Category: Philosophy and Religion
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The Concept of Freedom
The two dominant political parties in the United States of America, the Republican and Democratic parties, keep pushing reproductive rights in front of the public eye. It is the lever and the fulcrum that keeps the nation pried into two miserable, dysfunctional halves, an “either/or”1Kierkegaard, Søren, Howard V. Hong, Edna H. Hong, and Søren Kierkegaard.…
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Plato’s Phaedrus and the Paideia of Søren Kierkegaard
In the summer of 2022, a friend invited me to join a discussion group which gets its jollies reading and discussing Plato’s dialogues line by line in minute detail. Before long it became obvious to me that I had entered the gates of heaven though I was much more alive than dead. Old pockets of…
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Conversation with ChatGPT on Kierkegaard’s Concept of Time or The BOT Thinks I’m a Moron
Here in this transcript I test my wits with ChatGPT. Not only is the robot smarter, it’s more polite. PART I JOHN I am writing an essay on the concept of time in the thought of Søren Kierkegaard. My thesis is that chronological time is mostly irrelevant, more like a distraction, from his perspective. In…
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Living Poetically According to Kierkegaard
The Romantics believed in the ideal of “living poetically.” Today many people believe in the notion of the self-made person. Kierkegaard is suspicious of these kinds of ideas. What are his objections and concerns? The expression “living poetically” connotes a libertine, a person who marches to his own drummer, follows rules of their own whimsical…
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The Perils of the Socratic Method in Modern Times
When I went to a small liberal arts college, Marlboro College, in southern Vermont in the eighties, a “Great Books” program and various other study choices immersed me in the Socratic method more so than I had ever realized. In fact only recently, over forty years later, taking a massively open online course (MOOC) on…