Modernism v. Postmodernism, Absolute v. Relative Truth

Quotation marks and a little punctuation may have better conveyed my meaning :grin:

Pomos: “Reason determines no knowledge.”

Aufklarer: “Reason determines all knowledge.”

Aufklarer is plural, I did check on that before I posted the comment :joy:

  • All “Pomos” say that “Reason is not the origin of knowledge”? or
  • All “Pomos” say that “Reason is not the deciding factor in what constitutes 'knowledge?” or
  • All “Pomos” say that “Reason determines nothing”?
  • Who’s Aufklarer?
  • Aufklare says: “Reason determines what counts as knowledge”?
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That’s a great insight! There’s a book that I think says exactly that (plus that there was hyperbole, I think)_-“Enemy in the Household”
Caryn Reeder - The Enemy in the Household | OnScript I’ve listened to the podcast, I have not read the book, though.
Thanks.

I heard somewhere that laws like this in the Bible are based on case law, and not universal or absolute law… it’d be interesting to see what a good commentator has to say about it.

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I was going for an overly simplistic explanation. It could probably, no definitely, be expanded for a better working definition and contrast. There was a bit of confusion from the beginning with Jay’s original post, and the definition he offered.

My point, in response to his comment, was that I understand there is a difference between postmodernism and the Enlightenment.

Aufklarer, is German for the philosophers of the Enlightenment.

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Yes, that’s a good point. However, I’m not sure that there is any absolute law in the Bible, even intended, is there? There’s a book by James K A Smith to that point I think. I’d like to hear what you think. We would say that they’re absolute, but only in the setting that they are found.

Because you conflated them. Do you have some actual sentences or a source to flesh out what you said, or do you still expect me to interpret sentence fragments and breadcrumbs? Sorry. I’m not playing that game. Do you have something of substance to contribute, or is your contribution to the conversation limited to breadcrumbs and innuendo? I’ve put time and effort into this. You? A bunch of one-liners and nothingness. Don’t waste my time and everyone else’s.

  • LOL!! Fat chance of that happening in Physics.
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Just like I conflated Heidegger with being a new age mystic.

That’s your choice. I made a comment to someone else, you jumped on it, misunderstood it, and are still claiming I said something ridiculously stupid.

This is not true and it is insulting. It also appears to be a violation of forum guidelines.

The only law that is absolute is the law of love. Love God and love people. Beyond that, it’s hard to say. Even somethings like being modest or an evangelist, are based on love, and yet they are nearly impossible to pin down to specific set of instructions.

James Smith is a very good philosopher, I’d be interested in anything he has to say about legal philosophy. I know he wrote a book on postmodernism, I should see if he has a talk about it.

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Oops you cut off the context. That matters.

That doesn’t mean we can only ever discuss emperical matters. But as we begin to discuss truth, reality and wisdom … we have to recognize the need not to clobber people with arguments but rather to invite them to sample our intuitions.

So that means when we talk about other than empirical matters - and that includes physics.

  • So “physics” isn’t empirical? Gee, has anybody told the Relativists that?

A few good videos from Smith. The first one is a neat 4 minute summary of relativism. I may have noticed a couple small holes for where objectivity may still be considered :sunglasses:

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No, no. Physics is empirical but I said when we talked about other matters which are not empirical.

  • Then Pomo fails, IMO, when in the realm of Physics.

Reminds me of the Entartete Kunst exhibit in Munich c. 1937. Blame the artists for everything.

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Aufklärer has other meanings, too.
And the umlaut, like the Oxford comma, is important. It can be written as Aufklaerer, if no umlaut is available.

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Do you know of anyone who thinks it applies? I’m no expert but I’ve only ever heard of it applied in the arts and humanities. Hopefully someone will broaden my view.

  • How interesting! Shows you just how uninformed I am; I would never have guessed that it has only applied in the arts and humanities.
  • I’m not well-read in the history of the sciences, but I would be surprised if no one had ever written that the development of relativity theory and quantum mechanics undermined the traditional foundations of physics: the notion of a deterministic and objective universe; that reality is more complex than thought previously; and that our understanding of the universe is incomplete.
  • Ahh, … just read that some argue that the terms modernism and postmodernism are not applicable to physics, because physics is a science that is based on objective evidence and rational inquiry and that the development of new theories in physics does not mean that the foundations of physics are being undermined, but that our understanding of the universe is being refined.
  • So, whether or not the terms apply in physics is debatable and debated.
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Butler’s introduction to postmodernism is helpful. I felt it was even handed and he was obviously informed.

Postmodernists got into their most radical political positions (and their most obvious difficulties) in attacking the objectivist claims of science.

For example, Jean Baudrillard claims that in the Gulf War ‘the space of the event has become a hyperspace with multiple refractivity and the space of war has become definitively non-Euclidean’. Sokal and Bricmont comment on this that the concept of ‘hyperspace’ offered here simply ‘does not exist in either mathematics or physics’ and that it makes no sense to ask what a Euclidean space of war would be like, let alone to hypothesize the kind of space which Baudrillard has just ‘invented’ through his misunderstanding and misuse of scientific terminology.