Continuum Philosophical Insight
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"
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 …
The past three years have seen a considerable amount of angst over the changes digital technology--ubiquituous socialized participation in all forms of media, in particular (with social media platforms becoming increasingly expansive in their reach and integration with the rest of the media)--has been rendering in not only our political and social but also psychological …
The terms "modernism" and "postmodernism" are very frequently abused. As all terms of culture, they admit a wide variety of predications: were you to compare two things called "modern" or "postmodern" side-by-side, the connection may not be immediately evident, except that very probably they would both be ugly: regardless of whether they are architecture, sculpture, …
Continue reading "Modernism, Ultramodernism, and Postmodernism"
We take our instruments, our technologies--those artefactual extensions of our practically-oriented capacities--for granted. This is true most of all of our particular languages--those delimited, structured, historically-developed systems of verbal articulation recorded and regulated by dictionaries and grammar textbooks--which we seldom think of as technology at all. No technology receives as much use; though, like all …
Although not yet a widely understood field, semiotics--defined briefly as the study of the action of signs--has begun to make a name for itself; in Europe, at least. Heretofore in the United States, most people outside of a limited circle who believe themselves to know something of "semiotics" know what is in fact semiology, merely …
