/lit/ - Literature

Continental philosophy
>What is a tree? Is there an abstract "treeness" like the old Aristotelian etiology or Platonic metaphysics? Or is it just some kind of base set of elements, or "matter," obeying laws? If that's the case, what are the laws? Are they abstracts? What is the non-material ground of matter? Or is matter somehow self-grounding? Even more importantly, how is it even possible for us to be certain in our judgments about any of these things? Can we ever be certain? Can we even know things about the world? Who's to say there isn't a real nature out there, whether it's abstract "treeness" or some kind of base essence of matter and cosmological laws, except it's the nature of consciousness not to be able to know those essences and laws? Are we locked into our experience of the world, which pre-theoretically "makes sense" to us, only to be irritated any time we try to look beyond that pre-theoretical experience and really KNOW things? But how does that make any sense? Surely not everything can be subjective and "social," can it? The basic of the subjective must be the objective; or maybe a unity of the two that is higher than both? Maybe one way to know the "outside" is by better understanding the "inside," since both spring from the same source; yet a lot of philosophers are pessimistic about this, and think we are trapped in language. It's like we're right back where the Greeks started.. How are we to live in a world where we can't even get a firm footing on what it means to "be?"

Analytic philosophy
>◇ ∃p ≡ q{d~p} ∀m ⊢q∥~p ⊃ d p ⊧ ~p ∄ p
>∴ Matter is material.
>Ergo, mid-20th century market liberalism is objectively correct, as is every conception, ca. 1965 in Oxbridge, UK, of the ideas and culture of all past and future civilizations. Read John Rawls and John Locke every day. Ethics was solved by the Bloomsbury circle.

>>15590555
Analytic philosophy
>◇ ∃p ≡ q{d~p} ∀m ⊢q∥~p ⊃ d p ⊧ ~p ∄ p
>∴ Matter is material.
>Ergo, mid-20th century market liberalism is objectively correct, as is every conception, ca. 1965 in Oxbridge, UK, of the ideas and culture of all past and future civilizations. Read John Rawls and John Locke every day. Ethics was solved by the Bloomsbury circle.