Who Were the Sea Peoples?

Dole Office Clerk: Occupation? Comicus: Stand-up philosopher. Dole Office Clerk: What? Comicus: Stand-up philosopher. I coalesce the vapors of human experience into a viable and meaningful comprehension. Dole Office Clerk: Oh, a *bullshit* artist! -- History of the World: Part I Although mathematics presented a problem for establishing the sovereignty of doxa in Western culture, there was an even bigger problem: philosophy. Mathematics, after all, could be roped off as a specialized area that need only concern mathematical geniuses, too difficult for the average person to bother with. But ordinary people, back in the day, used to actually read philosophers. And the problem was that all of the best philosophers, almost without exception, if they paid serious attention metaphysics, wound up arriving at the conclusion that there is some unifying intelligence grounding the universe that we directly perceive. Parmenides, Pythagoras, Plato and Aristotle all arrived at th...

It's a common theme in TV shows and movies to see people positively boasting that they are "terrible at math." This is interesting: you don't see anyone boasting that they are terrible at reading, or terrible at choosing breakfast. But mathematics displays the reality of objective, transcendental truth. And this is a serious threat to the world of doxa , of mere opinion. So it is best to portray it as something only an elite few can possibly understand.

One of the most important points Eric Voegelin stressed in his work was that it is always actual experiences that are fundamental: intellectual symbolisms of those experiences are secondary phenomena. And when those symbolisms take on a life of their own, divorced from the actual experience that engendered them, they become "hieroglyphs": the fossils of once living ideas. So, some of my readers may be puzzled as to what I have been on about lately with my multiple posts on "doxa," and why I am using this Greek word to describe... well, what, exactly? The thing is, I had known this term for perhaps a decade before I ever started using it. And for a decade, I was vague about what it meant... and then, about a month ago -- you can probably trace the exact date by looking at my blog posts! -- I suddenly saw what Plato and Aristotle were talking about when they used this term. Since then, I have been trying to present symbols of what the experience I had meant, bu...

The realm of doxa , illustrated : "But The New Republic‘s Moira Weigel retorts that such responses are reactionary, and part of dating battles that we’ve had throughout history. After tracing the history of such dating wars from the 19th century through the present, she adds, 'Even a short survey makes it clear that every generation has thought that the next generation was dating wrong. … The death of dating genre tends to treat each new form of courtship as a moral aberration. This is silly.'" If kids today "date" through a series of fleeting sexual encounters while forming no lasting bonds, well: "Young people today are told to be flexible and mobile in all other aspects of our lives; we are told to be eternal entrepreneurs of ourselves, and that we cannot count on steady gigs or fixed contracts or benefits. Why would this not apply to our love lives, too?" Why not? After all, it's all just a matter of opinion, isn't it?