That's an interesting conclusion. I would say it's compatible with McGinn's cognitive closure. Funny, because Dennett really doesn't like cognitive closure, but he admires Wittgenstein. — Marchesk

I certainly would like to know more about that, but I think the above example clarifies the issue of 'mystical' existence. When you tell your wife 'it is raining' because you don't want to go outside and fetch something she asked for from your car, the two of you can agree it is raining, in which case you've agreed the proposition is true. But if she doesn't agree, then the two of you can argue until you're both blue in the face about whether it is raining or not, and neither of you can prove the other wrong--which you, being the rational philosopher, might realize in advance it postpones going outside and thus also meets your own objective--but as to how to evaluate 'truth' of the idea of whether it is raining or not, scientific evaluation of the amount of water falling from the sky is not going to persuade either of you as to what is 'true.' In fact, you could both collude on agreeing it is raining, when in fact neither of you believe it true, because she never really wanted anything from your car, and she was really trying to get you to cook dinner instead, so you wouldn't have to go outside. Then in exchange she fetches the thing she wanted from the car while you are cooking.....and that is the 'mystical' nature of reality, and its vague connection with experience that Wittgenstein tries to avoid discussing!

Well, I think his point is that language is an abstraction which is also defined by experience in an indefinable way, but Wittgenstein does everything he can to avoid talking about 'experience,' so it's not immediately apparent from his writing.

While I actually agree with what you are saying, Wittgenstein has a problem with your idea, because the statement 'it is raining' assumes there is something called 'rain.' A lot of people have trouble understanding this, so I annoy descriptivist philosophers by talking about boundary conditions. How many drops of water need to fall from the sky to constitute 'rain'? When is it 'mizzling' or 'misty' or 'sleeting' rather than raining?

Those following descriptive theories say, well, the truth of the proposition is defined by a proper definition of 'rain,' which is more than X drops of water of size XX per cubic meter per second in the temperature range Y-Z.

But Wittgenstein's point is that is not WHY we say 'it is raining.' W. ways that the descriptivists have confused HOW with WHY. If your wife tells you to bring something in from the car, you reply 'it is raining' because you don't want to go outside. Maybe it is not really raining and just mizzling, but if your wife agrees with you, then the proposition would be considered true for the two of you, accomplishing the goal of the communication.

lol, yes, but he doesn't say the world can be known. He said 'the existence of things in the world is mystical.' That's exactly what I said in less mystical terms.

It does not require abandoning truth value. Propositions can still be evaluated linguistically, so it is possible to make an inference or deduction. The problem is what to do with ideas such as color, which you rightly choose as an example, because Wittgenstein himself chose the same problem to discuss. And in the very end, he concluded the same thing. The existence of color is mystical. MANY people object to that, but that was his conclusion.

Setting that a side, how do we know that a proposition matches up with things in the world? — Marchesk

The point which Wittgenstein makes is that there is no necessity for such 'matching up with things in the world.' That results from the error of thinking that a statement is a direct description of 'the world.' There is no such 'world' that is necessarily known. All that a statement does is postulate a possible proposition, and if another person acts on the proposition in accordance with the speaker's intent, then the communication is successful. The statement may refer to something fictional, or non-existent, or totally whimisical, or be in total contradiction to that which scientific models hold that exist materially, and it makes no difference at all, in Wittgenstein's view, because there is no necessity for a proposition to match up with things in the world. Language is only a tool for communication, and epistemologically, from Wittgenstein's perspective, there is nothing else that is fruitful to define as 'the world' besides the language itself.

With respect to discussions of science modeling some physical materiality, the same applies. All that we can actually do is discuss the model, which being defined in language, is subject to the same restrictions of accuracy as language itself, defining 'objects,' 'states,' and 'events' which need have no actual reality beyond that defined in the words used to define the model. And that is the most that can be known.

