What I mean when I say the self is an illusion is that any conception of myself is a product of my imagination. — MonfortS26

Whose imagination is it of?

The "self" is not an illusion as much as the concept of an unchanging, concrete self is. There is clearly something that perceives, senses, imagines, feels, thinks, and decides. Whether this thing persists over time, or whether this thing is capable of being dissolved does not change the fact that it is still there.

I keep hearing people use the word "illusion" without explaining what it actually means. What is this "illusion" you speak of? A trick? A phantom? A construct that dissolves under analysis?

Being able to identify something means that there is some kind of registration going on. The phenomenal experience of something being so.

In any case, you say that our sense of self is an "illusion", but go on to say that the art industry is morally corrupt because it cripples our sense of individuality. Individuality entails self-hood. You can't have both.

>:O

Following Nietzsche, Sartre, and a plethora of other thinkers, the meaningful life is the one devoted to the aesthetics.

How everyone else who can't paint to save their lives are supposed to live is beyond me.

I realize that digital characters, for all intensive purposes, cannot actually be said to suffer. But these characters are representations of an entire sex. The developers made a choice: should we make women wear normal, modest clothing, or should we make them wear absurdly impractical and sexually arousing clothing?

The quest for enlightenment is a search for one's place in the universe. How the universe works and how one fits in the whole picture.

The rhetoric of "objectification" is completely untenable from a number of angles. And unfortunately, no one seems to be seriously, systematically challenging the untenable rhetoric.

It seems a far bigger problem to me to see a focus on sexual appeal as a problem--and that's what tends to happen. Any focus on sex/sex appeal/sexual attactiveness/etc. is seen as "objectification" (and usually as "misogyny" etc.) It's disheartening how people let rhetoric like that take hold so that it winds up more or less becomes unquestioned and simply accepted as a norm for an entire generation, to an extent where it even starts influencing the opinions of other generations. — Terrapin Station

I think it has more to do with women being unequal or "sex objects" than it has to do with sexuality in general. I'm all for making sexuality a common aspect of the public sphere. But I think there might be some issues with putting sexuality where it isn't needed, i.e. women being used to garner profits.

Holy moly no. No expression should be outlawed. — Terrapin Station

Agreed, only they should be limited to the private spheres, and the private sphere should not affect the public sphere.

I know plenty of women who don't buy into the rhetoric about "objectification." — Terrapin Station

Just playing devil's advocate here, the feminist would argue that these women don't know what's good for them. Indeed a lot of feminism seems to revolve around this aesthetic of the female nature and assuming every other female also wants to be this way. When in fact some females are okay with objectification. Feminists chalk this up to be the result of the Patriarchy, and it is the Patriarchy that is not allowing women to think for themselves.

But surely you know that we are integrated with technology so heavily, there is no way for our species to escape it as something we are working for. Think about it, almost everything you touch involves technology.. In fact, your whole mode of survival relies upon and involves the maintenance and growth of technology, whether you are conscious of what we are doing or not. There's not a day that goes by that you are not affected by technology and not only technology but technology stemming from the last two centuries. — schopenhauer1

True. But I'd say the economic aspect of technology is what makes this so. The reason we have so much technology is because technology is profitable, and it's profitable because we want to live more comfortable lives. I can respect technology that helps us live more comfortable lives.

With the utility that comes with technology, many people will point to this as a summum bonum of modern society. How can one have feelings of ennui and world-weariness when we can master our environment, create new possibilities, and be able to participate in the maintenance of these newfound ways of surviving and living, so people will say. — schopenhauer1

Who are these people that say these things specifically?

With all this being said, do these technologies and scientific discoveries provide some sort of overarching meaning to our species? If our species died out, arguably it would be the loss of scientific knowledge and technological innovations that would be most missed in its absence from the universe (at least from the vantage point of us imagining its non-existence as we stand here as already existing beings that are projecting a future state of affairs). — schopenhauer1

The technology itself? No...or at least it shouldn't. If it was then that would just be technology-worship.

Technology itself is a symptom of something deeper that we hold seem to hold dear: the future. That is what technology is, the manipulation of the environment to suit some future goal. Remove the possibility and desire for a future, and there's not much reason to progress technologically.

But as soon as you get the economy involved, the techno-craze is impossible to stop. Instead of being purely an instantiation of our desire for a future, technology becomes intertwined with profit.

