Wayfarer

Even though I know that many people see 'the Kingdom of God' as reference to establishing a political order. I had always thought that it was referenc...

Such verses can be interpreted 'esoterically', i.e. the 'captives' are captives 'to the flesh'. and are therefore 'blind', i.e. not seeing 'the Kingdo...

How do you interpret that? As a political revolution and an overthrowing of the establishment? As an 'end of the world' cataclysm?

Rather than respond directly to that, I think it might be helpful to consider what kind of human being He was. Of course the dogma was thrashed out ov...

Really, what was 'apotheosis' in Nietszche's philosophy? It was 'the Ubermensch' - the superior man. If the Wikipedia article on that subject is wrong...

In my book, 'philosophy' is 'the love of wisdom', or 'love-wisdom', which is realising a state of equanimity, compassion and loving-kindness towards a...

I've been exposed to a bit of Nietszche. He has many piercing insights and many pithy aphorisms, but he declared himself an 'anti-philosopher', and he...

Hint: quit now, save yourself a lot of pointless effort.

But Nietszche went irretrievably insane. It has been said in the past that this was due to tertiary syphilis, but many recent intellectual histories d...

perhaps, but is it a word? Is there a checkbox for it on the Census?

I think the distinction you might be after is between 'strong atheism', which believes strongly that there is no God, and 'weak atheism', which doesn'...

'Trust in Allah, but tether your camel first' ~ Arabian proverb ;-)

But nevertheless it is the commercial exploitation of an insatiable desire. I don't see it like that - again that is mistaking the means for the end. ...

Au contraire, they're not about pleasure or pain. The 'sensory life' is naturally highly attuned to pleasure and pain, because these are after all sen...

Actually, 'sapiens' means, as you know, 'wisdom', so I don't know if 'secular man' should be so described. 'Sapiens' is the Latin countepart to the gr...

Why, BC, do you include 'engaging in religious activity' be categorised as 'unbalanced or undisciplined', and why do you think that would be done 'for...

But there's a cardinal difference between playing video games and porn in terms of the outcome (although if you don't know what it is, I'd be embarras...

I can't do justice to the amount of material here. I can only make a few remarks. It is that element of Fichte that I feel most affinity with. There i...

In terms of addiction, surely it's comparable to gambling. Again, gambling can be reasonably harmless - the odd flutter at the horses, a casual evenin...

But how could such verbosity, the attempt to articulate the inneffable, ever become embodied in an aesthetic? The kind of discursive analysis he produ...

They're not anecdotes. There are indubitably enormous numbers of pre-teens - literally hundreds of millions, possibly billions - who have unrestricted...

Think about the term 'bad tempered'. It applies not only to humans, but also devices - like a band-saw or engine that is not 'tempered' properly, i.e....

ahem, Trump.......

It's trivially easy to filter out porn sites on the level of domain name servers. There are a lot of children, particularly but not only male, whose s...

Some people simply have too much time on their hands. I would say, would that lightning struck all of them, but that would be both implausible and unc...

I don't think it's irrational, but surely it is exceedingly verbose. I seem to recall there being something written by Fichte where he more or less br...

Does Fichte give any grounds for accepting that there must be an 'absolute self'? And, if it is self-evident, as he claims, as the foundation of criti...

You make many valid point, but there's only one thing that Donald J Trump could ever possibly say, which would lead me to respect him, which is: 'I am...

never had heard of Sebeok, but thanks, he seems very interesting. Will delve.

having a shit week. In a contract which has gone pear-shaped because testing has been delayed, so nothing for me to do, so about to walk out back into...

That small quatrain is one of the few snippets of Elliot I know, but I've always found it profoundly meaningful. There was a Foreign Correspondent fea...

Isn't that because intent is central to guilt? If a person kills another because he or she is in a florid state of psychosis and thinks the other is a...

That's true. You have to have a sense of what you're missing (and few do).

Which is why I say yours is an engineering perspective. And that's not 'framing you for scientism', as you openly acknowledge being physicalist. Where...

Well, that's what is so galling about it. Trump holds all these phony 'campaign stops' and fills the stadium (or, not quite), to re-inflate his ego af...

That's like asking, what is it about the destructive power of atomic weapons, or the invention of biological or chemical weapons, that convinces us th...

This thread has been quiet for a month, but the subject has by no means become less relevant. Trump demonstrates on an almost daily basis his complete...

Right! Perfectly true. And I think it provides a superior basis for philosophy, because it provides a basis for values, for a sense of reason in the s...

At the end of the day, you're still talking engineering, not philosophy.

I noted before, the root of the term 'animate' is 'anima' , which is literally 'breath'. So in traditional metaphysics the defining feature of life is...

Nobody - not one single person - knows what Trump will say next, let alone do. Hopefully the adults are in charge of this issue, if not, god help us a...

That reply above I entered on an iPhone waiting at the station to pick up wife. Hope it wasn't tactless.

There's really no use saying that 'it would be better not to be born' because the reality of our situation is that we have been. I think it's a case o...

tragedy can't exist in the absence of people (although the word is hugely devalued, someone's dog dying is considered a tragedy nowadays.)

Thanks, BC, I'll check it out. Also saw an interesting alternative title by John Michael Greer (a Druid) - 'Collapse Now, and Avoid the Rush'.

One thing that nobody seems to comment on - well nobody outside 'alternative' circles, like Naomi Klein, and others of that ilk - is that capitalist e...

Actually make it ten years.

500 years is a long time. I think in the next half century there is an obvious chance of global catastrophe. I think if there was a hostile nuclear ex...

I don't think 'inanimate' is or has 'essence' as it's simply an adjective for non-living matter. (Interesting that Aristotle's work on the soul was ca...

Or, by straining out all the mystical-sounding bits, and replacing with the newly-devised scientific-sounding bits, which serve the same purpose, but ...