>tfw you realize Hume and Kant as much as Nietzsche, Rawls as much as Nozick, are all basically part of a dogmatic faith tradition that sustains itself through indoctrination and the marginalization of all objectors, and has spread itself across the globe through coercion and violence.>tfw radical politics cannot break free of this path because it cannot itself question the core dogmas of the new faith>tfw the dogmas and faith of everyone around you are completely transparent to them, in much the way a fish might not notice water or think much about what lies beyond its boundaries. Particularly, because the dogmas dress themselves up in the clothes of epistemic humility and skepticism, their absolutizing nature has become invisible.Is there no escape bros?
>>24777466What are the core dogmas
how does this differ from Stirners "spooks" and Baudrillard's "simulations"?
>>24777475empiricist epistemic closurereason as instrumental and never ecstatic or luminous mechanistic or computational understandings of causalitythe most real is what can be measured and quantifiedfrom the previous two, values are something extrinsic to fundamental reality, either "emergent" or projected onto the world from without (by God or man)the world tends towards progressfreedom is power man can step back into dispassioned reason at will and be "led by the facts" thus the gold standard of all epistemology is what convinces the "reasonable" everymanthis world view is a product of sheer reason, not historically contingent and theologicaletc.Some challenge some of these, but never all of them.>>24777496IDK, don't these flow from the same sort of skepticism and distance?
>>24777539I mean some of these I simply believe because I don't find the alternative convincing - even as a former tradcath. But I think most contemporary philosophers would be critical of these propositions:>the most real is what can be measured and quantified>the world tends towards progress>man can step back into dispassioned reason at will and be "led by the facts" thus the gold standard of all epistemology is what convinces the "reasonable" everyman>this world view is a product of sheer reason, not historically contingent and theological
I haven't read this book, but the greentext you posted sounds like projection from religious people onto reason. Historically, religion has relied on indoctrination and violence to perpetuate itself, and rather than brainwashing or intimidating people, reason has relied on argumentation and its own results to convince people of its worldview.
>>24777586Yes, communism and neoliberalism both spread peacefully without coercion and violence. Modern liberal schools are unique in human history in not indoctrinating their kids. Whereas ancient Greek education, public festivals, and art clearly carried a didactic function, the modern West became uniquely immune to doing this and functions from pure reason.>>24777541Of course thinkers reject some of them, but they generally only reject a few at a time and attack them from other directions. The definition of freedom and the basic starting points of empiricism are rarely ever challenged though. Continental thought largely knocks down mechanism and "objectivity" by showing that they cannot be justified when starting with empiricism and instrumental reason (it's just one "language game"). I don't see how this is "post" modern. It's just more modernity, now turned cannibalistic.
>>24777466never read this but this is totally retarded and is some bullshit some brain damaged academic could say. If you think people are primarily operating off of like propositional philosophical, theological or ideological claims in general you are legitimately insane. people aren't even consistent with themselves over like a week and can barely think through anything people are not dogmatic at all, and I would say properly speaking even faiths aren't dogmatic at all for the most part. (How often do the connotations change, the emphasis which might even make the same words mean something entirely different? How many people even agree what the same identical "dogmatic proposition" even means?) if you think anyone operates like this you are basically helpless
>>24777590>The definition of freedom and the basic starting points of empiricism are rarely ever challenged though.They are almost certainly challenged by philosophers but that doesn't mean they must necessarily reject them
>>24777590Communism and neoliberalism deviate into violence and coercion when they deviate away from reason. You're basically saying to get rid of the baby with the bath-water. People and the world are less violence and less coercive when they are more reasonable.
>>24777634Isn't this a No True Scotsman argument? By the same token you could say that the violent and oppressive weren't true Christians. Afterall, I don't recall any stories of the Desert Fathers invading towns, or of Saint Isaac forcing people to convert at sword point, etc. Saint Francis followed the Crusaders, but only to run along ahead of them at great risk to his life to speak to the sultan face to face and try to avert violence. Likewise, Socrates and Boethius accept death rather than scheming to break out of their prison so as to murder their opponents. And I don't recall Plotinus forcing people to attend lectures at spear point either, nor Laotze, nor Shankara.But liberal theorists did generally think slavery and taking land away from natives who weren't using it efficiently was justified because it was freeing them from indolence and want. Hobbes argued this explicitly and so does Mill.It's worth noting that abolitionism and the Civil Rights movement were both primarily religious movements until their main battles were over and their martyrs already dead. Only then did they become mainstream secular liberal positions. The Battle Hymn of the Republic is a hymn after all and Dr. Martin Luther King was a preacher, not an economist or political theorist, as were almost all his fellow leaders.
