In addition to my Tumblr, Once-ness, where I post my own poems, I’m shifting some old blog posts from my Blogspot blog to a new Tumblr: Principium Omnium. 

Principium Omnium is a rather ambitious philosophical work-in-progress I began much earlier in the year, though some of it stems from other intellectual obsessions of mine in the past. 

It is essentially an ‘update’ of what the ancient Stoics referred to as ‘physics.’  The Stoic motto  was ‘Live according to Nature’—but what exactly is this ‘Nature’?  In the Greek, the word was φύσις (phusis), and in Latin it was natura—but these words had very different implications that the English word ‘nature’ does not.  But here I am less interested in doing a ‘philosophical excavation’ of ancient Stoic physics than investigating certain implicit ontological ideas with new, 21st century eyes, and bringing those implications to the surface. 

Essentially, my interest lies particularly in how language (especially the use of propositions) fails to work when dealing with existence as a whole, and tracing where language breaks down on a metaphysical level.  The root of the problem lies in the fact that we commonly treat existence in the same way that we treat an existent.  Epistemological errors inevitably lead to ontological errors.  As abstract as all this sounds, these metaphysical assumptions we make do have an important effect on our daily lives. 

The posts for the moment are initial sketches which I hope to flesh out in even more detail later.  Newer posts there will be forthcoming but slow (though I’ll be posting older notes too), and it won’t be everyone’s cup of tea to say the least—but I would like to invite those interested or curious to take a look.

Gratias vobis.