Matthew's Blog
Writing Daily: My 100th Consecutive Blog Post
Today is my 100th consecutive day of blogging and posting! Here are some thoughts on this experience. It hasn’t been all that difficult to blog and write daily. Most of my posts are small and light. The two key disciplines I have needed to blog daily are to have a...
A Brief Dictionary Timeline of the Word “Culture”
Per the Oxford English Dictionary, here’s some ways—with their dates—the word culture has been used in the past: 1483 Whan they departe fro the culture and honour of theyr god. (Worship; reverential homage.) 1450 In places there thou wilt have the culture. ( The...
Are There Paradigm Shifts In Philosophy?
After re-reading Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, I am more convinced than ever that there have been at least two true paradigm shifts in physics: The Copernican Revolution and Quantum Mechanics ( I am still on the fence about Relativity). But is...
Aristotle, Causality, and The Definition of Health
After considering Plato’s Theory of Forms as one type of essentialist definition, (as I discussed in my recent posts Definitions and Essentialism: Plato and Is There a Platonic Form of Health?) let’s see what Aristotle has to offer. Let’s consider his concept of a...
The First Time I Changed My Ikigai
I’ve changed my ikigai once before, when I was 28 years old. I was working as an engineer and program manager in the defense industry. It was a high-pressure job, with real money at stake, filled with tense meetings with corporate vice-presidents and “customers”. I...
A Podcast Review About Language in the Digital Age
I enjoyed listening to the Aspen Initiative UK Podcast on The Future of Language, especially the thoughts by Tony Thorne @tonythorne007, which reminded me of my recent post: Emojis: Intellectual Crutch or An Expansive New Language? He bought up the point that language...
Is There a Platonic Form of Health?
As pointed out by A. C. Grayling in The History of Philosophy,1 Plato believed his Forms were real things: In Plato’s philosophy, the Forms in the Realm of Being are real things: they are not mental objects only. They are Beauty, Truth, Goodness; but they are also...
Definitions and Essentialism: Plato
The ordinary language philosopher Raiziel Abelson divides schools of thought about what a definition is into three groups1: essentialism, prescriptivism, and linguistic theories. Roughly an essentialist will be looking for the essence of a word, a prescriptivist will...
My Project’s Why: What Makes a Good Definition?
As I recently mentioned in my blog post Definitions: Healthcare’s Rabbit Hole, one of my deep projects is to understand the ethics of AI in healthcare. However, to do this well I feel I need to first understand what health means, or at least have a good definition of...