Thinking Beyond Academia

Welcome to Continuum Philosophical Insight: a philosophical consulting, education, and research firm providing philosophically-informed insights outside the standard paradigms of academic practice. Welcome to philosophy for digital life.

What is the meaning of life?

Everyone asks this question and seldom, if ever, is anyone really satisfied with the answers.  Why?  It is perhaps the oldest of philosophical questions; you would think after 2600 years, someone would have—should have—found a final answer.  Maybe someone has, but we don’t recognize the answer; or, maybe, something of the answer resides in asking the question.  And maybe part of the question’s difficulty resides in learning to ask the question in the right way.

That is, questions about the meaning of life are not questions in the same way that math problems are.  There are no blank lines into which someone can write a solution which solves the problem once and for all, for all time, whenever it is asked.  Life—human life—is much too complex for that: our difficulties are not the same from one day to the next, let alone across years, decades, and generations.

Which isn’t to deny the wisdom of eras past; to the contrary, we are fools to ignore the great thinkers of those 2600 years who spent their lives struggling with the same questions we find ourselves facing today.  Questions of meaning—life, purpose, truth, goodness, justice—are pursued in countless reams of philosophical texts, from the dialogues of Plato to the disputed questions of the scholastics, from Descartes’ Meditations to Nietzsche’s polemics.

But navigating the halls of philosophical thought is no easy, straightforward, or simple task.  Where should one begin?  With Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics?  Descartes, Locke, the moderns?  Can someone pick up Martin Heidegger without having first wrestled with Kant?  Can critical theory be grasped without a phenomenological strength?

Individual Guidance

Navigating the digital age may seem a daunting task: there are endless claimants to have answers, endless advertisements of supposed expertise, supposed solutions to all life’s problems.  Though I have expertise and a specialization—having earned a Doctorate in Philosophy—I am neither an expert nor a specialist. You could say that I know a little something about everything, yes; but, much more importantly, I spend my days (and many of my nights) studying, researching, thinking about—questing after—an understanding of the whole: the whole of life, the universe, and everything; how all the pieces fit together, or how they ought to fit together.

Most of all, I seek to know best of all how to question rightly.  Little of what I do consists in the provision of answers (at most, I present arguments as for what I believe the answers to be)–instead, I teach how to ask questions, how to discover meaning through all the noise.

You and I and nearly everyone else in the world are entering, have entered, a new paradigm of technology: the paradigm of digital life. While many have focused on the mass distribution potential of the internet, the more potent possibility allowed by digital technology is the return of direct connections between persons. Distances are shrunk by our present-day connectivity; which, in turn, liberates time from the rigidity of the modern work schedule. In the emerging paradigm of digital life, new pathways for learning are developing.

 

Consulting & Analysis

To be a good company today does not mean simply being a profitable one that does not violate rules (regulations, codes of conduct, compliance, etc.), but rather, it requires to be one which actively benefits the lives of all its stakeholders: customers, employees, managers, investors, the community, the environment, and so on.

Through a process of theoretical research, conceptual distillation, and subsidiarist implementation, Continuum aids companies in becoming good: not merely profitable, but beneficial–true doers of good deeds.

Additionally, semiotic analysis is offered to help each company develop a strategy for communication and marketing that understands deeply the nature of what is being signified, the means of signification, and the reception in the community.

Contact

If you have a question, or want to know something more about Continuum–or philosophy in general–please feel free to send an email:

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