Who Gave Us Modernity? Becasue I Want My Money Back.

I need to invent a word to capture the something like irony, something like paradox, something like paradigm-less superimposition, radical objectivity meets facticity and both lose, feelings/ideas I had reading Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity.

As someone who feels like he is fighting his history and facticity, like Rebecca Goldstein feels Spinoza did on some level, but with the hope that there is some intellectual/rational solution to my facticity, as Spinoza ultimately felt there was to his own, via his radical objectivity (pantheism),...

I…

have my doubts.

Just can’t help thinking that happiness can’t be derived from a priori knowledge like 2+2=4. 

Human, all too human I guess.

Re the subtitle: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity.

Historians like Stephen Greenblatt, author of The Swerve, might offer that Spinoza played a part in modernity but that it began with Lucretius.

After all, modernity is time sensitive, by definition.

Rationality isn’t time sensitive though.

Or is it…

(cue ominous music)

 

Not A Choice

I wrote about the will here

And I asked “is choice at all a meaningful concept for addicts?

I guess it is up to a supreme court to decide:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/the-latest-court-eyes-drug-free-probation-order-challenge/2017/10/02/ea4c7124-a784-11e7-9a98-07140d2eed02_story.html?utm_term=.2ccd6f615bab

http://www.wbur.org/news/2017/09/24/probation-drug-test-sjc

“...she was unfairly punished because her relapse was the result of a disease, not a choice.”

I ask you dear reader, what is happening to free will?

What are the parameters of your quote unquote choices?

I also asked in the post noted above: “Is choice a meaningful concept in obesity?”

Consider: 40 Percent of Cancers Are Related to Being Overweight, Says Study

https://www.menshealth.com/health/cancers-linked-to-obesity