A Book of Essays: A Study in the Alliterative Alterity

By Nick Ross

A Study in the Alliterative Alterity is a profoundly elaborative campaign into the abstract and substantive nature of five, in a manifold rubric, conceptual semantics and its testimonial unfolding by these separate elements in the quest for the interpretive and pragmatic humanistic ideations by its author.
The first category, Knowledge, includes the colligation of the lemma and its concomitant descriptive import, addenda. The second, Logic, subsumes the focus of reasonable affiliation among concepts and again its accompanying association in extrapolation of the former titular correlation. Philosophy, as another category, includes the exposition of the various folds of designated and desultory distinction. The category, Humans, is featured as a necessitous ingredient in the coven of their particular consignment. And finally, Academic Learning, is a healthy salmagundi of the apprehension and consumption of scholarship.
The book contains a certain flux of alliteration to charm and captivate the reader.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jul 24, 2019
• ISBN: 9781796047349

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Copyright © 2019 by Nick Ross.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

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Rev. date: 07/19/2018

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Contents

Introduction

Knowledge

Academic Learning

Ologies

Logic

Philosophy

Essential Thinkers in Philosophy

The Pre-Socratics

The Eleatics

The Academics

The Atomists

The Stoics

The Neoplatonists

The Christians

The Scholastics

The Age of Science

The Rationalists

The Empiricists

The Idealists

Human Beings

Notations

Bibliography

Introduction

Essays have been around for a while, as long as there have been writers to channel their efforts on such a scale. They are a focus of the avant-garde, the literati and illumined class from which anything undertaken—essays, letters, novels, and other manuscripts—are a tenable and amenable effect.

Essays are a prodigious product—deliberating, delineating, and elaborating upon illocutionary and sententious lemmae. I am glad, gladdened and glib, able, abnegating adventitiously, antichally and annunciatingly abrogating of annual and absolutist axiology, born by bloviating blandishments. Blessed and benefic banalities homologate homologies and in a sestet of sestertia sequester synergizing and systematic synchronicity. N’est-ce pas?

Essays have been common forays into the fecund filliping as they foster flippant fluency. They have been around since the Enlightenment of French Frissons. Voltaire being one of many.

Voltaire wrote in excess of two thousand works, drank gallons of coffee daily, and complained about headaches although he wrote into his eighties. And as far as any Enlightenment author, he was the best of the French Zeitgeist in literature. He courted Catherine the Great along with Diderot and was a major philosopher of his day.

Some other great French writers were Moliere, Flaubert, Zola, de Balzac, and Rousseau. However, a great essayist was Ralph Waldo Emerson, an Englishman.

As an art form, an essay requires that a writer knows how to elaborate, expound among issues, concepts, and even precepts. Utilizing some Latin and some selcouth orismology, a writer can take a process and give it import, abstract facility, and even perspective to delineate a difficult lemma. So there is some subjectivity or opinion involved, but that is how a simple term can be highlighted and scrutinized to be comprehensible.

Philosophers from the ancient times to modernity have utilized language to present for a philological diversion of sorts, taking one concept and taking the liberty to mold and fashion it into something of their wiles, fancy, and desiderative designs.

So with a little rumination, attitude, and approachability, a writer can formulate a concatenation of expressivity and polish, refine, and explicate their notions on a certain issue to substantiate their claims within the depths of their intellect.

Essays are pragmatic and reveal the haecceity of its designer. One author’s gaffe is another’s grist, and the demise of one is renascent to another. Sometimes the idea is formed by the use of semantics in lieu of a semantic expressed in words. And the usage of terminology can posit the message as apropos.

Essays are aesthetic in their formation. They occupy elevation of thought and are a primordial and prescient study in the reification of requisite relevance and repute.

Essays are a stupendous reference mark as they borrow and utilize concepts from both the noumenal to the antithetical phenomenal along with their effects on transposing ideational meaning as one focus enables another. So there is a balance among considerations although equipollent in a substantive mein. One focus cannot survive without another.

