Posts by Joseph Murphy10

Beauty is just bits and pieces of a lost paradise.

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steelridge58... strictly in a philosophical sense
He’s actually paying a compliment here.
Every time I see him, I honestly start shaking—pure fear, man.

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Harold James9

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Sigmund is obviously Tom Cruise, right? 🙂

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Sandra Murphy33 said:I don't know any of those secondary characters, whether they're local or from abroad. I only looked up Gabriel on Google just to get a sense of what she looks like, but beyond that, I have absolutely no idea who she is.

🙂

She isn't some "side character." She’s a professor at LA Galaxy, president of the Democratic Party, and so on and so forth. Seriously, just Google her, Nad... oops, my bad, Nea

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Sandra Murphy33 said:Gabriella Perišić is younger and better looking than I am.

🤣

But you've got more brains than she does—kind of like Nadežda Čačinović

Like Sigmund is to Neven Budak,
Neo is to Gabriella Perisic running Fifth Day,
Volver is to Milani Vuković Runjić
Anonymous is to Aleksandra Musić
Walnut is to Peter Mitrikeska
Jednostavka is like that rector Boras Nobody
I can't picture anyone here as Ian Bobic.

Steven Clark2 said:Well, I haven't said anything that you don't deserve.

And besides, who really cares about that? What matters is what you write—whether it makes sense to anyone, how substantive and high-quality it is, and even how much it might inspire someone. With all due respect to academia, you don't need a PhD in philosophy or an official professorship to discuss these things. After all, we are just on a forum. 😁

Personally, I am quite interested in hermeneutics. I feel I know a fair amount, though I would very much like to delve deeper into philosophical hermeneutics, despite being fully aware of how profound and vast that subject truly is.

I am not certain that keeping pace with the most recent works is easy for anyone, but I certainly respect the effort. 😁

I’m not entirely sure what Hek would contribute to this, but to my mind, "norm" feels much closer to a "standard" than a rigid "rule."🤔 If you take a look at this, there seems to be an usage of the term "norm" that isn't merely a linguistic quirk, but suggests something far more profound.

Well, either your intuition is failing you, or your ability to communicate it is.😁 Or perhaps it is a combination of both—or something else entirely. Something is certainly amiss.😁

Both. Either way. 🙂
Too lazy to move—but I’m still out here stacking ammo. 😁
Look, I know I’m on the right track here—reducing philosophy to just some sidekick for neurocognitive psychology is a massive fail. Honestly? Neurocognitive psychology itself is a total bust. She’s asking questions that aren't going to get any real answers, and the path she’s taking is a dead end. Pretty soon, we won't even have actual psychologists doing the work—it’ll just be highly trained nursing assistants and techs mindlessly following templates.

I won't live to see this belief actually take hold—so for the foreseeable future, we’re basically just stuck teetering on the edge of what I call pure, unadulterated nonsense. 🙂

It doesn't cost me a dime to talk my mouth off—as long as Volver keeps letting me run wild.

We create because we’re basically called to carry on God’s work of creation.

But look—the act of creating isn't some pre-set script dictated by God or the world. It only works if there's true freedom involved. We're talking about a kind of freedom that emerges from nothingness—something we can't wrap our heads around using just logic or "being," since you can't explain the void using the stuff that exists. If we actually own that, we're accepting this irrational mystery of freedom—which, honestly, is a much bigger concept than just the typical Christian idea of free will.

If there wasn't this totally unconditioned freedom at the heart of creativity, we wouldn't be making anything new—we'd just be rearranging the furniture. Creation would be a total illusion.

God’s own act of creation happened through the freedom of His will. So, by that same logic, human creativity has to be free too—not tied down by anything, not even by God. That’s the only way it counts as actual creation. Otherwise? It’s just distribution. Just reshuffling what’s already there.

When you look at it through the lens of that irrational freedom to act, it’s actually a lot easier to make sense of destruction.

Nicholas Grant20 said:It's that Heidegger's forgetting of the battle.

I suppose it doesn't really matter whether they view them as sciences or not. :-)

To put it bluntly...

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Bravo Spartan, bravo! That’s exactly it! You just nailed what I meant by philosophical self-annihilation. Sure, I’ve taken some fair heat for suggesting that philosophy risks becoming marginal or irrelevant—some people even compare it to a pseudoscience like astrology. I know that’s not the case and there’s a solid rebuttal out there, I just haven't hammered it out into a formal response yet. Honestly, half the STEM crowd thinks the humanities aren't even "real" science anyway—they don't give them the time of day. But hey, does it even matter? We know who we are—or rather, you guys actually know what's up 🙂

Gave my vote to steelridge58 because her metaphor was spot on—kind of like some medieval theater mixed with Greek drama, complete with a potential deus ex machina twist, all wrapped up in a Warhol-esque narrative. She hit the nail on the head: philosophy’s core mission is digging into our own foundations, constantly hunting for answers to those age-old questions even as the world shifts under our feet. If you don't, you just end up spiraling into a philosophical dead end of self-negation—which is basically what I was hinting at in my own unfinished thread... I took her response as a solid nod to my own stance. 😁👍

As for where all this modern philosophical rambling leads? Maybe the best way to see it is by looking at the phenomenon of evil and the attempts to reduce it down to some messy, shapeless web of cause and effect—you know, that chaotic soup where everything gets dragged under, from decent folks to lies, suffering, and old scrap metal. But intrinsic evil? That’s metaphysical. It’s eternal, absolute, and nesreduktljivo—but hey, that’s a whole other rabbit hole, etc... etc...

