Elena > Recent Status Updates

Off the charts bursts of pure neuronal pleasure accompany the reading of this text. There is perhaps a bit too much biographical information for my taste, but this does bring a new perspective to the story charting the genesis of these ideas than I usually get.

“If we cannot deal in continuously identifiable items (in our self-descriptions), must we be content to be, as our own observers, our own fiction-writers? Indeed what is truth, and why bother?”

“We have to confront mysteries. We are not gods. Meanwhile of course philosophers hanker after deep foundations and describable (even if postulated) entities.”

Oh, so good. That the idea of unity is the soil out of which the history of Western philosophy, religion, morals, and aesthetics, all have grown. That our contemporary, "demythologizing" culture tries to get away from the idea, to "deconstruct" it, but only ends up presupposing it in ever more subtle forms as a fixed point of reference.

This work proves that you can glean perennial insight from a work even while almost entirely disagreeing with its metaphysics. How is that possible? What IS permanent?

Autorul ne arata modul acela de suferinta care se numeste "esecul existential." Consta in instrainarea si dezradacinarea mintala din fire, si in dezaxarea morala si spirituala. Cautam indestulare, dar pierdem speranta ca exista. Ma intreb oare daca nu-i asta Acedia. Nu ne este bine cunoscut acest mod de suferinta, nu avem multe cuvinte pentru el (poate de fapt n-avem nici unul), dar il traim de zi cu zi in tacere.

Embodied mind theorists, like Lakoff and Johnson, use Frege as their favourite punching bag. They say his rather formalist account of meaning implies a rather abstract (and cognitively unrealistic, as they put it) view of mind. But I see his work here as being potentially complementary to their project. Their own embodied view couldn't account for objective truth very well. Frege's does.

Once again, I feel I have had a casket of lit firecrackers dumped into my brain. I am far too impressionable to not fear neural overload when confronted with such intense beauty. How does one begin to process and package something like this... time and again, great literary works like this humble me. They offer a great reminder of how hopeless the philosopher's quest for the systematization of existence really is.

Made it to end of chapter 4. Uncanny how Buchanan manages to anticipate EVERY OBJECTION I end up making. I usually find myself making way more objections than the thinkers I read manage to deal with, so this work is turning out to be especially satisfying to me.