Existentialism
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In a moment of Sunday comfort, I sat down with a cup of tea and pulled a book from one of my shelves. It was an anthology of existentialist writings. Admittedly, it has been many years since I thought seriously about existentialism. With many dusty pages turned, I started to reflect on the numerous inscriptions…
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The late Steven Weinberg had a wonderful comment about life and the human condition in his book, The First Three Minutes: ‘The more the universe seems comprehensible,’ he wrote, ‘the more it also seems pointless.’ I’m sympathetic with his view about the god-of-the-gaps. Truth be told, I consider myself agnostic; I don’t know for certain…
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Outside of science, one of my favourite things to study as a hobby is history. I also deeply enjoy and appreciate philosophy. One thing I’ve learned in my time studying history and philosophy is that, when judged alongside the human character (insofar that we may establish such a generalisation), democracy is a system that perhaps…
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So much of my younger writing was written like an existential treatise. It sought to analyse patterns and trends in relation to human behaviour throughout history, focusing in particular on the reoccurrence of popular forms of orthodoxy and the epistemology behind them. In simple terms, it sought to critique the tendency toward the “absolute”, in…
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The theme of self-deceptive thought amounts to little more than the human ability to function in the mode of believing a particular lie whilst simultaneously not believing that lie. In Being and Nothingness Sartre tackles this human complexity – the human ability to be self-deceptive, through what he considers to be the phenomenon of ‘bad…