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they're all bumbling dogmatic existentialist toddlers in comparison with the metaphysically coherent and philosophically rigourous ancients and mediaevals
I literally don't see how anything from this era could be seen as philosophically substantial.
>let me just build on this tower of dogmatic untruths, starting from Descartes
that was their project
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>>24997900
>>let me just build on this tower of dogmatic untruths,
This describes the Medievals more more than the moderns, and it was the reason Descartes rejected them.
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>>24997900
how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?
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>>24997900
Early-modern thought was definitely way more amateurish. However, this did lead to some creativity, although admittedly much of it was garbage. I think you can say in defense of the 'New Science,' mechanism, and nominalism that, at least early on, it helped dissolve some dogmas that were retarding scientific progress. But Whig histories of empiricism and liberalism make it seem like it was *the* change. In reality, the scientific method began to be developed under realism, the Great Divergence whereby Europe pulled ahead of India and China started during realism, barely changed its trajectory for centuries as empiricism and the New Science spread, and only accelerates in the 19th century, ironically during the high point of idealism and Hegelianism, and then the gap massively shrinks during the post-war dominance of liberalism and empiricism. So the data for the Whig history is radically inconsistent. More empiricist areas didn't develop faster, there are many famous inventors and scientists who held to older ideas, etc. Also, Islam underwent a period of nominalism and atomism and it didn't have a scientific revolution. Nor did ancient empiricism cause one.

But scholasticism really had be ruined and dogmatized by the early modern period, so if you want to look to what ruined it you have to look not just to nominalism but the Black Death that made it possible and then the mass executions of the educated and destruction of the monasteries at just the time the printing press was coming out.
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>>24997908
Yes, and at all times and places up until the Enlightenment and liberalism people were constantly burning heretics and you could only ever repeat the dogmas or else be killed. Never mind all the largest politicides and mass executions of intellectuals occured under Enlightenment ideologies (including liberalism). For instance, French liberals found even the guillotine to slow for mass executing priests and nuns (the people had to be "freed" from sources of authority and knowledge counter to liberalism) and so began building barges with removable planks so they could sink and drown boatloads of people at one go.

Likewise, the move from experts deciding what was copied to the "market" deciding what good philosophy was had some predictable results.
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>>24997908
>dogmatic untruths
name a single one.
>>
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91gT68xeDMM
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>>24997908
If you reject the Church's teachings, you are by definition anti intellectual and spiritually Jewish
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>>24997908
Define "truth"
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>>24997900
>mental jousting of the scholastics
>produced materialists and idol worship
>sent their children to the Saracens to be sold into slavery

You're just postmodern, don't worry about modernism.
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>>24999725
>rejecting a jewish mystical cult is spiritually jewish
Huh? No thanks
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>>25000381
> " jewish mystical cult "
> actual rabinnic jews hate them
Are you fucking retarded ?
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>>24997900
What pisses me off most about this period is the mix of philosophy and literature. Hegel for example laid out a few arguments in his introduction, then carries on with a disorderly stream of claims and inferences. There's no method or rigor at all, and we're constantly flipping between reasoning proper and literary commentary. The thought of most of these authors could be boiled down to about a hundred pages.

Medieval philosophy, even when it dealt with weird stuff like angels or the names of God, did so in an extremely precise and formalised way. Any questio from Thomas Aquinas can be quite easily written in formal logic. All in all, I wish philosophy had broken away from religion without giving up the monumental progress achieved in logic and techniques of reasoning.
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>>24997900
>>24997954
>>25000459
>muh dogma
>muh lack of reason
philosophy is not for you. i think counting jars of wine is more your speed
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>>25000486
No offense but if you don't perceive a decline in formalism between Ockham or Abelard and Rousseau's philosophy which is basically a biography, perhaps reading is not for you.
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>>25000494
rousseau made arguments which weren't based on technical pedantry and didn't have trivial implications. he was also primarily an orator anyway, renowned for his rhetoric as much as his ideas
>>
The "angels on a pin" question was just a way to frame the distinction between the intelligible and sensible. It's the same sort of distinction that gets made in metaphysics to this day. It was popular because they would often test a student's knowledge by forcing them to apply abstract distinctions to more concrete questions. Education back then was in a number of ways more rigorous and adversarial than today. Defending a thesis actually meant defending it against people trying to tear it down, which rarely happens today. Copying books was time consuming and expensive so having your work spread meant being held in high esteem by other experts. Education was long, as long as doctoral degrees today, but in many ways more intense because it was an entire lifestyle, with ascetic labors and spiritual exercises considered essential to doing philosophy (this is common to earlier Pagan traditions and Eastern thought too). Often, those seeking to "do philosophy" took lifelong vows of celibacy and poverty to remain focused on their work (although, arguably getting an advanced degree with philosophy is a vow of poverty today too, lol).

