Arthur schopenhauer the art of being right free download

Isaac Asimov American biochemist and science-fiction writer. Peter William Atkins British chemist. And it is not possible to believe in gods and be a true scientist. Sir Isaiah Berlin British philosopher and intellectual historian. Joseph Campbell American scholar of mythology. Andrew Carnegie Scottish-American steel magnate. My god is patriotism.

Teach a man to be a good citizen and you have solved the problem of life. Chapman Cohen British activist. Clarence Darrow American lawyer. Democritus Greek philosopher. Emily Dickinson American poet. Denis Diderot French philosopher.

Benjamin Disraeli English politician and novelist. Benjamin Franklin American statesman and inventor. Sigmund Freud Austrian physician and psychoanalyst. Stephen Fry English comedian, actor, and writer. We have to spend our lives on our knees thanking him. What kind of god would do that? Heraclitus of Ephesus Greek philosopher. Christopher Hitchens British-born American journalist.

Victor Hugo French novelist. Everything that ever really happened testifies against the supernatural. Thomas Jefferson American president.

James Joyce Irish novelist. Johannes Kepler German astronomer. Stephen King American novelist. Richard Lederer American linguist. The time was called the Dark Ages. Ferdinand Magellan Portuguese explorer. Menken American journalist. Who gives you the right to tell others how to live their lives? I say, enough is enough. Respect is earned. The Church is inexorably losing or has lost not only any sense of respect it might have had once but is clearly losing influence in the day-to-day affairs of the community.

This trend is in part attributable to the utterly recalcitrant nature of the Church towards the few in our midst that were unfortunately born either gay or of indeterminate sex, along with the wholesale protection of those cardinals and others in the church who knew about and tried to hide the child sexual abuse scandals in the Church. I am particularly animated here because the Church is committing evil by hiding the evil of its clergy.

Unless and until the Church purges itself of this baggage it will continue its journey into irrelevance. Again with the emotion based nonsense coupled with Ad Populum. Yer version of non-belief is for the simple.

The Forest Gumps of Atheism. There is nothing intelligent in yer version of non-belief sir even if there are no gods. If God doesn't exist you merely made a lucky guess. Ye didn't reason yer way there son. Beg the question much? If no God or gods exists then who cares what happens to the Church? She is at the mercy of un-directed historical, social and physical forces and since there is no God who care what happens to Her and why would we wish to preserve a lie?

I dina care and I dina fash. It is all part of the Plan and I am not talking about the Seldon plan. Geez here is a quarter buy a clue. Maybe you might try claiming divine simplicity leads to modal collapse? Or similar argument a Classic Theist would care about? Just saying Go philosophy or go home! Otherwise, you either have to hate both the sin and the sinner, or love both the sin and sinner. If the former, you have to hate literally anyone who does absolutely anything wrong ever.

Since everyone does something wrong at some point, including yourself, you have to hate everyone, including yourself, and wish wickedness upon them. If that isn't itself sinful, I don't know what is. If you take the latter, then you have to love every act, no matter how evil it is. You would have to hope for even the most evil acts to be and in fact want those evil acts to be done. Clearly that can't be right. Therefore you are stuck in a middle ground of either loving the sin and hating the sinner, or the correct answer: hating the sin and loving the sinner.

I'm sure you have people you love who commit acts you believe are wrong. Do you actually hate them? Of course not. Do you want them to do these wrong acts? Of course. Clearly, you love the wrong-doer, but you do not love the wrong being done. I'm sure you don't think you are committing hate speech if you express any opposition to the wrong acts of your loved ones. In fact, its precisely because you love them that you might express your wish for them to stop doing these acts.

Quit this sophomoric nonsense, Paps. Schopenhauer did see a lot of truth in Christianity, even if he despised the hypocrisy of many Christians. Your point about the latter doesn't refute Feser's point about the former.

Poor, poor Papalinton. Did my comment hit home? Allow me to reiterate: you are a bigot whose heart is filled with hatred. It's probably why your arguments are as terrible as they are: you are so blinded by anger that you don't see their fallacious nature. Paps, do you know a guy called Schopenhauer? He defended that craving was pretty much the cause of suffering.

For instance, a obsession with getting catholics bored online is actually bad to the one who clinges to it. Even if you manage to make us all bored you will feel the necessity to do it again and again, everytime you satisfact your desire you open the door to more suffering. This first paragraph should be enough to a normal person to understand that mantaining this desire is futile.

