montefischer

Boethius was a Christian. He wrote a book explaining the Trinity, for example (De Trinitate). The work for which he is most famous today, the Consolation of Philosophy, does not mention Christ by name, which have led some to speculate that he lost his faith later in life. There is an absence of direct evidence for that claim.

This could be a great thesis topic for a Main’s degree in sociology.

Very nice! I’ll check it out.

One feature I would love is the ability to automatically generate the table of contents / “outline” metadata for a pdf. I run across a lot of old book pdfs without that metadata, which makes navigation annoying. Kybook3 has a version of this that doesn’t quite work. Maybe in the age of LLMs, this is now feasible.

Islamic fundamentalism and cult rationalism are both involved in a “total commitment”, “all or nothing” type of thinking. The former is totally committed to a particular literal reading of scripture, the latter, to logical deduction from a set of chosen premises. Both modes of thinking have produced violent outcomes in the past.

Skepticism, in which no premise or truth claim is regarded as above dispute (or, that it is always permissible and even praiseworthy to suspend one’s judgment on a matter), is the better comparison with rationalism-fundamentalism. It is interesting that skepticism today is often associated with agnostic or atheist religious beliefs, but I consider many religious thinkers in history to have been skeptics par excellence when judged by the standard of their own time. E.g. William Ockham (of Ockham’s razor) was a 14C Franciscan friar (and a fascinating figure) who denied papal infallibility. I count Martin Luther as belonging to the history of skepticism as well, for example, as well as much of the humanist movement that returned to the original Greek sources for the Bible, from the Latin Vulgate translation by Jerome.

The history of ideas is fun to read about. I am hardly an expert, but you may be interested by the history of Aristotelian rationalism, which gained prominence in the medieval west largely through the works of Averroes, a 12C Muslim philosopher who heavily favored Aristotle. In 13C, Thomas Aquinus wrote a definitive Catholic systematic theology, rejecting Averroes but embracing Aristotle. To this day, Catholic theology is still essentially Aristotelian.

I have wondered this too. I think there are regulatory constraints.

Do you have links to the text only news sites?

And despite the huge size of 52!, it is possible with basic motor skills to produce a random deck. For those with the background and interest, there is a great book: The Mathematics of Shuffling Cards by Diaconis and Fulman, published 2023.

For an example of this, I recall reading a proposal that acts of Congress be strictly limited to be at most (say) 5 pages in length. This would be a natural form of regularization of the legislative power.

What do you think about Ellul's arguments in that book?