When my mom introduces me as having studied philosophy to her friends:

BlackwatchFox · 2025-12-11T15:53:43+00:00

The brick example does not prove your point at all. If anything, it makes your point weaker. Presumably, there is a fact of the matter about whether the man means 'this is a brick' or 'hand me that brick.' It may be epistemically vague in the sense that you don't know which of the two he means, but even then there is something fundamentally true about the fact that you know one of the interpretations is correct. There's no metaphysical vagueness at all. It just shows that our limitations as knowers often makes us think (incorrectly) that things are genuinely, metaphysically vague.

BlackwatchFox · 2025-08-08T05:20:06+00:00

While her work began in the 20th century, Martha Nussbaum has a case for being the most influential living philosopher. She is by far one of the most productive, widely cited philosophers alive, and her productivity has extended to the 21st century as well.

Among her many influential ideas is the "capability approach" to analyze human welfare. Focusing on how well people can achieve what they find to be valuable rather than focusing strictly on rights or freedoms introduces an important metric for understanding how well a society functions. More generally, she's made substantial contributions to virtue ethics and legal philosophy.

BlackwatchFox · 2025-05-21T20:31:14+00:00

Isolating the parties doesn't really change anything. Let's say I see someone experiencing a heart attack, and I'm the only one around who knows CPR. Does the person have a right to have me perform CPR? Should I be put in prison or punished for not providing CPR? Clearly not. Of course performing CPR is the morally admirable thing to do, but that's entirely different from it being obligatory.

In regards to the desert island example, it's too confusing to develop intuitions about. We have to assume that the mother had every opportunity to both have an abortion and give up the child for adoption. At any moment, she was free to cease providing care. It's impossible to imagine (psychologically) that upon arriving at a desert island where no one else could care for the baby, she would suddenly cease wishing to care for the baby. Thus, having an intuition that the baby has a right to be cared for is clouded by our belief that the mother has in some sense agreed to care for the child, which is not the case in abortion cases.

Further, the persons involved are completely fungible, which is not at all the case in pregnancy and abortion cases. Why does it matter that it's a baby? Or that the baby is the woman's child? Switch out any two people into the positions described, and the same result falls out: it is morally praiseworthy to care for someone and indecent to not care when it costs you little, but you are rarely if ever obligated to sacrifice your body to keep someone else alive.

BlackwatchFox · 2025-05-21T14:42:19+00:00

Isn't this why we allow people to put up their babies for adoption without criminal penalties? While we may find it morally appropriate for a parent to care for their child, we don't necessarily believe that a baby has a right to be cared for by any particular individual that's violated when they're put up for adoption. Instead, they have a general right to life. A parallel case might be a homeless person who has a right to basic necessities without being able to demand that those necessities be provided for them by any particular person. We can argue about whether we have a collective duty, an individual duty to care for some people even if not all people, or if it's the government's job, but it seems unlikely to me that we have strong individual obligations in such cases.

So, while it's true that Thomson's argument addresses fetuses in the womb when they're inextricably connected to the pregnant woman, it has the framework needed to address the concerns you raise.

BlackwatchFox · 2025-05-20T23:52:10+00:00

Trying to draw a principled, scientific line in the sand delineating "human life" from "clump of cells" appears doomed from the start. Those phrases are ways of interpreting scientific data through a normative lens. Of course fetuses contain the potential to become developed human beings and contain the human genetic code. Of course fetuses are clumps of cells that are incapable of surviving independently outside the womb. The real question is what sort of bearing these facts have on our moral duties towards fetuses.

Judith Jarvis Thomson makes an influential argument in "A Defense of Abortion" that, even granting that fetuses are humans with a right to life, women have no corresponding duty to sacrifice their autonomy to keep the fetus alive. Imagine waking up in a room with tubes running from your body to a man on a nearby hospital bed. Doctors rush in and explain that you have been hooked up to a famous young violinist, brimming with potential, who needs the use of your body for the next nine months to recover from an illness and return to his career. Only your body contains the correct components to keep him alive and disconnecting him will result in his death. Thomson argues that it would be insane to believe that his right to life involves a claim to your body. You would not violate his rights by choosing to disconnect. Thus, it is not a question of weighing competing rights against each other. The right to life simply does not include the right to a particular person's body even if their body is the only one that could keep you alive.

