Upon reflecting on Xenoblade 2's story, I realized something profound about memory and the human brain. See, there are apparently some medical scientists trying to make some breakthroughs against human aging, where at some point age reversal may be possible; it is possible that some or many of us have reached what some call "age escape velocity", wherein that there may be developments to help us live longer and keep our health longer and longer (at least incrimentally) that we will see the day when a full on age reversal is attainable; for the sake of this idea, let's say that this is 100% true.
From what I've heard, the human brain could hold around 300 years of memory. This sounds fantastic, but what happens if people are able to surpass 300 years? Let's say 800 years? What happens to special impactful memories we made during our teens, 20s, and 30s, which would shape us into the person we are for the rest of our lives? At some point, with those memories overwritten (which is what a computer does when there is too much memory), we cannot remember those; they are not part of us.
Even if we record our memories some way, whether it be by video, audio, pictures, or (like Brighid), a diary, at some point those recorded life moments won't feel like us. It'll feel like a clone of us who did something at some point. This is the dilemma most Blades face, since even though they will always be the same person, the person they were in the past won't be who they are. Even in the special cases where records of their past are kept like Brighid, it doesn't even feel like the "her" who is currently reading about it. So at some point, when are brain's long term memories get overwritten, and our body's cells fully replaced themselves, can we call ourselves the same person we were in the past?
This is the genius writing I love about Xenoblade 2; it reflects a problem that comes with immortality, and that is, are we truly living forever if a part of us gets erased? Even if we have logs of our past, will we always recognize that as ourselves? Looking at the prospect of editing or forging some of Brighid's diary entries or using AI to create fake records, our whole identity could be compromised.

I'm in like day 5 of a pain flare and my arms are just useless. Can't work, can't play videogames, can't make music which is like my favorite thing. I feel like I just need to rest my arms and try to bounce back. Even writing this hurts.
I'm just so bored. What am I supposed to do? My thoughts right now are just so existential and I've just been sitting in this pain for so long and I just have no idea how to spend my time.
What do you do when having a flare-up?

We have been together for a little over two years, living together for one full year. I recently moved home to get a little space and for college honestly. We have had absolutely zero intimate or physical connection/activities for 9 months. I have no emotional connection with him anymore and cannot see a future with him. I find myself annoyed at having to spend time with him and when he calls. Id rather hang out with my friends then sit in that house and watch tv while getting high. He’s not a bad guy he’s just not my kind of guy. Everytime ive tried to break up he breaks down and it becomes a therapy session for all of his problems. I inevitably give in and everything that happens is swept under the rug. And when I bring it to his attention he says it’s not on purpose. But I feel it’s manipulation. I genuinely feel like I’m losing my mind sometimes because I feel right but he’s so confident in my wrongness. Hes my second boyfriend ever and I’m 20. I know I’m wasting my young years but I cannot find the capacity to break up with him. My cat and large fish tanks are over there and the house is decorated in all of my stuff. I’m not interested in taking anything other than what I need but I don’t want to endure the task of it all. I feel so lazy with my own well-being. I’m so unhappy and want to be single but cannot grow a pair to do it. I feel I have entangled my life so heavily but I remember people get divorced after having families and being married for 15 years. I’m just at a loss and feel like my last resort is writing a letter and blocking him on everything. But that feels so immature and undeserving.

i feel like yet again i need to post about the state of the game, and the direction it is heading.
for avid soundmap reddit users, you might remember me from a few days ago from my rant about the trading system. now, here i am again with today's latest issue - quests.
quests have been a hot topic since release. ever since the artist drop was increased to 3000 coins, opinions have been mixed on whether to even keep it in the game at all. however, for the most part, i've liked quests.
quests have given me, as a new-ish player, a way to collect my favorite artists. all of them, (and yes, i do mean ALL of them) are not on the normal drop rates. while quests as a solution is not perfect, it's given me a fighting chance to complete some discography's.
fast forward to today. i come to realize, after doing some quests, that quests are now limited to 3 lootboxes per artist, per day. which, immediately made me sigh and open reddit to start writing this post.
now, before i start listing what i see wrong with this, i want to reiterate that i know why this was done. the entire point of the game is to trade, and having the ability to just use quests to brute force your way through an entire discography in a day is a bit of an issue progression wise.
i understand that you are trying to make the difficulty sit well in line for popular artists. that's the majority of the userbase, after all.
however, this comes at the cost of the massive difficulty spike of people who only listen to less popular artists. this has caused not only me, but many of my friends, and i assume a decent chunk of the userbase to completely halt progression of our discographies, due to this "3 quest per day" limit.
i hate to say it, but, honestly, this game has only gotten worse since i started playing it. every day i get a little more frustrated at the developers decisions, and i'm sad about it, because the game, as a concept, is really fun. however, in practice, the community only grows more negative by the day. in the discord, the subreddit, hell even the trade notes, i have begun to see less and less positive sentiment about the game in general.
i understand fully that this is a small dev team, and that updates can take a long time, but is it not possible ask a few volunteers to test new features before they release? bounce some ideas around with actual players, to see what they would enjoy? currently the community's words seem to be going unheard.
i dont know. maybe im just salty. however, my desire to open this game in recent days has significantly died down. i think my run with this game is nearing to be over until they catch up on things. maybe ill do a "quitting the game" sale lol
which brings you to the end of the post. thanks for reading my incoherent rants (again), if you find any sense in this, please lmk. i loved your comments on the last one.

