Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Meaning of Life

  • How Should We Live? or The Fly Bottle Blues

    Here is a possible attitude for examination. Stick to the measurable, the calculable, and the empirically verifiable. Avoid Big Questions and Long Views. Live here, now, and to human scale. Speculation is idle. No one knows or will ever know the answers to the Big Questions. To bother one's head over the ultimate distracts from…

  • The Long and the Short of it

    Long views or short? Substack latest.

  • Politics and Meaning: More on the Conservative Disadvantage

    Here again is my Substack entry "The Conservative Disadvantage."  In it I wrote, "We don't look to politics for meaning. Or rather, we do not seek any transcendent meaning in the political sphere." Thomas Beale charitably comments (edited): Just a short note on that post: your observation about meaning is  one of the most penetrating…

  • Nietzsche, Salvation, and the Question of the Value of Life

    Substack latest.

  • Do You Value This Life? How Much?

    It is the hour of death.  You are informed by an utterly reliable source that you have exactly two options.  You can either accept death and with it utter annihilation of the self, or you can repeat your life with every last detail the same.  But if every last detail is to be the same,…

  • Practical Types

    Practical types look down on speculation, but we are not just animals with stomachs. We have eyes and not just in the head. Mundane grubbing and hassling for property and pelf are  necessary but if not kept within limits will dim spiritual sight. We are not here to pile up loot and land.

  • The Platonist and the Hedonist

    I am a Platonist (broadly speaking), but here I give the floor to the hedonist. The true philosopher aims to examine every side of every issue. He is, qua philosopher, no ideologue and no dogmatist.  Platonist: You pursue paltry pleasures that cannot last and cannot ultimately satisfy.  Hedonist: You  pursue objects lofty and lasting, but…

  • Religion as Morality and as Metaphysics

    I can't shake the thought that something is at stake in life. I cannot throw off the moral point of view. It addresses us from Elsewhere and calls us insistently to a Higher Life. It matters how we live. And this despite our being miserable bits of the Earth's fauna. This mattering cannot be a…

  • Why am I so Happy?

      Every day there are multiple outrages from the Left as my country turns into a police state. Why should I be happy?   Well, I live in Arizona, a destination state if ever there was one, and I have lived here for going on 22 years. Today is another one of those exquisitely beautiful,…

  • On Wasting Time with Philosophy (with a Jab at Pascal)

    People talk glibly about wasting time on this, that, and the other thing — but without reflecting on what it is to waste time. People think they know which activities are time-wasters, philosophy for example. But to know what wastes time, one would have to know what is a good, a non-wasteful, use of time.…

  • Is Religion Escapist?

    Escapism is a form of reality-denial.   One seeks to escape from reality into a haven of illusion.  One who flees a burning building we do not call an escapist.  Why not?   Because his escape from the fire is not an escape into unreality, but into a different reality, one decidedly superior to that of being incinerated. …

  • Is Life Good? Questioning the Question

    I do not begrudge the man who exults: Life is good! For it is good for some at some times and in some places. Such a one is living and exulting, not philosophizing. He is expressing his experience of his particular life: he needn't be trying to be objective, even if he expresses himself in…

  • Idolatry without God

    "I am the Lord thy God; thou shalt not have false gods before me." If God exists and you worship anything in his place, then that thing is a false god and you are an idolater.  But if God does not exist, and you worship anything at all, then you are also an idolater.  Or…

  • Buddhism, Suffering, and One Reason I am not a Buddhist

    (This entry touches upon some themes discussed with greater rigor, thoroughness, and scholarliness in my "No Self? A Look at a Buddhist Argument," International Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 42, no. 4 (December 2002), pp. 453-466.) For Buddhism, all is dukkha, suffering.  All is unsatisfactory.  This, the First Noble Truth, runs contrary to ordinary modes of thinking:  doesn't life routinely offer us, besides pain and…

  • Would Naturalism Make Life Easier?

    If only naturalism were unmistakably and irrefutably true! A burden would be lifted: no God, no soul, no personal survival of death, an assured exit from the wheel of becoming, no fear of being judged for one’s actions. One could have a good time with a good conscience, Hefner-style. (Or one could have a murderous…