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Descartes,
a delicious melon)
LOL
he perceived that the universe is both rational and united throughout by cause and effect. He believed that this conception could be applied from physics to medicine—hence biology—and even to moral reasoning. In this respect, he laid the groundwork for the belief in the unity of learning
all assumptions possible are systematically eliminated
he went on to argue for the complete separation of mind and matter. The stratagem freed him to put spirit aside to concentrate on matter as pure mechanism.
Descartes introduced reductionism, the study of the world as an assemblage of physical parts that can be broken apart and analyzed separately.
the falling apple that had triggered his thinking on the subject twenty years previously—apparently a true story. The
Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night: God said, “Let Newton be!” and all was light.
Why not a Newtonian solution to the affairs of men? The idea grew into one of the mainstays of the Enlightenment agenda. As late as 1835, Adolphe Quételet was proposing “social physics” as the basis of the discipline soon to be named sociology.
Auguste Comte, his contemporary, believed a true social science to be inevitable. “Men,” he said, echoing Condorcet, “are not allowed to think freely about chemistry and biology, so why should they be allowed to think freely about political philosophy?”
In this world view the entities of Nature are inseparable and perpetually changing, not discrete and constant as perceived by the Enlightenment thinkers. As a result the Chinese never hit upon the entry point of abstraction and break-apart analytic research attained by European science
Why no Descartes or Newton under the Heavenly Mandate? The reasons were historical and religious. The Chinese had a distaste for abstract codified law, stemming from their unhappy experience with the Legalists,
Of probably even greater importance, Chinese scholars abandoned the idea of a supreme being with personal and creative properties. No rational Author of Nature existed in their universe; consequently the objects they meticulously described did not follow universal principles, but instead operated within particular rules followed by those entities in the cosmic order. In the absence of a compelling need for the notion of general laws—thoughts in the mind of God, so to speak—little or no search was made for them.
The ionians werent monotheistic but thales ff. sought a universal principle and socrates after him and his student plato and then aristitle who all had great occidental influence. In fact these couldve shaped christian theology; reviewing coplewton's history volume two coukd be of service here.
moreover he explicitly states at the beginning of his medieval ? history that the rediscovery of aristotle's example of systematization caused european theologians to believe a systemtized science could be philosophized
Of probably even greater importance, Chinese scholars abandoned the idea of a supreme being with personal and creative properties. No rational Author of Nature existed in their universe; consequently the objects they meticulously described did not follow universal principles, but instead operated within particular rules followed by those entities in the cosmic order. In the absence of a compelling need for the notion of general laws—thoughts in the mind of God, so to speak—little or no search was made for them.
Hmmm
that would be known to extraterrestrials as well as to our species, and
Hypothetically
limitations of intuition unaided by mathematics;
The cost of scientific advance is the humbling recognition that reality was not constructed to be easily grasped by the human mind.
Im dubious
They invented a Creator obedient to His own natural laws, the belief known as deism.
rejected the nonmaterial world of heaven and hell.
in another plane
Whats tgis meAn
an omega point of evolution—total unity, total knowledge—toward which the human species and extraterrestrial life forms are converging.
had to be
I tgought it it means it didnt inherently have to be but rather the fact of our asking is what makes it as if it has to be to wit our asking IMPLIES these conditions
The fatal flaw in deism is thus not rational at all, but emotional.
Ceremonies stripped of sacred mystery lose their emotional force, because
As al such emotions can be said to have evolved around natural entities like family, the use of emotions towards an imaginary object is a misappropriation and unnatural and inasmuch as its unnatural, it conflicts with nature and is doomed to problems
better to use such emotions as tgey were evolved to be used
There is no substitute for surrender to an infallible and benevolent being, the commitment called salvation. And no substitute for formal recognition of an immortal life force, the leap of faith called transcendence.
As above, these ideas are in fact the substitutes
Deism and science also failed to colonize ethics.
Yes? What more is needed than the idea of compromise and the legal system?
and fundamentally, Asimov's rekativity of wrong is a satisfying principle
immutable
Wouldn’t that trap us in a cage of logic and revealed fate?
Even if this was true, it doesnt change our us; whether we were aware or unaware of fate, we are stil the same as beforw we became aware of it.
the only change would be the incorrect perception of loss; we had believed we were free and the rationalization that this was RETROACTIVELY mistaken, FEELS like a loss. But in reality , nothingbwas lost, only relabled. So we can be calm knowing we remain intact and safe.
Religious authority, the Hadrian’s Wall of civilization, will be breached and the barbarians of totalitarian ideology will pour in.
cf JB Peterson
Frankenstein’s monster and Hollywood’s Terminator, the latter an all-metal and microchip-guided Frankenstein’s monster, wreak destruction on their creators, including the naive geniuses
Revolt! Return to natural man, reassert the primacy of individual imagination and confidence in immortality. Find an escape to a higher realm through art, promote a Romantic Revolution.
The spirit enters another reality beyond the reach of weight and measure.
Bec the mind works by way of neural analogs to remembered objects, so even though it seems the mind has traveled an impossible speed, really it merely accessed memories stored in acceptably nearby memory contqiners.
an analogy is taking a large pice of paper and wring in large letters the word fire on it and then taking a smaller paper and writing ice on it and then folding the large fire paper aroynd the small ice paper. The two will happily remain together statically. In this way youve done the impossible of holding ice inside of fire indefinitely, but really, you havent at all; youve stored their analogs in a way which is possible for the medium of paper but impossible for the media of the referred objects of fire and ice.
Humanity, Rousseau claimed, was originally a race of noble savages in a peaceful state of nature, who were later corrupted by civilization—and by scholarship.
Cf Paintings of copley
Religion, marriage, law, and government are deceptions created by the powerful for their own selfish ends.
Cf Varo ctd in copleston vol 1
Analysis and synthesis, he liked to say, should be alternated as naturally as breathing in and breathing out.
Facts by themselves can never be more than partial truths. Those we perceive are only fragments of the universal flux. Nature is alive, Schelling concluded;
Cf jordan b peterson on how vision is constructed using value mapping
Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. The transcendentalists were radical individualists who rejected the overwhelming commercialism that came to prevail in American society
Louis Agassiz,
in a metaphysical excursion paralleling that of Schelling, conceived the universe as a vision in the mind of God.
Precisely because scientific information was growing at a geometric pace, most individual researchers were not concerned with unification,
They are professionally focused; their education does not orient them to the wide contours of the world.
This seems an icredible generalization. I suspect it might be true of individuals who are interested in and then trained for a parochial and techical interest in a science because they acientally became aquainted with the matter but there are still people who have a general curiosity for all things; why should there be fewer of the than before? In fact, with the advent of available information from library books or much increased educational institutions, such a general curiosity is only more handily fostered and reinforced.
It is therefore not surprising to find physicists who do not know what a gene is,
pneumonia.
Was he tge guy summoned on a cold night to entertsin some queen?
In 1797,
Most could discourse reasonably well on the entire world of learning, which was still small enough to be seen whole.
Fragmentation of expertise was further mirrored in the twentieth century by modernism in the arts, including architecture.
Psychoanalysis was a force that shifted the attention of modernist intellectuals and artists from the social and political to the private and psychological.
ALL MOVEMENTS TEND to extremes,
philosophical postmodernism (often called poststructuralism, especially in its more political and sociological expressions).
Enlightenment thinkers believe we can know everything, and radical postmodernists believe we can know nothing.
