NEW LOOKS Edition: People come up with new ideas all the time, often crafting what seem like fresh insights daily. It’s challenging to determine if these ideas hold any real value. In my book, 30 Philosophers: A New Look at Timeless Ideas, I offer what I believe are innovative perspectives on age-old ideas, as well as some ideas that might truly be original. It’s difficult to say if these “new looks” are just new to me or new to all of us—and if so, how new? After all, no idea is born from a void. The following is a list of the ideas in the book that I think are novel. Be gentle—I’m just a thinker exploring existence and writing about what I call natural philosophy. For more of my new looks, check out New Ideas by Mike Prestwood.
30 Philosophers Timeline: New Looks
Knowledge Framework
Knowledge frameworks are the mind’s filing system. They do not just store information—they shape how we sort ideas, test claims, and decide what deserves belief.
A network of ideas.
New Look
New Look: The Flood Stories
The Great Flood myths: Sumerian and the biblical story of Noah's Ark.
600 BCE
New Look
Normalcy, Normal, and Abnormal
Normalcy is a pattern-based idea formed from repeated experience and reinforced by social expectations.
Normal is our current experiences.
New Look
Plato and Aristotle’s Relationship
New Look
Epicurean Happiness Toolkit: A 4-Step Structure
Epicurean Agnosticism is the indifference to unknowable mysteries that are likely to lead to unhappiness.
New Look
Stoic Virtue Framework: A 4-Step Structure
New Look
Marcus Aurelius: An Explorative Agnostic
New Look
The “Dark” Middle Ages
The Middle Ages, from the end of the classical era to the Renaissance, is traditionally seen as intellectually dark due to the dominance of a single narrative over the unknown. It is characterized by the rise of belief systems.
New Look
Holistic Eudaimonia
The psychology of Holistic Eudaimonia surfaces with the various stages of life, acts of kindness, and elements symbolizing legacy and future impact. It blends natural life with the abstract concept of time and space, highlighting the continuity of actions and their lasting effects.
New Look
Eternity
Augustine's concept of eternity as 'all time at once,' positioned as a precursor to the modern block universe theory. Time existing simultaneously.
Block Theory of the Universe
New Look
The Floating Man Thought Experiment
Floating Man thought experiment, Deprivation Chamber edition. Imagine you are floating in a dimly lit, minimalist room with a futuristic-looking tub filled with dense saltwater. The separation of the mind from the physical body, conveying a sense of isolation and introspection.
New Look
The Five Senses of Humans
Olfaction or Sense of Smell Study.
Circa 1020
New Look
Time Trail Game: Mindful Time Travel
Time Trail Raw is you in two distinct but connected locations, pondering the raw, prelinguistic nature of thought and perception. Your prelinguistic thoughts creating a sense of mindfulness and introspection.
Mike's Spacetime Game
New Look
Object-Oriented Nature
Humans perceive a bicycle as a simple, efficient tool for movement, travel, and carrying things. However, each bike is an intricate assembly of parts like handlebars, frames, and wheels, made from materials such as aluminum, steel, and rubber. These materials themselves break down into fundamental elements like iron, carbon, and manganese. This image captures the layers of abstraction in our perception, from the complete bike to its atomic structure, showcasing the complexity behind everyday objects we use to move through the world.
Abstraction brings understanding and illusion
New Look
The Problem of Universals
New Look
The Idea of Ideas
A personal spiritual experience may be real as an experience, meaningful as a belief, and still fall short of public proof about the material world.
New Look
Grand Rational Framework
The Grand Rational Framework is comprised of rational frameworks in which validated empirical elements form a solid foundation. There are logically consistent interconnected relationships between empirical claims which create a stable and ever-evolving understanding of the material world. This knowledge expands and is limited by the vast expanse of the universe.
New Look
Idea Modeling
Idea Modeling is a fresh new look at the process of creating new ideas. It is the dynamic interplay of various cognitive functions, but especially pattern recognition and conceptual blending. For this discussion let’s add in curiosity, gap-filling, and information bias. The whole thing is guided by apathetic agnosticism, our defense against bad ideas. It is in line with modern neurobiology, but to be clear, it’s just a general philosophical lens, another view of how ideas are forged.
How new ideas become.
New Look
Pragmatism
The Rational Pragmatist embraces common knowledge and accommodates their Christian faith while rejecting most other supernatural ideas. The Irrational Pragmatist does not believe in common knowledge.
3 Types: Empirical, Rational, & Irrational
New Look
Absolute Truth
The Idea of the Unknowable Dao
New Look
Truth Hammers
A disciplined thinker does not hand confidence to a claim just because it is common. First ask whether it lives by habit, tribe, and repetition, or by testing, evidence, and open challenge.
Processes that uncover truth.
New Look
Idea Theory Framework
The transformative process of ideas through the Idea Theory Framework. Panel One: whimsical and imaginative birth of speculative ideas. Panel Two: rigorous testing of hypotheses in the scientific laboratory. Panel Three: established theories are taught and shared in the classroom. The cyclical nature of this process, including the possibility of demotion for disproven ideas, underscores the dynamic and evolving pursuit of knowledge.
New Look
Descartes Thought Experiment
Descartes' thought experiment: Descartes questioned the reliability of his senses, contemplated rational ideas with things like the influence of an evil demon. He eventually came to the realization "I think, therefore I am." This allowed him to emerge from an existential void. His cosmic and interconnected thought journey from doubt to certainty helped establish modern philosophy.
New Look
Material-Spiritual Framework
The Material-Spiritual Framework's division of spirituality into agnostic, nontheistic, and theistic.
Spirituality is exploration.
New Look
Open Viewpoint Method (OVM)
Open Viewpoint Method (OVM) is a bridge between worldviews — spirituality on one side, empiricism on the other — built on disciplined listening and calibrated confidence. It does not erase disagreement; it structures it. Debate becomes harmonic dialogue when ideas are separated from identity and claims are evaluated without tribal reflex.
New Look
Hume’s Fork
Life is definitions & observations.
New Look
Fear-Based Ethics
Fear-Based Ethics within Consequentialism is a dark, oppressive ethical system. Morality based on things like Karma and Divine Command Theory, are faulty. They evoke fear and anxiety because right and wrong are no longer a thing, only fear exists. The fix is easy, even within fear-based ethical systems, the solution is to emphasize the intrinsic value of moral acts. This allows you to transition at a fundamental level from fear-based ethics to understanding the intrinsic value of morality.
New Look
Ethical Roadmap
An Ethical Roadmap is a winding path through different philosophical landscapes from Aristotle's virtue ethics to Mill's utilitarianism. For many, the modern path is a holistic approach to ethics, avoiding fear-based systems and embracing good intent and good results. Along the path, people reflect on their actions, evaluate their motivations, and measure their results to guide future acts as one journeys through moral decisions.
New Look
Leap of Faith
Kierkegaard's Leap of Faith redefined for all. When faced with the vast unknown, you sometimes need to take a leap of faith whether that leap is rooted in religious beliefs or not. The using of angst and uncertainty to guide your life gave rise to both modern psychology and existentialism.
New Look
Nihilism
Nihilism is the idea that life lacks objective meaning, purpose, and intrinsic value.
1862: Ivan Turgenev novel "Fathers and Sons"
New Look
Authentic Recipe: Nietzsche’s Five-step Approach
The Nietzsche Five-step Authentic Recipe is the casting of his ideas into five steps. The journey towards an authentic self, the transformation and empowerment of your true self.
New Look
Consciousness
Experiencing life through the lens of consciousness.
The experience of living.
New Look
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