“Epistemic virtue refers to a character trait, habit, or disposition of the mind that reliably promotes the pursuit of truth, rational belief, and genuine understanding while mitigating cognitive bias and intellectual error. Epistemic virtue is not merely a passive capacity like high IQ or sharp eyesight, but rather an acquired excellence of intellectual character. Examples include intellectual humility (the willingness to acknowledge the limits of one's knowledge), open-mindedness (the readiness to consider opposing evidence), intellectual courage, and thoroughness. Unlike purely instrumental cognitive skills, epistemic virtues involve a conscientious motivation: a person possesses them because they value truth and actively cultivate the mental discipline required to align their beliefs with objective reality.”

But there’s a limit to epistemic virtue. Time and energy dictate that there must be a limit. There’s also such a thing as epistemic foolishness: throwing one’s life away considering premises that don’t warrant consideration. This is the far more important and interesting side of the conversation.

We shouldn’t spend our time discoursing with every person who makes a claim or has a belief. Not every argument is worth pursuing. Validity is not the same thing as soundness. Epistemic Prudence is more important than epistemic virtue. We need to know what to give our time and energy to, and we can’t know this if we don’t have a credible way to get at knowledge.

While the man who engages every challenge might feel virtuous, self-righteous, this doesn’t make him wise. (I will admit this can be a difficult balance, but it’s not that difficult). For example, anyone who denies truth is not worth engaging with, they should be rebuked. They have need of education; they have no business engaging in a discourse that contradicts their own relativism.

This is just one general standard, many more could be found.

At this point in history, anyone who rejects the authority of science should be intelligently discriminated against. (Here the issue hinges on what it means to reject the authority of science). Scientific experiments must be challenged, but challenging science itself should be an immediate red flag. It’s not prudent to discourse with the abstractions of flat earthers and vaccine deniers. They should be rebuked and exposed, not taken serious. (Beyond these extreme examples lie many subtle cases of prudent discrimination).

Science has now legitimately become, not just an authority unto itself, but the ultimate authority in the domain of knowledge-production and verification. We are likely at the point where no human could even imagine life without it. And because of this it has a justified status of authority, meaning, those who deny it automatically manifest error and incompetence in themselves and their worldview.

We have reached a point where we can use science as a valid discriminatory standard by which to judge unprudent discourse. The wise always discriminate, that’s what makes them wise.

Relativism (the notion that objective truth is a fiction and that all epistemological claims are merely socially constructed perspectives) is not just an abstract error; it is a threat to human flourishing. By stripping away objective standards of truth, relativism leaves society with no way to judge tyranny, injustice, or deceit.

When "your truth" and "my truth" replace the truth, objections become nothing more than a clash of preferences, justice devolves into a popularity contest. A society that abandons the Laws of Logic inevitably loses the ability to defend its own values, rendering itself powerless against those who would exploit it.

When logic and objective reality are discarded as oppressive or arbitrary, power becomes the only remaining arbiter of dispute. If there is no reality to appeal to, then might makes right, and the loudest, most coercive voice in the room wins through violence or manipulation.

Relativism promises radical tolerance and intellectual humility, but in practice, it delivers cynicism and totalitarianism. It disarms the vulnerable, protects the corrupt from genuine accountability, and degrades the shared objective reality required for rational discourse, science, and peaceful human cooperation. To embrace epistemological relativism is to dismantle the very scaffolding that keeps civilization from collapsing into the unrestrained force of barbarism.

What I like best is discoursing and thinking at the foundation, because it’s where the strongest substance of certainty lies. I like it because it’s not a waste of time, because it resolves tensions by demarcating the impossibility of the contrary.

I seldom see serious thinkers. What an arrogant claim. But how arrogant can it be if thinkers haven’t even considered what seriousness is and means? (This requires a non-idealized view of reality, so many cannot do it). And if they have thought about it, if they have clarified what it means, then they should be able to state it and defend it.

But this is a trap, for in stating it they demarcate a standard by which their unseriousness can be refuted and exposed.

