Thread 24791485

What happened to /lit/? In the 2010s the philosophers of choice were all existentialists, Nietzsche being the biggest, but Camus having a lot of following too. Aside from the, some of the post-structuralists were big, and then of older thinkers everyone liked Hume.

Then we went through a weird transition period where German idealism got big, along with some modern esoteric stuff and Indian thought, particularly Shankara.

Now, I keep seeing existentialism and Hume getting shit on and /lit/ is simping for literal Dark Ages thinkers and gushing over Scholasticism.

Are we just running backwards through history fueled by sheer contrarinism?

Mainstream culture was also all about Boomer existentialism in the 2000s and went through a neo-Enlightenment phase. Are the economic conditions of neo-feudalism forcing us back to a neo-medieval philosophical moment? Did the fruits of extreme nominalism finally just turn people off (it probably too late, AGI is going to be born during a period where it will be fed tons of nominalism and emotivism)?

philosophy is pretty useless, im more into poetry these days

>>24791485 (OP)
>In the 2010s the philosophers of choice were all existentialists, Nietzsche being the biggest, but Camus having a lot of following too.
Sounds grimmdark to me.
>Now, I keep seeing existentialism and Hume getting shit on and /lit/ is simping for literal Dark Ages thinkers and gushing over Scholasticism.
Since Schlasticism has his place and they produce sometimes very good material to technical questions like justice, truth etc.
Thats because they has had no need to build systems, the system was given by faith.

> Are the economic conditions of neo-feudalism forcing us back to a neo-medieval philosophical moment?

Let us alone with this communistic bullshit.
You have no idea about economic conditions, medieval philosophy or whatever neo-feudalism is. You just repead words, like a parrot.
> Did the fruits of extreme nominalism finally just turn people off (it probably too late, AGI is going to be born during a period where it will be fed tons of nominalism and emotivism)?
Oh please, stop it. It hurts...

>>24791485 (OP)
>What happened to /lit/?
/lit/ is an American board and America is currently going through a quite literal culture war. During this time where we are leading up to some kind of internal chaos due to the failure of democracy (the eclipse of the public), people are willingly giving over the minds to the cultural egregore and memetics and willingly becoming pawns of the world mind. In other words, they're giving up their intellectual autonomy and thus their interest in philosophy is no longer sincere but a mere expression of the culture war working through them. The reason that German Idealism and Neoplatonism are popular on /lit/ is that these are reactionary philosophies. When people become more educated, wealthier, and therefore more intelligent, they naturally reject religion as well as the belief in supernatural realms. They naturally begin to adopt a skeptical and nominalist attitude. When they do this, they also begin to have a more nuanced take on things such as race and religion. This nuanced attitude becomes associated with their skeptical attitude, and so reactionaries, in rejecting modern views on race and religion (note that it's really about race more than religion) they must also reject any kind of skepticism toward supernatural realms or a priori laws that order reality. But since they have tiny brains, they immediately go into the extreme end of becoming Hegelians and Neoplatonists.

>>24791485 (OP)
I think atheism used to be the general ideology of online cultuer in the 2010s, acompanied by a sort of disenchanted pragmatism/existentialism. from the right, a sort of re-enchantment happened through Jung/Peterson, while on the left, Zizek/Fisher popularized the move from post-structural to Marxist-Hegelian thinking. German idealism was the neutral middle ground respected by both camps. Later on, on the right the whole Petersonian/Jungian branch just kind of merged into christian nationalism, and so interest shifted towards more theologically inclined medieval philosophers. The left generally moved more towards revolutionary Marxism proper, but is anyway not very prominent on this board anymore.

>>24791485 (OP)
Romecuck mindset got big with the browning of the west.

>>24791495
>/lit/ is an American board and America is currently going through a quite literal culture war.
Nope, same shit happend in Europe.
>But since they have tiny brains, they immediately go into the extreme end of becoming Hegelians and Neoplatonists.
Yes, the big brains of the wokes. Kek. My God, those people are delusional...
>>24791501
>The left generally moved more towards revolutionary Marxism proper, but is anyway not very prominent on this board anymore.
American is about to become a new shithole. Have fun.

>>24791513
>the big brains of the wokes.
see? You've sacrificed your mind to the culture war egregore, so whenever you see someone expressing an opinion that the egregore told you was bad, you immediately accept the narrative that the egregore implants into you, which is that the person you disagree with must be part of or endorse some "woke movement" that you invented inside your head. Just as you reject any kind of philosophical skepticism through pure guilt by association with non-racist views, you also think that anyone who says something which can be in some way associated with what you have built up in your mind as "woke" must be inextricably linked to a wholesale endorsement of this "woke." It's the logic of a tiny brain that must categorize everything into one seamless narrative because it is incapable of understanding anything about reality on a case by case basis.

