Josh Watson

person S at time t purchases 10 yards of linen...

The average American thinking about Zuck’s wealth has three friends

i think it's often better to just not have a philosophical theory about something than to go around embracing all of the absurd consequences of the one you adopted

When Jesus told the rich man to sell all he had & give it to the poor, he also told him to follow him. Since Jesus’ group had resources that I assume they shared with those who followed the group, it’s not clear to me he was telling him to become totally destitute & resourceless.

Freedom for supporters of the government only, for members of one part only – no matter how numerous they might be is no freedom at all. Freedom is always freedom for those who think differently. ~Rosa Luxemburg

it was a lot of work

thanks

given that the cartesian demon can deceive me about a shockingly large number of things, i am forced to conclude that epistemic humility requires me to give some non-zero chance to the possibility that i painted the ceiling of the sistine chapel

That Plato’s texts are full of a billion versions of “Yes, Socrates” doesn’t bother me.

If what annoys folks is they’d like more objections to be raised & answered, then you’re going to find tons of philosophical texts annoying since passing over objections happens constantly.

old riffs in the lydian mode 🎵🎶🎼

Texting my friends “It is their opponent who is obliged to use words responsibly” at least five times a day now

deriving an ought from an is is on my bucket list

ever been in a situation where there is some other mode of God or Nature that you have to be around a ton but they're also really annoying and you think to yourself "not you again" when you see them?

some of those rock and roll songs are pretty good

If persons are helped in their worldly career by their virtues, so are they, & perhaps quite as often, by their vices: by servility & sycophancy, by hard-hearted & close-fisted selfishness, by the permitted lies and tricks of trade, by gambling speculations, not seldom by downright knavery. ~JS Mill

oh you believe in the principle of sufficient reason? then explain every truth

One thing there is, which if it could be affirmed truly, would relieve social institutions from any share in the responsibility of these evils. Since the human race has no means of enjoyable existence, or of existence at all, but what it derives from its own labor and [30]abstinence, there would be no ground for complaint against society if every one who was willing to undergo a fair share of this labor and abstinence could attain a fair share of the fruits. But is this the fact? Is it not the reverse of the fact? The reward, instead of being proportioned to the labor and abstinence of the individual, is almost in an inverse ratio to it: those who receive the least, labor and abstain the most. Even the idle, reckless, and ill-conducted poor, those who are said with most justice to have themselves to blame for their condition, often undergo much more and severer labor, not only than those who are born to pecuniary independence, but than almost any of the more highly remunerated of those who earn their subsistence; and even the inadequate self-control exercised by the industrious poor costs them more sacrifice and more effort than is almost ever required from the more favored members of society. The very idea of distributive justice, or of any proportionality between success and merit, or between success and exertion, is in the present state of society so [31]manifestly chimerical as to be relegated to the regions of romance. It is true that the lot of individuals is not wholly independent of their virtue and intelligence; these do really tell in their favor, but far less than many other things in which there is no merit at all. The most powerful of all the determining circumstances is birth.

The very idea of distributive justice, or of any proportionality between success and merit, or between success and exertion, is in the present state of society so manifestly chimerical as to be relegated to the regions of romance. ~John Stuart Mill

…these parts [of space] cannot precede the one all-embracing space, as being, as it were, constituents out of which it can be composed; on the contrary, they can be thought only as in it. ~Kant

"Society should be organized the way someone who didn't know anything about anything would organize it" —John Rawls

Excerpt from Walter Stuermann's "Benedict Spinoza: A Pioneer in Biblical Criticism"

It's wild what an absolute shitfit people threw over Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise, calling it a “godless document,” “wicked & blasphemous,” a “soul-destroying book” that “ought to be buried forever in eternal oblivion.”

Geez, calm down & pull yourselves together, folks.

The tithe was levied on every piece of land, on every property. But it was always the serf who paid it by his labour. Thus the poor people not only lost the help and support of the Church, but they saw the priests ally themselves with their other exploiters... . ~Rosa Luxemburg

The rule of a minority over the great majority requires for its preservation not only bloody terror but the splitting up of the population, in accordance with the old principle: divide and rule. ~Kautsky

as a dog returns to its vomit, so here i am, yet again, trying to cognize noumena

philosophers will be like “i love desert landscapes” and desert landscapes aren’t even in their ontology

I am now writing a treatise on my views regarding Scripture. The reasons that move me are: .... The freedom to philosophize and to say what we think. This I want to vindicate completely, for here it is in every way suppressed by the excessive authority of ... preachers. ~Spinoza

“Moralism bad” - someone secretly doing moralism

tfw you can't perceive any necessary connections between distinct occurrences

whereof thereof henceforth, hitherto per se qua qua

I post here some but am most on Twitter. I am bad at running two social media accounts

you can tell a lot about someone from their leibnizian complete individual concept