there's usually a thread for questions that don't deserve their own thread but I don't see any in the catalog so I guess this is it
i'm asking for help understanding one of Francis Bacon's aphorisms. I'm doing a commentary on a selection of them for a final paper and I just can't decifer this one at all, hopefully someone more literate than me can tell me what the big idea is so I can break it down
it's number 47 in Book 1, and it goes a little something like this
"The human understanding is most affected by things which have the ability to strike and enter the mind all at once and suddenly, and to fill and expand the imagination. It pretends and supposes that in some admittedly imperceptible way, everything else is just like the few things that took the mind by storm. The understanding is very slow and ill adapted to make the long journey to those remote and heterogeneous instances which test axioms as in a fire, unless it is made to do so by harsh rules and the force of authority."
any help would really be appreciated, and of course, post your own questions
Are there any philosophical works on consciousness after death, preferably ones that do not delve into metaphysics.
As in I can not imagine what it's like not to exist, think nothing at all and I'm interested if there any attempts to bring light onto the after"life"
>>7793525
there's Descartes' theory of Dualism, which he goes over in Meditations on First Philosophy. most of his rationalist stuff has been fairly btfo by critical philosophy but it's obviously an essential text in understanding the development of modern philosophy
I reading Ulysses and I'm enjoying the beautiful imagery/prose and the dialog, especially all the jokes between characters.
I'm like 150 pages in and I'm not catching any references. If I stretch my imagination I can make some parallels to other stories, but I feel like someone seeing faces in fallen leaves.
Am I a super pleb? Should I just keep going even if I'm not "getting" it?
>>7793629
Ulysses works on so many different levels. You don't need the allusions to enjoy it (and most of it you won't get unless you know stuff like Catholic doctrine or Irish history). Keep reading!
>>7793420
Is this appropriate use of dashes?
The house creaked - being a hundred years old - sometimes.
>>7793640
I think
>The house -- being a hundred years old -- creaked sometimes
works better, simply because it's clearer that the house is being described
>>7793629
I had the same experience as you, the prose is amazing enough to make it good and the dialog makes it dreamlike. The references are pretty tough and often I wonder if there is even something its alluding to or not.
>>7793420
Are there any good books on prose style or analyzing prose? Particularly the history of prose style.
Is it sound to abstain from all literature until I read the Greeks (Presocratics, Plato, Aristotle, Epicureans, Stoics) then Medieval, then Rationalists and so on until 20th century philosophy or is it too dense? I don't want to >readforplot
Is the movie good?
What happened to all the trip fags? Not to long ago this place was overrun by them but today you hardly ever see one? Not that it's a bad thing, just curious.
>>7793537
Thank you!
>>7794266
I liked it, and I was bored to death by the end of the book.
>>7793420
Bacon is saying that we are most affected by things that overwhelm us, think of lust for instance, or a riveting movie. These things have such a powerful impact, that we then expect everything else to have such a strong impact, but not everything does. And so we miss out on a lot. And then he's saying something about people being forced to go for less overwhelming intellectual pleasures or something, I think.
Basically, slow and steady wins the race.
>>7794266
Yes, you'll probably need to watch it at least two times
