/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.13964517]

Is Christian philosophy the purest form of philosophy?

[Anonymous No.13964534]

>>13964517

Help Christpill me on some good, wholesome philosophy books that teach me about life.

[Anonymous No.13964545]

bump

[Anonymous No.13964595]

Yes, I honestly don't think Aquinas can be beaten.

My recommendations in order of less to more difficult:

-The Last Superstition
-Aquinas (A Beginner's Guide)
-Scholastic Metaphysics

All by Ed Feser

[emonationalist !!HxQhKkNYVzK No.13964602]

I would think animist natural philosophy is the purest.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Thales

[Anonymous No.13964637]

>>13964517
Define pure as it pertains to this topic and this discussion.

[Anonymous No.13964646]

no, it's a hobbled form trying to conform independent thought with dogma.

[Anonymous No.13964655]

>>13964595
lmfao

[Anonymous No.13964658]

>>13964637


>enlightened tier
Plato, Proclus, Plotinus, Iamblichus, Augustine, Dionysius, Epictetus, Aurelius, Seneca, Pythagoras, Parmenides, Empedocles, Zeno, Lao Tzu, Zhuangzi, Patanjal, Buddha, Christ, Hermes, Sankara, Nagarjuna, Eckhart, Blake, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, Husserl, Heidegger, Gadamer, Benjamin, Kuhn, Feyrebrand, Jung, Eliade, Sloterdjik

>devil tier
Heraclitus, Aristotle, Confucius, Nietzsche, Marx, Descartes, Hume, Kant, Darwin, Dawkins, Freud, Aquinas, Machiavelli, Zizek, Badiou, Deleuze, Derrida, Camus, Sartre, Laruelle, Land, Negarestani, Voltaire, Beauvoir, Foucault, Russell, Popper, Chomsky

[Anonymous No.13964868]

>>13964658
but those are examples, not a definition

[Anonymous No.13964888]

>>13964868
care to extrapolate?

[Anonymous No.13965052]

>>13964534
With ever-increasing popularity of conjectures about a "final" theory (usually assuming some form of purely-scientific, materialist, reductive notions) that explains all fundamental questions, it might be necessary to remind ourselves that such a framework cannot yield meaning. To be blunt, there is a rather giant leap of faith necessary to conclude that a framework containing those notions could ever explain anything existentially meaningful (why is there something rather than nothing, why are we here and other such questions that are usually categorized as fundamental). Such a framework can only describe what we will call the "mechanics" of matter (a potential response might be: that is all there is to begin with, which is a point we will tackle later on). Intuitively, this seems rather obvious. You can understand the mechanics of a sheet of ice with stripes painted on it in exceptional technical detail, but you can't deduct that it is used to play ice-hockey from that. It takes consciousness to both impart on as well as interpret meaning from the sheet of ice. So our first point is that participatory consciousness is necessary to give rise to meaning or interpretation.

[Anonymous No.13965060]

>>13965052
Our second point is that belief is at the root of any explanatory interpretation when it comes to fundamental questions. That is, how we conceive of the world is in the first instance derived from belief. Here we can return to the objection that it is not even necessary to propose anything outside of a "mechanical" conception, because there is nothing that functions or exists outside of that and that consciousness itself (and its operations) can be explained within that framework. Indeed, if one subscribes to that kind of conception, this is a necessary step to take in order to explain consciousness. So meaning has no real role, outside of being a peculiar artefact of neurons, elementary particles etc. We can develop this line of reasoning right to to the very start, to the Big Bang or whatever the first instance is in a given model. However, a question that arises here is: Why is this point the first instance? Once we reach the boundary of a given model, we are talking about axioms that cannot be conclusively proven from inside the model. So the decision to uphold those axioms is an action taken on belief rather than evidence. But let us suppose the answer to that objection is to admit the objection, but claim that the evidence then suggests those axioms are better verified by our theory when compared to a different model (let's say Christian theology) and that it is this that forms or perhaps re-inforces the belief. That is, that the "mechanistic" conception is better reinforced by evidence than Christian theology is, even if both share the property of ultimately being a belief. But this line of reasoning, that it is "better" is problematic because both the definition of "betterness" and the method to obtain the results are pre-supposed precisely by the axioms one chooses. And this choice cannot be relegated purely to a line of reasoning, a commitment to a certain kind of evidence etc. because even those concepts and how we choose them are also already "contaminated" by our axiomatic assumptions. No matter how many layers we insert, we arrive at the boundary of the framework where things have to be just chosen with no other "ways out" to delegate the decision to. This means that it is absolutely necessary that this choice/decision involves our personal will. It is precisely here that free will obviously resides. Paradoxically, it is possible only from freely chosen axioms to then extrapolate models that deny free will.

[Anonymous No.13965065]

>>13964517
>>>/his/ wrong board retard

[Anonymous No.13965070]

>>13965060
Of course, we know that evidence is relevant in scientific method, in finding out certain facts about how our world works etc. It is far from the intention here to devalue that process. Instead, the danger in contemporary thought has been to generalize a tool that works in certain conditions to situations it cannot apply to, in effect extending a notion that sits positioned in a certain framework beyond its limits. Of course it is possible to construct meaning by applying just about any conception to everything and deriving answers to fundamental questions from it (including all the usual curveballs, like claiming there are no fundamental questions etc.). But when you generalize that far, when the interpretation cannot verify itself outside its own starting conditions which assume certain things to be true, you have to admit you're taking things on a certain degree of faith.

When you start talking about meaning and answers to fundamental questions you effectively have a Theory Of Everything (TOE). That is, if you want to fully explain everything there is, you obviously need a theory that can account for everything (TOE). In such a theory it is absolutely necessary that faith is involved as we will show. It's also prudent once again to point out a possible objection here. Someone might hold that it is nonsensical to talk about things in such a fundamental manner and that a TOE is not even necessary. This is an incoherent position because it involves certain axioms taken on faith that make this position viable (this will be demonstrated below, such a model has "prohibited questions " in order not to trespass its boundary where the boundary lies precisely at axiomatic faith-based assumptions). Within its bounds of interior logic, of course the model is coherent to claim this, but there is absolutely no reason to think a competing model with different axioms (also taken on faith) is unintelligible or should not be considered. The two are essentially the same in that both assume axioms taken on faith.

This is where Christianity really shines because in Christian theology, the model itself pre-supposes that faith is absolutely necessary. This is a critical fact that makes Christianity consistent. When you arrive at complete totality (all there is) you are moving into the category of faith by necessity, there can be no "outside" observer by definition. So the fact that Christianity has such a strong exhortation for faith and the fact that this isn't merely a concept without grounding (perhaps just a priestly call for followers as some might cynically argue) but the fact that it is an absolute logical necessity, is already a rather beautiful synchronicity. Even moreso when we consider some of the titles for God in what is effectively several thousand years old scripture (I Am that I Am....I am the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End) that also coincides with this logic.

[Anonymous No.13965076]

>>13965070
On the other hand, if one extrapolates something like a mechanistic conception we described earlier as being the best theory for meaning or fundamental questions (or lack thereof), you by necessity run into "prohibited" questions (an example would be the noted objection above that we should not even talk about fundamental questions or meaning, of course the key issue is what this prohibition hides: the faith-based assumption that everything there is comes strictly from elementary particles and from the "start" of the universe (provided it doesn't claim the universe is eternal, which doesn't change anything), other examples would be questions like: "why is there something rather than nothing" or "what caused the big bang " or "what caused the multiverse", we can run the sequence right down to the axiomatic faith-based assumptions whatever they might be) which are precisely those that expose the boundaries of the model where axioms were taken on faith or you run into such theories that implicitly require faith because they are by definition untestable under a mechanistic conception's own axioms (example: the multiverse as a scientific explanation). Such a model is inconsistent because a category that is by definition not admitted (faith) necessarily creeps into it when it tries to masquerade as a model that yields answers to (lack of/impossibility of) meaning and fundamental questions without admitting faith in its axioms. So such a system is obviously inconsistent/self-refuting when trying to answer questions or dealing with statements outside its domain. I believe we have proven that any model such as this cannot prove or disprove anything about fundamental questions (or the existence of fundamental questions themselves) we have as human beings. It can only suggest another way to look at the problem, however that renders it internally inconsistent, thus it's safe to say that it cannot carry any real explanatory truth as it relates to fundamental questions about meaning and existence.

This leads us to an apparent conclusion. Any claim to a "Theory of Everything" (theory that makes statements about meaning and our fundamental questions) NEEDS to have faith as one of its founding axioms. If it does not and still claims to be a TOE, it is in a position of inconsistency/self-refutation either by having prohibited questions (that reveal the position either isn't TOE as it claims (a true TOE does not have prohibited questions)) or the theory, despite following its axioms, extrapolates so far out (by necessity in order to yield statements a TOE has to give) that faith becomes implicitly obvious in its conjectures even if the position's axioms supposedly don't allow for that, which puts it into internal inconsistency with only two ways forward: Either it has to admit it isn't TOE or continue the TOE path but admit faith in completely the same way as theism does.

[Anonymous No.13965084]

>>13965076
Here another brilliant synchronicity emerges in Christianity. Namely that God is infinite. A true TOE cannot have a boundary. Because a boundary implies an inside and an outside. Thus any theory that is bound, breaks down in its consistency when the boundary is crossed. That is why the prohibited questions arise at the boundary, they are necessary to keep the theory consistent. But because in Christianity, God is infinite, it has yet another logical synchronicity. Of course this means that it cannot be conclusively proven in a way that a mechanistic model would consider valid (maybe short of a potential worldwide miracle changing everyone's interpretative faculties), but it is completely logically consistent as a TOE when accounting for faith (which is not only a necessary component in any such theory, but an explicit, key feature of Christianity as we mentioned). From there, one can extrapolate further out and speak about God's attributes, a believer's ability to know God (finite creature – infinite Creator), Divine Revelation etc. and notice that Christian theology stays entirely consistent and without tension in relation to the logical demands of a TOE as well as having uncanny synchronicities in Scripture with these logical facts. I will perhaps explore those further in another post.

Conclusions:

So what are the conclusions stemming from this stream of thought? Well, there might be more than one. If a theory doesn't admit it is based on faith and claims to explain fundamental questions about existence and meaning then it either extrapolates into untestability and infinity at which point it has to be taken on faith (with the advantage here going to theism since theism actually admits this off the bat as axiomatic), or prohibits certain questions at an arbitrary line, at which point it has to admit it has set that line in order to keep the system's axioms in place, with those axioms itself being arbitrary or the method by which they were selected being arbitrary. If one chooses to run this sequence as a causal chain, then it can be run backwards indefinitely until we arrive at a point where an assumption is made merely from our consciousness interacting with the environment (with those assumptions being different from one person to another, considering people tend to perceive things differently in their conscious experience) and it is that assumption that is then made essentially on faith.

[Anonymous No.13965090]

>>13965084
Thus the most obvious conclusion seems to be that all theories that claim to answer fundamental questions about existence and meaning are always necessarily based on faith. If a Theory Of Everything exists and it is true, it will necessarily not only have faith implicit in it, but will explicitly state it as necessary. While this was a very preliminary exploration (that could potentially be developed further to show even greater insights and nuance in Christian narrative), we can see that Christianity shows uncanny synchronicities with the logical conditions for a true Theory of Everything, this is moreso exacerbated by the testimony of Scripture written by people that could not predict modern developments in thought.

/ends philosophy
/ends materialism
/ends atheism
/ends cosmology

[Anonymous No.13965091]

>>13964517
It's the purest form of cope against the nihilism that naturally grows in the underprivileged.

[Anonymous No.13965105]

No but its the most Jewish one so if you're ready to throw your European heritage in the trash in favor of a subversive desert religion then go for it.

[Anonymous No.13965106]

There is no such thing as 'Christian' philosophy. The Bible rarely touches on metaphysics and is basically an exoteric corpse of ethics [that aren't even good] for the masses to engage in.

The purest form of philosophy is Advaita Vedanta and Neoplatonic thought. Christians can't even answer the problem of evil correctly.