Articles by Dinesh

One of the greatest philosophers of nineteenth century, Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) believed that human action is determined not by reason by but by 'will' -- the blind and irrational desire for physical existence. This selection of his writing on religion, ethics, politics, women, suicide, books and many other themes is taken from his last work, 'Parerga and Paralipomena,' published in 1851. These pieces depict humanity as locked in a struggle beyond good and evil, and each individual absol…

People with a fixed mindset towards anxiety tend to see it as a fundamental part of who they are, and something over which they have no control. But managing emotions and learning how to control anxiety is a skill that takes practice, just like learning any new skill. Adopt a growth mindset instead, and surprise yourself. From Aeon Magazine - facebook post

Tragedy is not injustice ~ Ihab Hassan

Craft, Collingwood plato.stanford.edu/entries/collingwood-aesthetics argued, is skilled work purposefully directed toward a final product or designed artifact; the ‘craftsman knows in advance’ what the end product will look like. The craftsman’s foreknowledge is required by the very idea of a craft. . . . . . Art is in this respect an entirely different domain. Like craft, art requires the exercise of skill and technique, but the artist does not have anything resembling the craftsman’s…

In Egyptian societies and in earlier ones, magic, played an important role in the treatment of illness, but it was proscribed in Judaism. Instead, prayer was the principal form of treatment. This makes sense considering that the source of illness was thought to be a failure of faithfulness of God. It also is consistent with the fact that until exposure to the scientific medicine of Greece in the second century B.C., Judaism lacked a counterpart to the priests of ancient Egypt. Prayer by individu…

"Whosoever wishes to grasp God with his with his intellect becomes an atheist.” Zinzendorf of Moravian Brotherhood

One summer in the early 1740s, on the last day of his life, a young man from Paris became the first modern cartographer to see the mountain called ‘Le Gerbier de Jone.’ This weird volcanic cone juts out of an empty landscape of pastures and ravines, blasted by the freezing wind called the ‘burle.’ Three hundred and fifty miles south of Paris, at a point on the map diametrically opposed to the capital, it stands on the watershed that divides the Atlantic from the Mediterranean. On its western slo…

::THE DIVIDED SELF:: . . . . Feelings of guilt, lust, or fear were often stronger than reasoning. (On the other hand, I was quite good at lecturing friends in similar situations about what was right for them) The Roman poet Ovid captured my situation perfectly. In ‘Metamorphoses,’ classics.mit.edu/Ovid/metam.html Medea is torn between her love for Jason and her duty to her father. She laments I am dragged along by a strange new force. Desire and reason are pulling in different directions.…

I am not a person I am a succession of persons Held together by memory. When the string breaks, The beads are scattered.

This is the moment when you see again the red berries of the mountain ash and in the dark sky the birds' night migrations. It grieves me to think the dead won't see them— these things we depend on, they disappear. What will the soul do for solace then? I tell myself maybe it won't need these pleasures anymore; maybe just not being is simply enough, hard as that is to imagine.

. . . Most theorists of beauty from Kant through the twentieth century would heartily agree: to think that our response to work of art should depend on its market value is today regarded as gross vulgarity. However, if we are looking back not only through history but als0o to the prehistory of art and decoration, we might come closer to an understanding of uncomfortable facts that are bound to irritate this modern aesthetic sensibility. The very idea that costliness and art are intrinsically c…

There is a bit of old gossip that continues to be retold amongst biologists. According to this take, the eminent British biologist, J.B.S. Haldane, was attending a cocktail party when he was confronted by a prelate with a rather unusual question. Repeated ever since the last 1930s, this brief encounter has become a staple when discussing the diversity of life on our planet. The religious gentleman's question was: "As a student of biology, Dr. Haldane, what can you tell us about the nature of God…

About two hundred years ago, the idea that truth was made rather than found began to take hold of the imagination of Europe. The French Revolution had shown that the whole vocabulary of social relations, and the whole spectrum of social institutions, could be replaced almost overnight. The precedent made utopian politics the rule rather than the exception among the intellectuals. Utopian politics set aside questions about both the will of God and the nature of man and dreams of creating a hither…

"Philosophy is the education of grown-ups ~ Stanley Cavell

The pluralism of Empedocles (495-435 BC) was more modest. He argued that a small set of elements sufficed to explain the material nature of the world. Probably borrowing from his predecessors, he took water, air, and life, added a fourth element earth, and composed a four-part elemental scheme that held for nearly 2,000 years. As for Anaxagoras, Empedocles believed that the elements required an overreaching principle of organization. In his case it was not ‘Nous’ (common sense) but rather a…

The 'Penguin English Dictionary' defines a delusion as 'a false belief o impression'. Surprisingly the illustrative quotation the dictionary gives is from phillip e Johnson: "Darwinism is the story of humanity's liberation from the delusion that its destiny is controlled by a power higher than itself" Can that be the same Phillip E Johnson who leads the creationist charge against Darwinism in America today? Indeed it is, and the quotation is, as we might guess, taken out of context. I hope the f…

There is a kind of immortality in every garden - Stillmeadow Daybook, Gladys Teber, 1899-1980 .......according to the legend that has persisted for a full century, Bateson en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Bateson spent most of that train ride immersed in an old article from a small journal published in Austria. He was not gazing idly at the scenery. The article, written by an obscure monk named George Mendel, described the elegant botanical experiments he had conducted in a modest monastery g…

*Reading does not make a man wise; it only makes him learned. *Respectability is the cloak under which fools cover their stupidity. *No action is in itself good or bad, but only such according to convention *The man who in these conditions listens tolerantly to your opinion and allows that you may be as right as he, is a friend indeed. ~ Page 16 *How happy life would be if an undertaking retained to the end the delight of its beginning, if the dregs of a cup of wine were as sweet as…