Even if you’ve only been paying attention to me since I started this blog, one thing you might have noticed is that I am interested in other people’s various worldviews. In particular I find myself compelled by their structures or their shapes.* I enjoy looking at these worldviews on their own, but I also like […]
Lucy Keer at the blog drossbucket wrote a post called “20 Fundamentals,” inspired by John Nerst’s post “30 Fundamentals” at his own blog called Everything Studies. The idea of each is that the author would list some of the background assumptions, attitudes, or approaches on which their thinking was based. I read “20 Fundamentals” with […]
If I’m right to endorse the Hofstatderean idea of the self (that is, that self is a pattern, and any instance of that pattern is an instance of the self), then I probably have to support the idea that if my pattern were replicated in a computer, it would also be a version of myself. […]
“Tell me one last thing,” said Harry. “Is this real? Or has this been happening inside my head?” Dumbledore beamed at him, and his voice sounded loud and strong in Harry’s ear even though the bright mist was descending again, obscuring his figure. “Of course it is happening inside you head, Harry, but why on […]
Watching Mad Max: Fury Road (Miller 2015), which I very much enjoyed, I was struck by how existentialist the film was; indeed, it made me realize that all post-apocalyptic fiction has an existentialist seed. But then, there is also something post-apocalyptic about existentialism. God is dead, spake Friedrich Nietzsche in 1882. God remains dead. And […]
A Problem with Harry Potter Due to the news that in the latest Harry Potter film the snake Nagini is revealed to be a human woman transformed, there has been a recent popular re-evaluation of the seven novels which originated the franchise. Many of the observations that I’ve seen on Twitter have focused on Rowling’s […]
(Read Part 1 first.) Having read his book, I had expectations about which theological world(s) W. Paul Jones’s Theological Worlds Inventory would place me in. World 3—that of T. S. Eliot’s “hollow men,” of people who feel like they might be wearing a mask over a personal emptiness—had most appealed to me in the book. Immediately on […]
Perhaps, to steal from a friend I couldn’t both pseudonymize and cite, it might be more accurate to call this page pedigree, provenance, heraldry, rather than a dramatis personæ. Whatever it is, it’s a list of the people I mention in this blog; it’s like a Works Cited page mixed with an index, but with […]
I would like to add a periodic feature to this blog: whenever I have a question for which I would like to know the answer, I will not just ask it in a single post, lost to time; I will also add it to a master list linked in the upper header of the blog. […]
Accidental Shelf-Browsing 