Why don't you consider dissolving this craving by pursuing a more fulfilling activity like actually studying philosophy? Etienne Gilson had one thing right: the long history of philosophy follows an intuitive and predictable path. Schopenhauer might very well represent the old guard; the last grand attempt at codifying the great city of man until the Postmodernists lifted the veil.

Unfortunately, we need not wonder how bad New Atheist-inspired music might be as Richard Dawkins has ended all doubt. Thanks for sharing. This is hilarious. We know the noumenal world through awareness of our volition in a fictional world. Well paint me skeptical. That hair. Dear Ed, thanks for an excellent summary of the greatest of atheist philosophers. I wish you would have discussed Schopenhauer's deliberate exclusion of Being from his system as mere speculative theology and how this move leads his universe to be godless, whereas Aquinas could have agreed with Schopenhauer's brilliant description of the world as will and idea, were it subordinate to the Being of reality.

One can't answer all these difficult questions at once or in short blog posts, but Schopenhauer himself at several points in his masterpiece faces the problem of the self-sufficiency of the will and its knowability qua will, yet avoids lengthy discussion.

Is there therefore any use that may be derived from a division between "the world", which Schopenhauer adequately describes in its physical and metaphysical relations, from "reality", which includes the world but gives it its meaning and telos, which Schopenhauer excludes?

Thanks for this! I've long appreciated Schopenhauer's philosophy and recognized its profundity as well, even though I am a trained Thomist. When Schopenhauer is correct, he's spot on. When he errs, he errs beautifully. The speak of Schopenhauer's understanding of Will being blind and having no ultimate destination seems to have some similarities with Albert Camus' understanding of the human pursuit striving if you will for meaning and value finding no place to rest either.

Maybe he'll be next in the series? Good mention, specially because Dr. Feser already discussed Sartre, he has a quite good knowledge of the existencialists. While Camus was the more charismatic figure, i would prefer to see a Simone post, though. She did have the balls to try to create a ethical system and took her philosophy to discussing interesting themes, she is underated.

Schopenhauer's metaphysics, specifically his vantage point of looking from the individual will, seems to have some overlap with Phenomenology, a philosophy taken seriously by, among others, Karol Wojtyla JP 11 for those who don't know. Some overlap, no doubt. The best of atheist philosophers? I'd rather go with Bertrand Russell--at least he had the good sense to be an advocate for the best of our moral intuitions, even though he regarded them as metaphysically groundless. It is interesting to me how this dichotomy between the phenomenal and the noumenal seems at the heart of so much that is wrong in Western society.

The idea that the phenomenal world is secretively hiding some sinister and deceptive noumenal structure that we can forever know nothing about or even if we do, it ends us being something demonic and malicious. Nature is a liar and a deceiver in their eyes, and if we could just get beyond it we would find only pointless despair.

And add to this the turn inward as the only limited access to the noumenal world - that makes us intensely egotistical and preoccupied with ourselves as we vainly fend off the irrational dictates and demands of the quasi divine god he called the species. And the external world points to Him as the creator and sustainer of all existence and our ultimate end. Schopenhauer mistakes the fact that because created goods, such as sex, are partial goods, and thus involve an inevitable admixture of suffering, that they are completely evil.

But this does not follow. And it is not an insight that belongs to him alone. It has been very well described in Ecclesiastes. But the very limitation points to a complete fulfillment. In some way the hiddenness of the noumenal may be analogous in some sense to the hiddenness of the Divine. But, as you point out, the former points to despair--even perhaps desire for despair--where the latter points to hope. Mister Geocon 5. On the contrary. And the arguments that you claim are terrible have stood the acid test of scrutiny by every societal metric, be it mainstream media, social media, law enforcement agencies, legal entities, even the average person of good character in the street.

You may not be following this religion-inspired tragedy as closely as you ought and you may think all this sexual abuse stuff is all in the past. But it is not. The hard work by the good people is still going on around the world to this day seeking to get the Church to be held to account for the massive evil perpetrated on innocent, unsuspecting little children by the very people were entrusted with their physical, mental and spiritual care.

Residential institutions, in particular, where also the site of widespread cruelty and neglect. Other widely seen films such as Tell No One, in Poland, and By the Grace of God, in France, tell the same appalling story: an insular, arrogant culture, deeming itself outside the jurisdiction of secular morality, has routinely ignored the suffering of the abused while offering mercy, secrecy and escape routes to the abusers.

