These several extended explorations are attempts to probe basically and deeply — into the underlying frameworks of our thought about the human. Very generally, we have either taken easier or simpler notions of the human to try to account for how we are, think, live.

I’m posting this work in progress to gather comments and feedback, which sections are most interesting today — or not — let me know what you think.

Context, to begin, takes up the continuing questions of how we come to know and live contextually. The usual drill: “leave it to context” – avoids the underlying truths that contexts are aspects of our knowing. Where we are, how we know that, how this shapes or affects our understanding: what is same, what different; when do the same concepts mean differently in various contexts?

As these continue to be works-in-progress, I have not yet begun to address how we, for example, learn, know, and discern the contexts in which we find ourselves; or teach them to each next generation.

Human Nature begins or underlies much of my observations that we have traditionally (and continuing) mis-or under-estimated the human. Especially in the Western philosophical tradition, we continue to play theme-and-variation on the mind-body and the idea that humans are unique “due to language.” We have moved away from observation in deep and subtle ways, as we use the concepts of language on which to focus and organize thinking about the human: Meaning, Reality, the Ideal…

Especially in this era of the rise of “strong religion,” we are in the midst of these conflictual ways of thought and being, but are more arguing “politics” than the underlying issues, as cast in the Foundations Project. Morality explores these issues, beginning by questioning whether morality is only or particularly human (NO! it’s a part of the being of all social species). How do we come to be moral: part of our interactions, especially with m/others…

Looking beyond the Western tradition, it has become clearer that questions of Life Paradoxes (just beginning this study) are everywhere, but vary in different traditions. Some traditions want/choose to “resolve” paradoxes on one side or the other, while other traditions find them to be “complementary.” How this happens or “works” seems to underlie much of how we consider our being, reality, etc. In Western thought and religion, whether change or permanence is the real, underlies most other arguments in these days of the rise of strong religion.

Last (up to this moment), the questions surrounding Identity flow in many paths and moments reflecting and refracting the other Foundation Projects.