I found myself reading an old (1944) paper by Erich Fromm while I was digging into one of his books, The Sane Society, I have just discovered. Having read a lot of Fromm, who is one of my prime sources of inspiration, I was delighted to find yet another equally meaningful work. I won’t comment on the book’s main theme here, but will say that his questioning the sanity of societies like ours is as valid in 2017 as it was in 1955 when the book was published. The following excerpt comes from an earlier paper of his that Fromm… Read More
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John Searle, the American philosopher of the mind I often draw on, wrote that institutional facts are “the glue that holds civilization together.” I find this assertion very important in this time when our civilization seems to becoming unglued. To understand this, you need, first, to know what Searle means by institutional facts. Searle divides the world of facts into two classes, brute facts and institutional facts. Brute facts are assertions about manifestly real states. I am a male. My house is in Lexington, MA. The Earth is approximately spherical and about 93 million miles from the Sun. Light travels… Read More
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