>>24777596You can be shaped by dogmas and indoctrination without having to actively think them through. Your average North Korean probably doesn't have strong propositional beliefs about capitalism that they act on day to day. Have they this not been indoctrinated? Since no people act in such a way (the masses anyhow) does this mean indoctrination and dogmatism is in fact impossible? So, not in the UK, but also not in Iran or Russia either?
>>24777466>escapeto where
>>24777532No, plenty of traditions are coherent and consistent in their claims to access truth. The only way you get to "there is absolutely no way to decide between them, it all comes down to arbitrary aesthetic preference is by secretly (perhaps unknowingly) still affirming some epistemic criteria as absolute.Consider the skepticism that results from empiricism. How do we know the world and our memories weren't created seconds ago? How do we know we aren't in the Matrix? How do we know causes and not merely constant conjunction in sense data? Etc.But notably, the epistemic presuppositions of empiricism that lead to this skepticism are not themselves knowable through sense data and instrumental reason.So, relativism is another option. Whatever is true is merely "true for that language game." But many areas of thought deny this fact in particular, and absolutizing the starting presuppositions of the relativist that lead to this conclusion is ALSO still dogmatically affirming one set of axioms over others.So then consider all those systems prior to the modern era that affirm a sort of noesis or intellectus. Welp, they don't have this problem. Knowledge, true knowledge, is luminous and reflexive. To be sure, they acknowledge that we never know things exhaustively, since one must know everything (the whole context of being and the First Principle) to know anything in whole. But they do have a real grasp on being in their own turns. Are they more dogmatic? Not really, they have their own starting positions that aren't really any more or less objectionable. And they allow for stuff like underdetermination of scientific theory. Aquinas mentions this explicitly vis-á-vis astronomy, as does Epicures. We can always "save appearances" in a way that anticipated Quine and even Rorty. What they deny though is that appearances can be arbitrarily related to reality, or that appearances can be free standing apparitions (and most pre-moderns require that they have a cause, causes here being not a mechanistic temporal chain, but a logoi, principle of intelligibility such that something is one sort of thing and not another).So does it all come down to aesthetics? No, only if you accept certain presuppositions.I will say that some are more liveable than others though. No one lives as a true radical skeptic. No one even lives like a true values anti-realist. You'll find it quite impossible to reason your way from skeptical premises to driving into oncoming traffic or jumping off a precipice because "I cannot know what this will bring more than anything else." Likewise, you can say value is arbitrary all you want but you won't be able to convince yourself that slicing your beloved pet in half is good for it, or that slamming your hand in a car door is just as good as reading a good book. But this is only what one would expect if your intellect is being directly informed by being through the senses.
>>24777712You cannot shake this sense of knowledge no matter how hard you discourse on them. You cannot actually live like a full on skeptic. And that is totally consistent with truth being "in" the senses and "in" the intellect, such that you cannot just undermine it through ratio (discursive reasoning). Ratio is weaker than direct noesis, and so less compelling (granted, people can sometimes talk themselves into wild stuff). Chesterton on the madman in Orthodoxy is quite right here. No one is more logically consistent than the paranoiac who believes they are secretly Christ or the King. But they live in a very small world. Hence, my advice to skeptics, and to modern malaise in general, is to seek beauty first and foremost. It is the philokalia (love of Beauty) that leads to philosophy (love of Wisdom). Dante says this and he's a pretty smart guy. So does von Balthasar or pic related. Whereas physicalism is small and dreary. Skepticism leads to solipsism and is the smallest of all. Nietzscheanism is still ultimately small, and must continually compensate with Napoleon syndrome. But philosophies of gnosis are expansive, and those of theosis most expansive.
