= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
TheOtherDave comments on Rational Repentance - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (150)
I'd be interested in seeing how you draw the line between Maimonides' work in halachah and in philosophy. I can certainly identify outputs that I would classify as one or the other, but I would have a very hard time drawing a sharp line between the processes.
I agree that there isn't a sharp line. But if we just look at the material that falls unambiguously into halachah as opposed to all the material that falls into philosophy or the borderline, there's a lot more halachich material.
Sure. Again, classifying the outputs isn't too hard. Philosophical and halachic writing are different genres, and it's relatively easy to class writing by genre. Sure, there's a fuzzy middle ground, but I agree that that's a minor concern.
But your argument seems to depend on the idea that if he spent a year thinking about stuff and at the end of that year wrote five thousand words we would class as halachah and five hundred words we would class as philosophy, that means he wasted that year, whereas if it had been the other way around, that would advance society.
Before endorsing such an argument, I'd want to know more about what was actually going on in that year. I could easily see it going either way, simply because there isn't a clear correlation in this context between how useful his thinking was vs. what genre he published the results in.