by Max Barry

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Region: Forest

Uan aa Boa wrote:Farewell Zwangzug, another big hitter moving on. You were always a calming and humourous influence and you liked posts judiciously so that I felt a little warm glow when you did. More than once your imagined exasperation kept me from a political rant I might otherwise have launched on. I've always remembered a wonderfully sarcastic phrase of yours from an RP in my first week in Forest - "a grand quorum of no person at all."

I'm not sure if that's a specific school of thought, but I think it has to do with the original division between the analytic philosophy that dominates academic philosophy in the English speaking world and the Continental philosophy that's influential in social studies, literary theory and theology.

Analytic philosophy, which in its modern form has a close relationship with mathematical logic, aims to find certainties as a starting point and proceed using logical methods to find new certainties. Given the difficulties in proving that you're not a brain in a vat, however, or living in the matrix, certainties to start from are in short supply. In the 18th century Kant introduced a new approach which he modestly described as a Copernican revolution, starting instead from subjective human experience and asking what must be the case in order for this experience to be possible, what are its conditions of possibility. Philosophy from that point tends to either ignore Kant and treat the subjective as ephemeral and inconsequential, or else build on his approach to the extent that it gets classified as post-Kantian.

Indeed! While most of my philosophy classes were with ancient or medieval philosophy, I nevertheless throughly enjoyed Kant and other thinkers from that period. I remember, with some fondness and also a bit of embarrassment, that I semi-seriously set out to essentially "figure out" which branch or school of philosophy was "actually correct" or something to that effect. Philosophy and language, though, are so fundamentally intertwined, since we only express philosophical concepts through the vehicle of spoken or written words (leaving out symbolic logic and such, although such systems also use their own 'language' of sorts). I was frequently tempted to switch from philosophy to linguistics, but it sort of passed me by.

I personally oscillate between starting with the objective world and starting with the subjective experience. One of the beautiful things about learning or thinking about such things now is that we can sort of look across thousands of years and hundreds of significant figures in many cultures and traditions, and sort of hold it all together at arm's length. I marvel how some of these people came up with or thought through their vast and complex systems of belief.

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As an aside, you mentioned the other day on here how Scotland is having very dry weather. I sympathize with your efforts to keep the vernal pools wet. We have been having a lot of rain and flooding in the south. Here, it was only a few degrees above freezing, despite that the leaves are coming on the trees and that it has already been like 24C/75F several times. These weather patterns that take weeks or even months to change, as opposed to more regular changes in these latitudes, are really creating extreme conditions that we haven't seen before. And, as I keep reminding myself, we are just getting started. What happens when Europe has ten years in a row of extreme drought, and parts of North America see 1,000-year or 10,000-year floods? And then it changes, and the reverse occurs? We don't have the infrastructure or resilience to combat that, especially in the long-term.

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Also, it's a shame that Zwangzug is no longer here. The Forest is much less...zwangy, now. :-/

I myself have been an occasional recipient of a Zwangzug like, which was indeed always a good thing to see. :-)

The new bluestocking homeland, Mount Seymour, Lord Dominator, Uan aa Boa, and 6 othersPalos heights, Turbeaux, Canaltia, Entitize, Rivienland, and Feline Masters

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