>>24777596People operate on abstract concepts and their relations, said concepts and relations are instilled through language both explicitly, through definition, and implicitly, through association, grammar, and omission. Proper use of language can absolutely affect someone's behavior and opinions, as seen in marketing and politics. Theology and ideology use this mechanic a lot, so does philosophy to an extent.
>>24777712>>24777724I don't see the problem with skepticism. It is just a form of intellectual humility. The fact that no one can "live in accordance with radical skepticism" is not itself a refutation of it - but why would it even be incumbent upon a skeptic to consider this a desirable or necessary course of action? Furthermore, from the perspective of me as a human being, a universe where values are real+objective and one where values are arbitrary are indistinguishable. Experientially, there is no difference - not unless I accept that God has interfered in human history to render certain moral truths known to his creation by means revelation (but even so, which revelation? which laws? which interpretation of said laws? etc.). So nothing about my own experience tells me whether values are "real" or "arbitrary" (from a top-down perspective). And whether they are real or not does not exacerbate or diminish the psychological effect they have upon me
>>24777539I don't believe most of these things, but I don't see a case for the argument that power comes from being enslaved. What enlightenment awaits me when I banish that final spook?
>>24777466I have this on my kobo reader. I looked it up in regards to how certain philosophies act as defacto religions.
>>24777880>All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts not only because of their historical development - in which they were transferred from theology to the theory of the state, whereby, for example, the omnipotent God became the omnipotent lawgiver-but also because of their systematic structure, the recognition of which is necessary for a sociological consideration of these concepts.-Carl Schmitt, Political Theology, pg. 36
>>24777466>axioms are endemic to all belief>all axioms are arbitrary Nice. You just figured out the truth. Time to start doing something with life.
>>24777932>all axioms are arbitraryThis is itself just a dogmatic axiom. Your axioms might be arbitrary, mine are know.
>>24777941Care to give an example of an axiom that isnt?
>>24777740If skepticism is>I don't knowIt is humility. Modern skepticism is more often:>I don't know but I also know you and no one else can know and I know exactly why we cannot know because I know how the mind works and all these various metaphysical truths about the limits of knowledge. Also, because I know we cannot know here is my 800 page treatise on how society needs to be run because of our (my) ignorance and how all ethics should work.There is nothing of humility in arguing from a position of ignorance though. It's a false humility. It doesn't help that Rawlsian liberalism through Neoliberalism has become a global hegemonic force that basically says "all humanity must live thus because we say all are ignorant and can only but he ignorant!"
>>24777949Sure:>Good is to be done and pursued, and evil avoided>A whole is greater than a part>Nothing can both be and not be without qualification>Nothing is simultaneously in potency and actual, in the same respect, without qualification
>>24777949Some axioms are considered self-evident. Axioms in math aren't chosen arbitrarily for instance. That they are true is a pretty major consideration. Continentals tend to appeal to axioms in a bizarre way since most mathematicians still tend to be lowercase p platonists and while they might explore more or less arbitrary systems, they still take core ones to be obviously true, which is the whole point of using them. Plus, to say that all grasp of truths comes from axioms is to axiomatically declare that all knowledge is discursive. But most thinkers of East and West until relatively recently rejected this in strong terms. Some things are known from direct apprehension, and there is often also considered a more holistic sort of knowledge of being, as in non-duality or "gnosis."
>>24777969>Axioms in math aren't chosen arbitrarily for instance. That they are true is a pretty major consideration.No mathematical axiom is true. They all correspond probabilistically and never with certainty
>>24777959Those are all built on dense auxiliaries and use phonetic language to approximate unfiltered reality
>>24777539>empiricist epistemic closure>the most real is what can be measured and quantifiedYou know literally nothing about Kant. Have you even bothered to read a wikipedia article about him?
>>24778047>No argumentKant dogmatically assumes much of the empiricist platform, yes.>Not reading.Ironic, considering Kant never read any of the thought he dismissed as "twaddle" because they didn't accept the same dogmatism as him.
>>24778054Does the phrase "thing in itself" ring a bell to you? Do you think Kant thinks it can be "measured and quantified"? You are such an imbecile.
>>24778071Wow, please show me oh great reader, who is so concerned about "not reading," where in that post there is anything mentioning Kant in particular. It says explicitly that some get rid of some of those, but not all.