>>24791495
Why exactly would questioning race lead to reading thinkers who inherently believed in a universal human race (best illustrated in Augustine himself, but the thread runs through all Christian thought). Fixation on Medieval Europe is clearly more of an aesthetic choice than a genuine interest in the ideology of that time, which was racially universalist. Issue there is gender and the incel movement which is given a sense of comfort reading monastic works, as they also didn't get sex or material success.
>>24791501
The left isn't particularly revolutionary right now. It seems to be in a phase where its not really sure if its interested in liberalism, genderism, or Marxism, but mostly its just in a state of reacting to changing economics , Trump's performative militarization and the genocide in Gaza. We won't see a leftist American narrative for a few more months I think.

>>24791522
>see? You've sacrificed your mind to the culture war egregore,
Oh c'mon dude. You start with "they have tiny brains".
Do you believe we, the reader, are so stupid not to understand this as a move in the culture war?

Your comment should with a short hint imply that the "reactionary" are stupid and therefor, they believe in ghosts and so forth. The woke side, on the other hand, are the "enlighted", smart, educated side.

>>24791528
>Why exactly would questioning race lead to reading thinkers who inherently believed in a universal human race
because it's not logical or based on any sincere engagement with philosophy, that is the entire point. Why is the American right wing embracing Christianity at all? Is it because it justifies their insane views? No, it's all just to feed into their reactionary psychology.

>>24791532
I say that they have tiny brains because they are fucking stupid. It's simply a fact that religious, racist, misogynist people tend to be poor and poorly educated and thus stupid. I don't support the purity spiraling that rightoids identify as "woke" either, as this is also reactionary.

I’m interested in this stuff but I’m not a reactionary. I am just really interested in late antiquity, it sucks seeing it being used as a fig leaf for American culture wars. It’s hilarious needing Aquinas or whatever to provide pseudo-depth to give legitimacy to the desiccated burger landscape of American right wing politics (I include servile European right wingers here who succumbed to the global American monoculture decades ago). IMO it’s the last gasp of a diminishing minority who awkwardly utilizing christian morality or whatever when the vast majority of the American right is more naturally veering hard into a post-moral pagan-esque master morality. Not that there’s any depth there either, at the end of the day it’s all a simulacrum and postmodern pastiche. No one has the words yet for the new cultural forms, like Marx said, “they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language”

The trad and orthobro nonsense will get dumped or forgotten in a few years once language catches up to reality.

>>24791522
>"woke movement" that you invented inside your head
Of course, wokeness doesn't exist. The changes we see in video games, books, Hollywood movies are all just some kind of optical illusion, mass haluzination.
Do you want to fucking kidding me?

Woke is as real as other political movements. They just doesn't like it when anybody pointed it out. For them, they are just "normal", the way or "progress" etc. If you disagree, something is wrong with you, you're either too old to take step with the movement of the time or you must be stupid.

>Just as you reject any kind of philosophical skepticism through pure guilt by association with non-racist views

Is not true.
In fact, I often take the skeptical position and like the philosophy of Hume.
Yet, I'm able to see the Woke ideology and I'm skeptical toward it, too.

>It's the logic of a tiny brain that must categorize everything into one seamless narrative because it is incapable of understanding anything about reality on a case by case basis.
See what I mean? You idiot believe in a ideology and you call it "progress".

>>24791528
>Issue there is gender and the incel movement which is given a sense of comfort reading monastic works, as they also didn't get sex or material success.
Maybe, it's about discrimination?
Sine this group do not get any quotas and so on!

>We won't see a leftist American narrative for a few more months I think.
You will never see it since you already accapted it as a reality instead as a couple of ideas.

>>24791485 (OP)
2000s America was a big reaction to Bush and the moral majority. Religion = bad. New Atheism was the rage. So was political incorrectness and eginess so go figure. So it makes sense people would like existentialists. Death of God, finding meaning in the absurd, etc. Makes sense. After Obama won we got the Tea Party, which morphed into the MAGA movement. The old moral majority died and the remnants went full Joker mode. So we got Yarvin and Land and Dugin, edgy accelerationism esotericism and neo-traditionalism. People went back to Evola, and then they went back to Guenon, and then they figured it was better to be tradcath, tradortho, or go back to Buddhism and Hinduism even. I don't think /lit/ really shits on Nietzsche or Camus or Hume those are just bait threads. Lots of other threads still simp for them. Sartre is really weirdly and unfairly hated on though, to the same level as Bertrand Russell. Shows that people here just go off vibes and don't extensively read what they like OR hate before making up their own mind.
>Are we just running backwards through history fueled by sheer contrarinism?
We're going to have the Frankfurt circle and Foucault fully redeemed, esoteric trad readings of Mormonism, and a new energetic push for niche analytic philosophy, by the next decade at this rate.

>>24791538
I should add that on the other hand, American trad/orthobro/evangelical may in fact be the language of this emerging pseudo master. Behind every recitation of “Christ is king” is self assured smugness and seething rage, never love. So it could go either way.

