relic seeker.
London, UK
Joined July 2024
- Tweets2.5K
- Following1K
- Followers4.8K
- Likes64.2K
Pinned Tweet
"I suppose you're right," Socrates said.
"Of course I'm right," the priestess Diotima said.
(Symp. 206e)
Augustine is led to his most execrable excesses only by his commitment to the historicised nature of Christian eschatology. His entire doctrine of grace, with its implications of predestination and election, are, when transposed vertically with Biblical linearity replaced by traditional cyclicality, not just comfortable to, but edifying for, Platonism.
5
32
1,763
All impulse towards the Good is not only from the Good but constitutive of the very progression into being itself. “All is grace”.
6
245
"It is a checked return, in which the impulse to go back to the source is balanced by an impulse of self-affirmation as other than the source"
A.H. Armstrong, "Salvation, Plotinian and Christian" p. 128
Come on, my good fellow; you can’t keep singing in Hades, where memory is undone.
κοὔτι τυ κερτομέω. πόταγ’, ὠγαθέ· τὰν γὰρ ἀοιδάν
οὔ τί πᾳ εἰς Ἀίδαν γε τὸν ἐκλελάθοντα φυλαξεῖς.
(Theocritus, Idyll 1.62-63)
The maxim of Plotinian salvation: "Cultivate Wisdom and do what thou wilt (Cultive la sagesse et fais ce que tu voudras)"
Pymander's ghost retweeted
Life begins when one takes the whitepill on the Chinese Rites Controversy (the Jesuits were right)
Thinking about Manichaeism’s warm piety to the cosmic ‘suffering’ Christ in each fruit ‘hanging on every tree’.
38
803
'So we can't include a forgetful man as one qualified for philosophy; we must demand a good memory' (Rep. VI.486d)
ἐπιλήσμονα ἄρα ψυχὴν ἐν ταῖς ἱκανῶς φιλοσόφοις μή ποτε ἐγκρίνωμεν, ἀλλὰ μνημονικὴν αὐτὴν ζητῶμεν δεῖν εἶναι.
I sincerely believe that one of the best things AI will bring to the University is that it will finally deliver us from the quantification of publications as a metric of performance. It was always a terrible and counterproductive one anyways.
This (e.g.) is a vastly superior way of understanding our place in the cosmos than our own and I'm tired of pretending it isn't.
ALT Astronomicum Caesareum, 1540
Whatever our future is, I think its truest prophecy will be that of the Parable of the Labourers in the Vineyard (Matt. 20).
'But he answered one of them, and said, Friend, I do thee no wrong...Take that thine is, and go thy way: I will give unto this last, even as unto thee.'
ALT The Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard, from Das Plenarium Hans Schäufelein German, 1517
I really wish this were true but unfortunately it isn't and to persist in thinking so is simply a reflection of your own poor use and limited imagination. Train Claude on exemplary prose stylists of your choice—upload entire books—and watch it fly where before it walked.
No that’s not it. AI writing is not good writing at all. Much less “too good.” It’s neat, yes. Perfectly spelled and punctuated. This writing itself is atrociously bad, though. Bland and dull and utterly devoid of style or personality. But it’s bad in a bizarre, uncanny way. Bad but perfectly coherent. Whereas bad human writing is generally bad because it’s not coherent. Maybe that’s the thing that makes AI slop so easy to spot. It is coherently shitty. A weird combination.
Modern man will surfeit himself with smug ridicule at the Albigensian practice of endura (ritualised suicide by starvation) and then drive to his office job. Even the grossest forms of world-denial in former ages were more lively and true to life than ours.
