Rationalism

For Mormonism, if we use the word "supernatural," we are referring to something that is part of nature, but not necessarily in our current scientific understanding or ability to detect. Therefore, studies in Mormonism are compatible with a rationalist approach, but the word supernatural does it a disservice, and the use of this word in the Church probably ought to be abandoned. Our religion is not a supernatural one.

This paper will review Richard Dawkins book The God Delusion, and will show how Mormonism is actually fundamentally compatible with the Transhumanist ideas that Dawkins puts forth in that book, and that Dawkins may have inadvertently described what is required for a religion to be compatible with rationality, and to be both true and not supernatural.  This paper also explores how skepticism is actually a Gospel Principle in Mormonism, just like faith is.

This essay seeks to reconsider the relation of the universal-rational ethos of Spinoza’s thought to the Jewish tradition and culture in which he was raised and socially situated. In particular, I seek to engage with two previous portrayals—specifically, those of Isaac Deutscher and Yirmiyahu Yovel—that present Spinoza’s universalism as arising from his break from or transcendence of Judaism, where the latter is cast primarily (along with Christianity) as a historical-particular and therefore non-universal tradition. In seeking a potential source of Spinoza’s orientation, Yovel points Marrano culture, as a sub-group that was already alienated from both mainstream Judaism and mainstream Christianity. By contrast, I argue that there are key elements of pre-Spinoza Jewish-rabbinic conceptuality and material culture that already enact a profoundly universalist ethos, specifically in contrast to more parochialist or particularist ethical dynamics prevalent in the culture of Christendom at the time. We will see, furthermore, that the Marrano dynamics that Yovel fruitfully highlights in fact have much in common with dynamics that were already in place in non-Marrano Jewish tradition and culture. As such, we will see that Spinoza’s thought can be understood not only as manifesting a Marrano-like dynamic in the context of rational-philosophical discourse, but also as preserving a not dissimilar Jewish-rabbinic dynamic at the same time. This, in turn, will point to new possibilities for tracing this latter dynamic through the subsequent history of modern philosophy and modern Jewish thought.

How the movement from one's perception being the arbiter of the real in "preSocratic" Ancient Greece shifted to thought/rationalism via Plato and Aristotle, and how that co-opting of perception allows for governments via corporate media to patently lie without critical opposition.

For those who study xxth Century Italian Art and wonder what continuities can be detected between the first and the second half of the century, Edoardo Persico, still a cultural-historical enigma, is a necessary passage. Sometimes we read his influence upon artists has been scarce and sporadic, but it’s precisely this commonplace we could try to challenge here. During the Twenties, Persico focused sharply on a few issues concerning cultural heritage, «nation» and «cosmopolitanism», sacred art and Italian modernism. He did so in touch with eminent intellectuals as Gobetti and Croce, whose antifascism he shared; and Lionello Venturi, who was his mentor in Turin. With a strong difference: Persico was an engaged catholic and a devout believer. His political stance is hardly understandable from a post war point of view. Persico’s thoughts on «arte sacra» are actually very much linked with ecclesiological debates and Vatican’s inner and foreign politics in totalitarian Europe of the entre-deux-guerres period. As a multiple outsider, Persico worked out a syncretic strategy for Italian artists and architects struggling for a true modernity - he collaborated with Lucio Fontana, Tullio Garbari, Ottone Rosai, Renato Birolli; and co-directed Casabella, the Italian prestigious magazine on art, design and architecture, with Mario Pagano, a committed rationalist architect and a militant fascist. Such strategy survived Persico, who died in 1936. He taught new generations, from «spazialismo» and “monochrome” to Arte povera, to ingeniously join past and present without ignoring splits or conflicts, instead drawing strength and cogency from historical and cultural differences; and to combine loose elements of a visual mother tongue with this or that occurring “international style”.

El "estado de naturaleza" de Thomas Hobbes es un concepto fundamental en la historia de la filosofía política. Ahora bien, la noción de razón que sustenta dicho concepto puede ser puesta en duda si se la analiza a la luz de la continuidad evolutiva. Es decir, teniendo en cuenta el hecho que los seres humanos no son entidades escindidas del resto de los seres vivos, sino que comparten múltiples características para con ellos, particularmente con los más cercanos en términos evolutivos. Es por ello que en este artículo se analizará este concepto hobbesiano desde tres enfoques críticos del supuesto de la razón humana como un rasgo desanclado de características evolutivamente anteriores.

