Descartes and the 'Discourse on The Method' Today

Descartes was a professional mercenary and during an extended stay in Bavaria he had an opportunity to use a sauna a lot. Evidently it was a kind of stove that one could get in and bake during the colder winters of the time. In such a peaceful environment he naturally experienced a kind of detachment and could let his mind wander and settle back to first principles of thought.

So he wondered in that sauna how he could be certain of his existence. Without mind and its thought he would not exist. That is his existence would be as uniformed as that of a log or a stone. He encountered the problems of dynamic subjectivism-he thinks therefore he exists, yet the existence is a phenomenon itself and like the Zen scholar he would need to wonder if it means anything at all.

http://www.philosophypages.com/hy/4b.htm

Today the pragmatist side of popular political philosophy can sing that 'there is no such thing as the real world, I am invincible' and so forth. Jean Paul Sartre in Being and Nothingness takes Descartes' French rationalism and describes direct experience without making metaphysical judgments about it.

Sartre was a French rationalist describing the phenomenon of mind and thought. Science or knowledge is a product of thought and intelligence. Intellect has a foundation in mass and energy, and W.V.O. Quine too assented to mind within a framework of philosophical physicalism. That leaves the question of what matter is really comprised of aside. One rationalist tradition builds on Descartres' method of critical analysis.

One cannot organize knowledge, provide an easy way to find all the prime numbers to infinity or form good science without thought.

post-script on body-mind dualism

The context is that thought exists in addition to things physically experienced such as the body. 

There obviously are numerous philosophical opinions about the nature of reality that thought experiences. Roderick Chilsom wrote a nice little book named 'The Problem of the Criterion' the title of which encapsulates a little of the paradox of finding some ultimate thing to base reality upon. One has Lao Tzu's man or a butterfly and Bishop Berkley's Three Dialogues and also Membrane Theory with a potentially infinite number of dimensions of which a few are selected.

There isn't even an ultimate particle or field to base anything from, and so Christians and physicists tend to offer the same opinion that the eternal preceded the temporal in some form. It isn't necessary to get to bound down in the objects vs. mind paradigm since no one can say more than relatively what either/or are made of.

Vedral's book on reality as information akin to holograms I suppose that are entangled probabilities from a quantum field that isn't actually the Higgs Field is interesting. One cannot point to this or that cosmological theory or abnegation of exteriority and mass energy-for itself and base speculate persuasively that either the mind or matter are not actual.

I had a unusual experience a year ago with a balance and consciousness fade out at the same time. It was worse than sea-sickness (I had that a couple times when first I went out to sea) and generally I like to forget about it.

I wondered what caused the experience of my mind seaming to break up into quarter sections, spin and dissolve like going down a drain before I fell over to the left and nearly but not quite became unconscious before slowly recovering on the ground. I think I ate to many chocolate donuts and chocolate bars and that in some way I developed a chocolate toxic reaction. I quit eating chocolate for good and the problem went away. 

Yet chocolate may not have been to blame, for it turned out that I had an abscessed tooth that made a passage into my nasal cavity, and I think that is in some way connected to the eustachian tubes in the inner ear. These medical issues and a lung/airway issue that lasted a more than a year camping in Anchorage Alaska provided a little experience with the temporality of mind and its relation to the body. Certainly I am convinced that the mind is a nice experience reliant upon the body.

Keeping one's body and mind in good shape is a good idea.

On the Philosophy of Religion

Reading Paul Tillich's book 'What is Religion' recently brought a lot of new insights. Of course one can regard Heidegger and Husserl as phenomenologists searching for essents or primal cores of being, yet Tillich wrote that metaphysics is fundamentally a religious act.Tillich differentiated a greater physics of the unknown from the transcendent mysticism or metaphysics that one might find in' The Cloud of Unknowing' or even contemplations of monism as a manifestation of God.

The philosophy of religion is a philosophical activity-intensely so, and Tillich explains very well  how that is so. Jesus Christ as a transcendent human being is obviously philosophically relevant, since philosophers search for the truth in what exists. In some regards true religion is one with the deeper philosophical insights into reality. The cultural manifestations of religion in some instances have more in common with culture than with the mystic or rational philosophical insights that one may have.

