#Atomists

[bedlund]

ARCHIE CAN’T LEAVE TOWN SWEEP

[a-god-in-ruins-rises]

i'm thinking i might add "appropriate the term 'liberal'" to my agenda.

[fractal-anatomy]

the trinity

[newleasemusic]

Chill out to Modern Atomists' album, 'Disco Chilled With A Twist, Vol. 2'

Chill out to Modern Atomists' album, 'Disco Chilled With A Twist, Vol. 2'

Billy Paul Williams has proven to be one of the most talented and innovative EDM music producers of the modern era. What sets him apart from the rest of the crowd is his innate musical ability and knowledge of multiple genres, effortlessly switching from jazz to hip-hop, deep house to lo-fi – he’s confident and versatile, no matter the medium. Simply put, he’s just so much more musical than most…

[philosophybits]

Our language is either — mechanical — atomistic — or dynamic. But true poetic language should be organically alive. How often one feels the poverty of words — to express several ideas all at once.

Novalis, Miscellaneous Observations

[yourdailyqueer]

Karissa Sanbonmatsu

Gender: Transgender woman

Sexuality: Queer

DOB: N/A

Ethnicity: White - American

Occupation: Structural biologist, researcher, public speaker, activist

Note: First to perform an atomistic simulation of the ribosome, determine the secondary structure of an intact lncRNA and to publish a one billion atom simulation of a biomolecular complex.

[formlab]

Atomist: Making Stride, Gabriel Orozco, 1996

[quasi-normalcy]

I don't want to sound like some weird New Ager, but I do ultimately believe that all life and nature is connected in a billion subtle and convoluted ways and we suffer because we've forgotten this fundamental unity and believe ourselves to be atomistic individuals with, at best, a few meagre connections to immediate kin.

[near-dareis-mai]

harrow naming mercymorn's specialization as "anatomist" in harrow the ninth is so funny in retrospect. like, she is an atomist alright, she turned john into atoms

[whencyclopedia]

Epicurus

Epicurus (341 BCE – 270 BCE) was an ancient Greek philosopher, the founder of the Epicurean school in Athens, who taught that "Pleasure is the principle and end to a happy life." He was a prolific writer, amassing 37 volumes, but unfortunately, only fragments and four letters remain. His teachings would influence many who followed such as Lucretius of Rome and his On the Nature of Things, and the Utilitarians Jeremy Bentham and J.S. Mill.

Early Life

Most of what historians know of Epicurus has been gathered from the writings of others. In 341 BCE Epicurus was born, according to most sources, on the small island of Samos located off the coast of Asia Minor in the Aegean Sea. His father Neocles was a schoolteacher. Neocles and his wife Chaerestrate were members of the Athenian poor – the Klirouchi – who emigrated to Samos from Athens after they had been offered land there. Initially, Epicurus was taught at home by his father but later was schooled by Amphilus (also known as Pamphilus), a Platonist, and Nausephanes, a follower of Democritus, the Atomist. While Epicurus was serving his mandatory two years in the Athenian army, his family was relocated by force to the small Ionian city of Colophon when Perdiccas the old Macedonian commander under Alexander had ordered the removal of all Athenians from Samos.

It was then that Epicurus began to develop his own, unique philosophy. According to sources, at the tender age of 14, he had become disillusioned with his teachers. Like Aristotle, he was an empiricist and believed that all knowledge comes from one's senses. His new philosophy centered primarily on the idea of seeking pleasure and avoiding pain. Although his name and philosophy have been misconstrued and linked to hedonism, his initial teachings were anything but. Obviously, because of his early education, Epicurus's thinking was heavily influenced by the philosophies of Plato, Aristotle, and most of all Democritus. Slowly, his teachings drew a number of dedicated followers, even appealing to both women and slaves. The fact that his schools welcomed everyone brought considerable opposition from others in and around Athens. At the age of 32, he moved to the city of Mytilene on the island of Lesbos, and later, not by choice, he relocated to Lampsacus on the eastern side of the Hellespont, establishing schools at both locations.

Continue reading...

[fractal-anatomy]

ATOMIST ALETHEIA

[collapsedsquid]

In contrast to economists from Adam Smith and Karl Marx through John Maynard Keynes, Friedrich Hayek, and even Milton Friedman, we have largely stopped thinking about ethics and about what constitutes human well-being. We are technocrats who focus on efficiency. We get little training about the ends of economics, on the meaning of well-being—welfare economics has long since vanished from the curriculum—or on what philosophers say about equality. When pressed, we usually fall back on an income-based utilitarianism. We often equate well-being with money or consumption, missing much of what matters to people. In current economic thinking, individuals matter much more than relationships between people in families or in communities.

This is not cute, economists only make this confession when they Very Upset that they have failed even on these utilitarian/income atomistic terms and need to blow some smoke up the public's asses.

[victusinveritas]

Residential building on Bolshaya Tulskaya Street, (aka "House of Atomists" or "the Ship")

Moscow, Russia,

design/built: 1970-1986

Architect: V. Voskresenskiy, V.Babad, L. Smirnova.

