The Real You: Alan Watts
The late Alan Watts on personal identity and understanding our place in the Universe:
The late Alan Watts on personal identity and understanding our place in the Universe:
Determinism refers to a particular feature of the world by which every event that occurs is the inevitable outcome of precisely operating physical laws on simple and complex systems. Many arguments and misunderstandings arise from not recognizing that there are different shades of determinism which are applicable to different levels of physical reality. First there…
Introduction The apparent conflict between science and religion is often viewed and argued with respect to the existence of God. In particular, demonstrations of God’s existence feature prominently in these discussions. The idea, presumably, is to show that God must exist, therefore science cannot dispense with God or theology, for that matter. Typically these demonstrations…
I lost a friend a few months ago. I miss him, but he is gone, though he lives on in my memory. My friend didn’t die, but our connection did—and it happened over the subject of death. He used to drop by unannounced late in the evening. I welcomed him in, and welcomed also his…
Big gruff men—supersaturated with testosterone—bully people with their stentorian voices, raised hackles, and looming bulk. Wielding the yang sword of decisiveness they impose their will, and women and children scramble for safety. The scrambling pays off in counterstrategies. When you don’t have yang working for you, you make yin work instead. Centuries of co-evolving yang…
Human-reality is free because it is not enough. –Sartre Within minutes of striking, the earthquake that shook Iran in 2003 claimed 30,000 souls. The disaster focused local and international governments and every type of aid group. After the tremors subsided in Bam, politics narrowed to the effort to find and save lives. In its immediate…
1. Nature and Art In Book II of the Physics Aristotle remarks, “If the ship-building art were in the wood, it would produce the same results by nature.” Aristotle is here contrasting nature and art. Nature provides the raw materials (here wood); art provides the means for fashioning those materials (here into a ship). For…