ShadesOfBlack

Michael earned his Honours Bachelor of Arts degree at the University of Toronto, where he specialized in philosophy.

Having an ability to analyze most subjects on a deep and profound level, he is a conceptualizer who thinks outside the box and does not limit himself to the status quo.

He is interested in how language and pretheoretical bias inform our understanding and even perceptions of things. He is also deeply influenced by Wittgenstein who suggested in Philosophical Inivestigations, that for most cases, "the meaning of a word is its use in the language". The adage "the proof of the pudding is in it's eating" applies to the meaning of linguistic entities - not just particles or aggregates of particles. Humans' cutting up the world (and creating/using language) is a tool - to which end may be arbitrary or determined by linguistic, perceptual or in other words contingent aspects of our nature that depend not on the way reality is outside our observations of it, but our nature as human animals and its own abilities and limitations.

While demarcating epistemic/metaphysical claims, Michael favours or keeps in mind a Kantian distinction between noumena and phenomena and he works with a "model-dependent realism" like that advocated by Stephen Hawking.

In the realm of ethics, he aims to draw as rigorous as possible a grounding of morality in secular, non-theistic, non-deistic terms; rather a common ground or 'lowest-common-denominator' that appeals to atheists, theists and agnostics alike.

This author has no Featured articles yet