This partly explains why early modern thought seems way more amateurish. It was. As education became far more common, it also became far shorter and less rigorous. Getting your book copied became about market forces. The sage and saint are the measure of good opinion in the pre-modern West and East. In modernity it becomes the "general audience." At the same time, the wars of religion were truly cataclysmic, killing vastly larger shares of Europe's population than the World Wars. They also focused on destroying the monasteries and purging universities, with intellectuals in particular coming in for exile, imprisonment, and execution.

Advances in the scientific method and technology, which were driven onward by the needs of warfare and competition, paper over the cataclysmic knowledge loss that occured over this period (in some ways worse than during the fall of Rome). Instrumental knowledge was maintained based on what was useful, but a bunch of other stuff was lost. Crucially, theology wasn't removed from science as Whig histories have it. Newton for example thought he was doing secular theology and thought his Biblical scholarship was absolutely essential to understanding his science. Rather, what happened was that a particularly shallow and dogmatic voluntarist theology (the result of the Reformation cataclysms, which also deeply shaped, and we could say corrupted, Catholic theology) was enshrined in the "New Science" of mechanism. But because the scientific revolution and Great Divergence continued due to instrumental technological progress (which began BEFORE nominalism and empiricism became dominant, and didn't really accelerate until the 19th century), this was obscured. It seemed like the new theology was driving the progress, even if it was actually retarding it in some ways.
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>>25000372
OP here. I was talking about the Neoplatonic tradition.
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>>25000498
>he was also primarily an orator anyway, renowned for his rhetoric as much as his ideas
so you're basically calling him a sophist
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>>25000579
oh i forgot you "logicians" are all retards
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>>25000394
Jews love christians
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>>24997900
>"Modernism is unrigorous and flawed! REAL scholars like myself read Saint Pedantius of Teufelsdröckh, who espoused aristotelianism, the most perfect philosophy to ever exist, that took a lot of guts and moxy."
I hate this reactionary neo catholic nonsense. It all amounts to smugly signalling to things that already exist then prescribing the Catholic Church as if it was pharmaceutical ointment. It's intellectual senility.
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>>25000637
It's incels using christianity as an identity signal
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>>24997900
You're a child, actually, because of your incoherent and hyperbolic babble. It wouldn't surprise me if you made this thread with AI
>metaphysically coherent and philosophically rigourous
Do you think this doesn't describe the 17th century rationalists? Do you think "Modern" in philosophy applies to Nietzsche and Sartre? Honestly get off this board fucking retard
>>
>Noah's Ark
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>>24997900
No good deed goes unpunished in Sodom, OP.
>>
>>25000494
Rousseau was more of a genuine philosopher than the dull formalists of the medieval period.
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>>24997900
The one major area that modern thinkers improved over the medieval and ancients in western thought is advances in phenomenology that allowed for more detailed and accurate descriptions of the nature of consciousness and mental states, which is one of the major areas where the ancients and medieval in the west are inferior to the ancient and medieval thinkers in eastern philosophy.

It wasn't until the 18th-20th centuries that the west finally begins to catch up to what Hindus, Buddhists and even Muslims had been writing about viz. phenomenology for centuries.
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>>25000638
Heresy stems from impurity, most commonly sexual impurity. People deceive themselves to justify their lusts. Little lies turn into big lies, and eventually you get long-deceased, erudite lunatics influencing pseuds on image boards in between their goon sessions (helps to avoid prostate cancer).
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>>25000494
>Rousseau's philosophy which is basically a biography
Do you also think Descartes' Discourse on Method to be a biography
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>>25001075
>~improved over~
>abandoned
ftfy
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>>25000394
I'm not worshiping a kike, anon. You can miss me with that gay shit.
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>>25001116
The phenomenology of consciousness and mental states in the entire Christian and Neoplatonic corpus is woefully incomplete up until the modern era when some Christian theologians/philosophers integrate phenomenology. The main thing they ‘abandoned’ was this gaping hole. Sorry to burst your bubble but that’s a straight fact.