Well I am glad you understand the difference, but in Wittgenstein's case, it is fair to say his intent was not to claim meaning does not exist. Rather his intent was to demonstrate that language is a 'game' or 'tool' which can contain logical propositions, but there is no need for a theory of description. That bypasses the Russell-Whitehead paradox of non-existent references, and voids other theories of descriptive naming, replacing them with Kripke's idea of causal reference. But it does not imply that W. denied the existence of meaning. Instead he just had nothing to say on it one way or the other.

One could perhaps say that W. believed it meaningless to discuss meaningfulness. But W. later did accept the existence of intent, and therefore causality based on intent. Austin did some very interesting work to extend W.'s model to explain utterances such as imperatives, which are beyond the conventional scope of formal logic.

Other theorists have denied the existence of intent, believing that there is in fact a correlation between material objects, states, and events and the words of language, but that it exists in a purely mechanical way. They hold ideas of conscious intent and free will are themselves confusions, and that is the reductionist method which has resulted in popular deflationary theories.

It is definitely true these are a form of logical positivism, but as it does not accept W.'s later thoughts on intent, such deflationary theories are really reductionist versions of Wittgenstein's early theory, which have gained popularity as the tremendous advances in scientific knowledge have so impressed modern thinkers that they believe strong materialism is the only reality. Therefore they wrongly consider themselves realists rather than linguists. Obviously that is wrong, as the basis of their argument denies our ability to know what reality actually is, beyond the language we use to accomplish goals.

It's been a long time since I studied it, but I think Luke expresses this correctly. A language game does not need to attach 'meaning' to utterances, although it could, W.'s point was more that there is no necessity to consider there being any 'meaning' to an utterance beyond mutual understanding of the intended action to be caused by an utterance. That is, W. accepts the existence of causality attached to speech acts, but not meaning attached to words.

Well I have written on this topic for five years now , and here is my obserrvation: anything which causes 2nd-amendment supporters to pay for everyone ELSE to own guns or to support OTHER peoples rights to life is automatically wrong. Hence, that is the only proof needed that the whole 2nd amendment thing is just an excuse that is haplessly exploited. I have yet to ever hear a genuinely sincere comment on supporting it, if it actually requires the 2nd amendment supporters to honor other peoples' rights at all. So I don't have anything further to say on that, as it obviously no more than the same kind of propaganda which propelled Nazism to its similar success. So, as I started by saying, firearms have killed 1,000 times more US citizens than terrorists have since 9/11, and happy anniversary to the gun-rights Nazis, as they are being so much more successful than the terrorists have been, and are totally resistant to doing anything AT ALL about the slaughter which their views mandate for the rest of us, and there is no rational justification for it at all, as I amply demonstrated in nine months of research on the topic before I even tried talking about it. So the only thing the rest of us can do is congratulate the duped fools on the blithe destruction of peace that we are forced to tolerate due to their preference for more violence as a solution to violence.

And we should demand that all people be entitled to buy bombs, tanks, RPGs, supersonic fighter jets, and aircraft carriers. That's what we need to form a well-regulated militia that can protect us from our own government, not to mention the right to buy nuclear bombs so that the rest of the country can declare a nuclear cold war against Washington DC. Anything less would be rather pointless, and that's the 2nd-amendment entitlement, hurray, and what could be better for us all.

I can only profess a minor victory. When I first moved to Sacramento, I was woken up by gunshots at least twice a week after 10pm. So I wrote the article now updated for 2017 at http://www.yofiel.com/guns/916-report and sent it to the police dept's public safety community forum. After a long quarrel about it, the city installed gunshot detection audio sensors on every street corner. Within a month, they had arrested all the people firing guns at night, and we have been enjoying an enormous increased peace and reduction in crime ever since. This is not to say my observations did not go down well at first, as those inclined to exercise 2nd-amendment rights and fire guns at all hours did spend several months trying to prove me wrong, and when that failed, threw rocks at my windows, stole my car, and sent me anonymous death threats. But they are all in prison now, and I havent even heard one gunshot, even during the day, in several years, so it was a victory in the end.