This might seem stupid but it’s been weighing on my mind lately as I’m quickly approaching when I need to start thinking about the OAT. My original plan was to start studying for the OAT early May 2025 and write in early August, planning for Fall 2026 enrollment. So I would have everything completed besides my OAT. But, I have been asking around and a lot of people have said to take it early. As in October-Dec 2024 early. Partially so if you need to retake it then you have time to do that etc. Which I understand. The issue here is if I take the OAT in October, realistically I should start studying now. However, this upcoming semester I am taking Physics and Ochem, so how would I be expected to take the OAT so early without having all this knowledge? What should I do?

I'm asking for a beyblade next generation AU I wanna write. Gingka has twin daughters with Madoka. One of them has a Fireblaze beyblade and other one has a Pegasus beyblade. My question is what type should the Pegasus and Fireblaze be? Attack,Stamina,Defense or balance? I'm struggling trying to think of one. Please help.

I'm a self proclaimed gnostic, I've been one for about 2 years, even so I'm flawed one, but one thing is that I have problem with the writings and understanding it, is this a good collection of books for a beginners guide to gnosticism?

Tell me your most toxic trait, your deepest fear, your darkest thought, your greatest ambitions, something you’re deeply passionate about. Everyone seeks out a deep conversation but few have the ability to actually have one. I don't care about how boring you think you are, there is something deeply interesting in all of us— tell me about it.
About me: 28, south asian / white, born / live in the US. I like to read history/philosophy/psychology/everything, write, travel, gym, pseudo-analyze movies/shows, and gently form judgmental but harmless theories about people and the world. Happy to chat or voice call on discord as well.

