John West wrote:

That's the one. They clearly know their Aristotle and primary source Aquinas, but, for instance, I've seen one of their administrators correcting himself that God is a brute fact. (I half expected some of the guys from here to show up with pitchforks! Haha.)

The conversation with Ingthorsson was another instance. I remember thinking that some of what Ingthorsson was saying was fairly boilerplate in contemporary powers theory, which is heavily influenced by C. B. Martin. They completely missed it, though, and spent a lot of time talking past him. People here would have been more likely to pick up on it.

Is there any real dialogue between modern French Thomism and continental philosophy? I'm very sympathetic to the 20th century European Thomists I've read (Pieper, Maritain), but I'm not sure to what extent that type of existentially flavored Thomism is a thing of the past. I'm certainly not seeing it at that forum.

(Spanish and French for me, and I definitely like the idea of non-English subforums.)

Due_Kindheartedness wrote:

Hypatia wrote:

I'm suspicious of anyone who tries as hard as Mythicists do to twist the historical evidence to fit a pet theory rather than letting it speak for itself. It's just bad scholarship.

Mythicism is becoming more popular among people though. Most people don't know that Jordan Peterson is probably a mythicist and there are Christians who are saying that he's one of those "sincere seekers of the truth." WTF?
 

Yes, I noticed that about Jordan Peterson recently, but I think it's more an element of his Jungian approach than anything else. If everything is a matter of psychological archetypes, then the historical question disappears into a mess of images and motifs.

I think Mythicism is if anything less popular than it used to be--it's no longer the trendy, daring hyper-skeptical option that it once was. Now you just look like a fringe conspiracy theorist with a minimal understanding of how history works.

Due_Kindheartedness wrote:

The atheist consensus is that Paul believed in a spirit Jesus. Again, I can't prove or disprove this.

It's not a consensus. You're not going to find many reputable historians who accept Mythicism. The more normal secular view is that an historical Jesus existed and that a number of miracles were eventually attributed to him.

Honestly, the amount of creative reinterpretation that you need to do to make the Pauline Epistles say what the Mythicists want them to say is pretty remarkable. I'm not sure how they manage to get "born of a woman" in Galatians 4:4-5 to mean "not born of a woman" instead, but I suspect they have their methods.

I can definitely sympathize, since I'm in a similar boat. Not Catholic, but I can neither truly accept nor reject Christianity. It's one of infinite live options, but the one that everything else tends to coalesce around just because of how reality-shattering its claims are.

I would ask you why you think it might be intellectually dishonest to introduce a bit of fideism to the picture. "I believe, help my unbelief" can be a legitimate aspect of Christian faith, and Pascal really isn't the sort of thinker who should be disregarded without a fair hearing.

John West wrote:

Hypatia wrote:

Hard to say, since I've always been something of a continentalist trying to fit myself into analytic categories. It tends to create more confusion than it solves.

So stop doing it! 
I seriously doubt that I'm the only one on here familiar with continental literature, and where we don't understand we can just ask for clarification or translation. The only thing I ask is that you avoid the kind of deliberate obscurantism Foucault famously quipped about. (I think the analytic-leaning philosophers on here do a pretty good job of avoiding the opposite danger, of insisting on a sort of specious clarity even when grubbing at the limits of intelligibility.)

Have I been obscurantist? If so, it hasn't been deliberate.

I didn't mean that I was trying to fit myself into analytic categories for the benefit of people here, though. I only have a B.A. in philosophy, which is a decade old now, and philosophy of mind is a much more recent interest. So I've been reading analytic philosophy of mind and trying to approach the problem on those terms, with Heidegger rolling around somewhere in the back of my mind, and I think Heidegger finally won. So I'm not sure how much my position has really changed--mostly it's been a process of disillusionment with the way the question has been asked at all.

I have concerns about dualism, partly because of phenomena like multiple personalities and split-brain surgery (though these seem to support a variety of views, depending on the research in question). I don't see how intentionality can be eliminated, so reducing mind to matter does not appear to work unless matter is conceived of teleologically. I don't think teleology entails dualism, though, so a non-naturalistic form of materialism looks like a fairly strong possibility. I have concerns with it, but I have more concerns with the altern