Zohar Atkins
@ZoharAtkins
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Learning is a Way of Life Founder @lightinspires Torah @ Philosophy @
The Clearing
Joined December 2016
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You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?
Plato: Nah. Coconut trees fell out of the idea of the Coconut tree.
Aristotle: Yes, but only because there was a prime mover.
Ecclesiastes: A coconut tree comes and a coconut tree goes, there is nothing new under the sun.
Burke:
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Reading is networking with ghosts.
Writing is networking with descendants.
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Leon Kass's life changed when he observed a chasm between intellectual virtue and moral virtue.
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My friend offers a thoughtful critique of my book Language but undermines his case by using words.
My friend & Harvard colleague Howard Gardner, offers a thoughtful critique of my book Rationality -- but undermines his case, as all skeptics of rationality must do, by using rationality to make it.
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What are the best conditions for philosophy?
Aristotle: You can’t philosophize unless you’re at leisure.
Heidegger: You can’t philosophize unless you’re in crisis.
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In what way are human beings equal?
Genesis: We’re all in the divine image.
Aristotle: We all desire to know.
Augustine: We’re all sinful.
Luther: We’re all conscientious.
Hobbes: We all fear death.
Rousseau: We’re all good.
Hayek: We’re all wrong.
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My philosophy mega threads:
Martin Heidegger
Walter Benjamin
Leo Strauss
Hannah Arendt
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Theodor Adorno
Adorno would recoil at being subjected to a
@threadapalooza
as it turns him into a commodity, his thought into a kind of brand or currency. Still, his ideas are timely & influential; if you want to understand today's left, internecine conflicts & culture wars, he's a touchstone.
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All is
Thales: Water
Heraclitus: Flux
Buddha: Suffering
Ecclesiastes: Vanity
Parmenides: One
Plotinus: Divine
Descartes: Extension
Spinoza: Nature
Hegel: Mind
Nietzsche: Recurrence
Schelling: Incomplete
Kierkegaard: Broken
Heidegger: Thrown
Derrida: Signs
Wittgenstein: Games
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IMO, Fukuyama is one of the greatest living thinkers of our time. He understood that profit maximizing alone would never satisfy us and that identity politics is inevitable—long before it was cool to talk about “identity”
"The End of History" was probably the most remarkably wrong political book of all time.
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@Plinz
Marx didn’t realize there would be a large middle class that would not want to revolt. His hypothesis is premised on a dualistic conflict between haves and have nots. But middle class are at once haves and have nots. Though media intensifies the sense that they are have nots.
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Philosophy is:
Socrates: Admitting Ignorance
Aristotle: Theory of Everything
Epictetus: Accepting Necessity
Descartes: Radical Doubt
Kierkegaard: Preparing to Leap
Wittgenstein: Freeing fly from bottle
Heidegger: Self-Concealing of Being
Hadot: A Way of Life
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Why do Humanities Departments trend Hamas friendly? Some theories:
The campus debate on the
#IsraelHamasWar
is also Humanities vs. STEM + Econ.
@Columbia
faculty issued two open letters, one defending and one condemning students' defense of Hamas. Here are their affiliations.
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Quite profound, actually, that the Biblical God never says “I am the Lord your God who created the world,” but rather”I am the Lord your God who took you out of Egypt.”
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Why do Diaspora Jews love egg salad?
Because after the Temple was destroyed we went into the eggs aisle
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One of Leo Strauss's core points is that we should read Great Books not because they are historically interesting, or politically useful, and not because they are good brain teasers, but because they might true. They might know something we don't.
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Who is ready for my Straussian reading of “Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?”
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Knowledge is:
Socrates: Self-Knowledge
Sophocles: Tragic
Plato: Recollection
Aristotle: Induction
Plotinus: Emanation
Sextus Empiricus: A ruse
Scotus: Analogy
Maimonides: Divine Imitation
Bacon: Nature's Secret
Locke: Doodling
Kant: Constructed
Freud: Diversion
Marx: Ideology
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What should we be grateful for?
Plato: The immortality of the soul
Aristotle: Practical Wisdom
Plotinus: Divine Emanation
Descartes: Cognition
Spinoza: Nature
Kant: The moral law within
Marx: The Contradictions of Capitalism
Heidegger: Unconcealment
Levinas: The Face
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My top 5 book recommendations for 2023:
1. Genesis
2. Exodus
3. Leviticus
4. Numbers
5. Deuteronomy
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Camus write a whole novel about virtue signaling (“The Fall”) almost 70 years ago but we are so “recency-biased” we think it’s a function of social media.
