The Philosophical Optimist

              Rational thought, it has been said, is an acquired taste.   And where, one might ask, is one to go to acquire such a taste?   Well, the logical answer to that question is: one goes to the logical to acquire logic—and who is more logical than Mr. Spock himself?   But how does one learn from a fictional character?   Again, the answer is simple: listen to what he says.             But before we go to our teacher to learn how to be logical, we should ask, what is logic?   Well, logical or rational thinking is simply thinking clearly.   Speaking the truth, said Aristotle, means saying of what is, that it is, and of what is not, that it is not [1] —matching our words to reality.   Logical thought—which also benefitted a great deal from Aristotle—is simply thought which seeks to find “what is” and match our thoughts and our words ...

              In Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew , is Petruchio's wooing of Katherine not an image of unrelenting love?   He refuses to see the bad in her words and deeds and imagines in them great good.   Even as she wishes his death, he speaks and acts as if she only loves and adores him.   He will not hide from her what others say of her, but he will not join with them; rather, he repudiates what they say, even as we see how true it all is.             Yet, he is as rough with her as she is with him.   He confronts her with force for force, but it is so deftly handled as only to serve to undermine further all her attempts to rebuff him.   When she slaps him, he does not act shocked, but merely threatens to respond in kind; yet he never does, for she is so shocked by his response that it provokes not more violence, but a further war of w...

            I have heard it said that you should not care about what a man thinks about anything unless you first know what he thinks about everything.   That is, a man’s general worldview affects everything about him, and is perhaps the most important thing about him to know.   It is unfortunate, then, that too many of us spend so little time reflecting on how we view the stage upon which we find ourselves playing out this drama we call human history, and how much of our thinking on the subject we allow to be outsourced to the general cultural climate of our time.             That climate is, as it has always been, one of idolatry; it is only the specific idols of the era that change, and even those only so much.   Two thousand years ago, Christ had warned us that we could not serve both God and Mammon—a Canaanite deity who, like his Classical equivalent Plut...

            A good idea, once someone thinks of it, seems to show up everywhere.   Somebody somewhere invents the wheeled vehicle, and pretty soon, everyone is using it.   Once upon a time someone managed to domesticate that naturally occurring plasma we call “fire,” and here we are still talking about him (or her, for all we know).   The ancients Greeks honored this man so highly, they made him a god—more than just a god, one of the Titans, the generation that came before the gods proper—and, in some versions, at least, this god, Prometheus, was the same god that made humanity in the first place, suggesting a sort of mythic equivalency between being a fire-user and being human.             Another popular god—one also associated with certain naturally occurring instances of plasma physics—is Thor, the Norse god of thunder (whose very name—in all its various f...