4 ms·
The clarity of St. Thomas is incomprehensible to anyone raised in postmodernism and not educated in philosophy.
by slumdev 5y ago
The clarity of St. Thomas is incomprehensible to anyone raised in postmodernism and not educated in philosophy.
- huetius 5y agoI’m not sure that’s true. There is a certain strand in postmodernist/critical thought that, by consistently seeking to unmask power, recovers the perennial, “religious” questions. Some examples might include Horkheimer’s later works, Simone Weil, or Habermas, who famously had an encounter with Pope Benedict XVI (then, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger) that caused him to reevaluate a lot of his views towards religious thought. I think Aquinas is also pretty accessible to the dedicated novice. Maybe you mean positivist instead of postmodernist? In that case, yeah, I’d agree.
- slumdev 5y agoPostmodernist suppositions regarding power and ideology include an implicit assumption that absolute truth doesn't exist. That used to be called relativism. It's ad hominem at scale -- an attack on the institutions that produced centuries of good work rather than an honest confrontation of the work itself.
- dang 5y agoPlease don't take HN threads into generic ideological tangents. The more generic they get, the more repetitive and tedious they are, and then they inevitably turn nasty. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=generic%20discussion%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=mind%20amuse%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html