The Personal Weblog of Edward W. Farrell   
 
 
Archived entries (in reverse chronological order)
 
The End of Civil Discussion
The end of Trump and the end of civil discussion
posted 2020-11-10
 
States Without Legs: Slezkine's House of Government
Thoughts on the vacuums revolutions create

posted 2020-02-10
 
Greta Thunberg and the Vagaries of the Climate Crusade
Ongoing thoughts on Global Warming
posted 2019-10-05
 
The Iceberg of Polite Social Discourse
On calling out "virtue signalling"
posted 2019-09-08
 
Notes on Poetical Birds
Some notes on poetical birds from Ovid to Shvarts.
posted 2018-12-29
 
To Hell With the Church?
To stay or not to stay in a corrupt church  
posted 2018-10-05
 
Amado Nervo and the Answer to All Tragedy
Amado Nervo and the poetics of tragedy  
posted 2018-09-19
 
Geoffrey Hill on "Individual Voice"
Geoffrey Hill on what constitutes the "individual voice" in literature.  
posted 2018-08-12
 
Dios No Existe
The ironies of "God doesn't exist."
posted 2018-04-22
 
When Facebook Feels FUBAR
Filtering a FUBAR Facebook
posted 2018-02-24
 
Nostalgia for a Smoke
Wistful thoughts on the pleasure of smoking cigarettes
posted 2017-11-29
 
Spiritual Retreat as a Form of Sour Grapes
When lack of success becomes a virtue
posted 2017-10-31
 
Akhmatova's Music : I'm Here but How Did I Get Here?
Thoughts on "revealed" poetry
posted 2017-06-10
 
Trust and Trump's America
A failure of trust led to Trump's election; can trust be restored?

posted 2017-01-25
 
Trumpism and Oligarchy
Thoughts on oligarchy and American political parties

posted 2016-11-05
 
Woody Allen's Irrational Man
Thoughts on Woody Allen's most recent take on a recurring moral premise.
posted 2016-01-24
 
Some Thoughts on Gun Control and Regulation
Recent thoughts on gun control as a response to mass shootings in the United States.
posted 2015-12-04
 
Notes on Searle's "Freedom and Neurobiology"
Notes on Searle towards a larger work on ethics
posted 2015-10-26
 
Love as Cancer
When love might as well be a disease
posted 2015-09-22
 
Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss
New tricks in the American culture wars.
posted 2015-04-06
 
Netanyahu's Address to the US Congress, March 3, 2015
On preventing a nuclear Iranian State.
posted 2015-03-05
 
I Am but a Seaman
If you dispute my word you are defying the Lord of Nature
posted 2014-04-04
 
Is Consciousness Biological?
Consciousness as a maker of worlds
posted 2014-04-04
 
Writing Aristotle
Does it take genius to portray a genius?
posted 2013-12-22
 
Northwest Passage
On moving to the Pacific Northwest
posted 2013-12-03
 
Concensus
The various meanings of concensus
posted 2013-10-02
 
Evolution Bumper Stickers
Here're a few evolution bumper stickers I've always wanted to see.
posted 2013-09-26
 
The God of the Philosophers
The wierd sisters: Revelation and Philosophy

posted 2010-07-08
 
Feeling a Little Blue? Dump Your Spouse.
Divorce is an easy thing to talk yourself into when a marriage sours because sour marriages contain the most expeditious argument for their dissolution: your spouse.  It may not be a valid argument, but it's convincing and that's usually enough.

posted 2009-12-19
 
Anthropology and 'Historical Jesusizing'
When anthropology meets Jesus, confusion reigns.

posted 2009-12-19
 
Why Pascal's Wager Persuades Even When It Doesn't
It is clear enough that choosing God should ultimately lead to obeying God and renouncing a Godless life.  And this seems quite tangible, much like the anticipated taste of a new food one reflexively hates without having tried it.