>>24791548
pseudo master morality**

>>24791485 (OP)
taking a stab in the dark here, but I'd wager the majority of 4chan is male, going by that philosophy is a male dominated field. That's not necessarily a bad thing at all, I think its a good thing. Keeps petty sentimentalism out of the practice. If you hadn't also noticed the topic of "inceldom" is a very hot button issue. male virginity is on the rise. women are completely shameless these days. can you really blame them for going back to a time when women basically were seen as secondary to men. mind you the idea of a tradwife is a fabrication and fantasy. so called "tradwives" did take care of kids and answer to their husbands, but they also didn't sit on their ass all day and shit out babies. they milked cows and fed pigs and hauled bundles of hay while also keeping the house clean. But back then men usually didn't have to risk no fault divorce or society telling women to withhold sex, either while flaunting their half naked bodies on devices which anyone could own, access and share these sordid images and videos with everyone and their brother. so, back to the question, why do you think those thinkers are gaining prominence?

>>24791537
>I say that they have tiny brains because they are fucking stupid.
And by saying so, you perform an act in the culture war.
It's like during reformation. If you stand up and call the protestants "heretics", then you cleary on the side of the Catholic Church.
>I don't support the purity spiraling that rightoids identify as "woke" either, as this is also reactionary.
Doesn't matter whether you support it or not. It exist and it changed the world.
For instance, the desires of heterosexual men are more and more depicted as fundamentaly illegit.

The woke claim to know that the distinguishment of groups on some factores, even "gender" (which they call is different to sex somehow. A miracle, since we observe in any animal a clear connection between behaviour and sexual category), and yet, they force some quoatas.

If I apply to a job, a university and so on, my statistical chances would be smaler just because of the group I belong according to the woke.
Because my group is "socially dominant" somehow.

In contrast to this BULLSHIT, the defintion of justice of Thomas of Aquinas are more fair, more logical and by far more just.

I think people are getting tired of the greeks and rome worship, the cool kids are starting to get into medievalism

knights and ren fair shit mayne

>>24791501
It's weird though because "Christian nationalism" in the US is very Protestant and very committed to classical liberalism, particularly the idea of freedom as power, and scholasticism and Neoplatonism are opposed to these at a very basic level.

35 years oldfag here...

When I was young, I was into existentialism and absurdism and nihilism. Never full new atheism. But skepdick for sure.

Did a philosophy degree. Was ok. Grew dissatisfied with analytic thinkers after a while however. Got into Zizek and Badiou and Deleuze and Lacan and Hegel on my own.

After leaving school, I decided to explore religious philosophy. Hippie phase. Even dabbled in Guenon and Evola. Even worse, I read stuff like Crowley and Blavatsky too. Suprisingly interestng.

After such esoteric and occult dalliances, I realized it was mostly a bad telephone game of classical education. Ended up rereading a lot of Plato and Neoplatonism.

After finishing reading much Hindu and Buddhist scripture as well, I got into ancient and medieval and renaissance Christianity. I instantly fell in love.

This led me to reading contemporary Christian thinkers.

I have woke sympathies but feel there is an emerging post liberal order. Few thinkers have fingers on the emergent pulse of society and its future as much as Christian philosophers.

>>24791495
>Muh presuppositionless pure reason grounded nominalism and empiricism
Your ideology is just an early modern Christian heresy with God chopped out of it.

>>24791533
I think it's neoromanticism. It's a purely aesthetics and emotional ideology, like 19th century Monarchism.
>>24791544
Maybe it is legitimate, my point wasn't about legitimacy it was about narrative, and the current lack of an American left wing narrative right now compared to the 2010s.

>>24791522
>Woke isn't real
>Anyone who disagrees with modernity secretly does it because they love racism and cannot get over how intelligent and not racist and reasonable people like me are.
lol

The brain tumor of Zionism is so intense in America that it has no coherent ability to think once progressive fell apart in the early 1970s and no coherent American system, other than 2010s SJWism and reactionarism, is possible until it is excised.

>>24791538
>>24791548
Hmm, this doesn't seem like a very fair and unbiased take. Surely the same thing can and has been argued for advocates of "woke," classical liberalism, Marxism, and neoliberalism. No doubt, traditionalism is employed in an incoherent and contradictory manner by some people, and by politicians like Vance or Desantis embrace of classical education. But lots of people are genuinely interested in this stuff and lots of traditionalist intellectuals take politically risky positions in condemning capitalism and even conservative liberalism. Actually, a fair few of them are more towards to political left, David Bentley Hart being a big example, and probably the biggest traditionalist today.

Anyhow, I think one underappreciated force here is the resurgence of Stoicism in the last decade. To be sure, this was largely done in a deflated, self-help, therapeutic (in Rieff's sense) sort of way, but it got some people more interested in the source material, which led them to Cicero, the Peripatetics, and Platonism. Prima facie, I am not sure why people think that anyone who finds Plato or Aquinas more compelling on the common good and freedom than liberalism or post-modernism must be secretly motivated by selfishness and rage, and be unserious. If anything, these philosophies lead to a more serious approach to philosophy when compared with those which make a virtue of detached irony.

>>24791555
>>24791548
>>24791495
Again, I'm not sure if you can ascribe a rejection of modernity to:
>They're racist and stupid
>They're incels
>They have evil and selfish motives

Attacks on modernity come from the left as well and they are, funny enough, almost identical to the Right, just without the same metaphysical alternative to propose (indeed, from the left it is normally just critique without solution, or else the solution is more progressive liberalism).

