Vaniver, I really appreciate the rigor you are bringing to this discussion. The OP struck me as very deliberative-utilitarian as well. If we want to account (or propagate) for a shared human morality, than certainly, it must be rational. But it seems to me, that the long history of searching for a rational-basis-for-morality clearly points away from the well trodden ground of this utilitarianism.
From Plato and Aristotle to the Enlightenment until Nietzsche (especially to the present day), it seems the project of accounting for morality as though it were a...
Perhaps, if I am in town,. I will certainly be there. But I probably don't get in town until the 13th.
You seem to be using the word 'religion' when you are more specifically talking about Platonism, right?
Yes it does need be so. Precisely because numbers are an abstraction of the world around us, an abstraction which we as wonderful human beings have advanced into a more and more sophisticated abstraction for many years, they reflect (if that is the right word) the world around us.
It is not "the unprecedented success of math," but of man.
I think this wonderfully evokes a point which may be off the radar, namely, that 'ritual' or whatever you call it (the possibility for group aesthetic experiences) is all around us in society. It permeates everything, it is all pervasive. I think that is true.
Choose the ritual that is right for you... not because it is most moving or pretty, but because it is the most true as far as you can discern.
A tangential point: It seems to me that aesthetic questions, questions of art, beauty, poetry, and the place of literature while occasionally mentioned are Le... (read more)