Not a bad explanation. And interesting OP, too. — Apollodorus
But do we do that before or after we learn how to drink, how to be a farmer, and how to be a bad emperor? — Apollodorus
I may have missed a spot here and there! — TheMadFool
And what about why? — Apollodorus
2. Why does God exist?
We must know how to prove/disprove God exists. — TheMadFool
A sophist's notion of 'wisdom' – a syllabus of self-help nostroms. :yawn: — 180 Proof
To put it simply, in line with the book titles that appear in the website you provided the link to, wisdom boils down to how to? guides. — TheMadFool
Don't let contrarian posts deter you. He's probably been imbibing too much of his namesake beverage. Which makes everything seem pointless. :joke:Yeah, Seneca, Cicero, Aristotle - all hacks. I'm wondering why I bothered posting it. — Wayfarer
You will note that I amended my very snide post immediately after making it, I would be obliged if you removed the quotation of it. And please don't litter the thread with pointless youtube rubbish. — Wayfarer
Yeah. I know. I was just poking fun at his ancient philosophy of "how to drink like a Cynic". :cool:In actual fact, I think his comment was directed at the post he replied to, which I realised after I made that snide remark, which is why I removed it. I know for a fact 180 holds those authors in high regard. — Wayfarer
In actual fact, I think his comment was directed at the post he replied to, which I realised after I made that snide remark, which is why I removed it. — Wayfarer
I suppose, I can concede there is a sense in which these could be 'self-help' books, with the caveat that there is no 'quick and easy' method. Takes reading, concentration, and patience. Also interpretive skill - the ability to take into account the very different cultural background of ancient texts. — Wayfarer
I think that's a very shallow reading. Many of those kinds of texts are far from self-help or how-to in any modern sense. I put that link up for reference, it's a good source for those materials. — Wayfarer
to try and get this back on track — Wayfarer
And it seems to me that wisdom is fast disappearing from both language and culture under the modernizing influence of "gangsta cultcha" and other progressive trends .... — Apollodorus
What secular reason is missing is self-awareness. It is “unenlightened about itself” in the sense that it has within itself no mechanism for questioning the products and conclusions of its formal, procedural entailments and experiments. “Postmetaphysical thinking,” Habermas contends, “cannot cope on its own with the defeatism concerning reason which we encounter today both in the postmodern radicalization of the ‘dialectic of the Enlightenment’ and in the naturalism founded on a naïve faith in science.”
Postmodernism announces (loudly and often) that a supposedly neutral, objective rationality is always a construct informed by interests it neither acknowledges nor knows nor can know. Meanwhile science goes its merry way endlessly inventing and proliferating technological marvels without having the slightest idea of why. The “naive faith” Habermas criticizes is not a faith in what science can do — it can do anything — but a faith in science’s ability to provide reasons, aside from the reason of its own keeping on going, for doing it and for declining to do it in a particular direction because to do so would be wrong. — Does Reason Know what it is Missing?
'the idea of the Good' — Wayfarer
But do we do that before or after we learn how to drink, how to be a farmer, and how to be a bad emperor? — Apollodorus
Admit - for it is true - that this age of which materialism was the portentous offspring and in which it had figured first as petulant rebel and aggressive thinker, then as a grave and strenuous preceptor of mankind, has been by no means a period of mere error, calamity and degeneration, but rather a most powerful creative epoch of humanity. Examine impartially its results. Not only has it immensely widened and filled in the knowledge of the race and accustomed it to a great patience of research, scrupulosity, accuracy - if it has done that only in one large sphere of enquiry, it has still prepared for the extension of the same curiosity, intellectual rectitude, power for knowledge, to other and higher fields - not only has it with an unexampled force and richness of invention brought and put into our hands, for much evil, but also for much good, discoveries, instruments, practical powers, conquests, conveniences which, however we may declare their insufficiency for our highest interests, yet few of us would care to relinquish, but it has also, paradoxical as that might at first seem, strengthened man's idealism. — Sri Aurobindo, Materialism
And it seems to me that wisdom is fast disappearing from both language and culture under the modernizing influence of "gangsta cultcha" and other progressive trends .... — Apollodorus
Please name your top five "ancient wisdom" reads for modern (beginner) philosophers. The Mad Fool and I both could probably use the encouragement. — 180 Proof
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