Of course, there are other purposes to technology, but in the end it's all about the future. Medical technology is invented so help people have a better future. Military technology is invented to help maintain the futural prospects of a country.

Is technology the reason why one should not be an antinatalist.. If our species can produce such things with our minds.. how can the Human Project be bad (and even more extreme discontinued) when new humans can contribute to and experience this technology? — schopenhauer1

We tend to like to comfort ourselves by appealing to the past: look how far we have come! Surely we can't turn back now!

But that's just the sunk cost fallacy. There's no point in continuing to work at a job you hate just because you've worked at it for a long time.

And appealing to how far we have come as a species requires one to ignore two possibilities:

1.) We will never progress further, because the universe is not capable of progressing any further artificially. If this is the case, then the universe must be quite a boring place for us to live in - infinitely wide but absurdly shallow. This is an aesthetic failure of the universe as a whole.

2.) We will never scratch the surface of what the universe has to offer, because there isn't enough time or energy to do so, similar to dipping our toe in the water but never being able to jump in. This is an aesthetic failure of our species as a whole.

In any case appealing to technology can end up being an unjustifiable forecast for the future.

Is the antinatalist ungrateful to the technology that has been the outgrowth of various industrial revolutions and discoveries? Should the mastery of various fields of knowledge that contribute to the maintenance and growth of discoveries and technologies be exalted? — schopenhauer1

We surely benefit from technology, no doubt about that. But at what cost? Was it all really worth it in the end? Or are we just massaging our egos?

Making my way through my first play through of the Witcher 3. Out of all the locations, Velen has got to be my favorite. The music especially is just amazing. Matches the atmosphere of a war-ravaged land perfectly.

That is simply false. — Sapientia

Really? Do explain.

That argument doesn't support your claim. It only supports a weaker revised version which mirrors your use of "it seems to make sense". Although that reduces to the even weaker "it seems to make sense to some people, but not others". — Sapientia

You're going to have to argue, then, that infinite regresses or spontaneous creation acts are reasonable. Because if we are arguing from with a certain metaphysical framework, then they are, from what I and many others can tell, are not coherent.

Easy. Infinite regress or a first cause without the inappropriate labels of "Prime Mover" or "God". — Sapientia

Infinite regress is incoherent, and labeling something with a different name doesn't change the ontological role it plays.

You might be right, but I find that doubtful, and you'll need more than a reference to the Neo-Platonists and "their neighbours" to back up your claim that this is typical. — Sapientia

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plotinus/#2

Alvin Plantinga is a theistic personalist, not a classical theist.

In any case these books by those pop-science superstars are not very well accepted in the philosophical community at large. Krauss's "nothing" is actually "something", despite his pretentious douchebaggery. Hitchens and Harris attack straw-men. None of them seem capable, or willing, to understand religious belief, or theist belief for that matter. It's just a publicity stunt.

Why shouldn't the New Atheists grapple with beliefs "touted around the world"? Because you find such beliefs to be shallow or puerile? Even if they are, that would seem to only make it that much more imperative that they be critiqued, wouldn't you say? — Arkady

Oh, sure, they can, I don't have a problem with them attacking organized religion. It's when they start claiming that their arguments address all conceptions of God that I have issues with them. That's when they become dogmatic themselves.

The new atheist critiques work well against the common conception of God as some kind of intervening sky father, touted around by evangelicals across the world. But they shouldn't be compared to the arguments used to argue for the classical conception.

That's where the conflict lies. You have religious people trying to justify their beliefs by appealing to theistic arguments that argue for a different conception of God than they believe in, and then you have atheists trying to argue against all conceptions of God by appealing to only one particular, and rather shallow, conception of God. The whole thing is mixed up and contradictory.

I understand, but you said "classical theistic God," not "the God of the philosophers" or something. — Arkady

That's what the God of the philosophers is.

Regardless, focusing only on the Judeo-Christian tradition, it is mostly definitely not a caricature to assert that Jews and Christians predicate certain personality characteristics of their God as judged from their holy scriptures (Christians in particular, insofar as Christians qua Christians are committed to the incarnation). — Arkady

Hence why I think it is shallow to try to combine this concept with the philosophical conception of God.

How so? At least in the Judeo-Christian tradition, the Bible very clearly speaks of God having likes, dislikes, emotions, etc, and engaging with humans (e.g. Moses) in a personal manner.
Indeed, if the Christian story is to be believed, Jesus was God incarnate, and Jesus clearly had emotions, preferences, etc. — Arkady

Right, but the Prime Mover hypothesis was postulated before these religions took off. Aristotle wasn't a Jew or a Christian or a Muslim, for example.

