#nominalism

[pav-anne]

You think I'm playing at some game? You think iron will keep you safe? Hear my words, manling. Do not mistake me for my mask. You see light dappling on the water and forget the deep, cold dark beneath. Listen. You cannot hurt me. You cannot run or hide. In this I will not be defied.

I swear by all the salt in me: if you run counter to my desire, the remainder of your brief mortal span will be an orchestra of misery.

I swear by stone and oak and elm: I'll make a game of you. I'll follow you unseen and smother any spark of joy you find. You'll never know a woman's touch, a breath of rest, a moment's peace of mind.

And I swear by the night sky and the ever-moving moon: if you lead my master to despair, I will slit you open and splash around like a child in a muddy puddle. I'll string a fiddle with your guts and make you play it while I dance. You are an educated man. You know there are no such things as demons. There is only my kind. You are not wise enough to fear me as I should be feared. You do not know the first note of the music that moves me.

-Patrick Rothfuss, The Wise Man's Fear

[calledbyflowers]

[grandpasessions]

Absolute Recoil S. Zizek

[eelhound]

"The desert practice of contemplative prayer abandons, on principle, all experiences of God or the self. It simply insists that being present before God, in a silence beyond words, is an end in itself.

God cannot be had, the desert tradition affirms, if this means laying hold of God by way of concept, language, or experience. God is a desert, ultimately beyond human comprehension. John Cassian defined contemplative prayer as an imperfect yet 'astonished gaze at God's ungraspable nature, something hidden' finally from human sight. Evagrius advised his students that 'when you are praying, do not shape within yourself any image of the Deity.' He knew that the God revealed in Jesus Christ is known ultimately only along the dry desert path of faith.

While this actual metaphor of 'God as desert' may not appear before the sixth century (in Pseudo-Dionysius), it stands in concert with earlier teachings of Gregory of Nyssa and is developed later in John Scotus Eriugena, Thomas Gallus, and Meister Eckhart. They unhesitatingly describe God as a desert mountain, high above all understanding.

Still other teachers in the contemplative tradition echo the author of The Cloud of Unknowing in emphasizing the need to love God 'with a naked intent,' completely apart from any of God's attributes or benefits. God is a desert to be entered and loved, never an object to be grasped or understood. In the end, we are no more able to 'possess' God than we are able to possess ourselves. It is only as we abandon every effort to control God by experiencing God, relinquishing even the grasping self (always anxious to add the Deity to its store of personal acquisitions), that the mystery of meeting God beyond experience ever becomes possible."

- Belden C. Lane, from The Solace of Fierce Landscapes: Exploring Desert and Mountain Spirituality, 2007.

[history-time-out]

“Logos Rising” | E Michael Jones

The notes come from a podcast episode of “Culture Wars” when he was a guest on the “Joe and Joe from The Frontline” back in January of 2022.

​​​​2:25 - Atheism: 10 years ago 4(horseman) atheists based their argument on logical fantasy. Darwinism is the operating system of atheism. Prime philosophical ideology of today.

​​3:39 - Parmenides “that which is can’t come from that which isn’t”

​​​​4:14 - St. John’s gospel “in the beginning there was logos and logos was God”

​​​​4:41 - The atheists banned meta physics as an attack on God

​​​​4:54 - Darwinism says something can come from nothing. Every little step is the same as the step before it. This was their way to sell it and make it make sense.

​​​​6:31 - Atheism isn’t a philosophical problem, it’s a psychological problem.

​​6:40 - psychologist Paul Vince from NYU wrote a book on the relationship between atheism and father deprivation

​​

​​8:26 - Q: Why has modern philosophy taken this route? A: Logos makes a rebound due to researches of Thomism (official philosophy of Catholic Church) Notre Dame adopts as official philosophy as well until ND hires 2 physicists to run philosophy department (Irish men hessburg and McMillan) Late 1960’s.

​​11:20 - Talk about how God revealed logos to the Greeks. Q: How did the Greeks accept logos after throwing around different philosophical ideas which led them to the discovery of logos. A: listen to audio below for EMJs reply.

13:40 “Your thinking in physical terms with something that isn’t physical”

​​​​14:45 - God did not abandon people

​​15:16 - John wrote his gospel based on reason. (Greek) because he could not preach to the Jews anymore since he was kicked out. He said we needed a sound philosophical foundation.

​​17:30 - philosophy today, is based on science now. Physical science has become so powerful that everything has to model physics. Economics has become physics.

​​17:58 - Aristotle talks meta-physics (he calls it first philosophy) which he calls theology. “You can’t talk about the beginning and not talk about God.

​​18:02 - EMJ had this experience in India. 16 year old Hindu boy asks can you prove the existence of God? India you have hundreds of Gods and it doesn’t make sense to the boys.

​​​​21:09 - In India you have over a billion and half people in a confused state because there is no logos.