Can you give me some help? Is it wrong not to hate Europe? I'm passionate about Europe and European culture, but many people tell me that I should hate Europe because of colonialism, imperialism and Eurocentrism. They say that those who like them didn't study history, they say I should read books that encourage hatred of Europeans like open veins of Latin America and books by Jessé de Souza, they say the world would be better if Europe didn't exist, they say Europe is only rich and developed because it stole resources from other continents (and still steals), that nothing was invented by Europeans and that all the customs and things that were said to be "invented" by Europeans were stolen/copied from other peoples, that before colonialism Europe was backward, poor, without resources and without culture compared to other people and that they only said they were advanced so they could steal resources from other continents, they lived in houses made of clay, wood, stone and straw, which Europe and those who argue that Europe already had scientific and technological advances before colonialism, that she is not rich just because she stole resources from other continents and that they invented many things, she is Eurocentric, suffers from "colonized syndrome" and did not study history. Milton Santos himself hated Europe. The other day I watched Pedro Daher's videos in which he was making hate speeches about Europe and also about Canada and other countries in the "global north" (I hate the expressions Global North/Global South). I've also seen 2 geography pages on Instagram (tudogeo and Leandro Levi) that said that "the United States and Europe are not examples to be followed, we just have to continue with our Latin way of being". Another guy on TikTok said that "The Global South should cancel Europe and only admire Latin America and Africa", another blogger called umasulamericana has already said that "Brazilians are always chasing European citizenship; European culture has nothing to do with with Brazilian culture or with our ancestors, Latin American culture is more similar to Brazilian culture, we just prefer European culture because of the Eurocentric media that makes us see them as superior." Camila Faria's channel is another one where you're more likely to see her growing wings and flying than speaking well about Europeans. In almost all of her videos she calls Europeans lazy and spoiled. I've seen a Brazilian YouTuber who looked like an American teenager who said that "Brazil is not considered a Western country by Europeans, Americans, Canadians and Australians. We are filthy Latins in their view. But we are better than them. Being Brazilian/Latino is a thousand times better than being Western". He also said that white Brazilians are not considered white in the United States, Europe, Australia and Canada. I saw 3 profiles on Quora saying that "Many people use racist arguments to explain why the United States and Europe are so rich and developed, talking to them is like banging your head against a wall." Despite not having colonies, I've seen people saying that Switzerland got rich by trafficking African slaves and that there is no other reason why Switzerland was rich and developed. I see that speech that "Switzerland is the largest chocolate producer in the world without having a cocoa tree","France has the largest gold reserves without having even one gold in its territory","England was the most backward, underdeveloped, poor and uncultured country in Europe and became this super influential country today thanks to the cruelties of colonialism", ""The English didn't invent football and the Italians didn't invent pasta", "Rome and Greece would be nothing if it weren't for North Africans and West Asians","The Moors brought Europeans out of the Dark Ages","Europeans didn't bathe before colonization","It is more likely that a camel through the eye of a needle that a Brazilian/Latin American can go to Europe and not be discriminated against","Europeans envied Africa", "Africans invented everything; engineering, medicine, architecture, navigation, agriculture, writing,international trade, language, art, transportation, astronomy","the oldest university in the world is in Mali", "The film Bacurau portrays very well how Americans and Europeans see a white Brazilian", "Canada, Australia and New Zealand are as imperialist as the United States and England", "Greeks and Romans stole philosophy from the Egyptians. They did not have enough knowledge to create philosophy ","Rome and Greece were the ancient civilizations with the most inequality","Afrocentrism does not exist, there is only the truth that Eurocentrics do not accept","Europeans don't have the morality to talk about human rights", "There is no nature in Europe", "The basis of everything is Africa", "Colonialism was the only form of Europe get out of the hole she got herself into"... I've also seen people saying that the only culture in the south of Brazil is that of the gauchos of the pampas and any other southern culture is just an attempt to attract tourists by copying German and Italian culture and there There are influences from German/Italian culture and it is wrong for Brazilians to say and be proud of being descendants of Germans, Italians, Slavs or European people in general. Just look at how many videos on TikTok and YouTube are mocking these Brazilians. Many say that they are German and Italian cultures from the past, which no longer exist and are very different from contemporary European culture. I'm afraid that in the future there will no longer be European culture in the south of Brazil since no one likes this culture. I see many Africans on YouTube and TikTok making hate speeches about Europe, saying that Africa has always been better than Europe in everything; Saying that Africans have always been more advanced in terms of science and technology and that they invented everything and that Europeans are just thieves, invaders and murderers; and anyone who disagrees with them is Eurocentric, racist and has not studied history. I've heard people saying that Jesus was born in Ethiopia and not in Palestine/Israel. I also see members of the black movement who say that Brazilian culture is closer to African culture than to European culture and even to the culture of other Latin American countries. And there's still that litany of "sulear, our north is the south" https://umasulamericana.com/sulear-america-invert/ . I study a lot about crimes committed by non-European people (e.g. Arabs, Chinese, Mayans, Aztecs, Soviets, Confederates) but still many people say that comparing crimes committed by Europeans with crimes committed by non-European people is idiocy, Eurocentrism, white supremacy, sophism and ignorance, generally an "attempt to ameliorate the harm caused by European colonization and enable racism and European imperialism" and that Google, Wikipedia and YouTube cannot be trusted for knowledge about geography, history and politics , I even have far-left cousins ​​who say that I shouldn't trust what American websites say about these matters. They say that "Western websites distort history to defend the West. Chinese and/or non-Western websites show that Europeans have always been backward and uncultured compared to the Egyptians, Arabs, Chinese, Mayans, Aztecs, Incas, etc." I also see people who say that everything Brasil Paralelo, BBC, Wikipedia, CNN say about non-Western countries is a lie. I must trust what História Publica and Pedro Daher say. I saw a guy on YouTube who said "If you like Europe you've been hypnotized by Western propaganda. There are millions of incredible places in the world and none of them are in Europe.". The other day I saw a guy who said "Being anti-Western is the duty of every Latin American. A Latin American who defends the West is like an ox that defends the butcher or a slug that wants to bathe in coarse salt." Is it wrong for a Latin American to be against anti-Westernism? I am completely paranoid about the possibility of Russia and/or China destroying the US and Europe. What do I do? Should I start to hate Europe? Would the world really be better if Europe didn't exist? Are countries like Australia, Canada and New Zealand really as evil as the United States and Europe? Is there any developed country that is not imperialist? Are there really no other factors that helped Europe to be rich and developed and is it only rich and developed because it stole resources from other continents? If Europe had not stolen resources from other continents, would it currently be poor and underdeveloped?Is it wrong to praise the culture and importance of German, Italian, English, Slavic, French, Portuguese,Swiss, Austrian,Nordic Spanish, Dutch, Japanese, Jewish, Syrian/Lebanese immigrants in Brazil? Is this racism because it excludes the culture and importance of the enslaved black people who built Brazil and the indigenous people who lived here? Did Switzerland really only become rich and developed because it financed the slave trade and became a tax haven for dictators and bad people? Is there at least one other reason why Switzerland is such a rich and developed country? Is it wrong to defend the West? Is it wrong to defend the West while being Latin American? Has Africa really always been better than Europe in everything? If Europeans were so backward in the past, how did they manage to colonize the world? Are non-Western countries as nice as they say? Really only Western countries have committed crimes and non-Western countries have never committed crimes? How do I avoid becoming anti-Western despite the pressure I face to be anti-Western? Do you agree with those who say that the United States, Europe (mainly England and France) and Israel are the villains of the world and African and Latin American countries, China, India, Middle Eastern countries, Russia, South Asian countries are the side Are you sure about the story? Do African and Latin American countries, China, India, Middle Eastern countries, Russia and South Asian countries really never commit crimes?Were Europeans really the least hygienic people in the world during antiquity?Will European culture cease to exist in the future since most people hate European culture? Is there any food of entirely European origin without influences or ingredients from other continents? Is there at least one good thing that Europeans have done in the world?
BTW: I am Brazilian