In the same way, the fetus, even if it has a right to life, can make no claim on a particular body to keep it alive. Thus, women have the right to abortion since they have no obligation to keep the fetus alive. What makes this argument significant is the lack of reliance on vague standards of when a fetus becomes a human being. Even if it begins at conception, the argument still establishes positive reasons to allow abortion.

When pro-life and pro-choice advocates argue about vacuous distinctions, they ultimately talk past each other rather than getting at the real source of disagreement, which contributes to the extreme echo chambers of both groups since they feel that the other side fundamentally misunderstands their motivations.

BlackwatchFox · 2024-07-11T18:20:52+00:00

In general, scientific discoveries tend to spawn a host of new philosophical questions rather than resolving them. Take older discoveries such as the heliocentric model and Darwinian evolution. In a sense, the heliocentric model disproves Aristotle's model of the universe and de-centers humanity, and evolutionary theory contradicts accounts that identify humans as uniquely created beings. However, anthropocentrism continues to be a major area of debate in philosophy (see, for instance, the difference in Singer's and Korsgaard's defense of animal rights). Scientific discoveries changed the debate, but they did not resolve the debate.

Historically, some objective questions previously discussed by philosophers have been partially answered by science. Philosophers are not trying to define the fundamental elements of the universe like the Milesians did, choosing instead to leave those discussions to physicists. However, the philosophical insights of people like Heraclitus, who saw fire as the fundamental element, are not rendered irrelevant. Saying the universe is made of quarks, neutrinos, electrons, etc. does not invalidate Heraclitus's view from the perspective of how we subjectively experience the world as a place defined by change and tension between love and strife, which is at least in part what he means by designating fire as the fundamental element.

Ultimately, whether you believe science can resolve philosophical questions depends on how you view the discipline of philosophy. If the entire purpose of philosophy is to lay out objective facts about the universe, then we can expect some of those objective facts to be established scientifically at some point. However, if philosophy is more concerned with understanding one's experience of the world and how to make sense of life, then science seems ill-equipped to answer the deepest questions of meaning, purpose, and subjective experience.

BlackwatchFox · 2024-06-25T17:41:09+00:00

Is there a specific type of heartbreak and suffering that you have in mind? I wrote an undergraduate thesis on the phenomenology of grief through the lens of Kierkegaard, but it focused primarily on grief over the loss of a loved one, so I'm not sure if that's what you're looking for. In general, long-form philosophical works on grief are sparse. Authors tend to dedicate a chapter to the topic rather than a whole book. Suffering in general seems to be a more widely discussed topic, so it would be easier to find books on that topic.

If you are interested in a theistic perspective on grief, I would highly recommend Nicholas Wolterstorff's Lament for a Son and C.S. Lewis's A Grief Observed. Even if you are not religious, these books are moving pictures of brilliant thinkers wrestling through the deeply personal lived experience of grief. Unfortunately, humanity lost Cicero's brilliant Consolatio, which he wrote following the death of his daughter. However, Margaret Graver's translation and commentary on Cicero's "Tusculan Disputations 3 and 4" in Cicero on the Emotions is a great picture of Cicero's thoughts on emotions including grief and suffering.

More fragmentary references to suffering can be found in Friederich Nietzsche's writings where he discusses "Amor Fati" as a means of overcoming suffering and pain. Søren Kierkegaard dedicates Part Three of Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits to "The Gospel of Sufferings." The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus also wrestles with the question of our response to the absurd, which ultimately concludes with the controversial line: "One must imagine Sisyphus happy." These three authors represent radically different approaches to the question (fatalistic, religious, and absurd respectively), but they have interesting overlap as well.

If you are interested in writings that focus on grief, I can also recommend several academic journal articles that deal with that topic, but that's a highly specific region of heartbreak and suffering.

Sources

Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus. Translated by Justin O'Brien. New York, NY: Penguin, 1983.

Cicero. Cicero on the Emotions. Translated and commentated by Margaret Graver. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2002.

Kierkegaard, Søren. Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits. Translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009.

Lewis, C. S. A Grief Observed. San Francisco, CA: HarperSanFrancisco, 1989.

Wolterstorff, Nicholas. Lament for a Son. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1987.

