Philosophy is a dog chasing its tail.

You know Lausten I don’t mean to be a jerk just for the sake of being a jerk. After all, it isn’t like my mind hasn’t been in an intellectual “philosophical” struggle with the basic questions from my first memories, it’s what the vagabonding was all about. But, when I watch someone speak, I listen and process. Celebrity philosophers you can recognize when performance and books sales is foremost on the dude’s mind, which comes through.

I listen to Carrier and he isn’t any more perfect than any of the rest of us, but he tells a straight story and sticks to the substance of that story. He holds his own vanity in check, it’s the understanding he’s really after.

Earlier this morning I stumbled across this rapid pace talk by Dr. Paul Maxwell. He gives a history that simply impressed and impressed, and it rang true to my mind’s eye.

The way he tied together the progression of thought was very sweet.

 

I’d be curious what you thought of his summary:

 

How Any Idiot Can Memorize The Entire History of Philosophy Dec 13, 2018

Philosophy can be insufferably hard. It doesn’t have to be.

Dr. Paul Maxwell breaks down the ENTIRE history of philosophy in 30 minutes.


 

Lots of videos make big promises and never deliver, it seems to me, Maxwell delivered. But, that’s just me, a ‘not well read’. :v:

 

 

I did notice that it doesn’t seem that philosophers have ever actually addressed the fundamental Human Mindscape v Physical Reality divide.

Sure, sure the body mind problem, but look up the topic and all the competing though are sooo anthropocentric, totally misses the point.

This failure to recognize acts subliminally to infuse a feeling that it’s our thinking that defines Physical Reality.

 

Instead of up front recognizing our thinking defines our understand, not the Physical Reality itself.

Such an explicit awareness ripples into all aspects of our being a human.

You know something else I’ve come to realize in the past couple days. One thing that makes me an apparently rare bird, is that I quite literally and viscerally feel myself as an element in the flow of Earth’s Evolution.

It doesn’t impart any power, it just settle everything about who I am, and why I am here.

I’m not looking forward to my death, since my day to day is pretty sweet and my health has rebound with the acceptance of full retirement from serious physical work. So I’m happy with every new day and my wonderful wife and my doggy Maddy who gets irritated every time I sit down to the computer, since she thinks I owe her a walk every half hour or so. Sure, I hope it’s quick and as painless as possible when it finds me, like everyone else. But, beyond that I have no turmoil, no shackles, my ethics led to a life …

well that got into more rambling than anyone’s interested in. Suffice it to say, seems to me, most people are still struggling with mysteries and finding their “truths” - when all that is way simpler than we make it. Just gotta pay more attention to the Earth (that created us and that we’re going to fold right back into after our deaths).

CC, I’ll put that at the top of my watch list. Interesting thoughts otherwise. Just an aside, related to what you said, often; I’m reading something, maybe current political, maybe broader, and I’ll think, “That’s CC’s mindscape” or “CC would appreciate that”. I don’t always get back to making them into CFI posts.

So, I think your ideas are in the culture, but you express them more explicitly, and give the idea a name.

That video was awesome. I tried to do that when I was first constructing my worldview after leaving religion. I gave up after a while. What I really liked about him is he didn’t favor one philosopher over another, just reviewed the timeline. Just about every word he used could have a book written about it, but he’s right, just memorizing that would give you a framework.

Thank you.