The Catholic Church as an institution must purge itself of this great evil. Equally, abuse of gays, transgender and people of indeterminate sex by the Church is an abomination of the human spirit, morality and ethic.

Take this report The Take-away? Churches urgently need to wake up to spiritual, emotional and psychological abuse. Just profoundly disappointed and uncomprehending at the actions of the Church and its enablers. Hide, deflect and enable as you might Mister Geocon, the truth is coming out, big time. People are now beginning to understand that organised religion definitely has no special transcendent power to guide morality, neither a 'direct link to God'.

Such a claim is devoid of reality and is now more than ever being understood to be nothing other than a pious shill. One is reminded of Morris R Cohen, Professor of Philosophy and Law at City College of New York and the University of Chicago, after having studied at Harvard, who so astutely noted: "If religion cannot restrain evil, it cannot claim effective power for good.

The Church has failed. And the Church has been found out. I think this is the difference between you and the rest of the people here. You measure the morality of things according to "societal metrics" like "mainstream media, social media, law enforcement agencies, legal entities, even the average person of good character in the street.

At another time and place, those things would've been on my side, and you'd have been on the outside, condemning them as corrupt and evil or maybe you would've supported them wholeheartedly? But that doesn't matter. You just have blind hatred in your heart and blind faith in the status quo.

Nothing I say will convince a fanatical bigot like yourself. You are fanatical because your faith is without reason, and you are a bigot because your hatred knows no proportion. Here's a thought, Paps: try to examine the morality given to you, like I did when I started getting serious about my faith.

Ask yourself whether the things you believe are good and true. Look at something from a different perspective. Try to put yourself into the shoes of someone who thinks differently from you and try to see things from their eyes.

I find that reading history as opposed to using it for polemical purposes is good for this. For example: is it true that Christianity does nothing to restrain evil? Is this a reasonable standard? What if we apply it to say the groups you have such blind faith in? How can you measure the degree to which evil is restrained by the Church?

These questions have an answer, Paps. I only pray that you find the right answer and that God's love finds its way into your heart. Papalinton, you maintain that you are not motivated by anger or hatred and instead are just looking at the picture rationally.

But if this were true, and you wanted a serious conversation, you wouldn't be so quick to say that your opponents must be ignorant as they do not agree with you. Arguments almost always devolve into unpleasantness at points like this: if you want a serious conversation, make your points without gratuitous condescension and rudeness.

I'm not a Catholic, so it's not really my place to defend or attack your arguments, but you're not getting responses because you aren't really seeking them. You seem to have made up your mind what you're going to believe, and no amount of reason or evidence will persuade you otherwise.

I say this because we've seen none of either of them from you. You're argument seems to go along the lines of, "More and more people are turning on the Catholic Church; so therefore nobody should be Catholic.

Your comments towards Geocon seem to suggest that you think that he, as a Catholic, must be evil. But this is obviously nonsense- just because many people in the Catholic Church are evil doesn't mean that those who follow the organisation must be. They could just be misguided. Or even- whisper it- bear in mind that they're neither evil or misguided but correct, and you and I are wrong.

I say this because I respect Catholics- hence I follow Ed's blog- and they are many of the best people I know. My advice: put forward a clearly formulated argument for the falsehood of Catholicism, and pose it respectfully, courteously and in good faith. If you can't do that, I advise you just leave the conversation altogether. Ask yourself honestly: is that so unfair?

Argument Ad Populum! The meat and drink of intellectually infer Gnu Atheism! Paps cannot rationally defend his illegitimate criticisms of religion so he mindlessly repeats himself and doubles down that is a tactic used by Gnus.

Jimmy Salvi and the Muslim rape gangs of Rotherham! The Public School system is knee deep in rape culture and sex abuse and now they want to make it the formal curriculum! In more ways than one they haven't learn from Catholicism. This is the secular leftist culture you advocate for Paps.

I don't see how it is better and the seething hypocrisy and double standards it has and you have only makes it worst. Of course none of this has anything to do with whether or not The First Way is valid. Or whether or not God is a moral agent in the univocal sense a maximally virtuous rational creature is a moral agent or not the answer is not. None of this has anything to do with Schopenhauer's positive view of Christianity as a belief per say nor his clear plundering of it.

That is stealing from it shamelessly over the idea pleasure should not be the focus of one's life because it leads to unhappiness. He stole from it.