>>24778080Nice job backing off your retarded, half-formed shower thoughts. Hard to call them "core dogmas" when barely any of these even come close to describing his beliefs.>empiricist epistemic closure>the most real is what can be measured and quantified>values are something extrinsic to fundamental reality>man can step back into dispassioned reason at will and be "led by the facts">mechanistic or computational understandings of causality>thus the gold standard of all epistemology is what convinces the "reasonable" everyman>freedom is powervague word salad you were probably trying to attribute to Nietzsche
>>24777466>The Theological Origins of ModernityNever read it, but looking at the summary it seems that it's trying to lead the reader to the usual braindead theist argument of "Western secular thought developed in the context of Christian thinking, therefore religious thought is more true than secular thought". Regardless of the fact that the mere historical origins of an idea say absolutely nothing about its truth or falsity, and using the same reasoning one could argue that Christianity should be supplanted by Judaism, Zoroastrianism, and whatever other mix of extinct folk beliefs contributed to Christianity's early development.
>>24778197>I didn't read it, but here's my take on it anywaywhy are you people like this
>>24778205Have you read it? Has OP?
>>24778233I have. Gillispie tracks intellectual development and how all of modern through stemmed from the complete train derailment of thought and theology that nominalism was. All early modern philosophy were attempts to reconcile this while massive wars ripped Europe apart over it. It resulted in theological idea-complexes being secularized, resulting into even further intellectual degradation as western culture continued to wrestle and rip itself apart through the next 400 years of history. And considering Christianity is just Platonism with a jewish middle man, nothing of value would be lost if it got supplanted by its actual originating philosophy, minus the demonic abrahamic demon jockeying it.
I like how OP immediately dipped from the thread when his basic characterization of this random collection of thinkers was challenged. So much for "seeing beyond the boundaries of dogmatism", huh?
>>24777466You had your turn, over a thousand years as I recall. And by the way it fucking sucked for 99.9% of the population. “Muh luminous ecstatic Reason” Fascist LARP.
>>24778197This is a horrible, straw man summary. This same thesis has been explored by scores of thinkers in great detail by this point, from accessible stuff like Charles Taylor to the detailed work of Amos Funkenstein. Personally, I think it's convincing enough to say that nominalism and its consequences have been a disaster for the world. People often offset its negatives by pointing out all the technogical progress but it's very hard to see how the two are essentially related and the empirical evidence that the one is the cause of the other is itself weak. There is I think no necessary reason that technological progress required the collapse of teleology, endemic moral skepticism, the obsession with the self, and the various sorts of nihilism that are increasingly endemic. A civilization could have trains and the via antiqua, a confessional state and electricity, education as formation in virtue and a focus on epistemic virtue and a space program. But at the very least this genealogy has some implications for something like a neo-Kantian liberalism such as Rawls', since it reveals its neutrality to really just be the absolutization of a historically contingent paradigm.I find this has teeth because *some* aspects of modernity do seem pathological. One can't contrast Greco-Roman ethics, Christian ethics, Islamic, key Hindu thinkers, and Chinese philosophy and not come away that they are in many ways much more similar to each other than modernity. Technological progress papers over that the difference is not a good one. Strip away the plentitude afforded by technological advantages and it seems extremely hard to justify that other core elements of the paradigm such as nominalism are beneficial. So to my mind, a defense of modernity has to lie on arguing that it makes technological progress and science possible, and I find this to be a hard argument to make.
>>24778348Whereas today it is awesome! I took cannot wait to eat ze bugs (everyone will still be obese of course) and consoom medications to stop us from killing ourselves and endless electronic media and p0rn from our pods as clankers reduced us to surplus cattle while tech lords craft themselves into voluntarist post-humans whose ideal is Milton's Satan. Based!
>>24778380All of my siblings survived infancy, what a hellscape. At least the original fascists has some balls. You lot are all losers resentful of the fact you give women the ick. You won’t win.