One example is that of the great neo-Platonist named Plotinus who wrote the Enneads on The One. Like other neo-Platonists he had an awareness of the mystical heyschasm of direct insight into the nature of The One transcending experience. The Orthodox authorities of course eventually declared heyschasm to be heresy on the premise that one cannot have a direct revelation of God.

That is a different problem than the philosophy of religion of course. Yet I can imagine driving a car through Utah and suddenly experiencing a different Universe where the profound Spirit of Truth has a presence before descending back into the integrated beingness of 'this world'. That kind of experience could be described as direct revelation  yet possible not for The Spirit is a presence yet not directly perceived even in a paranormal space-time context that is itself something of a revelation something like Swedenborg might have described.

Tillich's delineation of the philosophy of religion in an ontology different from the critical-analytical paradigm for science, the phenomenalism of philosophers such as Hegel and  Kant and the pragmatists does afford the opportunity to select for-oneself the sort of worldview to develop. Well, there may be some danger in writing about Jesus Christ in a philosophical area I suppose-atheists can make their way into such places perhaps from the background of the pragmatist sect of secularists regarding thought as a temporal manifestation without significance except as it serves to perfect human existence. There were and are philosophers that are simply cognitive nominalists wiithout a trace of Platonism.

Philosophically minded people should tolerate opinions including mentions of Jesus Christ affirmatively even if they don't rise to the level of 'preaching'. It might have been fun to do some preaching as did Ralph Waldo Emerson part-time of course. That opportunity doesn't arise in the humble writings of some philosophers. One can consider the party line, the thought police, the C.P.S.U. caliber media or the cynics and discern existential modes of behavior that it is possible to be philosophical about, yet a philosophy of religion has a deeper human interest since it transcends our own grounds of existence as physics beings with a mind thinking in-the-world.

Democrat Party Ups Price of Membership to Abortion & Gay Marriage

Some wonder if the Democratic Party plans to make homosexual marriage a part of its official party platform is representative of a focus on social issues and litmus tests for support including homosexuality and abortion that make the party a limited tent, exclusive and unconcerned about economics that are inclusive of all American citizens.

http://www.thenewamerican.com/culture/family/item/12278-democrats-to-add-legalizing-same-sex-marriage-to-party-platform

If gender is a factor in economic planning, it would entail that there is something to differentiate from, and I would not myself say that all individuals of a sex have a uniform template for economic formulations.

President Obama has made a Cage aux Folles Hope-a-Dope economic method his economic modus vivendi: Build up the national debt to 21 trillion dollars using the put it on the charge card of the rich. A homosexual economist named John Maynard Keynes invented that policy after World War One when the rich ranks were decimated by war. Cambridge University students had about a 70% casualty rate. 

Do homosexuals have different secular interests from families? Would they have a greater interest in disposability, travel or oil consumption. Do they have different interests in providing for children or grandchildren, inheritence of currency or property than straight people? Are their attitudes toward illegally immigrating male aliens different than those of straight males? If so would that effect labor supply in the U.S.A.? Are homosexuals working in some industries more than others with a different participation rate than straight workers?

There may be gender effects in macro-economic theory. I know that homosexual marriage supporters take direct economic retributive actions now and then, as if they were an oppressive class themselves. velopment of economic policies. It is difficult to say how much the homosexual factor effects effects national economic development.  I only took an intro to sociology course and haven't been reading in ongoing research into the sociological distribution of U.S. homosexuals in economic fields.

Hitler, Reagan, Bush II and Obama have all used variants of Keynsianism. It's only a short-term fix and dumps long-range troubles that seem to be building up now.

The Obama administration has made homosexual marriage and support a fundametal feature of his administration. He gave nearly free health benefits to homosexual federal workers sex live-in partners, has celebrated gay pride day in the military, made homosexuality in the military an acceptable practice and so forth. The homosexual Barney Franks was in charge of the House Finance Committee for the first part of the Obama administration, and so these real facts become part of the problem about how to repair the nation's finances, and to understand how the administration and politicians in general can be so incompetent.

Ishango Bone of Zaire/Uganda and the Prime Numbers

 In 6500 B.C. someone evidently carved several prime numbers on a bone and it was discovered in 1960. Some speculate the bone may be as old as 20,000 b.c. It was found in Central Equatorial Africa along Lake Edward near the present Uganda-Zaire border. Lake Edward is one of the head-water sources of the Nile. One wonders if that isn't where Arthur C. Clark's real mathematically inclined humans where from carving prime numbers into a baboon femur.