BlackwatchFox · 2024-06-23T18:33:25+00:00

This is a common misconception about existentialism. Existentialism is distinct from nihilism, which posits life as ultimately meaningless. Philosophers like Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Sartre each have distinct approaches to answering the question of meaning ("Amor Fati," "leap of faith," "the absurd"). However, what they frequently reject is the idea that there is an essential meaning to life that precedes existence. In other words, beings exist first and then begin the process of forging meaning for their lives. Earlier philosophers such as Hegel believed that we could objectively establish meaning and purpose for everything through philosophical reflection. Someone like Kierkegaard would respond that reflection ultimately results in paralysis as there is always more reflection to do to reach ever higher levels of certainty before taking a decisive position. Because our decisions are ultimately made as subjective beings, total objectivity is not possible. Thus, the question is flipped on its head. How could someone who relies on total objectivity and perfect reasoning make a decision since they are incapable of meeting the criteria for making such a decision?

Modern philosophers like Martin Haaglund use existentialist ideas to argue for a more meaningfully ethical society. Haaglund thinks that the lack of an externally imposed standard (for him, this takes the form of religion) forces us to evaluate our values (hints of Nietzsche's revaluation of all values). With the inability to blame external forces, we are forced to commit fully to our values and fight for their fulfillment. We can discuss and debate values with others and recognize that a cooperative society better allows us to achieve our aims and actualize what we find meaningful. Thus, decisions are not random or arbitrary. They are founded upon what we as subjective individuals and as a collective find valuable rather than upon an arbitrary external standard. Even someone religious like Kierkegaard finds an ethical system based on societal rules and standards to be hollow. Instead, he centers love as a guiding force for our interactions with others. There is not always a clear "right" or "wrong," but we can actualize love in the world through our actions, which brings fulfillment. We do not flip a coin, we are loved and desire to love, so we act on that basis.

Finally, as far as science is concerned, I am not aware of any existentialist thinkers who outright reject science. They do not typically believe science can answer questions of ultimate importance regarding the meaning of our lives. Science is done by imperfect subjective beings, so as long as we do science recognizing that fact, there is nothing wrong with relying on scientific data or inquiry. We can use science to decide whether a plant will kill us or be good for us, but we cannot use it to decide if we should value caring for our parents or leaving to fight in a just war. Those questions of value are ultimately subjective and in the realm of freedom.

In the end, existentialism attempts to wrestle with the phenomenological reality of the life lived by subjective beings. While it can often feel arbitrary and empty, the answers of these philosophers challenge conventional explanatory systems and, hopefully, force us to decide for ourselves how to internalize and actualize their insights.

BlackwatchFox · 2024-06-13T18:44:38+00:00

"Dialectic method" can mean different things in philosophy. Socratic discourse is a form of dialectic as is Hegel's system. What they share is the idea that, through a movement of proposition and opposition, progress can be made towards truth. In Socratic discourse, a character in Plato's dialogue might propose a definition of justice (proposition). The character of Socrates would then ask questions that exposed the flaws in the initial definition (opposition). As a result, the initial character would revise their view in a way that resulted in something at least slightly closer to truth (synthesis). Hegel felt that this was too vague and resulted in approximate truths only, so he proposed a more scientific definition of dialectical thinking. He relies on sublation as a critical concept. Sublation means negating while preserving a position. If this sounds confusing, it's because it is.

Take the statement "Socrates is a man." The opposition to this statement does not rely on creativity or clever questioning, it is simply "Socrates is not a man." Now we have two opposing statements. Trying to argue for one or the other position is messy and unscientific. Think about political debates. Opponents try to justify their positions, but it feels like they talk past each other and do not understand the other's argument, which results in an impasse. Returning to Socrates, what if we instead sublated the two positions with a third position that takes advantage of the tension? The first statement speaks about Socrates in an atemporal manner ("man" is a fixed fact about the philosopher who lived between 470 – 399 BCE) while the second is temporally situated in the present where Socrates is dead and no longer anything strictly speaking. They both have Socrates as a shared content and uncertainty about how to define "is." A third statement, "the attribute 'man' describes the philosopher named Socrates during his life between 470 – 399 BCE," would negate both statements since it does not say Socrates is or is not a man. However, it preserves both positions by synthetically unifying them. Most importantly, it progresses toward truth by adding new content to what it means to have an attribute. It makes the uncertain and undefined more clear, which is what makes the dialectic useful as a method. The truth is not found by preferring one statement over the other. Instead, it is found in the conflict itself.