posted 2009-07-08
 
Following Natural Law
What the natural law argument does not adequately account for in this case is the "natural" propensity of human beings to take things from their found contexts and transform them in myriad ways, which from any purely rational perspective can make the line between "creative" and "perverse" exceedingly fuzzy.
posted 2002-09-26
 
Art and Morals: Leni Riefenstahl
But we also have to assume that in any relatively intact society that practices art there are certain traditions and mores that will tend to limit the acceptable uses to which art is put, even when it has little to say about radical formal innovation. The variations here certainly contain ample room for conflict when differing cultures meet head on.
posted 2002-09-06
 
Is Christianity a Moralistic Religion?
Human morality is often nothing more than a manifestation of the will to power.
posted 2002-05-22
 
On Wildlife
The most contemporary notions of wildlife are modern but in a far more self-conscious manner attempt to raise their own philosophical foundations, and have thus become ideologies.

posted 2002-05-16
 
No Enthusiam in Necessity
Prodigal Summer offers up a great biological diversity of sex: moth sex, goat sex, human sex. It's all post-Miller sex: smashed, dehumanized, stapled like a bug in a specimen tray, prodded with pins.

posted 2002-05-08
 
Does Power Corrupt or Is Power Currupted?
Power does not itself corrupt, but rather serves to reveal and empower existing corruption (pride, lust, avarice, vindictiveness, etc.).

posted 2002-03-18
 
On Cataloging Books
For me, the main trouble with a book catalog is that it is linear and cannot capture to sorts of relationships my mind forms when I research and read.  The mind is far more able to keep track of such relations that the most clever computer program, but memory is unfortunately fickle.

posted 2002-01-26
 
Scientific Approaches to Art
I don't question that scientific or mathematical approaches to art can be insightful. What I question is their repeatability and therefore their accuracy, but given a good method their accuracy will largely be a function of the quality of their assumptions about the human mental activities that are involved in the creation and perception of art.

posted 1998-10-18
 
Art Versus Craft
This rejection of craft in nearly all of its traditional forms has almost amounted to a religion among postmodernists. It has led to some curious side effects.

posted 1998-10-12
 
Mind and the Autonomy of the Self
The existence of an incredibly diverse array of these human objects that exist in the physical world only through the agency of human thought is a powerful argument for the autonomy of that thought. A comparison with the products of the builders of the rest of the animal world might further illustrate this.

posted 1998-05-09
 
E. O. Wilson and Consilience
The humanities and sciences are preeminently activities and products of the mind, and evolutionary biology has (in general) assessed the mind quite succinctly: as we typically conceive it, it doesn't exist. There is a wonderful marriage of spirit with postmodernism here, yet art, science, and religion become epiphenomenon that can have no certain meaning in this assessment, because we no longer have an "organ" with the independence to determine objective meanings. Certainly the "brain" as seen by the materialists couldn't qualify for such duty.

posted 1998-05-02
 
Exclusivity in Buddhism and Christianity
Christianity also has its social and metaphysical aspects to exclusion. Because Christianity tends to be the native religion of most westerners, it is particularly difficult for us to separate the social from the metaphysical and the two are often confused, as much by believers as non-believers.

posted 1998-04-04
 
Magic and Applied Diversity
Reducing the term 'magic' to meaninglessness through diversity. When observing the convictions of others from a position that lacks any conviction, everything indeed appears quite relative, if not meaningless.
posted 1998-03-24
 
Cassirer and Myth
Cassirer's approach to myth has the virtue of insisting that it be placed alongside science and art as a common creator of symbolic forms, which allows mythical thinking to be evaluated on its own terms, without reference to psychology.
posted 1998-01-25
 
Scientism and Heisenberg's "Deplored Division"
What is fairly clear is that the "deplored division" and all of its consequences was an entirely unlooked for result of Bacon's Great Instauration and renaissance thought in general. E. A. Burtt once attempted to decipher the great shift in western thought that accompanied science and posed a question I believe is at the heart of this...
posted 1996-07-14
 
 
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