 Obviously one wonders what happened to those early mathematical genius'. Did they wander to New York to become 11 dimensional quantitative stock traders or where they aliens that returned to the shining planet above the hill leaving only a grisly bone scratchpad toy from their hunting party?

 A prime number is any integer that cannot be made by multiplying two other numbers to form it. All numbers that are not prime can be made by multiplying prime numbers together. I suspect that all prime numbers if divided in half end up with a .5 on the end, yet not all numbers cut in half with a .5 portion are prime.

 http://www.math.buffalo.edu/mad/Ancient-Africa/ishango.

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishango_bone

 All numbers are proportions formed by adding one standard integer unit to the number before and forming the next higher number.  Positive whole numbers have different quantitative values in various reference frames.

 As numbers increase in size the difference of adding one more standard unit becomes a diminishing comparative value to preceding numbers. Adding 1 to 2 is large. Adding one to 100 is less significant to 100.

 One could imagine stretching a ribbon or line representing the number value from a point and then looping it back to the starting point. If one cuts that loop in half (divides the prime number in half) it should always have a value with .5 A possible defining characteristic yet not an exclusive one. There are numbers such as 15 that if cut in half have a .5 element (7.5), yet it is also possible to multiply 3 times 5 to get 15. A prime number cannot be multiplied by other numbers to generate it (with the obvious nominal representation of 1 times the prime number itself).

 Mathematicians have a better cultural tool kit to use for  finding prime numbers than I.

 Numbers growing into a spiral that extends infinitely might take different values retrospectively as relativistic effects stretch or compact the spiral-perhaps not equally everywhere on the spiral. One wonders if dark energy or gravity might not be a consequence of differentials of physics in structures that change space-time proportionately to primes.

 Prime number locations that would theoretically exist could be altered with the forces acting upon the spiral, and with recombination of local position values through extra-dimensional junctions.

 The subject of prime numbers and of the quest to solve the riddle of how mathematicians might solve Reimann's Hypothesis-a method to determine all of the prime numbers I suppose through algorithmic compresability (an abbreviated style) is the topic of a book I am presently reading called 'The Music of the Primes'. The uninteresting ideas I've advanced here except for the Ishango Bone mention aren't blamable on that text.

 What if gravity is shaped in relation to prime numbers. Gravitational field strengths could rise in relation to some subtle proportion that is dilated in space-time that it warps. It would be great if one could solve that sort of criterion for primes much less gravity yet it does stim one to think a little more.

 What if gravity, gravitons or gravity string quanta can only act in three or four dimensions and when piling up on the dimensional boundaries crimp up space-time warping it? Dimensions in some string and membrane conjectures are not all of the same size, so an inference can be advanced rightly or wrongly that some dimensions are porous to gravity and others not. If gravity warps up some dimensions of space-time yet not all, it might be possible to slip small enough data through to the extra dimensions should one want to send a message to Sally over there (if that is where Sally is).

I neglected to mention two salient salient facts about prime numbers.

 First; the number two is prime because of default. There isn't another number less than two amidst whole numbers that amounts to anything besides itself when multiplied by available whole numbers of those before two - one times one equals one. So two is the sole even number that is prime. It's a prestigious title for that humble number to wear-the only even prime amidst an infinite number of oddballs.

 Well, enough trash talking of two.

The second fact I didn't mention is that there is a million dollar bounty on solving the Riemann Hypothesis with a proof. It is one of the seven Clay Millennium math prizes the solutions of which are worth $1 million dollars apiece.

Stimulated a little by the prospect of winning a million can bring creative ideas. Non-mathematicians such as myself might find it simpler to visualize possible solutions to the Riemann hypothesis instead of calculating them.

I guess one could imagine the infinite series of whole numbers being in descending rather than an ascending order. Consider numbers starting at a zero ring level attached and increasing down an infinite line into an abyss. Maybe the ring has an infinite number of lines descending from it along the edge with vast intervals between them so they won't get tangled with experimental configurations or instructions given to each line to direct its shape.

In the first line hanging from the ring each at every prime number except for two (that will be treated as non-prime for practical reasons) instructions are given to the line to make a turn in some direction in proportion to the percent of change the prime number makes from the prior number to the value of the line total at its point.

