Please Don’t go I won’t say I’m lost But I love You So much My heart Might break nature and artifice Every day I feel My soul Might Foresake Whatever you do Whatever you say I’ll just love you More My lady From afar If I die alone I’ll alone think Of you My only … Continue reading love
Tag: Nature
On the Whole
Republished in June 2022. It is common to see the world as fundamentally divided. We think that we are separate from other people, and that people are separate from the natural world. Some philosophers agree. Nature, as early-modern Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza put it, is divided between the properties of thought and matter. Plato thought … Continue reading On the Whole
Berkeleyan Platonism: A philosophy of pure ideas
There is an argument by Kurt Gödel that I find fascinating. Gödel argued that his predecessors’ attempt to create a complete set of logical axioms to ground mathematics was doomed to fail. Instead, mathematical ideas must subsist unto themselves (as must, presumably, logical ideas). Ideas cannot complete each other. They are sufficient unto themselves. But … Continue reading Berkeleyan Platonism: A philosophy of pure ideas
Why Stoicism is a scam
In the TV series The Dropout, Elizabeth Holmes cites Yoda’s dictum, ‘Do or do not — there is no try.’ But what *should* we do? Marcus Aurelius, who ruled after the most peaceful time in the Roman Empire and before the most violent time. Coincidence? For Yoda, we will do what is right only when … Continue reading Why Stoicism is a scam
Hobbes, the Person of the State, and the Beginnings of Balance
In the beginning, there was a simple thing — be that nothing, something, or everything at once. From this simple, eternal implosion of reality exploded the elaborate fantasy of this divided physical realm. Perhaps even then there were seeds of division immanent to the physicality of this world. Before time and space, however, can we … Continue reading Hobbes, the Person of the State, and the Beginnings of Balance
The rise and fall of the private state
There are three characters in our play of politics: Capital (or the economy), Commonwealth (or the polity), and Culture (or the society). Hobbes’s Leviathan: free from privatisation? To privatise a state (Hobbes’s ‘commonwealth’), capital either: Weakens commonwealth, allowing culture to dominate (indirect privatisation); orStrengthens itself to such a degree that capital can dominate (direct privatisation). … Continue reading The rise and fall of the private state
On power: Tech, the state, and class
Power comes in many forms. Productive power is a relationship between society and nature, whereby people transform nature through technologies (or ‘forces of production’, as Marx called them). Social power is a relationship between people, involving both coercion (the use of threats and rewards, most often to maximise power over production) and legitimation (the use … Continue reading On power: Tech, the state, and class
What it means to be human
What does it mean to be human? There are few questions more basic but also more difficult to answer. So, let me start as all answers to hard questions must. With a story. Meet Australopithecus africanus. An early human (Creative Commons). Yesterday, I sat as countless numbers of students before me have sat. In an … Continue reading What it means to be human
Edmund Wilson 