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Coffee, Summer Afternoons, and Greece

March 6, 2018

Today’s article is more like a stream-of-consciousness exercise. Expect it to be nonsensical, incoherent, or just simply obscure. If it has to have a topic, let that be coffee, summer afternoons, and Greece. I can’t begin to describe how many memories, thoughts, and feelings this deceptively innocent combination brings to me. These musings I called “timeless”, but I don’t mean that figuratively. I mean it literally: these musings, in actual fact, are outside time altogether.

They are timeless because they are connected neither casually nor temporally, but through affect, meaning, and… coffee. I said in my article on timelessness and experience:

There is an abstract reality hidden beyond the – largely illusory – veil of time, which connects you as a child to you as an adult. It also connects both those “yous” with all other “yous” that have or will ever have existed.

coffee, summer afternoons, Greece
Greek coffee; a grain of sand of the beach which is my memories
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Continuity of Experience in Dreams

March 2, 2018

Dreams and Waking Life

Here’s a question for you: Which are the major differences between your dream consciousness and your waking life consciousness? Pondering on this, you would perhaps come up with some of the following answers: a) you can’t (really) control your dreams; b) limitations don’t exist in dreams; c) dreams aren’t real. This latter possible answer I consider controversial, but let’s leave that aside for another day. Let’s instead focus on another major difference between dreams and waking life: the continuity of experience.

continuity of experience
How would it be, if there was continuity of experience in dreams?

You see, when you wake up in the morning, you still remember what you did the day before. You remember your plans for the present day. And if you left a book in the middle before going to bed, you can pick up from it remembering the plot that far.

The same almost never applies for dreams. With extremely rare exceptions, when you dream you don’t just continue doing what you were doing in a previous dream. There is no continuity of experience in dreams, unlike waking life.

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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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