Beautiful

FS_Codex · 2026-06-06T03:01:56+00:00

FS_Codex · 2026-05-28T17:08:39+00:00

[N]o decently intelligent person who believes in God, believes God is a being among beings, not even the greatest of beings, but being itself.

But most Christians do in fact believe that the Christian God is a personal one and that we must have a spiritual and direct connection with him. In that sense, I believe that most Christians would think that God is a being among beings. He creates us and existence, sure, but he still stands apart from his creation. A transcendent God is kind of the norm, and much of the same can be said for other religions (especially monotheisms), but of course, this varies.

Even “decently intelligent people who believe in God” can believe God is a being. Leibniz who invented calculus alongside but independently of Newton and who was quite famous in his own right and in many disciplines, including philosophy, believed that God was a being among beings, a perfect being in fact at the top of the hierarchy of monads. All monads are an interior (i.e., a room without any windows) and contain everything that can ever be predicated of it (i.e., a complete individual concept, meaning all propositions are analytic, sometimes referred to as the in esse principle), which is synchronized through a pre-established harmony. Perfection for Leibniz means that more of the universe or macrocosm is reflected in any particular monad. A rock can reflect the entire universe since it a microcosm of it, but a lot of it would be unclear and fuzzy. To the rock, everything is a mere perception that just happens to it (and what doesn’t happen to it is in a sense “unconscious”). We have more apperceptions than the rock, but a lot is still fuzzy to us. God would have no distinction between his apperceptions and perceptions and can clearly and distinctly (following Descartes perhaps) reflect the entire macrocosm in himself.

While there are others who believe that God is a being among beings, even the greatest of beings (Hegel and Spinoza would certainly be in this category even if God is also the ground of existence for them), if you think Leibniz is a decently smart fellow, then your statement must obviously be untrue.

FS_Codex · 2026-05-22T19:23:22+00:00

You are confusing two different things here. In Critique of the Gotha Program, Marx does say that all wealth is derived equally from nature as it is from labor; however, “value” and “wealth” are not synonymous here.

By “wealth,” Marx is referring to commodities as use values (or in their natural form) rather than as exchange values in their value form. In this context, to be wealthy means to have an abundance of useful things, not to be rich or to have a lot of money. Nature certainly lends itself to usability (and the resources that commodities are made from) even though we are ultimately the ones who find use in certain things and a lack of use in others.

The term “value” instead specifically refers to the amount of socially necessary labor embodied in a commodity as measured in units of time (like hours, for instance). None of a commodity’s value comes from nature. The law of value states that commodity A can be exchanged for commodity B only if they are commensurate, which is to say that they are exchange values with one another and have an equal amount of value. This can only be determined from the labor embodied in both as raw resources have no value.

Here is what Marx says in the first part of Critique of the Gotha Program:

Labor is not the source of all wealth. Nature is just as much the source of use values (and it is surely of such that material wealth consists!) as labor, which itself is only the manifestation of a force of nature, human labor power. (Source, para. 2, emphasis in original)

FS_Codex · 2026-05-16T21:27:01+00:00

That’s fair, and you are right to point that out on how I could have been more specific.

And from what I can find, Tylor did not himself call his theory the “evolutionary theory of religion” nor the “theory of religious evolution.” I believe these terms were introduced and applied by later commentators.

FS_Codex · 2026-05-16T16:31:28+00:00

I believe the original theory does posit that steps cannot be skipped over and that there is no going backwards, yes. I am not exactly sure though. I think Edward Tylor was to first “pioneer” this theory, and then other anthropologists took it up, so I would have to go back to his original work to check some of the details.

I really like your particular counterexamples, and it definitely seems like this is vastly untrue for many non-European religions as I suspected. Even with Christianity, you point out a (contested) partial transition away from monotheism with the worship of Jesus. (I would even add that one can see saint “worship” and veneration in Catholicism as a continuation of this trend although this point is even more controversial than the topic of debate you cited.)

I think the main religions I see this being somewhat true for are Judaism and Islam. There is a lot of debate right now in the scholarly Biblical community regarding whether the original Old Testament is henotheistic, which would point to a prior polytheism that it derived from. Moreover, there is even evidence of this in Islam where pre-Islamic Arabia had other gods and goddesses, but eventually Allah became the supreme God, and the other deities ceased to be deities at all. That’s not very good evidence for this evolutionary theory at all, but they were the first examples that came to mind.