So indeed the "intelligent designer" advocates are philosophically shallow. And I would go on to say that Christianity in general has adopted a metaphysics to justify its rather silly beliefs.

Notice the assumption that curiosity is a product of, or form of, anxiety. Don't you think it's possible that you're generalizing on the basis of your own motivation? — Wayfarer

No, I don't think so. I am curious about a lot of things - and if I don't get answers or discussion about things, I end up thinking about them on my own. I can't just let them go, and I highly suspect this is the same experience that made people discover new things. Not-knowing is unbearable, it's just that in curiosity, the desire to know coincides with the anxiety of not-knowing.

Yet that's just not empirically true. My computer, a complex entity, was created by many thousands of people, each extremely more complex than the computer. — Hanover

True, but these complex people were not derived from even more complex entities. They exist thanks to a very long process of evolution, which started with simple biochemicals.

Creativity, following Whitehead, is an intrinsic aspect of reality. New and improved things follow naturally from a simple starting block.

One would not conclude that a piece of driftwood found on the beach had a designer, but one would conclude that a watch would. — Hanover

The difference is in agency. Clearly we see the watch seemed to be made by an agent. But the piece of driftwood was not, it arose due to natural processes.

Yet were these natural processes, in some sense, "designed"? Or if they evolved from a simpler state, what was this simpler state? Hence why classical theists sometimes called God the One.

IF the complexity of the universe entails a designer,as the theist asserts, then the designer's understanding, intentions, and abilities to actually implement his design surely are more complex than the level of complexity apprehended by the theist who asserts that such complexity entails a designer. — Brainglitch

But this is misunderstanding the argument. The argument is that God is simple, out of necessity. Complexity does not explain complexity. Indeed, if there was a person who designed the universe as it is, then it would also need an explanation. But this doesn't lead to atheism immediately; it merely pushes the explanation back more. It's a caricature to see the classical theistic God as akin to a mega-human with a personality, likes and dislikes, etc. God is theorized out of necessity, a byproduct of the PSR and a certain view of causality.

Reject the PSR and you're left with an irrational universe. We can bite this bullet, for sure. But if we don't bite this bullet, then God becomes a plausible explanation for why things exist. There is reason all the big rationalists in the past have been theists. God helps explain why things are intelligible and reasonable.

If every event has a cause, it's impossible to have had a first cause just by definition. If every complex entity had a more complex designer, then it's impossible for there to have been a first designer by definition — Hanover

Contrary to this, the fact that every event must have a cause necessitates the existence of an uncaused Prime Mover of pure actuality. The trouble with asking "who created God" is that it applies an intra-wordly phenomenon to something that is, by definition, outside of this phenomenon. And the hypothesis that there is something "outside" of this cause and effect chain put forward out of metaphysical necessity. Indeed, infinite regresses and spontaneous creation acts do not seem to make sense, so it is conceptually necessary to postulate the existence of something that is not affected by the normal cause and effect we see every day.

So within our metaphysical framework, we seem to be required to postulate the existence of a Prime Mover, or God. Otherwise we must provide a different framework, or show how God is not necessary in our original framework.

Additionally, God is typically not seen as "complex", but rather necessarily "simple". The Neo-Platonists and their neighbors taught that complexity cannot explain complexity. Simplicity is what does all the explanatory work, for all complex structures can be reduced to their components.

So it is not that every complex entity has a complex designer, but rather every complex entity has a prior simplicity.

You of course. If positive psychology has anything to offer, it is empowering you with the skills to discover what is your fault, what is the world's fault.

One already presumes it is going to be a mix of both (although you may be without personal flaw?). — apokrisis

Ah, but aren't we fundamentally a part of the world? Is it the fault of myself for thinking wrong, or is it the fault of the universe for having the capability of producing such wrongness? Should we blame the victims or blame the machine that creates victims?

Positive psychology tends to depend on the manifest image of man and is philosophically shallow.

If not anxiety (curiosity or panic) then what else would cause us to investigate something we don't have to?

“The splinter in your eye is the best magnifying-glass available.”

