Pierre Grimes is an insightful man. However due to my piety as a Christian, I must disagree with him when he says that the teaching of Jesus comes directly from the “Greek tradition.” — Dermot Griffin

With all of these conditions observed regarding the mixture of language and culture in such a time of extreme violence, it is difficult to say what actually happened, So I am curious why you make it a matter of faith when you reject Grimes who suggests Jesus received an education from one of the Hellenistic schools. How is that an article of faith rather than a question of fact?

I am chipping away at the lecture but have to stop all the time to research the premises. I am not a student dedicated to this period of theology. I don't know if I will get to a point to respond to it properly. Thank you for bringing it to my attention.

The matter of "univocity" versus "equivocity" in making reference to the divine is a big deal in both western and eastern churches. Is there something you like regarding the issue?

At what point do we start questioning the assumption that consciousness comes from matter? — RogueAI

As a matter of scientific method, using the models that have been developed so far is not dependent upon including "materiality" as a prerequisite. The duality in question is presented by the circumstance that our experience of consciousness happens whether it is explained or not while models that explain why it happens are not given but require much effort. The "hard" problem is not difficult because it has to prove that something like "mind" does not exist. It is difficult because the 'duality' of experience is one of the phenomena that has to be explained.

The question of whether any model will sufficiently explain the phenomena is not hanging on the balance of whether a physical or non-physical dimension is involved. The mind/body identity theorists keep changing their models when one set of factors fail to correspond with 'experience' as a fact. Jabbing at one's cranium with an index finger while exclaiming, "It is all in here" is no advance upon the problem.

An excellent account. Thank you.

In that your interest was piqued by the comment: "'addresses the psychological drives that underlie various philosophical programs and perspectives, as a form of critique', I suggest starting with the Genealogy of Morals. In that work, the "perspectives" have a history that does impart a complete explanation but is not arbitrary either.

A large chunk of secondary literature is looking for digestible bite size chunks that a genealogy will not provide.

Some agenda behind a position like that... — ZzzoneiroCosm

It sounds like some version of Bridgeman's operationalism combined with Skinner's behaviorism in order to establish Rand's direct realism as a law of nature.

Hard to say, on this side of the curtain.

It is difficult to separate the original from what some people made of it because the reports we have that have survived time and erasure are also responses to whatever was said and done. We will never get the direct feed.

Because of that, I think of it as two tracks of development that may cross paths in some places but cannot not be resolved into one: There is the uncertainty of the origins that point to a variety of sources: There are the theological edifices that were built afterwards. The "looting: of pagan thought and practices can be cogently investigated in the latter case. I think a different register is needed for exploring the former.

With that said, I do share one element of why you wanted to separate the two. I grew up in a church environment and was shocked when I actually read the New Testament for myself the first time. Hearing the words of Jesus was getting a different message outside of the bottle it was shoved into.

In regard to the Judaic elements, you may be interested in Oliver5 comments in the "Jesus Freaks" OP.

Don the Don asked the class: "What is the difference between a sophist and a philosopher?

Franz: The sophist just wants to win contests whereas the philosopher seeks what they do not know.

Don: How does this "argument from ignorance" work if the adversary rejects it as a thing?

Paine: What thing? Either the philosopher is honest about what they do not know, or they are not.

Don: Are you saying the whole enterprise revolves about the sincerity of the participants?

Franz: That would be nuts. That would suggest that all the advancements of knowledge over the centuries was somehow bound up with the character of certain people.

Paine: So, Franz, how would you test for the difference between people to confirm or deny your proposition?

Don: That is enough from both of you.

Again, its time to move on from this, you staying stuck on this terminology bit is only going to make your points stranger and stranger. — Garrett Travers

You are arrogant. That is a self-evident fact.
I will not hinder your progress with any other observations.

But the expression "F=MA" did not magically appear to you as self-evident fact. It came from years of people asking why things happen the way they did.

Edit to Add:
I scanned the article. I did not spot the "anti-science" part you spoke of in relation to identity theorists.

Much of that earlier stuff, identity theory and the like, was led to apologize years after being established for being anti-science. — Garrett Travers

Citation, please.

Why is what you ask when you think f=ma means something beyond it being described within its operant nature. — Garrett Travers

That is not how the word is used. Your definition sounds more like a premise to a model, not something found to be true by one means or another.

A concept with a clear distinction that, much like f=ma, has correspondent value. "Why", on the other hand, does not. That is exclusively a human concept that does not apply to the universe. — Garrett Travers

That is an interesting bifurcation of experience.

When shown how to complete the square in algebra, I can learn a set of rules that will work each time I use it. The method does not tell me why the rules work. The rules to calculate are arbitrary until grounded by a reliable principle that makes them valid. In the realm of scientific inquiry, the dissatisfaction with mere plausibility is why the models keep changing. The validity is hard fought over and easily lost.

