Philip Diaz-Lewis 🇻🇦🇬🇧

🧵: my field is ancient Greek philosophy and its impact. Aristotelianism, Platonism, Stoicism, and Thomism. I both use Thomism to argue around contemporary issues, and investigate how ancient thought in general has influenced later eras. Articles added as they are published.

A dying, if not dead, genre is the essay high-minded but not academic, meant to be read over and over again as a classic. As opposed to the piece meant to be thrown away after reading because it's obsolete after two days.

The average person perceives his likes and desires as completely brute, basic, and unarticulated. The word ‘because’ doesn’t enter into them. If they’ve been formed by culture, upbringing, propaganda, etc. he isn’t aware of it. So debates about taste online nearly always devolve into endless contests of, ‘this’, ‘no, this’, ‘this’, ‘no, this’.

Social media is its own language. Its symbols are memes, clichés, stereotypes, empty culture signifiers, words defined by the mass. Any idea entering this system will merge with it, or else be rejected and spat out. Any soul living here for long will forget its native tongue.

The Butterfly Effect: small changes in a system lead to massive, unpredictable consequences over time. An event shifts the next, which shifts the next, creating a chain. The cumulative changes grow until the final outcome is huge compared to the start. Therefore, what happened three centuries ago can be more important than what happened three years ago.

I understand the frustration when Philippa Foot described herself as a dreadfully slow thinker.

If you want an image of what social media is, think of what happens to a butterfly when it falls into a swarm of ants.

Work in progress. An allegorical drawing I’m making in my own Neo-renaissance style.

'afternoon