>>24791654
Vance is a white nationalist coded politician with a nonwhite family. His big thing in the 2010s was being a never Trumper and he is now Trump's VP. He is inherently nonserious at an ideological level.

>>24791654
David Bentley Hart is neoromanticism. Anglo thought is traditionally Protestant rationalism, or a proto form of that. This has been consistent since the high middle ages. His thought is a mix of anglophone esotericism and orientalism. Even shows in his Anglican background and conversion experience. Plus the idea of being a nationalist and being Eastern Orthodox as an Anglo is inherently nonserious to the point it's genuinely funny.

>>24791694
This is such a bad assignment of labels that I question whether or not you've ever read DBH. Certainly you haven't understood him or his key influences.

>>24791495
>Neoplatonism are popular on /lit/ is that these are reactionary philosophies
No.

>>24791731
Probably just an Anglo-empiricist liberal. For them, everything outside their narrow bubble isn't "rational" and is thus "romanticist." That's the only way I could see someone building of Saint Gregory of Nyssa and the other Capaddocians, Nicholas of Cusa, and modern influences like de Lubac and Milbank as a "romanticist" and the Patristics as "orientalist."

>>24791731
>>24791745
You guys are pathetic. He is like a neopagan druid who actually believes his own and you guys are as deep a someone who believes in Marvel movie based Paganism. There cannot be a serious Anglo-traditionalism that draws on ideas that the Anglo world didn't encounter until the 19th and 20th century. A serious anglo non-rationalist world view is found in Pentecostalism btw, which is very grounded in traditional perspectives native to that cultural context.

>>24791753
>David Bentley Hart and John Milbank are Pagans
Is Pryzwarra also a Pagan, or because he is a Pole can he cite the Patristics?

>ideas that the Anglo world didn't encounter until the 19th and 20th century.

The Anglo world was dominated by these ideas for centuries. And there wasn't an "Anglo-world" then. This is an anachronism, everyone did philosophy in Latin and used Greek sources and travel was not uncommon. Eriugena was Irish and practiced in Germany. Your argument relies on "Ockham was English, therefore England has no tradition with the Patristics and high scholasticism and a frankly bizarre linguistic essentialism where, if your write in English, even if you are fluent in Greek and other languages (DBH has done many translations) you must hold to recent Philosophy in that language alone.

>>24791528
>Fixation on Medieval Europe is clearly more of an aesthetic choice than a genuine interest in the ideology of that time, which was racially universalist.
Lol

>>24791513
you type like you based your personality off those youtube culture war react videos where they pause the video every other line to give their snarky little jab.

>>24791771
The Lord is testing us

>>24791762
The Anglo-Protestant world had existed for 500 years. And it has a tradition of citing the Church fathers. Even Pentecostal documents cite the church fathers. The absurdity comes in when you try and graft Russian aesthetics onto a system that is so throughly fleshed out. On the second thought, yes, on the ground level there is no serious Anglophone-Catholic tradition of any meaningful traditionalism as it isn't the religion of the powers that ruled over the Anglo world for that 500 years period. When Latin Christianity split in-half (until Vatican II) there was little to no dialogue for centuries. Most Anglophone Catholic participation in public life was limited to making pithy comments like Alexander Pope. It's that they didn't contribute to literature, it's that until 1922 there wasn't an Anglophone Catholic society at all that had to grapple with political questions at all and so it's a completely unfleshed out system. To the extend their is a traditionalism in it at all there is Irish republicanism, which is decidedly not conservative.

>>24791495
You had me up at
>philosophy is no longer sincere but a mere expression of the culture war working through them.
But everything after that is just plain bollocks.

>>24791774
City of God Book XVI Chapter 8.

>>24791762
You realize that like small town Baptist and Methodists preachers not only read the church fathers in seminary, but they also have hundreds of years of their specific denominations commentaries on these fathers. Just because catholicism has old churches in Europe and [insert state] Synod Methodists/Lutherans and their Baptists equivalents operating out of a weird modern building with a leaking flat roof from the 1960s don't have incredibly fleshed out philosophical systems that address everything from Church fathers to liturgy. It shows how based on looks and feels your kind of movement is. Even if they on monolingual they can read all the way back to Knox in English without translation.

>>24791662
not a leftist and I'm sympathetic towards incels

>>24791495
note those same educated, wealthier, more intelligent people also push things like antinatalism, post-colonialism, and feminism on a hapless, helpless European/white working and/or poverty stricken classes. Atheists, the wealthy and educated hate white hilrods unanimously, seeing them as backwards patriarchal, racist tyrants. but in truth they have zero power. in an alternate timeline Pol Pot would have been born in a West Virginia mining community. and because cognitive dissonance and hypocrisy is rampant among the former class of individuals, there's no reason that these "deplorables" shouldn't use the same tactics.

>>24791485 (OP)
>Then we went through a weird transition period where German idealism got big, along with some modern esoteric stuff and Indian thought, particularly Shankara.
Shankara remains the final redpill even though he isn't dicussed as often on /lit/ due to nearly every possible discussion already having had taken place from every possible angle in the preceding years.