Im still trying to figure out why you are saying this at all. What UI suggested would actually increase gun sales.

gee I,m sorry you didn't like it. It seems to me the hawks and doves model is a rather strong refutation of your position.

Well, Dawkins wrote a very good counter to that in his book the 'selfish gene,' and it is very easy to read, one can pretty well read it in a day, and it will make you feel much better about the world, really, it is quite brilliant, I greatly recommend it.

Well, the first stage is splitting the argument of Thrasymachus into the view of the governor and governed. Socrates points out that they will not agree with each other on what justice should be. He then argues that justice is an ideal principle that should be the same for all, whether they are those in power or those who are governed. That was the first assumption, and most people through time have decided that was right.

When challenged with how people know what such law should be, Socrates later said some people discover it by finding a state of internal harmony. the test of whether the knowledge is true is whether the inner harmony results in outer harmony, which can only be known to those who are by nature philosophers. That was his second assumption, and over time most people have decided that was wrong, but as Plato wrote, only a few people ever discover that, so that was in fact in agreement with what Socrates actually said too.

Socrates' own conclusions as to an ideal political system were however based on everyone accepting that philosophers were wise enough to know when inner and outer harmony are achieved. That has not been shown the case, because people who are not philosophers, as per Socrates' definition, assert that they are, but disagree with Socrates. So the system failed on that case. And that is a very rough summary of the Platonic view on politics.

If you are looking for a slightly deeper explanation, you will find it in the creation myth, which holds that woman was created from the rib of a man. Hence, it was held that the union of a man and woman is a return to the unity before man was divided and woman created.

At first there was only one human, but God decided that his creation in his own image needed a companion, so it was written in the Zohar, the taking of his rib signifies the breath of his soul, which moves between the light and dark. But as his soul was split, then just as God first separated the light from the dark, the light of the human soul became man, and the dark of the human soul became woman.

As the division of the human soul was before the great fall from perfect grace, the union of man and woman in blessed state restores the original unity of light and dark. The emanation from that pure union creates a new virgin conception, which is why the conceived child is purely innocent. There is no question, in such interpretation, that the child is part of God's order at the moment of conception, due to conception's mystical connection to the creation.

As to whether the rib was physically taken to make a woman, the answer from such tradition is no, it is a metaphor to explain the division of the soul to children, who cannot imagine or understand the deep before the separation of light and dark on the first day, or the consequences of such division.

My own opinion, which I dont think counts for much, is that it is rather pointless to argue philosophically when someone has a gun pointed to your head, so from an academic stance, its rather pointless saying anything more about it than Socrates does, and I dont really regard Machiavelli as much more significant, philosophically, than Mark Twain. That is, one may find his rhetoric engaging, but as there is no metaphysical grounds for his view, it doesn't really amount to much more than a polemic.

that is the second topic ever written about in Western political philosophy, and this is pretty much the standard discussion of it within the last century.

http://www.jstor.org/stable/4181704?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

On the contrary, what I propose supports the 2nd amendment, as it makes it cheaper for people who do not own guns to buy one. For the second time.

Typical knee jerk response. Who said ANYTHING about banning guns?

If you look at the section "more guns, no less crime" http://www.yofiel.com/guns/916-report#yToc-2-8 you will see there is no empirical evidence from independent sources at all to substantiate the claim that guns reduce crime.

If gun violence is reduced 50%, and the savings returned to taxpayers as I state, it would result in an annual saving of $67 per taxpayer. The total taxpayer credit right away is $120, which is more than enough to pay for any person who doesn't own a gun to buy one, pay the violence tax, and still save money. So there is no argument against it from rights perspectives either.

Sadly I cannot find evidence that what you state is true. I did provide some 20 charts incorporating 3,000 data points to draw the conclusion that the most sensible action is to create a gun-violence tax, and to reduce other taxes by the income generated by that tax.