Mark Torres14 said:What about an ant? Where does it come from, and where is it going?! 🙂

Look, it's a fair question, I guess—but I don't have the answer since I'm not some biologist specializing in ant life cycles. Go ask a scientist. And if you're talking about humans? A biologist isn't even the only authority you'd need to talk to to get a real answer.

Your question is basically a textbook example of a fallacy.

Honestly, that’s the million-dollar question—it never ends. What even is a human being, where did we come from, and where the hell are we headed?!

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ruggedraven36 said:Look, if the question was "What is the single most important question in ancient philosophy?", would you respond by saying, "I didn't take the question as a fact, but rather as an opening for a debate on what should have been the most important question back then"? Probably not. It’s pretty simple—one refers to modern thought, the other to antiquity. That's the difference.

You're spot on... 🤦

But hey, the question's out there, and I said what I said. Honestly, I don't think anyone can sit there with total authority and give a "valid" answer to "what is the most important question in modern philosophy." Why? Because such an answer would have to be the one and only correct, arbitrary truth. If we did that, we'd lose the whole point—the debate, the arguments, the speculation, and all that "rambling" the author mentioned. We need that friction.

Plus, let’s not forget my classic American streak of being contrarian just for the hell of it—even if a single right answer actually existed. 😁

We’ve already got some killer responses first thing in the morning—clearly MMovca set the bait with a pretty provocative question.
I didn't take the prompt as someone stating a hard fact; I saw it more as an invitation to kick off a debate about what the single most important philosophical question is in today's world. So, I'll try to chip in with my own two cents before time runs out, though honestly, Neo, Walnut, and Joseph Murphy10 have pretty much covered everything I would've said anyway—just in their own way.

Have they made their choice?
In his book *Humankind*, Rutger Bregman argues the exact opposite. He uses a ton of examples to show that unity, cooperation, and togetherness are actually second nature to us. Think about it—on a Navy destroyer, the captain isn't exactly "one" with the sailor at the bow (other than them both being in the Navy, obviously), but they have to work together perfectly just to keep the ship from sinking. If you’re talking about an aircraft carrier, you’re looking at 6,000 different individuals working in total sync. Six thousand! And for that kind of functional teamwork to happen—for everyone to actually nail their specific role—they had to compete and refine themselves first.

According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, civilization is basically a term for the various stages of material, intellectual, and social progress within a community; it's the whole toolkit of skills, knowledge, customs, and beliefs held by a society. The French Enlightenment added those "positive" vibes to the definition, too. It essentially represents the ability of individuals to live cooperatively as members of a society (*societas*), which leads us to the obvious conclusion: humans are social animals.
So, division, fighting, and competition—while they definitely exist—aren't baked into our DNA. I'd say it's actually the complete opposite.

Equality, if we take it as the direct opposite of diversity, is just plain impossible for the human race. We aren't all the same—not just when it comes to class, social status, or money, but cognitively, psychologically, physically, intellectually... you name it. Perfect equality is nothing more than a pretty illusion. We might hit that level of equality only in the eschaton, and even then, only through a very specific lens—certainly not here in the real world. Paul hits on this idea when he says, "There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female. You are all one in Christ." Beyond that, we can look at division, struggle, and competition as either healthy or toxic depending on the context. They can be within our control or forced upon us. Usually, when things feel forced, I'm talking about political and economic disparities. But if they're endogenous—meaning they're part of who we are as thinking beings and don't depend on outside forces—then they're just a given.
Bottom line: these concepts don't have absolute definitions.

James Lee77 said:The real question is, does life even matter if there’s nothing waiting for us on the other side? I mean, back when we were all immortal souls, we hung around for thousands of years—ever since we were just civilized monkeys—so two hundred years feels like a blink of an eye, I guess. Maybe.

Q.E.D.

Bravo! Now that’s the only comment worth reading. Time is an absolute void, my friend, a total void!

Amanda Jackson5 said:By the way, Hegel didn't spend much time rambling on about death. As far as I can tell, the only thing he ever really said about it was that death represents a "real danger to man." Whatever that’s supposed to mean.

Sounds pretty deep—and since I haven't even cracked a Hegel book yet, it feels like it’s tied to how he defines a human being within a logical framework. My gut tells me he isn't talking about "humanity" in some broad, fuzzy sense, but rather something very specific to his context. If that's the case, the whole sentence makes sense if "death" refers to breaking the continuity of that process where a person actually becomes "human" in a conceptual way...

but look, I haven't read him, I don't know his style or how his brain works, so I can't really weigh in properly.

Yeah steelridge58, we gotta die to truly live...

Just to be a little petty and give Amanda Jackson5 a hard time—honestly, Saint Paul left us some pretty deep thoughts on this exact thing. Like, check out his letter to the Romans (Romans 14:7-9)... "For none of us lives for ourselves alone, and none of us dies for ourselves alone. If we live, we live for the Lord; if we die, we die for the Lord. So whether we live or die, we belong to the Lord. For this very reason, Christ died and was raised again, to be Lord of both the dead and the living."