>>24791794
That literally doesn't exclude the difference of powers between men and therefore does nothing to dispute the difference of powers between human populations. Also laughable to cite an Antique African when talking about general medieval European views on "race".

>>24791826
The anti-Indian sentiment might contribute as to why

>>24791826
>pooinloo parmenides
Lolz

>>24791831
you really just proved >>24791830's point within 1 second lmao

>>24791832
Not anti-Indian. Just unimpressed by unqualified nondualism. I'd say the Gita, most Upanishads, the Yoga Sutras, and Tantraloka (or Tantrasara for the lazy) are all superior to anything written by Sankara. Stuff like Aurobindo and Vivekananda is also superior insofar as it builds on him too IMO.

>>24791828
This is a really low IQ post.

>>24791851
Feel free to provide an actual argument anytime.

>>24791867
City of God against the Pagans was the most important philosophical work for the middle ages. It was the most common philosophical work of the Church fathers in the Latin West.

>>24791879
Yes, I'm aware of who St. Augustine is retard.

>>24791831
Comparing Shankara to Parmenides fails to do him justice, the richness and depth of his thought can only be compared to a Plato or Aristotle. In Shankara's works we find an abundance of interesting discussions on metaphysics, epistemology, hermeneutics, soteriology, we find an analysis of the nature of conciousness that far exceeds in sophistication anything found in Greek thought or in western thought generally until the modern era with things like phenomenology (Plato's and Aristotle's discussion of conciousness seems primitive by comparison). We find an extremely analytical thinker who argues with a high degree of precision and clarity. He is a master of using metaphors to convey subtle concepts.

He is also a genuinely good author of prose, his style is characteristically understated with an almost laconic sense of humor. He expresses ideas in 2 or 3 sentences that other authors would take an entire page to express. When you have many different works by him some of which are 800+ and 900+ pages of this style and which are filled with hundreds of different arguments his works are really like an entire universe unto themselves.

>>24791898
So why would his views on race not be normative in the Latin west in that time when all his other views were normative?

>>24791903
Assuming that medieval Europeans in general read and held the ideas of St. Augustine in their heads is obviously untrue. But in what way does the passage you cited conflict with Aristotle's account of populations in The Politics; or how does supposing that all men are descended from Adam and eligible for salvation conflict with the idea that different human populations have different powers?

>>24791929
The Latin west didn't have access to manuscripts of Aristotle until the high middle ages. Thomas Aquinas Himself didn't read Greek. The idea that anyone in the Latin west was reading Greeks in Greek until the early modern period is an anachronism.

>>24791942
qed

>>24791945
That's based on William of Moerbeke's translation. TQ wasn't proficient in Greek.

>>24791942
>The idea that anyone in the Latin west was reading Greeks in Greek until the early modern period is an anachronism.
>That's based on William of Moerbeke's translation

>>24791812
Rural Protestant here, this is definitely not generally true lol. Anyone other than Augustine elicits blank stares. The only place where these figures are known is in the very liberal urban churches I've gone to, and even then they are peripheral.

>>24791960
Methodist, Lutheran or Baptist?

>>24791960
>>24791812
BTW, this is from like 12 years of experience. Whereas my first class at a basic intro the Orthodoxy thing Origen, the Capaddocians, and Maximus came up, and of course the Church walls are carpeted in icons of these guys. It is very different. No doubt theologians pastors read are reading these guys but not pastors normally.

>>24791955
Moerbeke's translations were the first attempt at it, and were done in the late 13th century and the renaissance started in the 14th century, so we aren't talking Medieval anymore, and we are talking about people getting their first look.

>>24791972
St. Aquinas, not a medieval theologian.
The late 13th century, the beginning of the early modern period.
Argument I presented: unaddressed
Are you posting using ai?

>>24791981
I don't start the early modern period until the 14th century. Your post isn't properly formatted for 4chan. Is it supposed to be greentext? I don't know what your argument is, but if it's claiming that anyone was reading Aristotle directly from the Greek in the Latin west until the renaissance then it's not correct. Moerbeke was living in Greece when he did the translations. The translations were specifically created because no one in the Latin West had access to Aristotle. He was a key first step to getting to people reading Aristotle in Greek in the west. I am not using AI. I assume it would date early modern as starting in 1517 or 1500 or something. But I am starting it between 1300 and 1400 for philosophy. Borderline counting TAq as early modern.

>>24791963
Baptist and non-denominational.

>>24792143
Particular or Freewill?

>>24792010
>Your post isn't properly formatted for 4chan
What a joke you are.

>>24792157
I'd have to guess based on private conversations with the pastors. The preaching was always very surface level or focused on political issues.

At the two liberal churches I went to for longer periods (both Baptist) everyone was educated but theology was approached in a very intellectual but hands off way. "You do you." Rieff's Triumph of the Therapeutic definitely rang some bells when I read it (and this was even more true at the non-denominational one I went to for three years). Whereas other's just preached the Great Commission every single Sunday, but none of them ever really mentioned Hell, they just sort of implied it (not-saved versus damned).

