Archive for July, 2026
Sunday, July 19th, 2026
Suppose that we have justified a Gnostic cosmology and cosmogony of the usual form: hierarchical heavens presided over by a more or less tripartite God and its Aeons and Luminaries and so on, a material world existing as the failed creative effort of a Demiurge, humans containing particles of divinity ...
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Thursday, July 16th, 2026
Secondary Texts
Modern
Brakke, D (2010) The Gnostics: Myth, Ritual, and Diversity in Early Christianity, Harvard University Press.
Ehrman, B (2003) Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew, Oxford University Press
Jonas, H (1958) The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity, ...
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Sunday, July 12th, 2026
The massively complicated cosmogony, cosmology, and metaphysics of Gnosticism often strikes students as merely fantastical. I propose, however, that a very large part of it can be explained as an attempt to integrate a small set of not-obviously-coherent principles and presuppositions. Amongst those are the following, listed here in no ...
Posted in Arguments, Philosophy, Religion | 1 Comment »
Friday, July 10th, 2026
1
In discussion, we have wondered about the lunacies that are afflicting us, and I have been asked what I make of them. I begin by noting that the nonsense we observe is characterized by its uniformly destructive nature. I have previously noted that in order to determine whether the agents ...
Posted in History, Politics, Sociology | No Comments »
Thursday, July 9th, 2026
It has no foundational texts
We were discussing the origins of the multiculturalist ideology and the idea that ‘Diversity is Our Strength.’ (I shall call this the MCD Complex - MCDC.) I pointed out that although Liberalism could point back to JS Mill and any number of other philosophers, and Socialists ...
Posted in Politics | No Comments »
Thursday, July 9th, 2026
No inner monologue
Here's an interesting (short!) interview with a girl who says she has no internal monologue. The interviewer is trying to comprehend what that could be like and how it could be possible.
I think a good way to start thinking about it is to realise that there is no actual little ...
Posted in Cognitive Science, Philosophy | No Comments »
Wednesday, July 8th, 2026
Does the Analysis of Populism Rest on a Mistake?
Scholars who are struggling to come up with a coherent and plausible characterization of populism may be approaching the problem from the wrong direction. They seem to have assumed that there is a thing that ‘populism’ describes and that all uses of ...
Posted in Politics | No Comments »
Sunday, July 5th, 2026
Almost all mainstream political programs have ultimately aimed at (or at least have been justified in terms of) improving the lot of humankind. In this respect you might call them Eudaimonist. Socialists think that humans will flourish better with equality maximised, liberals think the same for maximising liberty, and so ...
Posted in Politics | No Comments »
Friday, July 3rd, 2026
Genesis 6:4 in the KJV says
There were giants in the earth in those days, and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.
Here ‘giants’ translates ...
Posted in History, Religion | No Comments »
Thursday, July 2nd, 2026
A standard justification for the approach of Analytic philosophy is that no real progress can be made on philosophical problems until the concepts with which it deals are made properly clear, and until we have determined that the concepts are in fact well formed. That this is not always the ...
Posted in Philosophy | No Comments »