The interests various people may have in the discussion of religion is interesting. It seems to me that if you are interested in different motives for what has happened, making everything just about one story is not helpful.

But you are speaking to intellectuals on a forum set up by such people to talk about stuff.
Where are you going with this thought?

The truth of the matter is always quite simplistic, — synthesis

Sounds more like a principle of action than a result of consideration.

It would certainly be unreasonable to expect James to solve the problem (or question) of what is "supernatural." I don't think Kierkegaard's challenge regarding the limits of psychology regard that element.

William James' look at religious experiences also concerned his effort to make the "psychological" a perspective of common experiences that could be recognized beyond the arguments between philosophers and theologians. At roughly the same time, there were thinkers like Kierkegaard who argued that "psychology" could not go where one actually decides what direction will be taken by an individual.
Is that sort of difference a part of a dialectic that will eventually become a story of past conflicts or a divide that will continue to divide?

I love that book by William James. What I missed in it was a discussion of practices that increased the powers of perception and/or the ability to do things. The sort of experiences the Taoist suggested were possible.

The Russians started doing it and the practice became about other things.

I think so. There is a materialism amongst communitarians such as Ivan Illiich who considered our tools as limiting what could be made of them. That point of view is helpful in comparing universal agendas against more local ones. But the local thing has often showed itself to be a praxis of tyranny.

I would like to dispense with nostalgia from all sides.

Love is not a resource one is able to use in this way or that. If you accept it as your only guiding light then who knows what will happen next. Maybe some really terrible things.

After many examples of what we imply when we say “seeing”, Witt is admonishing us not to take our first impression as correct; not to equate “seeing” with “understanding”, as if both always happen right away. — Antony Nickles

Or maybe the hoped for connection will not happen at all.
I had one tutor a long time ago who asked: Are you sure you are sharing his problem? Isn't your impatience to go beyond it a lack of interest in it?

Maybe one way to think about it is the way the dynamics of families are brought into question or practically challenged by other dynamics. Stated that way, the scope includes the anthropological view of social structures but also permits claims like those made by Ortega y Gasset that the appearance of the "State" is the result of restless young men.

I could go into many other examples but my observation is that the "modern" is an inevitable result of experiences more than an invention or diversion that distracted us from some stable form of life that we gave up for something else.

The number one is being used as the only divisor of a prime. It is difficult to understand how the function can be applied to the value given this job.

The article is interesting in how nouns are used to group things or not. But the matter of being singular or not in distinction to the zero is a counting thing as well. We use zeroes to multiply a set of things.
I think the first negative number of -1 plays a part. Zero is excluded from the identity operation.

It is a salon.
It is interesting whether one is well understood or not by others. There are many times where I am unable to separate the elements I would like to challenge from the parts I agree with.
I wish my brain was larger.

Working backwards, there is a fan fiction element to Dante, Milton, (and Shakespeare too). But they also had living enemies who were implicated by their stories. A lot of the present controversies surround how the Harry Potter stories should turn out. There is some kind of difference there.

I think Dostoevsky was trying to wrestle with archaic generational struggles. I will try to come back with something more coherent later on that.

Well, he put himself up as an encumbrance, a bridge not easily crossed. I don't completely understand what he was saying. But he has had made my life more difficult.

I see one element of the disassociation with history you are describing in the energy put into "fan fiction." The genre would not have been possible without the technology supporting it (or very unlikely) but the point of leverage is a matter of narrative qua narrative. It works something like this: "All that has been experienced is a story told somewhere and that story could be a different story." So, the narratives that can be remade are like our lives. malleable narratives rather than our history of unfortunate choices mixed in with hopefully better ones.

I have been reading a lot of 19th century Russian novels lately and they all seem to be concerned about this sort of thing. The antithetical thought there is that we recognize crazy things in our children from our own experiences and worry it will bring them more harm than it did us with less support than we had. That is not to say my use of "we" is not just another narrative because surely many of us have not experienced such support.

As practical matter, planning is attracted to the most difficult elements to achieve and seeks various ways to make those things manageable. I figure the fantasy element is playing out different solutions in ones head and trying things out as a consequence. A large number of those attempts are mixed bags of success and failure. In the trades, the process teaches boldness and restraint at the same time. Give it your best shot but know when to back off and stop fooling with something.

It is perhaps when we learn certain things from them, that changes and new circumstances occur. I am not thinking that this occurs through some divine hand of fate, but from within the depths of our own consciousness and being, which brings forth shifts in our circumstances. — Jack Cummins

I don't think Nietzsche was proposing a fatalism for creatures in the circle he proposes. He expressly opposes a simple mechanistic view of the universe and uses the idea of the eternal recurrence of circumstances to bring the matter into focus. Consider the following entry from Nietzsche's notebook, The Will to Power:

If the world had a goal, it must have been reached. If there were for it some unintended final state, this also must have been reached. If it were in any way capable of "being", then all becoming would long since have come to an end, along with all thinking, all "spirit." The fact of "spirit" as a form of becoming proves that the world has no goal, no final state, and is incapable of being.