It's not like they have a catechumenate, you just show up. We moved a lot so I went to a lot of churches on a short term basis, a few months, including some mega churches and a lot of those are just a pep talk about converting more people every week paired with a praise music concert, maybe some Biblical self-help mixed in.

I can absolutely see why most kids "raised in church" subscribe to "moralistic theistic diesm."

Clicked this thinking it is a Proclus thread and wondering if there were people of actual intelligence posting on this board again - turns out it is just another nonsense thread.
What does Proclus have to do with your post? Should I assume that you think he is a "Dark Age" thinker? Or somehow associated with Scholasticism?

>>24792266
>looks at op pic without reading anything
>picrel

>>24792266
Proclus was often studied during late medieval period as a spurious pseudo Aristotle. Aquinas himself corrected this error.

Plato asides Timaeus was largely unavailable and people studied mainly Aristotle's Organon in early period of medieval.

Nevertheless, works like Psd-Dionysius introduced many Neoplatonic elements to the West. Some would say he is a Christianized Proclus. Augustine was also incredibly popular. In addition to Confessions and City of God, his work De Trinitate is a masterpiece of Christian Neoplatonism. We must also not forget Boethius. In addition to Consolation of Philosophy, one of the most popular works in medieval era, he wrote logical treatises and a work on the trinity like Augustine as well.

Even during early medieval, there were still interesting works, classical liberal arts and much more were oft recorded in books on christian education (for monks). Stuff like Isidore of Seville. One musn't forget Eriugena either. An amazing and unique mind.

I believe Patristics were not well studied in Latin west. Orthodox east preserved them well however.

The Byzantine too were source of much Plato and Aristotle leading to renaissance as much as Islamicate world.

>>24791902
Have you read Plotinus? I read both Shankara and Plotinus and Plotinus is by far greater

>>24792373
not him but why

>>24791485 (OP)
/lit/ is for LITERATURE, pseud dipshit

The idealists and Deleuzians are on the right track because these philosophies cut through the culture wars like acid. Beyond that it’s just left vs right, on /lit/, in philosophical form.

>>24791495
>nominalist
You faggots keep using this word and you don’t know what it means. Any anon making vague appeals to “nominalism” is a pseud. I had a seminarian friend who talked like this and he was definitely a pseud.

>>24792639
You are definitely a pseud. Only a pseud would get triggered by the term nominalism. 99% of people don't even care about it.

>>24792676
It’s because it’s a lazy shorthand for “things I don’t like, things Trump and the chud converts in my parish wouldn’t like”. It’s retarded, anyone who is genuinely interested in Aristotle and the scholastics can see through you like you’re made of glass.

>>24792687
But right-wing philosophy is nominalist, dumbass.
I'm not even right-wing.

>>24792687
>chuds
>Trump
>wahhhhh
We are discussing theology and philosophy, in a historical and global and Catholic vein moreover, begone with thine petty politics of the day.

>>24792699
Again with the vague “nominalist” charge. Have you read Aquinas’ Commentary on the Metaphysics? He was damn near a nominalist himself. But I’m sure you don’t know what a nominalist is and think it means someone who believes in nothing but subjective truths.

>>24791495
>a quite literal culture war.
It's a global psycho-memetic war.
In its most expansive form it is "the attention economy."
I wrote all these posts and much more.

>>24791495
You'd best start believing in memepunk animes.
You're in one.
https://vimeo.com/specalblend

>>24792723
>>24792687
It’s happening again.

>>24791495
TFW you read this pic.
TFW it was written in 1993.
TFW you can read about it here:
https://pastebin.com/4s91qRn6

>>24791495
https://archive.org/download/co-creative-evolution-final/Co_Creative_Evolution_1.05.pdf

https://archive.org/details/simsane-9.1-vyrith

>>24792172
Still wasn't.
>>24792350
Aquinas Couldn't read greek. William of Moerbeke's translation is the only way he encountered Proclus, and Proclus's texts were mistaken for Aristotle by the Arabs. Moerbeke seemed to have no issue identifying it, so it was probably literally labeled Proclus in the Greek.

>>24792836
>aquinas couldn't read greek
And your point therefore???
>arabs mistook proclus for aristotle
The arabs purposefully altered it and called it book of causes and Aquinas being a good reader said hey this is a Proclus gloss.

>>24792867
I thought they though it was likely an Iberian Jew. Either way, while obviously derivative, I like the Book of Causes.

The Theology of Aristotle, which is a gloss on Plotinus, was definitely Arabs though IIRC.

>>24792867
Well yeah, wasn't the whole reason for Moerbeke's entire translation project that the Dominican order wanted translations of Greek works into Latin for research? Like he was essentially their field archeologist?

>>24792350
>I believe Patristics were not well studied in Latin west. Orthodox east preserved them well however.

Well, many of the Latin Fathers were still studied quite a bit. Some of the Greeks had been translated too, and Greek influence comes in through Saint John Cassian as well (who brings in things like Evagrius' Eight Deadly Thoughts). The Sayings of the Desert Fathers made it into Latin, and so did the Capaddocians. It's not uncommon to see Saint Gregory the Theologian cited as an authority (e.g., in Eriugena). Origen's work also continued to circulate in translation under other names. Saint Bernard of Clairvaux is thought to have been familiar with some of his corpus and some Evagrian texts that had been renamed. And obviously Dionysius is all over the place. I think he is the authority cited most after Augustine and Aristotle in Aquinas (Augustine actually being the most common, although the commentaries are implicitly using Aristotle as an authority the whole time).

