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Count Timothy von Icarus

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I haven't. None of the monastics I have personally met came from particularly wealthy backgrounds, and everything I've read suggests that isn't the no...
October 16, 2025 at 21:58
I can only say that I think that is a reading largely or wholly absent from the tradition. Aristotle's typology, for instance, has it that the furthes...
October 16, 2025 at 18:18
Sure you could, you could: A. Argue for moral anti-realism, nothing objectionable there. B. Point out that all decisions must thus be motivated by "pr...
October 16, 2025 at 17:59
With what, the examples themselves? But my point isn't that those positions are correct, but that our current systems allows students to pick between ...
October 16, 2025 at 17:32
So when a child feeds their cat antifreeze because it looks like a fun drink. Cats love antifreeze too. Is it thus truly good for the cat to drink ant...
October 16, 2025 at 15:50
Relative in what sense? What exactly is: "All else equal, it is bad for a monkey to be eaten," relative to? Certainly not the tiger. To the extent tha...
October 16, 2025 at 15:05
To see what I mean about the modern paradigm, just consider that if you wrote a paper in most schools claiming that: -ethics is wholly bunk and we sho...
October 16, 2025 at 14:58
Right, but is it not a fact that "being eaten by a tiger is bad for monkeys?" It seems to me that this is obvious. What monkeys are tells us at least ...
October 16, 2025 at 14:36
Most pre-modern theories of "objective moral truths" (a modern way of putting it) are at least prima facie as "verifiable" as those of the relativist/...
October 16, 2025 at 11:37
A few really good resources I can think are: The Oxford Very Short Introductions - they can vary in quality, but they are generally quite good. They a...
October 15, 2025 at 21:19
I'm only vaguely familiar with a few of those names. Wouldn't this diagnoses be more broad though? People have seen "building a bridge back to the wor...
October 15, 2025 at 17:56
Two famous books on this topic that are more on the critical side, Philip Rieff "The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith After Freud" and Christ...
October 15, 2025 at 17:15
I was thinking primarily of the empiricist movement away from any metaphysical theorizing, although the continental tradition has its own version of t...
October 14, 2025 at 02:49
As a counterpoint, a book I really love, Robert Wallace's Philosophical Mysticism in Plato, Hegel, and the Present argues, compellingly I think, that ...
October 14, 2025 at 01:33
I forgot about a good quote I like on this topic: It seems to me that Indian thought avoids a lot of the problems that dominate Western discourse on t...
October 14, 2025 at 00:42
Pavel Florensky, a priest, mathematician, scientist, and electrical engineer (sometimes called the "Russian Da Vinci") approached this in a Christian ...
October 13, 2025 at 20:29
:up: This is similar to my thoughts, but since I had already written this earlier, I'll share? I was reading Peter Harrison's "Some New World" recentl...
October 12, 2025 at 20:08
Yes, a new, popular way of looking at things is of seeing the universe as a sort of (quantum) computer. A veritable whose who list of eminent physicis...
October 12, 2025 at 19:47
Do you think such a "dual-aspect" monism resolves the problem of psycho-physical harmony? I have always thought the problem remains just as acute. Con...
October 12, 2025 at 14:32
So Hume's premises should be accepted over others because he is "doing psychology?" And it's not problematic that they are self-undermining because it...
October 12, 2025 at 09:15
I don't, I just think Hume's conclusions are reductio ad absurdum against empiricism, while famously, the dogma also isn't supportable by its own epis...
October 12, 2025 at 08:50
What can or cannot be deduced, given the opening books of the Treaties are taken as true and infallible, as Hume himself takes them. He refers to his ...
October 12, 2025 at 08:20
Which is ironic, because we are expected to dogmatically accept Hume's judgement on how the mind works, the exact contours and limits of introspection...
October 11, 2025 at 23:28
According to who? And certainly, it can at least be imagined as such. One can say many things about the Neoplatonists, or say the Sufi poets, but that...
October 11, 2025 at 22:43
Anyhow, this reminds me of a common debate in contemporary analytic thought vis-á-vis their version of "Aristotle." The claim is that a focus on culti...
