What we’re about
The world is in chaos. Societies are fragmented. People can no longer speak to one another. They talk at each other, but there is no growing and deepening awareness of what is good, true, and beautiful. We are not even speaking the same language.
--Much of this chaos in society is the result of bad thinking and ungrounded conclusions.
--Everyone is a critic before they have something healthy to say.
--Instead of discussion about what is real, true, good, and wonderful (which is philosophy), discussion today is a tool to corner and shame your opponent, it’s a war, not a search for what helps us thrive and understand.
We may not think we are Aristotle, Galileo, Marie Curie, M L King, C. Jung, Solzhenitsyn, or Thomas Aquinas. But we are by nature philosophical animals.
We search for principles and answers to explain our experience and our world. Both philosophy and science are driven by a desire to explain reality and find its ultimate foundation—it’s a search for wholeness, receiving the wholeness of all that is real around us, receiving it by thought and action.
How we answer these important questions shapes everything we see in the world around us.
--Are people just a bag of chemicals, or do we have a soul?
--What does it mean to be a person?
--What is real? Is truth real?
--What is truth, or is it just true for you?
--Do humans have a built-in purpose and value, or do we make our own purposes and values?
--Do we discover right and wrong, or do we create right and wrong?
--What constitutes a just government, and what is its role?
--Is there evil? Should you resist evil?
These are important questions and the best way to approach these questions is to begin with “wonder”:
“Wonder is the feeling of a philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder.”--Plato
“It is owing to their wonder that people began to philosophize.”—Aristotle
Wonder is a beautiful fascination and curiosity about with what surrounds us. This initial attitude sets the tone for later questions. We can ask questions like a critic/pundit or like a wondering explorer and child.
Scientists, children, artists and the philosophers approach the world with this sense of wonder. But if you examine our world only as an analytic critic, you will find nothing valuable. You may discover a formula, but you will never discover the wonder of a human person or grow in your personal life quest.
Certain ideas and knowledge rightly belong under a critical microscope, but some truths cannot be explained by a test. Those basic foundational truths are the beginnings of philosophy and metaphysics. And they may be difficult to explain neatly.
“We can know more than we can tell,” says Michael Polanyi (chemist, quantum theorist, friend of Einstein and later philosopher).
The ancient Greek philosophers were scientists, humanists, musicians, moralists, and existential theorists---all at once; they were looking for all the truth that could be known; we should try to be like them.
“My sense of god is my sense of wonder about the universe.” --Albert Einstein
“I give infinite thanks to God, who has been pleased to make me the first observer of marvelous things.”—Galileo.
This is the aim of our group, to approach important questions as if we were sitting in a circle with Einstein, Galileo, Marie Curie, Aristotle, Gandhi, M L King, Carl Jung, Solzhenitsyn, and Aquinas.
If you would like to discuss important questions in a manner that would interest these giants, please join us.
