It is estimated that over 2 billion stars in our own Milky Way galaxy have planets orbiting them that could sustain life.  Are we on planet Earth a lottery winner, a one in 2 billion chance for establishing life and intelligent beings?  The odds suggest life exists elsewhere.   However, although it took billions of years to life on Earth to evolve to where we are today,  there are stars are much older that our own sun.  Several billion years older in fact.  Why no evidence of extraterrestrial life?  No radio signals, no unmanned probes, no hard evidence of v ..read more

"Creation ex nihlilo (creation out of nothing) or "Ex nihilo nihil fit" (from nothing comes from nothing)? The notion of a creator God is fundamental to Western religions.  But is it true?  The opening of Genesis in the Hebrew Bible, studied so long and hard by the Kabbalists suggests so, and the Big Bang theory gave reason for many to believe the cosmological argument for God (everything that began to exist has a cause). But the newest scientific data suggests something preceded the Big Bang.  And in our secular age, many prefer to follow the science, rightly so. Planet Earth ..read more

Hegel's "triad" of Being, Nothing, and Becoming are central to his ontology.  And it can also be used as a framework for personal achievement.  This episode explains how.  The Being/Nothing/Becoming dialectic comes first in Hegel's Science of Logic, but it also presents the pattern for his overall project of Mind (Idea), Nature, and Spirit (Geist).  And it is just this framework that one must use in pushing to new heights of success in life.    The basic approach is goal setting (Mind), assessing the path to take, including the obstacles to overcome (Nature), an ..read more

Hegel famously said  in his Phenomenology of Spirit, "Everything turns on grasping and expressing the True, not as Substance, but equally as Subject." (Miiler trans., ¶17).  That the true - truth - is equally substance and subject.   He makes this explicitly clear in the following statement, “What seems to take place outside it, to be an activity directed against it, is its own doing, its own activity; and substance shows that it is in reality subject” (Ibid, ¶37). Meaningful coincidences, Jung's synchronicity, are a demonstration of this truth.  And the mediation of the ..read more

Does Spirit evolve?   How about God? And what exactly does the term panentheism mean? This episode takes a deep dive into process philosophy, process theology, and the evolutionary nature of "becoming."   The pioneer work of Charles Hartshorne, Alfred North Whitehead, Charles Sanders Peirce, and of course Hegel, all in a way process philosophers, is addressed.  Support the show ..read more

Wittgenstein is often mention as the most influential philosopher of the 20th century.  His focus on the meaning of words became an integral part of the so-called "Analytic" branch of the discipline.    The later Wittgenstein contended that words are but tools, defined by their use within the context of the “language game” of the arena they are used, which is societally based and can evolve.  One of these sandboxes is philosophy, as well as science and religion.  And the language of one space does not necessarily hold water in another.  That there is not one unde ..read more

Is philosophy just mental masturbation?  Nothing but air? Many today see no value in philosophy because there seems to be little agreement among philosophers on anything, and much of what they say seems to have little or no impact on one's life, or society in general.  Is this the case? An examination of the major pillars upon which society stands - political systems, the law, science, and its moral base - shows just the opposite.  Holding each of these institutions up is a philosophical position.  In most cases, these are stances that have been analyzed for over two thou ..read more

The behaviorism of B.F. Skinner took the psychology world by storm.  His 1971 book "Beyond Freedom and Dignity" was hailed as the most important psychological publication of the 20th century.  And this was from someone who denied mind and free will.  It was an attempt to dignify psychology as a hard science, based on experiments and what can be observed, rather than what people think or feel, a direct contradiction to the root meaning of word psychology - "a study of mind."  He claimed that reason, values, concepts,  judgment, and purpose simply do not exist.  To ..read more

Developing one's own philosophy of life can be one of the most rewarding experiences. ll can serve as the basis for a productive, rewarding, and happy experience in this world.   Otherwise we rely on the default position, given to us by others, absorbed into our unconscious from the environment. And this produces conflicting and random direction, which can lead to doubt frustration, a lack of fulfillment, and a lack of meaning in one's life.  Whether we realize it or not, we live on the ground of philosophy, either by our choice or by adopting the views of others.  The current ..read more

The duality of Mind and Body has been debated for millennia.  This has resulted in two polarized camps - Realists vs. Idealists.  Realist contend that there is a world existing out there where we are here or not, whether we are observing it or not, whether we are thinking about it or not.  Idealists contend that ultimately only Mind exists, and the physical world around us is just an illusion, an unreal fantasy of the Mind. But there is a third camp.  Many mistakenly classify Hegel as an Idealist,  However, he actually proposed a tripartite system with Mind and Nature ..read more