Charlie Huenemann is fascinated by the ways that human lives get tangled up with ideas, theories, and abstract entities. Philosophical questions impress him, especially the ones that keep surfacing despite great historical turbulence. He has published various works on Spinoza and Nietzsche, and is Professor of Philosophy at Utah State University. Blog posts that don't make it to 3QD can be found at huenemanniac.wordpress.com. Email: [email protected]
by Charlie Huenemann David Hume, that most sly student of human experience, declared he couldn’t find himself anywhere. As he gazed inward, he came across sensations, feelings, passions, and moods, but he had never come across a self in the way one might come across a vivid shade of turquoise or a lampshade or a…
by Charlie Huenemann The biggest struggle my fellow modern-day cyborgs and I face is to create a virtual reality that connects more wholesomely with the human part of our nature. The artificial reality we currently plug into is a Terry Gilliam nightmare. Too many characters within it are armed, dangerous, and barbaric. The bright spots…
by Charlie Huenemann Plato, as we know, told tales of an abstract realm beyond the senses, a realm beyond the dim and dark cave we call “the world.” It was a realm of forms, first glimpsed through the discipline of mathematics, and more thoroughly known through philosophical cross-examination, or dialectic. It’s not clear just how…
by Charlie Huenemann What would it be for life to have a “meaning”? What does it mean when people say life is meaningful? I’m not sure, so let’s start with smaller, more obviously meaningful things. Better yet, let’s start with some meaningless things. When Bob sits down to polish the steel junk he’s about to…
by Charlie Huenemann Descartes was not a bookish man. There’s a well-known anecdote that reveals what he thought of libraries: One of his friends went to visit Descartes at Egmond. This gentleman asked him about physics books: which ones did he most value, and which of them he did most frequently consult. ‘I shall show…
by Charlie Huenemann There’s a particularly good episode of Doctor Who (“The Shakespeare Code”) wherein the Doctor and Martha visit Shakespeare and save the world from a conspiracy of witches. The witches’ plan is to take possession of Shakespeare and force him to write magical incantations into the (now lost) play Love’s Labours Won. (It’s…
by Charlie Huenemann Philosophy students are typically taught the wrong lesson from the great Scottish skeptic David Hume. The standard story goes something like this. British empiricists like Locke and Berkeley wanted to connect everything we know to what we experience through the senses. The welcome consequence of this strategy is that all the stuff…
by Charlie Huenemann How wonderful it would be to be a systematic thinker! One marvels at the Aristotles, the Aquinases, the Descarteses, the Kants, and the Hegels and the Marxes (well, the Karl Marxes anyway), the Freuds – those who know how to approach anything, how to incorporate any material into a systematic empire, those…
by Charlie Huenemann “I’m not afraid of death; I just don’t want to be there when it happens.” —Woody Allen Set aside any belief in an afterlife, even the vaguely hopeful “I’ll return to the energy of the universe” sort of view. The realization that your run of life is finite is troubling. At first,…
by Charlie Huenemann “Many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased” – Daniel 12:4 London in the early 1640s London was an exciting place to be in 1641. The political uncertainty was both thrilling and terrifying: many Puritans, convinced that their suspected crypto-catholic king, Charles I, was in league with the Anti-Christ,…
by Charlie Huenemann The Fermi Paradox The story is that sometime in the early 1950s, four physicists were walking to lunch and discussing flying saucers. The place was Los Alamos, and the lunch group included Enrico Fermi, Edward Teller, Emil Konopinski, and Herbert York. None of them believed in flying saucers, of course, but –…
by Charlie Huenemann a family genius, flanked by two other celebrating guardian deities (from UTexas) “A genius is a god under whose protection each person lives from the moment of his birth.” This is the opinion of Censorinus, a Roman rhetorician of the third century CE. Censorinus tells us that our birthday celebrations are not…
by Charlie Huenemann We all seek to capture the world with a net of language. Yet it is in the nature of nets to capture some things and let others slip away, and that goes for languages too. Our words turn experiences into objects, qualities, and actions, and we can build these into a kind…
by Charlie Huenemann (Image from “AhtheMacabre” on Etsy) As I'm closer to death than birth, I think from time to time about what to do with my dead body. Of course, in the main I don't really care. I'll be done with it, and it will be nothing other than Other People's Problem, in the…
by Charlie Huenemann An experiment on a bird in an air pump (Joseph Wright, 1768) Sometime in the late 1650s, Robert Boyle built an apparatus that removed the air from within a glass dome. The members of the newly-formed Royal Society promptly set about devising all manner of experiments to perform with the newfangled device.…
by Charlie Huenemann Some years back my musicologist friend introduced me to the charming world of gramophones. (A brief history may be in order: before there were iPods and YouTube, there were CDs; before that, there were vinyl records, still very much in vogue among hipsters today; and before that – from roughly 1895 to…
by Charlie Huenemann “It is therefore worth noting,” Schopenhauer writes, “and indeed wonderful to see, how man, besides his life in the concrete, always lives a second life in the abstract.” I suppose you might say that some of us (especially college professors) tend to live more in the abstract than not. But in fact…
by Charlie Huenemann How much of the world do we actually experience? Of course, I'm not bemoaning the shortness of human life, or the narrow range of the visual spectrum, or the insensitivities of our skins and tongues. There's no doubt we're missing out on a lot. But within the world of our experience –…
by Charlie Huenemann Now that every click we make is watched, archived, and meta-data-fied, it is time to start thinking seriously about a personal ethics of internet consumption. This goes beyond mere paranoia and worry over what others might think of what you're taking interest in. Each click is in fact a tiny vote, proclaiming…
by Charlie Huenemann Denying the existence of the material world never goes down well. No matter how clever and compelling the arguments, most of us want to insist that matter exists – and as our insistence becomes more vehement, we start pounding tables, as if that will impress our interlocutors. Time and again over the…