>>24778352ngl, modern productive capacity with ancient aesthetic sensibilities would be a pretty huge improvement on its own. we have the capacity to decorate public spaces like Pompeii and employ tons of craftsman and instead we do an individualist soup of bottom bidder Chinese slop that is covered in barely clothed models or huge blown up photos of gluttons meals or other shit to consoom. that part at least is quite soulless
>>24778385Notice how you have to appeal to technology here. Now where is the argument that nominalism, a rejection of teleology, the modern focus on the self, etc. is a prerequisite for technological progress of even the contingent cause of it?
>>24778385Your siblings are all going to either be enslaved or exterminated by the most malicious global regime in all of world history. Sad!
>>24778404Go find a woman and some friends and live out your trad fantasy on your own amongst yourselves.
>>24778385>You won't win.Even in 2019 athiest women had fertility rates on par with Korea. Strongly religious American women edge out India and Libya. You're going extinct and your legacy will be terabytes of porn (dominated by sodomy), square steel block towers, strip malls, and Marvel movies as your epic, and a bunch of trite literature about finding yourself by being licentious and abusing drugs like On The Road (muh freedom as "authenticity").
>>24778385>My siblings survived.In the atheistic Warsaw Pact nations 60-75% of all conceptions were murdered in the womb across several decades. Even with later declines, Western women still murder about a fifth to a quarter of all their children, largely because they are "inconvenient" (for consoomption and money).
>>24778551How many of those kids are gonna stay in your retarded church? Also do you actually have all these birth rate statistics memorized or are you just tossing out bullshit so people waste time fact checking you
>>24777539Very interesting. Thanks for sharing. It’s nice to know there’s a book out explains those points. This aligns a lot with what Whatifalthist believes the false assumption of modernity are.
>>24778352but if nominalism IS a christian invention that even predates the renaissance and the reformation, then how is this not the fault of christianity
>>24778352Why are you acting like nominalism didn’t exist as a philosophical tradition in most of the traditional societies you mention. DESU I think realism is a sign of decadence - Plato etc.
>>24778551Sodomy is not modern. It is right-wing and traditional.
>>24778766What did that post have to do with Christianity? The point is that you can't defend the flaws of empiricist, liberal, exclusive humanist, etc. modernity by simply saying "if you reject this you reject science and republican government and want to get rid of cars and reinstitute slavery," unless you can convincingly show that the one can only exist in the context of the other.This just doesn't seem true though, because societies have gotten rid of slavery without liberalism (indeed, liberalism wasn't the main reason liberalism got rid of slavery) and republican government has functioned in the context of ancient Greek metaphysics and teleology, medieval Christian, etc. Likewise, the point was that one can well imagine a Taoist paradigm with natural science and industry, or a Buddhist one, or one grounded in Greek metaphysics. But the modern paradigm pretty much exclusively defends its flaws by claiming you cannot have science without it, or at least that it was the primary cause of the scientific revolution. I am not sure if they can be supported. Arguably, in important cases, both mechanism and empiricism have retarded scientific growth, quantum foundations being just one well documented example, and the information theory revolution being another plausible candidate. And certainly it has really, really fucked up moral thought and aesthetics.
>>24778920if we're talking about nominalism and its development in the west, then we're talking about ockham and his take on christian theology, that's what other people who take part in these threads overwhelmingly point to as the culprit besides lutherboth of these are, of course, christian, and were accepted by other christians, but are also called the foundation of modernity
>>24778766>>24778920mind you nominalism came out of the churches condemnation of the philosophy of Aristotle after it resurfaced within muslim civilization and for the logical restraints that his universalism placed upon God. the church condemned it to both protect against what was seen as muslim barbarian influential theology and to protect the omnipotence of God. everything following was one giant parade of mental gymnastics that literally fucked europe up to the side of the plague and mongols. so yess, it is the fault of christianity for being so theologically retarded outside of thomism
Nominalism is wrong because… it just is, ok
>>24778013>No mathematical axiom is true. They all correspond probabilistically and never with certaintySo there's a probabilistic chance that 1+1 not 2?
>>24778385>All of my siblings survived infancyChild mortality, plague, and famine have been replaced by lowering birthrates and higher rates of abortion. You can't really escape nature, you can only delay it.
