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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   9386 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 6, 2026

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Rationalists are reductionist materialists/physicalists.

The Stoics were also materialists/physicalists, even if they did believe in a divine telos, as you say.

What then is that which is able to conduct a man? One thing and only one, philosophy. But this consists in keeping the daemon within a man free from violence and unharmed, superior to pains and pleasures, doing nothing without a purpose, nor yet falsely and with hypocrisy, not feeling the need of another man’s doing or not doing anything; and besides, accepting all that happens, and all that is allotted, as coming from thence, wherever it is, from whence he himself came; and, finally, waiting for death with a cheerful mind, as being nothing else than a dissolution of the elements of which every living being is compounded. But if there is no harm to the elements themselves in each continually changing into another, why should a man have any apprehension about the change and dissolution of all the elements? For it is according to nature, and nothing is evil which is according to nature.

-- Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 2.17

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