Good morning, everyone and welcome to Saturday’s Morning Open Thread.
Morning Open Thread is a daily, copyrighted post from a host of editors and guest writers. We support our community, invite and share ideas, and encourage thoughtful, respectful dialogue in an open forum.
Join us, please.
For the next couple Saturdays, I’m exploring language—its ways of working and our attempts to understand how it actually provides commonalities universal (or at least public) enough to allow communication and the philosophical schools that touch upon our human nature. The main focus of the short series (like much of contemporary philosophy) is with the inconsistency, inadequacy, and muddle which characterizes ordinary language: how do we actually communicate. A side offering is in ethics.
Initially we explored some limitations on language (symbols and their meanings) in a lecture on the famous "Chinese Room" thought experiment. Next we explored the basics of our present day understanding of how language works with Gottlob Frege's theory of sense and reference. Widening our net slightly, the following week we discussed Occam’s Razor and Objective Morality, and a couple weeks ago it was Thomas Nagel’s argument against the philosophical school of Physicalism.
I’ll come clean here, this was a huge deal in my life. Today is about a paper published in 1972 (that I ran head-first into a few years later) that made me think about morality in a more universal way. I was young when I was confronted by Peter Singer’s argument, but I sort of decided back then to live my life in what he describes as “a moral way.” Listen to the video, if you have the time and inclination. It (the video and Singer’s approach) may have no practical effect on you life. But there are people that do believe that no matter how difficult and “bad” your life is, there are those of us whose life is worse.
Don’t worry, there are not moral judgments this morning. Just information and ways of seeing light that defies its speed and slows time to a moment-by-moment consideration. Take care, but please give some consideration about our world and all those in it.
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Happy Saturday!
My hope for the day is that each of you celebrates life in one way or another and finds peace in these turbulent times. Be well, be kind, and appreciate the love you have in your life.
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Grab your coffee or tea and join us, please.
What's on your mind this morning?