Gotcha, so I guess or disagreement might be this: I think the rather titanic problems of liberalism in the current moment, not least of which is the r...
I don't know if it's that much of a contradiction. I suppose that quote, taken alone, could be read in a very Nietzschean or Sartrean light, but I hav...
Yes, good point. I think that's very true. I think the OP sort of gets at the social forces that lead to that catastrophizing and lack of appreciation...
Well, fair enough, he might not even have been a real person. The text appears to be an accretion. Siddhartha Gautama might have been a better example...
Just to make sure I am understanding you, are you saying LLMs "produce knowledge" for us, or that something like ChatGPT actually "knows" things? Or i...
Isn't this precisely what people like Laotze and St. Francis thought they were doing by telling people to stop following worldly ambitions, helping ot...
Or perhaps the list of material goods you have mentioned are simply not the most important things for happiness? I don't think people kill themselves ...
That's an interesting question. I have heard, but not really looked into, the idea that Egyptian Memphite Theology contains an early version of Plato'...
I am curious if proponents of liberalism would at least agree with this analysis though: There are three broad principles of the modern liberal state:...
That would make sense if Trumpism and the rise of the far-right in Europe were some sort of foreign, extrinsic force attacking liberalism from without...
This skepticism relies on a particular metaphysics of consciousness and appearances. In materialism, potency is king, thus contingency and accident re...
It's an interesting subject. The empiricist tradition often justifies itself by pointing to the fruits of modern science and ascribing these to its ph...
No, I am suggesting that if one chooses something "for no reason at all," then one is acting arbitrarily. Now, you suggest that there is "no reason," ...
I mentioned in a recent thread here recently why I am skeptical of attempts to pin these problems on either "progressives" or "conservatives:" That sa...
I was going to make the old joke about 100% of popes being Christian, but then considering some of the pontiffs I am not even sure if this is true :ro...
Well, first I'd just point out that Israel is very much a liberal ethno-state, not a confessional state. Most modern liberal states were founded as et...
It seems to me like you are getting at the role of understanding in knowledge, which has a phenomenological component. If truth just involved discursi...
Someone can correct me if I am wrong, but my knowledge of pre-modern architecture and bathing facilities suggests these were distinct. I am not sure t...
Pretty much every issue brought up by the OP has been kicked around since the earliest days of philosophy. For instance, the idea of cultural relativi...
I don't think I followed this. This would seem to indicate that what is true is a facet of the logical premises one chooses to adopt. For example, tha...
Such as? Probably "blue and not-blue" would work better as an example, and "without qualification or equivocation." I'm sure you know that, it's just ...
There might be something there, but here is a wrinkle: Charles Taylor reviews a lot of anthropology in his mammoth A Secular Age, and one of the thing...
I'm not sure if that's quite the difference. Perhaps can clarify, but I thought his point could variously be: A. That there is a common sense metaphys...
You're attempting to ground logic itself in a notion of what is "logically compatible." This is circular without intuition. This is just an appeal to ...
I'm not sure that you mean here. Following an inference rule consistently is what leads to consistency; any rule followed consistently is consistent i...
This is essentially the old question of: "why was man not created perfect, such that he did not fall?" I agree, it's a difficult one—one theologians h...
I find it interesting that you associate this sort of thing with Peterson. Nietzsche has tended to be more fodder for the left, and I think the "death...
Right, if any role for intuition and understanding is ruled out and reason is 100% discursive, you have an infinite possibility space of possible "gam...
That beliefs and attitudes about something vary by time and place should not suggest that such beliefs and attitudes are "stories all the way down." F...
That's a thoughtful post. I am wondering if you have ever read Boethius' "Consolation of Philosophy?" It was the most copied book of the Middle Ages a...
I wish I could be more helpful, but IRCC it's all in the last chapter, where he presented his "agential realism" as an alternative to the intractable ...
A good question for Hoffman would be: "could there be a perceptual/cognitive system (a mind) that was 'selected for' or 'engineered' based on 'truth i...
R. Scott Bakker has a neat horror story on the consequences of "neural implants" that would allow people to adjust their own emotions "on demand" from...
BTW, if anyone is interested in reading a particularly dismal anthropology, I would highly recommend Rollo Tomassi's "The Rational Male." His book on ...
Like I said, I wouldn't necessarily equate democracy with liberalism. There is a lot of right and left liberalism that is quite skeptical of democracy...
Excellent point. And this goes right with the evolution of modern nominalist thought. Things are just math, and so things have whatever telos we give ...
Interesting comment I saw that isn't worthy of its own thread: In the commentary on the Metaphysics St. Thomas says: " However, the objects of mathema...
I'm no expert on Russell Vought, but this strikes me as another case of progressive liberals identifying conservative liberals as "not real liberals,"...
Very little, except for the observation re the impotence of legislatures. I think this has fairly obviously tended to hold true, with the executive ta...
Glad you liked it. It's a good book. One thing to bear in mind is that in most pre-modern ethics "good" is predicated of something as respects some en...
If anyone wants an audiobook version: https://youtu.be/Gd7Trt0jWyA?si=5xcOWum_FLlouwb4 You can convert YouTube videos to mp3s quite easily if you just...
I may have missed my chance to brag that the New York Mets have the best record in all of Major League Baseball (they are now tied for that honor). Th...
This strikes me as a deficient definition. For one, it would imply that Martin Luther, John Calvin, Huldrych Zwingli, etc. must have been motivated by...
"Good" is predicated relative to ends. Sustaining their own life is, in general, an end all humans (and all organisms) share. However, it is not the o...
But that's the very thing the racist denies, they will point to decades of studies on intergroup IQ scores, peer reviewed studies on rates of violent ...
I think Magee's particular thesis is too maximalist, in part because much of what he designates as "Hermetic" is also a part of the broader medieval t...
To even have "two potatoes" or "two people" requires that there are similarities between particulars such that there are potatoes, people, etc. If peo...
I also reread the Divine Comedy for a book idea I was working on recently and it led me to pick up Attar of Nishapur's Sufi classic, The Conference of...
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