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[–]NeoRail 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

So much of what has been philosophized can be psychologized, sociologized or otherwise scientized. Freud, for example, has been recorded as once remarking that he was essentially psychologizing Schopenhauerian philosophy: that is, that certain key claims of Schopenhauer matched his more 'scientific' (keeping in mind that I view psychoanalysis as pseudoscientific, although still more scientific than philosophy) findings.

This is essentially reiterating my previous claim that everything is downstream from metaphysics and philosophy, only in different termss. It should not be surprising that alternative explanations for the mind, society, the conception of knowledge etc. can be offered by various scientistic approaches, because all of these approaches are rooted in a presupposed metaphysics and philosophy, however defectively understood or applied. Modern materialist science is itself a form of natural philosophy, as we discussed earlier.

I must wonder just who possessing of a scientific mind would accept something such as either of these tripartite conceptions of the soul? For how am I to verify just which man's typology, if either, is indeed correct?

Not with the tools of a modern materialist sub-branch of natural philosophy which we refer to as science, which by design exclude non-quantitative phenomena, at any rate. If you wish to verify these things for yourself, there are a plethora of traditional methods available, which of course presuppose an entirely different methodology.

Why should I accept Plato over Aristotle or vice versa?

There are some people who would argue this rationally, but I am not one of those. I would rather you think what you believe to be correct, regardless of what it is. My objection to your initial post was your framing of the soul as some sort of abstract and levelling egalitarian concept, when historically the exact opposite has been the case.

will not science erode the value of philosophy as it proves that of it which is provable, leaving only that which cannot be?

It will not, because that would be the same as science eroding its own value, given that it is a subordinate branch of philosophy and draws its legitimacy from it.

All that I have said of the Cartesian mind also holds true of the Christian soul, as Caspar has observed.

That's not really true, as I demonstrated with my example about the sinner earlier. Not to mention that to my knowledge both the Catholic and Orthodox Churches have much more developed conceptions of the soul than is commonly known, most Christians are just completely ignorant of those conceptions and instead rely on the modernist, secular Cartesian model.

physicalism that can easier attribute human worth to the body and gene?

Well, that's wrong, so you would obviously have to deal with that problem. I assume you remember the example I gave to demonstrate the falseness of this notion in our previous conversation. Countless other examples can be given. A quick look at the members of the aristocracy today is sufficient proof.

(and Cartesianism, were it not repressed and largely wiped out by the mid-eighteenth century)

What do you consider to have replaced Cartesianism? If I recall correctly, in our last thread you agreed that the modern understanding of a human being is essentially that it is a "sovereign rational actor", with humanity being defined as our common ability to use the reasoning faculty.

must surely lead to egalitarianism precisely because the alleged content or properties of the soul plain and simply encourage it.

An indefensible claim. In order to stick to what to you sounds plausible, you end up entertaining the utterly ridiculous.

Hence the common claim in these quarters, that contemporary Left-liberalism is some kind of mutant bastard child of Christianity that simply took this underlying egalitarianism and then cut out God, original sin (except for White people) and a few other things, thus leading to the conclusion that a dualist creed—not a physicalist one—led us to where we are today.

There is nothing even remotely dualist about modern leftism, absolutely everything in leftism is constantly reduced to matter and is completely lacking in any transcendent character - the conception of the mind is materialist, the conception of society is materialist and the conception of morality is materialist-utilitarian too. Critiques like this can only really point at the superficial moralism and zealotry of modern leftists, but this is by no means something only the religious have a monopoly on. A great example of this is Dawkins, who is an extremely materialist individual, yet a no less zealous, puritanical and bigoted one for all that.

[–]EthnocratArcheofuturist 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

given that it is a subordinate branch of philosophy and draws its legitimacy from it.

Science draws its legitimacy from the fact that it works.

[–]NeoRail 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

On a popular level, you are correct. The problem is that that is still completely nonsensical. In the first place, knowledge isn't supposed to "work" - it simply is. To say that the "scientific" perspective is always correct just because science has resulted in the production of advanced technology is logically incoherent and completely arbitrary. The former does not follow from the latter at all, not even a bit. Initial proponents of the empirical method had far humbler goals and understood their scientific pursuits as merely one way of knowing things, with rather limited applications at that.