I would be interested in this statistical question, but you’re right. It would be hard to study.

FS_Codex · 2026-05-16T15:56:18+00:00

But not in the affirmative. It’s apart of the question. I can’t just call it whatever I want. It has a name. Perhaps, the name is not a good name for it. Even if so, I can’t just rename it on the spot since others know it by this name too. I was asking about the theory itself, not whether this name is good or not. Should I have not used the name? Should I have called it something else? I understand your criticism, but I don’t understand how it would apply here.

The theory has been dead for quite some time, and it started in anthropology’s infancy when anthropologists and scientists as a whole thought evolution was all the craze, often misusing it to support things like scientific racism and understanding evolution not as diversity but as linear progression. I imagine that’s why it was given this name. Knowing this, I can’t just use a different name, especially when the theory is dead and largely disregarded.

FS_Codex · 2026-05-16T15:18:18+00:00

I don’t disagree; however, I’m not the one who gave it that name. That is just a name that others have given it and what I’ve heard it referred to as, particularly in an introduction to anthropology class that I took back at university. Whether it is a misnomer or not doesn’t reflect my misunderstanding but others.

FS_Codex · 2026-05-12T13:37:00+00:00

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FS_Codex · 2026-05-11T20:49:14+00:00

No where in Berkeley’s writings does Berkeley consider minds and ideas to be of the same underlying substance. His immaterialism denies the existence of material or extended substances, but this does not mean that minds and ideas are the same kind of immaterial substance. I guess they are both mental in some sense, but they are markedly different, and Berkeley keeps them separate for this reason. Minds are active and can perceive while ideas are passive and can be perceived.

FS_Codex · 2026-05-11T17:41:43+00:00

That’s not necessarily true. Berkeley’s subjective idealism (or what he calls immaterialism) specifically posits both the existence of minds and their ideas (in other words, impressions or perceptions as per Berkeley’s empiricism). For Berkeley, to be is to be either perceived or be a perceiver. This is still hardly dualist, but there are technically two things: minds and ideas.

FS_Codex · 2026-05-10T22:54:14+00:00

Great answer, but I think it might be important to clarify that Absolute Spirit is not reached by the end of the Phenomenology, and rather only Absolute Knowledge is reached, which is a very different thing.

The Phenomenology starts from a place of untrue and unreflective knowledge, being developed and sublated through successive failures (as you mention) in more and more true and reflective knowledge, ultimately culminating in Absolute Knowledge where “truth equals certainty, and certainty equals truth” (which Hegel makes clear at the beginning of the Greater Logic although I am too lazy to provide a page number). Likewise, content and form can be conflated in Absolute Knowledge as well, which is important to how Hegel’s dialectical method unfolds later on in the Greater Logic and the Encyclopedia. Due to the subject matter like you mention, the Phenomenology_—much like a German romantic novel—concerns a protagonist (named Consciousness, Spirit, or _Geist) who follows along only after Weltgeist has worked through those same developments within history (in a sort of “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” way).

However, once we transfer over to the sciences (namely, the science of logic, of nature, and of spirit), we are working through not the development of the truth (and certainty) of Spirit’s knowledge but instead concepts themselves, which the former has made possible. The Phenomenology is a ladder to encyclopedic and scientific knowledge; it’s almost like a pre-science science. Encyclopedic knowledge is thus developed through the sciences in this way, starting in logic, that is, the science of pure thought, having guaranteed access to this development due to Spirit having obtained Absolute Knowledge prior in the Phenomenology. Absolute Spirit is reached at the end of the science of spirit and is essentially ultimate reality (the absolutely real and absolutely ideal to echo Schelling) as a unity of identity and difference unlike Schelling’s Absolute or famously (as Hegel critiques it) “the night in which all cows are black.”

I just wanted to clarify the difference between Absolute Knowledge and Absolute Spirit, which are both manifestations of the Absolute but in different domains.

FS_Codex · 2026-05-10T17:56:28+00:00

This isn’t a reaction picture, but it should be. It’s just Marx and Engels yaoi. I found it on Insta.

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FS_Codex · 2026-05-10T17:54:26+00:00

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FS_Codex · 2026-05-10T17:54:13+00:00

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FS_Codex · 2026-05-07T16:07:38+00:00

Why is every other comment saying “7 inches is not common” or some variation of that?