​​

​​21:34 - India cosmology is that earth is a semi-circle sitting on 4 elephants that is standing on a turtle.

​​20:33 - It is mandatory for every rational creature to believe in God. You don’t have to believe Jesus rose from dead, you accept that by faith.

​​

​​23:22 - “conform your desires to the truth or conform the truth to your desires”

​​

​​Read Degenerate Moderates

23:47 - fulfilling desires by questioning the order of the universe so you can do what you wanna do.

​​

​​23:54 - Polytheism exists bc you want to do something against Gods will (ex: sexual desires) Another example is you want to sleep with your neighbors wife. You can’t pray to God about that so you pray to another god. You are praying to demons. This stuff leads to demon cultures. Wilhelm Schmidt said “all primitive cultures are monotheistic and polytheistic cultures are a sign of decadence”

​​

24:59 - Are you willing to conform your life to logos?

​​

​​25:35 - Host: One problem in America is everyone is looking for political solutions instead of moral solutions…. Looking in wrong places for solutions…. In particular political parties.

​​​​EMJ - Reason “pure and practical reason”

​​-Pure allows you to know the truth

​​-Practical allows you to achieve the good AKA morality. Conform life to practical reason.

EMJ says Founding Fathers understood this:

​​John Adams “we have no constitution that functions in the absence of a moral people”

​​If you can’t have people do this to their lives you won’t have a government that can do it.

​​Freedom became defined as doing what you want to do as opposed to doing what you ought to do.

​​Host: “Perverted concept of freedoms”

​​License became the substitute for freedom.

31:00 - Co-Host: “Science as Opposed to Religion (modern dialogue) which is a fallacy.

​​​​“What is the Trinity? How does this concept of God lead to science itself?”

​​​EMJ: It goes back to the gospel of St. John. It begins with logos and logos was with God. Logos is God. This is the trinity.

A meditation on that phrase and the word Son. 300 years of meditation on that phrase to come up with an understanding of God. The Trinity is God revealing himself to us.

​​Pythagorus: was preparation for the Trinity. Believed number was order of the universe.

​​1 + 2 = 3

​​1 is unity

​​2 is diversity

​​3 is the Trinity (unity and diversity at the same time)

Beauty

​​​​EMJ: Another characteristic of God “The true, the good, the beautiful”

​​Because of 20th century beauty gets lost as a result of the decline of art. Beauty is a manifestation of God. There is evidence of this Trinity throughout creation.

​​​​Relationship between Jesus Christ and God the Father

​​“The father, the son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen”

​​Aryas said “if the son comes after the father then there was a time when the son was not. If there was a time when the son was not, then the son was not God. Therefore Jesus Christ is not God” This is False

​​You can’t take the term son and applying it to an analogous way to God and it does not apply because all of 3 of those principals were co eternal and always existed in relationship to each other.

​​Muslims did not get this. Did not believe Jesus Christ was God. This is the main reason science did not develop in the Islamic world.

​​The universe is a manifestation of God.

​​Openness of Heart to Accepting Linear Truth

​​EMJ: Fundamental problem is basing life on satisfying irrational passions.

​​Aquinas “lust darkens the mind”

​​Dealing with people sunken in sin and have made a living with one of these ideologies.

​​​Racism is an irrational ideology.

​​Lutheran church evaporated in Scandinavia and Iceland.

​​EMJ: Main problem in Middle Ages was collapse of Thomism and replaced with nominalism.

William of Ockham ended in Munich and died of Black Death. “no universals. Universals are all categories of the mind” (ex: Islam taking over catholic philosophy)

Martin Luther

​​Luther couldn’t control his passions. Violent guy, a drunk and didn’t pray. Finally broke from church and subjected to sexual temptation.

​​During this time the Lutherans were breaking into convents and raping nuns or pimping them out to priests to get them to join Luther.

EMJ on pornography

​“Pornography is a form of social control”

​​He once said this to a group of zoomers and they knew exactly what he meant because they were all enslaved to their passions.

[castilestateofmind]

What liberalism and progressiveness seek is not the liberation of humanity but the liberation from humanity.

[lcatala]

It's ultimately a property of language that true objective translation is impossible. When we talk, we assign labels to a subjective experience. The labels can be shared, but not the experience itself. If I say the word "dog", you don't hear exactly the same thing that I think, because my experience of dogs is particular to me, it's informed by all the particular dogs I have met or seen, which are not the same dogs as you (and even if they were, we would have saw these dogs from different angles and perspectives, each with our own experience).

And that's for something as simple and uncontroversial as "dogs", while speaking notionally the "same" language in the "same" western cultural context. Now imagine different languages. Imagine people separated not just by hundred of miles but by hundreds of years. Imagine entirely different media that use language in completely different ways.

