Major Movements in Philosophy as Minimalist Geometric Graphics

From relativism to absolutism, or what the geometry of knowledge has to do with negative space.

I have a soft spot for minimalist graphic representations of complex concepts. (Previously: famous lives in pictogram flowcharts; famous personalities in vector illustrations; famous songs as typographic reductions; world statistics as minimalist infographics; anticonsumerist aspirations.) And it hardly gets more complex than the entire school of Western philosophy. But that’s exactly what designer Genis Carreras explores with remarkable visual eloquence in his Philographics project — a series of posters each capturing a single philosophical ideology through simple geometric shapes.

Relativism

Points of view have no absolute truth or validity, having only relative, subjective value according to differences in perception and consideration. Principles and ethics are regarded as applicable in only limited context.

Absolutism

An absolute truth is always correct under any condition. An entity's ability to discern these things is irrelevant to that state of truth. Universal facts can be discovered. It is opposed to relativism, which claims that there is not an unique truth.

Positivism

The only authentic knowledge is that which is based on sense, experience and positive verification. Scientific method is the best process for uncovering the processes by which both physical and human events occur.

Empiricism

Knowledge arises from evidence gathered via sense experience. Empiricism emphasizes the role of experience and evidence, especially sensory perception, in the formation of ideas, over the notion of innate ideas or tradition.

Humanism

Human beings can lead happy and functional lives, and are capable of being ethical and moral without religion or dogma. Life stance emphasized the unique responsibility facing humanity and the ethical consequences of human decisions.

Hedonism

Pleasure is the only intrinsic good. Actions can be evaluated in terms of how much pleasure they produce. In very simple terms, a hedonist strives to maximize the pleasure and minimize the pain.

Solipsism

Knowledge of anything outside one's own specific mind is unjustified. The external world and other minds cannot be known and might not exist.

Holism

The properties of a given system cannot be determined or explained by its parts alone. Instead, the system as a whole determines in an important way how the parts behave.

Authoritarianism

Submission to authority and opposed to individualism and democracy. An authoritarian government is one in which political power is concentrated in a leader who possesses exclusive, unaccountable, and arbitrary power.

Scepticism

True knowledge or certainty in a particular area is impossible. Sceptics have an attitude of doubt or a disposition of incredulity either in general or toward a particular object.

Determinism

Events within a given paradigm are bound by causality in such a way that any state of an object or event is determined by prior states. Every type of event, including human cognition (behavior, decision, and action) is causally determined by previous events.

See the full series here, though sadly not at a scale that makes the copy legible.

via PSFK

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Happy Birthday, John Locke: The Essential Locke in 3 Minutes

What the Founding Fathers have to do with remix culture and the centerpiece of consciousness.

Exactly 379 years ago today, the great philosopher John Locke was born — father of Liberalism, one of The Enlightenment’s greatest minds, and a pioneering British empiricist. Locke’s legacy lives on most memorably in the American Declaration of Independence and his theory of mind, the first to define the self through self-contained consciousness beginning with a tabula rasa at birth, is a foundation for much of today’s thinking on identity and selfhood. His timeless work is all the more relevant today — a parallel to his insistence on separation of powers between church and state exists in today’s debate about keeping corporation and state separate; the near-plagiarism of his ideology by the Founding Fathers in the Declaration of Independence raises questions of remix culture and intellectual property; and his rational case for cross-faith tolerance carries a message of exponential urgency today.

To celebrate his birthday, here’s a piece of priceless edutainment from the brilliant Three Minute Philosophy series (previously).

If you’d rather spend more than three minutes on one of humanity’s most influential thinkers, do so with The Selected Political Writings of John Locke and Lee Ward’s excellent John Locke and Modern Life, which examines the impact of Locke’s legacy on contemporary culture.

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Library of Dust: Reflections on Life Through the Unclaimed Dead

Psychiatry’s ghosts, the poetry of the metaphysical, or what tree bark has to do with chemical corrosion.

I’m spending some time in Bulgaria this month, keeping my grandfather company as he wanes through the final stages of cancer. So death and mortality are on my mind a lot, underpinned by the inevitable question of what remains of us after we breathe our final breath. I was reminded of the work of photographer David Maisel, who explores the subject from an unusual, almost surreal angle in Library of Dust — an artful depiction of copper canisters containing the cremated remains of individual patients from the Oregon State Insane Asylum, a state-run psychiatric hospital, who died there between 1883 and the 1970s, their bodies never claimed by their families. Maisel photographed many of the 3,500 canisters with incredible detail, their multicolor blooming corrosion reminiscent of nature’s wonders like vibrant sunset skies or rich bedrock textures or the aurora borealis.

Among my concerns with Library of Dust are the crises of representation that derive from attempts to index or archive the evidence of trauma; the uncanny ability of objects to portray such trauma; and the revelatory possibilities inherent in images of such traumatic disturbances. While there are certainly physical and chemical explanations for the ways these canisters have transformed over time, the canisters also encourage us to consider what happens to our own bodies when we die, and to the souls that occupy them.” ~ David Maisel

Asylum 16, Oregon State Hospital, Salem, OR

Asylum 4, Lounge/Meeting Room, Ward 66, abandoned portion of J Building, Oregon State Hospital, Salem, OR

Asylum 2, Doctor's Office, Ward 66, abandoned portion of J Building, Oregon State Hospital, Salem, OR

A closer look at the canister details brings to mind Cedric Pollet’s incredible photos of tree bark:

Poignant, poetic and just the right amount of unsettling, Library of Dust is the kind of project that will give you pause as you find in its physical splendor an existential meditation on the metaphysical.

Images courtesy of David Maisel

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