And finally, essays are nondescript. Abstruse and recondite in their complex simpleness and discordia concors.¹

The following essays are excursive campaigns in the abstract and deliver meaning and substance in their own right.

Knowledge

Knowledge, epistemics or epistemology are a study in awareness, to be brief. It is a far-ranging and inclusive lemma as it seeks to explicate, service, and reference as a testament on the grounds of rational thought. The human organism, as a thinking and ratiocinative element, desires the awareness and capacity to know or understand information as there is a desiderative desideratum to do as such.

As human beings, the acquirement to absorb information, ideas, and certainly the foci and object nature of it, pinions us as intelligent creatures. According to great minds this wherewithal to ameliorate the human plight, condition, is a function that isolates the being from mere organisms to cerebral, civil and moral ones. This bearing enables us to render ourselves as peaceful, loving, advanced beings as intelligence is the true measure of humanity rather than our values or pecuniary status.

Knowledge or the acquisition of it lends tangible awards: in society, in relationships, and moral standing. It is a religious attribute as we abnegate pleasures, maintain our fear of God, and profit from the testimony of the elect as well as that of fools.

Another orismology of this conception is the word awareness. And this object can relate to the notion, There are disparate levels of awareness. At issue is the fortuity of the subconscious mind as it traces the confines of the conscious one that remains intact. Apparently, this perfunctory process is a semelfactive one as its longevity is lengthened by a longanimity of its laconic latency. Also a preemptive and peremptory, it perpetuates perdurance and past pertinacity. Knowledge seems to accord a more omnigenous dictum de omni et nullo and in a Peripatetic context.

Memory is all knowledge and somewhat random, enabling us to extrapolate intuit awareness while thoughts tend to associate predisposing one in its connection with routine and more mundane thought processes. The intellect has to allow a cognate cerebration to fit in with and find an intelligent design that results in channels of thought and their logical sequences in an orderly fashion.

There are various modes in which we retrieve stored-away knowledge, and sometimes these cerebral confluences flow in permeable regions as one area of the mind affects and modifies another. The cerebrum is knowledge, thought processes; and the hippocampus has been defined as a constituent of encephalic memory.

Knowledge is a medium between the absorption of awareness and the expression of it. Storage is primed for retrieval in a systematic dynamic as certain synaptic transmissions subsume the totality of these impulses as one thought v. another can be stimulated to ensure the appropriate thought sequence. For example, the thoughts, Cars and motorcycles require fuel can be titled Vehicles that need gasoline. The former is more specific and can be included by the latter. You practically have to envision both to derive a sense of subject matter, and so thoughts require a visual dimension. Words themselves can and effectively can be understood without a visual context.

As a philosopher philosophized, All is for the good, reasoning that knowledge has an ultimate design and that is sanctification, hallowedness, and/or the piety of the sacred. So philosophy can be construed as meaningful in a devout sense, rubric. The great philosopher and theologian St. Thomas Aquinas alluded to esse and essendi, or loosely attributed as being, the temple wherewith the holy are elaborated and endowed with an imminent and redeeming and immaculate essence: spirituality, saintliness. Do we have as much of knowledge to satiate the whim of man? Is there a blasphemous proportionate of evil to good? Is there goodness in us that maintains our journey / our journey’s end, a better place? A diuturnity? An understanding of the noumenal, the soul?

Knowledge can be relegated to the realm of insight and experience. Knowledge helps us delineate cognoscibles as it knows us in our capacity to recognize indicia, rhetoric and social consuetude. So it is persuasive and legitimate. Awareness is a ware of the cognoscente, literati, and avante garde. It is tempered by time and the ratiocinative. It evolves in segues of the archaic, obsolescent, and postmodern as an ignis fatuus, antediluvian, and primordial prosopopeia accordance. Experience is a recurrent item, although stored in the memory banks for an ameliorated glance, a retrospective look back, and firsthand account, immarcescibly maintained and at some point reinforced by reference and relegation.

