For Kant Architectonics is the “legislation of reason,” which consists in the relating of all of the specific content of science to the “essential ends of human reason”. The Canon of Pure Reason is nothing but the set of these ends: soul, world, God / freedom, God,
immortality The first set of three are the regulative ideas of speculative reason at work in metaphysics. The second set are the ideas of practical reason, the essential ends of morality. But Kant also assigns a practical use to Reason’s speculative ideas.

Walter Lippmann believed that democracy unmediated by expert authority was impossible, because the public was beset by “stereotypes”, and mass of education to correct this wasn’t feasible. In this his psychology is fundamentally Lockean, Stereotypes being Locke’s “confused ideas” Leibniz, Kant, and John Dewey all hold an alternative model of discourse. Lippmann conceived mass education as a case-by-case positivist training in specialized social science for every policy topic. Education for Dewey instead involved Methodus, a general science of inquiry

The truth about the “culture war” is that it serves to mystify the underlying historical, economic, and technological processes that created the modern Neo-Liberal order by reframing them in hollow spiritual terms, as a lose of “moral consensus” amidst expanding pluralism

https://twitter.com/wydna00/status/1522267950744584192

The author sees even secular progressivism as a religious position, growing out of modern currents of protestantism. But the details of this involve John D Rockefeller Jr.’s mobilization of interfaith protestant modernism in constructing an internationalist American hegemony

The twitter devs are shook

Certain works like James Burnham's Managerial Revolution have been recycled in recent discourse as a foundation for understanding the rise of the "professional managerial class". But analysis of this concept is much more pervasive and central in modern philosophy than realized

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In 1922 Walter Lippmann wrote in his work Public Opinion about the incoherence of public discourse and about his proposal to create a Central Intelligence Agency, which he interestingly conceived of as a kind of university of expert social scientists managing information.

@newconnecticut @morally_supreme @Logo_Daedalus @civit999 I think one difference is Tom Jones is much more about the management of social appearances, of the proper use of constructed identity in the emerging English public sphere. Less a celebration of God given humanity stripped of all its arrogant and false pretensions @newconnecticut @morally_supreme @Logo_Daedalus @civit999 Tom Jones is more of a mirror world of public personas which each character employs to their own ends. Tom Jones’ weakness is that he takes these at face value, due to his well meaning naivety. Likewise he doesn’t know how to properly project his own identity

@newconnecticut @morally_supreme @Logo_Daedalus @civit999 Not that there’s a huge difference. I meant that that style was followed by people who delighted in lots of weird knowledge and trivia, and used it to satirize the pretensions of the establishment to moral purity and intellectual sophistication. @newconnecticut @morally_supreme @Logo_Daedalus @civit999 So the humor of Panurge’s use of all these languages is that Pantagruel can’t understand any of them. Despite being a noble educated by the scholars of the Parisian academy. Likewise Panurge resorts to all these esoteric languages instead of just French which they both speak

Counterintelligence necessarily involves the cultivation of the very plots it intends to prevent. Observation is never passive, but creates the things it studies, just as much as the object’s existence invites observation. The two always develop reciprocally. It’s not precisely the case that agencies like the FBI “plan” consciously the terrorist plots they facilitate, it’s more that the very practice of counterintelligence inherently and uncontrollably manifests the hypothetical objects of its paranoia and anxiety

The extinction of “Polymaths” or “Geniuses” has less to do with pedagogical benchmarks or the volume of information requiring synthesis, and more to do with the empiricist-positivist opposition to the metaphysical unity of knowledge. Polymathism wasn’t a function of iq or “intelligence,” but was a reflection of the encyclopedic worldview which the Polyhistors held in common. That worldview posited an internal cognitive architecture that logically structured the sciences into a coherent, interdependent whole

The Saudi Oil industry was created by the US during WWII, between the first Cairo Conference, November 22–26, 1943, and second, December 4-6, pioneering petroleum geologist Everette Lee DeGolyer was sent by FDR to report on Saudi reserves. ARAMCO was formed mere months later Standard Oil of California was approached by St. John Philby (Kim Philby's father) about purchasing Saudi oil concessions in the early 30s. Philby was an adventurer orientalist like Lawrence of Arabia during WWI, and converted to Islam afterwards to become a minister to Ibn Saud.

