>>261989>>261989It's not actually that complicated. The really-easy thought experiment is "is there a tree?" There are leaves, stems, roots, a trunk... whatever. When does it become a tree? It's entirely a construction, and it's still 100% real, to us. It's entirely an invention. We start with brute facts, and log-in to a virtuous loop (Keith Leher from Arizona something--dude, read him! He's my fave contemporary philosopher, but if you visit his website? He's totally convinced he's an impressionist painter. Whatever--that's not the point. What's important is that he has a solution to irreducibility). But we invent those brute-facts out of absolutely-nothing. Science refines them, so that we keep getting our brute facts from something more basic, but we define the entire universe not from what things are, but from what we understand them to be.
This is a guy who defined his universe very-simply. Yes. I reflect on it likewise. It's good. It's kind. It's joyous. It's also very-simple.
Anyhow... read a lot of Joyce, some Dewey, too much Derrida, hate yourself, switch to Sartre, try to read Proust then hate yourself way-more, become convinced that Aristotle is meaningful, realize it's not true, and become obsessed with all the 17th-century humanists who just expounded on philosophy based on absolutely nothing. Then find James. Then realize that philosophy meant everything, the whole time.
Philosophy is multi-jurisdictional. It's complicated. It's also easy-to-understand, and really simple. Logic is kinda hard, but you only need to learn enough to understand an argument, and then it doesn't matter (an no--an "ad hominem" isn't a logical fallacy. Ignore the internet. That's an informal fallacy, which means that it has absolutely nothing to do with logic).
All animals with four legs are cats
You have four legs
Your mother is a whore
You are a cat.
Not a damned-thing to do with validity.
