Re: dhw--Epistemological Framework (Order of Rank?) (Humans)

by xeno6696 , Sonoran Desert, Saturday, March 05, 2011, 22:25 (5011 days ago) @ David Turell


> > Why does some of us feel that it needs to rush to solutions when we've only been aware of the deeper nature of these questions for about 70-80 years?
> > 
> > I know you might interpret this as "why isn't everyone agnostic," but we can turn different questions on ourselves: Are we not choosing for egoistic reasons? We know that we can't "know" if God exists, but why is it unreasonable to infer a God, knowing that even for the snapshots of life we've seen, we know that the odds are impossible for things to have come about by random combinations? Why can't reason alone be enough? (Other than it's unfashionable?)
> 
> Your entire post is the best summary I've seen in a long while. The only disagreement I'd obviously have, is my observation that there is a very vocal minority that still are Thomists, and feel he is ignored for no good reason, in fact, that ignoring him is a loss for philosophy.-Thomism is dismissed because he asserts that we can know truth. We can't. Truth of any proposition is only ever based upon the context of the situation--in other words, objective truth doesn't exist. Nietzsche summed this up well, in "Truth and Lie in an Extramoral Sense."-paraph. "Light hits the eye. First metaphor. The image enters the brain and is translated. Second metaphor. Lower level processes then try to ascribe meaning to the image. Third metaphor. Then we try to form words about what we see. Fourth metaphor."-Every stage of this process adds its own perspective; light, in that we can only see a very narrow band. Lower level processes ascribe subconscious meanings. Finally, language... language forcibly shapes how we perceive the world.-Realism--Thomist variety included, makes this distinction: "Contemporary philosophical realism is the belief that our reality is completely ontologically independent of our conceptual schemes, linguistic practices, beliefs, etc."-This has been rejected by philosophers since Hume, with very few notable exceptions, primarily because linguistic relativism is accepted as a fact among humans.

--
\"Why is it, Master, that ascetics fight with ascetics?\"

\"It is, brahmin, because of attachment to views, adherence to views, fixation on views, addiction to views, obsession with views, holding firmly to views that ascetics fight with ascetics.\"