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Count Timothy von Icarus

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It comes out of the Doctrina Signorum, the understanding of signs laid out originally by Saint Augustine, which predominates across the Scholastic era...
August 02, 2025 at 14:19
If stasis precludes life? Is a This reminds me of a quote I've shared before: Sheer change and difference wouldn't really be "change." If one thing is...
August 02, 2025 at 14:14
Sort of like the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis for philosophy? It's an interesting though. However, it seems to me like Sapir-Whorf has fallen into ill reput...
August 01, 2025 at 18:37
Not to add more wrinkles, but in his Orthodox Psychotherapy, Hierotheos Vlachos argues that soul (psyche) is said in two ways in Scripture, as the lif...
July 31, 2025 at 16:52
If you liked Nietzsche I would give Dostoevsky a try. In a lot of ways they have very similar biographies and personalities. Nietzsche was a tremendou...
July 31, 2025 at 15:59
This is what I understand too, broadly speaking. Although there seems to have been a fair amount of diversity. However, the Pharisees, who play an out...
July 30, 2025 at 22:43
I find this assertion strange because the annals of Woke protest letters/debates are full of assertions of an expansive moral and epistemic relativism...
July 30, 2025 at 20:02
How is this not an argument against the very possibility of totalitarianism tout court, regardless of the ideology consumed by its practitioners? And ...
July 30, 2025 at 19:46
Well, it's complex. Saint Thomas cites Saint Augustine more than any other thinker (10,000+ times!) and Augustine suggests we can see the divine image...
July 29, 2025 at 22:47
Relativism, even in its extreme forms, does not need to imply that we prefer or will all possible eventualities equally. Indeed, extreme forms of rela...
July 29, 2025 at 21:37
Prima facie, it didn't have to lead that way. Many of the early adopters of Nietzsche who rescued him from obscurity leaned to the right. I actually t...
July 29, 2025 at 21:07
Sure, you could describe it lots of ways. You could also think of it as a system of (perverse) incentives. I'd place the main influence for the appear...
July 29, 2025 at 20:43
:up: Mark Fisher has a charming explanation of this in Capitalist Realism. But other theorists see this not as a property of late-capitalism, but of r...
July 29, 2025 at 19:10
It doesn't always. There are right-wing descendants of Nietzsche who also draw from Derrida, Deleuze, etc. as well as critical theory, although they t...
July 29, 2025 at 19:01
I'm certainly not committed to the idea that all philosophy is good, and that all philosophical "progress" is necessarily part of some sort of provide...
July 29, 2025 at 14:40
Absolutely. I wrote an article a while back that World War II has become the "founding mythos" of modern liberalism. In doing this, it has made (gener...
July 28, 2025 at 20:45
That's a very broad question. I think it comes down perhaps to evangelical zeal and praxis, although providence is another option! But Christianity di...
July 28, 2025 at 20:06
Well, al-Gharbi traces it back plausibly to early 19th century American politics, particularly in the context of abolitionism (which was also a quite ...
July 28, 2025 at 19:51
Relics are also relevant in the other direction. There can be nuance on relics, but on pretty much any sound theological view handing over gold so tha...
July 28, 2025 at 19:19
You pose an interesting question with a well thought out OP. A difficulty here is that the relevant ground to cover is incredibly broad, because there...
July 28, 2025 at 19:10
That unit is prior to multitude isn't really about the Holy Trinity, it's just relevant to speaking about the topic. Unlike Bob, Aquinas does not thin...
July 27, 2025 at 01:57
Right, numerical identity (dimensive quantity) is posterior to virtual quantity (qualitative intensity) and anything's being any thing at all. Unit (a...
July 27, 2025 at 01:27
As I pointed out earlier, this is a misunderstanding. There is only a contradiction if we assume that: A. Any distinctions made vis-á-vis God require/...
July 27, 2025 at 00:49
In its original development, maybe not, although key figures there tended towards a view of morality as mere sentiment (although sometimes divinely au...
July 26, 2025 at 14:45
I'm not sure if it will play out the same way. The noxious "White nationalist" faction notwithstanding, the fact that the GOP has embraced an identity...