It seems like much of your use of the word 'material' is a version of Mind/Brain Identity Theory. A common objective amongst these many versions of the theory is to dispense with mind/body duality in explaining and investigating the phenomena. I don't see anywhere in this group of theories any kind of appeal for the duality between 'how' and 'why' that you propose.

I was trying to make heads or tails out of the Monadology when I lost focus after seeing the other kids outside the window, throwing knives they had just made in Shop class at a spare tire conveniently mounted on the back of the Gym teacher's Bronco.

"Paine!" barked Don the Don. "How will you ever become unemployable if you keep drifting off like that!"

It seems to me that one of the points made in the Bushido culture is that accepting death is not just a matter of being willing to check out if events require it but that you come into a different kind of mind that is important to use while you have it.

Hinge propositions are predicated on facts accrued by humans through data gathering and analysis — Garrett Travers

Wittgenstein said as much.

The presupposition of belief is not necessarily a factor. — Garrett Travers

A factor of what? People more or less agreeing that some things happen but others don't? Common sense versus some other kind? Wittgenstein seems to be militating against a set of propositions being the last word on why propositions are used. The propositions in question are not like the many used to convince people of something despite good reasons to doubt them.

I am radically skeptical about everything for which there is no, or little evidence of. — Garrett Travers

Wittgenstein is asking what evidence is or looks like in this text. He may be more skeptical than you are.

Here's the point I'm making with his next statement: the conformity with mankind bit, is mankind's creation. Not the other way around. If I make a mistake in conformity with MY standards, I am still making a mistake, and have now added MY standard to the "conformity" of which Wittgentein spoke. — Garrett Travers

I don't understand what you are saying here. Perhaps you can bring in more of Wittgenstein's language that you object to for the purposes of clarification. Or maybe you could show how the article you linked to relates to passages in Wittgenstein's text.

One aspect I do think I understand is that Wittgenstein is not saying that hinge propositions are "beyond rational confirmation." You will have to do more than assert it when Wittgenstein specifically rules that out.

Edit to add:
Oh wait, I get it, It is the shared reality you oppose to objectivity. By that measure, you will never be wrong.

But, the idea that they cannot be challenged or put under rational scrutiny is bizarre. — Garrett Travers

On Certainty is not saying that. The article you linked to does not seem to understand that Wittgenstein is questioning the extent of Moore's use of self-evidence as the basis for argument. That purpose is the opposite of saying that some propositions are given special status for the sake of advancing a theory. And it doesn't sound very mystical if Wittgenstein is using a shared reality to limit the utility of Moore's certainty:

155. In certain circumstance a man cannot make a mistake. ("Can" is here used logically, and the proposition does not mean that a man cannot say anything false in those circumstances.) If Moore were to pronounce the opposite of those propositions which he declares certain, we should not just not share his opinion: we should regard him as demented.

Can we say from this that Kant's idealism is a form of naturalism? — Tom Storm

Well, Kant did say this:

The question was not whether the concept of cause was right, useful, and even indispensable for our knowledge of nature, for this Hume had never doubted; but whether that concept could be thought by reason a priori, and consequentially whether it possessed an inner truth, independent of all experience, implying a perhaps more extended use not restricted merely to objects of experience. This was Hume's problem. It was solely a question concerning the origin, not concerning the indispensable need of using the concept. Were the former decided, the conditions of the use and the sphere of its valid application would have been determined as a matter of course. — Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, pg 259

In due course, Kant lays out his 'determination' and says:

"Accordingly, we shall here be concerned with experience only and the universal conditions of its possibility, which are given a priori. Thence we shall define nature as the whole object of all possible experience." (299)

Therefore, objective truth is a special kind of experience:

For instance, when I say the air is elastic, this judgement is as yet a judgement of perception only; I do nothing but refer two of my sensations to each other. But if I would have it called a judgement of experience, I require this connection to stand under a condition which makes it universally valid. I desire therefore that I and everybody else should always connect necessarily the same perceptions under the same circumstances. — ibid. 299

So it is by this repeatability that we can have an objective reality and it eat it too. It is transcendental in the suggestion that we couldn't possibly be putting on such a fine show by ourselves.

I am unsure how the element of 'truth value' fits into this work. I have no idea what an "antirealist" reading of Wittgenstein might look like.

But the work shows Wittgenstein questioning Moore's confidence in the use of certain propositions. That is not presented as an argument against him or what should be accepted as a set of facts. From that point of view, Moore wants to have done with a set of issues that Wittgenstein is not ready to close the door upon.

