Friday 22 July 2022 — At present I am immersed in four projects: My upcoming presentation for NoRCEL, “Toward Universal Biology: An Observational Scientific Research Program in Origins of Life” A re-working of my previous NoRCEL presentation, “How many branches are there on the tree of life?” which I will eventually present to U3A. A…

Friday 15 July 2022 — In a PS to last week’s newsletter I mentioned that I have been reading up on stellar evolution, with the ulterior motive being to understand the energy flows in the universe necessary to the origins and evolution of life. The deep history of life in the universe will be tied…

Friday 08 July 2022 A hundred years ago positivism was the big movement in western philosophy, with logical empiricism (also called logical positivism) sweeping through science and mathematics with an iconoclastic fervor, intent on dismantling tradition and erecting shiny new steel and glass structures in the newly cleared ground. Modernity…

Friday 01 July 2022 — Last Wednesday’s Overview Round Table Zoom call provided much food for thought. Daniel Dyboski-Bryant of Virtual World Society gave a presentation about using virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) as a way to make the overview effect widely accessible. (I learned that “xR” is used to indicate either VR…

Friday 24 June 2022 — A problem that increasingly bothers me both in relation to civilization and to history (and, by extension, philosophy of history) is the reality of historical complexity in contrast to the simplified abstractions necessary to scientific understanding. This may prove to be one of the great barriers to the expansion of…

Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History — Today is the 255th anniversary of the birth of Wilhelm von Humboldt (22 June 1767–08 April 1835), who was born on this day in 1767. Wilhelm von Humboldt (not to be confused with his younger brother, the naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt) was a linguist with wide interests, including…

Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History — Today is the 130th anniversary of the birth of Reinhold Niebuhr (21 June 1892–01 June 1971), who was born on this date in 1892. Niebuhr, author of the widely familiar “Serenity Prayer,” is remembered as a theologian, but his theological writings generously overlap with the philosophy of history. One can…

Friday 17 June 2022 — In last week’s newsletter I discussed, among other matters, the possibility of worlds that are chemically distinct from our world, though still an expression of the familiar laws of chemistry. In that brief sketch of chemical diversity I failed to note that not all isotopes are stable, and unstable isotopes…

Friday 10 June 2022 — NoRCEL took the trouble to contact me a couple of times to ask if I am interested in participating in the conference this summer. I’ve pulled back somewhat from this kind of activity, but, as I said, they actually reached out to me, so I have been seriously thinking about…