Just a brief update...
Well, this big ol' book is a bit of a disappointment so far. Halfway through, and there's hardly a highlight worth highlighting.
But I am nevertheless determined to finish it, because there's a deeper principle involved: that the next book hasn't yet arrived in my mailbox.
Or in other words, while the author's mind goes a mile an hour, the Post Office is even slower.
Turns out the book is an extremely fine-grained look at the entire history of philosophy, with every obscure nook & cranium getting a moment in the sun. I now know more than I want or need to know about the Presocratics, the Stoics, the Epicureans, and the Neoplatonists, and although I've finally made it to Thomas Aquinas, now I'm afraid to leave him behind and venture into modernity. Save us from the Enlightenment!
One has only so much memory, and besides, Bob has never pretended to be a scholar so he has no use for all this historical trivia. Rather, Bob pretends to be a __________, a _________, even an unalloyed _________!
Just give me your bottom line take. I don't really care how you got there. For example, there are philosophers who deny the existence of free will. Good. That means I can ignore them.
Likewise there are philosophers who deny essences, or don't believe language has an external referent, or insist that natural selection is a sufficient explanation of humanness. Thanks for the warning!
It's not even Brandolini's Law ("the amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude larger than to produce it"), rather, just Dávila's Admonition:
A few lines are enough to demonstrate a truth. Not even a library is enough to refute an error.
Moreover, as we tell nearly every troll, we were once leftists too, and there but for the grace of being odd did we leave it below:
Let us say frankly to our opponent that we do not share his ideas because we understand them and that he does not share ours because he does not understand them.
So,
Engaging in dialogue with those who do not share our assumptions is nothing more than a stupid way to kill time.
In short, life is short, and there will never be sufficient time to respond to every quibble of every assoul.
Besides, this is in fact a LAWFUL cosmos, and here are some of our favorites, courtesy of Señor D:
The doctrines that explain the higher by means of the lower are appendices of a magician’s rule book.
Either God or chance: all other terms are disguises for one or the other.
Well, this book had better be building up to something big.
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