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Maz

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You know it's going to be a late night when..
In category General on 14 Jul 2008 @ 01:54 am
At 2am you catch yourself saying:

Maz: there are very few global truths
Maz: "i think therefore i am" is about the limit of it
Maz: Descartes may have convinced himself that everything else exists because of his belief in a higher power, but thats just bad logic to me

I think I might be a little late to work tomorrow. Maybe not, I did do a lot of sleeping on the weekend so maybe it'll all work itself out. depends how long the conversation goes from here... I don't hold out much hope.
Maz
I think philosophy and history need to be read together. Descartes was a rationalist Catholic, which was pretty much the equivalent of being a member of the Zimbabwean opposition. Empiricism (his 'radical doubt' idea that everything is false unless definitely provable) was a huge threat to a power body that tells people stories about loaves, fish and men in the sky. My interpretation is that he reconciled this with a religion he couldn't turn his back on by defining God as the one "universal truth". That since we can't create ultimate truth but strive for truth, the truth has to be metered out by some guy in the sky.

Ignoring this makes his work on what became rationalism pretty spot on, and personally I lean towards a literal reading of the CES quote: that existence is the universal truth and that beyond there, the world is defined by the actions of man.
# Comment by slowly decaying public servant on 24 Jul 2008 @ 02:01 pm
That is a good quote. I should save that somewhere. Although I know it will just get lost among the tons of data I already hoard. Maybe I could write that quotes module for my new site.

You obviously do have far too much time on your hands at work.
# Comment by Maz on 28 Jul 2008 @ 04:12 pm


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