October 11, 2025 at 12:44
This premise: ...seems to do all the heavy lifting. I'll allow that every intentional act involves desire. How could it not? But you seem to be arguin...
October 11, 2025 at 12:24
It seems to me that positions like "in the real world it's: "might makes right," "nature is red in tooth in claw," "everyone is an atomized, self-inte...
October 11, 2025 at 09:08
For some reason it always puts spaces between em-dashes, which is a stylistic faux pas outside a few style guides (basically just AP), and so this is ...
October 11, 2025 at 08:14
You might find the chapter "The Sage and the World" in Pierre Hadot's Philosophy as a Way of Life interesting as it gets at this topic, not just thank...
October 08, 2025 at 21:24
It made sense to me. This same basic problems shows up for any metaphysics of sheer difference. If everything is completely different in each "moment"...
September 29, 2025 at 01:38
But consider Russell's Turkey. The turkey knows from a lifetime of experience that every morning the nice man comes to feed him at sunrise. This corre...
September 27, 2025 at 15:36
But you have already allowed that cultural-historical regressions might lead to a case where a culture widely accepts that a true idea/theory has been...
September 27, 2025 at 15:00
Hume's anthropology/psychology is what justifies his skeptical positions. Book II of the Treatise lays this out pretty well. The senses—impressions—ar...
September 27, 2025 at 11:21
Right, but if you cannot be sure that you have true beliefs now why should you trust your own beliefs about the long term trend of knowledge or episte...
September 27, 2025 at 11:03
D.C. Schindler makes this point in his cleverly labeled Freedom From Reality: The Diabolical Nature of Modern Liberty. The second part of the title is...
September 25, 2025 at 22:44
I think that is a fair reading. IIRC, Godel was something of a platonist, so his reading of axioms would also not be that they are unjustified. :up: W...
September 25, 2025 at 11:30
:up: I think that's a good answer. A difficulty in epistemology that I think is often under addressed is that the idea that knowledge "progresses" (e....
September 24, 2025 at 20:48
I was thinking rather the opposite. The reason people fiddle with T is to make it so that we can possess "knowledge" and access "truth" while still ma...
September 24, 2025 at 19:53
There are the "Four Thoughts" one reflects on before Lojong practice in Tibetan Buddhism. There is first reflection on the preciousness and extreme ra...
September 24, 2025 at 18:16
Well, on a "pragmatism all the way down" account I assume that J would be a mix of cultural norms and personal norms that have been wired into us via ...
September 23, 2025 at 22:42
I would think it isn't. We just act like it is true until we are prompted to reconsider. Doesn't that have to answer the possibility question. If P is...
September 23, 2025 at 14:51
Wouldn't the counter to Collingwood's statement be an example that is uncaused or self-causing? The statement is not afterall that: "all causes are di...
September 23, 2025 at 14:10
Right, some versions of pragmatism are merely pragmatic. I was speaking only to the metaphysical thesis. So Peirce, a realist (metaphysically and mora...
September 22, 2025 at 21:43
This is leaving out the metaphysical part of the thesis, the idea that there is no such thing as truth outside of practice. I don't agree that "it was...
September 22, 2025 at 21:23
If I have this right, it's: "I am not contradicting myself because I am equiovcating." I am not sure if that's much better though. If someone wants to...
September 22, 2025 at 12:15
Upon reflection, I think you might be right (at least in the JTB context that isn't committed to fallibalism). We can "know that we know" just by beli...
September 22, 2025 at 11:48
So, is the idea that we can possess knowledge (i.e., possess beliefs that are justified and true) but we can never know that we possess knowledge (unl...
September 21, 2025 at 01:24
Attacks on custom have been a big part of liberal ideology for a long time. Obviously, one sees it more often in progressive liberalism than conservat...
September 18, 2025 at 20:56
It's a dialectical synthesis, not a reduction. What communal telos? One knows if one is corresponding to what is "said to be good by others," yet this...
September 18, 2025 at 14:29
So how exactly is the supposed to respond to the charge of self-refutation (and the ancillary issue of affirming contradictions)? If the idea is that ...
September 17, 2025 at 17:38