There are the two views of looking at the cosmos I mentioned earlier. There is the view of Aristotle, that the physical world is all there is. Anything more complex or divine than what we can see and touch and…
Category: philosophy
The log
Everyone knows Raphael's painting The School of Athens. It is a fresco in the Vatican, illustrating philosophy, by showing one great big happy cocktail party with all the ancient philosophers.I had a background in classic science fiction, and one of…
The One thing
My adult life has been one of travel. I've been lucky enough to circle the globe many times, and to travel to Europe and America more times than I can count. I try to seek out sites of history, of…
The One, part two
In my previous post, I sketched out Pascal's Wager, and commented a little on why the cosmos must be more complex than our thoughts about it.I was moved to comment by this endearingly earnest post in a blog I follow.…
The One
There is a philosophical argument that first arose in Western thought in the Seventeenth Century: God exists or does not exist. We cannot determine which is true by thought alone.There are two outcomes at death: Heaven or HellYou must choose…
Cross and bothered
Yesterday, I talked about how a national flag could be used as a symbol of hatred. Hatred towards immigrants, hatred towards the rest of the world. If someone displays an American flag icon prominently on their social media talk page,…
OK never
A Twitter friend of mine - a very talented writer by the name of Jacinta Horgan - put me on to a book called The Exact Opposite of Okay by Laura Steven. This Young Adult novel is as powerful and…
Are you Greek?
At a conference in Delphi - we were studying The Sophist, which turned my brain into spaghetti, with Plotinus and Sophocles* for light relief – our dialectic professor asked me at the evening plenary, "Tell me, are you an Australian?""Yes,…
Putting the Sass into Disaster
I've written about the Notre Dame fire. It is a disaster that affected me deeply through my own personal connection. Countless millions around the globe, not to mention Parisians and French folk also saw the fire as a tragedy.I put…
Coming alive
There's a moment - and every writer knows it well - where the characters step off the kerb and start walking for themselves.No matter how tightly the story is plotted, how rigidly the character's actions and appearance and thoughts are…
