Hacker News Reader

Comment by shannifin | Hacker News Reader

I always find Feser thought-provoking. Haven't read anything of his for a while though, so this was refreshing. Will probably spend more time browsing his posts from the past few months now.

In regard to the subject matter, I do wonder how it may relate to the pursuit of knowledge for the sake of keeping it a secret, at least for a time, for the purposes of using it to start a business with a competitive advantage.

I wonder, because this is precisely what I'm doing. Startups are obviously a great place for unhealthy / disordered desires for wealth, power, fame, etc., to easily take root, and I wonder how the pursuit of knowledge may play into that, or how one can guard against it.

View on HN

I’m glad you’ve gotten something out of the writings of this Professor of Theology. When I’ve read him in the past I’ve found his lines of reasoning chaotic, his arguments unconvincing, and him to be uninformed about some of the matters he treats at length. But, perhaps more seriously, his comportment is inconsistent with someone who wants to be taken seriously. He often seems to be fighting personal battles against real or imagined enemies, rather than examining ideas. At times he descends into personal insults against people whose opinions he objects to. It’s here, too: look at the swipe against the imagined “village atheist” right off the bat—a phrase obviously intended to evoke the “village idiot”. He’s hard to take seriously for me, or even to tolerate beyond a few paragraphs.

I came here to provide similar, if not this exact feedback. I hadn't heard of the author before today and I only made it to the second labelled section of the essay before thinking, "Wow this reeks of arrogance and lack of self-awareness."

I must be on a different planet because he didn't sound that way to me at all. Even his "village atheist" comment that parent had a fit over completely slipped by me until he pointed my attention to it just now, and it doesn't seem like the kind of thing the author meant in bad faith.

I quite enjoyed the ideas discussed in the article, and even though it is steeped in religious undertones, you don't have to be religious to understand his broader point, I think.

“The highest sort of knowledge concerns the divine first cause and last end of our existence, and of how to prepare our souls so that they might be united to him forever. The further one’s intellectual pursuits take one from interest in and knowledge of these ultimate matters, the more disordered they are.”

So yeah, I think you kinda do.

Very much seconding this take. His arguments routinely lack nuance and there's some tenuous dot-connecting.

As I got to the end of the article, I kind of got this nagging feeling that when I went to read about the author I was going to find some bit about conservative punditry, and lo-and-behold it was there.

Nailed it.

> One of them is the desire to be seen as clever. Manifestations of this might include developing abstruse lines of argument, with feigned earnestness, for positions one does not really take seriously and one’s readers are not likely to take seriously either; the use of logical symbolism and other technical apparatus in cases where it is not necessary in order to make one’s point; a predilection for one-upmanship and argumentativeness; and, in general, a tendency to treat intellectual life as a kind of game or mental onanism.

If their blog post isn't self-ironic on purpose, then it is at least accidentally. I would definitely categorize the writing above as an excellent example on how someone might choose to word their opinion or thoughts in a manner that is seen as intellectual. The whole post reeked of this mental intellectual onanism.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com