>>24778991>>24779001Sort of a weird point to make when the trads are always talking about nominalism and voluntarism.Christianity came from Greek metaphysics. If one of its later heresies produced modernity is it thus Greek metaphysics, in all its forms, that is to be written off? That's the sort of argument you're making. X produced Y (Y, which it recognized as heretical, after millennia), so therefore if Y is bad then X is bad. Which is totally irrelevant to the original point which is that you cannot defend Y by saying it is necessary for science unless you can show that this actually makes any sense.OP's book makes this point about Islam, but it's not made very well. There was suspicion, but it is not straightforward in the way you are putting it. First, Islam went voluntarist before Christianity and much more fully than it. Second, a number of the important Islamic and Jewish texts circulating in the late medieval period are more "Neo-Platonic" and closer to a Saint Bonaventure than "Aristotleian" or closer to Saint Thomas. The Book of Causes is pretty much a gloss on Proclus. This stuff is honestly less threatening to divine sovereignty precisely because it is in no way deflationary re causation (indeed, it's a sort of "thicker" development on Aristotle, Aristotle as used by the Neoplatonists).Fears over Islam are also perhaps less relevant than the other worldlyism of later Franciscian spirituality and the return of essentially gnostic heresies.But whatever, it is still a weird argument. Early Enlightenment liberalism is part of what eventuality gave birth to Marxism and fascism (Hegel being a foundational figure for all three later streams). Does this somehow condemn the entire Enlightenment of Marxism or fascism is flawed?The point about Islam shows that voluntarism and nominalism actually is NOT unique to Christianity. It developed in the Near East for quite similar reasons, but not in quite the same way. But it DIDN'T develop in Eastern Christianity, Hinduism, etc., except as imported into it as a rival theory.
What do you guys make of Lubac? I am trudging through the Supernatural. Quite fascinating. Personally, I think idea of pure nature and cessation of miracles from empiricism and Protestantism respectively is as much part of problem as nominalism. Pic related
>>24777466>The scientific mechanism of inertia states that an object will remain at rest until an external force acts upon it. Generally speaking, this reflects the conventional contemporary view of the social-body and man’s position in it. Man is a causally determined product of his causally determined environment – if we want to change something in his condition, we simply need to adjust one of his inputs. For every problem there is a solution – the poor can be lifted out of poverty by redistributing wealth, while social unrest can be managed through policy adjustments. Man is nothing but a cog in the great machine of human society and will respond predictably to the inputs he receives. This kind of thinking is the root of totalitarianism – the total state, which is how the mechanized West conceives of the state in general. >When we survey the history of ideas, we find that this phenomenon is very particular to the West. In ancient cultures, the uplifting of man’s spirit was considered to be an issue of morality and virtue. The Romans, when they entered a period of internal division and crisis, attributed it to a decline in Roman character. Writers like Livy and Tacitus believed that the strength of Rome lay in the moral fibre of its citizens and leaders. In the mechanized West however, such explanations are always invariably linked to economics. If man is an inert object, then nothing could possibly be his fault – the fault rather lies with the causal mechanisms that shape and influence him. This is why we have such a voluminous body of scribbling on socioeconomics. Roman society, on the other hand, had many professional charlatans, but the economist was not one of them. For the Western scholar, a change in man’s condition always results from an external force – it was for a long time thought that the effects of agriculture were what caused the emergence of the higher civilizations. Until that idea was debunked, and even then only recently. Technology is the practical arm of economics, and so mechanical thinking divides up the history of humanity into successive periods of technological revolution. First there was the Stone Age, and then the Bronze Age, followed by the Iron Age, until finally the Industrial Age. Left unchecked, the most primitive tribe will eventually put men on the moon. This is the basic idea of progress.
>>24781345Whats this passage from?
>>24781345Gee sure sounds an awful lot like Hegel’s criticisms of the mathematicization of reality by empirical scientists but whatever you do don’t read him! He is modern, he is le badthought. Especially don’t read chapter 5 of the Phenomenology of Spirit! No, philosophy stops with Aquinas.
>>24781359Trads normally like Hegel more than most. He sort of bucks the trend in having a very classical vision of freedom and his politics is ultimately still oriented towards an end.
