• How do you interpret nominalism?
    "The truth can never be told so as to be understood and not be believed"
    William Blake

    I think stephen pinker nailed in when he said we have a "language instinct"

    Understand how an infant is predisposed to grammar and you are speaking of phenomenology-

    That is, a reality that is imposed a priori by descriptions and assimilations of relations

    The kantian idea of a priori concepts that are irreducible to another category

    We do not come into the world blank slates,

    Names in themselves are arbitrary, the ability to name is not

    A linguist, don't remember his/her name, discerned the possibility of more than 30 kinds of intelligible grammars where as only.5 were utilised globally

    Say, you see a shape you've never seen before, you can say with accuracy it is formless, when you see it twice it is recognisable

    The shape of the island of Ireland appears as something specific the second time you encounter it

    A child's capability to name things is a priori, the form of trees are derived from experience but one's first impression precedes the concept

    Saying nominalism is concerned with names only is not a paradox but a refutation,
  • The role of compassion and empathy in philosophy?
    I meant empathy and compassion are the supreme reality-
    As a poor analogy you could say beauty exists in and of itself, trying to reduce it to a category is ineffectual, an AI algorithm can create an image of a beautiful face any number of times given the appropriate criteria but it doesn't get to the soul of the aesthetic experience
  • The role of compassion and empathy in philosophy?
    I'm not moralising, proselytising or preaching or advocating or advising or recommending but-
    Imho compassion and empathy are the entirety of meaning without reference to anything other than themselves,
  • Currently Reading


    Brave New World, Aldous Huxley

    Dystopian fiction called 'prophetic' by critics, citizens are manufactured by genetic engineering on assembly lines to fulfill their respective roles in society, they anaesthetise themselves into acceptance by sex and opiates, children are conditioned to hate flowers and books, the calendar begins from the first creation of cars on the assembly line of ford, A.F.- after ford- as opposed to -anno domine- A.D. polygamy is encouraged and monogamy is a perversion, love and parentage are disgusting anachronisms to the conditioned citizens of the brave new world

    3 characters have the intimation of the emptiness of their lives, one is a woman who falls in love with a man who is physically defective for the caste he was engineered for, another is a case of refinement above his upper echelon purpose, a fortunate idiosyncracy of the assembly line,

    The society is predicated on empty hedonism, the material needs are provided for, so the culture is without neccessity and without purpose, or meaning, it is not a totalitarian imposition, it's enclosed upon itself by citizens' anaesthetised acquiescence.

    The soma the citizens consume resemble psychiatric medication to assuage the anxiety of a life without purpose or meaning, the material needs are provided for, the spiritual sense negated, reflected in the calander measurement, of "our Ford"

    Aldous Huxley lamented he did not include nuclear power in the narrative, it would have lended the prediction greater accuracy, a complaint in spite of the accuracy of the culture he wrote of in the novel, it was so spot on, using nuclear power as a concept would have been clairvoyant

    I read the Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels and the Gulag Archipelago by Solzhenitsyn, the edition of the Communist Manifesto had a treatise on the horrific conditions of the lives of the newly created working class in the major cities of Britain, "property is theft" and a "dictatorship of the proletariat" appeared to be an appropriate response to the injustices inflicted by the economic power of the bourgeoisie, the Manifesto is thought to be a worthy ideal because it advocates for property to be centralised, parentage is negated in the manifesto itself

    I think Aldous Huxley took the communist manifesto as a template for the utopian ideal inverted in brave new world, characters include a woman called Lenina and a protagonist named Marx,

    In the Gulag Archipelago a faithful rendition of the disaster of Stalinist USSR is revealed in its outright hellishness, a criticism to a friend of the regime was weighty enough to be sentenced to a 5 year prison term, that is a minute detail in the epilogue of horrors, not to be glib, but it was hell.
  • Heidegger and idealism
    Das mann was a concept of heidegger's in which individuals submerge their own anxiety in conformity, he saw anxiety as the precondition and the negation of individual autonomy
  • Heidegger and idealism
    Correct me if im wrong, heidegger was saying primordial being bears a paradoxical relationship to the use of amenities, there is no traction between the two orders of dasein, the use of a hammer is an analogy, the culture is neccessarily loaded, as a thought experiment the item itself is irrelevant, say a culture sees a microchip for the first time and cant put it into context, dasein is still pesent in the attempt to place it as an amenity, i think heideeger was addressing being as opposed to particularity