The Ten Bulls
A series of ten Buddhist drawings make up what are known collectively as the Ten Oxherding Pictures or sometimes just as the Ten Bulls. Each one graphically illustrates a stage…
philosophy
The sharp edge: razors and rituals
Since I switched to using a safety razor, as I wrote about last spring, I’ve continued to pursue my explorations into razors, blades, technologies and techniques about shaving. I’ve learned…
Channelling John Stuart Mill
In the opening few pages of his essay On Liberty, John Stuart Mill warned about the “tyranny of the prevailing opinion.” Anyone familiar with the mob mentality than can erupt…
Plutarch on listening, and The Block
“e observe that… the great majority of persons …practise speaking before they have acquired the habit of listening.” Plutarch wrote that in his essay De Auditu, or On Listening. Reading…
A Royal Wedding, Or A Royal Life, And A Royal World?
Some find a royal wedding moving and beautiful. But I disagree. Beautiful would be taking the vast fortune of the “royal” family of England and sharing it with the five…
This Flowchart Helps You Evaluate any Argument
Figure 1 from Cook, Ellerton, and Kinkead 2018. CC BY 3.0 Complex issues with multiple influential factors can be difficult to process for some. Three researchers from George Mason University…
Found in translation
Language translation fascinates me. It’s a mix of language skill, art, interpretation, science and, apparently, divination. Maybe even magic. Going from one language into another is far from a simple…
What Do I Want? (Or, What is to be done, if we are to have any future worth living?)
What do I want? Well, I would like to see us move immediately to a libertarian socialist society, along the lines that Chomsky, Bertrand Russell, Rudolph Rocker, or Murray Bookchin…
Hundreds of Short Videos to Learn About Philosophy
Too many people think that philosophy is a practice for elites or people with too much time on their hands. Contrary to popular belief studying philosophy is easy and readily…
Bitcoin, Crypto-Currencies and Global Trends — Tipping Points Approaching Fast
Question: Cryptos — Which ones, and when? Answer: Two, and right now Waiting for the (painfully slow) transfer of funds from one Bitcoin wallet to another — both my own, in order to be…
Shin Godzilla: the reboot
I’m almost embarrassed to admit that, of all the Godzilla films I’ve watched, I can recall the exact details of few. I cannot remember, just by looking at the title,…
War for the Planet of the Apes considered
Pierre Boulle never imagined War for the Planet of the Apes, the latest film in the remade franchise. In fact, it would be fair to say the author of the…
Montaigne and The Block
I do love reading Michel de Montaigne. And writing about him. In 2014 alone, I wrote ten separate posts about him and his famous book, Essays. But since then, my…
The Dude, the Tao and the Dharma
I suppose it all began with Benjamin Hoff. Hoff was one of the first contemporary writers to attempt to distill Taoism in a lighthearted form for Westerners when he wrote…
Thrasymachus and The Block
There’s a character in Plato’s Republic called Thrasymachus who acts as a foil to Socrates by presenting a series of comments and arguments the old philosopher has to debate and…
Marcus Aurelius and The Block
Perhaps the most famous work by any Stoic is the Meditations, written as a series of notes-to-myself by Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius. I’ve been reading a lot of Stoic works…
The hospital, the trolley and political ethics
In its decision about the redevelopment of the Collingwood General & Marine Hospital, Collingwood Council is evidently taking the track less travelled, trolleyology-wise. Seen as an ethical issue, our council…
The dystopian present
If there is one good thing to come out of the election of Donald Trump, it has been the renewed interest in a certain genre of literature. Sales of dystopian…
Empathy and The Dog Allusion
Empathy, writes Martin Rowson, is one of the things that make us human, make us civilized, allows us to interact without tearing one another’s throats out. Without it, we’d have…
On growing old
No man is so old that he does not think himself able to live another year. (Nemo enim est tam senex qui se annum non putet posse vivere) I was…