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Count Timothy von Icarus

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No, it assumes that, for constraints to constrain, the truth of their reality cannot be dependent on current belief and practice affirming that they t...
September 17, 2025 at 15:31
Right, but Fukuyama's Hegel is very much Kojeve's deflated, liberal Hegel. Actually, I'd argue that Fukuyama fundamentally misunderstands Hegel in see...
September 17, 2025 at 11:58
I agree. To be sure, a lot of liberals get away from his particularly dire anthropology, but even if they pivot to a more Kantian, abstract "choosing ...
September 17, 2025 at 01:36
Thank you; I really, really like that idea. I have read some of Nguyen's stuff before and liked it; thanks for reminding me about him. If anyone is in...
September 17, 2025 at 01:00
I didn't say he did though. I said the appeal to constraints points outside current beliefs and practices. It seems to me that it has to, because it i...
September 16, 2025 at 22:11
Sorry, I must have missed that. Sure, you can't reduce his theory down to his slogan: "truth is what our peers let us get away with," without losing a...
September 16, 2025 at 21:10
Ok, but I pointed out that Rorty's theory is self-refuting in a quite specific way directly related to the very thing it is trying to explain. I am no...
September 16, 2025 at 16:59
This reminds me of Byung Chul Han's theory of autoexploitation in the "achievement society." I wrote about this before: As Han himself describes part ...
September 16, 2025 at 16:33
I think that identifies a very common thread in modern culture, but I think it oversells its reach. Surely, plenty of people do think they have reache...
September 16, 2025 at 15:47
So, does Bertrand Russell's famous turkey, who knows from a whole lifetime of experience that every morning—without fail—the nice man comes to feed hi...
September 16, 2025 at 02:00
Yes, this is a point Reiff makes in The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith after Freud. I have found that book to be extremely prescient and we...
September 16, 2025 at 01:44
Sure, I have no real disagreement there. But liberalism says questions of the human good are, for the most part, private matters. Public ethics must b...
September 15, 2025 at 20:04
Re the understanding of ideas, there is this prescient part of C.S. Lewis' lectures in medieval and renaissance literature where he sort of summarizes...
September 13, 2025 at 13:19
I find it more bizarre to see an Italian who doesn't include Virgil and the Commedia. It's like leaving out Shakespeare and Milton in English. Well, t...
September 13, 2025 at 13:10
I don't see how that follows. Presumably, it is bad for a bear to have its leg mangled in a trap, yet I'm not sure how this would be "socially constru...
September 12, 2025 at 23:03
Also, while the issues identified might stem from elements of liberalism, I should probably do a better job precisely identifying which elements. A pr...
September 12, 2025 at 19:58
I think this is probably true to some degree, particularly in some specific areas of the self-help space (the Manosphere being a hyperbolic example). ...
September 12, 2025 at 19:06
The world "spiritual" is not in the original quote. Aristotle, Plato, the Stoics, and their successors broadly orient their ethics and grounding of th...
September 12, 2025 at 16:06
That's the fundamental question of ethics, no? @"apokrisis" is essentially advancing his own answer to that question here and in the recent thread on ...
September 12, 2025 at 11:51
Ok, so then it wasn't supposed to be relevant to what I wrote? I didn't write anything about "esoteric knowledge," nor any necessary preference for th...
September 12, 2025 at 03:58
I'm sorry, but I don't see how your post addresses the dilemma I pointed out. I am aware of how these thinkers frame truth. I pointed out why I think ...
September 12, 2025 at 03:21
Wellness retreats, access to outdoor education, etc. all skew towards the high end of the income distribution, so I'm not really sure what you're talk...
September 12, 2025 at 02:37
There is a Taoist monastic tradition; the lifestyle is similar to Buddhist monks in broad outline, obviously with a different set of traditions. They ...
September 12, 2025 at 02:27
Some are like that, although the "life-hacking" stuff tends to lean more "cutting edge." Then there was the Human Potential Movement too, and things o...
September 12, 2025 at 02:06
That's an interesting article. I had been reading Traleg Kyabgon Rinpoche's book on Lojong practice, and I recall thinking that the key "preliminaries...
