/lit/ - Literature

>>18191161
>a biological critique of jews
The Culture of Critique

>>17827285
>Aren't Natural Kinds already supposed to 'carve nature at its joints'? And Laws of Nature?
Natural kinds are sometimes regimented as universals (Armstrong) or as perfectly natural properties that turn out to be natural sets (Lewis), and then natural laws have to be presented somewhat in terms of the natural predicates (and whatever their metaphysical correlates are). Both of those approaches are ontological. And Sider wants to say that quantifiers, logical connectives, etc also carve at the joints: he wants to go beyond the predicate. He also thinks we'll fail if we just treat those under a predicate regimentation, and doesn't want to treat natural predicates in turn under an ontological regimentation.
>Or is he just a Realist about ontological categories like these (ie. there really is a property blue, relations like identity, ontological tense, etc., in the world which our categories range over), and that's what he calls 'structure'?
He is a realist about things like that but he doesn't want to be ontologically minded about it (see above)
>i'm not entirely sure what you mean by worldly but not ontological.
That's what's so wild about the book really. At first sight it looks conceptually incoherent or hard to accept at least, but if he's right then he's on to something really major. Even if he's wrong it's informative.

>>17799865
it’s called getting cancelled now

>>17068078
You can prove there were no Dark Ages when you realize that technologically Western Europe was literally on par with Eastern Europe and the Middle East and the rest of the world the whole time. Now of course they didn't have gunpowder and what not, so I understand that. And of course they didn't have a lot of old classics translated and of course they had a pretty shitty idea of how to even do science, they avoided carrying out experiments and observation practically on purpose. But they barely regressed technologically or scientifically. The 'Dark Ages' were more like a very big slowing down of progress. And even though there was progress in other parts of the worlds, a lot of that was basically in glorified nerd clubs. It wasn't really leaving those areas. The Chinese were making rockets for fun and the Islamic scholars lived in a university in Baghdad and when they got wiped out by Mongols their whole society was fucked because it was that much centered on a specific pocket location of the civilization. The Europeans began building universities before and better than anyone else while the Middle Ages were still going on, in the 11th century forward. If anything, that's what's most responsible for stirring in the Europeans an eventual interest in the knowledge possessed by the Muslims and the Greeks. That's why Aquinas was reading Averroes and via Averroes, Aristotle, in the 1200s. European university culture is responsible for taking Europe out of its mediocrity and forward. And that was decidedly engineered by Europeans, actually sponsored by the state and beloved and so forth. Those despotist empires of the East were so authoritarian and volatile that despite geniuses existing in them, their fates would often amount to little, except insofar as their knowledge was actually taken seriously by Europeans who gradually surpassed them. The Medieval Christian spirit was directly responsible for the start of universities. You should blame feudalism for the dark ages more than either Christianity or the Germanic barbarians. Feudalism was already beginning in Rome, this whole idea of people up top giving graces to their best men in the form of land grants and expectation that they would return the favor with service. That, more than anything, is what led to Europe's intellectual decline, but it ironically led to its gradual rise, because the decentralization of Europe in the long run made it better than the volatile-but-somehow-also-static despotic regimes of the East.

Philosophy has no practical application in real life situations and is therefore useless. You can use something you learned in a book of law in a courtroom, but you can't win a trial by discussing the meaning of Truth. Philosophyfags have no right to look down on anyone.

>>12585065
>he fell for STEM meme