Category Archives: 3QD essays

Everything is meaningless – but that’s okay

Posted on October 26, 2015 by

What would it be for life to have a “meaning”? What does it mean when people say life is meaningful? I’m not sure, so let’s start with smaller, more obviously meaningful things. Better yet, let’s start with some meaningless things. When … Continue reading →

Posted in 3QD essays, Meanings of life / death / social & moral stuff | 7 Comments

“A Stranger to One’s Own Country”

Posted on September 28, 2015 by

Descartes was not a bookish man. There’s a well-known anecdote that reveals what he thought of libraries: One of his friends went to visit Descartes at Egmond. This gentleman asked him about physics books: which ones did he most value, … Continue reading →

Posted in 3QD essays, Books, Historical episodes | Leave a comment

The Magical Dimensions of the Globe

Posted on August 31, 2015 by

There’s a particularly good episode of Doctor Who (“The Shakespeare Code”) wherein the Doctor and Martha visit Shakespeare and save the world from a conspiracy of witches. The witches’ plan is to take possession of Shakespeare and force him to write … Continue reading →

Posted in 3QD essays, Historical episodes, Machines / gadgets / technology / games | Leave a comment

Learning from Hume; or, Hume and Particle Physics

Posted on August 5, 2015 by

Philosophy students are typically taught the wrong lesson from the great Scottish skeptic David Hume. The standard story goes something like this. British empiricists like Locke and Berkeley wanted to connect everything we know to what we experience through the … Continue reading →

Posted in 3QD essays, Historical episodes, Kant and/or Hume | 1 Comment

On appreciating systems

Posted on July 6, 2015 by

How wonderful it would be to be a systematic thinker! One marvels at the Aristotles, the Aquinases, the Descarteses, the Kants, and the Hegels and the Marxes (well, the Karl Marxes anyway), the Freuds – those who know how to … Continue reading →

Posted in 3QD essays, Kant and/or Hume | 2 Comments

How not to be afraid of death

Posted on June 8, 2015 by

Set aside any belief in an afterlife, even the vaguely hopeful “I’ll return to the energy of the universe” sort of view. The realization that your run of life is finite is troubling. At first, when we begin to think … Continue reading →

Posted in 3QD essays, Meanings of life / death / social & moral stuff | 2 Comments

London, 1641

Posted on May 11, 2015 by

“Many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased” – Daniel 12:4 London was an exciting place to be in 1641. The political uncertainty was both thrilling and terrifying: many Puritans, convinced that their suspected crypto-catholic king, Charles … Continue reading →

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The Fermi Paradox, Mass Effect, and Transhumanism

Posted on April 13, 2015 by

The Fermi Paradox The story is that sometime in the early 1950s, four physicists were walking to lunch and discussing flying saucers. The place was Los Alamos, and the lunch group included Enrico Fermi, Edward Teller, Emil Konopinski, and Herbert … Continue reading →

Posted in 3QD essays, Machines / gadgets / technology / games | Leave a comment

On Birthdays

Posted on March 16, 2015 by

“A genius is a god under whose protection each person lives from the moment of his birth.” This is the opinion of Censorinus, a Roman rhetorician of the third century CE. Censorinus tells us that our birthday celebrations are not … Continue reading →

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Overcoming Babel

Posted on February 16, 2015 by

We all seek to capture the world with a net of language. Yet it is in the nature of nets to capture some things and let others slip away, and that goes for languages too. Our words turn experiences into … Continue reading →

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What to do with my dead body

Posted on January 19, 2015 by

As I’m closer to death than birth, I think from time to time about what to do with my dead body. Of course, in the main I don’t really care. I’ll be done with it, and it will be nothing … Continue reading →

Posted in 3QD essays, Meanings of life / death / social & moral stuff | 2 Comments

Hobbes, Boyle, and the vacuum pump

Posted on December 22, 2014 by

Sometime in the late 1650s, Robert Boyle built an apparatus that removed the air from within a glass dome. The members of the newly-formed Royal Society promptly set about devising all manner of experiments to perform with the newfangled device. … Continue reading →

Posted in 3QD essays, Historical episodes | 2 Comments

The aural time traveler

Posted on November 24, 2014 by

Some years back my musicologist friend introduced me to the charming world of gramophones. (A brief history may be in order: before there were iPods and YouTube, there were CDs; before that, there were vinyl records, still very much in … Continue reading →

Posted in 3QD essays, Historical episodes, Music, Phonograph records | Leave a comment

Reality is down the hall

Posted on October 27, 2014 by

“It is therefore worth noting,” Schopenhauer writes, “and indeed wonderful to see, how man, besides his life in the concrete, always lives a second life in the abstract.” I suppose you might say that some of us (especially college professors) … Continue reading →

Posted in 3QD essays, Metaphysical musings | Leave a comment

Quaere, how much do we really see?

Posted on September 29, 2014 by

How much of the world do we actually experience? Of course, I’m not bemoaning the shortness of human life, or the narrow range of the visual spectrum, or the insensitivities of our skins and tongues. There’s no doubt we’re missing … Continue reading →

Posted in 3QD essays, Historical episodes | 1 Comment