The old habit, however of associating a goal with every event and a guiding, creative God with the world, is so powerful that it requires an effort for a thinker not to fall into thinking of the very aimlessness of the world as intended. This notion--that the world intentionally avoids a goal and even knows artifices for keeping itself from entering a circular course--must occur to all those who would like to force on the world the ability for eternal novelty, i.e., on a finite, definite, unchangeable force of constant size, such as the world is, the miraculous power of infinite novelty in its form and states. The world, even if it is no longer a god, is still supposed to be capable of the divine power of creation, the power of infinite transformations; it is supposed to consciously prevent itself from returning to any of its old forms; it is supposed to possess not only the intention but the means of avoiding any repetition; to that end it is supposed to control every one of its movements at every moment so as to escape goals, final states, repetitions--and whatever else may follow from such an unforgivably insane way of thinking and desiring. It is still the old religious way of thinking and desiring, a kind of longing to believe in some way the world is after all like the old beloved, infinite, boundlessly creative God--that in some way "the old God still lives"--that loning of Spinoza which was expressed in the words "deus sive natura" (he even felt "natura sive deus").

What, then, is the law and belief with which the decisive change, the recently attained preponderance of the scientific spirit over the religious, God-inventing spirit, is most clearly formulated? Is it not: the world , as force, may not be thought of as unlimited, for it cannot be so thought of; we forbid ourselves the concept of infinite force as incompatible with the concept "force." Thus--the world also lacks the capacity for eternal novelty. — Friedrich Nietzsche, Will To Power, section 1062

As a matter of ethics, the idea challenges the notion that our life in "this world", as articulated by Paul, is an entry exam for the next life.
On one level it is a joke. Nietzsche is suggesting that the exam that is supposed to validate entry into heaven amounts to repeating your life after it ends through a process of judgment. On another level, the idea is to accept your life as it is given and not compare it to something you are not a witness to. The repetition happens during your life. The uses of eternity toward different observations.

Loy makes good points regarding how the importance of personal conscience came to occupy the stage.
But the arguments from that side also include a demand for responsibility that is very personal. Each decision is like deciding how all the rest will be. I don't understand how that bit of praxis relates to issues of "culture" as a thing.

Maybe there is a challenge there unlike other things. One does not have to understand all of civilization to accept it. Liberty is yourself stuck with yourself.

Can we agree on the distinction between inductive and deductive reason essential to consciously contemplate forms? — Nikolas

The dialogue Parmenides doesn't exactly address that issue but does have Zeno instructing Socrates that approach through discourse to get closer to the reality of the forms requires engaging with what is excluded in a proposition along with what is included. The interest in Philebus in how perception works is very Aristotelian. We are doing things in a certain way and that is given to us in one way or another. In other words the distance from the reality of the forms was not a measure of their importance in our experience.

As for talking about the source of the situation, that was taken up in the Timaeus. It is a difficult dialogue to quote from. But what the heck. Starting from section 41, there is a description of why the Maker made mortals a part of his work:

The part of them worthy of the name immortal, which is called divine and is the guiding principle of those who are willing to follow justice and you--of that divine part I will myself sow the seed, and having made a beginning, I will hand the work over to you. And do ye then interweave the mortal with immortal and make and begat living creatures, and give them food and make them to grow, and receive them again in death. — Plato, translated by Benjamin Jowett

I get that. One can hide incidents. I will too. But the effort is visible. The pretense of being free of what your children will suffer is the lie.

This is an interesting question. I need to check if I am taking part in some weird Russian parlor game where I will be humiliated by what I say. Oh, no way to know.

I think the biggest lie I was told by my parents only became known to me when I became a parent, namely:

One can hide one's shame from your children.

That isn't to recommend that one saddle your progeny with what you most deeply regret but let them know the person doing the regretting. I am visible. I was brought up to think that was an option.

To be precise, it was Judaism Nietzsche singled out as embracing slave morality; Christianity tagged along and turned it into polity. By approaching the matter as a Genealogy, the observation is not given as an explanation of present events. We live our lives over and over again, not those of our ancestors. From that point of view, it is a challenge to all self identification. His opposition to Christianity was not based upon a vision of a different identity but an objection to glorifying the mutilation of oneself as a spiritual advance.

To me this is a world where no one is justified to claim they know anything, so why has humanity torn itself apart over and over again to define what is what and who is who? And for what? — Anopheles

Under those set of conditions, your question applies to your question along with any others. There is no separate place where humanity is explained outside of the standards we set for ourselves to attempt talking about it.

Are there any just wars? Now that is a question.

That is good challenge. As a question of what can be asked, can the ideas of every philosopher be explained in terms they did not use? Is there a universal language of what can be talked about that encompasses all of what has been expressed?
I am not so sure. I greatly appreciate the various encyclopedias that compare one body of thought to another. But the act of collection misses something. If one can say what everything means, why bother with trying to understand things for oneself?

