I’m starting a 30-day trial of switching off the Internet on my laptop, and I thought I’d give your site a last check to see whether you’d updated it. And you had! Truly great stuff, I have never read an article of yours that was anything less than amazing.

Keep up the good work,

Filidexter the Filosofy Freshman

I also wrote some goals in this very site that I haven’t achieved. My most successful discovery in 2008 has been finding out how to block out distractions well enough to start reaching short-term targets that may eventually add up to a long term goal. Having the goal of “Be a millionaire in 10 years” is never as affective as “work on client relationships with more personalized emails this month” and other such specific realizable goals.

Looking forward to your upcoming insights ;)

A fan of your writing and came upon this today. Timely and relevant to my current life experience(s). Thank you.

Glad you’re back in the game.

P

I think philosophy is great, but it seems like philosophy, religion, and self-help literature can all overlap quite a bit — it seems like, many times, they’re all after the same thing.

Yeah, unfortunately some people do treat philosophy as an intellectual stairmaster. They love coming up with bizarre dilemmas that require splitting hairs on the path to insanity.

I also agree that some philosophy is delivered with unbearable complexity. Worse, many readers assume this to be greatness. Usability is everybody’s problem, including authors. Ambiguity is not depth.

I once wrote down a clearly defined goal…why, it was on this very website! However, I haven’t achieved the goal in it’s original form. However, I do drink and smoke a lot less than I did. Those were lifestyle changes that I’m still working on.

But I’ve done fairly well with my major life goals so far. I just graduated with my degree in civil engineering last month, so that’s something. But I never wrote that goal down. I was too busy writing homework solutions and lab reports. Now that I have achieved that goal, I’m kind of at a crossroad and faced with all sorts of ethical dilemmas about the sort of work I will be doing.

Anyhow, Philosophy was an elective I took one semester in order to maintain my full-time status. I loved it, and I’ve been studying it intermittently ever since. The ethics of it were always my favorite part. And I’ll never forget this ridiculous ethical dilemma the professor posed to us: A tank covered in a shield of innocent human babies is poised to destroy a village of 100 innocent people. You can either blow up the tank and save the village, or you can untie the babies, but in the meantime the village will be destroyed.

Of course, it’s a ridiculous hypothetical with no correct answer, but it certainly introduced the subjectivity of right and wrong and illustrated the necessity of clearly defining the process by which decisions are made. Of course, in the Spiderman movie he gets to save both Mary Jane AND the subway car full of innocent kids, but he’s a superhero. We mere mortals must make unclear decisions and we can’t do it all.

Another one I liked was four humans stranded in a life-raft starving, and also a large dog among them. Who do you eat? I could never take that philosophy professor very seriously because he liked those crazy dilemmas so much. But at least the textbook treated the subject seriously.

One thing, though, I could never get over about professional philosophers was their need to say things in the most complicated manner possible, with as many uncommon words as they could think of. I guess it’s a good way to learn new words, but it seems a bit pretentious and ego-driven to me. Then again, maybe that’s why I like philosophy so much.

Glad to see you are still kicking. I’m not one to demand more content, especially when it’s so educational, interesting, and free. But WRITE MORE BLOGS or the babies are going to get it. The choice is clear.

Peace