Whatever problems one may have with the “Allegory of the Cave” from Plato’s Republic, this claymation is pretty damned compelling: I still have a measure of distrust for the notion’s scarier uses in getting people to believe funny notions about the world with no evidence save testimony (someone is always willing to claim that he has his own special access to ultimate truth, and [fill in pitifully unimaginative proposition here]; but being aware of the limitations of your own perceptions is a good thing. It applies to things like culture, or even relationships, not just to metaphysics and ontology and …
Tag: philos
Stuff From This Week
UPDATE: This post has finally been reconstructed. Enjoy! UPDATE: Somewhere from a third to half of this post disappeared. I’ll rewrite that soon. But not today, as I’m (dramatic flourish) feeling ill! It’s been a busy lazy week. Since there’s nothing new in Gordland, I thought I’d just dump some links. I don’t do this often, but since I’ve just been catching up and surfing around (aside from a rewrite I’m working on) I have lots of stuff to share. I’ll subdivide it all by headings. One more thing: for the LJ readers out there, there are some Youtube videos …
Why Diamonds? Evolution, Instinctual Niches, Advertising, and the Killer App…
Editorial Note (7 March 2015): This post has been edited from its original form. Basically, the original post triggered a year of rampant, but off-and-on, trolling and discussion derailing (some of it under bizarre pseudonyms, a lot of it passive-aggressive, some of it quite lunatic) by the person whose own blog post prompted the thoughts here. It was bewildering, and not fun. In the end, I decided to negotiate a peace with the nut: I’d erase the evidence of his crazyass trolling, and he’d take down ridiculous slander he’d posted elsewhere. Despite not liking that — I don’t enjoy helping people be nasty with impunity — …
Pre-Enlightenment “Rationality” (So-Called) and Aquinas’ “Five Ways”
Why Aquinas’ Five Ways? So. Toward the end of a discussion about whether atheists are angry and unhappy people — by the way, my basic sentiment is that if they are that way, it’s because of all the zealot nutters we have to deal with in life, and that, actually, most atheists I know aren’t all that angry or sad — someone challenged my assertion that Aquinas’ Five Ways is transparently fallacious and relies on all kinds of assumptions that simply need not be accepted by a listener. This was in the course of a discussion that had such amazing …
Derridian Nonsense, Story Idea
You know, I decided to give Derrida one more try, by perusing a bit from Of Grammatology — the bit collected in A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds, edited by Peggy Kamuf. The only thing that resonated with me was a bit of a footnote, which I’ll quote here: Linear writing has therefore indeed [“]constituted, during many millennia, independently of its role as conserver of the collective memory, by its unfolding in one dimension alone, the instrument of analysis out of which grew philosophic and scientific thought. The conservation of thought can now be conceived otherwise than in terms of …