Paine

Point taken. He was a writer of his time taking on the challengers as they appeared. But I think there is a geometric element in his rhetoric that end...

I think some of the style comes from growing up in a dour religious household.

When you put it that way, the 'now' sounds like a description of a Bed and Breakfast one reports visiting without enthusiasm. It was okay for the nigh...

I would not describe it as a 'perfectly good real opportunity.' Perhaps you are aware of this, but Nietzsche specifically called out Pascal as the pos...

What Nietzsche rejects in the expectation of an afterlife is that it avoids our responsibility to decide for ourselves what to value or discard in thi...

Are you familiar with the doctrtine of eternal recurrence that N proposed as the antithesis to depicting life 'here' as some kind of test for another ...

The element of what Nietzsche refers to as 'Socratic' (that Nietzsche objects to) is the separation of the realm of becoming from the realm of the ete...

I appreciate your focus on attention. As a young person, I liked what I liked as an immediate response to music but learned a lot from people drawing ...

I don't know if is an illusion or not. Our condition is especially good at fusing experiences with accounts given about them. A thoroughly skeptical p...

Humanity scares the crap out of me. I do think our shared experiences of being human is more evident than many other things. Is 'faith', in this conte...

Are you saying that Gosar fantasizing about the death of a colleague is part of a protest against a tyranny of civic conventions imposed by a group wh...

That is an excellent brief, counselor. Some of the problem involves how attempts to clarify relationships get taken for other things. Hume and Kant sw...

That is an interesting perspective about the limits of what can happen in a corporate environment. But the vulgarity being embraced in this case is do...

The distinction you make between 'genuine beliefs' and the merely 'hypothetical' suggests a kind of disassociation that I have not observed between di...

I figure the answer points to the importance of a dialogue that develops different models and assumptions over time. Framing answers to problems creat...

What is politically expedient is to satisfy the insatiable demand for transgressive performance. There is a market demand for that and suppliers are w...

That reminds me of my embarrassment in school when I interpreted Shakespeare's, "Better well hung than ill wed" as a kind of Zen koan with bawdy under...

What makes Roark so attractive to some young males is that the theme of rugged individualism and the virtues of a pure meritocracy provide cover for t...

I see the distinction you are making but balk at the true versus false designation. It is not a field to win or lose honor except in the eyes of the l...

One could ignore them, I suppose. Picking at vegetables on the plate when the eyes are cast your way. Maybe create a diversion to change the subject i...

Nietzsche throws down several stumbling blocks to Mill's kind of utilitarianism and Frankl's 'search for meaning' Book One of The Gay Science puts the...

One of the appeals to reason in the argument is that we could not have had a notion of the divine unless we were infected by the notion at some point....

Anselm brought in the idea of what can be imagined and what were the conditions of such an activity. It was not a work of mysticism like others of tha...

What do you make of St. Anselm? He was not interested in replacing faith with reason. Nor vice versa.

I don't understand the human side of these speculations. If there is a god who is interested in what I do and think, then that is an important part of...

Perhaps it has something to do with the division Descartes made between the I and the world it perceives. The singularity presumed is not concordant w...

Yes.

That is unlikely given this writing is one of the first of its kind. I was referring to the willingness to have every proposition be challenged as suc...

As far as I know, 'persons' are the only ones who might be possibly interested in these 'constructs.'

My response was directed to what might be wanted beyond acceptance to any particular account of our limitations, however those things may be described...

Doesn't our experience with recognizing kinds, types, and universals in the realm of particulars count as 'psychologically useful' correlates? Your de...

To understand the universe as it is, both with us and without us. Yes, it is only my description.

So, you agree with Protagoras: 'Man is the measure of all things.' That view captures a certain kind of immediacy in our experience but exemplifies th...

I propose the goal is to understand the world and ourselves in it. Being correct (or not) is an attribute of a proposition or a set of them. Understan...

Is that not making the struggle to understand risk free? The Collingwood method of not framing assumptions as true or false is helpful toward a taxono...

The topic prompted me to check out examples of assessing "EQ" and it seems peculiar to me that so many are based upon reporting on oneself through ser...

It should be noted that the lines you quote from Kafka are half of aphorism #104, the last of the series titled Reflections On Sin, Pain, Hope, And Th...

This is a great question but also makes me wonder if you want to have your cake and eat it too. The collective unconsciousness is presented as both a ...

Jung is interesting. The architectural side is at odds with the willingness to hear about individual suffering. He did both. Something about the exper...

I don't have a clear idea about what constitutes the "psychological." It seems like it is not only a set of explanations but a method for putting othe...

Your question of how one might do the work of another led me to think there is viewpoint prior to either by which to compare them. Is that a psycholog...

In your asking about the difference between philosophy and religion, I have difficulty with taking either as a given circumscribed set of activities t...