Isn't this what Scott Adams talks about in 'How to fail....'? ie the importance of developing stacks of skills with flexible application to respond to circumstances, rather than fixating on a single specific end-point?
It is interesting that you talk about Buddhist understandings of this, and then the Greek, yet you do not here engage with the Christian tradition on this point (which gathered the Aristotelean threads). The different religious traditions are ways of educating our desires, and the dominant one in the West is the Thomist system. If anyone is interested in this, Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue is where to begin.
Thank you for this post, and indeed the whole sequence. I'll go back to lurking now.
I'm newish here (six months or so) so if this comment takes things in a bad direction or is otherwise inappropriate please delete it. It might also be too long.
With that clearing of the throat, I would like to suggest the following:
- that the atheistic perspectives become more informed about the actual nature of the philosophical/ theological tradition, especially within the dominant (Thomist) tradition of Western Christianity. If this site is seeking to become 'less wrong' through exploration and respectful dialogue then please hear a representative of that
... (read more)Some questions (either answers, or summaries of answers plus pointers elsewhere for the full treatment, would be fine):
What kind of question is it?
What kind of agent is he?
In what sense is “theologically necessary” a relevant or interesting category in epistemological terms? (More bluntly, if you like: why should we care what is, or is not, theologically necessary, as distinct from what is epistemologically necessary?)
... (read more)