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Are there any contemporary writers or artists whose work is serious, thoughtful, nuanced, yet characterized by overwhelming joy?
I open up the Paris Review and find a lot of guilt, anxiety, sorrow.
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AI will be sentient when
Plato: It has a soul
Aristotle: It has reason
Descartes: It doubts itself
Kant: It obeys the moral law
Kierkegaard: It trembles in dread
Freud: It has an unconscious
Heidegger: It fears death
Merleau-Ponty: It is embodied
Levinas: It is before the Other
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An odd thing about secular Western culture is that if you say you study the Bible in pursuit of wisdom people think "That's soooo religious" but if you do the same thing with Mahabharata, Yoga Sutras, Plato, Cicero, Marx, or Bon Iver people nod their heads like it's reasonable.
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"Some ideas are born as you write them down, others become dead."
--
@nntaleb
(A great frame for thinking about Plato/Socrates's critique of writing, as well as Rebbe's capitulation in writing down "oral Torah.")
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Politics is:
Aristotle: Ethics at scale
Hobbes: Avoidance of war
Machiavelli: Management
Hegel: Struggle for recognition
Arendt: Speech and action in public
Schmitt: Friends vs. enemies
Berlin: Competing values
Levinas: Infinite responsibility to each person
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Here goes my
@threadapalooza
on Heidegger, the greatest thinker of the modern era, a social, political, and cultural conservative (who briefly flirted with fascism and Nazism), a mystic, a contemplative, a contrarian, and a thinker whose influence extends far beyond academia...
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People often ask me why I devoted 10+ years of my life to reading Heidegger. Why the obsession?
The trivial answer is I wanted to understand a thinker that influenced pretty much every important 20th thinker and artist in one way or another, but especially Jewish ones: Levinas,
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Giorgio Agamben (1942-present), Italian philosopher and philologist, is one of the most original, wide-ranging, and virtuosic thinkers and writers alive. This
@threadapalooza
is my tribute to a mind who is so much more than his headline-making politics.
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I have exciting news! I'm leading a seminar on the Book of Genesis, over a new app, called Threadable, which is like if a university seminar, medieval monasteries and Twitter had a baby. It's free and open to everyone. Please join & share
Use this link:
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Leo Strauss was one of the greatest and most influential thinkers of the 20th century and deserves a
@threadapalooza
. His thought is both controversial and poorly understood. He argued for the critical relevance of ancient ideas and great books.
Charged by the reception of my Heidegger thread, I've decided to go for a
@threadapalooza
on Walter Benjamin, another thinker whose influence is far-reaching, despite being quirky, esoteric, and, in his own life-time, deeply unlucky.
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People are startled to discover
that their inner monologues
are ghostwritten.
- Rae Armantrout
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History is:
Herodotus: Conservation
Thucydides: Moral Lesson
Ibn Khaldun: Science of Decay
Hegel: Development of Truth
Nietzsche: Useful Myth
Ranke: What Happened
Ginzburg: A Day in the Life
Yerushalmi: Cope
Kuhn: Paradigm Shift
Faulkner: A Tale Told By An Idiot
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The New Year is:
Plato: Illusion
Aristotle: A time to renew habits
Holderlin: A wedding of God and poet
Hegel: A Historical hinge
Nietzsche: More of the same
Husserl: A symphony
Heidegger: A denial of death
Arendt: A sign of natality
Benjamin: An allusion to another year
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Do you know what the principle-agent problem is?
Buckle up for a thread on how this fundamental problem is everywhere from self-help to management to law to theology to philosophy of language to politics.
(THREAD)
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The time is nigh for a
@threadapalooza
on Carl Schmitt (1888-1985), Nazi apologist, romantic, and one of the most brilliant minds of the 20th century. Schmitt's critique of liberalism remains trenchant and influential on both the right and the left to this day.
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Imagine if Heraclitus, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Dante, Cervantes, Milton, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky etc. had to pass through peer review. The surest way to incentivize mediocrity.
Is better writing rewarded in peer review?
Our newly published suggests the answer is “Yes”!
#EconTwitter
🧵 1/7
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On the other hand, Moses, Homer, Plato, Lao Tzu, Buddha, Jesus, never drank coffee, and likely all drank wine. The greatest cultural treasures were not produced by optimization and required no stimulants.
very difficult to overstate how much changed when people stopped drinking alcohol all day and started drinking coffee/tea!
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🚨Big announcement, friends.
I'm launching a podcast: Meditations with Zohar.
I'll be talking to thoughtful, brilliant people about philosophy, theology, art, and culture.