Knowledge inspires recognition as it is stalwart and accessible. Knowledge without a systematic referral and deferral mechanism is worthless as a concept and may be without the means to command the appropriate ideation for its referential value and meaning. It seems that concepts are formed by ideas more than ideas produce that entity. For example, the words, alone and lonely are concept and idea rather than ex pide herculean in their reference gear. Sometimes, however, both end results modify one another in an associate assonance without their primal precision, actuality. Do we really want, desire the reality of an experience?

We acquire most of/ much of our learning through academic channels and means. The child becomes aware of the environment, sexual stage of development and memory around the years from two to three years of age. This youth becomes aware of academia such as finger painting and filling a sandbox with more sand or removing it to contrive this, another form of artistic material. After nursery school, the individual displays some assimilation as he or she has a clean slate or tabula rasa, as simple evolves to the more complex, one stage at a time. Rudimentary learning, say, writing to a hundred or two and drawing pictures and the primordial formation of basic wording develops to the appreciably more complex. First grade, a child does some early math and reading, orthography and sentence structure. These three years of academia training laid the groundwork for advancement from level to level. Second grade, the child learns to engage cursive skills, is involved in religious instruction, such as in the Catholic, Baptist, and Methodist denominations.

Schools and scholastic life is competitive, and the parity in light of equal instructive maintenance is in conflict. Lower-budget inner schools do not possess the educational wherewithal to provide optimal and efficient levels of quality instruction. University life is also disparate in terms of financial and pedagogical and quality of what is considered a better academe and not just the best students but those that have the pecuniary means. So education is not a moral focus of achievement, yet it is unfair and unjust. The better schools have the capacity to proffer the affluent a more efficient education even if the chances are unavailable for a moral equity academically to which the best are the best financially speaking. Knowledge can’t be universal with the onslaught of a dearth of opportunity. Education is the only opportunity for a poor kid to make it in life.

However, the media controls just about everything amenable to this juggernaut as the three top media corporations, including Time Warner and Sony, vie for universal superintendency. Everything on television, the radio, magazines, newspapers, and billboards, for examples, is already determined, modified for their having inordinate control and power, both financially and morally.

The media also determines what we think, say, or do as propaganda is utilized, are subject to, and affect political and social mores and climate, and as manipulated by current designs. Prejudice, wrongdoing, and enmity will be and are all predisposed in our mind-set that our scions will be corrupted as there will be a pandemic disease, not doing the right thing, and not making the right decision. There will also form a polarity of high culture to low culture. It will pinion one set beneath the lowest or subculture, as there will be a mad dash for the optimal, the zenith of cultural hierarchy. Hence, a binary society of epistemic morals.

It is important for us as consumers to recognize these social and informational evolvements, structures. We need to become politically active and provide for the greater good. It is imperative that we moderate the emplacement and strictures that render us as helpless drones that bear the brunt of an autocratic and financially plutocratic power that wants to maintain a political and economic chokehold on our society’s and as well as a cosmopolitan global oligopoly. Only with the real control of a well-informed society can we begin to mitigate the power crunch that results in increased revenue at the expense of the many who are exploited as such.

Knowledge is science. One of the earliest artifacts or inventions, for that matter, is the Stone Age wheel. This capacity is something that distinguishes animal from human; with this—the ability to transport goods—people had ushered in the age of yeomanry. Bronze and iron technology furthered this development, tools that furthered the prosperity of mankind as it fostered mass production that could result in a higher-tech society or the welfare of existing ones. Soon there would be other inventions like trapping and the hoplite spear to kill for consumption. Shipbuilding also improved as biremes and triremes were used in war. The Egyptians had developed mathematical and astronomical effects as they built pyramids and develop glass technology. The Greeks invented some objects as revolutionary as Archimedes’ screw, and chariots were manufactured for competition and warfare. The Roman Empire endured for more than a millennium, and they were prodigious warriors. Knowledge was also mass produced as the oral stage of communication was now to enter the written stage. Ancient societies were to welcome the era of print with Gutenberg’s printing press. The Dark Ages, which also lasted more than a thousand years, was really a time of illumination, as John Sullivan was to mention. Cathedrals and other structures were built as flying buttresses and other architectural forms were employed. Religion was a vital and burgeoning industry, lasting longer than any civilization.

