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idealism

Justice in an Unjust World: How It Can Happen

April 12, 2019

“Only justice will bring you peace”, a band I like sings. Listening to this song, I wondered: How do you find justice in an unjust world? Consequently, then, how do you find peace in an unjust world? The quick and pessimistic answer is: you don’t. There is no justice in an unjust world, and there is no peace in an unjust world. And yet, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that first reaction might be wrong.

Finding Justice in an Unjust World: a Matter of Creating the Invincible

The number of blogs, opinion columns, and editorials I read online can be literally counted on the fingers of one hand. There is such an incredible amount of noise out there, that I have made a conscious decision to remove myself from the trash.

In one of those few places on the internet that I follow, I recently read a harrowing narrative. A man – over fifty as he explained – described how nothing had managed to break his will; neither financial problems, nor unemployment, nor hardships.

He was broken, as he explained, seeing people’s viciousness.

justice in an unjust world
Injustice is all-powerful in a material context…
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Used Item Journeys: Musings of Interconnectivity

August 21, 2018

I once bought a Nikon EM film camera from eBay. I did it just for fun, out of curiosity, whatever you wanna call it. My plan was to try it for a while, then sell it again to someone. On its bottom there was a metal plate reading “Department of Corrections, Facility no:….” (I don’t remember the exact wording). This made me realize that used item journeys is a fascinating thing to ponder on.

Imagine, all the things your used lens has seen, all the experiences around it, all the places it’s been. Someone with a prosaic outlook on life might say “well, hang on! These are mere items, they don’t experience anything! And the people using them aren’t the ones journeying around.”

Although prosaic, this argument is valid. Indeed, used item journeys are not experienced by their users. They are not experienced by the items themselves either, since (as our prosaic imaginary friend mentioned) inanimate objects do not experience. So, what’s going on?

used item journeys
You haven’t gone there, but your camera has. But does this offer you some level of experiencing?
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Neo-Hegelianism and F.H. Bradley’s Absolute

February 24, 2018

Note: the following article on Neo-Hegelianism and F.H. Bradley’s Absolute is a modified excerpt (pp. 53-56) from my doctoral dissertation, “Time is Everything with Him”: The Concept of the Eternal Now in Nineteenth-Century Gothic, which can be downloaded (for free) from the repository of the Tampere University Press. For a list of my other academic publications, see the list on the main website.

Introduction

Neo-Hegelianism is the branch of idealism that is historically most pertinent to the Victorian era. As the name implies, this school of thought draws from the works of the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.

Typical representatives of British Neo-Hegelianism were Hutcheson Stirling, in his The Secret of Hegel (1865), the brothers Edward and John Caird, in several works in the late Victorian era – such as An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion (1880) – and also F. H. Bradley, in works such as Appearance and Reality (1893) and Essays on Truth and Reality (1914).

Bradley’s Absolute: “No Truth which Is entirely True”
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