Hume, Kant and Hegel. — Jack Cummins

Plato, Kant, Schopenhauer — Jack Cummins

If it hasn't been said already, it might be important to note that Hume's and Kant's attacks on metaphysics have probably been the most important in the history of philosophy. To embrace these philosophers is not to embrace metaphysics (or, when it comes to Hume, "system building").

I'm puzzled by this phenomenon. Every so often people arrive here and start complaining about the evils of belief. What's going on? Is this a thing, some kind of movement, perhaps related to new atheism?

I agree with Banno. Also it's clear that the OP's complaint is with believing wrong or evil things, and that swearing off belief as such is going too far, not to mention impossible. Be careful about what you believe, and never think yourself infallible, and try only to believe true things rather than things that make you feel good--that seems like a more useful response to the evils that have been committed on the basis of certain beliefs. Or criticize faith, unquestioning belief, etc.

When I heard this song for the first time it seemed like the best piece of music I'd ever heard. Context is everything.

I fault that song primarily for a couple of historical inaccuracies. Rasputin was probably not the "Lover of the Russian queen" and I have not seen sources supporting the claim that he was "Russia's greatest love machine". Otherwise it's pretty much spot on.

It's a reflection of the private and perhaps even sacrosanct nature of shitting and fucking, but another aspect is probably the widespread cultural conception of these things as low and of the animal, maligned by preachers, poets, and philosophers since forever.

Current
Graham Joyce, Indigo

Recently read
Robert Silverberg, The World Inside :up:
Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr Ripley :up:
Richard Matheson, I Am Legend :down:

Soon to read
Orhan Pamuk, The Black Book
Jan Potocki, The Manuscript Found in Saragossa
Robert Silverberg, The Book Of Skulls
Christopher Priest, The Glamour
Italo Calvino, The Baron in the Trees
Philip K. Dick, Radio Free Albemuth
Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle

Well I'm not arguing in favour of uncaused causes, just pointing out that it's not self-contradictory in the way that "nonexistent existent" is.

I guess you’re lucky he didn’t give you bigpox.

The term uncaused cause makes no sense, it's like saying the nonexistent existent — universeness

The latter is self-contradictory, but the former is not. It’s not nonsense to say that a cause is itself uncaused: it causes, but is not caused. However it is nonsense to say that something existing does not exist.

Goat pox is a thing, only it’s not conventionally a single word.

If my memory serves me right, sources of the virus include cutaneous lesions, saliva, nasal secretions and faeces, and is most likely to occur in crowded stock.

Succinct and useful :up:

A followup question might be: how much does neoliberalism allow capitalism to abandon states, that is, nation states?

Posts deleted, user banned.

Same here, but … everything in its right place.

A civil war in Russia would very likely be characterized by national conflicts, since 22 of the country’s federal subjects (constituent divisions) are republics representing different ethnicities. Several of those, like Chechnya, are predominantly Muslim and haven’t always got along with Moscow.

Yep.

Whether instead of Humanities and Social Sciences we should have psychology, sociology, history, and so on, as separate categories, I don’t know. Seems ok as it is.

He or she clearly requested to be banned.

Any more stupid questions?

Done

Today is Victory Day.

In what way, by feeding about 80% of the people who didn't previously have food? Everything is failure if you see it from the appropriate angle. Humans should go back to living in starvation, darkness, mass hysteria, and violent psychosis, I suppose.

It would be better than having everything we need and being able to provide what other entire continents need as well despite their governing bodies buying and selling citizens or starving them to death. — whollyrolling

Even if this comment made sense it would be foolish. Don't waste our time please. Up your game.

Thanks :smile:

Since China and Russia are capitalist states now, is there really any true representative of leftism today?

What is the left now, and what is the far left? Who is the far left? — frank

Definitionally I'd say that the far left is whoever is politically active towards the swift replacement of capitalism with socialism, where socialism is the social ownership and democratic control of the means of production, which might lead to some sort of classless society, e.g., communism. Note: not (necessarily) government or state, but certainly social, ownership and control.

The project has been a horrendous failure so far and it has no current prime representative. But capitalism has been in many ways a horrendous failure too, so the spectre of socialism will continue to haunt the world.

Here's Russia-1's response to the Brits. The graphics at 17 seconds and then at 1:27 get the point across.



Why Huddersfield is the main target, I'm not sure.

That's probably an illusion. With Ukraine, in contrast with the wars of the past, it's just too early for simple narratives to have developed, or to have become credible. And anyway, if you really look into past wars, you soon see how endlessly complex they are.

On the other hand, I guess it's plausible that as the world becomes more interconnected, clear narratives become more difficult to establish.

But even if we narrow it down and ask "is the web beautiful?", this similarly might have to be narrowed down further. The principle of the technology (HTTP, HTML, etc) and the flow of information are certainly impressive and wonderful, but what can we answer beyond that? It's a bit like the question "is music beautiful?" The alternative answers I might give are (a) yes, in principle and in general, the fact of music is a beautiful thing; and (b) it can be. Same goes for the web I suppose.

I don't think it's pedantic or too obvious to complain that there's no clear distinction in the OP (or in the discussion in general as far as I can see) between the internet and the web. Asking "is the internet beautiful" looks like a rather old-fashioned, anachronistic question, like asking "is transportation beautiful?" Are we talking roads, urban planning, aircraft design, or your new carbon road bike? The fact is that the internet has become almost as much a part of life as transportation. It's not some thing whose beauty can be evaluated as such.

