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  1. The Grey Man

    What is (post)modernity?

    My conjecture is that modernity is essentially a wound in the collective human psyche that opened up in the 17th century as a result of an explosion of our knowledge of nature. The Scientific Revolution caused a 'dissociation of sensibility' from the intellect whereby the world of visible and...
  2. The Grey Man

    Philosophy is dangerous

    but there seems to be no point in warning people about it. Any youngster who has a real vocation to philosophy, who genuinely loves the truth, will read Hume and Kant even if you tell him not to, and attempting to dissuade him from doing so will only make the situation worse, for no sooner will...
  3. The Grey Man

    Analogy and Hierarchy

    What fascinates me more than anything else lately is analogy, by which I mean similarity between different things, especially similarity between different classes of phenomena or conceptual domains. Of course, analogy can also mean the recognition of such similarities by human beings, and in...
  4. The Grey Man

    Potential, virtual, and actual value in economics

    I've been thinking about how the old philosophical terms of potentiality, virtuality, and actuality can be used to explain the role of science and imagination in economics. Take gasoline for example. The potential value of gasoline is, of course, immense due to its usefulness as fuel, but until...
  5. The Grey Man

    Religion, transcendence, and dogmatic exclusion

    The occasion for this thread was @onesteptwostep and @Puffy's discussion in @EndogenousRebel's thread: https://intpforum.com/threads/what-is-transcendence-how-does-one-transcend.28556/ Since the above-mentioned thread is about transcendence in general, I didn't want to treat specifically...
  6. The Grey Man

    What is the quintessence?

    The elements or generic kinds of matter recognized by every traditional society are earth, water, and fire. Air is usually also included, and ether may be included as a quintessence that integrates and transforms the other four (as in Aristotle) or as another name for air. The varying...
  7. The Grey Man

    What if the voice of depression is the voice of reason?

    Benjamin Franklin said that the sting of any reproach is its truth. Indeed, unless one is so diffident as to be be unable to reject patently false claims about himself, he is not going to suffer from a rebuke unless it is rooted in and makes him aware of some real defect in his character or...
  8. The Grey Man

    Ad rem and ad hominem, ratio and recta ratio

    People have a fallacious tendency to think that, because they have discovered someone else's motive for believing x or an undesirable consequence of believing x, they have thereby refuted x, forgetting that it is possible to believe the right thing for the wrong reasons and with evil results...
  9. The Grey Man

    Philosophical implications of non-declarative memory

    @Inexorable Username brought to my attention the neurological concept of non-declarative or implicit memory, which encompasses all memories which do not manifest as speech. A particularly important species of non-declarative memory is procedural memory, which pertains to one's memory of how to...
  10. The Grey Man

    Identity and difference in mathematics

    @Siouxsie has mentioned the Hegelian idea of 'negation of negation' in a thread about theodicy. https://intpforum.com/threads/is-there-a-problem-of-evil.28551/ Hegel inherited from Spinoza and Platonic-Christian apophatic theologians the notion that, since every affirmation doubles as a...
  11. The Grey Man

    Is there a problem of evil?

    https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/is-there-a-problem-of-evil Last year, I mentioned having asked some colleagues of mine a question similar to the Hardy Question: https://www.intpforum.com/threads/answer-the-hardy-question.28243/ What I did not mention at that time was that one or two...
  12. The Grey Man

    The World's Smallest Political Quiz

    can be found on the Advocates for Self-Government website: https://www.theadvocates.org/quiz/ What do you think of their model? Is economic regulation and social freedom vs. economic freedom and social regulation an adequate description of the opposition between the 'Left' and the 'Right', or...
  13. The Grey Man

    I believe so that I may understand

    I'm back, though I might not stay for long. Looking at the Forum with fresh eyes, one thing jumps out at me: Even something as innocuous as the rationale for the division of the forum into subsections (punctuated by a smiley face!) betrays the pernicious and characteristically modern...
  14. The Grey Man

    What is the relation between natural and mathematical knowledge?

    "...somewhat to be signified." What does John Dee mean when he says that natural things are "somewhat signified" by mathematical things? We might answer that, for example, a husband and wife number two, but are not the number two, or the silhouette of a mountain is triangular, but not...
  15. The Grey Man

    Ontogeny recapitulates cosmogony?

    A particular idea has been haunting my brain for the past year or two years, and I want to hear what some of the clever members of this forum have to say about it. Ernst Haeckel's well-known formula is "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny," meaning that the development of an individual specimen...
  16. The Grey Man

    There is no 'I'

    over and above the fortuitous synthesis of sense-data that we call the present. The past and the future are not extensions of 'myself' in two 'imaginary' space-like directions like the indefinite twofold extension of a Euclidean line, but interpolations of the present that the analytical...
  17. The Grey Man

    What is the relation between form and substance?

    The formal aspect of the key (its specific shape, including the contours of its teeth) and the force that turns the key are necessary, but disjunctively insufficient conditions of the key opening the lock. Analogously, the momentum of the light rays impinging upon one's retina and the shape of...
  18. The Grey Man

    My Theory of Everything, Expressed in Layman's Terms

    Karl Popper and the Friesian Trilemma Karl Popper, for those of you who are unfamiliar with him, is one of the most prominent philosophers of the 20th century and the most important commentator on the scientific method since Bacon. His chief epistemological work, The Logic of Scientific...
  19. The Grey Man

    Wilfrid Sellars: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

    @DoIMustHaveAnUsername? introduced the thought of Wilfrid Sellars to me some time ago and, though I originally rejected his "Myth of the Given"—the notion that our beliefs are not grounded in immediate knowledge given by sensory experience—due to my own foundationalist conviction that beliefs...
  20. The Grey Man

    Is Socratic Philosophy Possible?