Here's the trailer. First episode drops next week.
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The end user is
Leviticus: God
Deuteronomy: Community
Prophets: The Poor
Plato: The Soul
Aristotle: The Rational Animal
Kant: The Universal “I”
Hegel: The Absolute World Spirit
Marx: The Proletariat
Freud: The Unconscious
Baudrillard: The Matrix
Levinas: The Other
Zen: Nothing
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Time for a
@threadapalooza
on Michel Foucault (1926-1984), historian of madness, archaeologist of the marginal, skeptic, existentialist, culture war touchstone, enfant terrible turned god of hipsters, and one of the most original and brilliant minds of the 20th century.
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“To believe in God means to see that the facts of the world are not the end of the matter.”
Wittgenstein
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1. Humanities aren't empirical
Their theories can't be falsified. You can say anything you want and the more radical, moralistic, edgy, or abstruse it sounds the more you are applauded for it. The name of the game is convincing other Humanities profs to let you into the guild.
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Emmanuel Levinas (1905-1995) is one of the most underrated thinkers of the 20th century. This
@threadapalooza
is my tribute. Levinas was imprisoned as a POW on the Western front during WWII. A Jewish student of Heidegger's, he criticized Western thought to save it from itself.
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Why doesn’t Peter Singer become an Amish Straussian on consequentialist utility maxxing grounds is the kind of content I am here for.
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Marx and Nietzsche couldn't be more opposite, yet progressives often borrow liberally from both.
From Marx, we get the belief that inequality is irrational and unjust.
From Nietzsche, we get the belief that all values are socially constructed.
Pick one.
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Who here is into crypto, either as a founder or investor, and also into philosophy and/or theology? Who has a philosophy and/or a theology of web3! Who has a metaphysics of the metaverse? Hit me up for a special opportunity.
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This is my base case view for why you should read the Great Books.
this monologue in the devil wears prada is everything. she taught us what fashion is
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It's time to honor Maimonides (1138-1204) with a
@threadapalooza
.
The "Rambam" (Rabbi Moses ben Maimon) was one of the most daring & revolutionary (Jewish) thinkers of all time. He was not only a philosopher, but a community leader, jurist, legal theorist, and medical doctor.
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Analytic philosophers see a contradiction and go “Gotcha.”
Straussians see one and go “Huh. Wonder what the author was trying to teach me.”
Derrideans see one go “All terms are unstable.”
Poets see one and go: “Very well, then, I guess we contain multitudes.”
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If you want to understand today's culture wars, study the moment when pagan Rome became Christian.
Then read Nietzsche and Kierkegaard as two ways of dealing with the cognitive dissonance of being both an imperial power and a self-perceived victim.
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Our minds are not wired to grok convexity. Only God sees fat tails as clear as daylight.
@nntaleb
@zoharatkins
explains Nassim Taleb’s parable of the Uber driver to demonstrate psychological resilience and preparedness.
#thelightningpodcast
Ft.
@cyruspalizban
&
@nicosarian
for laughs.
#philosophy
#wisdom
#discussion
#lightningmeditations
#nassimtaleb
#taleb
#resilience
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It's time for a
@threadapalooza
on Hans Jonas (1903-1993), a brilliant and under-appreciated philosopher, theologian, and scholar of "Gnosticism," who fled Nazi Germany to teach at the New School, and who was a pioneer in the fields of bioethics and environmentalism.
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According to Hannah Arendt, the biggest divide between ancients and moderns consists in their attitude towards the contemplative life. For ancients, the highest goal is contemplation. For moderns, by contrast, the purpose of life is action. For ancients, it was a sign of
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“Poetry proper is never merely a higher mode of everyday language. It is rather the reverse: everyday language is a forgotten and therefore used-up poem, from which there hardly resounds a call any longer.”
Heidegger
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A wonderful profile of Will McAskill and Effective Altruism that stirs a lot of thoughts and feelings.
I'm not an EA, but I find it fruitful to think about why not. I'm also not a fanatical opponent. There are many qualities in EA to admire.
🧵Thread
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I had a blast talking to
@tylercowen
about life in the internet age, what we can learn from empty restaurants and the philosophy of Leo Strauss.
I hope you enjoy the conversation, the premiere episode of my new show, Meditations with Zohar.
