phillip retweeted
Our dear friend, Colin Sharpe, passed away in a tragic accident. He was a brilliant, kind, and courageous man who left an immense impact on our lives and many others.
We at BUCR extend our heartfelt condolences to Colin's family, friends, and all who knew him. Colin will be deeply missed by our organization and the wider communities of which he was part.
May he Rest in Peace.
phillip retweeted
Last semester, I served as president of the Boston University College Republicans but decided to step down for this academic year. These days, I mostly just post about the books I read and have little interest in discussing politics on here.
But on Friday, this year’s president, Colin Sharpe, tragically died in a car accident. And now people are celebrating his death on BU’s anonymous student forum.
Yes, the post has only eight upvotes. But that is still eight people celebrating the death of a fellow student because of his political affiliation.
I’m sure the overwhelming majority of BU students find this just as disgusting as I do. But it is deeply disturbing that some people on this campus don’t merely disagree with conservatives.
They seem to genuinely want us dead.
phillip retweeted
Awful news. We DM'd a few times—he was quite thoughtful, though we were very different ideologically.
Rest in power @ColinJSharpe
EXCLUSIVE: BU College Republicans President Who Endorsed Democrats Dies in Car Crash newsbarron.com/p/exclusive-b…
phillip retweeted
The anger and tone of voice that we find in Reformation battles were alien to the Middle Ages. As we have to admit, Reformation contests were like peasant brawls compared to the elegant fencing of the scholastics. As I said yesterday, one could then make very radical assertions unhindered without going over the line or really getting out of step.
Karl Barth
phillip retweeted
Max Scheler notes, in religious life, that “believing is seeing.” This runs contrary to the empiricist’s maxim that “seeing is believing” and that all perception is the perception of sensible and material objects.
In fact, faith is its own kind of perception with its own domain of knowledge, a domain qualitatively distinct from the others (i.e. the rational, practical, and scientific) but no less real.
phillip retweeted
Max Scheler describes a type of man he calls an “arriviste” - we would say striver - that I think is relevant here. He is kindred to the man of ressentiment in that he (unlike the noble sort of person) never experiences his own value or that of another without it being mediated by comparing them and only perceives the qualities in them that constitute possible differences, “more” or “less”, “higher” or “lower” than his own. He arrives at all value judgments by comparing himself to others and vice versa, and feels any respect in which he could be lesser as a threat to his self-value. The arriviste/striver is one who has this problem but is also energetic and relatively capable, and so he pursues power, property, honor, etc, but not because he enjoys or values these things intrinsically, but only because they are indifferent occasions for him to try and one-up others in an attempt to soothe his oppressive feeling of inferiority conditioned by the neurotic rat race comparison game he's running in his head.
phillip retweeted
“Indeed, we have already become too weary to die; now we continue to wake and we live on—in burial chambers!”
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
phillip retweeted
Scruton’s ruling out of an after life on the basis of a Kantian account of causality was more Kantian than Kant, who of course didn’t rule it out on that basis.
phillip retweeted
Sexual Desire: A Moral Philosophy of the Erotic—Sir Roger Scruton—an excerpt on erotic grief
phillip retweeted
I respect the Catholic Church for having zero interest in women priests. No question about it, no movement for it among the cardinals. Popes laugh if they’re asked about it. A whole org just profoundly unmoved by this pervasive modern sensibility. Eternal institution energy.
phillip retweeted
Sir Roger Scruton ran an illegal underground university behind the Iron Curtain in communist Czechoslovakia at enormous personal risk in the 70s and 80s. For this *alone* he was a hero and more virtuous than any other public intellectual or commentator we have now.
phillip retweeted
In France, the correlation between teacher staffing per student and test scores is measurably negative
phillip retweeted
This is why we need Husserl. If the abstract structure were "nothing but" the concrete intention, mathematics would become contingent upon the factual occurrence and psychological laws of those acts.
My humble opinion is that the “abstract structure” of mathematics is not some timeless idea floating in a transcendent realm but a concrete intention in the mind of the mathematician—something very much of this world. For example, the set of natural numbers, shorn of all representations, is nothing but the intention to count.
phillip retweeted
Cell phone addiction is an absolute thermonuke to the brain and nobody 'takes it seriously' because it is not clear that there is any solution in a world where the revealed preference of everyone across the globe, regardless of income, race, age, any factor whatsoever, would rather be on their phone than do *anything* else. Deciding "I use this too much" and meaningfully altering one's behaviour doesn't seem to have much success for any of the very small minority of people with the sentience or self-reflection to realize how bad it is. Most people seem to think of it as an unproductive habit at most, rather than an addiction. Any attempt to speak seriously about this is met with derision, accusations of pretentiousness. There is no real solution to it. The future of human cognition fifty years down the line is horrifying if you stop and think about it for even a moment.