I am confused here. I thought some of what Wittgenstein was resisting was the utility Moore put in placing some propositions outside of what could be doubted. Moore's intent seems to be denying 'antirealism.' Section 94 seems to be saying: not so fast, if the measuring stick I have been given can only be used under certain conditions, its use tells me jack about those conditions in the way Moore says they do.

Thomas is simply a list of sayings, not a narrative and is unfortunately lumped in with "Gnostic," which is misleading, although it also seems like Gnosticish sayings may have been added to the version of Thomas we have at a later date as well. What is of note is that some sayings are also more similar to John's more philosophical and mystical sayings. This makes sense either way, because the Gospels were clearly written for varying audiences originally. — Count Timothy von Icarus

One big difference between the gospel of Thomas and the other versions is that in Thomas, the kingdom of heaven is said to have come into existence and that most of us are too distracted to notice the change. That message is starkly at odds with those waiting for the end of "this cosmos."

One of those options became doctrine while the other option was thoroughly erased from memory (except for the bits left in buried pottery).

So, is the will to erase exhibited here related to the views of the winners of these barely seen conflicts or the result of politics, where some win and some lose and so it goes?

Especially when you have to ship device overseas for repairs.

'm curious why even the most "philosophical" of Christian theologians (e.g. Teilhard de Chardin, Barth) include Jesus in their theology. — Ciceronianus

I am curious how Barth figures into your argument. He argued for a Pauline vision of the struggle between the spirit and the flesh that put the idea of an imminent God of nature outside of the crisis of faith. Grouping this hard-core Protestant with Chardin hurts my brain.

My wife would kill me if I got an android spouse. She would merely turn me out on to the street if I committed adultery.

In the first section of the Leviathan, Hobbes delivers a hearty rant against Greek philosophers and all who followed in their footsteps. The short version: They are a bunch of wankers, free to wander about gardens without trousers while discussing problems that don't really exist.

The question of whether Thrasymachus will benefit or harm his students, is an echo of the accusation against Socrates' corrupting the youth of Athens. — Fooloso4

I see that.
I also see how wrestling with Socrates makes Thrasymachus a better sophist.
Opposing people may empower them. But what is the alternative? Silence?

As a blueprint of an ideal city, it has some odd features. The problem of inheritance, as the cause of bad outcomes, is not made less sharp by how difficult it would be to remedy it. Socrates is pulling upon beards.
The entire dialogue centers upon trying to disprove Thrasymachus's assertion that justice is only the preferences of the powerful. It turned out that we had to explore many sides of human motivation to approach the question.
The city of words allows the other regimes to be distinguished from each other.
Socrates was killed for bringing some of the city of words into the city of Athens.

It is sort of a mirror image of Dante's Hell: "Why do I know so many of these losers"?

Your dissatisfaction with these chaps may or may not match up with that expressed by Arendt.

She finds Paine to be insufficient while Rousseau is dismissed as just being nuts. Perhaps that has something do with Paine being pragmatic. At the end of Common Sense, he says that groups of individuals have three ways of influencing outcomes: They can develop forms of representation, join a military, or participate in a mob. The singularity of being a king compared to the singularity of being an individual does not fill in the big blank in between. In any case, Arendt's general dissatisfaction with the chaps, as a group, goes back to this observation in the essay:

Since all acting contains an element of virtuosity, and because virtuosity is the excellence we ascribe to the performing arts, politics has often been defined as an art. This, of course, is not a definition but a metaphor, and the metaphor becomes completely false if one falls into the common error of regarding the state or government as a work of art, as a kind of collective masterpiece.

The difference is between a picture of society as you against everyone else, or a picture of society as collective growth. — Banno

Hobbes would say that your first option is not a society but a war. The agreement to not have a war is to accept a binding force. The argument of Thomas Paine was that such a binding could happen without cancelling the natural ambition of individuals to gain their own advantage. In that sense, the instruments of cooperation are forms of rearranging the components that lead Hobbes to justify monarchy as the best polity. The war could be avoided by other means than establishing an absolute source of authority.

Well, the FBI spent considerable resources infiltrating/parsing MLK Jr's world. The intentions for doing that is clearer to me than a CIA agent pulling on a Gitane while arguing against Foucault.

I agree with the points you make about education. But I agree to them as components of a life I want to live, not as a defense protocol in the face of a new emergency. I am still working through all of the emergencies already at hand. It is hard to keep up.

I count Nussbaum's capability approach as one of the efforts toward a 'guaranteed public realm"

I haven't the will to engage in this pointless exercise. Plato definitely points to this issue in his attacks on the sophists. — Metaphysician Undercover

Got it. You cannot recall any specific instances in the text that supports your claim of Plato's intention.

