Been reflecting on the fact that Spinoza was a working lens grinder while rebooting western philosophy on the side
On other side, Leibniz was designing bridges and a computer while inventing calculus and resisting the reboot
Both revealing activities. Instrumentation vs design
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It’s one of the reasons we should take seriously philosophical writing by people like Ray Dalio (on first principles thinking), Ted Kaczynski (on criticism of techno utopianism), and Mark Zuckerberg (on free speech) even if it seems a little cringe in the moment.
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By “take seriously” I mean “judge on their merits” as opposed to discounting them because, whatever else we think about them, they’re not the sort of minds we’d expect this kind of thinking to come from.
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IIRC poor spinoza later suffered from a lung condition due to inhalation of the glass particulate for so many years...




