Okay, that’s fair enough. But in my view Jacob is particularly adept at coming in here and making these ponderous observations that appear to be intellectually weighty, but only [in my view] up in the clouds of abstraction.
I still have no idea how VO might relate to the manner in which I construe the values that individuals acquire over the course of actually living their lives. Let alone how that relates to something instead of nothing or the debate that swirls around dualism and human autonomy.
And now this from him: “All that is definitive is the ring of power.”
Right.
But what do you mean by impossible here? There are clearly things that are in fact possible in regard to human interactions. Things that we can agree are true for all of us.
And while we do not appear capable of linking our own narratives to an understanding of existence itself, that never stops folks interested in philosophy from giving it their best shot. And do we ever really know which members here might be thinking about all this in a way that never really occured to us? Besides, if it stops being of interest to someone, they can always just cease and desist from coming here.
Again, this might be an extraordinary insight. But I have absolutely no idea what “on earth” it means. Though, sure, if that part is of little or no interest to you, you can always find others here who are willing to trade “technically sophisticated” “general description” “scholastic assessments” with you.
But it always just seems to be so much mental masturbation to me. A ceaseless attempt to coincide conflicting renditions of “definitional logic” so that everyone is at least absolutely certain that they agree on what the words mean.
Will Durant’s “epistemologists” in other words.
What I am is someone who is interested in taking observations like this out into the world of actual social, political and economic interactions. And then in exploring how “for all practical purposes” they are relevant to the lives that we live.
[b]What on earth do you suppose the evolution of human speech and language is really all about? In other words, what is it that speech and language is intended to communicate?
First of course words that facilitate our actual subsistence itself. We can’t be philosophers unless and until we are able feed ourselves, shelter ourselves, defend ourselves, reproduce ourselves.
And then words that sustain all the things that we are able to want.
Only after all that can the very few focus on those words that revolve around what we call “the big questions” in philosophy.[/b]
The stuff that is the aim of this thread.
So, what I do is attempt to connect the dots between what we think we know about the nature of human speech and language, about the “big questions”, and how that might be relevant to the behaviors that we choose in the course of living our lives.
As that relates to the question, “how ought one to live”?