Yes, I know I am. We both went to party and I drank too much(firts time happening) and I send him a message 'come with me', I needed help, I was alone and dizzy and I knew he was near. He got the message, just didn't answered or cared, he was busy and the message didn't sound like I was in troubles,I get It. I deleted It but still didn't recieved any answer.
I causally found him in the crowded and I saw his face, a face of someone who wishes haven't come across you.
I had a panic attack, I felt neglecteda and abandoned and write him he was an asshole for ignoring me. I deleted It. I would have regretted It. He noticed something happened and that I was not doing good, but still didn't answer. He knew we were near but didn't try to call to check on. It is not his responsability, I get It.
Again, no messages, no calls, I felt neglected. Deeply hurt and told him It was over.
After and hour he decided to say that I was acting childist (which is true), and again those words. 'You are suffocating to the max', ' leave alone for once, god', ' I am fucking sick of this'.
Again, my fault.
I know I fucked up again, this is my fault again and something I have to work on. Just...venting out.

I have often caught myself fussing over how to best format my new notes as I'm populating them with ideas/notes. Do I just write an introduction and move on, or do I write # Introduction and then proceed?! This was getting in the way of doing the task at hand -- a hidden danger all too familiar to many of us -- and so now I just write and use a heading hierarchy when I think it's appropriate. I now have a mix of notes that are composed entirely of text with no heading, some that are formatted with a rigid heading hierarchy (e.g., literature notes, documentation, etc.), and some that are in between!
Do you always use a prescribed format? Or do you also just do what makes sense given the note in question?

Tell me your most toxic trait, your deepest fear, your darkest thought, your greatest ambitions, something you’re deeply passionate about. Everyone seeks out a deep conversation but few have the ability to actually have one. I don't care about how boring you think you are, there is something deeply interesting in all of us— tell me about it.
About me: 28, south asian / white, born / live in the US. I like to read history/philosophy/psychology/everything, write, travel, gym, pseudo-analyze movies/shows, and gently form judgmental but harmless theories about people and the world. Happy to chat or voice call on discord as well.

Mine is writing. I've loved it ever since I made my first story in 4th grade (I'm nearing the end of sophomore year in high school). I'm currently hyperfixating on that first story because I'm fixing it because the first version of it sucked. It was bad.
I made it on paper, the handwriting was bad, I didn't staple the pages together or number them (Seriously. What was 4th grade me thinking when I did that? Why did I think that was a good idea?), and the cover art was terrible. Luckily, my art and writing has gotten better though. And I'm doing some world-building/world planning for the story which is interesting. I also made a web of all the characters and their relationships with each other yesterday. It's a mess, but I understand it and it makes sense. It also helps me remember how they are all connected.
I also have a lot of google docs dedicated to my stories. If I had to guess, there's probably 30 or something. There's a lot.

My bf is a good partner and not avoidant, but we are long-distance, which amplifies my anxiety. I know the problem is 100% my attachment insecurities. Even still it takes one small trigger for me to start panicking, wondering if something is wrong about the relationship, and questioning everything... to the point where I constantly lose track of time/responsibilities.
Granted, this might be my ADHD and severe PMDD just as much as my AP.
I'll be feeling super secure in the relationship, reading tons of material about healing an AA, and make huge progress on soothing my anxiety. But it takes only ONE thing to send me down an anxious rumination spiral. Logic stops working, and I lose control. I'll be stuck on an anxious, obsessive thought pattern for hours, sometimes days.
I had enough of neglecting college because of this, so I fine tuned my whole routine. Made a super elaborate plan where I wake up, meditate, fill my mind with self-love, envision my goals, and write down my goals and motivations on a sticky note. Additionally, I planned to set aside specific times during the day where I can text and think about my boyfriend, and a specific time frame where I can engage in anxious thoughts. But outside those windows, I would tell myself to "store those thoughts in a box for later" and return my focus to my goals.
This was all in attempt to make ME the main focus of my thoughts instead of my boyfriend. And it was going really well! I felt great, stayed on task, and easily "packed away" any anxious thoughts.
But as soon as I texted my boyfriend during my first designated "boyfriend window," the anxiety immediately started and spiraled. I convinced myself that he's clearly losing interest/pulling away. And I was obsessed with figuring out whether or not we're compatible (just because he hasn't been quite as present or intimate for couple months due to stress). I lost any ability to validate myself and ended up seeking advice on Reddit. It wasn't until a stranger told me "Girl, nothing's wrong in your relationship, just chill" that I was finally able to let go of the rumination.
And now I realize it's 10 PM, and I'm not even half way through my study goal for the day, because I spent the afternoon obsessing over my relationship...
I don't know why my thoughts are so destructive or how to break out of this cycle. I have tried SO many things over the years. Therapy, watching and reading all the AP self-help I can find, journaling, reframing my thoughts, gratitude and giving the benefit of the doutb, meditation and mindfulness throughout the day, shadow work, reparenting my inner child, positive affirmations, learning how secure/healthy relationships work, learning healthy boundaries, asking for reassurance, not asking for reassurance, using AI as a therapist, exercise, and various drugs to try and calm my brain. I've been consistently working every day to heal for the last five months. But no matter what I do or how much progress I make the thoughts always take hold of me again, sooner or later, and pull me under. And then it's like I forget everything I learned and have to start healing from scratch.

