/lit/ - Literature

>>12719708
I have read Antifragile thrice, Skin the Game twice, the Bed of Procrustes once and the first few pages of Black Swan. I have also paid attention to Taleb on twitter, have thoroughly meandered through his 'Philosophical Notebook' found on his website, and studied his physiognomy and presence in interviews and lectures found on Youtube.

My impression is that he is through and through a skeptic and a realist, and perhaps a bit of a prejudicial empiricist. The deepest he goes is in mathematics, the metaphysics of which, to my knowledge, he has never discussed, although he is concerned with the epistemological side, since he focuses on the relationship between science (which has an a priori ground) and the phenomenal world. In other words, he does not seem to be much concerned with why mathematics can make predictions, but he has an intuition for its scope and applicability. In my opinion he is very much a worldly man, interested in always having the edge in life (not a bad thing), which he would phrase as 'not being a sucker', but not a metaphysician or particularly religious, even seeming to be somewhat of a reductionist in religious, mystical, and moral matters. As such he is a tremendous therapeutic against speculation, bloviation, armchair philosophizing and so forth, but not a systematic philosopher, either in ethics, logic, or physics.

>>12609726
Truth, along with the whole of Western science, is a patriarchal tool of oppression, obviously, so going on about 'correctness' is tantamount to flaunting one's manhood about at everyone else's expense. That being said, Weininger can be studied (within the context of an incestuous academia) as a stark reflection of the bourgeoisie mentality of late 19th century Vienna. The crisis of manhood, recoiling from a threatening 'femininity' and 'Jewishness' which threatened to undermine traditional gender and social roles, defines the thought of this period, which desperately sought to affirm 'masculinity', obviously as a means to secure or rather reclaim its power over a changing mindset amongst the underclass which would take it into a more progressive era free from classist, racist, sexist power structures that have dominated the West since its inception.