I firmly believe that some stories can never be translated into a different medium and that's okay

[fangednominals]

Erik Hoogcarspel talking about Nagarjuna in a podcast

Host: "How does Nagarjuna's use of the tetralemma relate to the idea of dependent arising? Is it because you can look at things from all these different perspectives?"

Hoogcarspel: "Well, logic is based on ontology. In Aristotle's predicate logic, a predicate implies a subject, or a substance, to which the predicate applies." Host: "But there is no such substance?"

Hoogcarspel: "No, so the predicates... Are up in the air, as it were, they are no longer certain."

Host: "You can't have logic; you can't talk about it." Hoogcarspel: "No, because there is nothing that you are talking about."

[adventism-atheism-orthodoxy-me]

Aliens - and the Catalog of Human Experience

A few years ago I got tuned in to a podcast that prompted some interesting reflection. While listening to that podcast, I was introduced to "The Gods of Eden", a book about the origins and history of humanity. While the podcasters were reviewing the book, I became interested in the Good vs. Evil motif that was developing. Christ was Good, but the Old Testament God was a bit of a Demiurge, and I was intrigued, having not been given a full workup on the issues surrounding how Christ could be Good, but the Old testament God from which he sprang could be bad.

I texted the Hosts of another podcast to ask if they'd look into it.

Their next episode was a mockery of aliens.

I lost a whole lot of respect for these hosts at that exact moment. Especially since aliens became the topic, and not Good vs. Evil motif that I had been most interested with.

However, to say that "The God's of Eden" didn't include the idea of aliens would be wrong. Everything about the book involved a materialist presupposition of alien interference into human societal evolution. The problem was that my interest revolved around the dichotomy between the Good God and a Bad God; not aliens. In hindsight, Perhaps I was unclear in my inquiry as to my interest.

Nevertheless, since aliens are a subject of interest, and since "Nones" follow supernatural threads of thought, I will give my take - which hasn't really wandered too much throughout my life.

And that is this…

There's a lot of weird stuff that people experience.

I'm not going to say that aliens are real or not. I'm also not going to say that anyone who's seen something they interpret as "alien" is a hallucination.

What I will say is that the world is huge, and wonderful, and full of mystery. Half of what we think we know may be wrong, and the rest may be distorted. Nobody knows how anything works, as all actions are contingent upon preconditions - why does mass work the way it does regarding gravitational pull? Nobody knows. We accept our gravitational constants and constraints and move on, unconcerned that we don't really know why things work the way they do; only that they do, in fact, work the way they do.

So what do we have?

We have a Catalog of Human Experience.

We have Cyclopean Masonry, the Pyramids, Stonehenge and any number of truly impressive structures such as Puma Punku with very precise cuts into hard stone, all dotting the globe. The cool thing about these structures is that people can see them in person, they can touch them. Not bad for a catalog. The problem is that none of these structures give evidence for anything beyond amazing engineering. Engineering that humans could have developed and lost do to other priorities - such as the development of concrete.

The other thing we have is the eyewitness reports of strange lights in the sky - When I was a kid, the Battle of LA was sited, though official sources have pulled back and attribute that event to Imperial Japan. However, That still doesn't account for the Phoenix Lights, the Hessdalen Lights, the Marfa Lights, and historically The Air Battle of Stralsund, the 1561 Celestial Phenomena over Nuremberg. and the 1566 celestial phenomenon over Basel. Every once in awhile, you hear someone earnestly recount an event where they saw something they couldn't explain, and attribute it to aliens.

Much of this is on the internet, if you can wade through the sensationalist garbage. When I was a kid, I read books. There were a few compelling accounts in England where someone observed a landed UFO, and "figures".

The truth of the matter is that "A" doesn't always necessitate "B", or if "A" and "B" appear to be related, that doesn't necessitate "C". The Fundamental Attribution Error, also called correspondence bias, is enough of a thing that Wikipedia has a full article on it.

What we have are mysteries.

Deep, abiding, and profound mysteries.

Some may be related, some may not. But I refuse to accept that every single one is delusional.

And none of these mysteries create a doubt in my mind about God. In fact, the actual fact that these mysteries continue to perplex and confound the wise amongst us, only confirms the mystery of the universe…

And of the God who runs it all.

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, Have Mercy upon me, A sinner.

[omegaphilosophia]

The Philosophy of Natural Kinds

The philosophy of natural kinds deals with the classification and categorization of objects, entities, and phenomena in the natural world. It explores the concept of natural kinds as groups or categories that reflect the structure of reality, rather than arbitrary or human-made classifications. This area of philosophy is central to metaphysics, philosophy of science, and philosophy of language.

Key Concepts in the Philosophy of Natural Kinds:

Definition of Natural Kinds:

Natural vs. Artificial Kinds: Natural kinds are categories that exist independently of human thought or social conventions. They are contrasted with artificial or conventional kinds, which are categories created by humans for practical purposes. For example, "water" and "gold" are considered natural kinds, while "furniture" or "vehicles" are seen as artificial kinds.

