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Blog posts on philosophy and everything
I had a thought this morning that seemed profound, or at least worth writing down before I forget. The thought was simple: gaining knowledge means adding something, while gaining wisdom means subtracting something. This is easy to illustrate. When you learn something new, you read a book, listen to a lecture, or attend a talk,…
This is a brief linguistic essay following up on some thoughts and conversations I had while visiting my home city of St. Petersburg, Russia, two weeks ago. As usual, I had just one week and too many things to do. Therefore, I decided that I would meet only with family and a selected few of…
This is another topic of interest to me, closely related to the topic of freedom in general. Bound by the rules of society and by our personal limitations, are we at least free to make simple choices? Can we freely choose ice cream or creme brulee for dessert? Apparently, this is one of the central…
This is just a short note for today. I am very interested in this topic and plan to write a book about it one day. But one has to start somewhere, right? Before discussing freedom, it seems helpful to define it. Although this seems quite obvious, it is far from simple. Freedom from something, like…
We recently picked up a puppy. It was totally unplanned, really just a play of fate. On our way to Philadelphia, we stopped in Allentown to see my wife’s friend. It turned out that the friend was picking up two puppies out of a litter of six. Two of the other four were still available,…