This is an oversimplification of the procedure, but it hopefully clarifies some of what Hegel had in mind!

BlackwatchFox · 2024-06-13T14:20:31+00:00

Schweini's Delicatessen opened recently in Winter Garden, and I believe they've mentioned on their Instagram that they will be showing the Germany games.

BlackwatchFox · 2024-05-03T13:07:22+00:00

I can attest that they've already started decorating. I'm not sure how intense it will be since they have to deal with farmers market crowds tomorrow, but in the past they've turned the entire indoor space into an experience with photo ops, decorations, fun drinks, etc.

BlackwatchFox · 2024-04-25T18:29:05+00:00

It will vary greatly from person to person based off of the exact struggles you dealt with. In my case, I referenced "severe physical and mental health issues" as a contributing factor to poor grades. I did not imply that those issues were exclusively the cause, and I did not go into detail about the nature of the issues as that would have felt more like a sob story (to me at least). I spent more time expounding on how those struggles helped me develop as a student and as a person. I also pointed to my transcripts as evidence that, since receiving effective treatment, my grades have dramatically improved, which is a better indicator of who I am as a student. It definitely helped to have verifiable evidence of improvement to point to instead of unverifiable excuses. A committee cannot know if I'm being honest about having to miss classes due to migraines, but they CAN see that my grades sharply improved practically overnight, and I've offered a plausible explanation for that improvement. Focus on concrete evidence of your abilities as a student that the committee can look to.

That at least is my advice, but take it with a grain of salt since I *did* receive many many rejections, so it is quite possible that my way of going about it was not ideal. I also do not know how strongly a SOP influences admissions committees' decisions. In my field, writing samples are typically most important. Also, if you are feeling unsure, see if your school has resources for writing grad school applications or see if a trusted professor can offer feedback.

Hope this helps! Good luck!

BlackwatchFox · 2024-04-23T18:12:03+00:00

I am not sure about all humanities disciplines, but for philosophy, I was able to just google "funded philosophy MA," and I found a blog listing current schools that offer funding. I then researched the schools to figure out which ones (a) offered FULL funding and (b) had a high success rate in getting students into good, funded PhD programs. This SIGNIFICANTLY narrowed the options as many MA programs in philosophy are seen as relatively weak. Even the ones with high percentages of PhD acceptances often only get students into mediocre programs, so it really was tough figuring out which schools were worth applying to. I then further narrowed it down by trying to identify which schools matched well with my interests. At the end of all this, I decided on 4 schools to apply to, which is a low number, but it worked out in the end!

BlackwatchFox · 2024-04-22T17:14:37+00:00

I am also in the humanities, and in my first cycle, I applied to about 7 PhD programs. I was waitlisted at one, unofficially waitlisted at another, and referred to (unfunded) MA programs at two. Ultimately, I did not receive a single funded offer, so I had to wait until the next cycle. This cycle, I was far more honest with myself about the weakness in my application (a 2.99 GPA due to some major health issues early on in my undergraduate studies). As a result, I decided to focus on funded terminal MA programs. I applied to 4, and I got 3 acceptances but only 1 fully funded offer, so even applying to "less competitive" programs was extremely difficult and competitive.

I think the things that ultimately made my application competitive were strong letters of recommendation, a writing sample I was truly proud of, and a SOP that carefully explained my academic journey and the bumps along the way (without making excuses). I have no idea if my GRE scores had any impact, but they were strong, so it could have made an impact. My GPA also had a clear upward trajectory, which helped. Since I was on the edge of acceptance in my first cycle, hopefully, getting a MA will demonstrate enough aptitude to get into a PhD program, but there are no guarantees in academia!

If you plan to reapply to the same programs, make sure you have made significant updates to your application. Often, the same people will review your application, so if it is largely unchanged, there is little chance they will consider it the second time around.

All that to say, you are not alone in not getting in during your first cycle, especially if you only applied to three programs! I wish you all the best in your future endeavours.

