Philosophy by the Way

Thomas Edison said: “Creativity is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration”. I had to think of it, when I read an article in Scientific Ameri...

People who regularly read my blogs will know that I am often on holiday. Usually I spend two or three holidays abroad, not counting th...

In his book on nationalism Caspar Hirschi quotes the following story from Johannes Aventinus’ Bavarian Chronicle , written around 1500: “A...

Trying to suppress “dangerous ideas” is of all times. In my last blog I wrote about a recent case. One of the first known cases in history...

In future it will be possible to scan your ideas before you enter an aeroplane in order to prevent that you’ll make an attempt. It works o...

Once I wrote a blog in which I presented the results of a study by Susan Greenfield that the Internet can make us insensitive to what we d...

Pinhole camera In my last blog I told that I take pictures with a pinhole camera. I think that most readers of my blogs don’t know w...

Fumay sur Meuse - photo taken with pinhole camera Montaigne loved travelling, albeit only because it gave him the opportunity to rid...

After Stefan Zweig had fled the Nazis, he established himself in Petrópolis in Brazil. Once he complained against his friend Jules Rom...

Regular readers of my blogs will not have failed to notice that I have just published a book entitled Running with my mind (in Dutch). I t...

Once the window-cleaner, who came to fill his bucket from the tap in my kitchen, asked me: “What are you doing?”, wanting to know what kind ...

During the years I learned twelve languages. I must admit that I forgot some because I stopped investing time in them for keeping them up....

Philosophical insights and conclusions are often founded on intuitions, at least partially; even in that degree that some – or maybe many – ...

The way I developed the idea of intention in my last blog is typically philosophical. I formed an intuitive idea of intention in my head and...

Suppose that I love running. Initially, I ran twice a week. But after some time I did it effortlessly and I started to do it three times a w...

The trip my wife and I made to Nancy had nothing philosophical. Actually we did not go there for the town but for seeing Rossini’s opera “L...

A central theme in the free will debate is the question whether responsibility exists. The idea is that a free will cannot exist, if respons...

The definitions and examples of causation in my last blog were an arbitrary selection just for showing that one has to define what cause me...

Thanks to the recent progress in neuroscience, the question whether man has a free will has become one of the most important philosophical t...

In my last blog I talked about an adage on the ceiling of Montaigne’s study in the tower of his castle. It said that actually thinking is pa...

Montaigne is famous for his Essays . One of the striking things in this work is that it is full of quotations, mainly from classical author...

We are our customs, at least in a certain sense and at least for a part. We have seen it in my blog last week. Customs belong to those thing...

Customs play an important role in life. They are not simply like branches on a path that we throw away, when we think that someone can stumb...

Somewhere in the beginning of his essay “Of ancient customs” Montaigne says that sometimes customs rapidly change and that what once was a ...