Category: Philosophy
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Many creatives I’ve met and studied have outlined, sometimes well-practiced and even calculated, creative processes. My methods, or seeming lack thereof, are more like a bizarre brand of madness. The way my brain works, my creativity often latches onto a certain concept, then so much energy goes into analyzing that concept from a high-level philosophical…
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When I stumbled upon an early draft titled “Hierarchy of Ideas,” I realized that I had the bones of a schema that can sit alongside my CRAP framework as a kind of “compass” for orienting ideas. So, I decided to build my original ramblings into more useful, straightforward terms. I’ve thought a lot about what…
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“Bygones are forever bygones,” William Stanley Jevons once wrote. But human minds are not blank ledgers wiped clean at each decision. We’re accumulators — of sensations, biases, and half-baked rules of thumb — and we act on them whether or not they’re still relevant. In 1996, Louis Lévy-Garboua and Claude Montmarquette published a paper titled…
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Here are my reflections on Chapter 15 of Longinus’ “On the Sublime,” using the Criticism, Rhetoric, Aesthetics, and Philosophy (CRAP) framework. Criticism Longinus begins this chapter by emphasizing the importance of phantasia, or visualization: “…dignity, grandeur, and urgency are to a very large degree derived from visualization (phantasia).” He distinguishes this from the mere production…
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In my college years, I often lamented at length in my journals about so-called higher education being rarely more than an extension of high school. On some rare occasions, a professor would present more advanced and challenging material, but those happenings were few and far between. I was thinking about what my first class would…
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Whenever I get in a bad mood, I do what I can to reframe the situation. I try to put what’s negative into a more positive frame so that I can build off of that. One of the ideas that I’ve gotten when trying to figure out how to be more positive is the idea…
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I’ve dabbled in philosophy a lot over the years, including watching many philosophy videos on Khan Academy. Yet I’ve never actually sat and read many original philosophical works. When I have, I find myself lost. It seems like I can’t put myself into the right state of mind very often to understand the profound ideas…
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“One isn’t necessarily born with courage, but one is born with potential. Without courage, we cannot practice any other virtue with consistency. We can’t be kind, true, merciful, generous, or honest.” – Maya Angelou With courage, Maya Angelou once said, comes the ability to consistently practice any other kind of virtue, including kindness, honesty, and…
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“Failure runs parallel to letting your guard down.” – Eric Longenhagen & Kiley McDaniel, Future Value No matter how hard you try to prevent it, failure will happen in your life. It’s an unavoidable part of being human, especially when you have your guard down. Sometimes you think it’s safe to relax and let your…
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“It is better to learn wisdom late than never to learn it at all.” – Sherlock Holmes, from Arthur Conan Doyle’s Holmes short story, The Man with the Twisted Lip. While I’ve always been a fan of the Sherlock Holmes mystery stories, since reading the DK Big Ideas Book about Sherlock Holmes, I’ve gained new…