(c) BACU 2020, photo by Dumitru RUSU

[methed-up-marxist]

frankly if he was suicidal it would have made his actions more "rational" by most metrics since his life would already be more at risk and so it would make more sense to wager it as a resource for political demands. But ofc suicidal people can't be sensible, suicide is meant to always be the product of some deranged incomprehensible thought process because we are never meant to value our existence as complex social beings but rather legal atomistic subjects. "is a life lived as an adjunct of imperialism really better than no life at all?" is a completely leggible and plausible question.

[fairyhagmother]

me when the development in the 50s and 60s of molecular genetics signaled a move away from atomistic terms to describe the way genes work!! And the subsequent replacement of those terms with words like ‘transcription’ ‘translation’ and ‘information storage’

[absolute-immunities]

increasingly convinced that Morton Horwitz is a moron

it’s really irritating to hear someone is banging on about context and language and history and then gets them all wrong

for example:

Take the concept higher law—When Thomas Jefferson invoked the ‘self-evident ... truth’ of an ‘inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ in the American Declaration of Independence, he sought to weave together at least four different historical strands or layers of meaning: first, the seventeenth century Whig fundamental law tradition derived either from immemorial custom or from an ancient constitution existing before the Norman invasion; second, Thomistic natural law, whose content consisted primarily of specifying a person's social duties in an organic community; third, the seventeenth century social contractarian conception of natural rights existing in a state of nature and exercised by atomistic individuals against the State; forth, a conception of rights in which Newtonian scientific laws were gradually transformed into Kantian moral laws.

beyond the dubious proposition that Jefferson was trying to “weave together” any “strands or layers” of meaning, most of this is unfounded

“Thomistic natural law” was simply not present in Anglo-American imagination, much less its discourse

the language of the Declaration, and the discourse of which it was a part, was in the key of public law, the law of nations, of the publicists Vattel, Wolff, Pufendorf, and Grotius

these publicists, men of Protestant education and Protestant service—Vattel, of Basel, Geneva, and Saxon service; Wolff, of Leipzig, Jena, and Prussian service; Pufendorf, of Leipzig, Jena, and Swedish service; Grotius, of Leiden and Dutch service—could not, by any stretch of the imagination, be called “Thomistic”

Pufendorf, whose survey of the history of the field in The Law of Nature and Nations (Basil Kennett trans., 5th ed. 1749) (1672) has full chapters on the Chaldeans, Thales, and Anaxagoras and Archelaus, treats of the scholastics, and the whole Roman middle ages, with a single dismissive aside at the end of his chapter on the Neoplatonists, short enough to excerpt here in full:

Aristotle had hitherto but very few Followers: He was scarce known in the Western Parts of the World, till towards the Beginning of the sixth Century. The celebrated Boëtius, by translating some of that Philosopher’s Writings, laid the Foundations of that prodigious, and truly despotic Authority, which the Peripatetic Philosophy became afterwards possessed of; and which, even to this Day, in many Places, it ftill maintains. The Arabians, in the eleventh Century, grew fond of it, and introduc’d it into Spain. From thence sprung the Scholastic Philosophy; which spread itself all over Europe, and, with its barbarous Cant, became even more prejudicial to Religion, and Morality, than to the speculative Sciences. The Ethics of the Schoolmen, is a Piece of Patchwork; a confus’d Collection, without any Order, or fix’d Principles; a Medley of divers Thoughts, and Sentences out of Aristotle, Civil and Canon Law, Scripture, and the Fathers. Both good and bad lie there intermix’d, and confus’d; but so, as that there is much more of the latter, than the former. The Casuists of the succeeding Centuries, made it their sole Business to excel their Predecessors, in vain Subtilties; nay, what is worse, in monstrous, and abominable Errors; as all the World knows. But let us pass by these unhappy Times, that we may, at length, come to that Age, wherein the Science of Morality was, if I may so say, rais’d again from the Dead.

“passing by these unhappy Times,” which, for the author, included the full millennium after the death of Boethius, Pufendorf renews the narrative with Francis Bacon

if that was how the Continentals treated the scholastics—and Vattel and Wolff do not even condescend to mention the scholastics, though Grotius, writing in the infancy of his field and under the protection of a Catholic prince, allows them a handful of cordial notes—still less could the English be thought “Thomistic”

Blackstone, educated in the civil law, who littered his Commentaries with references to Roman and canon law, to Domat and the decretals, to the Institutes, the Novels, and the Codex, and who made some few sparing references to Montesquieu and Locke, made, across the whole of his Commentaries, his vast survey of the public and private laws of England, which begins with the natural rights of man, precisely zero references to Thomas, and zero to the Thomists

they simply did not matter

despite the Thomists’ insistence on writing the revered Thomas into our history and insinuating him into our thought, this is a dialogue in which Thomas did not take part, and a discourse in which Thomism has no place

the “seventeenth century social contractarian conception” is presumably a gesture at that mainstay of the American syllabus, Locke, who was an irrelevance in public law

the “contractarian conception” is, again, more properly grounded in the eighteenth-century publicists, in Vattel and Pufendorf

here Horwitz’s suggestions are, again, totally inapt,

but I’ve tired myself out confirming that the public and natural law background to this public and natural law text bears no marks of “Thomistic natural law,”

so, rather than make any further analytic or conceptual arguments, or address the balance of the misconceptions and crude errors that Horwitz has knit together here,

I’m just going to gesture towards the text and say “get a load of this guy”