The total cost of gun violence per gun owner in 2017 is currently $407/year. One in three households now own an average of five guns each. A $80/year per-gun violence tax provides an incentive to reduce the cost of gun violence by all concerned, thus placing all lawmakers on the same side of the problem of a half million dead, thus creating sensible legislature rather than the current continual controversy. A reduction in gun violence by only 15% would reduce taxes by more than the amazing tax reductions introduced by Bush I over which Republicans are still giddy with delight.

Thus it is clear that a gun-violence tax is the rational solution from utilitarian principles. Of course, the USA does not really care much about rationality or utilitarianism, so it is going to remain nothing more than a philosophical observation for the foreseeable future.

I see what the point is in the sense that in case of self-defense, I agree, it seems that in that isolated case even though there is a really bad consequence, intention seems to be more crucial here in determining criminal liability and that seems to be the main point of consideration — piramjida

I am obliged to point out that the cases are not so isolated. According to the Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, victims in homes defended their property with guns 103,000 times, over a total of 84.495 million reported crimes. So firearms deter 0.122% of all property crime. Of those 103,000 incidents, an average of 750 resulted in the home defendant intentionally killing the invader, or 0.72% of all cases. That is the official story.

Intent. US law does also make a distinction in all such cases between intended action and intended result. In cases of self defense, the law regards the action as homicide, and the law makes a further distention between justified homicide and unjustified homicide (murder). In addition to making distinctions on degrees of murder based on intent, the law makes a distinction between homicide (intended killing) and manslaughter (unintended killing).

Actual Deaths from Self Defense. Now as to the numbers of deaths from self defense:

• There are ~16,000 cases of manslaughter/year, and approximately 2,850 of those manslaughters are in attempts at self defense where the gun owner kills himself, family, or friend by mistake. So the ACTUAL percentage of people killed due to attempts at self defense, including both acts of justified homicide and involuntary manslaughter, is 3.48% of all home invasions where the home owner used a gun, instead of taking the law's recommended action and fleeing the scene.
• But even that is not the end of the story. Additional government research shows that the killer knows the victim in 1 of 3 cases where the victim uses a gun in self defense. In cases of home invasion where the criminal is known, this is the fact because they are often revenge invasions. In such cases, the verdict would be murder instead of justified self defense. This adds about another 1,500 victims, bringing the total killed with guns compared to crimes stopped by guns to ~5%. That is, Compared to cases where the home owner used a gun to stop a crime, in 1 of 20 cases, either a criminal was killed in justified self defense, or the home defender killed himself, friend, or relative, either by accident or on purpose. .

I heard a lot of dispute on this, particularly from people who profit from selling guns, and there are a lot of them. There are now more places selling guns than all supermarkets, MacDonald's, and Starbucks combined. So you will hear ALOT of people disputing these numbers. But also, there are anti-gun pressure groups distorting numbers in their favor. So I derived the data myself from CDC and DoJ sources, and you can find the tabulation here: http://www.yofiel.com/guns/916-report

hahaha. Sometimes when I try to think about Kant, I get lost in another story of Borges' in Labyrinths - The tower of Babel. Somewhere in that library we get lost between determination and the undetermined, so an infinite number of books appear between them -- the determinable in the middle, with the determinable determined on one side, and the determinable undetermined on the other, then in between them again, yet more pairs of books... and yet more...

That's something that Buddhism refers to as the infinite sphere of the knowable unknown around the finite sphere of the knowable in which we live -- and outside both of those, the equally infinite unknowable unknown. At some point in such infinite regressions I end up turning away from Western empiricism as being at all useful in the comprehension, until sometimes Kant pulls me back with a reminder that his idea is transcendental; and those who are cynical of Kant then seem somehow even less comprehensible than Kant, however much any of them delve into obscurantist ideas.

I am so glad to find an expert on this.

Please could you update me, what is the current thinking on Austin's idea of performative utterances, and Ryle's idea of categorical mistakes?