    Plato's theory of forms, in its various forms, has been one of the most, if not the most persistent school of metaphysical thought in the history of Western civilization. Ever since its systematization and synthesis with nascent Christianity by the Church Fathers in the early centuries of our...
  21. The Grey Man

    The Excellence of G.E. Moore

    In this thread (and I should have done this a long time ago), I'm going to take a break from shaking my fist at Anglo-American university philosophy in general to bring the forum's attention to a certain Cambridge professor who embodied what I consider to be the attributes of an excellent...
  22. The Grey Man

    Consciousness as Cosmic Sex

    I submit that if one reads between the lines, Kant's seminal work The Critique of Pure Reason is all about consciousness (perception) as a medium between sensation and thought. By now, some of you are probably tired of hearing me talk about multiplicity and unity, but I must ask you to indulge...
  23. The Grey Man

    Spengler on the Difference Between Tragic Morale and Plebeian Morale

    From The Decline of the West; Volume 1, Chapter X: By way of interpretation: What should I do? is not a question that primitive people take seriously. Their lives are too short, their needs too pressing, for them to spend too much time in idle thought. Their morality is therefore expressed...
  24. The Grey Man

    My Philosophy in Everyday Fucking Language

    Apparently, my communication on this forum has been so bad that the phenomenon of poseurs pretending to understand somebody's incomprehensible writings has been dubbed the "greyman effect." Ironically, posing is one of the things that I despise most about academic philosophy so, in a sense, I've...
  25. The Grey Man

    On the Vacuity of the Concept of Existence

    Thought is the interconnection of concepts which are thereby identified with each other; judgment is the act of combining the concepts. We call a concept that is connected to another concept by means of judgment the predicate to the latter's subject. For example, in the sentence, Socrates is...
  26. The Grey Man

    A Brief Sketch of My Philosophy of Philosophy

    Unity and multiplicity. Throughout all periods and places of human history, one question has never failed to vex philosophers, for it is as intimate to them as their very selves: what is the relation between the one and the many, between the multiplicity of natural phenomena and the unity of...
  27. The Grey Man

    The needs of the many do not outweigh the needs of the few

    The needs of the many are in fact weightless. There is no collective good; individuals are alone the arbiters of what is good, and they are under no compulsion to agree with each other. It is a matter of indifference to the lords feasting in the banquet hall that prisoners endure torture in the...
  28. The Grey Man

    onesteptwostep on Contemporary Wart-healing Pseudo-religion

    The purpose of this thread to bring your attention to what I conceive to be a particularly excellent post. I agree with every word of this: We of the West like to think of ourselves as champions of reason who heed best the advice of those who best know the matter, but when the matter is a...
  29. The Grey Man

    The Mirror: Unity and Multiplicity

    It's everywhere It's Atman and Maya Yang and Yin Psyche and physis The soul and nature The Cartesian substances, mind and matter Spinoza's thought and extension Locke's secondary and primary qualities Leibniz's simple substance and the multitude within it Kant's noumenon and phenomena; the...
  30. The Grey Man

    Mainländer and the Death of God

    Nietzsche is famous for proclaiming the death of God through his character Zarathustra, but Philipp Mainländer (1841-1876) was actually the first philosopher in the Western tradition to assign a prominent role to the concept in the exposition of his thought. Mainländer occupies an obscure...
  31. The Grey Man

    Schopenhauer, Panpsychism, Nihilism

    What follows is crude. Its purpose is to stimulate discourse and to respond to some posts made in the “Awaiting Orders” thread and in other places. Consider that central identity of Schopenhauer which has been shamelessly appropriated by his present-day coattail riders David Chalmers and...
  32. The Grey Man

    Awaiting Orders

    I have spent five years camping in this forest of half-measures, awaiting orders. I have no intelligence on the enemy's disposition, capability, or intent; indeed, I cannot even be sure that there is an enemy. With each day the adversary remains hidden behind a veil of uncertainty, time takes...
  33. The Grey Man

    What is suffering?

    Is it just resistance to a system reaching equilibrium? Or is our suffering somehow more real than that of comparatively uncomplicated "disturbed systems", like the pendulum that must swing back and forth while "wanting" (i.e. tending, in the absence of interference) to come to rest? Why do...
  34. The Grey Man

    I know you folks like to analyze personalities, so here's one.

    I'll present it in the form of a list of descriptors associated with it. Verbose. Has strong convictions. Speaks loudly, wants his words to be seen as important and true. Wants to control conversations, often at the expense of the opportunities given to other participants to speak...
  35. The Grey Man

    How would the various types fare in a military setting?

    Particularly the introverted intuitives. How would the types adjust to a full-time job in a military? How about part-time/reserves?
  36. The Grey Man

    Hello everybody.

    Introductions are always awkward for me in person, so that's one thing about me. Most of the rest follows from a reserved, contemplative nature. I am in school, and the sciences interest me. I am most at home dealing with theory, philosophy, and mathematics. I am not an expert in any of...
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