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Sophia’s Coracle

I spent most of 2019 and early 2020 writing about moral philosophy based on my 50 years of reading and reflection. This started as a reply to what I saw as a glaring absence of historical context and critical thinking about the philosophy of information. The work became a brief chronicle of moral philosophy from […]

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Moral Philosophy

Ethics Part 16: The Frankfurt School (aka Critical Theory) and the Devolution of Academia

“The Matrix” was an unusual event as a movie at the close of the millennium. A box office hit that set a long-standing record for an R-rated film, people lined up around the block to watch it because it would blow your mind and was the kind of social force Walter Benjamin long before said […]

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Moral Philosophy

Ethics Part 14: Darwin, the Death of God and the Birth of AI

Otto Neurath was a founding member of the Vienna Circle of logical positivists in the early 20th century.  A latter day Comte, Neurath was both a Marxist utopian and a campaigner for the grand vision of the unification of all learning under one materialist, atheist, anti-metaphysical science. Neurath was a pre-cursor to Edward O. Wilson’s […]

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Moral Philosophy

Ethics Part 13: Transcendentalism, Idealism, Pragmatism and Vedanta in the West

  Ram Dass and George Harrison did much to popularize Indian metaphysical and spiritual ideas in the 1960’s and beyond.  They were gurus to hippies the world over. But they were not the first to bring this way of being to the West. In early to mid- 19th century America, Emerson and Thoreau were part […]

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Moral Philosophy

Ethics Part 10: The Legacies of Kant and Goethe and the German Enlightenment

Frederick II, (1712 – 1786) was King of Prussia. Called “The Great” and “Old Fritz,” he was a powerful prince who sponsored the growth of arts and sciences across the entire spectrum of learning. As a military leader and statesman, he was among the greats and doubtless the people of Lithuania and Poland had less […]