That sort of schematic might make a nice pattern. With an infinite number of lines with prime numbers known extending to some computer-friendly extent that is finite, and with those lines given different instructions for changing course when reaching a prime it might be possible to effect quantitative analysis of the lines and perhaps find a pattern indicating a value predicting the location of primes in the future like Jack Ryan predicted Capt. Remus' turns in 'Hunt for Red October'.

Jesus had 12 disciples to start; yet one was pre-destined for betrayal so He was left with the prime number of eleven. Some might say that The Lord and Judas Iscariot needed to be included as the original number of associated religious practitioners; even so that number is also prime at 13.

The 0 ring of prime number series might have line intervals based on the first prime's 50% quantitative value increase for the whole line a that point, instead of placing the lines at the location of respective primes. It could be that if prime numbers are used as locations for place whole number lines into the abyss they will grow to close together along the circle and cramp infinite spacing soon crossing over into the realm of irrational numbers behind a decimal point with their own significance for finding the proof for the Riemann hypothesis.

Obama's Cage aux Folles, Hope-a-Dope Economic Plan

Since the first homosexual economist invented deficit spending of the assets of the rich to stimulate an economy-John Maynard Keynes following the First World War that practice has been a popular method of last resort in the West. Adolph Hitler, Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush and Barrack Obama have all followed that line. It is effective only as a short-term strategy though, and the President's plan to charge government ops to 21 trillion dollars if re-elected seems bad.

Federal Reserve buying up Federal bonds simply runs the printing press. That can lead to inflation or a dumping of dollars in exchange for the Yuan or Yen-even the Euro as a last resort. At some point it would be necessary to raise taxes to pay down the debt concurrent with austerity measures.

Obama economic planners seem to use old style classical economic premises in a post-modern new world order of global financial redistribution from nations to collective corporate private interests.  The President had the opportunity to let the Bush II tax cuts expire in 2010 and rebuild a better tax structure for the time from the ground up and demurred to be a cheerleader for their renewal when the chips were down.

The European Central Bank has about 900 billion dollars in deposits made by European banks. It pays no interest yet is a safe place for large banks to keep their cash. It does lend to banks in Europe at low rates. There is very little inter-bank direct lending as in the U.S.A. These banks and their funds managers are speculators with super-computers waiting to snap up anything profitable that moves. U.S. Government economic managers need to take into account the new world order of global bank skimming in provisioning for an American economy beyond food stamps and fruit loops.

In some portraits of the logical economic future of the new world financial order planetary wealth is concentrated in networks of corporate investors that move away from the renter class with a Fibbonacci progression prowess.  Global corporate networks merge as a planetary Kudzu species overrunning non-corporate private investment. Capitalism is then effectively dead.

A reformation of capitalism limiting the growth of networks of banks and business and promoting small and medium size business through taxation would redistribute enterprise opportunity to the creative and un-co-opted remnants of free enterprisers not free-riding corporate share-holding power in a planetary collective as oppressive as anything as the aristocracy of the 18th century Adam Smith sought liberation from.

Paul Tillich and The Philosophy of Religion; Problems of Dynamic Subjectivism

Paul Tillich's 1925 essays on religion and the philosophy of religion are worthwhile reading for those that progress in philosophical readings along a normal course of classical and 20th century philosophy inclusive of linguistic and analytical thought. It is implicitly contradictory for the dynamic subjectivists to posit anything objectively meaningful about an experience they regard as fiction.

With that 20th century course of philosophical development one moves from the Frege, Russell and Vienna Circle to empiricism and the post-empiricism of Quine, Strawson, Kripke and others. Early on there was a rival school of thought such as Dewey represented that Tillich could regard as the pragmatic school of thought. Deweian pragmatism is quite different than that of Charles S. Pierce.

Tillich was able to associate various worldviews of religion into three primary ontological paradigms all of which were somewhat exclusive of the others. The critical analytic world-view included science and was empirical, the phenomenological sought the essences things-perhaps more of a Platonic direction, and the pragmatic had what is for the purpose of this brief essay the most interesting point of view.

Today one finds the pragmatic point of view-also known as dynamic subjectivism to be a common populist-elitist party belief. The belief is those concepts are fundamentally meaningless manifestations of human beingness with no transcending value. Though ideas or words and objects may correlate meaningfully, that correlation is entirely a result of ontological relativism in which words and meanings assigned by usage are coincidental. The dynamic subjectivist point of view is that there are no truths of a Platonic sort and is of course irreligious.

