Living rationally and authentically means understanding that life centrally involves making leaps of faith, both small and large, and that the value of living is to a large extent the value of experiencing your life, whatever that experience is.
L.A. PaulI just realized, sometime early on in college, that I wanted to be a philosopher. I basically decided that I wanted to spend my life thinking as deeply and carefully and reflectively as I could about the nature of reality and our human engagement with it, and that taking a philosophical approach was the best way to go about doing this.
L.A. PaulThere are laws of nature - of course there are - even if they don't exist in some sort of bizarre Platonic Heaven.
L.A. PaulWe should listen to both philosophers and scientists, because the philosophical contribution is different from the scientific contribution, and both of them are worthwhile.
L.A. PaulLiving rationally and authentically does not mean that you map out your future by thinking carefully about what it would be like if you chose one path versus another path and then choosing on that basis.
L.A. PaulI argue, based on metaphysical and physical considerations, that we should think of the fundamental parts of the world as a mix of intrinsic natures, rather like a paint-pot filled with a rainbow of colors, loosely mixed to give a richly varied, spatiotemporally inseparable, spread of qualities, and that this mixture is what gives rise to ordinary reality.
L.A. Paul