Well you only steal the good stuff. Anyway Paps as I have shown I can match emotional argument with emotional argument. I didn't even have to bring in the mass genocide by militant Atheist States like the former USSR or present Communist China and their casualty rate which exceeds the religious one about ten fold.

Do you have anything better to offer us? Or just more of the same? I could and would forgive the absence of the "respectful" and "courteous" part as long as it contains the "clearly formulated" and "good faith" part. It is the absence of the later two that irk me.

That is not in my skill set. You lot are here to convince me what I believe is wrong and give me a good reasons why. So, yet another example of the principle that sin damages the intellect. S's own sexual habits - being deranged - led to a corruption of his philosophy. No doubt there were many other factors, not least being the many horrid philosophers of modernity that came before him and screwed his mind up as a young man.

But a refusal to permit the evidence of music and other kinds of beauty to declare good - indeed, to establish that good as being self-evident - implies a philosopher out of touch with reality.

Blind and pointless, it can never find satisfaction Yet attributing to "the species" an underlying intention, and effectively an underlying will by which it carries into effect that intention, by definition requires a referent that stands to "the species" as at least an apparent GOOD. I am probably missing some of "the details" that S uses to try to escape this, but I also suspect that his attempt remains invalid, because his metaphysics is all cockeyed to begin with.

I can't find the articles about it Stanford Encyclopedia does mention it, though , but Schopenhauer treatment of mysticism did show how bad the philosopher life screwed his system. In seeing how the mystics seems to become will-less on their experiences, Schopenhauer had to admit that the Thing-Itself is Will on our perspective and that it could appear diferent to beings with a diferent situation, as it does to the mystics.

Despite admiting that his terryifing picture of reality as aimless Will is not all there is, Schopenhauer probably never considered that reality could not be horrible. A shame, if he tried to put his philosophy into pratice he could probably see things with his own eyes. Not wonder that Niezsche thought that Arthur perspective was caused by his own defects, if reality is as the german says then there is not really a way of classifying it as bad.

It just is and every evaluation of it is relative. A strange philosophy. From a Christian perspective, he is living a kind of hell because he denies that there is a real object for our infinite desires. There is no fulfillment of desires or infinite satisfaction as he says.

No resting in God. This is the cornerstone of Christian self understanding - that our desires, our wills, our sexuality, our appetites, are all disordered because they are not directed or submitted to the one entity that can bring them to fulfillment. And this is God. S and the eastern religions are right in identifying the cause of suffering in desire. But they are wrong in asserting it is because desire itself is to blame.

And another problem with the Cartesian turn into the self is that one loses sight of the external world, of the beauty and goodness, although partial, that points beyond itself to God its creator. The stripping away of teleology is also the stripping away of inherent goodness and purpose. Nature loses its character as an icon or a quasi sacrament that points to God.

And so, we are not taught to properly appreciate our own nature and its various ends either. We are taught to see our nature as completely devoid of goodness in a Manichean flight into pure spirit. Or, in reaction to the flight to the spirit, is an opposing reaction which is a flight to naturalism.

An excessive focus and naive belief that the limited natural ends of our human nature can bring us true happiness without reference to our ultimate good.

We are enjoined to defend the Church against direct attacks on it. But what could be more direct than attack moved by the error that is hatred? Determined hatred is very difficult to speak to, especially when lying and mischaracterization are involved. So how could such an attempt, in its probable failure, be anything other than harmful "feeding of the troll", and how could such failure fail to discourage?

Is there a greater good that would be lost through banishment of such a troll based on good judgement? What would be the loss where the right to banish, and its act, have already been defended and exemplified? Tom Cohoe. This is a summery of Paps' view of himself in a nutshell. Thank you Papilinton for being such a steadfast counterweight to the reactionary and bigoted nonesense that is a staple on this site, especially from the above clique who laughingly accuse you of bigotry and hatred and would dearly love to have you expunged from here.

These people are indeed lost to their delusions and in-group conformity, but believe me, many will read what you write and agree wholheartedly with it, as well as being grateful that a decent and measured person is at hand to prevent this place from becoming an echo chamber for the extremists.

Long may your comments, observations and analysis continue. Enough already. The sub-thread initiated by Papalinton has been a gigantic time waster and barely on topic. In the interests of allowing a free exchange, I've tolerated the back and forth, apart from a few nasty and substance-free drive by comments from both sides which I did not let through moderation.