Well, both Nietzsche and Wittgenstein asked that their readers undertake some kind of labor to engage with them. I don't understand what either was trying to say. But the demand to produce something is clear to me.

One element that stands out vividly after reading across the works of Descartes is the confidence that his Method is more important than any particular result it can yield by him using it. His opposition to the vision of Aquinas was directed at the desire to settle questions rather than to make them the work of future thinkers.
In that context, I read the close embrace of thinking and being as a challenge rather than an explanation. To the degree it explains something, other things stand outside, waiting to be explained.

Finding places of mutual interest does require a shared intellectual capacity to some degree. On the other hand, smart people bore other smart people all the time.
What seems exciting and clever in the beginning can become tiresome and trite after a bit of living. The difficulty Madame Bovary has watching her husband eat potatoes is in every relationship by one means or another. There has to be something on the other side of the scale to keep desire alive.
I was in several relationships as a young man with women who were brilliant and insightful while also full of a spirit of punishment that I fled in order to survive. The experience changed who I found interesting.

One example can be found in The Idiot. One could say all the outcomes of Prince Myshkin result from his responses to fear.

He is unafraid of many kinds of judgement from others or anxious about his future in manner that provides the common background to interactions with those he meets. This quality charms those people and softens suspicion of his intentions. The Prince receives the benefit of those responses.
But when the Prince does become afraid that he will do the wrong thing, his attempts to protect himself against it only make it even worse than he feared.

His innocence leaves him helpless in situations that show how well-defended people rely on different kinds of violence.

I disagree from the point of view that original works give an audience to a passion that descriptions of the ideas never will.
The net result of some survey you might employ is not the challenge the authors required from the readers.

I don't think that the paradoxes of Parmenides was presented to prove that a certain condition existed but to marvel that an essential aspect of our experience was not something that could be explained the way other things are talked about. We don't know much and we understand that little even less.

He posited that fear could be amplified by danger-avoiding behavior. — Bitter Crank

That element is what makes Dostoevsky so fascinating as an observer of feedback loops. We keep writing the narrative of our demise too well.

The first problem with your model is that it it compares the people who won't die with those who will. The dead people are not in a position to protest that particular observation.

Slowing down infections helped many people not die from other infections. It is a simple approach. You find a way to not die and you take it.

The second problem with your approach is that communities that protect themselves by masking and demanding other people to do the same are safer than the ones who do not.

I don't necessarily disagree. The highest density of the virus (in the environment) is that which is closest to a shedder of the virus, hence the reasoning to stay 6 feet apart. But what one breathes in from the environment, or the surfaces in the environment that one touches (and then touches nose/mouth) is where one ultimately comes in contact with the virus. In other words, it is the contaminated environment that one is in, that determines if one receives the virus. — Roger Gregoire

The virus is around and either infects people or not. Smart people try to slow that process down. Why? Because it kills people at an incredible rate.

Yes, the quickest way to attain herd immunity is to allow the virus to kill as many people as possible in the shortest amount of time. That worked with the Black Plague. But that wasn't a policy, per se, but a society confronted by something that had no way of grasping the catastrophe as an event.

The point of my previous comment was simply to observe that the virus isn't changed if it enters your lungs and goes right back out. Your antibodies are your antibodies. Other people have other antibodies.

Atmosphere is the shared matter of respiration. Most of what is breathed in comes right back out. There is the exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide because our metabolism are little campfires. Viruses are not transformed through respiration in a similar manner. Some of them enter the system and the others go right back out. Spreading happens when the virus is close enough to other people (who are breathing) such that the exhalation of a carrier is inhaled by others.

If that description is too abstract, consider what it is like when you hang out with smokers. They absorb some of the tar and nicotine but a lot comes right back out again and when you inhale, you are sharing in their experience.

My own experience, fwiw, with Christianity is that in terms of external substance it is a game of three-card monte, and never ever the right card chosen, because the trick is that when it comes to choose, the right card is never on the table. — tim wood

That makes sense as a range of options one could select from. Pascal and Kierkegaard included that condition of skepticism into their rhetoric. They argued that there was a universal condition that underlies how we talk about what we want.

Is that approach simply rhetoric or an attempt to understand something?

May you be removed from the pile.

In essence seeming to say that you, in your beliefs and practices, or rather that your beliefs and practices, are constitutive of what you believe. — tim wood

I think Paul would have agreed with that. In describing it as a struggle with others who did not agree with that dynamic, there is a political element Paul developed that was central to the efforts of the first "Church Fathers" to keep the flock together. If the solidarity being called for so clearly in the Letters has no bearing upon the ideas being promoted, it is fair to ask why not.

The reason why you are having trouble locating those arguments is that "nihilism" is not a set of beliefs such as a Methodist might entertain.
There are plenty examples of opponents of an idea who charged some other group with embracing it as an idea. Thinkers like Nietzsche said it was a result of promising a certain order of things while not being able to deliver the results.
I need a list of self identified nihilists to respond intelligently.