Rick Joines

Illustration of woman holding her palm toward the viewer with her face obscured by her hand.

Literary intellectuals investigate the power imagination gives us to pose unending questions about our world—viewing religion, philosophy, and science as literary genres full of metaphors.

Essays Philosophy

The Opposable Thumb at the End of the Imagination

August 17, 2023August 17, 2023 21 min read Rick Joines Henry David Thoreau, Pragmatism, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Rorty, Wallace Stevens

Literary intellectuals investigate the power imagination gives us to pose unending questions about our world—viewing religion, philosophy, and science as literary genres full of metaphors.

Two people stand opposite of each other where two split walls of different stone designs almost meet in the middle.

Poets, like pragmatists, possess a unique ability to sit with uncertainties, mysteries, and doubts. For them, neither walls nor metaphors are ever complete.

Essays Philosophy

On the Something There Is

April 17, 2023April 23, 2023 17 min read Rick Joines Henry David Thoreau, Pragmatism, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Rorty, Robert Frost, William James

Poets, like pragmatists, possess a unique ability to sit with uncertainties and doubts. For them, neither walls nor metaphors are ever complete.