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> Everyone else is just a long drawn out claim that we live in a false reality compared to another dimension or that man is impotent to know reality Can you na
by bccdee 3y ago
> Everyone else is just a long drawn out claim that we live in a false reality compared to another dimension or that man is impotent to know reality
Can you name one mainstream philosopher, besides Plato, whose primary focus was the idea that we live in a false reality? (Not that that was even Plato's primary focus.) That's such an odd complaint. Do you think Wittgenstein, Foucault, and Sartre were all just complaining about how the universe is unknowable because we can't directly access the realm of forms?
- kromem 3y agoYour focus on individual names does kind of gloss over the fact that for centuries the Neoplatonist and Advaita Vedanta schools of thought had an extensive foothold on philosophical thought. Someone like Philio might not be widely read today, but the adoption of Plato's ideas into the dual creation of man in Genesis lives on today among Kabbalah much as Plotinus's contributions to Neoplatonism evolving alongside the Gnostics which in turn live on in everything from Scientology to The Matrix to Nick Bostrom. That the commenter is mischaracterizing medieval and later mainstream philosophy doesn't mean their underlying claims about views of being in a world-copy being extensive among the broader set of philosophical thinking is incorrect. It was quite prominent in both East and West in various points in antiquity.
- bccdee 3y agoSure—I'm not saying that metaphysical idealism was never a dominant or influential idea, especially in premodern philosophy. But Rand lived in 20th century, when contemporary philosophy was overwhelmingly materialist. I'm genuinely unsure who the "everyone else" is that the original commenter was trying to contrast her with. Presumably not Augustine of Hippo.