We all have ideas of things that sit in our minds and captivate us. It may be the perfect Christmas where it is snowing, you are inside with a roaring fire crackling with dry douglas fir wood, making the house smell like evergreen and light wood smoke. The dog is by the fire, and it [...]

When passing my classroom on your way your first-period class, you see I have tons of espresso and I am out of my room talking with students down the hall. It'll be easy to pop in and make an espresso, and no one will be the wiser. So, whether you can get away with stealing is easy to answer, but the moral question surrounds stealing itself is that which you need to weigh. If you say that stealing is bad, then it is bad as a rule, categorically. Otherwise, you stealing my coffee means that others can as well, then I have no coffee and rage on my classes when my caffeine levels drop. 

This lovely meandering essay is really a good example of the style of reflection that both reflects the way the mind works, as well as shows us how formal the informal method of writing was in the 1800's. After going on a nice walk in the Sussex countryside with him, I think we decided that [...]

Descartes helped turn the process of doubt and understanding into a systematic approach that allowed him to apply the same or similar lines of questioning on different issues he wanted to understand. 

Henry David Thoreau famously wrote when he was out walking in the mid 19th century, "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately."

Paul Warmbier is an essayist, memoirist, teacher, and woodworker living in McMinnville, Oregon. His essays have appeared in various journals and outlets from The Lutheran Hour - Thred, Punctuate, Allegory Ridge, Under the Sun, and Watershed Review. Paul earned his MFA in Creative Non-Fiction from the University of Idaho in 2017 where he was the assistant Non-Fiction editor of the Fugue Journal. [...]

" Being is. Being is in-itself. Being is what it is." ~Sartre "Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does." ~Sartre The above quotes come from Sartre who was kind of cynical when it came to the concept of freedom. At least he was on the surface.

In my last brief intro to phenomenology, or the philosophical study of events and our processing and understanding, I set up just the main idea of what that strange long word was. In this post, I want to elaborate on the process of thinking through perception and how we come to any meaning.