IIRC Saint John of Damascus had earlier influence, which is why he is a Doctor of the Roman Church and Saint Isaac of Nineveh, despite being far removed, had some influence.

My understanding is that, while obviously a great deal wasn't translated, it was also the case that translations from before the schism, when the ERE still had a presence in Italy, lost relevance due simply not being copied as much, and the inevitable problem of destruction, loss, etc. so that Eastern influence actually waned with time (I would imagine that stuff also became less likely to be copied as the traditions diverged). And since copies were scarce, influence was uneven.

>>24792997
One of the problems of this post is that it assumes that Summa was normative when it was only finished 166 years before the printing press and a mere 243 years before the 95 theses. While this seems like a long time it is not in terms of the manuscript tradition. Plus the Summa is very long. So it was probably not available to most archbishops bishops until its first full publication in the 1480s.

>>24793062
Saint Bernard is a century and a half earlier than Saint Thomas and Eriugena is two centuries prior to that. That's a pretty good spread.

Richard of Saint Victor also appeals to Dionysius often, Olivi too

>>24792997
Augustine didn’t know any Aristotle directly besides the Categories. In the Confessions he boasts about how he didn’t find it at all difficult to understand. And he uses it in De Trin. But he didn’t really know Aristotle like say Boethius did.

I feel like Benedict/Ratzinger is a really underrated figure in all of this. Online discussion of philosophy and theology was really taking off in the 2010s and Benedict was there to kickstart a lot of discussions that are still taking place to this day. Now, 10 or 15 years later, it's kind of reaching maturity and escaping into the normalfag sphere, hence the turn towards serious discussion of Christianity after atheism was the default mode of online for so long.

Benedict is also fairly important since he's basically a lifelong refutation of the idea that you have to be stupid to be a Christian. The man was one of the great minds of the 20th Century.

>>24791495
>When people become more educated, wealthier, and therefore more intelligent, they naturally reject religion as well as the belief in supernatural realms. They naturally begin to adopt a skeptical and nominalist attitude. When they do this, they also begin to have a more nuanced take on things such as race and religion.

Education and wealth allow one to enter into the class of rootless cosmopolitans who can relocate to the other side of the world at a moment's notice. Such people have an unconventional interest in race and religion (if any interest at all) because racial developments turning negative will only ever frustrate their prospects marginally. They can always sail off to another land of plenty. The anxiety and unease that many of us here feel, as well as across the wider internet, reflects the broader working class reality that we are, in some sense, rooted to the land. We can't step out of a situation in which we're treated with hostility on account of our race, religion, gender, or any other identity, at least not as easily as someone from an academic dynasty where each family member has a PhD.

>>24793095
The Summa is really long. I am assuming it made it out in bits but I seriously doubt more than a few dozen full collections ever existed at a time, until the printing press. Like seriously imagine the man hours of copying it. The summa is like 6x at least City of God in length. Also part of why Augustine was so influential in Protestantism, as like who actually had access to a full Summa prior to 1485 and that limited the time to actually read and analyze it? Like I am sure the relevant sections made it where they needed to go, but not the full edition. Pretty sure at least Calvin noted this exact issue.

>>24791485 (OP)
>In the 2010s the philosophers of choice were all existentialists, Nietzsche
the edgy 14 year old teens have grown up

>>24794677
That's probably part of it. It's also no longer edgy because it is the dominant philosophy.

>>24796224
As I said before, there's also the fact that Reddit atheism won and THIS was the result. Reddit Atheism won, Christianity lost, but the world that resulted wasn't some glorious enlightened age of reason, truth, and beauty. The world that resulted was... this. Slop. Bugmanism. Consumerist filth. Empty hedonism.

It fucking sucks and it has basically totally discredited atheism, at least the Reddit variety. Reddit Atheism didn't lose because it lost, it lost because it won.

>>24796244
On the right larping Romecucking won and actual belief in anything at all lost.

>>24796258
Who are you to judge what "actual belief" looks like? If someone goes to Mass every Sunday, if they go to Confession regularly, if they give to the poor and have an active prayer life, is that not enough to count as "actual belief," since none of us can look into the heart?

>>24796260
>why is being an NPC a bad thing?!?
You do you Mr. Roboto.

>>24796260
>if I do all the motions without believing who are you to say I can't be saved?

>>24796269
>>24796284
The point is, you can't know. What would constitute "real" belief for you, that you could observe, since you can't read their minds and see their innermost thoughts? What would it take to convince you?

>>24796362
They are following the pope who is an antichrist. Simple as.