This article develops a generalized ontological framework able to absorb all world-models that might be conjectured, including those which may be outside a human’s ability to propose (i.e. the ‘God’s eye view’). A filter is provided in the form of a principle of equivalence. Only one class of world-model passes the filter and this implies a unique origin for our world. All other conjectures are closed out.

In the film Little Miss Sunshine, we have an expert in Proust, an aficionado in Nietzsche and a 7-year-old girl, Olive Hoover, who unexpectedly qualified for a little Miss Sunshine pageant contest.

Little did she know, that by Americans mainstream standards of beauty, she was completely off the mark for the actual contest. Her mother and family member, however, stood by her side all the way through.

In the film Proust, Nietzsche and the Beauty pageant contest are set in complete asymmetry with the characters they are related to. The expert in Proust even when versed in the topic could not really appreciate Proust beyond some fanciful catchphrases. The one obsessed with Nietzsche felt almost as if Nietzsche would have shot him in the head if alive and Olive Hoover, the little girl, felt like we really did not want to ever expose her to the pain of knowing the true reality of a pageant beauty contest.

The text of chapter 7 of B. H. Smith, *Belief and Resistance: Dynamics of Contemporary Intellectual Controversy* (Harvard UP, 1997). "Arguing with Reason" examines certain recurrent features of intellectual controversy as illustrated by Jürgen Habermas's efforts, in *Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action*, to rehabilitate the central claims and concepts of rationalist moral theory in the face of increasingly significant challenges from skeptics of various stripes. Of particular interest are, first, the recourse to cognitively stabilizing rhetorical and conceptual moves (such as equivocation and circularity) in arguments defending classical philosophical views and, second, the evidently fundamental tradeoff, in any moral theory, between practical utility and theoretical rigor. The chapter concludes with some genial speculations on the inevitability and value of conceptual “circularity” and the eternal dance or reciprocal relation between Belief and Skepticism, represented here by, respectively, orthodox rationalism (or, as it is sometimes seen, philosophy proper) and a variety of heterodox (or, accordingly, improper) philosophies.

The book, still more as it's predecessors, it scarcely an easy task for the reviewer. The scientific domains span from philosophy, classical as well as modern epistemological, to physics and biology. It proves not feasible to follow the trains of thought without a more than superficial familiarity to the specific problems touched, e.g. of biological taxonomy. The way Nalimov enfolds his constituting ideas, as that the role of basic constants in physics as opposed to biology, the mode he is in search for relationships valid throughout reality, especially the Bayesian syllogism, asks for solid acquaintance with mathematics, logic, linguistics and epistemology as well. His questioning often seems deceivingly simple, revealing only on more close inspection a lot of problems in the fore field and aftermaths for related domains rendered so far as plain. 

Is, e.g., pangeometrism possible?
....
As to avoid misunderstanding: the book is extremely well written, the steps of argumentation lucidly clear; in toto, to read it turns out an exiting pleasure. But behind the well pointed sentences lies hidden the doubt and the challenge: Our ways  of understanding - are they appropriate? Especially the laws of probability, the Bayesian syllogism; do they suffice?

There are people who have impeccable skills in bringing others to agree with them by the sole use of reason. There are also people who have impeccable skills in bringing others to agree with them by the sole use of faith. If we looked back in history we can find that those who have agreed by the terms of reason, and not only scientific reason, have done so with no less strength than those who have agreed by the terms of faith, and not only religious faith. It wouldn't be hard to agree that there is something of a rational effort in any religious faith. It wouldn't be also hard to agree that there is something of faith in any rational endeavor. The difference being, religion, for the most part, is based on a static way of thinking. It makes faith metaphysical and ancestral. Science, in contrast, is based on a dynamic way of thinking. It makes reason oscillating and unfixed. Yet, we also know that science can set reason in stones and deviate towards metaphysics and dogmatism. The interwoven connections between science and religion is far tighter than they both have been willing to admit. Reason and faith have a common origin: They both started as a way to figure out the meaning and purpose of life. They also have a fair share in how they operate. They both tell us rules to follow and they both aim to be impartial in their own terms even at the expense of their own biases. Science has not a monopoly on reason. Science is just a stewardess of reason. Religion has not a monopoly on faith, religion is just one of faith's crew members. You might rightly think that all this dialectical relationship between science and religion, reason and faith is just another gimmick of reason patronizing faith. But if so, we could also say the reverse. Dialectics would be a gimmick of faith patronizing reason. Reason loves dialectics not less than it loves facts and proof validation. Faith cannot be based on dialectical reason not even on his criticism via negative dialectic in the style of Kierkegaard, Sartre or Adorno.