But the exchange has nevertheless degenerated and is at this point pretty much irrelevant to Schopenhauer or anything else discussed in the original post. Hence I will not let through any further comments related to that particular sub-thread. In future, in this comment thread and others: Stay on topic. Don't indulge the temptation to bring your pet obsessions and talking points into every discussion.

Ignore trolls and other people incapable of logical reasoning. Don't indulge the temptation to post bitchy drive by comments devoid of substance. Use common sense and show common courtesy. Well said. Say, Dr. Feser, do you intend to someday do a post on Schopenhauer version of the PSR or his criticism of cosmological arguments?

Along with Kant, i think that he had very good, even if not sucessful, criticismsq of how metaphysicians thread these themes. Your analysis of his philosophy was sublime, but besides having a very interesting worldview Arthur Schopenhauer also had offered interesting reflections on these themes, so i suppose thar commenting on what he had to say on these would result in another cool post.

Well said, Dr. Sometimes this blog has superb philosophical discussion. Sometimes not. More souls are won to Christ by kindness and personal example than anything else. I am all for the Dad voice. Argue Philosophy or go home. Answers in Genesis is over there boiz if ye want to argue against an easy Theistic foe. Here you need to bring the philosophy.

So bring it. One can understand why it is Christians think of Schopenhauer as a 'friendly atheist'. Through his work he formed the view that to add value to one's life the fundamental nature of human existence was predisposed towards shunning the sensual, the emotional, and the comfortable, through the renunciation of pleasure and the practice of self-mortification.

After all, at base he [Schopenhauer] saw life as a deep and enduring struggle with the self. And this is where Schopenhauer and Christianity shared the same abiding penchant for asceticism, that is, the practice of the denial of physical, emotional and psychological desires in order to attain a higher level of 'spiritual' attainment.

His defence of Christianity was not that it was itself founded in a paradigm of truth. Far from it. Rather it was because of the shared common understanding of the central role of asceticism in his and Christianity's belief structure. When said and done, Schopenhauer did acknowledge there was a small kernel of truth in all religions, not just Christianity. But then asceticism is not a unique, nor an exclusive domain or prerogative, of Christianity. The Greeks wrote and understood the concept of asceticism many hundreds of years before Christianity came along.

Indeed asceticism was a philosophical stance understood many centuries before Christianity was even a twinkle in Paul's eye. The origins of asceticism is bound into the fabric of our very primitive ancestors, many thousands of years before the advent of Christianity. As the Encyclopaedia Brittanica explains: "Abstinence and fasting are by far the most common of all ascetic practices. Among the primitive peoples, it originated, in part, because of a belief that taking food is dangerous, for demonic forces may enter the body while one is eating.

Asceticism was appropriated by Christianity and made a central tenet of its belief structure. Asceticism is not a unique Christian feature. It was borrowed. But that is where the shared belief largely terminates. Many if not most Christian philosophers, all of them apologists, have tried to pump up the idea that Schopenhauer 'defended' Christianity.

The truth here is that apart from the commonly shared idea of asceticism as a worldview, any other implied or imagined defence of Christianity by Schopenhauer is simply putting icing on a rock. Much of the massaging of Schopenhauer by apologist philosophers, like Dr Feser, that try to legitimate the claim that the Christian narrative is historically, ontologically and epistemologically true [or factual] demonstrates a somewhat desperate effort to convince the unwitting believer, exampled by Son of Ya'kov, that Christianity is the 'only true and genuine religion', even Schopenhauer says so, is stretching it a bit.

As made very clear by the man himself in his own words: "But the bad things about all religions is that, instead of being able to confess their allegorical nature, they have to conceal it; accordingly, they parade their doctrine in all seriousness as true "sensu propio" literally , and as absurdities form an essential part of these doctrines, you have the great mischief of a continued fraud.

Saying what he likes about Christianity is hardly a "defense" for its truth or falsehood. I can say nice things about Dave Ruben because of his criticism of leftist politics and shift to the Right.

Same with Sargon of Akkad but that does mean I am defending or endorsing their Atheism. This is not the Dangerous Minds blog Paps. Philosophy is primary. If you want apologetics my boi Dave Armstrong can oblige you. Geez give it a rest Paps. Although his asceticism was driven in large part through pessimism he had the intellectual insight to note the Old Testament had a happy or optimistic tone about the physical world and life lived in it.

And the evening and the morning were the sixth day. There was to be no salvation in this world; only the false and indefensible promise that what people miss out in this life they will reap in the next.