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The Mind is:
Plato: Reason, Appetite, Pride
Aristotle: A Creature of Habit
Epictetus: Free
Plotinus: A Splinter of Divine Light
Luther: A Saboteur
Kant: A Content Creator
Nietzsche: Revenge of the Nerds
Freud: A Crime Scene
Fanon: Internalized Oppression
Dawkins: A Meme Dealer
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Jeff Bezos: "If everything you do needs to work on a 3 yr time horizon, then you’re competing against a lot of people. But if you’re willing to invest on a 7 yr time horizon...”
Heinrich von Kleist: “To you reading this a thousand years from now, to your spirit, I bow.”
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If I have one thesis, it’s this:
Art is the bridge between the secular and the religious.
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The image of Aeneas bearing his father, Anchises, on his shoulders, is a under-appreciated image of tradition:
Not the past as something that we stand on, but as something that stands on us.
The past is what we save.
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The Jewish people are a living miracle, and that’s just the uncomfortable truth.
A small people that survives against all odds, punches well above its weight, and makes the world better on every axis. We aren’t going anywhere.
In a thousand years there will be no Hamas.
There
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Time for a
@threadapalooza
on Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900-2002), philosopher, classicist, and leading thinker of hermeneutics, AKA "the understanding of understanding." Gadamer was a moderate postmodernist who thought life was an unfinished conversation with ourselves and others.
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2. Humanities are dominated by Critical Theory.
Humanities profs in elite schools like Columbia aren't emphasizing Shakespeare and Boccaccio but Foucault, Said, and Spivak. The analysis is all about power with the implicit Pelagian theology that having it is bad.
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There are 2 kinds of philosophers: Those who write beautifully & literarily (though not always clearly) and everyone else.
The so-called Analytic vs. Continental divide is a red herring.
It’s beauty vs. information.
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Gm to the Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
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Interviewer: Can you explain this gap in your resume?
God: The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And my spirit was hovering over the face of the waters.
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Peter Thiel has a fascinating theory that Plato and Xenophon think you can seek the truth even under duress, but Gospels think humanity is thoroughly broken. Even Peter, on whom the Church lays its foundation, betrays Jesus.
Christianity is more pessimistic than Philosophy.
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The time has come for a
@threadapalooza
on Gillian Rose (1947-1995), a giant thinker and deep soul. Massively under-read and under-appreciated. A philosopher, theologian, and memoirist, she
sought both to defend and mourn the Enlightenment after the Holocaust.
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My contrarian take is that book banning and censorship is what happens to a society that doesn't have Midrash, the ability to generate rich, interpretive, paratextual traditions.
At
@PENamerica
we are alarmed at news of "hundreds of changes" to venerated works by
@roald_dahl
in a purported effort to scrub the books of that which might offend someone. 1/13
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A small dose of irrationality may be an effective vaccine against greater irrationality conducted in the name of rationality. Think of custom as a kind of downside insurance against Enlightenment run amok.
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"Rousseau argues that...progress in the arts and sciences does not lead to greater virtue. On the contrary, it necessarily produces luxury, augments inequality, debases tastes, softens character, corrupts morals, and weakens patriotism, leading ... to human servitude." Leon Kass
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What have we forgotten?
Plato: The Good
Augustine: Grace
Hobbes: The State of Nature (civil war)
Rousseau: The State of Nature (innocence)
Freud: Oedipus
Heidegger: Being
Levinas: The Face
Girard: Human Sacrifice
Buffett: Intrinsic Value
@mattyglesias
: The Median Voter
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"EXPERIENCE" is a word we use every day. "Lived experience" has become, both a touchstone and bugaboo. But the philosophical history of experience is not well known. ( 🧵)
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Hegel Explained:
Thesis: It's so over
Antithesis: We're so back
Synthesis: Back is the new over
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I'm excited to bring you a
@threadapalooza
on Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855), one of the greatest religious thinkers of modern times, a brilliant literary stylist and psychologist whose influence reaches everywhere, from Dr. Martin Luther King to the films of Terrence Malick.
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Fukuyama anticipates why social media is not going away even as everyone loves to hate on it. It’s the medium for the human need for “prestige battles.”
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It's not hard to prove the existence of God. But the God you end up proving is very abstract. God is a prime mover. God is a unity. God is perfection. God is thought thinking itself. God is the cause of causes and causa sui (self-caused). The God of philosophy does not inspire
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I am delighted to bring you a
@threadapalooza
on Friedrich Schlegel (1772-1829), philosopher, poet, novelist, critic, founding figure of German romanticism. An atheist at first, Schlegel converted later in life to Catholicism. Schlegel is the unsung muse of hipsters.
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The sages taught: Does hate speech require kavanah (intent)? Yes.
Asks the Gemara, how do we know? Because we already know that you can't fulfill the Shema unless you have kavanah (intent).