Well, you must forgive me for introducing too many extraneous topics, lol. But I do persist in reiterating my thought on VALUE. Americans are pre-programmed to consider value in terms of fiscal wealth. And I will provide a parallel example. Today I was forwarded an essay on how one American wanted to gain a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford by arguing that a rational approach to altruism would solve the world's worst problem, poverty:

http://quillette.com/2017/04/20/crucible-application-process/

And the applicant woefully misunderstood the level of cynicism such a hyperbolic statement would cause in the ivory towers, which first is totally disinterested in pathos as a mode of rhetorical persuasion in academics; and secondly, and for more significantly, maintains a profound objection to the USA's consideration of money as some absolute gauge and method to fix all woes. Just because society places a fiscal value now on the commodities you cite does not imply that they necessarily have any greater fiscal value on the services I cite. Consider for example, what would have happened in history Ford automobiles not changed the entire nation to believe that factory work to make travel easier was the way to go forward. In alternative history lines, cars could have been considered nothing more than a necessary evil, and had it been discovered how to make plastics from corn before they were made from oil refinement, we would be surrounded by crop fields and canalboats instead of roads And maybe Europe would even never have let the railroad companies buy up all the canal locks then fill them with concrete to render them unusable, which started the whole modern race to force all alternatives to the current preferred mode of transport into oblivion by buying the patents and burying them. .

So maybe that's just because I was cursed with an international education. But on this issue, I really do have to side with the British. Academically speaking, that is.

Well, if you really want my own opinion, I do find the entire focus on 'the self' as the basis of knowledge very solipsistic. Regarding the arguments on Descartes, so many people have already expressed their opinions on it, I have nothing original to add. My own opinion, for whatever its worth, is that people should be less concerned about what they know about themselves, and more concerned about what other people think of themselves. But that is more a topic for psychology than philosophy currently.

The problem with this is that 'cogito ergo sum' is only supposedly only valid in the present tense and with the person both saying it and evaluating it, not in the past tense and/or another person evaluating the statement. — dclements

whatever, I don't argue with informal opinions about standard philosophy based on people's own intuition, its a waste of time.

One of the reasons we stopped growing (more than our piddling 2%) was that all of the growth gains that could be extracted from the technological innovations of the previous century had been extracted. — Bitter Crank

Right. But that's ONLY true if you interpret 'growth' as the American rich and power mongers want you to define it. What America COULD have done was expand its idealism by accepting more other nations as states, and export education and science instead of weapons and war.

Last month a Russian company demonstrated a giant 3D printer that can extrude concrete to make an entire 4-room house in <24 hours, at a cost of total $10,000. Estimated lifespan of the house is >150 years, and all it needs is a coat of paint. They are using the in Siberia now.

If the USA did that, it would still be growing. But it was more to benefit of the USA's own oil oligarchs, such as the Bush family for example, to sell and export war, which only diminishes growth. So everyone turns a blind eye to Venezuela now, it hardly even gets mentioned in the news, when in the 1960s they were even asking if it could become another state in the USA. But no, the USA oil drew the lines instead. Not even Puerto Rico managed to cross that line.

Well sure. And as Russians will point out, there are far more liars, thieves, swindlers, and scoundrels here, and you may be surprised, if you look it up, that population growth has also been increasing in the last 20 years--at less than its GDP, unlike the USA.

mean it's all really confusing to me. If reality can be simulated via logic, then shouldn't all Platonists necessarily be logicians too? — Question

That's not how they see it. I explained the view from Russell, which is that language is descriptive. You discussed Wittgenstein as a game theorist, however right that is. Platonists don't see it either way, and none of these groups think of reality being 'simulated.' That's a modern idea derived from the growth of computers, which have supplanted WHY people think with HOW.

I was just remembering, when I started college in 1979, I was told I'd have to take statistics. I went to meet him, he had been sitting in front of an Apple 2E for a solid week. He had read the manuals and written one program, then he just sat there looking at it. For a week.

When I arrive, he looked up and said, "I had to think what to tell you a long time. This thing is going to make enough pointless numbers to make hell boil over, and I'm throwing out all the textbooks on what I should be teaching you. My job now is to stop you taking this thing for granted, and think about what numbers it generates that have any meaning. Because I guarantee you, you will be seeing a lot of people citing its numbers as some kind of irrefutable truth the rest of your life."