>>24791485 (OP)
I've read philosophy for a decade and I still find the greatest philosophers to be Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and, to a degree, Heidegger. Unless you're a christfag or moslem, the only other remotely interesting thinkers are Leibniz, some of the Daoists and Confucians (Analects upper chapters and Mencius especially), Buddha, and Wittgenstein. Moderns just don't seem capable of philosophy outside of Germany for some reason (probably a special kind of university environment).

>>24793095
>Saint Bernard
Was he a good boy?

>>24796244
This, but it applies to Nietzscheanism and liberalism too.

>>24791485 (OP)
There is always at least one 100+ reply "fuck modernity" thread up at any given time. This shows the widespread discontent. And it just happens that the Cathlodox traditionalists, with a handful of dyed in the wool neo-neoplatonist academics, articulate by far and away the most coherent alternative to this. It's not that there aren't critiques from the "left" or from Continental philosophy, it's just that they generally just point out the same flaws with less confidence but almost never propose any sort of an alternative except for "expand the welfare state" since they cannot bring themselves to grapple with the fact that not only is Enlightenment solipsitic reason flawed, but so are all the elements post-modernism built on.

Where we the "non-ontology" of the suspended middle and reason as participation is both aesthetically pleasing and has been reasonably well justified in a modern context by a number of thinkers from Ulrich up to today.

It helps that such an approach can also market itself as a "third position" since it rejects capitalism and conservative liberalism as much as socialism and progressive liberalism.

>>24797815
Oh, and for people who can't get themselves to embrace the revealed religion of Christianity of Neoplatonist Judaism or Islam, Pagan Neoplatonism is non-threatening enough as a dead religion to allow them to get into it. It also helps that there are a lot of similarities between these and varieties of Eastern thought that have been popular alternatives in the West to date (Hinduism more than Buddhism, but some forms of Buddhism too).

The move to German idealism, particularly Hegelianism, and Romanticism was already a step halfway in this direction. People went to Kant, got dissatisfied the same way his original readers did, and so moved to Schelling and Hegel. But that is already leading you more towards the older view; all that is left is to break the confines of the "close world system" of immanence. Post-modernism, despite being all about immanence, actually helps here because it shows how the closed world system and barriers to transcendence and participation are just historically contingent constructs, and yet also reveals that this is true of post-modernism too, leaving the seeker free to abandon post-modernism as a sort of crutch and make the leap towards Logos.

>>24791486
Is poetry more useful than philosophy?

>>24797825
Theory: Christianity adopted neoplatonic thought to try and bootstrap out of the psychopannychism that the texts explicitly describes. This structure, built entirely on it meant that Medieval thought was always built on this ramshackle structure and it eventually collapsed.

>>24797883
I think the texts are ambiguous. For instance, in Luke 23 Christ tells the penitent thief that he will be with him that day in paradise and Revelation appears to have saints present in the divine throne room, Hebrews speaks of witnesses, etc.

I've come around on the idea that "Neoplatonism" is an anachronism. Numenius suggests less of a definitive innovation (indeed some texts accuse Plotinus of being derivative). And yet he is quoted by multiple sources as saying: "what is Plato but Moses speaking Greek?"

Plotinus might have had his issues with the Gnostics, but the texts we now have access to show that the basic idea of emanation is present in their texts prior, along with the Barbelō functioning similarly to the Nous in some ways.

The stark division between past "middle-Platonism" and the idea that borrowing largely went in one direction, instead of being a hodgepodge, seems more like a modern hallucination that was aided by the fact that this is how it goes in Saint Augustine's autobiography.

>>24791485 (OP)
/lit/ has always had a thing for parmenides and other presocratics, really. The other stuff is just edgy fluff from people who still call themselves christian or hegelian or whatever for clout/keeping up appearances.

>>24798099
Counterpoint: much of what was saved from neoplatoism was what aligned with the Augustinian Christian world view, and the canon was created much later, perhaps as late as the creeds as note how things like the Shepard of Hermas is missing? But Luke 23:43 does say a lot about the theology and philosophy of Luke, particularly considering it's the last of the 3 written this makes it in the middle Platoism period? Just interesting how it's such a prominent addition that seems to only serve to address that specific topic.

>>24798270
The dating of Luke is interesting. The strongest evidence for an earlier date is that is quite odd that it would choose not to cover the martyrdom of Saint Paul and Saint Peter, and would instead leave off as if it was written in the middle of the journeys described (although perhaps edited later).

To be honest, I find the dating stuff all to be extremely speculative, and it's hard to see why one should rule out either the quite late or quite early datings with much confidence.

The Canon wasn't officially fixed until later but the early Fathers are all fairly consistent on it, particularly the Gospels and Paul's letters (e.g., Origen).

But to your question, Philo of Alexandria is considered a middle Platonist and he's before Christ, so Jewish Platonism would be an influence for any dating anyhow (e.g., John 1).

And given what can be gathered about Numenius and others, these ideas were probably around for the first century to some extent anyhow.

>>24799170
I was entirely posting off the top of my head, but the Luke 23 point really makes me think about how its clearly something that came up in Greece and Acts is set there, so like it tracks, but also it is weirdly inserted for no reason except to try and refute that concept, as Jews like Maimonides specifically believed in Psychopannychism so it clearly was always kicking around in the Jewish tradition.