Yet dynamic subjectivism can regard all human though and experience as a kind of fiction-even religious beliefs are regarded as fictions of human construction equivalent to every other concept made by human beings. Those concepts are valued for their utility rather than for potentially apprehending some kind of a mystic, transcendental or self-standing truth for-itself.

Tillich wrote that the pragmatists seek to strengthen human experience and circumstance, yet since they believe human concepts are entirely fictions they also believe that perpetual change of thought content is good in-itself if it has some pragmatic value for making the human circumstance better. Of course the values of good, evil or better are entirely subjective and fictitious too. One could not develop a good theory of utilitarianism on the foundation of dynamic subjectivism.

So I suppose I should write something about the phenomenology that Tillich describes. Beyond superficial descriptions of things-for-themselves the phenomenologists pursue the essents that support being. The neo-Platonist philosopher Plotinus took that sort of approach I think, yet Tillich was reading considering Husserl and Heidegger perhaps as much.

Contemporary quantum mechanics makes it easier to consider the essents or particle fields that make up things like automobiles and eagles then in 1925. Leibniz' spiritual monads are another approach to describing the essence of things, yet for Tillich I believe another course existed-that of meta-logic and the investigation of meaning in reality.

Reality-meaning would be something different from the critical-analytical, phenomenological or pragmatic weltanschauungs (world views). Though many on the pragmatists develop from a critical analytic background, they leave that off to pursue their epistemological Zen of meaninglessness. That subjective epistemology choice is self-limiting.

One cannot be satisfied with the ideology that there is no such thing as the real world and that we must rise above it. The human experience of the world is temporal and with much potential for philosophical development-even beyond this Universe, and that is what are religious faith is about; faith in Jesus Christ the way to the Unconditional.

-- Updated August 1st, 2012, 1:16 pm to add the following --

Paul Tillich's 1925 essays on religion and the philosophy of religion are worthwhile reading for those that progress in philosophical readings along a normal course of classical and 20th century philosophy inclusive of linguistic and analytical thought. It is implicitly contradictory for the dynamic subjectivists to posit anything objectively meaningful about an experience they regard as fiction.

With that 20th century course of philosophical development one moves from the Frege, Russell and Vienna Circle to empiricism and the post-empiricism of Quine, Strawson, Kripke and others. Early on there was a rival school of thought such as Dewey represented that Tillich could regard as the pragmatic school of thought. Deweian pragmatism is quite different than that of Charles S. Pierce.

Tillich was able to associate various worldviews of religion into three primary ontological paradigms all of which were somewhat exclusive of the others. The critical analytic world-view included science and was empirical, the phenomenological sought the essences things-perhaps more of a Platonic direction, and the pragmatic had what is for the purpose of this brief essay the most interesting point of view.

Today one finds the pragmatic point of view-also known as dynamic subjectivism to be a common populist-elitist party belief. The belief is those concepts are fundamentally meaningless manifestations of human beingness with no transcending value. Though ideas or words and objects may correlate meaningfully, that correlation is entirely a result of ontological relativism in which words and meanings assigned by usage are coincidental. The dynamic subjectivist point of view is that there are no truths of a Platonic sort and is of course irreligious.

Yet dynamic subjectivism can regard all human though and experience as a kind of fiction-even religious beliefs are regarded as fictions of human construction equivalent to every other concept made by human beings. Those concepts are valued for their utility rather than for potentially apprehending some kind of a mystic, transcendental or self-standing truth for-itself.

Tillich wrote that the pragmatists seek to strengthen human experience and circumstance, yet since they believe human concepts are entirely fictions they also believe that perpetual change of thought content is good in-itself if it has some pragmatic value for making the human circumstance better. Of course the values of good, evil or better are entirely subjective and fictitious too. One could not develop a good theory of utilitarianism on the foundation of dynamic subjectivism.

So I suppose I should write something about the phenomenology that Tillich describes. Beyond superficial descriptions of things-for-themselves the phenomenologists pursue the essents that support being. The neo-Platonist philosopher Plotinus took that sort of approach I think, yet Tillich was reading considering Husserl and Heidegger perhaps as much.

