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Count Timothy von Icarus

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Is slamming your own hand in a car door over and over until every bone in it is broken "rational?" What if you have a very strong desire to do it, and...
April 18, 2025 at 10:44
So, assuming Singer is right about individual infants, if a genocidal regime only kills infants it isn't genocide because they aren't yet people? E.g....
April 18, 2025 at 10:10
I didn't suggest that changes in education could resolve all of liberalism's ills. I suggested it would be beneficial and that liberalism's anthropolo...
April 18, 2025 at 01:35
Neo-liberalism is the dominant form of right-wing liberalism after about 1980. Yet this sort of thing happened plenty before neo-liberalism was a thin...
April 17, 2025 at 23:59
It wasn't meant to be a realistic depiction of their phenomenology. But you seem to just be using loose synonyms for good here, and having your anti-r...
April 17, 2025 at 23:37
Sure they do. But then they aren't strictly anti-realists about all values. Let's look at emotivism, which is probably the most popular form of anti-r...
April 17, 2025 at 23:12
I'm using the term "liberalism" in the same way its most popular advocates (e.g. Fukuyama) and critics (e.g. Deneen) use it. As people have noted, "gl...
April 17, 2025 at 22:53
Sorry, it's in the quote right below the section you quoted if that wasn't clear. And obviously, the classical view of freedom is aspirational. It is ...
April 17, 2025 at 22:00
I don't know what you mean, I included the argument right below the quoted section. They can advance their own competing definition of "rational actio...
April 17, 2025 at 20:18
I find it strange that you think that "education in virtue" must necessarily be religious. Military training involves a lot of ascetic training in vir...
April 17, 2025 at 20:04
Doesn't this point back to the controversy surrounding the Pelagian heresy though? Man, on the orthodox view, cannot know and strive towards the Good ...
April 17, 2025 at 19:57
I wasn't speaking to religion, I was speaking any conception of human nature that strays from liberalism's volanturist Homo oeconomicus, and the "buff...
April 17, 2025 at 18:51
Well, this is often how it is framed. "Statements about value are not truth-apt, they are emotional expressions." If one wants to limit this to a spec...
April 17, 2025 at 17:56
Yes, but renunciate philosophy was once widely considered the cornerstone of education. Boethius' Consolation, for instance was the most popular ethic...
April 17, 2025 at 17:29
BTW, an interesting argument that can be derived from Deneen's Why Liberalism Failed is that the reason the Humean view or Homo oeconomicus seem so pl...
April 17, 2025 at 16:13
If an "anti-realist" re values acknowledges that there areobjective facts about values then they are not an anti-realist. The question of egoism, or o...
April 17, 2025 at 15:57
All moral theorists are relativists to some degree. You can see straightforward analysis of relativism in cultural norms way back in Herodotus for ins...
April 17, 2025 at 15:19
If this were true one would discover what a good therapy for liver cancer is solely by investigating people's opinions instead of by studying livers. ...
April 17, 2025 at 09:06
By the way, I don't even think champions of liberalism want this. Our "meritocracy" has become a sort of curse. David Brook's writes about this a lot....
April 16, 2025 at 19:44
Maybe. "Capitalism" would be too narrow, and wouldn't capture the philosophical anthropology underpinning the problems of globalized liberal capitalis...
April 16, 2025 at 16:12
Maybe part of the problem has to do with the way we've come to view the world? The Baconian view of "nature" (and so, the entire cosmos, and literally...
April 16, 2025 at 16:03
Funny enough, the dictatorship of the CEO in the "corporate city-state" imagined by the Alt Right, with the heavy focus on a right to "exit" is not so...
April 16, 2025 at 15:55
Yes, although, like I said, you can see something in the period before WWI, a lot of discussion about how a war was needed to restore honor, glory, vi...
April 16, 2025 at 14:26
The key examples of the "ruthless" pursuit of liberalism that came to my mind is the US attempt to foist liberal democracy and social norms on Iraq an...
April 16, 2025 at 13:57
lol, the word I was searching for was "opprobrium." I agree with you, and we could stretch the analogy to say that overly aggressive conservatism is l...
