Pantagruel

My take is that, per the theme of my original post, the dominant social trend can be understood in terms of a relative alignment with or alienation fr...

I think that we are due for a new phase. The moral vacuity of pure technology is not only becoming evident, it is precipitating crises across many dom...

“We have all got to exert ourselves a little to keep sane, and call things by the same names as other people call them by.” ~George Eliot

That's a silly question.

Not a very thoughtful response. Another perspective, everyone dies, and everyone is subject to unique conditions of life...and death. No one has any m...

This is a generalization and a fallacy. Lots of farmers love to farm. Lots of people happily pursue daytime jobs in order to indulge their passions. T...

Myth and Meaning by Claude Lévi-Strauss

But how did that individual's version of whatever "meaning" arise? He didn't create it ex nihilo. It was constructed out of framing elements which evo...

I assume that this is the entire project of culture, to symbolically memorialize individual experiences such that they can be re-ingested by subsequen...

Amerika by Franz Kafka One-hundred Years of Solitude was absolutely spellbinding.

If people are in inner-conflict then small wonder that this manifests in outer conflicts, no? This might fall within the interesting tradition of "Psy...

Does this itself establish that mental constructs cannot exert causal force? Isn't that the essence of deductive logic, where premises necessitate a c...

This surprises me not at all. But it IS exceedingly cool. Thanks for sharing.

This is a misconstrual of embodied cognition, which is not about "knowing that" at all. It's about knowledge being enacted via its environmental embed...

Actually that is exactly what embodied-embedded cognition implies, represents a definition of knowledge as much as anything. The idea that he is the m...

But there is no inside without outside. Collingwood's position falls directly within the parameters of a philosophy of embodiment. He is the metaphysi...

True. Except that he relentlessly fuses these: The concept is not something outside the world of sensuous appearance it is the very structure or order...

Prototypical. Paradigmatic. Proto-digmatic. Just having fun with language. I think the essence of the answer regarding the nature of abstraction and t...

Indeed. Obviously there is not a unique set of two "proto-digmatic" entities. On the other hand, any pair of things can exist in a state of "two-ness"...

Here is an excerpt from R.G. Collingwood's Speculum Mentis on the logical nature of mathematical concepts, which emerge through the power of abstracti...

Ok. How about this. Numbers primitively seem to correlate with things. But are there in fact things? Or are there really only processes, whose synchro...

You mean like quantum fields, that kind of "substantively real" thing? Or more like statistically defined entities like subatomic particles?

Exactly. Mathematical relationships inhere in material objects. The abundance of fractal features in the universe additionally is suggestive of this p...

The sun is yellow. Yellow is not a physical object. But the light being emitted at 510 Terahertz is.

Even if that were true, it wouldn't contradict the existence of an objective correlate of the mental object. i.e. Just because numbers have a mental a...

Numbers can be mental concepts. However anything natural can also exist as a mental concept. And numbers appear to inhere in the natural world, as evi...

What about considering binary fission as exemplifying a kind of organic ontology. One parent cell is the efficient cause of two daughter cells. One is...

And I think that it is a problem with the mechanisms of democracy for sure.

I don't think that revolution is the only or most logical means to address systemic problems; you don't have to replace a system to address a systemic...

If you place any credence in critical theory, then all problems are systemic. I do, inasmuch as we are more than just accidentally responsible for the...

Sure. So populism is essentially a symptom of the deficiencies of the existing system of governance.

So the underlying concrete problem is addressed by a coalition of billionaires who don't like to pay their workers. Does this make populism a corrupti...

Ok. What is the underlying "rationally and contextually situated request" of which MAGA has become the empty signifier? At least ostensibly, populism ...

Kicking off 2025 with One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez Also a History of Philosophy, Volume 1: The Project of a Genealogy of Po...

Finished my last book of 2024, thus my year in review. To my surprise and pleasure, the tales of Robert Louis Stevenson proved to be some of the most ...

It isn't "non locally real" it is "not locally real" - as in "locally non-real" The title may be confusing some people unfortunately.

The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 by Karl Marx, Fredrick Engels

The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas

Man and Crisis by José Ortega y Gasset

John Carter and the Giants of Mars; The Skeleton Men of Jupiter by Edgar Rice Burroughs

Can we ever know what "the good" is? If we accept that our knowledge is inevitably limited, then, in any given circumstance what one person thinks is ...

I think the gap between the heights of human knowledge and values and the depths of the mass-mind has never been greater. There is an economic-power a...

History as a System and other Essays Toward a Philosophy of History by José Ortega y Gasset

The Way Things Are (De Rerum Natura) by Lucretius,

And I would agree in general with this argument. Except to say that, at a fundamental level, there may indeed be "facts of the matter" which cultural ...

My avatar agrees.

:up: If we can agree that there can be degrees of reality then, for my part, that is the critical thing.

Well that doesn't beg any questions..... Ideas exist in the physical world (ta-da). Justice is an idea. Ergo justice is real. ergo sum

Consciousness Matter Consciousness may not itself be more real than matter. But the state of affairs that includes both consciousness and matter is "m...

It's a question of cultural norms. Incest has historically been widely practiced to varying degrees, especially among ruling classes. Is morality a cu...