Contemporary quantum mechanics makes it easier to consider the essents or particle fields that make up things like automobiles and eagles then in 1925. Leibniz' spiritual monads are another approach to describing the essence of things, yet for Tillich I believe another course existed-that of meta-logic and the investigation of meaning in reality.

Reality-meaning would be something different from the critical-analytical, phenomenological or pragmatic weltanschauungs (world views). Though many on the pragmatists develop from a critical analytic background, they leave that off to pursue their epistemological Zen of meaninglessness. That subjective epistemology choice is self-limiting.

One cannot be satisfied with the ideology that there is no such thing as the real world and that we must rise above it. The human experience of the world is temporal and with much potential for philosophical development-even beyond this Universe, and that is what are religious faith is about; faith in Jesus Christ the way to the Unconditional.

-- Updated August 1st, 2012, 1:16 pm to add the following --

Paul Tillich's 1925 essays on religion and the philosophy of religion are worthwhile reading for those that progress in philosophical readings along a normal course of classical and 20th century philosophy inclusive of linguistic and analytical thought. It is implicitly contradictory for the dynamic subjectivists to posit anything objectively meaningful about an experience they regard as fiction.

With that 20th century course of philosophical development one moves from the Frege, Russell and Vienna Circle to empiricism and the post-empiricism of Quine, Strawson, Kripke and others. Early on there was a rival school of thought such as Dewey represented that Tillich could regard as the pragmatic school of thought. Deweian pragmatism is quite different than that of Charles S. Pierce.

Tillich was able to associate various worldviews of religion into three primary ontological paradigms all of which were somewhat exclusive of the others. The critical analytic world-view included science and was empirical, the phenomenological sought the essences things-perhaps more of a Platonic direction, and the pragmatic had what is for the purpose of this brief essay the most interesting point of view.

Today one finds the pragmatic point of view-also known as dynamic subjectivism to be a common populist-elitist party belief. The belief is those concepts are fundamentally meaningless manifestations of human beingness with no transcending value. Though ideas or words and objects may correlate meaningfully, that correlation is entirely a result of ontological relativism in which words and meanings assigned by usage are coincidental. The dynamic subjectivist point of view is that there are no truths of a Platonic sort and is of course irreligious.

Yet dynamic subjectivism can regard all human though and experience as a kind of fiction-even religious beliefs are regarded as fictions of human construction equivalent to every other concept made by human beings. Those concepts are valued for their utility rather than for potentially apprehending some kind of a mystic, transcendental or self-standing truth for-itself.

Tillich wrote that the pragmatists seek to strengthen human experience and circumstance, yet since they believe human concepts are entirely fictions they also believe that perpetual change of thought content is good in-itself if it has some pragmatic value for making the human circumstance better. Of course the values of good, evil or better are entirely subjective and fictitious too. One could not develop a good theory of utilitarianism on the foundation of dynamic subjectivism.

So I suppose I should write something about the phenomenology that Tillich describes. Beyond superficial descriptions of things-for-themselves the phenomenologists pursue the essents that support being. The neo-Platonist philosopher Plotinus took that sort of approach I think, yet Tillich was reading considering Husserl and Heidegger perhaps as much.

Contemporary quantum mechanics makes it easier to consider the essents or particle fields that make up things like automobiles and eagles then in 1925. Leibniz' spiritual monads are another approach to describing the essence of things, yet for Tillich I believe another course existed-that of meta-logic and the investigation of meaning in reality.

Reality-meaning would be something different from the critical-analytical, phenomenological or pragmatic weltanschauungs (world views). Though many on the pragmatists develop from a critical analytic background, they leave that off to pursue their epistemological Zen of meaninglessness. That subjective epistemology choice is self-limiting.

One cannot be satisfied with the ideology that there is no such thing as the real world and that we must rise above it. The human experience of the world is temporal and with much potential for philosophical development-even beyond this Universe, and that is what are religious faith is about; faith in Jesus Christ the way to the Unconditional.

-- Updated August 1st, 2012, 1:16 pm to add the following --

Paul Tillich's 1925 essays on religion and the philosophy of religion are worthwhile reading for those that progress in philosophical readings along a normal course of classical and 20th century philosophy inclusive of linguistic and analytical thought. It is implicitly contradictory for the dynamic subjectivists to posit anything objectively meaningful about an experience they regard as fiction.