- Theodor Adorno

Philosophically speaking, what do bear attacks, anatomy, chemistry, physics, office work, aliens, foraging societies, and technology have in common? — schopenhauer1

They can all be predicated upon, i.e. they are subjects (nouns) and thus metaphysically speaking substances, events, processes, or whatever floats your metaphysical boat.

The freedom that evolves in a hierarchical, stable environment results in a wide diversity of things. All of them are connected by the fact that they exist and produce entropy.

Considering there probably isn't a God, this question becomes irrelevant.

So really, on one level, all this reasoning is very dangerous stuff. We end up believing anything only due to some emotional reaction. We check in with our rather subconscious and automatic orienting responses and discover which way our feelings want to point us. — apokrisis

Yes, we follow the rules of logic not simply because they seem to match reality fairly well but because it "feels right" to think logically. The decision to use logic may itself be logical but it based upon an emotional conviction.

The normativity of logic enters when we start asking why we should use logic and reason. Logic is necessary to complete projects. Unreasonable behavior tends to hurt other people. Unreasonable behavior tends to hurt yourself.

So when we criticize people for not thinking logically or thinking emotionally, it's more of a difference in degree than a difference in kind.

I think the OP is actually an attempt to justify Hume's 'reason is a slave to the passions'. But it does this by use of reason, thereby undermining its own premises. — Wayfarer

But the argument itself is syllogistic. So if you want to prove that the argument is true, the only way you can do it is by appealing to the very faculty which you are saying ought to be deprecated. — Wayfarer

I'm not saying that logic ought to be thrown away. I'm saying that reason has the capacity to self-analyze itself, and realize that for every position we have, we have a basic emotional premise. This is why I said that humans are some of the most strange and neurotic organisms on the earth; we have a tendency to analyze things that aren't beneficial to our survival. The reason we have philosophy is because we have anxiety - philosophy is the intellectual method of calming anxiety (whether that be the curious anxiety or the panic anxiety).

So yes, Hume used reason to show that reason is a slave to the passions. Yet it was clearly his passion to show that reason is a slave to the passions. He had a desire to do so.

Emotions and beliefs are heavy hitters in the mind games that go on in our brains. It is sometimes not possible to tell whether we are being objective or not BECAUSE our perceptions and thinking can be colored so easily. — Bitter Crank

Agreed. All this reminds me of Nietzsche's proclamation of epistemic perspectivism; i.e. those who weren't dancing couldn't hear the music.

Modern day skepticism is dogmatic.

There is value to honesty because if you are caught lying, people will not trust you anymore. It is this dynamic between personal desires and social expectations that I think keeps people relatively virtuous.

I don't see why we can't try to progress to a utopia - it's a fallacy to claim that just because there hasn't been progress in the past means there will be no progress in the future. Yet I highly doubt we'll ever get to a utopia, simply because of the metaphysical truth that humans are imperfect and thus any human society is going to have imperfections; any "perfect" landscape is "ruined" by the presence of the imperfect. Perfection and humanity are thus incompatible. It's not that just because we haven't made progress, we won't make any future progress - it's that any substantial progress is inhibited by our own nature. The reason we didn't make any progress in the past was because we're not meant to progress substantially. To progress requires us to change our nature, and I'm not sure if we're capable of doing that.

I think that's the destiny of human achievement. We're always striving for perfection, because we get a glimpse of what it's like when we experience the beautiful. But the desire for perfection is the desire to implement the beautiful, which is inherently short-lived, over a long-term period. And that just doesn't work.

Oh, how I love retro-synthwave music. This one is wistfully melancholic.

Does it make sense to assign a (universal, not personal) "meaning" to "life"? Or has the question always been a category error? — hypericin

There is certainly objective "meaning" behind "life". The trouble arises when this meaning does not work well with our own concepts of meaning. This meaning, or rather, purpose, is the uncontrollable process of cellular reproduction, co-existing in a condensed, cohesive pattern of organic material, held together by said mitosis and ultimately responsible for the production of special exploration cells meant to pass on genetic information to a numerically different meat machine, so they can go through the same process and make more meat machines. That is what is ultimately responsible for our collective existence, a plug-and-chug train of DNA spliced across generations, without much of a discernible end goal apart from reacting to environmental constraints. I guess that's why they call it the game of life, after all. Unfortunately it seems that nobody gets to win. :(

Wittgenstein disproved radical global skepticism by identifying "hinge" beliefs as those which are necessary for reasoning, including the reasoning involved in doubting reason itself. Whether these a priori beliefs are actually true is irrelevant, because we are not able to evaluate them without simultaneously using these beliefs.

This is similar to Kant's idea of transcendental categories, which are necessary for rationality itself. You can't conceive of something without it being in space or time, or by not considering the quantity, etc.

In any case, however, these hinge beliefs seem to work pretty well. Hinge beliefs, or beliefs in general, that are horribly off-base would probably not be very conducive to survival and would thus be selected against. But it also seems unlikely that we have 1:1 correspondence in our models of reality; indeed we only experience a fraction of what is actually "out there" in a model composed of an accretion of sensory experience.

So neither are we born "tabula rasa" and neither do we have that Platonic "memory wipe" described in the Meno, but rather it seems that we have basic "rules" of learning that are required for any sort of inquiry at all.

So mild suffering sucks only relatively and not - per your original statement - absolutely? — apokrisis

To call suffering "mild" is to abuse both terms. A little pinprick isn't a case of suffering, clearly, because it doesn't break someone's spirit.

And thus if this permits prioritisation, then you have no issue with a little bit of suffering being balanced against a greater amount of pleasure? — apokrisis

If the same person is experiencing both and they consented then no, I wouldn't have a problem with it. Nobody is being instrumentalized.

Or even a fleeting amount of suffering being outweighed by long periods of fairly neutral affect - no strong feelings at all? — apokrisis

I doubt the existence of neutral feelings. You might not be feeling anything but you're still in a state of mind, or a mood, which is either positive or negative. Analysis leads to the realization that most moods are not enjoyable but rather striving.

A pragmatist understands a calculus of risk and reward. No pain, no gain, the say. But you have been taking a purist line which seems fundamentally intolerance of chance or "imperfection". — apokrisis

Because you shouldn't gamble with another person's life, or use another person's life for your own benefit, against their will.

Does mild suffering suck absolutely or only relatively?

Do you see your problem yet? — apokrisis

What does this mean? Suffering sucks regardless of intensity, although intensity offers prioritization.

My criticism of your approach is that it is essentially from the romantic perpspective and not from the enlightenment or rational humanistic perspective.

So you are always seeking purity or perfection. You reify suffering as pure qualia for instance. And the slightest imperfections of existence become intolerable for you as a result. — apokrisis

Because it is only natural to seek perfection. In any case, it's not romantic at all because I'm not applying an aesthetic to this issue; non-human suffering is not bad because it disrupts some special organic family, it's because suffering absolutely sucks and I recognize this.

And I stand by that quote. I asked you to provide evidence showing that the same reasoning involved in vegetarianism is involved in Nazism. And I defended the position that vegetarianism can be adopted out of both romantic and non-romantic reasons, thus showing how the apparent link between vegetarianism and Nazism is a red herring. The concepts held by those who think romantically will be connected in virtue of their romanticism. The same applies to non-romantic thinking. It's wrong to say that vegetarianism can only be arrived at by romantic thinking.

Actually it was you trying to find a connection between Nazism and vegetarianism by claiming that both depended upon romantic thinking. In which case I pointed out how both non-romantic and romantic thinking can lead to vegetarianism.

You asked what the connection could be. I said notions of purity. So your rant aside, I take it you agree about that then. — apokrisis

Not really. I agree that vegetarianism has been held by romantics, but also of non-romantics. It is incorrect to assign a causal relationship between the two.

Romanticism boils down to the complaint that the modern technological mode of existence is soul-less and impure. It is dirty, messy, disgusting, unclean, ugly and joyless. — apokrisis

Do you have any examples? Until you provide specifics, you'll have the advantage of ambiguity.

As far as I can tell this is just Luddism.

Philosophy has been a struggle against nihilism. You have the side that rejects aspects of the world, and you have the other side that tries to affirm them. Plato vs Aristotle, Stoics vs Epicureans, Aquinas vs Augustine, Schopenhauer vs Nietzsche, etc.

Of course early Romanticism had a lot of overlap with the Humanism arising out of the enlightenment. But Humanism was anti-theistic and socially optimistic. It was forward looking and celebrated the modern possibilities for human growth, personal freedom and the triumph of rationality. — apokrisis

Sure, at least the French Revolutionaries were, who came at least a century after Locke, who was a deist, and Hobbes who had a sour view of society in general. It wasn't until Rousseau that we have a major thinker who thought everything would be a-ok if we all just went back to nature.

Evolutionary theory also plays into it because it showed that humans were animals and so raised questions for both the rationalists and the irrationalists (the sentiment driven romantics) in terms of how animals ought to be treated. — apokrisis

In fact it seems that Darwin himself was a product of a "proto-Darwinian" movement, stemming from the Enlightenment, which was trying to formulate a new "secular religion" that could explain the human condition in a more "naturalistic" manner. He was right, of course, but his theory owe a lot to the environment that Darwin was a part of.

Anyway, the association between vegetarianism and romanticism is well known.... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetarianism_and_Romanticism — apokrisis

But the association between vegetarianism and romanticism does not mean that vegetarianism is bullshit because romanticism is bullshit (which it's not obvious that it is either).

It would be akin to saying that philosophy is bullshit because an extraordinary about of philosophers in the past were misogynistic, and misogyny is irrational, therefore philosophy is irrational. Correlation does not equate to causation, and in any case the arguments presented for vegetarianism should be analyzed for their own merits and not from their apparent "origins" in romantic thought, despite vegetarianism being practiced thousands of years ago, cross-culturally.

In any rate the article you cited goes on to show how scientific theories of the day, as well as perennial liberal thinkers, were important motivating reasons to see humans and non-human animals as "interconnected", as opposed to "God's chosen", which we see so commonly in religious and rhetorical assertions.

Then there is this other view of back to nature that unites the romantics, Nazis and vegetarians. Purity is the ultimate good. Hence the sentimentality about children, bloodlines, untouched nature, medieval peasantry, animal innocence, etc. — apokrisis

It's a good thing that my vegetarianism, as well as a good deal of others' vegetarianism, is not motivated by that wishy-washy poetic nonsense. "Back to nature!", la-dee-dah, for the Fatherland!, nope, that's not my position at all.

Unless of course you want to argue that compassion is somehow "romantic" and not just basic decency.

An obssession with purity allows the rationalisation of extreme or absolute positions. That's how the Nazis could justify their concentration camps. That's how vegans can justify their own non-negotiable beliefs. If purity is the good, it is rational to argue imperfection should be eliminated by any means necessary. — apokrisis

Yes, indeed people tend to be staunch believers in something and think that belief is all they need to do. We live in an imperfect and violent world, belief ain't gonna change shit by itself. We have to compromise. I accept this. But this compromise is what we ought to do in practical terms, simply because the theoretical (which we can certainly conceive of) cannot be brought about because of certain contingencies, typically those involving and laziness and apathy of humans.

These romantics you cited are approaching this whole game from an aesthetic point of view. Animals should be treated with respect because it fulfills some aesthetic for a modern day Garden of Eden, lah-dee-dah, we'll all be animal lovers and live in a great happy family, yay!

I'm coming from a purely ethical point of view, paintings and orchestras be damned, one that stems directly from a conception of the phenomenal experiences of another animal. "Intersubjective experience".

But if your view of nature is instead essentially stochastic, then there will always be variety and imperfection. The good is now always about a global dynamical balance that constrains existence in a statistical fashion yet is also creatively sloppy, still fruitfully disorganised and playful at the margins. — apokrisis

Yet it seems that it is you who has an aesthetic for the universe. You use words like "sloppy" and "playful", or "creative" and "balance", when you could have said "non-uniform", "complex", "different", and "equilibrium". There's an aesthetic going on here: the universe is something utterly fascinating and bottomless, just an explosion of amazing material, and has anthropomorphic qualities - the Scholastics thought the point of life was to come to know God, and now you are arguing that the point of life is to come to know the Universe (an aesthetic pantheism). The Universe is just bristling with potential, waiting for the memorable and curious scientist to discover something new in a blaze of intellectual passion and triumph. And the more we come to know the Universe, the more we see ourselves as part of some great, beautiful cosmic tale...

If that isn't romantic then I don't know what is.

Interesting perspective, I can't say I disagree.

You said religion is metaphysics for the common man. What about the metaphysics of Aquinas, or Augustine, or the nominalists? Scholasticism set the structure for future inquiry.

But fire away. If you want to draw some kind of conclusion about the value of philosophical arguments based on the moral character of their originators, then amuse me. — apokrisis

I mean, you were the one who brought up the apparent relationship between vegetarianism and Nazism. A brilliant move, really.

Please explain to me what exactly is involved in the reasoning of vegetarians and Nazis that make them both "romantic" according to your book.