Reviews and Comments

Long-winded essays tracing the historical debates regarding teleology in evolution, with more negation than affirmations made. The greatest merit of Thomists and Aristotelians are their strong belief in common sense, which is also their greatest flaw. Also, philosophers and theologians have a bizarre habit of citing authoritative figures: even if someone like Darwin believed that teleology is needed to account for evolution, since Darwin is not an authority of Nature, quoting Darwin's words on his belief says nothing about the necessity of taking teleology into account. If the Jesuits are still trying to use the arguments that can be classified in the same class the arguments given in this book are in, then they're certainly doomed. They're too easy and hand-wavy, if present at all. All negative assessment of positions that are counter to what Gilson holds are made in the name of common sense, and the problem with that is that it doesn't provide a valid or viable, or at the least, interesting, alternative to what is negated. Clinging to intellectual stagnation is never a good way to defend a philosophical position, and is precisely what Gilson is trying to do.

This is quite an uneven book. It is short book, an one-hour read.

The form and the characters of the book is actually quite cliched. It is a typical Dostoyevskian dialogue between the faithful and the agnostic, and adding to that, the faithful is represented by a magical negro, a humble, uneducated, black man, who is versus a cultured yet agnostic professor. As is always the case, the humble, unassuming, who has gone through hardships and is eager to live and love, lives a relatively miserable life obectively, but subjectively he seems to be in a much better condition than the professor, who is upper class and cultured, and seems to have no particular reason for the "pessimistic" view of life, or of the world.

The point of view and the narrative that is given by the faithful now seems extremely cliched, while not at all stupid or ridiculous. It's better than Dostoevsky, but for those who have already dived into philosophy of religion and existential philosophy, it is familiar and repetitive. The point of view that is represented by the professor seems quite devoid of actual substance other than words, at least to me. But taking into account of the fact that people nowadays are willingly buying into dungs like Richard Dawkins, and they're still fascinated by those debates given in Dostoevsky's novels, the book might be worth of reading for them, since it actually touches upon some real stuff, and does it right - cliched, but not superficial.

In The Passenger and Stella Maris, Cormac McCarthy will not only touch upon, but venture into and dive into the real stuff.

Constantly annoyed by the imprecision exhibited by the recent, American-style textbooks, which is more or less a consequence of their trying to be heuristic and friendly, but results in many confusions and their being much too time consuming. This is a paradigmatic text that exhibits this sort of imprecision. Along with imprecision comes verbosity.

Also the textbook is quite a sham because it does too many things so it does nothing really good. It should have been condensed to the first five chapters and the last chapter. 800+ pages and after reading the book you won't know what BGP is, but the book introduces off-topic things such as FTP and VoIP.

I came to realize that while computer networking is neither a hard subject nor a deep subject, it is a tedious subject that deals with shits and bloods of the real-world. Maybe a better way to learn is just to stay informed and use the search engine when in doubt.

I've taken some notes, or made some comments, on the text: notes.itinerariummentis.org/share/qJKxpNfXeugv While Ruyer is really good at finding out good examples to make his point, his thought doesn't go deep enough, and it stumbles before words like "meaning" which seem to be a sort of substitute for some metaphysical entity that is wholly mysterious. The proposed solution, given by Ruyer, to the problem of the origin of information, while in his words is to abandon some form of "Platonism" (a crude interpretation), is still essentially Platonism, in that meaning and value is put in a transcendental world ("trans-spacial world"). The Mind here do not create ex nihilo, but it channels the transcendental to the physical - this is full-blooded Platonism, but with some modifications done by Neo-Platonists ("emanation") or by the Peripatetics (active-passive distinction, telos versus efficient cause). On these points I've already pointed out in the notes. Still Ruyer's examples, while lengthy and hard to tolerate its verbosity, are genuinely good.

The author is a disciple of Dumezil, and he just can't stop praising Dumezil. I've always been perplexed by humanity scholar's pretension to be "scientific" since in the field of anthropology and history of religions it is impossible for a clearly defined notion of "scientific" to be formulated, first and foremost. Starting from the level of anthropology, hermeneutics is indispensable for any meaningful treatise to be written, and the author, marginally starting from a stance that can be spoken of as structuralist, completely disregards the validity of other methods of humanity, and by so doing, he proved, exactly, himself to be not at all rigorous or rational in his own method.

It is precisely his epistemology that is problematic: he, while pretentiously trying to show his Aristotelian learning off by citing, without any pragmatic effect, Aristotle's Topic or so, to illustrate simple points, and he, typical of a "learned" scholar in humanity, writes pages and pages of semi-rigorous word-playings that has virtually no philosophical value while pretending to be philosophical and rational and analytic (which is typical of French structuralist thought: not at all analytic but tries to be and pretends to be and finally deceives itself into thinking that it is analytic), while actual fact the whole book can be condenced into a wikipedia article.

But the part on Dumezil, who the author praises like a fanboy, is quite well-written, since here we see no such pretensions.

As is the case of Aku no Hana, Shuzo Oshimi doesn't understand his main characters, but he depicts and captures the atmosphere, the "mana" that these characters emanate so accurately, that the truths flow seamlessly from the expressionistic lines he draws. He doesn't understand, but he knows he doesn't, so he won't even try to explain, but simply becomes one with the characters and sees the world in their utterly subjective mode. Factually, there are some psychiatrists in the manga that express the opinions and understanding of the author regarding human psychology, but it is plainly observable that they're all but one facet of a deeply complex and nuanced subject from what is drawn so vividly by the author, and from the script. The manga literally strips your soul from your body and forces it to be the subjects of the main characters, to the point that from time to time the sense of reality becomes hazy. The manga is only to be experienced, not to be understood, and I suspect that when Oshimi was working on this one, he, too, only experienced the manga, never understood what he was really creating.