September 11, 2025 at 22:19
I would say the irony is more that the right to bear arms only secures liberty if those bearing arms are (at least somewhat) virtuous and capable of s...
September 11, 2025 at 18:29
As noted above, I think Rorty's view is self-refuting (in multiple ways). It also would seem to make "usefulness" into a sort of volanturist metaphysi...
September 11, 2025 at 14:26
Sure, let me lay out the three main objections here: 1. You say the theory doesn't allow that "anything goes," and this is because: "constraints" dete...
September 11, 2025 at 14:00
:meh: Compassion is value-laden, it comes from judging a person against what is truly good for them. If there is no better or worse way for a person t...
September 09, 2025 at 14:25
IDK, terms like "aggressive," "weak," "afraid," "pain," "toxic," "grief," "rage," "powerful," etc. all seem to be value-laden in a way that would make...
September 09, 2025 at 13:49
Sure, that would seem to be one consequence of the idea that truth only exists (is created by/dependent upon) human practices and language. How could ...
September 09, 2025 at 10:41
If truth only exists inside the context of human practices—is indeed dependent on them—what truths could we possibly be missing such that we are not o...
September 09, 2025 at 01:21
Hey, I didn't say it wasn't absurd, insane even. But his argument that it follows from some commonly held positions is not bad. I think the idea is th...
September 09, 2025 at 01:10
According to Alex Rosenberg down at Duke, this is simply true of all of us. The reason paradoxes emerge is because the "self" and "intentionality" are...
September 08, 2025 at 22:13
Only on a particularly deflationary view of "science." At any rate, those who embrace such a view, and who stick to a "hard" empiricism and naturalism...
September 08, 2025 at 21:54
I won't deny that some people use "inter-subjective" to mean essentially the same thing as "objective" once meant. This seems to me to be an unwilling...
September 08, 2025 at 12:29
Well, it's also common for anti-realists, even professional analytic philosophers, to assume that the realist must be committed to the idea that "most...
September 08, 2025 at 11:50
Wouldn't B exist potentially before it is actual? So A doesn't need to contain B, it just must contain what brings B from potentially into actuality. ...
September 07, 2025 at 11:10
Reminds me:
September 05, 2025 at 21:46
The Gnostics called NPCs "hylics" (the spiritual seed of Cain). Those who were conscious but dragged down into worldly concerns and their own bodies w...
September 05, 2025 at 20:43
It strikes me as a sop thrown to common moral sentiment in the context of his broader philosophy. Of course Hume doesn't deny the appearance of evalua...
September 05, 2025 at 20:22
Are you familiar with any of the physicists who suggest that information is ontologically basic and that matter and energy emerge from it? Sometimes i...
September 05, 2025 at 11:21
Well, liberalism has had its evangelical moments. Revolutionary France initially began by setting up "sister republics" everywhere it could. In the ea...
September 04, 2025 at 22:50
Well, the core of Fukuyama's thesis isn't that every country will soon become a liberal democracy, nor that no liberal democracies will cease to be so...
September 04, 2025 at 21:02
I'll respond to the rest later but I wanted to point out a potential miscommunication: Right, I am aware of the distinction. But it isn't a "logical d...
September 04, 2025 at 16:44
Yes, although "physical" retains its original meaning here in that it is "being qua changing" or "mobile being." This would contain the subject matter...
September 04, 2025 at 15:47
I also thought David Bentley Hart's "All Things Are Full of Gods" was pretty good on this topic too, if not particularly original. But it covers a ver...
September 04, 2025 at 15:17
Yup, that's the one. There is even an abridged version that is acted on YouTube, although it is not particularly easy to follow lol.
September 04, 2025 at 14:49
Right. Plato attributes this open endedness to reason itself, and in a way, G.E. Moore seems to have merely it on this vis-á-vis practical reason with...
September 03, 2025 at 21:05
Indeed. But wouldn't this be because the mirror reflects any light, and not just red? Likewise, we call certain things "magnetic" but it isn't that el...
September 03, 2025 at 14:19