It was only this last week that I realized how profound what he said was, because the same applies for words as for numbers. So the same has gradually boiled over into all philosophy--the computer has replaced people's search for meaning with a search for some empty model that means nothing, yet appears to describe everything.

Nowhere has the working class -- proles -- completed the process of acquiring the level of skills needed to run society — Bitter Crank

That's not entirely fair. Many of those now running the Chinese Communist party and some of the Russian oil oligarchs can cite extremely poor families in the past. And there is limited space at the top, so it only takes the fact that a clear number have succeeded in doing that to demonstrate that the communist regimes far exceeded the original expectations, and had served their purpose in elevating national well being to the level where people can now choose their own lives, and moreover, can read and write better to higher levels than countries with a purely capitalist past now demonstrate. And more recently, Russia and China's economic growth has far outstripped that of the USA for decades.

Oh , I see what you are asking. If a sentence has nouns for both a subject and object, and for simplicity one considers both to be references to physical objects, then there is more than one descriptive pointer in the sentence which may or may not refer to something existent. For example

The King of France is a unicorn

has two failures in reference, the first being that there is no king of France, and the second being that unicorns are imaginary. Substituting a name which does have a reference for either one does not change the proposition to one which can be either true or false, unless it is further qualitied:

In the novel by Peter S. Beagle, the unicorn is called Lady Amalthea
Lady Amalthea is a unicorn

am no Latin scholar but I note that the Latin original 'cogito ergo sum' contains no pronouns. Literally it seems to say something like 'thinks therefore exists'. — andrewk

You don't need pronouns in Latin. It means, "I think, therefore I am." Which is the source of the problem, because what it should say is "dubio ergo sum," and the basis of the argument is that one cannot doubt that one is doubting, therefore one must exist.

The possible flaw is the NEXT statement, which is that doubt is the same as other activities of the human mind, SUCH AS experience of sensation, thinking, and feeling. When I was younger I would have agreed the flaw undermines the argument, but more recently I tend to agree Descartes was actually right about that.

You may try to say "I cannot doubt that I am doubting" is circular, but according to formal logic, it is not. According to current theory, AFTER you make the statement, you seek empirical evidence, by asking the question, "was I doubting?" to evaluate the proposition. At that time, the referent is to an activity in the past, and therefore the argument is not cyclic, but rather, a valid reference to a past state.

I do not consider the Soviet Union or China a successful example of Marxism, Communism, or the like. — schopenhauer1

The problem you have is that Marxist theory did not predict what would happen after communism raised the standard of living of the proletariat to such an extent that the class no longer exists. According to the classical definition in the time of Marx, the proletariat is too poor to change its own status and too uneducated to read and write.

The real problem with Marxist theory of social evolution is that it succeeded at a rate beyond the wildest dreams of its original proponents. So they did not state what should happen AFTER the proletariat elevated itself, which has been, in lack of other better theory, a cycling backwards in political evolution, rather than an evolution to the kind of minimal state proposed by Nozick, which arrived on the scene rather too late to make a difference.

Meanwhile, the old bastions of capitalism are rapidly regressing, as evidenced for example that one third of all Americans now believe Trump was stating undisputable fact when he claimed that Clinton was a criminal and that Obama wiretapped his phones, because they do not have the discretion to recognize that Trump is exactly the kind of con-artist that Marx was warning against. So the descent into military totalitarianism continues in all but name.

I think what you are interested in, if you truly mean valency as it is defined in chemistry, is some kind of weighted probabilistic logic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Probabilistic_logic

It is a rather undeveloped field.

The United States of America was founded on the basis of diffusion of state’s power, curtailing the power’s potential for injustice. — Ashwin Poonawala

That's not quite correct. The USA was founded on the basis that the people living on this continent were not accorded the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them. These laws entitle all people to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, it was claimed, and that the British had violated these rights, thus providing the rebels with justification to alter and abolish the rules imposed on them.