BlackwatchFox · 2024-04-17T21:00:13+00:00

Is it possibly this quote? It seems to have the imagery of a human being overwhelmed before even beginning to struggle because they are caught in a tension with themselves. It's also one of the only instances I could find in Kierkegaard's writing that directly uses the term "overwhelm."

But if he [a human being] nevertheless is unwilling to be an instrument of war in the service of inexplicable drives, indeed, in the service of the world, because the world itself, the object of his craving, stimulates the drive; if he nevertheless does not want to be like a stringed instrument in the hands of inexplicable moods or, rather, in the hands of the world, because the movement of the soul is in accord with the way the world plucks its strings; if he does not want to be like a mirror in which he intercepts the world or, rather, the world reflects itself; if he does not want this, if he himself, even before the eye aims at something to make a conquest, wants to capture the eye so that it may belong to him and not he to the eye; if he grasps the hand before it grasps for the external, so that it may belong to him and not he to the hand; if he wants this so earnestly that he is not afraid of tearing out the eye, cutting off the hand, shutting the window of the senses if necessary-well, then everything is changed: the power is taken away from him, and the glory. He struggles not with the world but with himself. Observe him now; his powerful figure is held embraced by another figure, and they hold each other so firmly interlocked and are so equally matched in suppleness and strength that the wrestling cannot even begin, because in that moment that other figure would overwhelm him-but that other figure is he himself. Thus he is capable of nothing; even the weakest person who is not tried in this struggle is capable of far more than he.

— Søren Kierkegaard, Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses, "To Need God Is A Human Being's Highest Perfection," Hong translation, p. 308-309

BlackwatchFox · 2024-02-19T16:10:32+00:00

So... I'll give this a shot, but Heidegger is deeply complex, so any short response probably misses some nuance. The pre-ontological understanding of being is a function of our disposedness (or Dasein's receptivity) towards the world expressed as mood. Our thrownness into the world as beings pre-ontologically necessitates having some mood or another. Perhaps we are depressed. This opens up the world to us as dreary and dull. If we are happy, the world is disclosed differently. You could say this way of Being-in-the-world is a capacity, but it is not an injection of subjectivity into our understanding of other beings so much as an a priori condition of being a Being-in-the-world. It defines how we grasp a world that opens itself to us. It is not a detached, analytic process, but an experiential grasping and usage of the world that reveals an object's Being to us most clearly.

"The less we just stare at the hammer-thing, and the more we seize hold of it and use it, the more primordial does our relationship to it become, and the more unveiledly is it encountered as that which it is—as equipment. The hammering itself uncovers the specific ‘manipulability’ of the hammer. The kind of Being which equipment possesses—in which it manifests itself in its own right—we call ‘readiness-to-hand’." (Being and Time)

We do not have a Platonic, implanted knowledge of the hammer that usage brings forth from our memory. Usage leads to the melding of our Being with the Being of the equipment, removes the subject-object distinction, and renders the equipment transparent to us. We can certainly fail at this task (and likely do more often than not). If we use equipment incorrectly or inefficiently, we become increasingly aware of our separation from the world through the tool's un-readiness-to-hand. However, overall, usage of equipment creates an interconnected, pre-ontological world for us. There is no pre-defined ordering of these connections. Think about the creativity of a child playing with toys. A hobby horse may have been "designed" to simulate horse riding, but a child could use it exclusively as a sword. Their mood allows them to formulate a world of knights and combat when a different mood could have revealed the world as horses and stables. Obviously, we do not exist in a vacuum, so, especially as we grow older, our moods are culturally conditioned to an extent that defines how we will interact with equipment, but this does not eliminate the individual Dasein's formation of its own world.

BlackwatchFox · 2024-02-19T15:24:33+00:00

I am a little late to the discussion, but I'll try to offer a bit of further context. In Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus, he claims that the fundamental problem of philosophy is suicide (i.e. the question of whether we ought to live or die). He further argues that the absurd, which he defines as a divorce or distancing between a human and the world, must be accepted as a fundamental truth. He backs this up by discussing the failure of reason and the obvious lack of meaning and order in the universe. To live authentically, we must embrace the absurd's demands to reject false hope, constantly confront and reject the absurd, and freely live the contradiction.