April 16, 2025 at 12:41
I think that's a fair description from "Philosophy as a Way of Life." He doesn't spend that much time on Christianity and makes it seem largely just d...
April 16, 2025 at 11:23
I really like Hadot. His "Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates of Foucault" is quite good, although I do think he misses som...
April 16, 2025 at 00:18
There is an important, difficult sort of discernment in realizing that something can be wrong, or even terrible, without it necessarily needing to be ...
April 15, 2025 at 22:18
I am reminded of some psychology/neuroscience research that showed similarities between moral approbation and disgust/fear of contagion. I don't remem...
April 15, 2025 at 20:18
"Free enterprise" has indeed become synonymous with "capitalism." I think that's one of the ways in which liberalism and capitalism can make themselve...
April 15, 2025 at 20:03
This is of course true, but it's a matter of degree. A century or so ago, when liberalism faced actual opponents in the form of reactionary monarchism...
April 15, 2025 at 19:41
I didn't think to clarify "liberalism." Maybe because I was thinking more in terms of contemporary economics and political science instead of politica...
April 15, 2025 at 15:07
I feel like it's a cool way to develop magic systems in fantasy settings. I've long thought a fantasy series that based it's magic on Renaissance-era ...
April 15, 2025 at 01:28
It's perhaps my fault for having too many different critiques in mind to start. So, I will just home in on my favorite here. Disparate thinkers have c...
April 14, 2025 at 15:37
Here is Han from The Agony of Eros: I find it interesting that Levinas mentions "knowing" here. This problem itself comes from a certain conception of...
April 14, 2025 at 13:56
If liberalism creates citizens who are so easily manipulated, who are so ignorant, then doesn't this directly impugn its claims to empower freedom? Fo...
April 14, 2025 at 12:53
Great quote, and I think my point would be that this "questioning" tends to result in its own sort of dogmatism. The standards by which such questioni...
April 14, 2025 at 12:11
You can see this in liberal criticisms of anti-liberal movements as well. For instance, the "nu-Right" as simply "a bunch of sore loser men who are up...
April 14, 2025 at 02:15
Perhaps, but you could consider Schiller's view where the moral and appetitive are aligned in the aesthetic and our actions are over-determined in des...
April 13, 2025 at 12:02
It seems to me that there is a plausible trade-off between duration and intensity in terms of punishment. One might justly meet out a short, but inten...
April 12, 2025 at 18:23
That man's telos lies in God does not mean that man reaches his end. On a deflationary evolutionary naturalist view, man's telos is to reproduce. That...
April 12, 2025 at 14:25
For my part, when I say infernalism has difficulties, this is not to say the other views don't themselves have difficulties. I think these are mostly ...
April 12, 2025 at 13:56
I will just chime in that here the objection 2 seems weakest to me. Punishment delivered as a means of deterring other would-be transgressors is punis...
April 12, 2025 at 02:36
There is an impressive lack of self-awareness in that article given the way in which Americans are extremely prone to simply painting their own domest...
April 12, 2025 at 01:30
So the problems of modernity would stem from the collapse of older institutions a century ago and a surfeit of income and lesiure, not from any positi...
April 12, 2025 at 01:13
The two aren't unrelated though, right? Hume has been extremely influential, particularly in Anglo-American thought and the broader culture. The "is-o...
April 11, 2025 at 18:51
I quite like the official Roman Catholic response, although sometimes Catholic theologians don't seem to always respect it: Or the contrasting Eastern...
April 10, 2025 at 18:32
There is an interesting history there. There is the absolute unity in Dionysus' "Darkness Above the Light," and later conceptions would tend to play u...
April 10, 2025 at 15:44
FYI, I am pretty sure this line, at least in its widely accepted Western form, comes in good deal earlier, through St. Anselm of Canterbury (although ...
April 10, 2025 at 12:47
I think the standard Patristic response here would be to object to the literal reading of Scripture. "The spirit reading gives life, the flesh profits...
April 10, 2025 at 01:16