A but of a fair warning, I’m not very experienced. I only write in my free time as a student:)
It sways and swishes, the leaves dancing in the light. Orange, Yellow, And red, The colors of the leaves changing with seasons, Just like emotions can change in seconds. Red hot fiery anger, Neutral orange, Excited, happy, yellow. The dance of the autumn leaves as they fall lower and lower towards the earth ground is one of many different things. Some leaves are perfect and untouched by the bite of the cold, others perhaps have seen a caterpillar or two. Beauty, unchanging between each and every leaf. Untouched and admired. Branches bare and raw to fend the icy winter weather. Dropped. Down, down, down.

I have had two dreams about this mystery man lol. He is so handsome, he has brown hair, golden brown hazel eyes with a hint of green, a beautiful smile, and he is very tall. In the first dream I was working somewhere that look like a gas station and I was writing something in a journal. When I looked up he was standing in front of me in a military uniform and he said I love how you are always writing. From that moment on I fell madly in love with this man. After that he gave me a hug and let me tell you I’ve never felt more loved from just that one hug and his arms wrapped around me so tight it was an unconditional love. Then he gave me a puppy and that little puppy lit up my world. The second dream looked like I was at my grandma’s trailer park in New Mexico, I knew it was because I could see her trailer at the end. I was riding a horse down the road and I noticed like 4-5 men riding horses at the end of the road coming towards me. One of those men was the man from my first dream and we instantly locked eyes and when we did he got off the horse and walked with me to my grandma’s trailer. He asked me so many questions about myself because he wanted to know about the thing’s in my life that meant the most to me. Then we were standing in my room and he hugged me and when he did there was a mirror behind me and he could see him mouth the words I love you while looking at me in the mirror. I said back to him I Love you too and then I woke up. I know it is my future husband because I keep seeing the same man and the unconditional love he has towards me and he has all the qualities I’ve been praying for my whole life. I just need to find him haha. So if you’re out there and see this I live in Texas and I haven’t given up looking for you lol. <3

I think it would be fun to spread this throughout different fandoms! (My language is AO3-specific because that's the site I use: feel free to translate it for however your favorite site works).
Go on your favorite fandom or ship tag, and sort by comments. Go to the bottom of the very last page, where you should find fics that have 0 comments (if there are any). Find any fic with 0 comments that appeals to you, read it, and leave a nice comment when you're done. A line that you enjoyed, a part that caught your attention, even just that you appreciate the author for writing it. Challenge mode: try to pick a fic that was written a while ago (so they likely didn't get any comments at all, not just that the regular commenters haven't come in yet).
I mean, obviously, do whatever you want. But I'm going to do it, and I thought it could be nice to spread the love :)

I was just wondering if anybody had any good ways to write some action heavy scenes and such. Like any tactics that help you better write it and make it more interesting. For reference I'm writing a Spider-Man story (currently on chapter 9) and I just feel like sometimes my writing gets repetitive or even if it's not repeating, it isn't very interesting. Anybody have any good ways to add a bit more to the action scenes or just how to write them in general? Also, if you have some of your own writing to share as example, that's totally cool. Or any moves you yourself know how to do irl, fanfic writers always have one secret talent and who knows maybe some of y'all got moves lmao
For my own example, I've got some things just to share where my level sort of is on this skill:
-- He dodges the first punch, but the second comes just a bit too quick and he's sent stumbling backwards. He finds his footing within seconds, thankfully, and braces himself for the third punch, blocking it by grabbing hold of the man's fist, then soon after his other fist with his other hand.
But of course, he's some big brute and slams his head into Spidey's. That lands him on his butt, hands at his side as he looks up at the goon.
"You're puny." He tells Spider-Man, who waves it off and shrugs.
"I'm still gonna beat you," Spider-Man says with a pointed finger, rolling over to block the foot about to land on his stomach, then lifts his hand off the ground and shoots small balls of webbing to the man's face.
As expected, he reaches for his face in an attempt to remove the substance blocking his view. So Spider-Man takes the opportunity to get off the ground, move behind him with a jump, and kick him in his back. The crook is already turning around with a fierce fist that only charges through the air, and Spider-Man attacks him from the back again before lifting him up with a groan of exertion and throwing him at the wall.
--“I've come to prove you're a fraud, Spider-Man,” Mysterio claims, then brings his hands together, raises high, and he makes a circle with them, green trails of something following his fingers. The circle outline starts forming, and once it does, lines start extending towards the middle in some strange pattern, making Spider-Man squint with curiosity.
“Man, and I thought you just wanted an autograph.” Spider-Man sweeps to the left as the circle is sent hurtling in his direction, landing where he previously was and sending wooden blanks flying. He grimaces, flipping back to the wall, eyeing Mysterio. “Could it be possible to sign on that fish bowl of yours?” He asks, leaping off the back wall of the stage, aiming his web shooter to said bowl, but while in he's in the air, Mysterio abruptly spreads his arms wide, sending his green power thingy (Spider-Man has yet to figure out what this wizard guy has exactly) to beam upwards, slamming straight into his stomach.
It feels like an impossible amount of wind being tossed straight at him, Mysterio's strange energy sending Spider-Man tumbling over his head, once again returning to the front of the stage. When he looks back, thankfully people have started to retreat, escaping for safety.
“Nice magic trick,” He says, looking up at Mysterio where he's landed on his side, then he gets back up, crouched. “If it is magic. That's magic right? Super cool.”

