The real kicker is Pyrrho’s claim that pragmata—the "issues" we love to argue about—are unstable and indistinguishable. So if you ever feel lost in a political debate or a Twitter thread, congratulations! You’re living the Pyrrhonist dream. The article’s simple thought experiments—like "Is a hot dog a sandwich?"—are proof that even the dumbest questions are bottomless pits of disagreement.
The real twist: Socrates, the guy who made "defining things" his entire personality, might have been wrong all along. Aristotle tried to clean up the mess by inventing "essences," but Pyrrho wasn’t buying it—because things don’t have stable essences. We just slap labels on chaos and pretend we’ve got it under control.
The takeaway? Maybe instead of trying to nail down rigid definitions, we should just embrace the beautiful uncertainty of life. After all, the moment you think you’ve got something figured out, someone’s going to come along and ask, "But is water wet?" And down the rabbit hole you go.
slapping labels on things is what our social learning institutions provide for us as thought styles - we often think with things and feel they are natural or just, even as we gather them from the world around us, and invent little ourselves (even the focus on the individual is learned from social learning)... so.. i suspect a lot of more recent anthropological literature can raises awareness due to the relative comparisons between …different suites of things…. different societies think with… 'institutionally'. It is important to realise that these things and their creation and maintenance in 'social learning' (I call it the world) are not obvious to us, even when we defensively double-down on them into dogma and identitarian indulgence.
Given Buddhist survival primarily by a soteriological practice and thus more selfing based, a different frame might have create the institution of an anthropological Buddhism a long time ago had their been sufficient interest to create such a 'worlding' institution.
the word 'things' is actually an 'exact' word for issues, it is only its more recent use as a synonym for object that occlude this state of 'affairs' and making do.
The real kicker is Pyrrho’s claim that pragmata—the "issues" we love to argue about—are unstable and indistinguishable. So if you ever feel lost in a political debate or a Twitter thread, congratulations! You’re living the Pyrrhonist dream. The article’s simple thought experiments—like "Is a hot dog a sandwich?"—are proof that even the dumbest questions are bottomless pits of disagreement.
The real twist: Socrates, the guy who made "defining things" his entire personality, might have been wrong all along. Aristotle tried to clean up the mess by inventing "essences," but Pyrrho wasn’t buying it—because things don’t have stable essences. We just slap labels on chaos and pretend we’ve got it under control.
The takeaway? Maybe instead of trying to nail down rigid definitions, we should just embrace the beautiful uncertainty of life. After all, the moment you think you’ve got something figured out, someone’s going to come along and ask, "But is water wet?" And down the rabbit hole you go.
slapping labels on things is what our social learning institutions provide for us as thought styles - we often think with things and feel they are natural or just, even as we gather them from the world around us, and invent little ourselves (even the focus on the individual is learned from social learning)... so.. i suspect a lot of more recent anthropological literature can raises awareness due to the relative comparisons between …different suites of things…. different societies think with… 'institutionally'. It is important to realise that these things and their creation and maintenance in 'social learning' (I call it the world) are not obvious to us, even when we defensively double-down on them into dogma and identitarian indulgence.
Given Buddhist survival primarily by a soteriological practice and thus more selfing based, a different frame might have create the institution of an anthropological Buddhism a long time ago had their been sufficient interest to create such a 'worlding' institution.
I'm too much of a Neo-Platonist to go omg with this, but it was an interesting read - thank you!
the word 'things' is actually an 'exact' word for issues, it is only its more recent use as a synonym for object that occlude this state of 'affairs' and making do.
https://whyweshould.substack.com/p/if-the-world-is-a-thing-we-have-made