Francis Williams' Philosophy Blog

 what use is moral philosophy or philosophy in general to the average person? not much. all this high falutin talk about virtue and vice, and discussion of simple concepts in terms of technical jargon is just the plaything of pseudointellectuals. no one needs to be that precise about their moral values, nobody is that obsessed with moralizing that they will need categories of values or complex arguments to support their actions. only the fewest people, mainly intellectuals, read moral philosophy, and most of them rarely enact what they have read or practice what they read. most people treat philosophy, like religion nowadays as a trivial accompaniment to their lives, like a pleasant bedside story that they read to themselves so they can sleep better. who is going to read all of kant's metaphysics of morals, and base his daily actions on the the strict observance of these principles? nobody. if you tell the average person on the street that you are a deontologist or a utilitarian, t...

 we have given ourselves the impression that we can arrest time, that we can control the forces of nature. museums keep artifacts preserved as long as possible, they store them in dry cool cabinets for as long as possible. we believe we can create immutable things, language has given us the concepts, the illusion that we can arrest time. as a result we believe there is nothing left to control anymore, except ourselves, we have turned inwards because in our consciousness is still the remains of some mysterious force that cannot be controlled. but soon we will have that under control as well. we used to be much more in awe of the forces of nature, we read into them something divine,  we spoke to them through our prayers, like we supplicated our gods. everything around us reminded us of change of the inevitability of death, of the cycles, of mutability. now everything reminds us of staticness, of inertia,,and whatever change there is it is controlled measurable calculable by man....

 the whirling dervishes gathered in the courtyard, whose perimeter was filled with spectating guests. they bowed to each other as a gesture of respect and honor. as they entered they wore black cloaks the removal of which symbolized the spiritual rebirth, their arms clasped around their upper bodies represented the number one, god's unity. they slowly begin to spin or whirl on a central axis, from right to left, around the heart, once he  starts  to whirl faster his arms open with the right arm pointed at the sky to receive god's beneficence and his left hand, where his eyes are staring, pointed down towards earth. the process of spinning in circles is a  from of active mediation in which one dissolves the ego and personal desires and focuses on god. the spinning dervishes are representative of the planets orbiting the sun. greater spiritual perfection is achieved the faster one spins , calling out the name allah, and abandoning personal identity and ego. with head t...

 don't dress for the job you have but for the job you want. by that i mean. what kind of philosophy do you have and what kind of philosophy do you want? is your philosophy a reflection of who you are or who you want to be? philosophy is usually a form of commands, precepts, tenets, that have a normative tone, they instruct you to do something. if i am a lazy person and i feel guilty about it, then my philosophy might be "carpe diem, seize the day": that would be a productive philosophy because it means that i am aspiring towards something which i am lacking in. on the other hand the opposite would be the self justifying philosophy which is "do not strive for more than you can achieve" or "know thy limitations"- that would be a philosophy of resignation. because it means that you have already accepted that you are lazy and the way you try to overcome the guilt of being lazy - the feelings of inadequacy - is by justifying it , by saying "look there ...

 he looked upon everything with disgust, he looked down upon the world and its creations. he frowned upon the world. everything therein is rotten, it is sick. he could not be moved by spectacle, or any human achievement of significance. for him it was all just matter piled up. what happened to the olden days when congregations used to be awe inspired by the organ, now it was just a whining windbag. it is better that it all just ceased to be, that we stop trying to produce great works of art, that instead we just focus inwards in tranquility and calm and peace, and strive to escape the world. we should all be working on our sand mandalas in order to pour them away on the beach. what are all these projects, but a tribute to mans vanity, but an expression of mans vanity. he builds a great monument but to please himself, then he sits down and eats a hotdog, out of disgust. he had already concluded that there was nothing to explain. that every explanation required its own explanation, a...

 having spent a life crafting other worlds he now no longer seemed able to dwell within his own. his training was that of hypotheticals and counterfactuals - his pedigree was in the unfulfilled, it was in the unmade. it was in the cavernous, convoluted worlds of the merely imaginable, the permissive, the promiscuous. so when he touched down back on earth he was unable to breath the air that i breathe. we have to understand the position of this eleventeenth century monk, who was reclusified in his own prism. he crafted worlds of his own fabrication, he moulded shapes from his own whimsy, he built edifices of his own flights of fancy- yes but was he capable of settling with the real? no. what did he do in his spendtrhift pages, he stormed and railed against the world. he wrote the passage that were best remembered as peerless entries into the vaults of time. after all that was the highest form of meditation, meditation upon the unthinkable. for him timelines extended, they extrapolat...