Brett Fawcett

Short: The Sweater Language: English Country: Canada

“Mathematics thus takes its proper place as one of the loci of theology” (Alvin Plantinga)

“Mathematics is…the chief source of the belief in eternal and exact truth, as well as in a super-sensible intelligible world” (Bertrand Russell)

“Recent troubles in philosophy of mathematics are ultimately a consequence of the banishment of religion from science….Platonism…was tenable with belief in a Divine Mind…once mysticism is left behind…Platonism is hard to maintain” (Reuben Hersch)

The Great Books trend of the past 5 years has been a total catastrophe. The simple fact is that Plutarch and Homer and Virgil et al. do have radical insights buried in there, but at the same time most of these books are truly boring and lame and most people pretend to like them, cannot really digest anything, and get absolutely nothing from them! The trend is overwhelmingly powered by these books' aspirational quality; it's like a luxury heritage brand that conveniently only costs $15 a pop. The people on social media who've made brands around how great all these books are, often they are trying to *express* something about *themselves*, which is nice, but does not change how lame and boring the lion's share of these books are! You don't have to pretend to love them! If you're teaching undergrads that's great, or doing real research, fine. But this in no way means that everyone should read these books; it does not even mean that the smartest and most educated adults today need to read these books. The bits of radical alpha in them are great to find, explore, and write about if you are in the .01% of people who are called to do such things, but there is really zero reason why anybody else should read any of these books. Frankly, many of these authors are even somewhat primitive and infantile compared to the best thinkers of modernity. Plato and Aristotle have tons of provocative alpha worth getting, but also they were retarded on many topics, especially religion. The Romans were even worse in many ways. But all of this gets shrouded in the cult of Great Books. There have never been more people professing to love the Great Books, and mass public culture has never been lower brow than it is today. A ton of larping and precious little education, virtually zero novel insight, has come out of this movement.

Yea we know, it’s called The Logos

@jeffguhin What do you think of critical realism? It has a guarded place for concrete universals in sociology (something akin to Idealtyp)

Do sociologists care about human universals? I think we’re a bit vague about this, perhaps intentionally. Does field theory or front stage/backstage work in any society in any time in human history?

Leibniz on the inability of Jesuits to defend middle knowledge against the arguments of Dominicans: “It is amusing to see how they torment themselves to find a way out of a labyrinth when there is absolutely no way out.” - Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Théodicée, part. 1, chap. 48

Of all the things I’ve said in defense of unpopular Catholic moral teachings over the years – on abortion, sexuality, social doctrine, or what have you – I don’t think anything has generated more undiluted hostility and unreasoning, spittle-flecked rage than what I’ve said against intentionally killing civilians and obliterating civilian infrastructure during wartime. It is truly extraordinary. I never would have guessed it. Make of it what you will.

Augustine had a word for the vice of the internet age: curiositas. It doesn't mean "curiosity", but rather a disordered desire for knowing stuff regardless of its real value. It is the intellectual twin of bodily lust—the following of ephemeral passions without regard for consequences or what they're leading to. It's the act of knowing stuff as a form of possession; as if knowing everything that the latest Dwarkesh podcast guest had to say has any real value in itself.

“Canadians usually try to resolve social tensions and conflicts by some form of compromise that keeps the interests of both parties in view, in the conservative spirit of Edmund Burke. The result is that the country seems to an outsider, and often to insiders as well, to be perpetually coming apart at the seams, with nothing to sustain it but a hope that some ad hoc settlement will keep it together until the next crisis.” —Northrop Frye, “Criticism and Environment”

C.S. Lewis on the difference between Romance and the Novel: “The Romance differs from the Novel in one very important respect, that it has no need to explain its images away. For its world is the world in which such images are native. With the novel it is very different. There each image has to be carefully accounted for in naturalistic terms and provided with its causal pedigree. In Little Dorrit, for example, the final horror of the whole nightmare in which Affery has been living comes when she creeps downstairs to see what her terrible husband Flintwinch is doing—and sees two Flintwinches, a waking Flintwinch and a sleeping Flintwinch, exactly alike. Since the story is a novel, this terrific image has of course to be explained away by some nonsense about a long-lost twin brother. In The Faerie Queene, on the other hand, duplication could actually be performed—as in fact it is, by the witch in iii, viii, 5-8: ‘In hand she boldly tooke / To make another like the former Dame, / Another Florimell … The substance, whereof she the bodie made, / Was purest snow in massie mould congeald, / Which she had gathered in a shadie glade / Of the Riphoean hils, to her reveald / By errant Sprights …’ And in place of life, to rule the corpse she put ‘A wicked Spright yfraught with fawning guile, / And faire resemblance above all the rest, / Which with the Prince of Darknesse fell somewhile, / From heavens blisse …’ This particular duplication will presently be loaded by the poet with entirely conscious allegories. But that is not a necessary condition for the admittance of such impossibilities to Romance. Even without it, Shakespeare manages a not dissimilar effect. For when Troilus witnesses Cressida’s disloyalty, and exclaims ‘this is Diomed’s Cressida ... this is, and is not, Cressid’, it is much more than a way of saying that such unfaithfulness is not like her.” (Spenser’s Images of Life)

“Should the time ever come when Latin and Greek should be banished from our universities and the study of Cicero and Demosthenes, of Homer and Virgil, should be considered as unnecessary for the formation of a scholar, we should regard mankind as fast sinking into an absolute barbarism, and the gloom of mental darkness is likely to increase until it should become universal.”—Cincinnati Western Review (1820)

“Lord, during my time on earth i read Aquinas and Augustine and Liguori and-" “did you feed the hungry? did you clothe the poor? did you visit the sick?” “uhhhh…”

In 1962, C.S. Lewis was asked to name the books that most influenced his life philosophy. The list he came up had many classics, but also some lesser known gems. Here’s his list:

Speaking as someone who writes a fair amount for public consumption: in the last 3-5 years, there’s been an observable collapse in readers’ ability to follow and engage an argument. Most notably, people will raise “counterarguments” addressed in the text of the piece itself (1/x)

Original painting is btw. far more effective at conveying the intended message

Samuel Johnson’s advice for Twitter users: “I therefore retired from all temptations to dispute, prescribed a new regimen to my understanding, and resolved, instead of rejecting all established opinions which I could not prove, to tolerate though not adopt all which I could not confute. I forbore to heat my imagination with needless controversies, to discuss questions confessedly uncertain, and refrained steadily from gratifying my vanity by the support of falsehood.” (Rambler no. 95)

One thing I realized is your whole social life can’t be friends. This is hard to put into words, but there need to be people you aren’t friends with but you are respectful to them because of a shared belonging. People whose company you don’t really enjoy enough to be friends with.