Philosophy The unexamined life and all that jazz.

"Don't call me a mindless philosopher, you overweight glob of grease!"
—C3PO in Star Wars

"Philosophy is the talk on a cereal box."
—Edie Brickell in What I Am from Shooting Rubber Bands at the Stars

"A compulsion towards philosophical introspection is his chief characteristic, if I may put it like that. It does not mean he is mad. If does not mean he isn't. Very often, it does not mean anything at all. Which may or may not be a kind of madness."
— Rosencrantz in Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead

Introduction

Where to begin? A personal philosophy is a big thing and articulating it in a fashion comprehensible to someone else is, as I sit here now, no easy task. Even so, I feel it's an important thing to undertake. The act of writing down my beliefs, of organizing them for consumption by others, seems worthwhile. In doing so, I hope to gain some clarity on what I do believe and whether these beliefs really make sense.

I swear I had another paragraph written here. Granted, not enough to even explain that last sentence fully, but at least enough to get across the point that this is an unfinished page and I hope to come up with something really brilliant here sometime in the near future (read: before I die). I really have no clue what happened to that paragraph, so this one will have to do. In the meantime, I'll try to start an outline of what I want to talk about below, so you can amuse yourself with that for now.

ONTOLOGY: What exists?

The "world" is a unity of value.

A single, unprovable ontological assumption: Reality = Good. 

EPISTEMOLOGY: How do we know?

We don't know for sure.

Reality is ultimately unknowable except for direct experience unmediated by intellectual concepts. (Mysticism.)

Any intellectual construction ("model") of reality is arbitrary. Our understanding of the world is socially constructed. (Constructivism.)

What we "know" consists in more or less useful models of the world. (Pragmatism.)

Knowledge begins with the perception of difference. Difference requires changing and staying-the-same. (Process Philosophy.)

METAPHYSICS: What do we know (about what exists)?

Patterns in a process of evolution.

 

ETHICS: What's good?

Maximizing Potentiality.

Given the pragmatic epistemology, no universal principles of ethics may be articulated. However, given our ontological assumption, all decisions have an ethical component since reality is identical to the Good.