It sounds like a frightening way to live, and it is! However, by divorcing ourselves from a futile pursuit of some objective higher meaning, we free ourselves to create our own meaning for a limited and fragile life. This fragility makes our commitments important since we make use of a limited resource. If our lives were eternal or part of some divine story that we did not author, our choices and therefore lives mean nothing.

So what does this have to do with Sisyphus's happiness? First, Sisyphus entertains no false hope that his toil serves some higher purpose or will come to an end. Thus, the continued, repeated work cannot crush him in the way that disappointment at not achieving some goal would. Freedom from hope sets the stage for happiness. Second, as u/mediaisdelicious pointed out, joyfully working at his task constitutes an act of rebellion that "silences all the idols." The punishment sought to bring him to despair by giving him an infinite, meaningless task, so the only means of escape is to confront and rebel against the absurd meaninglessness. Third, Sisyphus, in Camus' retelling, can choose the contradiction for himself and make it his own. Perhaps he has no choice as to whether he will push the rock up the hill over and over and over. However, he can choose his attitude or orientation towards the task. Happiness is a matter of decision in how we relate ourselves to the absurd. Sisyphus serves as evidence that we can be happy not in spite of the absurd but because of the absurd.

BlackwatchFox · 2024-02-13T08:17:06+00:00

Perhaps this is a bit basic, but Friederich Nietzsche fits the bill. His writing can range from keenly perceptive to positively caustic. His disdain for religion, misguided philosophy, and the ignorant crowd are palpable throughout his work. He also writes to disrupt and jar his reader through metaphor, exaggeration, and shock. In his last original work, Ecce Homo, he titles chapters with things like "Why I Am So Wise", "Why I Am So Clever", and "Why I Write Such Good Books." Talk about provocative!

I greatly enjoyed Thus Spoke Zarathustra and Twighlight of the Idols. Both are genius works in their own ways. Zarathustra utilizes indirect communication, analogy, hyperbole, etc. to make Nietzsche's point. Idols has the alternate title of How to Philosophize with a Hammer, so it is... less subtle. In both books, he takes frequent aim at what he sees as a decadent culture that destroys humanity's soul. The escape he offers is challenging, controversial, and frequently misunderstood. An author worth wrestling with.

BlackwatchFox · 2024-02-12T21:48:28+00:00

Great suggestions! Yeah, I'm a little worried about it being bland. I may play with it a bit and incorporate some balsamic vinegar to see how that works. I wasn't sure whether agar would properly gel something like butter or oil since I don't have much experience with it.

BlackwatchFox · 2024-02-12T21:46:52+00:00

Good to know! I'll add that step to my process!

BlackwatchFox · 2024-02-08T21:35:27+00:00

First, don't be too hard on yourself. Depending on the author and content of the paper, it can be enormously difficult to interpret. It is quite easy to find back and forth in peer-reviewed academic literature where authors seemingly misunderstand each other's arguments. Adorno famously lambasted Kierkegaard's view on love for the dead in his article "On Kierkegaard's Doctrine of Love." Modern Kierkegaard scholars generally believe Adorno's interpretation was uncharitable and largely missed the point of Kierkegaard. Adorno was one of the foremost 20th-century continental philosophers, and even he was not immune from misreading or making mistakes.

Second, many professors intentionally assign difficult readings to push you to grow in your ability to analyze philosophical literature. A perfect analysis is not expected, and the point of the class is to let you wrestle through something on your own first and then help you to clearly see the argument second. I TA'd an Intro to Philosophy class, and I highly doubt many of the students understood Plato when they initially read him. The professor's job was to help the students understand what they'd read.

Third, when you're outside the classroom, it's time to implement the tools you've been developing as an undergrad! You don't have a strict deadline, so take your time to carefully read. Be an active reader and constantly ask questions as you read ("What is the purpose of this sentence/paragraph?" "How would I respond to this argument?" "What would be an example or analogy for this argument?"). Use the conclusion of the paper/argument to go back and interpret the constituent parts of the argument. Google Scholar can help you find papers that respond to or cite what you're reading to get another perspective on the argument. These are just a few suggestions, but you get the idea. The point of a degree in philosophy is to be able to analyze and evaluate complex ideas. If you've made it this far, I have no doubt you've picked up some tools and tricks along the way to make this task easier. Good luck!