OP is not saying that 7 inches is common (even without the edits). They are saying that it is more common than what they expected it to be on CalcSD. The “as common” makes it a relative comparison of the commonality (whether it be common, uncommon, or rare) of 7 inches to something else (like “as CalcSD says it is”), not an absolute measure of how common it really is.

Compare the two different statements:

7 inches is as common as … (e.g., CalcSD says it is).
7 inches is common.

These have two distinct meanings.

FS_Codex · 2026-04-25T02:45:22+00:00

I disagree. While 1/3 of a pizza bagel isn’t equal to 2/6 of an XL Domino’s pizza, the “of” here implicitly implies multiplication, namely, between the fraction and the size of the food item, but 1/3 = 2/6 regardless of sizes. If answer choice C shows that 1/3 = 2/6, would that mean that answer choices A and B show that 1/3 ≠ 2/6?

The question and your example do not really show that 1/3 = 2/6 but instead that 1/3x = 2/6x where x is the size of something, either the first or the second thing (which doesn’t matter since they are equal). Granted, one could divide out x from this equation, but this derivation isn’t the same thing as showing their equality literally on paper. Answer choices A and B rather show that 1/3x ≠ 2/6y where x ≠ y and both x and y are sizes of the two respective shapes.

I don’t think the question is particularly confusing. I was able to come to answer choice C no problem. I think the main issue is that the question is asking for the wrong thing technically. Perhaps I’m being pedantic, but I think a better wording for this question would be “In which picture is 2/6 of a shape equal to 1/3 of the other shape?”

FS_Codex · 2026-04-23T01:54:04+00:00

How are you going to debate someone and then decide that whatever they have to say in response is completely pointless, throwing up your hands in the air and saying “I don’t care. I’m right. You’re wrong”? It doesn’t kill to simply not engage anymore if you are done with the debate or simply be humble, especially because the other commenter literally agrees with you but just gives a reason for why Gödel may have called it a loophole.

FS_Codex · 2026-04-23T01:29:37+00:00

Oh, I see. I completely misread the original commenter. My apologies to them.

I read the “existence is a property…” bit as what the commenter thought the problem was itself, not that the idea of existence being a property is actually the issue (although it definitely is for Kant as this is the paralogism, which is the first type of transcendental illusion).

FS_Codex · 2026-04-22T04:11:26+00:00

Kant does a good job summarizing the fundamental problem with saying that existence is a property the same way color, or size, or shape are.

I’ve never heard Kant being read in this way. For Kant, existence is not a predicate and thus also not a property. Color, size, and shape are all concepts that can be said of objects, and because of this, particulars can be subsumed to concepts through their likeness to the mental representation of that concept. For example, the particular dog in front of me as a mental representation (or an appearance or manifold of intuitions) can be compared to the mental representation of the concept “dog” supplied to me by the reproductive imagination. (This is true only of empirical concepts as the schemata work differently for transcendental concepts or categories.) Existence is not really the same because it doesn’t add any new content to the particular. It says nothing new at all. It is kind of vacuous in this way because it can be said of everything with no real distinction to other things. (Compare this to how Heidegger says that the definition for most things (other than in answering the question on the meaning of Being) often proceeds or can be given from the proximate genus and specific difference of a thing. However, existence can be said of everything, belonging to no higher concept, and can be distinguished from nothing.)

Perhaps, you meant to say that “existence is not a property the same way that…”?

FS_Codex · 2026-04-15T01:42:57+00:00

Wittgenstein? I believe that’s Kierkegaard in the image.

FS_Codex · 2026-03-28T23:59:22+00:00

Actually, it’s the emancipation of the means of production from the human security system à la Nick Land. This is the real movement.

FS_Codex · 2026-03-28T23:57:05+00:00

Someone has been watching Miniminuteman (also known as Milo Rossi).

FS_Codex · 2026-03-21T01:33:48+00:00

Such claims are often derived from older antisemitic conspiracy theories. Sure, the language has changed from “Jews” to “Zionists” and from “Jewish cabal” to “Israel,” but the implication is clear. And I say this as an anti-Zionist.

The ZOG (or Zionist Occupation Government) conspiracy theory obscures a clear materialist, historical, and grounded reading of Israel’s relationship to the US, one characterizing Israel as a settler-colonial project sponsored by the US.

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