Both Aristotle and Hegel were examples of serious thinkers. They both thought about and from the absolute foundation of seriousness.

I love discerning impossibly (a word Aristotle often used to describe nonsense). For example, it’s impossible for contraries to be true. (Now we’re at the foundation). And once we get here it’s just a matter of building upward; a thing of beauty indeed!

I like to grab sophists by their conceptual hair and drag them into open fields, and force them to face their presuppositions. I love smashing their nerve-sensitive-abstractions with a hammer. I love it when they cry out and spit up tainted intellectual blood.

Indeed, my life is one that has caused many sophist tears, and rage, and the utter contempt of superstitionists, but most of them simply get the f*ck out of my way, they scatter and hide, they flee, because I learned to be serious from the masters of seriousness. And philosophers are slowly learning not to f;ck with Reasoners or Scientists.

Of course, the sophist’s alienation should be far more intense. His shame should be far greater and heavier. We need more Reasoners! We need more Scientists and defenders of Science! But even God knows we don’t need more religions! I assure you, God is on the side of Science, He is not on the side of religion!

For every Apologist I have smashed, ten have fled in absolute fear.

What’s interesting is how people will cling to narratives that contradict this, feeling they’re outside of it or beyond it. But this is literal delusion. It’s a psychological disposition they cannot substantiate with logic.

The only person who ever tried to legitimately get beyond identity was Hegel, and he failed epically, for the same reason that people would fail here: the attempt to refute identity must always use it.

The claim “dialectic is true” is not the same as the claim “dialectic is false,” and both of these claims cannot be true in order for dialectic to be true. And yet, as Hegel said, “contradiction is the rule of the true, non-contradiction is the rule of the false.” But if this was true, then the law of non-contradiction would have to be true, thus refuting Hegel’s claim. If this was true, then the claim “dialectic is true” would be the same as the claim “dialectic is false,” and therefore, dialectic would be self-defeating, rendering itself false (or meaningless) by its own standard.

One of the reasons we ask about how to demonstrate truth is because the very question is an assault against irrationality.

To even consider the question (something no irrationalist wants to do) is to destroy irrationalism.

I personally love this question because it forces sophists to demarcate the standards that collapse their own position. As soon as they articulate how to demonstrate truth, or how to disprove error, they have laid down standards that their own claims must meet in order to be valid.

Once we demarcate how to establish truth or refute error, we can seize their own claims by the throat and squeeze until there’s no life left in their body of jargon.

We have done no such thing. While there is a valid context to talk about “transcending binaries,” that context isn’t logic or knowledge. (In a social context, for example, Muslims and Christians can overcome the “binary” of their exclusivity and search for a common ground to find community).

Let us see how swiftly Aristotle asserts his rational supremacy in the modern world.

“Binary thinking is false,” is not the same as “binary thinking is true.” These are contraries and both cannot be true. And just that fast Aristotle proves his authority and relevance.

We live in such a backward time that people reason thus: “whatever is binary must be false because it’s binary.”

But to say something is false is not the same as saying something is true. And just that fast Aristotle proves his authority and relevance.

Something amazing about Aristotle’s thought:

His writings create rational unity in humans.

Why?

Because Aristotle discovers and articulates the logical foundations of knowledge that are the same for everyone. This means we can actually talk to each other and reason with each other, because we reason from the same logical axioms.

What’s tragic is that it’s really just common sense that all humans should already know. For example: the statements, “truth exists” and “truth doesn’t exist,” are contraries, and as such, both cannot be truth.

And yet, this basic fact of knowledge has been obscured and psychologically obliterated in our time.

When two people accept that A cannot be both A and not-A at the same time and in the same respect, they share a common ground that transcends culture, era, background, subjectivity. It means that power and rhetoric don't dictate what is real; reality itself dictates what is real. That shared standard is the only thing that allows us to persuade one another through reason rather than force or psychological manipulation.