The consequences of that decision is that the US government has to honor the same rights for its citizens, or it no longer has the authority to govern. And those rights of the government to intercede in no way allow it to exercise the morality you suggest as superior. That would require overthrowing the US government and replacing it with a new one.

If it is any consolation, Benjamin Franklin did say no government should last more than a century or two anyway, but the powers that be generally choose to ignore that statement when interpreting the will of the founding fathers.

Well, as I say, it is not really me you are critiquing, it is the Jeffersonian definition of natural rights, and apparently, the Lockean social contract, upon which I can only reiterate, that is what it is, and there really isn't anything I can do to change it, however right or wrong you want to say it is.

regarding your first statement, the source material is available for free online, and the main substance of the argument is in chapter XXI:

http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/10615/pg10615.html

In ethics, consequences are now generally considered more important. However the specific nature of 'consequence' itself can be difficult to define, due to problems with identifying whether there was intentional agency in the causality. So in law and morality, intent is usually more important.

If you are wishing an academic exploration of the topic, the most recent is probably this

https://www.amazon.com/Terrible-Love-War-James-Hillman/dp/0143034928

I could not provide twitter level quotes, you would have to look at Homer, Greek tragedy, and Virgil yourself.

It seems problematic because you would have found a breed of humans that live in total happiness for a much longer period of time. — Andrew4Handel

the PROBLEM is that you could equally imagine humans living in total misery for a thousand years, so any conclusions you draw from that are totally meaningless.

The Iliad. — Wosret

Homer in fact showed glory to be glamorous but pointless, and simply results in a long ordeal for everyone, which is why the Iliad ends with the victor Agamemnon being killed after reaching his home and while in his bathtub anyway, and why the Odyssey is a sequel.

The Greeks were not so simple minded as modern people want to think, so they actually understood that better than almost all people alive do now. And that is also why Euripidies, Sophocles, and Aeschylus extended the myth in their plays to examine the nature of fate, and whether it can be avoided.

It was actually Virgil who glorified glory by rewriting the Iliad, adding a long section on the Trojan horse and ending the story there. But even he rather cynically ignores that the Trojan horse was a vile and dishonorable ruse without any redeeming factor, instead making it out as some great act of valor yet again, which he could not have written at such length without recognizing the hypocrisy of it, and thus expressing his real opinion in agreement with Homer that glory is really a delusion fostered on the public by those in power in order to manipulate the mob mind into hostile effort extending to self sacrifice.

The whole post-fascist period is one of clear and present danger. . — Marcuse, Repressive Tolerance

What a hyperbole, lol. I did meet a feminist psychoanalyst who used Marcuse t6 argue for the ontological power of men over women, other than that I never heard him seriously discussed, but then I am one of those fringe people who only enjoys mainstream philosophers now. When I was a teenager I might have been drunkenly singing something like Marcuse from the top of the mast of my sinking sailboat in a French harbor, but that was a long time ago.

Das Capital is pretty good too. I could produce perhaps a hundred tweetable paragraphs from it to prove that Marx would have really liked Trump )

Am I right in saying this is more like "Three Things the Communist Manifesto Got Wrong"? — jamalrob
You could be. Do you have a reason for the distinction? — schopenhauer1

The reason for the distinction is that Marxism is not a political ideal, as most people believe, but a process of dialectical materialism. Marx himself was ambivalent overall about many things in the process, and mostly left the more pragmatic details of communist theory to Engels.

But Marx did manage to make a short concise statement in the manifesto. These days, it's about as much as anyone wants to read except in reply to their own thought, so that's became substituted in the mass mind as 'Marxism.'

Marx also contradicted himself on virtually everything at one point or another, so if you are really determined, you can almost invariably find a Marx quote somewhere to prove he thought anything you want, as long as you keep the extent of you statement about Marx thought somewhere around the length of a Tweet. This would be my own explanation of his widespread fame, whether people want to say he is right or wrong, whatever you want. there'll be a Tweetable comment on it.