The internet is the computer network over which data is moved around in various ways. It's the servers and cables and home computers. Among the various ways there are of moving data around on the internet are email, file transfer, instant messaging, and the world wide web. The web is the collection of interconnected pages (some of which can be used to access other internet applications like email).

bye

So guess the statistics they want to know is about how many don't think the sex at birth doesn't represent them, have had a sex change or something. — ssu

But the question on the application, according to you, asks for the gender, not the sex.

It seems self-evident to me that knowing things and asking "how do we know things?" are qualitatively different. The same goes for most philosophical questions. For instance, mathematicians need not concern themselves with whether numbers exist independently of the mind. The question is non-mathematical.

Otherwise, I think this is the right track:

I'm not even sure it makes sense to call it knowledge. — T Clark

Grouping all of this stuff under the same term is surely just a historical artifact. Just say no to epistemology.

I've always thought of it as a process, like a checklist. It's true - check. It's justified - check. I believe it - check. Ding, ding, ding - It's knowledge. — T Clark

Well, this is something like what we are doing in philosophy, rather than what people are doing when they come to know things. It's what some philosophers do when they're trying to work out what knowledge is. But the comment I referred to was this:

I find it hard to understand how people can believe they know most of the things they do by justified true belief baloney or some other mechanical process. — T Clark

This suggests that you understand the process to be one that's proposed to be undertaken by people generally, when they come to know things in everyday life, and not particularly as part of philosophical examination.

I find it hard to understand how people can believe they know most of the things they do by justified true belief baloney or some other mechanical process. — T Clark

I’ve never seen justified true belief described as a process before. It’s just an observation (in the Theaetetus) of what we often mean when we speak of knowing, viz., something we believe, that is true and justified.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/4/14/russia-warns-of-nuclear-deployment-if-sweden-finland-join-nato

Russia warns of nuclear deployment if Sweden, Finland join NATO — Manuel

This caught my attention, because in my line of work, to deploy is the same as to launch. But of course, that's not what it means.

According to the Lithuanian defence minister, Russia already has nuclear weapons in Kaliningrad. In any case, I'm not sure how seriously we should take the words of Medvedev, who is widely regarded in Russia as a posturing buffoon with no real, independent power. On the other hand, his statements maybe often reflect Kremlin thinking, in that what he says is a simplification or exaggeration of what others around him have been saying. And I guess a military buildup on the Baltic wouldn't be a surprising response to Sweden and Finland joining NATO.

He also sired ten children in that period, so it wasn't all worms and pigeons.

Rejection can suck, it can be embarrassing and its a blow to the ego, so that's something that should be taken into consideration if you're going to ask for something or try to get something. — HardWorker

But it's already part of the equation. The reason we say "nothing ventured nothing gained" so much is that, normally, the psychological balance lies in favour of "nothing ventured nothing lost", because of our fear of rejection and humiliation, the fear of a loss of status in the eyes of our peers, and the fear of emotional pain. It's our default position. Most of us need an extra push to take a risk.

I keep wishing he'd post more about Tbilisi cos I'm thinking of going.

Titus Groan — T Clark

Extra motivation to read. — Noble Dust

A favourite of mine. If you like Titus Groan read the second book too. Gormenghast is just as good. In fact, the two books read as one.

Regarding the OP, I used to think there were "books that everyone must read", but now I don't.

I think you built a Russophobic fantasy of ignorant subservient masses in your head and then attempted, and failed, to find academic studies proving it's true. — jamalrob

To be more charitable @Christoffer, it might just be because the idea that "nasty politics is caused by bad education" (paraphrasing) is very dear to you, and you thought you could apply it to Russia just as you do to far-right European politics.

Education in Russia has some big problems, primarily funding. As the OECD overview I linked to says, "spending per student is still low, about half of the OECD average". And as you say, many rural schools have closed. I don't know for sure, but this latter fact could be associated with rural depopulation (which is obviously not to let the state off the hook in any way, if levels of education are deteriorating).

It's easy to miss the smaller communities/villages, rural and countryside areas of Russia when evaluating the educational system in Russia since most of what we see is the front view of the major cities and the illusion of national wealth that they demonstrate through that image. — Christoffer

"As of January 1, 2021, 109.3 million inhabitants lived in Russian cities, opposed to 36.9 million people living in the countryside."
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1009893/russian-urban-and-rural-population-size/

My point was about education, unbiased education as a foundation for people to be able to view their own nation's politics critically. If you get nothing but state-approved knowledge or live in a village where they shut down the school... what then? — Christoffer

So your point now is not the quality of education as measured by the widely-accepted standards of authoritative organizations such as the OECD. Your point is that Russian education doesn't allow or encourage students to be critical of the government. That's probably true, but that's not what you said. I think you built a Russophobic fantasy of ignorant subservient masses in your head and then attempted, and failed, to find academic studies proving it's true.

The best tertiary education is indeed concentrated in the major cities, and that's where all of the ministers and beaureacrats went to university. High quality education is no guarantee that students will be able to oppose the government. Those who are most loyal to the Russian government are among the best educated in the country. Your thinking on this is too simplistic.

in Russia students of 15 years of age demonstrate a level of knowledge “below average”

The paper you got this from is citing the Programme for International Student Assessment, which is an OECD study. The same study, for example, ranks Russia above Sweden in 2003–2015.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programme_for_International_Student_Assessment#PISA_2018_ranking_summary

In the latest data Russia is around 30th. China is first. If you're wondering how Russia can change its politics, education isn't the primary problem.

See this PDF for an overall assessment of education in Russia: https://www.oecd.org/education/education-at-a-glance/EAG2019_CN_RUS.pdf

So, maybe not "little to no education", but I wouldn't call any of this quality. — Christoffer

I don't think you know what you're talking about.