Mysterious Brony wrote:

@iwpoe
Do you practice ascetics, monasticism, mystic spirituality, etc? According to Plato, doesn't one need to guide and discipline the appetites, desires?

I have a deep sympathy for monasticism- I visit the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani in Kentucky at least once yearly for about ten years -and I think that a full recovery of classical philosophy would involve the recovery of what Foucault would call technologies of the self, which include discipline of the passions. I think the modern era requires additional such technologies, because it is not lust but acedia: sloth/apathy/depression that is the characteristic sin of our age. The most concerted effort to develop a means of reviving the passions in the modern age is to be found in the romantic era, which is why I'll sometimes refer to myself as a romantic virtue ethicist.

AKG wrote:

@iwpoe.
What made you choose Platonism as the philosophy that you follow instead of other classical theistic views such as Aristotelian or Scholastic metaphysics? 

I've mentioned elsewhere that I don't consider the distinction between Plato and Aristotle as strong as it's pretended to be, nor indeed did the classical philosophic tradition. I'm also quite sympathetic to Aquinas until he introduces elements from special revelation.

Hmm, are you having a propositional problem, one with respect to insight, or some issue with your passions?

Well, I'm not sure what it is that you're looking for. If you want an argument that you don't think you can refute, that means that you're having a propositional problem: you're searching for a demonstration sketched out logically.

If you've seen the arguments and don't think you can refute them, but still don't believe that they are necessarily sound, then you are more than likely having a problem about insight. This would be like the situation of somebody who really just doesn't see that the principle of noncontradiction holds, even if they know that they can't dispense with it in argument in a satisfactory way.

You may however simply both see the arguments and think that they're sound, but still have some kind of annoying emotional rejection or lack of feeling that is haunting you. This is an entirely different problem from the former two and has to be approached in another manner.

AKG wrote:

The best way to explain it would be the use of this analogy courtesy of hammiesink:
"It's like if you are locked in a small lab in Antarctica looking at weather data, and all the numbers tell you that there is a blizzard outside. So intellectually you know it. But there is still a vast difference between knowing it intellectually and opening the door and seeing it for yourself, directly."
Has anyone ever had a feeling like this before? If so how did you overcome it as this is my main intellectual barrier against accepting classical theism fully.
 

There's no intellectual way to overcome it. The best way to deal with it is probably to appreciate the value of knowing what one would get into as a classical theist. There is also value in knowing that you are not there yet, that you have not completely converted body and soul.

It's best to have a direct experience or taste of it, but there's also value in knowing that you don't have the taste (yet). You know that you don't have it because you know, more or less, intellectually, what it would be like to have it. This knowledge has some value. You know what you are waiting for. When you are lucky, you may even know what next step is appropriate.