This first book is a must for anyone wishing to understand what's going on in my mind, and why I refer to myself as the American Philosopher. Here within philosophy everyone young and old can begin to comprehend where this century is leading humanity. You will discover why philosophy leads, and not science or politics.

As I'm finding most don't have the time to read the entire text online, here is a quick synopsys.

I have four themes:

1) The truth of empirical science is fallible. The mantle of human truth cannot belong to science. Empirical logic does not stand upon its own tenets. Everything we believe empirically is due to the enchantment we experience with ideas given to us by our contemporaries or that we find in books and has come to us from the past. No one has even a single bit of empirical logic that is the same as anyone else because this "enchantment" is an emotional process that gets all garbled up with mental processes using the personal universal forms and ideas we each independently created ad hoc, and, we each use to consider anything.

2) In order to establish any human truth, it is necessary to start with the cogito, Descartes' "I think, therefore, I am."

3) From the cogito we can surmise, the important thing in life, is that it is a good, even if there are painful moments. I've enjoyed my life, have not you yours?

4) As life is imminently enjoyable, and apparently finite with others who seem to be following us into this world, there arises from the cogito a moral imperative. This is Kant's conjectured Categorical Imperative.

The moral imperative of life is to live a life that detracts not at all from the lives available to those who will follow us into this world. Unlike empirical truth, the moral imperative is human truth. The moral imperative is categorical truth, the quest of philosophy.

Categorical truth is that truth that is true without exception and in every instance. No scientific or empirical truth can be categorical truth.

All our moral obligations arise from the moral imperative's succinctly stated moral obligation to the future. All other moral obligations are subordinate to that most moral purpose.

And then back to the first theme. Empirical logic and its many sciences are not human truth because they have not embraced the moral imperative as the requisite first step in considering any human action. Empirical science holds out many shiny-objects of discovery and invention with which empirical humanity has based the legitimacy of claiming the mantle and throne of human truth with no regard to the continued degradation of humanity for the future caused by the necessary destructive byproducts of the empirical processes that give to man these shiny-objects of emperical invention.

Human truth is the cogito, the moral imperative, life, diversity, humor and the beauty of it all, and especially the importance of not shutting the door for those who would follow us into this world, or, making of the world a place where no one would want to spend a lifetime by the cumulative effect of so many immoral nicks and dings empirical science seems to think it has the freedom to inflict upon the future of humanity.

I arrived at this philosophic juncture, finding it is just that, a crossroad. There is a choice as to which way to turn, toward real civilization where our primary moral concern is for the future, or to continue along the path of empirical barbarism. Is humanity unconcerned for the future? Might humanity continue in vain hope, hoping to find scientific solutions for all the problems science has given humanity regardless of the apparently suicidal futility of opening the seemingly limitless supply of empirical Pandora's Boxes, tempting us onward down the same darkening path?

The process that brought me here was attempting to write an introduction to philosophy for young readers. In so doing I had to remove and pare back from philosophy much that just isn't philosophy, and much more that is really ugly, silly and inherently incoherent about philosophy. What I was left with provided the foothold for the philosophic epiphany I have just described.

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This next work is very theoretical, even hypothetical, and an attempt to link the history of scientific discovery to the current state of cosmological inquiry.

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This short story is for those who just want a taste of my ideas, how I view this delicious world, and how I view my small place in it as a philosopher-artist.

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Some years back I edited and published an online satirical publication entitled, "Maine Before Dawn". It was great fun and it ran a year, twelve monthly issues. Here are just a few of the articles published there.

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Don Robertson, The American Philosopher is booking speaking engagements through 2007. If your institution or business is interested in having Don speak, you can find out how to make enquiries here:

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The Philosophy Consulting Group

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July/07 This is my great work in progress. It is entitled, The New Epistemology of Morality and Truth. It needs much work, but for those who wish to see where it is I am leading philosophy, it is here: The New Epistemology of Morality and Truth

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