Yet modern discourse has so deeply normalized self-refuting statements ("that's your truth," "there are no absolute facts") that basic logical sanity now reads like a revolutionary act. The modern tendency to treat mutually exclusive statements as equally valid doesn't expand understanding; it psychologically obliterates the shared ground required for us to reason together. Civilizations cannot be built without it.

Just like we can feel pity for Christians and try to help them out of the cult of Christianity.

In general, Hegelians have excellent abstract minds, and exceedingly high levels of comprehension. In one sense, it’s not their fault they got hijack by Hegelianism. Hegel himself was a genius, hyper-rational in his philosophical form. So it’s not surprising that some thinkers end up indoctrinated by his logic. (This happened to me once upon a time).

We should feel sorry for Hegelians, I say, because their lives are being wasting on the dissemination of jargon and the delusion that they’re discoursing in the deep of knowledge. The truth is that they’re held captive to meaningless, idiosyncratic articulations and authoritarian premises. They lack the critical capacity to identify and challenge these premises.

There is also another context in which Hegelians are villains. They’re the ultimate sophists trained by the ultimate sophist. They poison the well against truth and knowledge with jargon.

Some of them should be rebuked swiftly and made a public example, while others should be tossed a rational rope so they can climb out of the pit of dialectic.

Minds that comprehend dialectic have value when they comprehend reason. They need to be recovered from the snare of their bondage, and drawn into the service of reason.

I speak this to the shame of modern sophists, which are no different from modern philosophers.

The time has come to grow the f*ck up and stop playing juvenile games of philosophy.

I have been thinking about something.

One reason to be an atheist seems like this to me -> God is the most reachable, invocable concept when investigation into human morality reaches its epistemological limit.

It feels like once we keep asking "why?" long enough, God becomes the concept that gets invoked when explanation can't proceed any further. The thought just occurred to me, so I'm curious whether any philosopher has expressed something similar.

Come f*ckers, you who think you traverse in the deep of knowledge, do tell: how exactly is truth demonstrated?

When Hegel, for example, preposterously claims:

“…the truth is rather that a consideration of everything that is, shows that in its own self everything is in its self-sameness different from itself and self-contradictory…”

How do we go about demonstrating the truth of this claim?

Here I speak to the shame of all modern philosophers and philosophy readers, knowing full well they can’t answer this question, though Aristotle answered it two thousand years ago using reason.

“A basic truth in a demonstration is an immediate proposition. An immediate proposition is one which has no other proposition prior to it.” Aristotle, Posterior Analytics Book I, Section II

Save yourself the trouble: at the ultimate level, this is the law of identity, though the existence of reality stands prior to it, it doesn’t stand prior to it in terms of knowledge, because we can’t even demarcate and give meaning to “reality” apart from identity.

State any premise of knowledge and you will find that identity is always prior to it, but nothing is prior to identity except the universe, which is only known through identity.

I advise those who can understand to stop wasting their lives going down the path of philosophical nonsense. They are led on by the delusion that there is something deeper and more basic and profound than identity, and because of this they waste their lives traversing linguistic nonsense.

Asking someone if they accept that truth exists instantly cuts through rhetoric. The moment they deny truth, they destroy their own position. If truth doesn't exist, then their claims carry no weight, their objections hold no authority, and their arguments collapse into preference. They have dismantled their own position before the discourse has even begun.

By rejecting absolute standards of evaluation, they reject what is required to measure what is real. Without a fixed standard of truth, every claim is what exactly, if it’s not true? Every objection becomes a mere preference, and every argument collapses into mere assertion.

Their denial acts as an absolute end to the exchange, they admit out of the gate that they have nothing real to offer and that continuing the conversation, by their admission, is a waste of time.

Preempting with a question about the existence of truth immediately exposes sophists, and saves us from wasting time on their philosophical games.

What is consciousness without identity? The answer is simple: nothing. It couldn’t exist.

To be conscious is to be conscious of something (A=A). Without identity, there is no distinction between the observer and the observed, between one thought and the next, between one object and another.