Paul Oskar Kristeller

22 May 1905 – 07 June 1999
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
Paul Oskar Kristeller and the Status of Historical Knowledge
It is the 119th anniversary of the birth of Paul Oskar Kristeller (22 May 1905 – 07 June 1999), who was born in Berlin on this date in 1905.
Kristeller is most widely known for a popular anthology of renaissance philosophy—Renaissance Thought: the Classic, Scholastic, and Humanist Strains—and I quoted Kristeller in my episode about renaissance philosopher Franciscus Patricius. Here is Kristeller on the historiography of renaissance humanists:

“The humanist works on history have a number of peculiarities, both good and bad. They are often written in a highly rhetorical Latin, and they show the influence of classical historiography in the use of fictitious speeches. Since they were usually commissioned by the very state or city whose history was to be written, there is an element of eulogy and of regional or dynastic bias, something which I understand is not entirely absent from the national histories of modern times. On the other hand, the humanists usually did not place much credence in miracles and avoided theological speculations, and they tend to account for historical events on a strictly rational basis. Moreover, they often had access to the archives and original documents illustrating the subject matter of their history, and employed more exacting standards of documentation and historical criticism than had been the custom during the preceding centuries. Valla’s treatise on the Donation of Constantine is a famous example of historical criticism in the fifteenth century; in the sixteenth, we might single out humanists such as Sigonius, who must be considered in their erudition and critical acumen as the direct forerunners of the great historians of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.”

Kristeller wasn’t exclusively a renaissance scholar. He was also fully engaged in the philosophy of his time. Kristeller edited and wrote the introduction to Siegfried Kracauer’s book on philosophy of history, History, the Last Things Before the Last. In my episode on Kracauer I quoted from Kristeller’s introduction to Kracauer. Of Kracauer’s book Kristeller wrote, “I profoundly agree with the spirit out of which all of his work was written,” so at least some of what he says about Kracauer applies to his own conception of history. In his Foreword to Kracauer’s book Kristeller wrote:

“On several important issues, Kracauer hesitates to give a definitive solution, but rather formulates a problem and thus lays the ground for further thought. The discrepancy between general and special history, or as he calls it, macro and micro history, represents a serious dilemma. Kracauer seems to think that the results of special research are so complicated and so resistant to generalization that most of them must be ignored by the general historian. I tend to be slightly more hopeful, and to believe that the results of special research, after some lapse of time, will penetrate the general histories, and that the diversity of contradictory details can be handled in terms of comparative and qualified statements.”

And…

“Another basic dilemma that Kracauer forcefully presents but does not resolve is that between chronological time and ‘shaped’ time, or between the general sequence of all events occurring at a given period, and the specific sequences peculiar to one particular area or tradition. Again I should be inclined to be more optimistic, and try to lay the stress on the pluralism of cultural history, while maintaining the concept of universal cultural history at least as a regulative idea in the Kantian sense.”

Thus Kristeller presents himself as being more sympathetic to the possibility of a philosophically informed history (or what we could call a macro-historical account) eventually coming into being, than was Kracauer, but Kristeller is also willing to grant significant concessions to the idiographic conception of history implicitly held by Kracauer. In another place in this Foreword, Kristeller notes that Kracauer was less interested in philosophers discussing history than in the actual practices of historians, so we shouldn’t be surprised at Kracauer’s philosophical skepticism, which Kristeller does not fully share, though he implies that his point of departure in philosophy of history is similar to that of Kracauer’s.
As I discussed in my episode on Morton White, there is a tension in those philosophers of history that claim to follow the lead of the practicing historian, because they want to borrow the authority of the historian within his own discipline, but they rarely want to follow the historian’s lead in all matters theoretical. And many historians seem to leave no theoretical lead for the philosopher to follow, or it is a very slim lead at best. This might be better expressed as there being an overlap between the practicing historian and the philosopher who takes his inspiration from the practicing historian. Where exactly is the overlap between the practicing historian and the philosopher of history, and how extensive ought it to be?
More often than not, the overlap is an idiographic orientation toward historical knowledge, along with the conviction that philosophers seeking nomothetic explanations have gotten lost in specifically philosophical problems that aren’t firmly rooted in history and the study of history. On the other hand, there is a perceived gap between historians and philosophers of history who make no pretense of taking their talking points form historians, which is what I just called philosophers discussing history, in contradistinction to philosophers discussing the work of practicing historians.
It is worth mentioning in this context that there is a temperamental difference among those philosophers who are impatient with other philosophers who they see as getting too deep in the weeds on specifically philosophical problems, and those philosophers who are impatient with other philosophers who get too deep in the weeds on specific disciplinary questions that are not part of philosophy proper. At least they have their impatience with each other in common. For my part, it makes perfectly good sense that philosophers should discuss specifically philosophical problems, whether related to history or not, but there is a certain mauvais foi about this at present.
We can see more hints of Kristeller’s idiographic epistemic orientation in a 1943 paper co-authored with Lincoln Reis, Some Remarks on the Method of History. In this paper the authors wade into the venerable question of historical methodology, seeming to come down on the side of Dilthey, Windelband, Rickert, and Isaiah Berlin, inter alia, that history has a method all its own, and this is a method of particularity, not one of general laws, i.e., idiographic rather than nomothetic:

“…the special contribution of the historian is the reconstruction and interpretation of specific events. It results from the combination of elements united by the historian and made accessible to the reader. Every element of that combination must be supported by the proper evidence, and thus the whole combination must be verifiable. It is a picture rather than a causal generalization. Though it includes causal relations, it is itself not a causal relation. For this reason, narrative rather than generalization is the only possible mode of presentation of the historical event.”

However, Kristeller goes a little bit further than most philosophers of history who contend that the historical method is not that of the natural sciences. He places this unique historical method and its narrative products in a larger context that includes rather than rejects natural science and philosophy of history:

“We have said that universal laws or rules have no place in the actual work of the historian, which consists in fact-finding and interpretation, but that they do have their place before and after this work, and outside history. They belong to a different field which we may prefer to call sociology or rather the philosophy of history. Hence the philosophy of history will make use of the work of the historian, and to a certain extent it will provide him with the guiding ideas for his work. It is this latter fact which explains why the historian himself very often is also a philosopher of history, and rightly so. This accounts for the point we have discussed above, that is, that some people have taken the philosophical statements of great historians as authoritative statements about the actual method of historical investigation. The main requirement for such a philosophy of history is that it should be critical, not dogmatic, to use the Kantian terms. What it says about general laws of history should be tentative and flexible, since the precise manner in which these rules should be applied is a matter of debate, and it should be subjected to the test of further historical research. Otherwise it is as harmful to historical research as general metaphysical preconceptions are and have been to the progress of the natural sciences.”

Kristeller is saying here that philosophy of history is distinct from history itself, and part of its task is to place history in a larger epistemological framework, which latter would include the methodologies excluded from narrowly historical inquiry. However, I don’t think that many historians are likely to take kindly to the idea of philosophers of history providing them with “guiding ideas” for their work, which he implies is another task of philosophy of history, though Kristeller has formulated this a little ambiguously, so that we could give his sentence the opposite meaning, namely that the philosopher of history should take his guiding ideas from history.
At the same time Kristeller holds that the historian is also a philosopher of history, at least in some cases, or at some times. This is a theme I’ve discussed in several episodes, quoting Hayden White on every history involving an implicit philosophy of history. One of the distinctions we can draw within the philosophy of history is between those who hold that philosophical ideas distort and contaminate history, which ideally should be a bare account of facts, so that true history is innocent of all philosophy, and those who hold that all history involves philosophical presuppositions, whether or not an historian wants to acknowledge his use of them.
An overlapping distinction is that between the historian as historian and the historian as philosopher of history. One and the same person might put on the hat of an historian and write history, and then swap his historian’s hat for the hat of a philosopher of history, and in this way provide his own guidance, and integrate his strictly historical work into a large epistemic framework. In this way, a philosopher could provide the guiding ideas for a history, because they are his own ideas. And in this context, when then historian and the philosopher are the same person by turns taking different roles, this is the same thing as historians providing the guiding ideas for philosophers.
The same year as Kristeller’s paper with Lincoln Reis, 1943, Morton White responded directly to Reis and Kristeller in “A Note on the Method of History,” and he, too, goes a little beyond the familiar dialectic and keeps moving the ball forward:

“In general, I think, it is rare to find disciplines distinguished from each other solely on the basis of the number of logical concepts they employ. In this case, so far as I am able to see, Reis and Kristeller would have us rigidly separate two disciplines simply because one of them employs the logical operation of generalization or quantification, whereas the other does not. On the whole, I think, the history of the empirical sciences teaches us that this divorce is a rare one. Moreover, the history of methodology teaches us that it is a dangerous one. For these reasons, I think that Reis and Kristeller are wrong in their analysis of the nature of historical statements, and not only that—historians who practice as if Reis and Kristeller were right would do well to change their procedures.”

