What Are You, 12?
Meanwhile in other pre-adolescent fits, Pamela of Atlas Shrugs posts the following picture (and many more) of herself flipping off Cindy Sheehan.
Idiots.
forsaking meaning for the search for means
Tracy, there is no usage of "empiricism" in English that corresponds to what you’ve said:However, our progressive counterparts, for the most part, believe that reality is entirely subjective, with all of reality being inside the brain of the perceiving subject with nothing independent of it. This philosophy is also known as Empiricism.This is solipsism and is regarded as the antithesis of empiricism.
Adler’s book was written in 50s and has thus missed much of significance in the development of philosophical thinking over the last half century. Adler also indulged his prejudices quite freely and his book should not be mistaken for a systematic (let alone consistent) approach to philosophy.
I haven’t read Sire, but IVP is generally not a reliable publisher when it comes to philosophy.
If you really want to understand philosophy, I strongly recommend Metaphysics: An Introduction by Michael Loux or Metaphysics by Peter Van Inwagen. Inwagen is a Christian so that you may be more comfortable with him. Loux is a bit more rigorous. Neither of these are easy reading. However, given the complexity and significance of the issues, they deserve serious attention. You might also find Robert Audi's Epistemology: An Introduction of interest.
The correspondence theory of truth that you talk about is quite problematic in many ways. The American philosopher Hilary Putnam examines this in great (some might say excruciating) detail. Putnam is not what you would call postmodernist. His essay "Language and Meaning" in his collected papers would be the best place to begin thinking through the issues. Any of his books touch on this at some point.
All of this presupposes, of course, that you’re actively interested in thinking through the issues rather than throwing things together into a club with which to beat up people whose politics you dislike.
I do not think "the unhinged side" means what you think it means.
WRT the quote from the Qur'an, one has to wonder about the translation because the beginning commands "slay them" while it is clear in the remainder of this, and subsequent verses, that whoever the idolaters are (again, I do not think this means what you think it means) they’re still very much alive.
It should hardly be necessary to say this, but there are parallel passages in the Old Testament. You may have noticed those are not operative in 20th century Christianity (or Judaism), except, of course, for the looney-tunes branches. The same is true of Islam. Contemporary Islam, like contemporary Christianity, has found ways of reading the scripture in tolerant, humane ways. The Tim McVeighs and the David Koreshs are exceptions, just as Osama bin Laden is an exception in Islam.
Repeating yourself more loudly and at greater length does not change the simple, transparent, pellucid fact that you are indulging in ignorant, paranoid racism.
If you deny humanity to entire races/religions, what realistic expectation should you have of not being the subject of ad hominem (note the spelling) attacks?
Zero. That’s what.
Edit your comments. Pull the door closed and live in your room of mirrored fear. Do not, however, expect any of the rest of us to applaud.
Haiku -> Season-Reference Haiku-Body
| Haiku-Body Season-Reference
Season-Reference -> Season-Word | Season-Word Noun
Season-Word -> winter | spring | autumn | summer
Haiku-Body -> ExtendedImage | Image Image
ExtendedImage -> Image Preposition Determiner Noun
Image -> Determiner Adjective Noun | Adjective Noun
| Noun
Determiner -> a | the | this | that
Preposition -> about | as | by | down | for | in
| into | of | on | to
Conjunction -> and
Verb -> ate | cut | digs | goes | has | have | keep
| melt | opens | see
Adjective -> bare | black | crane_s | dried | first
| interesting | misty | my | settled
| silent | snowy | tonight_s | weathered
| white | wind-pierced
Noun -> body | bones | branch | chestnut | chewing
| crow | day | end | evening | eye | frost
| fuji | hand | hibiscus | horse | i
| law | legs | mind | moon | moonflower
| moonlight | morning | myself | net | no_one
| outhouse | rain | road | roadside | salmon
| seeing | torchlight | tree | way | worm
Stephen Voyce: When did you first begin to write poetry? How would you describe those initial efforts at writing verse?
Christian Bök: I began writing poetry in my late adolescence, producing work inspired mostly by the likes of Michael Ondaatje, Leonard Cohen, and Gwendolyn MacEwan. I published some of this juvenilia, but I became convinced late in my undergraduate career that, if I continued writing emotive, lyrical anecdotes, then I was unlikely to make any important, epistemic contributions to the history of poetry. I decided to become more experimental in my practice only after I encountered the work of Steve McCaffery during my graduate studies. I was surprised to discover that, despite my literary training, none of my professors had ever deigned to expose me to the "secret history" of the avant-garde (what with its wonderful zoo of conceptual novelties and linguistic anomalies). I realized then that, by trying to write emotional anecdotes, I was striving to become the kind of poet that I "should be" rather than the kind of poet that I "could be." I decided then that I would dedicate my complete, literary practice to nothing but a whole array of formalistic innovations.
SV: This assumption about what a poem "should be"—can you elaborate on this statement? Why has the emotive lyric become almost synonymous with poetry as such?
CB: Unlike other artists in other domains where avant-garde practice is normative, poets have little incentive to range very distantly outside the catechism of their own training—and because they know very little of epistemological noteworthiness (since they do not often specialize in other more challenging disciplines beyond the field of the humanities), they tend to write about what they do know: themselves, their own subjectivity. The idea that a writer might conduct an analytical experiment with literature in order to make unprecedented discoveries about the nature of language itself seems largely foreign to most poets.
SV: That said, has the concept of formal innovation changed since high modernism?
CB: Postmodern life has utterly recoded the avant-garde demand for radical newness. Innovation in art no longer differs from the kind of manufactured obsolescence that has come to justify advertisements for "improved" products; nevertheless, we have to find a new way to contribute by generating a "surprise" (a term that almost conforms to the cybernetic definition of "information"). The future of poetry may no longer reside in the standard lyricism of emotional anecdotes, but in other exploratory procedures, some of which may seem entirely unpoetic, because they work, not by expressing subjective thoughts, but by exploiting unthinking machines, by colonizing unfamiliar lexicons, or by simulating unliterary art forms.
...There is not a correct kind of poem to write, or an incorrect kind. I want access to the whole spectrum. If I piss on the surreal, I won't let myself head in that direction. If I insist that the lyric is dead, that door closes. Being open to all kinds of poems allows for a fuller range of expression and helps the poet write out of different kinds of moods and sensibilities.
...I almost never have a goal in mind for a poem, so poems failing to do what I want them to do aren't usually a problem. It's a large part of the joy of writing for me, to arrive where I didn't know I was going. Writers talk about this quite often. I think it's why many of us don't want to talk in detail about what we're writing. I tend to run with the first line or image that arrives with force.