July 25, 2025 at 14:20
Enactivism can be consistent with more traditional Aristotleianism, Thomism (even of the existential variety), or more "Neoplatonic," thought, althoug...
July 25, 2025 at 13:12
This is largely Fukuyama's answer in his recent "Liberalism and it's Discontents," which treats the same issue, but also the excesses of neoliberalism...
July 24, 2025 at 12:13
Or it can make old identities new targets of power. In the context of the Great Awokening, gender seems most relevant (although religion is important ...
July 23, 2025 at 23:19
What's the objection here aside from him being a "moralist?" It seems like you could describe his basic thesis just as well in the amoral language of ...
July 23, 2025 at 23:07
Unfortunately, I don't think it's going away. I think it is merely having a sort of recession on the left, due to political defeats. However, I think ...
July 23, 2025 at 18:54
If you're interested in the topic, I thought Musa al-Gharbi's We Have Never Been Woke was a good treatment. His main thrust was that the "Great Awoken...
July 23, 2025 at 18:46
Well, a wrinkle here is that weakness of will doesn't necessarily have anything to do with any sort of "moral" consideration, only practical judgement...
July 23, 2025 at 16:59
The key theological terms here are "theosis" (used more often in Eastern Christianity) and "diefication" (used more often in the Latin West). The idea...
July 23, 2025 at 15:54
Well, in the case of the law, I think it's important to consider that there is a difference between what God wills and what God permits. I don't think...
July 23, 2025 at 03:20
Well, that's Nietzsche's account. I think that, whatever his other merits, he is not a particularly accurate (or charitable) student of Plato, and esp...
July 23, 2025 at 03:01
I don't think Nietzsche is really in conflict with the Platonists on this particular point. They certainly allow that different appetites can be more ...
July 23, 2025 at 01:54
No, weakness of will is when one of the lower appetites, the concupiscible (related to pleasure/pain) or irascible (related to hope/fear), overrules t...
July 22, 2025 at 23:01
Precisely; this gets highlighted a lot in theology or in "the Bible as literature." Adam and Eve have the right goal, "becoming like onto God," but ha...
July 22, 2025 at 22:55
I'm not sure if I understand the question, but I'll try my best. Weakness of will is when we do something, despite having a strong desire not to do th...
July 22, 2025 at 18:48
Right, many versions of Christianity start from a quite different metaphysics, which is difficult to acclimatize to. I used to think the athiest prefe...
July 22, 2025 at 18:31
On some older views that have fallen out of fashion, what defines a state of "virtue" is that the virtuous person both tends to do what is right, and ...
July 22, 2025 at 17:11
That's a good point, although today, the working class of rural areas, (the closest analog to the peasantry in the electorate?) is also very right win...
July 22, 2025 at 16:33
The forum where you opened with the insult "someone must have had their brain cut out to be Christian?" If you cannot see why your post is pretty much...
July 22, 2025 at 12:29
Hume takes the categories and assumptions of his milieu as a starting point, so this seems totally fair in his case. He does provide a robust analysis...
July 22, 2025 at 12:03
Thank you for reminding me why this is such a dangerous technology in the hands of people who don't understand it (particularly GPT, with its default ...
July 22, 2025 at 11:38
It's not a psychological explanation. The rise of volanturism and nominalism and attacks on final causality were explicitly based on the idea that nat...
July 22, 2025 at 03:17
I can articulate it just fine, it's just based on a claim that is at best (and this is probably being too charitable), very misleading. Feel free to f...
July 22, 2025 at 00:30
You're equivocating here between your initial formulation, which sounds like straight penal substitution theology, and the idea of propitiation. Somet...
July 21, 2025 at 23:02
It takes the difference between real and conceptual distinctions for granted, or at least, tries to understand them properly in context. I don't see h...
July 21, 2025 at 22:51
This is not how I would put it, although it's better than your OP. While we can speak of God's "wrath" analogously, the Fathers are pretty much unanim...
July 21, 2025 at 22:38