By Jim Selman | Bio
I was listening to a lecture today on the philosopher Martin Heidegger. He is pretty difficult to understand at the best of times, even though I have been a student of his thinking for many years. The lecture today spoke of the distinction he made between ‘tradition’, which he felt was a bad thing, and ‘heritage’, which he thought was a good thing. In fact, he felt heritage was essential to understanding the true nature of ‘Being’.
I won’t pretend to grasp it all
By Jim Selman | Bio
It was said that the philosopher Martin Heidegger’s last words were “Only God can save us.” He was, perhaps, one of the deeper thinkers (at least in modern times) on the question of who we are and what is really going on. As far as I know, he wasn’t religious. So what he meant by these words, if indeed he said them, is open to question.
My view is that he was talking about the fact that all human beings live in interpretations of “reality”—cultural and linguistic
By Jim Selman | Bio
Since Alvin Toffler published Future Shock in the 1970s, futurists have been speculating what will happen in the coming decades. As with most attempts at long-range predictions, the proof is in the pudding. Most turn out to be somewhat accurate, along with lots of unpredictable ‘surprises’. No one, for example, anticipated the Internet, globalization, Google, global terrorism, cell phones or the unimaginable cost of energy. The future continues to be a fickle mistress and pretty much does what she wants to do, regardless of our prognostications.Behind our fascination with future scenarios is our belief that if we know what will happen, it will inform our actions and choices and we will be more successful, happier or merely survive. In the Michigan Citizen last week, environmental leader Maynard Kaufman was quoted as having predicted that we are going to again become an agrarian society. In another piece in the same paper, Shae Howell is speculating on the future of globalization following the recent collapse