Occams Hatchet and Is Materialism "Special"

[Neo-Scholastic]

You know, you might have to ask yourself whether or not your system of inference..the one you're using to make determinations about the inferences of others, is based upon innate mental instincts or acculturation as well.  There are and have been other systems of inference, in the world...apart from the western system...and the western system itself has been evolving over time.  When you ask that question above, whether or not (and to what extent) culture affects it..by reference to medieval scholastics... who conceived of their body of knowledge as nothing -other- than an expression of and demonstration of their particular conception of god.....you might be onto something.

Indeed. For this reason, I try to pair my introspection with the question of whether the resulting insights are self-sustaining or self-defeating. And even not doubting the validity of that approach is dancing on the edge of the abyss. Still that seems to be the whole point, to not be consumed by the void of modernism or getting mired in a vicious postmodern circle.

There is some truth to your last sentence. No doubt the unquestioned notion of a transcendent spiritual realm did inform quite a bit of Scholastic discourse despite its pretenses. I now believe people should be careful not to consider their own culture as an intellectual apex or invalidate prior worldviews as savage, backwards, and unsophisticated. In point of fact, indigenous American and Asiatic cultures are complex and in their own way uniquely insightful. Similarly, I think it is a mistake to view Western folklore as simply ignorant superstition and not a product of an alien paradigm.

Please don't misunderstand. I'm not interested in reinterpreting old myths into Jungian archetypes or Campbell-like meta-mythology. Instead, I want to know what it actually feels like shed one worldview, immerse oneself in another, then come out on the other side with a worldview different from both - one that perhaps better maps out what it means to be alive here and now.