As if. Any and every two-bit soothsayer can promise that sort of nonsense. How does one recoup on the warranty if the damn thing doesn't work? There are many quotes Schopenhauer offers to demonstrate the deep pessimism about this world and life by asserted by Christianity, such as John And he clearly notes: "We see, then, that the doctrines of the Old Testament are rectified and their meaning changed by those of the New, so that, in the most important and essential matters, an agreement is brought between them Simply because apologists engage in these intellectually and philosophically dubious practices does not make their Christian narrative any less false or less mythologised.

Schopenhauer is correct. The Christian narrative is all allegorical. This was Schopenhauer's main argument and criticism against Christianity. For Schopenhauer, Christianity was, to the core, "sensu allegorico". While much of Christian dogma, which most might be regarded as true in an allegorical sense, Schopenhauer was quick to observe that it was all a pretence to claim it as fact in a literal sense.

And therein lies the rub. In today's world religion has been found out and, through its centuries of shape-shifting apologetics, finds itself right now between a rock and a hard place. Even as a fall-back, it can no longer even pretend its main tenets are merely allegorical [as Schopenhauer correctly inferred], and as many apologists are now want to do [apart from the shrinking hard-core die-hards], because to do so would be to undermine their very own credibility.

I would not recommend to a reader to glean what Schopenhauer says about Christianity through Christian philosophers. Read the damn man yourself. Christian apologetical philosophers are not a bona fide source to appreciate the works of Schopenhauer. Not one philosophical argument or analysis in either post. Just repeating yerself That is just boring. Paps this is a philosophy blog not a Christian Apologetics blog.

Feser is first and foremost a philosopher. Granted the philosophical arguments for the existence of God which it is clear to everyone you cannot address in any fashion are useful to Catholic Christian apologetics but philosophy is the final causality around here. Not yer leftist politics or Gnu Atheist contra Fundamentalist nonsense. Can you do any philosophy? As yer boi says "Come on Man! Christian apologetical philosophers are not a bona fide source to appreciate the works of Schopenhauer" But you are?

I'll go with Feser, who doesn't despise what I am. As for reading Schopenhauer, no thanks. Your recommendations are unappealing. Yes, I read Feser. I read Christian apologists. I do it as a matter of interest and duty. I read Feser and make comment where there has been a mischaracterisation perpetrated or a mischievous massaging of interpretation to fit his narrative.

This has been one such occasion. He is free to do so, but his narrative will not go unchallenged. And when I say "appreciate" the works of Schopenhauer, it is to intellectually understand where he is actually coming from; not through the synthetic perspective of Dr Feser's. Whether you read Schopenhauer or not is of no interest to anyone.

However, not to do so is to render any comment you make about Schopenhauer an irrelevance. Two words for ya Paps. He is a young up and coming religious skeptic more of an Agnostic than Atheist in the Russell mode.

He is also a philosopher and critic of Classic Theism. Granted he is a bit overly verbose but that is just "young". I am sure he will grow out of it. The ladd has done remarkable work as a student. Why don't you read some of his work and come back here with actual philosophical arguments against Natural Theology? I think that will serve you better than boring the poop out of us with yer warmed over contra Fundie arguments. Or yer bitching over Orange man 11 months into Uncle Bad Touch's reign.

Really philosophy will make you an Alpha dingo here. That all of this You conceal it well. Now take my obvious correct advise. There are always good reasons to decide whether or not to read any particular writer at all.

One reason to decide not to read one is that no one has made a compelling case that he is important enough to spend the time on. Such is the case, for me, with Schopenhauer. You certainly haven't made a case with your pretended expertise and your expressed contempt for Christianity, especially Catholicism.

If only 5 books had ever been written, there perhaps would be no excuse for an intellectually superior person not to have read them all, no matter how incoherent, but you speak as if to claim to have read all of dear Schopie and so be an actual authority on what he thought, and how his thinking changed through his life, and you have similarly claimed to have read Aquinas well enough to not be able to understand him sorry, a little sarcasm slipped in there.

I suppose then, that you have read every philosopher and writer in depth? Because if you haven't, you should take your own advice and stop pretending that what you post is sufficiently well informed to be worth reading note, I don't read your stuff but couldn't help noticing your claim that we who haven't worshipped at Schopie's podium by reading his every word, as you insinuate that you have, have no right to speak of him at all.

Anyway, since there are far too many writers to have read them all, rather than just 5 books, I must be selective.