Tigmafuzz
is a Wild Rose Rebel
¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Are you German?

Indeed I am!

Sorry I quoted and then summarized the rest.

here

Oh yeah - either the problem is not being able to marry objectivism with subjectivism or that it was because we're simply incapable of understanding it. Look at page 12 (or read the whole thing and then respond to page 12)

whee

good enough. You mentioned the saddle shape. wtf @ that

Wait you said philosophy. I have something on hand. I asked a bunch of my intellectual superiors and peers and they just called me a crazy asian:

Imagine that Aristotle, as he's walking around the Lyceum, encounters a time-warp and pops forward to today, on a well-known campus somewhere in some English-speaking country, with the ability to speak English, dressed in modern garb, and that he doesn't become deranged as a result of this. Curious about the state of knowledge, he finds a physics lecture and sits in. What he hears shocks him. A feather and an iron ball fall at the same rate in a vacuum; being heavier doesn't mean falling faster, something he doesn't understand.

Aristotle along with the rest of the class is shown the experimental verification of this from the moon (from the moon?!?!?) performed by Commander David Scott of Apollo 15. The very same equations (equations?!?!?) that explain why an apple falls to the ground explain how the moon stays in orbit around Earth and how Earth stays in orbit around the sun (orbits?!?!?). He learns of quantum mechanics strangenesses. The more he hears, the more shocked he gets. Finally, he just faints away. He faints away again in cosmology class where he learns, for starters, that comets and meteors, and the Milky Way are not atmospheric phenomena, as he concluded. The Big Bang, relativity, the size of the universe, the number of galaxies, dark matter, and dark energy...are too much for him. In biology class, he learns that a living thing's potential, its matter, is not at all explanatory, as he thought, but instead learns of genetics and developmental biology.

He also learns that his idea of spontaneous generation is just plain wrong -- not even close to being correct. He learns of evolution and the discovery that all of life on Earth is related. As the class continues, he again faints dead away.

There's two takeaways here. The first is that Aristotle cannot hope to just understand science and physics. The second is that we have no problem accepting that he can understand our most complex philosophical ideas (at least once they are explained). The argument posited by the essay is that philosophy is incapable of going forward - we can only adjust philosophy to do two things: keep up with our metaphors, and um...nothing else. The alternative is that the solutions for our philosophical issues are unsolvable by our own minds. For example if an alien who can easily understand and refute our philosophies tried to explain it to us, we would not understand it.


Now I have to say something PGish. So asl ?

Checked and fixed, hopefully. Let me know if it's all okay now.

so you wouldn't answer me? D:

astrophysics eh? So if I asked you what the shape of the universe was..../is....

GC is a hack. and dead.