>>24777466Well yes you see but I actually have observed certain dogmas that OP is engaged in that he shares with Hume, Kant etc, And I myself am above these dogmas through my eccentric genius. I will not elaborate on this any further other than to say that I am very smart.
>>24781345>Until that idea was debunked, and even then only recently.I want to know more
>>24777466I've never heard anyone explain why dogmas are bad. It's always just the assumption that they're bad and people go into deep arguments around it.
>>24782276It's not exactly a secret. Well, to the non-academic world it might be. Recent anthropology suggests farming is many tens of thousands of years older than previously thought and like many things in human history was invented, forgotten about, and then reinvented many times and in many places. David Graeber's book is specfically about this if you want to read it.
>>24777541>>24777539>>the most real is what can be measured and quantifiedexcept of course things that are too complicated or not of a discipline considered robust and definitive.hence why you are just atoms, feelings and even the senses are not real. of course (most) philosophy is generally not that inane about it, but the popular form seated in the culture believes this, and it influences all intellectual pursuits including philosophy.
>>24777586The exaltation of human reason literally comes from religion and was not only aligned with it until recently but was important for making it what it is
>>24777596People are not an island separate from history and society. Especially not in a world of mass communication, standard education, globalisation. I don't know if you realise but there is increasingly little difference between the youth of an Englishspeaking country and the youth of Egypt or Mainland China.This is akin to saying normal people operate just by instinct, as if that wouldn't be completely alien to how they actually operate. Which is by received ideas and impressions and sentiments, and personal thoughts and experiences filtered through and shaped by them.
>>24777740People generally don't understand scepticism philosophically, so while there might not be anything wrong with it, where are the people who understand scepticism let alone attempt to practice it? There's people who call themselves sceptics or people who make some claim to scepticism, but for them it is essentially a means to an end of advocating their dogma or culture, only briefly and shallowly entertained to discredit an opponent, or not really entertained at all and merely invoked.
>>24779579Chind mortality is fairly speculative to begin with. As are quantifications of the past.
>>24782631Very true. >Skepticism means we ought not affirm universals. Therefore my nominalism wins by default.>Skepticism means we cannot know the Good. Therefore my liberalism wins and is "good" by default. Everyone must pay into and abide by this system, which we have justified through an appeal to our own ignorance.>Skepticism means we cannot know being. Therefore my empiricist phenomenal materialism wins be default.>Skepticism means we cannot know man's essence or things divine. Therefore my voluntarism and exclusive humanism must be the default for all people except in "private" spaces.>I am skeptical of rational desires, noesis, ecstasis, etc. Therefore we must just assume my instrumental and wholly discursive notion of rationality.>We must be skeptical about truth. Therefore my deflationism is true. We will be "pragmatic.""Pragmatism" is normally the catch all solution to skepticism, but it should be obvious that either things are truly "useful" and knowable as such or they aren't. If they aren't, than an appeal to "pragmatism" and "usefulness" is just an appeal to appearances, whatever we currently desire and feel is useful. But this is just a more convoluted path to Thrasymachus, Protagoras, and Gorgias, affirmed over and against Socrates and Plato, by dint of a mere appeal to ignorance.Not:>The sage is no true sage.But>I cannot tell if the sage is a true sage, therefore all must act as if he is not a sage. At most, one can affirm what he says in a "privatized" sphere, for all temporal power must rest with my own ignorance.
>>24779804100% agree. What is interesting is that Dante's purification and return to the "Earthly Paradise" of Eden is very much framed as a return to nature, not a supernatural transformation (that only comes in the Paradiso). To be natural IS to be oriented rightly towards God.Dante is in agreement with all the Patristics here. Pic related is a great collection of Patristic thoughts on this subject and their core idea is of course that it is the Fall that is unnatural. The idea of a pure nature is incoherent as it is God "in whom we live and move and have our being," (Acts 17:28). Likewise, the celebration of the body and the Transfiguration militates against such a separation. For Dante, souls must be purged of lust, gluttony, etc. on Mt. Purgatory precisely because the bodily, natural appetites are essential to the diefied man. All of nature is sacramental.The abuse of Saint Thomas and the rise of the nature/super nature distinction shows that the Reformation wounded the Roman Church quite badly, pushing it into the very corrupting heresies it originally sought to push back on.
