizophrenia or active bipolar illness. Many were responding to the medications they were given in the hospital, becoming more stable, so it seemed that it was unnecessary to keep them in […]
Joel Waldfogel recently published a little book titled Scroogenomics: why you shouldn’t buy presents for the holidays. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press (2009). The author presents results of his research showing what I’ve become aware of for years: Folks frequently get gifts that they don’t care for that much. The author finally suggests, why don’t […]
In the June 7, 2010 issue of the New Yorker on page 21 there is an article about whether college is really cost effective. My attention was caught by the statement that skills appropriate to the workplace include the ability to “resolve conflict and negotiate,” “cooperate with others,” and “listen actively.” What strikes me here […]
I brought up the idea of the ethical will with my son and we were wondering together what kind of words, what heritage, did we wish to impart to his kids, my grandkids, others. (Whoa! as of today, over 100,000 hits!) The ethical will is an old Jewish tradition in which we write a letter […]
I was reading a humor book in which one of the themes is the two-column list of what “he said” and what he really thought but would not say—or how that phrase might be covering a more mundane or less favorable reality. There are other lists of she said and what she meant; or what […]
In the June 7, 2010 issue of the New Yorker on page 21 there is an article about whether college is really cost-effective. My attention was caught by the statement that skills appropriate to the workplace include the ability to “resolve conflict and negotiate,” “cooperate with others,” and “listen actively.” What strikes me here […]
Epistemology is that branch of philosophy that inquires into the problem of how we know what we know. Can some of what we think we know be illusions or errors? How could that be? Can Truth be known? Reality?
The first point here is that most people seem to buy into the idea that truth exists, […]
Everyone generates a meaning system. Most often it is an unconscious set of assumptions that help you make sense out of things. Alfred Adler (a physician who was an earlier associate of Freud but then dropped away because of his own independent ideas) observed that children around the age of five begin to have provisional […]
Responding to a NY Times article about science and discovery in December, 2009, the article speaks about how our consciousness continues to grow as we discover new horizons in astronomy, sub-atomic physics, and so forth. This brings up an interesting epistemological issue! (Epistemology is that branch of philosophy that asks, “How do we know what […]
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