Continuum Philosophical Insight
Personal Philosophical Consulting and Education
In his highly-quotable, rarely understood and seminal work, Understanding Media, Marshall McLuhan distinguishes early on between what he calls "hot" and "cold" media, which are, respectively "high" and "low" definition. A hot, high-definition medium is low in participation, while the colder and the lower-definition a medium is, the deeper our participation in it must be: that …
Where do we get our “ideas” or “beliefs”? Before answering, it is helpful to define each of those terms—they tend to be terms that we presume ourselves to know but may not really understand. First, “idea”: an idea is a conceptualization of meaning. In other words, it is the means by which we understand the …
Continue reading "Thoughts on Being Human [2] – Sentimental Belief"
One thing lies common to all of us: we are human. We have human bodies, human minds; human feelings, human thoughts, human desires, human beliefs. But aside from these and other such generic commonalities, our experiences differ. The experiences of being a man or being a woman (or being intersex, for that matter, though an …
Continue reading "Thoughts on Being Human [1] – Presumption"
As a Research Fellow with the Center for the Study of Digital Life, my main project has been to explore the connections of the faculty psychology originated by Aristotle's Περὶ ψυχῆς (transliterated: Peri psuche; in Latin: De anima; in English: On the Soul) and carried into the medieval tradition, especially as found in Thomas Aquinas and …
And why is it such a problem? One of the most serious and extensive controversies of the Latin Age of philosophy was that of universals. The Greek philosophy of antiquity, and its transmission into the Latin Age by Boethius and through the Islamic tradition, had long discussed the question of whether the way in which …