With that 20th century course of philosophical development one moves from the Frege, Russell and Vienna Circle to empiricism and the post-empiricism of Quine, Strawson, Kripke and others. Early on there was a rival school of thought such as Dewey represented that Tillich could regard as the pragmatic school of thought. Deweian pragmatism is quite different than that of Charles S. Pierce.

Tillich was able to associate various worldviews of religion into three primary ontological paradigms all of which were somewhat exclusive of the others. The critical analytic world-view included science and was empirical, the phenomenological sought the essences things-perhaps more of a Platonic direction, and the pragmatic had what is for the purpose of this brief essay the most interesting point of view.

Today one finds the pragmatic point of view-also known as dynamic subjectivism to be a common populist-elitist party belief. The belief is those concepts are fundamentally meaningless manifestations of human beingness with no transcending value. Though ideas or words and objects may correlate meaningfully, that correlation is entirely a result of ontological relativism in which words and meanings assigned by usage are coincidental. The dynamic subjectivist point of view is that there are no truths of a Platonic sort and is of course irreligious.

Yet dynamic subjectivism can regard all human though and experience as a kind of fiction-even religious beliefs are regarded as fictions of human construction equivalent to every other concept made by human beings. Those concepts are valued for their utility rather than for potentially apprehending some kind of a mystic, transcendental or self-standing truth for-itself.

Tillich wrote that the pragmatists seek to strengthen human experience and circumstance, yet since they believe human concepts are entirely fictions they also believe that perpetual change of thought content is good in-itself if it has some pragmatic value for making the human circumstance better. Of course the values of good, evil or better are entirely subjective and fictitious too. One could not develop a good theory of utilitarianism on the foundation of dynamic subjectivism.

So I suppose I should write something about the phenomenology that Tillich describes. Beyond superficial descriptions of things-for-themselves the phenomenologists pursue the essents that support being. The neo-Platonist philosopher Plotinus took that sort of approach I think, yet Tillich was reading considering Husserl and Heidegger perhaps as much.

Contemporary quantum mechanics makes it easier to consider the essents or particle fields that make up things like automobiles and eagles then in 1925. Leibniz' spiritual monads are another approach to describing the essence of things, yet for Tillich I believe another course existed-that of meta-logic and the investigation of meaning in reality.

Reality-meaning would be something different from the critical-analytical, phenomenological or pragmatic weltanschauungs (world views). Though many on the pragmatists develop from a critical analytic background, they leave that off to pursue their epistemological Zen of meaninglessness. That subjective epistemology choice is self-limiting.

One cannot be satisfied with the ideology that there is no such thing as the real world and that we must rise above it. The human experience of the world is temporal and with much potential for philosophical development-even beyond this Universe, and that is what are religious faith is about; faith in Jesus Christ the way to the Unconditional.

'Hate' Just Means Saying Things Stink

The word 'hate' and odor share a common etymology. In latin the word odorem meant 'smell' and the word 'odi' meant 'hate' or 'no love here'.  The expression of the word hate was an existential cognizance that something smelled bad. The Democrats have tried to overcome the human immune defense mechanisms that recognize putrid, wicked things.

Politically the desire to make people love things they should hate is a perennial wish of autocrats and authoritarians. An effort to bend language usage and proscribe it to force subjects to support policy they should hate has been a modern political practice. Orwell's 1984 was the best expositor of the 'war is peace' procedures.

The 2012 election is the most devisive, racist and Chicago-politics campaign I recollect. Instead of competent economic and ecosphere debate their isn't much beside personal attacks by the Democrat party on individuals. One might hate the 2012 Democratic campaign tactics with attacks on Mr. Romney through the media. NPR seems a leftist radio rag on its coverage of Mr. Romney's journey to Europe. He did not get the Mickey Mouse kid gloves treatment of Barrack Obama the candidate, and if elected the Nobel Committee probably won't give him a Nobel Peace prize before he can stimulate wars in Africa and the Middle East.

Like Hitler's homosexual led S.A. the Obama homosexual team transforming the Democrat Party into a homosexual marriage perennial attack on resistors brings a detraction from traditional values. That distraction from rational economic and environmental reforms to make the nation some sort of a Leninist dystopia with authoritarian, homosexual slum lords isn't a good way to go.

http://wordinfo.info/units/index/O/page:

: