Geez; where have ya’ll been for the past few centuries? Or for the past 30?
(18th Century)
Kant: “I have found it necessary to deny knowledge, in order to make room for faith”
Man possesses 2 perspectives: the perspective of fact (Phenomenol) & the perspective of “pure reason” sans fact (Nounmenal). The first is based on the senses; the second is derived from truths achieved thru the imagination.
Hume: The analytic-synthetic dichotomy, i.e., the is-ought divide. Facts are objective, values (which derive from facts, btw) are not.
Cause & effect are mere probability, not certainty.
Etc.
All of which are, essentially, derived from Plato’s *primacy of consciousness* philosophy (the mind creates reality).
The two philosophers who stand alone against 3,000 years of primacy of consciousness philosophies, in one variant or another, stand alone for a primacy of existence philosophy (“Reality is identity; consciousness is identification.”): Aristotle & Ayn Rand.
This age’s resultant enshrinement of subjectivism is merely the product of centuries old philosophical thought that 99% of the people have come to accept as true. (Irony can be pretty ironic, can it not?)
What has caused this degeneration in Western epistemology–even after Plato was (partially)refuted by his student and, later, completely refuted by Rand? The wholesale, unquestioning acceptance by men of the ethics of sacrifice.
What? You didn’t think self-sacrifice referred to sacrificing one’s reason (and thus the truth) for the sake of the weak (with the weakest among us being the bovine; the lazy; the criminal; the tyrannical–the men without any self)?
That SELF-sacrifice doesn’t require jettisoning one’s mind (reason, judgment, integrity, honesty) and, with it, the truth if the facts condemn, rather than commend, the weak?
Lies, hatred, dictatorship, nihilism (i.e., emotionalism) for the sake of the weak.
Silly rabbits. Don’t you know that rason, facts and truth are the first thing that *must* be sacrificed?
But all that’s theory and philosophy and just a waste of time–or just for 2am bull sessions in the dorm bathroom.
Right.
