Micah Tillman

So, to prove that I hadn’t just made up the Bizarre Ontology — but rather that it was something that people actually believe — I used the “frontispiece” from Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan.
Now, I would like to use Hobbes’ main philosophical rival, John Locke.
Locke writes (Second Treatise, Section 145):
For though in a commonwealth the members of [...]

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(Don’t you think?)
You may recall my recent discussions of the “Bizarre Ontology” that makes individuals responsible for things other people in their “group” do — even when they disagree with what those other people are doing — because it treats groups as the primary reality of which individuals are mere appendages or manifestations.
You also may [...]

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This is something I keep thinking about as the health care debate continues to drag on.  This is what I’ve got so far.
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Table of Contents
I. Quintads
II. Active and Passive, Fore and Aft
A. Active and Passive Rights
B. Fore and Aft Quintads
C. Active and Passive Duties
III. Transferable Duties
IV. The Coherence of Quintads
A. Two Kinds of Coherence
B. Digression [...]

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You remember last post?  The one where I said that many people hold to a “bizarre ontology” that claims, “The separate individuals you see are really just manifestations of the group, which is the reality that lies behind them and acts through them (and upon whom you act through the individuals you see)”?
Remember that one?
Okay, [...]

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I’m listening now to Dr. John D. Currid’s lectures on “Judges through Poets” from RTS.
To set the background for Judges, he’s discussing Joshua, and the Israelite invasion of the Promised Land.
This, naturally, leads to the problem of what appears to be not only God-sanctioned, but God-instructed genocide. 
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Moses, claiming to be speaking for God — [...]

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I was explaining the Classical Hierarchy of Being to my classes today.  We’re studying Augustine, you see, and you can’t understand Augustine if you don’t understand his view of the overall order of the universe.
This is how the universe looked to most classical Christian thinkers:

They wouldn’t have used the term “energy,” but what they meant [...]

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Saw a t-shirt.
The t-shirt said:
Honor the Warrior, Not the War
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You’ll remember this kind of thinking from such popular anti-gay t-shirts as:
Love the Sinner, Not the Sin
and
Hate the Sin, Not the Sinner
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The problem with all such lines of reasoning is that you cannot draw so sharp a distinction between a person and her or his actions.
In [...]

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I was privileged to engage in a short comment conversation with Jeff S regarding unity and diversity yesterday.
Mr. S noted that some of the worst conflicts in our world today seem to occur in places where there are stark cultural divides.  His examples were Iraq, Chechnya, and Sri Lanka.
The question is, “Wouldn’t a united culture [...]

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Pat Buchanan’s article — “Is America Coming Apart?” — continues to disturb me.
Let me quote the paragraph I quoted last time, once more.  Buchanan writes:
In what sense are we one nation and one people anymore? For what is a nation if not a people of a common ancestry, faith, culture and language, who worship the [...]

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Continuing to listen to the Questions of Value lectures by Dr. Patrick Grim.
He suggests that one of the reasons “we” do not legally punish some morally-bad things is that it would “cost” too much to do so.
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Given that “our” time and manpower “resources” are limited, one has to pick and choose what to “spend” them [...]

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