φύσις κρύπτεσθαι φιλεῖ
Karl Marx, in his book Das Kapital (1867), attempts to make the claim that history is a story of power struggles. He sees this primarily thorugh the lens of class conflict and economic control. In the future we will return to this short sighted, dangerous and, frankly, moronic understanding of the world…what is important for…
In this week’s Main Project post we ran thought the Babylonian creation myth as it appears in the Enuma Elish. Today, in the first of several posts which will deal with that story in more detail, I want to talk about the primordial goddess, the dragon of chaos, the god of the salt water —…
Editors note: I struggled for some time trying to figure out how to go about this post. The material is so incredibly rich that attempting to mine the entirety of its value in a single post is just not feasible and would do overall harm to the coherence of the project. What we are going…
In this week’s Main Project post we are going to be talking about the Babylonian creation myth found in the Enuma Elis. After thinking about it for quite a bit I decided to put forward a rather straight telling of the story. I plan, over the course of the week, to flesh out the philosophical…
In today’s More Unfashionable Observations I want to take a moment to discuss how it is that all perception, including scientific reasoning, is done with an implicit morality. Earlier we touched on the play circuit in mammals and how it regulates fair play in rats as was discovered by Jaak Pankseep. For the rat, playing…
“Only one who has risked the fight with the dragon and is not overcome by it wins the hoard…the treasure hard to attain” Carl Jung Symbols of Transformation 1912 For a Swiss psychologist Carl Jung dedicated quite a bit of effort on the discussion and analysis of dragons. In his books Symbols of Transformation 1912, Psychology and…
“The words she spoke were living things, and to speak them was to create.” – C.S. Lewis, Perelandra (1943) “Chaos is dull; it is order that is interesting, because order is the signature of a mind” -G.K. Chesterton The Man Who Was Thursday (1908) Mark Twain famously said, “history doesn’t repeat itself, but…
“The doer alone learneth” -Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra 1883 Do you like to play? That is a pretty easy question to answer. Do you know why you like to play? That is a much harder question to answer and to do so we need to enlist the help of neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp. Back…
“Die Grenzen meiner Sprache bedeuten die Grenzen meiner Welt” – Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1922 (The limits of my language mean the limits of my world) Meta- (Gr. μετά): The prefix meta comes from the greek preposition originally meaning “with,” “beyond,” “after” or “among.” Its meaning evolved in different contexts, particularly linguistic, philosophical and technical…
“I took you from the pasture and from your work as a shepherd to make you leader of my people Israel.” Samuel 7:8 In the ancient world, as people began to psychologically unify, the image of the shepherd is ubiquitous. For the Zoroastrians it was Mithra in the Avestan texts. In the Gilgamesh, Enkidu is…