Both Kristeller and White are trying to get at the big picture, but each of them sees a slightly different big picture, hence there is a distinct role for history in each of their big pictures. As recently as 2018, Kristeller wrote in his paper “Philosophy and Its Historiography”:

“Philosophers who claim to explore the status of historical knowledge have written about general laws of history and about causal explanation. These topics may concern the philosopher of history and also the sociologist or anthropologist, but they are speculative and derivative, and at best marginal for the practicing historian or philologist.”

Again in it we see the idiographic orientation and the effective irrelevance of philosophy to history, though I’m not sure how Kristeller’s dismissive attitude to philosophy in relation to history is to be squared with his claim that historian could take the directives of philosophers for the guiding ideas for their work, but, as we saw, this claim can also be interpreted in the reverse sense, that philosophers of history should take their guiding ideas from historians. Kristeller’s views on philosophy of history did not substantively change from 1943 to 1985, as he is still making the same point, but here it has been shorn from Kristeller’s larger point from his earlier writings about the reunification of knowledge within a larger framework.
The previous quote from Kristeller was used by Fons Dewulf in his 2018 paper “Revisiting Hempel’s 1942 Contribution to the Philosophy of History.” Dewulf concludes this paper with the following observation:

“The disappearance of the Windelbandian problem left open what kind of philosophical questions one could ask about the historical sciences. Here, Hempel’s paper saw its most visible contribution. It suggested the centrality of a philosophical concept that had not yet received much analytic attention, namely ‘explanation.’ In Hempel’s and Oppenheim’s 1948 paper, ‘Studies in the Logic of Explanation,’ explanation became a central concept for understanding scientific activity in general, and thus a prime object of analysis for the philosophy of science as a discipline. This in turn was refracted into an analytic philosophy of history that in the 1950s and 1960s focused its debate around ‘historical explanation.’ Thus, when Dray looks back at four decades of analytic philosophy of history and lauds Hempel’s 1942 paper, he testifies to these shifts that radically changed the methodological and conceptual norms for a philosophy of history. And when Kristeller laments the path of the philosophy of history in the twentieth century, he also attests to these shifts, but evaluates them differently, since it is his methodological and conceptual voice that became lost in the disciplinary norms of the philosophy of science and the philosophy of history after the Second World War.”

The Windelbandian problem, as far as I can ascertain in this context, is a neo-Kantian understanding of logic as transcendental logic, i.e., determining the conditions of the possibility of knowledge, which in this case means the conditions of historical knowledge. We can find this in Windelband’s Theories in Logic, from which I quoted in the episode on Windelband.
Windelband’s conception of logic is much more comprehensive than that of Hempel. It was the disappearance of this comprehensive point of view in logic that led Anglo-American philosophers of history, following Hempel, to think of logic exclusively as an extentionalist modern formal logic, which is all about determining the conditions of valid inference. The extensionalist conception of logic, which is pervasive in contemporary mathematical logic, and in analytical philosophy built on mathematical logic, is prima facie less relevant to history than traditional logic. Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing is Dewulf’s point about the different valuations of this historical development made by Dray and Kristeller.
Logic has gotten trapped into its current extensionalist incarnation by its own precision, which no one wants to surrender, but that leaves a great deal of what we would like to think of as rational thought without the immediate assistance of logic. We can shift this problem a bit by recasting it from the problem of the role of logical inference in historical explanation, to the role of rationality in historical inquiry, or intelligibility of history. Whether or not historical explanation conforms to canons of extensionalist validity is a much narrower question than whether historical inquiry is a rational enterprise and whether history itself is intelligible.
Certainly, Morton White and Kristeller have somewhat divergent conceptions of scientific rationality, and therefore different conditions for the intelligibility of history. Dewulf formulates this in terms of the logic employed in historical explanation; above I characterized it in terms of a different conception of how history fits into the bigger picture of human knowledge. But the Windelbandian problem in the larger sense, in the sense of whether history has its own distinctive methodology, which is in turn the perennial problem of whether history is a science, has not disappeared.
This problem can be temporarily papered over, but it always returns, and it will continue to return until we formulate a conception of science and a conception of history sufficiently comprehensive that the two either fully coincide, and it can be shown that history is definitively a science, or that the two overlap to some degree, and the extent to which they overlap, and at what points they overlap, can be definitively shown. This addresses the point about the reunification of knowledge in a larger framework that I mentioned earlier. History and philosophy of history are incomplete until we can do this. However, logic and science are also incomplete until we can do this.

Video Presentation

https://youtu.be/Zn4SjntNsSE
https://www.instagram.com/p/C7Sq41ZNJKB/
https://odysee.com/@Geopolicraticus:7/paul-oskar-kristeller-and-the-status-of:f

Podcast Edition

https://spotifyanchor-web.app.link/e/YD1PtCLROJb
https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/a31b8276-53cd-4723-b6ad-a39c8faa4572/episodes/ae88addf-169d-4283-a275-f97b9c3c0271/today-in-philosophy-of-history-paul-oskar-kristeller-and-the-status-of-historical-knowledge
https://www.iheart.com/podcast/269-today-in-philosophy-of-his-146507578/episode/paul-oskar-kristeller-and-the-status-178735703/
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