Essential Properties: Natural kinds are often thought to have essential properties, which are the characteristics that all members of the kind share and that define what it means to belong to that kind. For instance, the chemical structure H₂O is an essential property of water.

Realism about Natural Kinds:

Metaphysical Realism: Realists about natural kinds argue that these kinds exist independently of human beliefs, language, or practices. According to this view, natural kinds reflect the objective divisions in nature, and science discovers these kinds rather than inventing them.

Essentialism: Some realists hold an essentialist view, which suggests that natural kinds have a set of necessary and sufficient conditions (essential properties) that determine their membership. For example, the essence of a species like "tiger" includes certain genetic and biological traits.

Nominalism and Conventionalism:

Nominalism: Nominalists, on the other hand, deny the existence of natural kinds as objective features of the world. They argue that categories are constructed by humans and do not reflect any inherent divisions in nature.

Conventionalism: Conventionalists believe that the categories we use to classify the world are based on human conventions and practices rather than on any intrinsic structure of reality. According to this view, what counts as a natural kind is largely determined by social or linguistic conventions.

Philosophical Issues:

Inductive Inference: Natural kinds are often linked to the problem of induction in philosophy. The idea is that if natural kinds are real, they can support inductive inferences—generalizing from a sample of observations to broader conclusions. For example, observing that all samples of water boil at 100°C (under standard conditions) allows us to infer that this is a property of the natural kind "water."

Scientific Classification: The philosophy of natural kinds has significant implications for scientific classification. Scientists rely on the notion of natural kinds to group entities in ways that reflect underlying natural structures, which is crucial for forming scientific laws and theories. For example, the periodic table in chemistry is a classification of elements based on their natural kinds.

Challenges to the Concept of Natural Kinds:

Biological Species Problem: One of the major challenges to the idea of natural kinds is the problem of biological species. In biology, species are often seen as fluid and not always fitting neatly into natural kinds because of evolution, gene flow, and hybridization. This challenges the idea that species have essential properties or that they are fixed natural kinds.

Homeostatic Property Cluster (HPC) Theory: In response to such challenges, some philosophers propose the HPC theory, which suggests that natural kinds are not defined by a single essence but by a cluster of properties that tend to co-occur due to a stable underlying mechanism. For example, a species might be defined by a cluster of genetic, morphological, and behavioral traits that are maintained by evolutionary processes.

Natural Kinds in Chemistry and Physics:

Chemical Elements: The concept of natural kinds is perhaps most straightforward in chemistry and physics, where elements and fundamental particles are seen as paradigmatic examples of natural kinds. Each element on the periodic table is classified based on its atomic number, which is considered an essential property of that kind.

Subatomic Particles: In physics, particles like electrons, protons, and neutrons are also treated as natural kinds, with specific properties (e.g., charge, mass) that define their identity.

Natural Kinds in the Social Sciences:

Debate on Social Kinds: The application of the concept of natural kinds to the social sciences is more contentious. Some argue that categories like race, gender, or mental disorders should be treated as natural kinds, while others see them as socially constructed and not reflecting natural divisions in the world.

Social Kinds as Natural Kinds: Some philosophers propose that certain social kinds could be considered natural if they are stable and have causal powers similar to those of natural kinds in the physical sciences. For instance, certain mental health conditions might be seen as natural kinds if they consistently manifest specific symptoms and respond to particular treatments.

The philosophy of natural kinds is an exploration of how we categorize and understand the world around us. It raises important questions about the nature of reality, the basis of scientific classification, and the extent to which our concepts reflect objective divisions in the natural world. Whether natural kinds are real or constructed, essential or cluster-based, the debate continues to shape our understanding of science, language, and reality itself.

[tonreihe]

Rowan Williams, Christ the Heart of Creation

[ringosmistress]

grammy nominations for record of the year 2025

[russia-libertaire]

Isaiah Berlin summarises Herzen's core ethical and philosophical beliefs:

"...that nature obeys no plan, that history follows no libretto; that no single key, no formula, can, in principle, solve the problems of individuals or societies; that general solutions are not solutions, universal ends are never real ends, that every age has its own texture and its own questions, that short cuts and generalisations are no substitute for experience; that liberty - of actual individuals, in specific times and places - is an absolute value; that a minimum area of free action is a moral necessity for all men, not to be suppressed in the name of abstractions or general principles..."

'Herzen and Bakunin on Individual Liberty', in Russian Thinkers, by Isaiah Berlin

[evie-carnahan]

HECK YEAH NIMONA !! 🤘

[theeminentlyimpractical]

The Guardian out here asking the real questions.

[frakes]

most relatable character ➣ Julian Bashir STAR TREK: DEEP SPACE NINE (1993-1999)