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Don wrote:
>Great answer! Meaning: that is no answer at all. As philosophers are bent
>to do, they can only question and not produce any answers.
Philosophy is the source of any answers you know, or think you know. What you, or anyone else, "knows" may be the product of good philosophy or bad, but it is the product of your view of reality (your metaphysics), your way of knowing things (your epistemology), your understanding of good and evil (ethics), your view of man's relationship to other men (politics), and your view of beauty and ugliness (aesthetics). In short, all answers to life's questions are based on philosophy (again, your particular philosophy may be correct or incorrect). Philosophy not only asks questions, it provides all the answers (whether you consciously recognize the philosophy upon which your personal answers are based, or not).
Don also wrote:
>If your *wonderful* philosophical mind can somehow take away someone's
>beliefs, but do not substitute anything else, that is going to disolve all
>need for terrorism? Get real and go think some more. I suspect you will turn
>into another statue of "the thinker" before you come up with any useable
>answer.
What we witness with "terrorism" is the inevitable dead-end of the road one travels when one substitutes mysticism for reason as one's way of knowing things (one's epistemology). When a "higher power" (whether that higher power is "the people", or "the state", or "God") is substituted for reason as one's way of knowing things, when "revelation", for example, replaces reason as a way to know good from evil, then the whims of the "higher power" become the standard against which all actions are judged.
Thus the "terrorists" find justification, as all terrorists throughout history have, in the service of their "higher power".
Reason is the right path to discovering things - the way to discern good from evil. What happens when we follow the path of reason is that we discover that the free life, man's life qua man, is the ultimate value, the ultimate good. As long as men follow paths other than reason they will find things more important than man's free life, and they will sacrifice other men's lives in pursuit of their "higher" goals.
Philosophy based on reason dissolves "terrorism" by showing that there is no value higher than man's free life. Once one sees that, committing acts of terror against other free lives becomes unthinkable. It would be a violation of one's own highest value.
The Omega Man
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