And we can derive the laws of hate speech from the laws of love speech. Just as a
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Time for a
@threadapalooza
about Hannah Arendt, a versatile contrarian, public intellectual, original mind, child prodigy, and postwar refugee, equally at home in the study of the Classics and in the contemplation of 20th century totalitarianism.
Leo Strauss was one of the greatest and most influential thinkers of the 20th century and deserves a
@threadapalooza
. His thought is both controversial and poorly understood. He argued for the critical relevance of ancient ideas and great books.
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No, because I read Heidegger (and Rebbe Nachman) who taught me that the only cause of dread is finitude itself, and that this selfsame finitude is a gift and a joy, the source of my vitality, personality, and care. Thank you, Lord, for another day.
Do you share my sense of dread about the year ahead? If not, why not? 1/
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Let's go! My
@threadapalooza
on Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961), phenomenologist of perception and embodiment, whose work has influenced everyone from cognitive scientists to feminists to theologians to AI engineers. MMP was in the "Resistance" before it was cool.
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The time has arrived for a
@threadapalooza
on Richard Rorty (1931-2007), pragmatist, ironist, liberal, and romantic; a self-cancelling philosopher who imported European postmodernism into the American mainstream, and believed fiction could do what metaphysics could not.
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The time has come for a
@threadapalooza
about Heraclitus, an Ancient Greek thinker (Ephesus, 500 BCE) whose fragments read as a contemplation on our inability to say what is.
If I were being cheeky, I'd tweet "you can't step into the same tweet twice" and retweet 99x...
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I just arrived at my Airbnb but can’t get inside because the entrance is guarded by cherubim holding flaming, rotating swords. This would never happen at a hotel.
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Here is one of my favorite teachings (it’s ~ 2k years old):
Joshua ben Perahiah used to say:
Make for yourself a teacher
Acquire for yourself a friend
Judge all people with the scale weighted in their favor
— Pirkei Avot 1:6
THREAD 👇
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I wrote about how Ronald Coase's theory of the firm elucidates the meaning of Biblical monotheism.
Tldr: The easy come easy go mindset can't stand a chance against relationships built on longevity and loyalty.
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4. George Steiner: "Humanities don't humanize."
Moral strength may have little to do with the ability to appreciate music or art. It's even possible that people incorrectly arrogate themselves more moral authority as a result of their self-defined "fine taste."
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3. "Over-Production of Elites." (Peter Turchin)
Frustration at gap between perceived status and actual agency leads professors and students to vent and act out by paying lip service to toxic ideas. "We must do something. This is something. Ergo, let's defend terrorism."
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Ontology: What is X?
Epistemology: How do I know X?
Social science: Why does Y think X?
Ethics: Is X Good?
Rhetoric: Does X sound good?
(Social) Media: Will X go viral?
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At 6k followers I will answer your self-help related questions as if I were Heidegger.
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I sometimes wonder if the biggest psychological divide is not between the religious and the secular but between those who make a god of power and those who make a god of vulnerability.
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Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger: "You only believe in God because you're afraid of X."
Medieval Theologians: "God, in His perfection, created us with fear of X so we would believe in Him."
Our motives for reasoning are not proof for or against our reasoning.
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Let’s do a
@threadapalooza
on Nietzsche, an unavoidable force in our thought and culture, a brilliant polemicist whose work is both over-exposed and undervalued; he would have been off Twitter but would have written a Substack railing against everyone—including his fans.
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I frequently tell the apocryphal story about how Max Planck, after he won the Nobel Prize, went around Germany giving the same standard lecture on the new quantum mechanics. Over time, his chauffeur memorized the lecture and said, “Would you mind, Professor Planck, because it’s
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Charged by the reception of my Heidegger thread, I've decided to go for a
@threadapalooza
on Walter Benjamin, another thinker whose influence is far-reaching, despite being quirky, esoteric, and, in his own life-time, deeply unlucky.
Here goes my
@threadapalooza
on Heidegger, the greatest thinker of the modern era, a social, political, and cultural conservative (who briefly flirted with fascism and Nazism), a mystic, a contemplative, a contrarian, and a thinker whose influence extends far beyond academia...
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“Nietzsche so dominated and charmed me between my 22nd and 30th years that I literally believed everything I understood of him.”
— Leo Strauss to Karl Löwith
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"While probably no former time tolerated so many diverse opinions on religious or philosophical matters, factual truth, if it happens to oppose a given group’s profit or pleasure, is greeted today with greater hostility than ever before."
Hannah Arendt
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