Form Follows Function?
Louis Sullivan is credited with coming up with the phrase “form follows function.” It is useful to know that someone in the recent past invented this notion…
Patriarchal Culture
In the nineteen fifties, Lawrence Kohlberg produced a theory of moral development. The three main levels are pre-conventional, conventional and post-conventional. In nineteen eighty-two, Carol Gilligan published…
God the Father
Some things are simpler than we give them credit for. Contemplative prayer requires stilling the mind and being attentive because being a self-obsessed distracted chatterbox is the…
Belief vs Knowledge and Plato’s Tripartite Soul
Plato suggested that if a person were to be cut open a homunculus,[1] a lion and a many-headed beast would be revealed. These creatures represent the three…
Outlandish Freedom
In Dr. Faustus, Thomas Mann identifies the inadequacies of thinking of freedom in terms of free will. The narrator describes the paradox of freedom as being only…
The Significance of “Public” in the Public Justice System
The alternative to public justice is private justice. Historically, private justice has included interminable feuds. A member of a family is killed or injured, the affected family…
“Folk Psychology:” You are Buying into a Crazy Theory If You Use This Term
Folk psychology is the derogatory term used by physicalists for our normal natural language (e.g., English, Spanish, etc.) way of describing mental states and explaining why people…
The Chinese Room Thought Experiment by John Searle
John Searle introduced the Chinese Room thought experiment in 1980 order to give people a way to picture the difference between what computers are doing and the…
The Reflexive Problem in Analytic Philosophy: Illogical Logicians
On some topics, most analytic philosophers embrace assertions that involve gross violations of logic and common sense. For instance, determinism is either accepted as true, or it…
Does the Concept of Metaphysical Freedom Make Sense?
“Michael” writes: “Freedom and determinism are empty categories; they cannot be employed to distinguish any sequence of events from any other.” Logically, this could be because all…
Moral Relativism and Moral Realism
Moral relativists, also known as moral “subjectivists,” believe that all moral perspectives are equal. Thus, we should be tolerant of other people’s moral views even when they…
Cultural Relativism
The argument for cultural relativism is this: 1. All moral principles and rules apply only to the culture, time and place from which they arise. There are…
Clare Graves, Spiral Dynamics, and the Purple/Blue Hybrid
The pathological version of Green thinking flattens Clare Grave’s hierarchy of moral development because it rejects the notion of superior and inferior. Strangely enough, the tendency has…
Taleb and Business Ethics
Many of this semester’s readings will be taken from Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. He first rose to fame with his 2007 book Black Swan, the title…
Whom Do We Imitate?
We imitate absolutely everybody, at least potentially. We will imitate homeless drug addicts with psychiatric disorders, our boss, celebrities, and anyone we interact with socially. When anyone…