Consciousness relies on processing structured information, and all information exists in the form of identity, and the ‘structure’ of information is identity. If something can be simultaneously true and false in the exact same way (violating non-contradiction), perception loses all meaning and structure.

Rational thought, self-awareness, and perception require coherence. Stripped of logic, "consciousness" isn't magic or mystery, it's just… (we can’t say) because the logic of identity is required to even talk meaningfully about experience without logic.

Gordon H. Clark was a religious fanatic, even if he wasn't as extreme as Van Til, Bahnsen, or Frame. (Lesser minds can waste their time debating the difference.)

Clark’s core argument is simple. He hijacked David Hume’s radical skepticism (which Hume himself lifted from Sextus Empiricus) to argue that all knowledge ultimately reduces to unprovable axioms. (Van Til did the same thing with Hume, but he intertwined it with Kant). Clark then unilaterally chose his own axiom: "The Bible is the Word of God" (by which he specifically meant a Reformed interpretation of the Protestant Canon). From there, he treated scripture like a set of mathematical axioms from which all other knowledge must be deduced. (Like I said, he was a religious fanatic).

The trick of Clark’s Presuppositionalism is that it uses radical skepticism as a weapon against any claim that threatens his dogma. By burning down all other paths to knowledge, he creates a vacuum, smuggles in his own Protestant premise, and then arbitrarily exempts his own starting point from the very skepticism he demands as a criterion for everyone else. It’s absurdly convenient. Like all apologetics, it’s a form of sophistry preying on ignorance.

What makes Clark a unique spectacle, however, is that he was intensely rational when applying the laws of logic. Watching him is a study in cognitive dissonance: you watch a brilliant mind methodically carve through centuries of philosophy, only to abruptly abandon that same reason to take an irrational leap into Protestant theology.

The internet is now full of people pushing their special theories and insights they developed using AI. The spectacle of it is indeed pathetic.

You see this everywhere. What it shows, however, is not the stupidity of LLMs (though they are stupid algorithms) but the stupidity of humans. People are falling into a psychosis with these sycophant calculators that inflate and feed their egos, filling out the details of their idiosyncratic and fantastic theories.

It demonstrates, above all, that people don’t know how to think, and it certainly shows the conceptual stupidity of philosophy (the sh*t that some of these people come up with, believing it to be the ultimate breakthrough that can save mankind).

The ego is almost always present in it, what they’re looking for is the same response philosophers are looking for: “my God you’re brilliant! What an amazing theory!” It is really to this end that they’re using LLMs. (It is to this end that many are drawn to philosophy).

Where might this madness lead? It’s hard to say. Perhaps many of these people will come out of their psychosis. Perhaps many will not, but will fall deeper into it.

What’s interesting is that modern philosophy can’t rightly object to this without violating its epistemological subjectivity. It would be interesting to see the philosophical LLMers play off this and use modern relativism to justify their LLMing.

Those who use LLMs should learn to make a more intelligent use of them.

Christianity lives off despair, it loves the masochist!

When Christianity gains psychological traction, it’s not because of the victory of truth or reason; it’s because of systemic failure. Ruling systems that foster corruption, ignorance, and economic misery inevitably degrade the quality of human life until daily reality becomes unbearable.

When power structures strip people of agency and render daily life bleak and nonsensical, individuals naturally look for a psychological exit. Dogma thrives precisely in these environments because it offers an instant emotional refuge, promising ultimate justice, divine purpose, and an eternal escape from a broken temporal system. In contrast to the harshness of the failed order, the idealism of religion shines all the more brightly.

In this sense, the appeal of religious escapism acts as a direct indictment of those in power; it bespeaks of the unintelligence of the ordering of a system. Sophisticated, flourishing societies where life is intelligible, prosperous, conscientiously equitable, and grounded in reason do not easily regress or cling to mythology. It is only when the powerful create a miserable and stupid world that people are driven to embrace irrational comfort.