(August 14, 2020 at 3:12 am)Grandizer Wrote: There's a lot I'm ignorant about.
Me too!
This is all endlessly fascinating, and I get surprised all the time by what I find.
Now I'm reading a thing about Thomist epistemology, and although I don't accept some of the premises, there is no question that the logic is powerful and challenging throughout. Large parts of it anticipate modern phenomenology, even in the specialty terms they use.
And even where I don't accept the premise the concept is helpful. So for example they think that a purely intelligible mind, with no material substrate, is possible. I don't agree with that. But they largely use the concept of such a mind in order to demonstrate why a mind with a body (like that of a person) would have its ways of thinking determined by that body. We think as we do because of the kind of body we have.
Plus there is a kind of science fiction pleasure in it. If one of the main reasons for reading books is to discover minds wildly different from my own (without hating them) then a clear explanation of how a non-embodied mind would think, in contrast to my own, is a pleasure and a challenge. Far more than something like Star Trek, for example, in which the aliens on distant planets are about as different from us as people in a different neighborhood of Los Angeles.