[Serious] Book reports

[Belacqua]

Reading (re-reading, actually) Twain's 'Following The Equator'.  While actually a travelogue, he spends roughly a third of the book discussing the religious practices of the various cultures he encounters, particularly India.

He concludes that, 'True irreverence is disrespect for another man's god.'

Boru

Sounds like a book I would love to eventually read.

I guess I don't understand why he makes showing disrespect for someone else's god a desirable thing. Irreverence is easy. 

still wonder if Aquinas (and by proxy, Feser) hold to the view that "potentiality" is something that almost spookily "waits" for certain conditions to actualize it ... as opposed to being incidentally actualized because a set of conditions occurred that naturally leads to the actualization. When he writes of the "gooeyness potential" of a rubber ball, does he mean there is this inactive tendency that actually exists and is ready to be actualized if/when the ball is subjected to heat? Or does he simply mean that when the rubber ball is subjected to heat, it will melt and become gooey, and in this sense the "gooeyness potential" was actualized? 

Maybe I missed it, but I didn't get the impression that there's anything spooky going on. Each object, due to its nature, has a set of potential things it can do or become. The rubber ball can become gooey, in the right conditions, but it can't become edible. Whether the various potentials get activated or not depends on various factors. 

Obviously quantum physics is out of my area, but some people are taking Aristotle-type potentialities seriously as a way to explain certain strange behaviors. 

https://www.sciencenews.org/blog/context...-realities

This suggests that various potentialities do somehow exist concurrently before they become actualized. 

 

In other words, they had to think hard about various "simple" topics so that "we wouldn't have to".

I like that! 

It's amazing to think they could do all that. Such basic things that everybody saw -- like change and motion -- yet the desire to conceptualize and explain turned out to be fantastically difficult, and require explanations that nobody would have expected. 

And they didn't even have coffee!