Seeing as how my challenge is pointless, I will not darken your door again. May the road rise up gently to meet you.

It is expressed in the passage with the distinction between "common good" and "private good", such that the "private good" is always sinful. This means that there is an inherent incompatibility between the common good and the private good. But this is faulty by Aristotelian principles, and those expressed by Aquinas, which were later accepted by Catholic moralists. — Metaphysician Undercover

What Augustine is referring to is not the 'private good' as expressed by Aristotle. Augustine is separating the 'what is good for oneself' as oneself from the matters of self-interest involved with participation in human affairs. In regard to the happiness of an individual, Augustine says:

[God] himself is the source of our bliss and he himself is the goal of all our striving. By our election of him as our goal … we direct our course towards him with love, so that in reaching him we may fnd our rest and attain our happiness because we have achieved our fulfillment in him. For our Good, that Final Good about which the philosophers dispute, is nothing else but to cleave to him whose spiritual embrace, if one may so express, it fills the intellectual soul and makes it fertile with true virtues — City of God, 10.3, translated by Betterson

It is argued in many places by Plato, that we knowingly do what is wrong. — Metaphysician Undercover

Point out a few of those places, please. Your observation does not square with the often-repeated perception of ignorance as a condition of the soul. The following was said amongst friends rather than argued against Sophists:

“Anyway, think about it this way,” I said: “aren’t hunger and thirst and [585B] things like that certain kinds of emptiness in the condition that involves the body?” “What else?” “And isn’t ignorance or lack of understanding an emptiness in the condition that involves the soul?” — Plato. Republic, 585b, translated by Joe Sachs

I am trying to understand an essential difference between Kant's version of idealism and versions of idealism which came before him. Berkeley would be the most prominent example for my purposes. — Tom Storm

I am not sure how this observation fits in to the project of understanding Kant, but Berkeley can be read as the ultimate empiricist rather than as an idealist.
If one's ideas about causality have no bearing on what is outside of experience, then they cannot confirm or deny anything beyond it. The skepticism of Hume becomes an implacable barrier. It is like Hume on crack, to borrow a phrase.

One could take the same sequence to say that the result thrust 'Christianity' into incoherence. Pascal spoke of it as scandal to reason. The early Church Fathers told the Gnostics to stop making sense.

The idea of the self as a battleground was the dissolution of a single world that explains our nature in the language of Greek thought. The duality makes sense in the terms of Manicheism where good and evil are essential components of creation. But that world is as far away from the Timaeus used to design Augustine's heaven as Paul of Tarsus is from Aristotle's Ethics.

The problem with the passage you presented is that it defines "sin" in such a way that turning inward towards the maintenance of one's own well-being, is by definition sinful. This is the problem inherent within the distinction between apparent good, and real good, first proposed by Aristotle. — Metaphysician Undercover

Why do you speak of a 'passage presented by me' rather than address it as what St. Augustine says? To my knowledge, it is representative of what he says in other places. If you find this statement of his problematic, should that not be taken up as a challenge to his intent?

I disagree that turning 'toward its private good' is equivalent to "turning inward towards the maintenance of one's own well-being." Augustine says, " It turns to its own private good when it desires to be its own master. The will wanting to be its own master is not a concept in Aristotle's practical art of distinguishing what is good from what only seems to be. Turning 'inward' for Augustine is accepting that one must choose one life or another. The experience of the conflict is given through Paul's terms in the Letter to the Romans:

We know that the law is spiritual; but I am carnal, sold under sin. I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Now if I do what I do not want I agree that the law is good. So then it is no longer I that do it but sin which dwells within me. — Romans 7:13

However, if we maintain Platonic principles, the good is what moves the will toward understanding and accepting intelligible principles. — Metaphysician Undercover

Please give an example of that language in Plato. In so far as doing bad things is the result of ignorance, isn't a 'faculty of choice' an idea that Socrates makes problematic? When will is spoken of as a cause, Socrates says things like:

And is this not a general truth? If a man acts with some purpose, he does not will the act, but the purpose of the act. — Gorgias, 467d

The distance between Plato and Paul on these matters causes me to think that the term "Christian Platonism" is an oxymoron.

Yes.
Thanks for the introduction.

All points well taken.
Regarding the Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt looked deeply at how both torturer and the tortured became products of the destruction of man as Man. I think her later works always kept that danger in view.

This, it seems to me, is by way of articulating the antisocial consequences of what has been revealed as the Christian notion of free will. — Banno

Strictly speaking, Arendt is giving a genealogy of the way political ideas about freedom became equated with free will. It is the equation she is militating against. The objective is not to give the last word on free will, Christian or otherwise. Her intention is to uncover a big mistake and move on with the problems of meaningful politics after correcting it.