So even before the microscope had been put to serious use, the telescope created vertiginous sense of the infinite vastness of the universe and the insignificance of human beings when viewed, in the mind’s eye, from outer space. In the Lucretian universe the gods are indifferent to human beings, and…

7 days ago / 5 visits

"Do not suppose that I was a very deep thinker, or was marked as a precocious person. I was a very lively imaginative person, and could believe in the Arabian Nights as easily as in Encyclopedia!" ~ Faraday.

9 days ago / 5 visits

In ‘Civilization and Its discontents’ www.stephenhicks.org/wp-content/uploads/ 2015/10/FreudS-CIVILIZATION-AND-ITS-DISC ONTENTS-text-final.pdf Sigmund Freud wrote, “One can try to recreate the world, to build up in its stead another world in which its most unbearable features are eliminated and repl…

5 weeks ago / 11 visits

As a historical science, evolution is confirmed by the fact that so many independent lines of evidence converge to its single conclusion. Independent sets of data from geology, paleontology, botany, zoology, herpetology, entomology, biogeography, comparative anatomy and physiology, genetics and popu…

8 weeks ago / 10 visits

Science is "Organized common sense"

3 months ago / 21 visits

When the past has ceased to throw its light onto the future, the mind of man wanders in obscurity. ~ Tocqueville.

3 months ago / 14 visits

What most interests us here is not the truthfulness of a person but the truth of a story, and the story tells us that there exists such intense happiness in acting that the actor like a gambler, will accept that all the odds are stacked against him. This I admit, is difficult to believe; what convin…

3 months ago / 16 visits

. . . Politics begins, as it were, to expand its realm downward to the necessities of life themselves, so that to the philosophers’ scorn for the perishable affairs of mortals was added the specifically Greek contempt for everything that is necessary for mere life and survival. As Cicero, in his fut…

3 months ago / 16 visits / 1 comment

World History is the Final Court of Appeals” ~ Hegel

3 months ago / 17 visits

I learn more from your doubts than from All that the divine Aristotle, the wise Plato, and the incomparable Descartes have affirmed so lightly

4 months ago / 11 visits

Consciousness is the 'appearance of a world'. The essence of the phenomenon of consciousness experience is that a single and unified reality becomes present: If you are conscious, a world appears to you. This is true in dreams as well as in the waking state, but in dreamless deep sleep, nothing appe…

4 months ago / 12 visits

* Everything in life is meaningless, the pain and suffering are fruitless and futile. There is no object in life. To nature nothing matters but the continuation of the species. And is not this last a hasty proposition based on over-brief periods of time, the observation of an eye that sees but a lit…

4 months ago / 14 visits

The incomplete joys of this world will never satisfy the human heart

4 months ago / 18 visits / 1 person likes

Arthur Schopenhauer shared with Hobbes a pessimistic view of human nature, but he posited the source within the individual: he exposed the dark side of humanity. Hobbes saw people at war with one another, whereas Schopenhauer considered that they were at war with themselves. For him, the internal fe…

4 months ago / 17 visits

I’m Tibetan, I’m Buddhist and I’m the Dalai Lama, but if I emphasize these differences it sets me apart and raises barriers with other people. What we need to do is to play more attention to the ways in which we are the same as other people

4 months ago / 17 visits