As someone who reads a lot of Neo Reactionary thought, it seems you have a very similar path to me. Raised Christian, fell away and returned in teen years, so never had a liberal phase. Rush baby in other words.
08 Global financial crisis lead me to Austrian economics and Libertarianism (so started with Ron Paul and read Rand later), coll…
As someone who reads a lot of Neo Reactionary thought, it seems you have a very similar path to me. Raised Christian, fell away and returned in teen years, so never had a liberal phase. Rush baby in other words.
08 Global financial crisis lead me to Austrian economics and Libertarianism (so started with Ron Paul and read Rand later), college expanded my knowledge of philosophers of antiquity and the medieval period (stoicism, skeptics, epicureans, and of course Plato and Aristotle, then Christian era Augustine and Aquinas).
Arguing with atheists online led to reading various apologetics -> Edward Feser's The Last Superstition which argues that abandoning the philosophy of Aquinas and Aristotle was the greatest mistake of Western Civ. Feser's Five Proofs of the existence of God was also enlightening.
2020/2021 pushed me out of the Deist camp completely, due to non rational inhuman levels of evil on display.
As for virtue ethics in general, Ultima 4 really influenced me, as silly as that may sound. A mostly successful attempt at a game where winning was based upon being good (in human terms) not merely more powerful.
Sorry for the blog post, just amused that similar in background. I started After Virtue but got distracted.
I assume you will progress to the True (epistemology), the Real (metaphysics), and the Beautiful (aesthetics). Politics is only a subheader in Ethics to me (those parts related to the virtue of Justice and the rightful use of force within society)
It does sound like a very similar path, yes! I have Feser's The Last Superstition on the list. Great book. And I concur completely that the non-rational inhuman evil on display has been a major "jolt" to bring me out of atheism or deism.
Re: The Good, the Beautiful, the Real, The True -- I hadn't planned to organize the reading last in that order, but that is quite an interesting way to do so. I think I probably don't know enough about Aesthetics to carry that to fruition, sadly.
Ah it was not an ordinal list. These fields of knowledge are interlinked at the core. I don't even know which to start with for sure. I think the strongest base would be Epistemology (Truth/knowledge) then branching out, but that's probably bias. As for the Aesthetics, it is a rather withered branch of Philosophy though I know Rand dabbled in it.
No. Scruton is very fine, and Rand has her moments. The recent death of Sir Roger Scruton from cancer felt like a personal loss, though I never met the man. I have many of his works, and revisit them
A good starter - his collection of essays, "Confessions of a Heretic".
It could be said that the Last Superstition is the bogus claim that the "catholic" church is the only source of truth in the world or the beyond obnoxious claim (by Feser) that the grotesque "catholic" magisterium is binding on all people.
In one of his recent postings some benighted "catholics" including perhaps even Feser himself claimed that it was perfectly justifiable that "heretics" be executed - even in their tens and thousands if "necessary"
As someone who reads a lot of Neo Reactionary thought, it seems you have a very similar path to me. Raised Christian, fell away and returned in teen years, so never had a liberal phase. Rush baby in other words.
08 Global financial crisis lead me to Austrian economics and Libertarianism (so started with Ron Paul and read Rand later), college expanded my knowledge of philosophers of antiquity and the medieval period (stoicism, skeptics, epicureans, and of course Plato and Aristotle, then Christian era Augustine and Aquinas).
Arguing with atheists online led to reading various apologetics -> Edward Feser's The Last Superstition which argues that abandoning the philosophy of Aquinas and Aristotle was the greatest mistake of Western Civ. Feser's Five Proofs of the existence of God was also enlightening.
2020/2021 pushed me out of the Deist camp completely, due to non rational inhuman levels of evil on display.
As for virtue ethics in general, Ultima 4 really influenced me, as silly as that may sound. A mostly successful attempt at a game where winning was based upon being good (in human terms) not merely more powerful.
Sorry for the blog post, just amused that similar in background. I started After Virtue but got distracted.
I assume you will progress to the True (epistemology), the Real (metaphysics), and the Beautiful (aesthetics). Politics is only a subheader in Ethics to me (those parts related to the virtue of Justice and the rightful use of force within society)
It does sound like a very similar path, yes! I have Feser's The Last Superstition on the list. Great book. And I concur completely that the non-rational inhuman evil on display has been a major "jolt" to bring me out of atheism or deism.
Re: The Good, the Beautiful, the Real, The True -- I hadn't planned to organize the reading last in that order, but that is quite an interesting way to do so. I think I probably don't know enough about Aesthetics to carry that to fruition, sadly.
Ah it was not an ordinal list. These fields of knowledge are interlinked at the core. I don't even know which to start with for sure. I think the strongest base would be Epistemology (Truth/knowledge) then branching out, but that's probably bias. As for the Aesthetics, it is a rather withered branch of Philosophy though I know Rand dabbled in it.
Right. As far as aesthetics, Rand and Roger Scruton are the only philosophers I've read. Rand's "Romantic Realism" was very influential on me, though.
Again there is zero resonance between the writings and aesthetics championed by Roger Scruton and Ayn Rand
No. Scruton is very fine, and Rand has her moments. The recent death of Sir Roger Scruton from cancer felt like a personal loss, though I never met the man. I have many of his works, and revisit them
A good starter - his collection of essays, "Confessions of a Heretic".
It could be said that the Last Superstition is the bogus claim that the "catholic" church is the only source of truth in the world or the beyond obnoxious claim (by Feser) that the grotesque "catholic" magisterium is binding on all people.
In one of his recent postings some benighted "catholics" including perhaps even Feser himself claimed that it was perfectly justifiable that "heretics" be executed - even in their tens and thousands if "necessary"