I do exist. I am your creator. I own three houses in the US (in the states mentioned) and don't really like the rest of the world. I passed this dissa...
Maybe we can sum it up by contrasting Bach's music to some shrill post on Facebook. The lines of my favorite thinkers (and rarely and gloriously my ow...
I would say that it is a fact that we become 'bigger' than our former selves. We are not at 14 who we are at 40. I will agree to something like a self...
Let's imagine that Plato wasn't a "great name" in our culture like Shakespeare or Newton. Let's imagine that a community college professor (perhaps an...
These days I divide the God issue into two separate issues. There is the necessarily anthropomorphic God game and (for me, beyond this) those impossib...
I'd go a little farther and suggest that some questions are "structurally" unanswerable. We can form these questions in Standard English, but what can...
It is indeed reductionist. But one could argue that all philosophy is reductionist, just as every map is a reduction of the territory and useful exact...
I was surprised by how deep Essence turned out to be. And the Eliot translation is beautiful. As far as Marx goes, I recently enjoyed The German Ideol...
This is great stuff, with which I agree. I'm personally grateful to various sophisticated interpretations of Christianity. I agree, here, too. But I c...
My dissatisfaction with this politics-as-religion is (1) that it's not transcendent enough and (2) that it's inherently unstable as a religion of a pr...
That's a great Chomsky quote. As I see it, a merely philosophical God is itself just more "Good without God." We might call it God, but it doesn't sho...
Respectfully, try to imagine it from the other side. We dream every night. Our brains are well known to create rich and memorable scenarios that most ...
Indeed. My criticism of stoicism (in this context) is that such a defensive attitude toward Fortune might drain life of its beauty entirely. The only ...
I see what you're getting at, and I agree. I understand the temptation to fend it off with what I would call rationalization, but it's not hard to sha...
Great post, Robert. We are dealt cards that we are forced to play with our whole lives long. I sometimes reflect on kind of thinking or personality de...
I wonder though if it's only a caricature in retrospect. Isn't water still blessed and aren't magic prayer handkerchief's still for sale out there? I ...
Absolutely. The less human God is, the more He is just some undiscovered aspect of nature. God is not only necessarily anthropomorphic but humanity's ...
I roll a die that you cannot see. Either the die lands on a 6 or it does not. Therefore there is a 50% chance of guessing correctly whether or not a 6...
I definitely relate to the impulse to tell the whole truth, which is to say reveal the whole person. But that's like exposing one's belly to the claws...
Hegel is pretty complicated. I don't at all agree that he pointed outside of man. He's probably most vulnerable when he generalizes his personal exper...
I've also written a little book to answer this question definitively. Unfortunately the book indicates in its introduction (which is all there is of t...
What is lost here (in the abstract existence of some abstract God) is pretty much everything God is good for ---- away from systematic philosophy. I c...
It seems like a badly written sentence. "Conceptual meaning" sounds redundant. Valuation is presented as a part of the natural world and yet independe...
If I can jump in, I think the best critique of the The Irony (along Hegelian lines) is simply that we crave something real and objective and social. W...
Sure, I think F has this kind of passage in mind: Hegel makes a great point here, but perhaps he is attached to the domination of matter by mind or th...
Nice quote. Marx strikes me as an over-correction. If the German philosophers emphasized the dominance of non-thought by thought, then Marx did the op...
This is from Principles of the Philosophy of the Future. This fits with God as Logos, but the Logos is incarnate. Here's an interesting quote that sho...
As I understand it, the knowability of God asserted by Hegel is founded on an identification of God and (social) man. (I don't, however, see this kind...
Great analogy. I think it was Diogenes who masturbated in the street and joked that he wish he could do the same trick with his stomach, which is to s...
I don't Hegel's God has much to do with the usual theism (though maybe with yours, if you consider yourself a theist.) Of course Hegel isn't the easie...
Feuerbach is stressing that the transcendence of the Christian God is the essential point. When a community's God is above or outside of nature, so is...
'Exuberance is beauty' applies to both of them, but Stirner has lost points with me since I have discovered him to be an elaborate footnote to Hegel. ...
Feuerbach seemed to see himself as fixing Christianity so that it would work better. He thought that if man would just wake up from his confused proje...
I came to Feuerbach late, unfortunately, but it's a great book. He's a more "objective" man than Nietzsche with many of the same concerns. I've someti...
Great post. There's a line in Derrida's Spurs that I struck me as true. In short, men are their masks. They kill and die for "honor." Of course Hegel/...
I hear you, and even largely agree. But I think you've framed me in your mind (incorrectly, from my perspective) as a recurrent forum type, namely the...
That's roughly the theme. I'm especially connecting the idea of God to that fantasy. A nice little point to add: Feuerbach stressed that the gods of t...
I sincerely think there's some great TV at the moment. (I realize I've been mixing my points, trying to rip out the entire thought-clump at once.) My ...
Sure. I'm happy to. He's basically sketching a person who feels above all things and detached from every "finite" or fixed identity. This person sees ...
I don't think we have any choice. We employ reason to doubt the perfection of reason. Reason is who we are when we're not just meat. We're embodied la...
Has anyone watched this? It's a Black Mirror episode. Bing is the "ugly" intellectual who pops a hole in a dream within the dream. There's an appetite...
True, and Shakespeare was respected in his. So the mainstream doesn't exclude greatness. But surely we forget much of the mediocrity of the past. Curr...
Yes, the theory of evolution does suggest that reason isn't pure. And yet have this impurity as a result of this same "impure" reason. It's plausible ...
Just to be clear, I also see it as a valuable quality. I guess it is a shallow age, but I wonder whether "deep" art has ever been mainstream or whethe...
Yes, this is the heart of the matter. But consider this scenario. Somehow it is establish (and everyone agrees) that there is indeed an intelligent cr...
I guess "childish" is pejorative, but then there is disdain for the impractical artist, for instance. The successful rock star or painter or writer is...
Great quote from Albert. I do agree that certain questions are undecidable or even pseudo-questions. I think we can test such questions by considering...
Thanks. I agree that acceptance seems monstrous. In my view, there's no cure for life, no perfect philosophy that destroys cognitive dissonance and an...
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