Aristotle categorizes the functions of the intellect but gives little to no phenomenological description of what it is like to think, attend, be aware, or self-present. Intellect is treated functionally and metaphysically, not experientially. This pattern is followed by practically all subsequent western thought until the modern era, by contrast eastern philosophy was never encumbered or bound by this limitation.
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>>25000637
, OP here, I'm not catholic
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>>25000699
>>metaphysically coherent and philosophically rigourous
>Do you think this doesn't describe the 17th century rationalists?
yes I think that and know it as well. Descartes and Spinoza are rubbish when compared with Proclus or Eriugena. they're dogmatic and incoherent. they just don't make sense. they sound like they do, but they do not. just like a lot of modern science and "philosophy"... I wonder where the tendency came from.
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>>25001563
Oh sorry for assuming. People who make that argument tend to be catholic. Anthony Kenny is one, for example. It's just a somewhat common current among them.
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>>25001075
>>25001151
>The phenomenology of consciousness and mental states in the entire Christian and Neoplatonic corpus is woefully incomplete
dreadfully, dreadfully incorrect about the neoplatonist part. phenomenology does not explain consciousness. phenomenology provides for consciousness and experience what Aristotle provided for metaphysics: a terminological toolkit, nothing more; it does not explain consciousness. descriptions are not the same as explanations.
plus, you equate christian philosophy with neoplatonism; that there is a mistake woeful in itself.
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>>25001589
>dreadfully incorrect about the neoplatonist part.
Okay then show where there is an advanced phenomenology of consciousness in any pre-modern Neoplatonic work, it's simply isn't there.

> phenomenology does not explain consciousness. phenomenology provides for consciousness and experience what Aristotle provided for metaphysics: a terminological toolkit, nothing more; it does not explain consciousness. descriptions are not the same as explanations.
Why are you even posting this as a response to me?

I never claimed that phenomenological descriptions of consciousness provides some sort of causal or reductive explanation of consciousness, I merely observed the objective fact that both the Christian and Neoplatonic corpus have a conspicuous absence of any well-developed phenomenology of consciousness in comparison to 1) the modern era or 2) eastern philosophy for almost its entire history. In the first post I specifically wrote "descriptions of the natures of" because I was distinguishing phenomenological descriptions from some sort of causal or metaphysical explanation. So I never once made the conflation you seem to be accusing me of making.

>you equate christian philosophy with neoplatonism
Incorrect, I stated that both were characterized by the absence of a particular thing, that is not to equate them.

You entire post is retarded and accuses me of holding a series of views and positions that I never once endorsed. Next time think twice before posting some dumb shit like that.
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>>25000588
No, no they don't
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>>25000638
Are these "incels" in the room with us right now?
>>
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>>25001151
This is wrong though. First, Plotinus has plenty of phenomenology. The Patristics have an even greater focus on this, right down to detailed techniques for achieving hesychasm (total stillness) and practicing nepsis. Someone like Evagrius is deeply focused on practical phenomenology. And the terminology of modern phenomenology literally comes from scholasticism (which, to be sure, is less focused on phenomenology than the Patristics and the Byzantines). Phenomenology and particularly practical exercises, askesis, what Hadot calls "spiritual exercises" is vastly more developed in Christian though, particularly Eastern Christianity, than in contemporary post-modern phenomenology desu.
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>>25001075
I could see how someone could come to this conclusion because most survey courses on philosophy skip right from Aristotle to Descartes, and when late-antique and medieval thought is covered, it is essentially covered according to modern epistemic and pedagogical assumptions, but this strikes me as woefully inaccurate. It's particularly odd to me to see Islamic thought held up as a counterpart here since it is in many ways very similar but had *less* or a tradition of monasticism and less of a focus on contemplative knowledge and askesis.
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>>25001733
Aquinas has an extremely well developed psychology. I'm not really sure what you're talking about here. He describes the process of decision-making, of desire, etc. in very detailed terms. It definitely isn't sparse. It's definitely far more developed than say, Hume.

Second, I'm at a loss for how modern therapeutic models (which tend to be functionalists an utilitarian) necessarily provide more insight than Plato's description of the civil war in the soul and the tripartite structure of epithumia, thymos, logos. For instance, why is a modern distinction like id, ego, superego superior?

Also, Augustine is full of deep studies of the nature of experience, sensation, memory, etc. That's a main focus of De Trinitate, he has his famous section on memory in the Confessions, etc.
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>>25001733
then in that case you're finding faults in a things the respect of which has no business being in those things. whatever your account is of is of a non-problem in the first place. why adduce lower things with respect to diviner matters as a point of lack?
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>>25001575
shit tier bait kys



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