Oh wow, what a surprise, they made a movie… about BATMAN? I never saw that coming. Whoa? They killed his parents? That’s so tragic. What an iconic character. I’m so glad they made a 20th movie about him instead of the only actually good character they have, aka Mr. Mxyzptlk Let me guess, Clayface isn’t in it. Solomon Grundy isn’t in it. Gorilla Grodd isn’t in it. And don’t even get me started on Clock King. Yep, who’d ever want to see a Batman movie without the same 2-3 characters over and over again, God fucking forbid

The creation of Paypal seems to have been a fluke. Prior to being a money transfer service, Paypal was Confiniti, and before that, FieldLink, one of several obscure, failed companies started by Max Levchin. The original focus had been Palm Pilot encryption Not often mentioned, this article notes Stanford cryptography professor Dan Boneh as a backer. The Palm Pilot was brand new at this time, and was masterminded by a bizarre-seeming character, Jeff Hawkins, a neuroscientist crank who thinks he can predict memory or something

What made America possible was the Baconian revolution of logic and knowledge, which fueled programs of agricultural and land reform, and birthed the Royal Society, which William Penn and many other colonial governors were members of. Knowledge is power. Andrew Carnegie built the public libraries of America, which, using the Dewey Decimal System, not only organized public knowledge, but in doing so systemized the American mind. This was not a symptom of American industrial ascension, but a primary cause of it.

There's no contradiction here. The World System is conflated with US Imperial Hegemony. The Pacifist position is support for continuing US domination of the international world system, as the enforcer of international law and the guarantor of stability and peace through air power

https://twitter.com/RTSG_Prism/status/1499065068239003655

Air Power doctrine was developed by Fabian socialists, anarchists, and pacifists in the early 20th century. World peace would be ensured by means of an international air force that would carry out punitive strikes to enforce laws passed by Wilsonian international institutions

Walter Crane, in his Of the Decorative Illustration of Books (1896), deploys repeated architectural metaphors where reading is as a kind of spatial movement through constructed space. Thus the book’s end paper (the inner cover) becomes a forecourt, etc.

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In The Grammar of Design (1856), Owen Jones makes the principles of architectural proportion the basis for design, and Crane follows suite in his geometrical subdivision of pages and rectangular blocks of illustration, which seems to flow naturally Jones’ Seventh Proposition

Extremely important book Kant’s theory of the imagination usually receives little attention, but it’s the key to the Critique of Judgement due to the role Kant assigns to it in Reflective Judgment, which is the mechanism by which intuitions are compared and generalized into cognitive concepts

Public propagandists of Science today uncritically accept the naïve epistemological “realism” of positivism under the false assumption that Science conquered metaphysics and formal logic obsoleted classical logic sometime in the 19th century, but the details of this elude them The “Scientific Method” as it’s taught today is in no real sense actual Science. It’s merely an algorithm. It doesn’t represent the “Practical” compliment to any Philosophy or Theory of Science. It’s a brute force, unintelligent adherence to an algorithm of knowledge manufacture

The “plain” style of Puritanism, and its hatred of ornament is a reflection of the influence of Ramist logic. Petrus Ramus expelled Rhetoric from the discipline of Logic, identifying it with Sophistry. Rhetoric includes Dialectic, and Ramism is purely Analytical in its method. This is the real subtext of cultural critics and discourse havers today who invoke the Puritans as a boogeyman of repression. These critics, who style themselves as “transgressive” artists against neo-Puritanism, are really acknowledging in the comparison that they’re Sophists.

Extremely excellent book. Absolute must read imo This is also a must read

The concept of Worldview has degraded heavily from its origins to its present use in psychology, sociology, etc. It’s not an unconscious set of prejudices, assumptions, and values. It’s rather World-INTUITION, an image of cosmological unity we actively represent to ourselves An intuition for Kant (who coined/invented the term worldview) is a class of representations. It’s a bundle of sensory data which the imagination binds together into a mental object, which we represent to ourselves in order to cognize/think about

The Voynich Manuscript is worthless actually, he was never able to sell it. His widow sold it decades later for $25,000, less than 1/4 his asking price. The buyer was unable to resell it and donated it to Yale. It’s value is only in the fictitious mystery constructed around it The legend of the manuscript was only ever a marketing ploy, which a perpetually cash strapped Voynich cooked up with amateur Roger Bacon scholar Robert Steele, a friend from the Savage Club, and Steele’s friend A.G. Little to coincide with the 700th anniversary of Bacon’s birth