An abiding and central concern of philosophy and religion alike is the fear that the world is alien … - David E. Cooper

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I hope you didn't bring the Asian kid along thinking he's a computer genius. Because I'm not," Takumi said.

David E. Cooper

An abiding and central concern of philosophy and religion alike is the fear that the world is alien to human beings, that nature is, in Hegel's words, 'out and out other' to 'spirit'. It's easy enough to see how 'constructivist' or 'humanist' conceptions are efforts to dispel this fear.

Abiding, Effort, Fear, Philosophy, See, Words

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It is indeed impossible to describe reality 'in itself', but that does not mean that our lives are answerable to nothing but our own conventions and commitments. They are answerable to a way of things that transcends the reach of our conceptual schemes.

Commitment, Mean, Nothing, Reach, Reality, Things

It is hubris, claim the critics of 'absolutism', to suppose that we could ever even approximate to a true description of how the world anyway is. It is bad faith or 'bullshit', respond 'absolutists', to suppose - as the rhetoric of postmodernism implies - that we could seriously live and act with the thought that truth and value are simply our own projections. An attractive feature of 'ineffabilism', as I see it, is that it evades these accusations.

Absolutism, Bullshit, Implies, Respond, Simply, World

Nietzsche's 'perspectivalism' was expressly directed against the 'laughable juxtaposition of "man and world"'. But 'absolutist' accounts, too, typically try to demonstrate that human beings are integral components of the world these accounts articulate - that, for example, we are simply material bodies subject to the same natural processes as everything else.

Beings, Directed, Example, Integral, Men, Trying

To describe this world is not to describe reality 'in itself', as it is independently of how we regard and describe it.

Independently, Reality, Regard, This World, World

What impressed me about Plato and Sartre was their conviction that we should live our lives in the light of big truths about reality and human existence.

Human, Light, Plato, Reality, Truths