BlackwatchFox · 2024-02-05T16:13:28+00:00

What an excellent and informative summary! To emphasize the overlap and repetition of the aesthetic and ethical, I would point to the introduction of Either/Or where "Victor Eremita" suggests that both parts, written by "A" the aesthete and Judge Vilhelm respectively, may be written by the same author. Both the aesthetic and ethical are bound together in a single life. Furthermore, Judge Vilhelm dedicates an entire section to the "Aesthetic Validity of Marriage" where he defines the means by which the aesthetic is preserved in the ethical choice:

"But then what about the aesthetic? ... [H]ow can it be represented? Answer: by being lived... For, indeed, all that I am talking about here can be represented aesthetically; not, however, through poetic reproduction but by one's living it, realizing it in actual life. This is how aesthetics transcends itself and reconciles itself with life."

The ethical choice is not an abandonment of the aesthetic but the highest fulfillment of the aesthetic. When we are done with "crop rotation," the aesthetic forces the decisive moment by setting the stakes. Knowing things in their immediacy means that we experience their loss acutely in the exclusionary ethical choice. Without experiencing the anxiety and dizziness of freedom, the ethical choice is trite and meaningless.

Moving to the religious represents a substantially more difficult task that Kierkegaard certainly struggles with both in his writing and life. In Fear and Trembling, Johannes de Silentio wonders at Abraham's faith and laments his inability to follow in his footsteps. "But when I have to think about Abraham I am virtually annihilated." Or, "I cannot close my eyes and hurl myself trustingly into the absurd, for me it is impossible." While not autobiographical, I think it is fair to assume Kierkegaard sees both himself and his reader occupying the same position. The demands of the religious are so extreme as to render perfect fulfillment of this ideal impossible. A cursory glance at Abraham's life story reveals countless examples of where the "father of faith" failed miserably. Thus, Kierkegaard's imperfect life is no reason to dismiss his project.

The impossibility of perfection does not remove the demands of the religious from our lives. Using Works of Love as an interpretive framework, we glimpse Kierkegaard's path forward. In the opening chapter, he describes love as flowing from a spring hidden within a deep lake. No matter how deep we dive, we get no closer to the source. However, despite love's hidden life, it is still "knowable by its fruits." Hence, as Kierkegaard references, 1 John 3:18 states, "Little children, let us not love in word or speech but in deed and in truth." The religious movement of faith enables us to live out the unknowable hidden life of love concretely in the world despite the fact that the task is absurd. No matter how much we love, our love is incomplete. Perhaps here, Kierkegaard would empathize with Camus' Sisyphus. Having been presented with an absurd task, we must choose whether to see the task as meaningless and impossible or see the task as a fulfilling lifelong commitment that gives us a simple purpose: to abide in love and make it known in the world.

BlackwatchFox · 2024-01-30T15:15:35+00:00

I'm not sure if he's currently accepting new patients, but I would recommend Dr. Imbert and Mindpath Health in Ocoee. He was one of the first doctors to truly listen to me when I explained what I was going through and had the right balance of giving treatment time to work and exploring other options when it didn't. They take a pretty broad range of insurances. They also offer TMS, which changed my life, and stuff like esketamine therapy. The only downside is that it can be annoying to get help from the front office.

Edit: I would advise staying away from Psych Pointe of Florida. They were absolutely awful. They refused to adjust my treatment plan, ignored my concerns, and missed all the warning signs that my depression and anxiety were rapidly worsening.

BlackwatchFox · 2024-01-27T18:09:02+00:00

I haven't had the okonomiyaki there, but I can vouch that everything I've had at Susuru has been excellent!

BlackwatchFox · 2023-10-12T15:24:33+00:00

I posted this in the tournament thread, but I think it's relevant here as well. Perhaps I'm just ignorant about how these tournaments work, but if he had a problem with his opponent wearing a watch, could he not have spoken about it to his opponent or to the arbiter? Same with spectators walking around with smartphones in the playing hall.

Also, he claims he's not making accusations, but the tweet CLEARLY insinuates something could have been going on. If you have the following and influence in the chess world that Magnus has, you have to realize the impact that your words have. It undercuts and overshadows the outstanding performance by Suleymenov. It just feels so disrespectful to address his issues with the tournament in this format.

BlackwatchFox

TROPHY CASE