And for centuries, scientific study delineated medicine, alchemy, and pharmaceuticals. With the advent of printed materials, colleges and universities were the focus of higher education and helped an intellectual class to migrate to urban centers where there were available jobs. There was also a mode of communication as newspapers provided a forum for current events and the necessary oversight to maintain order and the safety of various societies. Knowledge is apotropaic.

As information was flourishing, the need for literature in the form of bound books was increasing. And with these entities, learning was now available for its assimilation, variegation; and also, with its evolvement, it created an unequivocal literati that provided a society with a moral, civil, and humane command. Tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner.² With this literary base, advanced and technocratic surfeit enabled this society to prosper, defend its rights, and maintain an oligopoly on a global scale. An educated society is a puissant one.

The Industrial Revolution set a course for technology. Soon there were steam-powered contrivances, huge vessels for transporting goods and submarines for warfare and state-of-the-art inventions. Also available were sextants for ocean travel, telescopes for astronomical observance and for direct travel, and watches and eyeglasses. With knowledge diverse and omnigenous, a zeitgeist that remained to perpetuate an informed and higher-functioning society was to be immarcescibly emplaced and precursorily bent on furthering an already-burgeoning macrocosmic mastership and prosperity.

And so with this boon in technological advancement is the need for the concomitant ascension of cognitively based sameness. Tempori parendum.³ This is good as it enables in us a moral, social, and financial clime that achieves a sort of overriding balance. When the going gets rough, the rough get going. Out with the old, and in with the new. How does knowledge improve the human condition? Well, for one, it strengthens the human resolve, as the more one knows, the more valuable they are; and what we know can prepare us for failure and loss, and arm us with the resolve to overcome adversity as every motion we undertake meets resistance. With a metaphysical outlook, we can solve just about every puzzle and predicament.

Knowledge is supply and demand, and with this wont availability, we can come by and absorb just about any shape, fashion, and amount thereof. What happens when we watch the news? Why are the first few stories so important while the remainder in any given episode are abecederean in lieu of. Supply meets demand, as with the knowledge-based currency we can require, desiderate a flow of information that can be utilized for our desiderations. It seems, though, that a pasil of begets mean there is exponentially an aggrandizement of knowledge being transmitted. Daily there are more minds to inform. But there is more knowledge for the individual. E pluribus unum. Who thinks Malthus was expedient?

Knowledge is exigent, requisite, and rich and varied. It can sound euphonious, mellifluous. It can be dulcet and pleasant, alluring, lurid, sensational, fabulous, arduous, a real joy, enduring, powerful, subtle, orotund, valuable, goal oriented, egregious, and a whole slew of adjectival multifariousness.

Knowledge is veracious, illative, expedient, and aesthetic. It is eternal. Epistemology is a noble science, study. And etymologies are historical, basal, and pristine, a lexicographical derivation and a semantic precursor. Knowledge can be dereistic and amphigoric, notwithstanding. And it can take any shape, form, or manner to apply to one’s memory banks, a receptacle of volumes of ideas, attitudes, and mores.

Knowledge is semelfactive. It loses its impactive texture as thoughts are initially absorbed by governable, amenable means, as these thoughts are the by-product of a systematic knowledge-based storage facility of sorts and contained until these incorporeal and intangible entities are vitiated by losing the mind’s encapsulational capacity to contain them for future utilization and processing.

Knowledge, or the gaining of idiopathic and insightful modes of reference, such as attitude or conatus, a mind can be receptive to the linear, random, and an entropic motley of focus or failure as when there is something on the tip of one’s mind that remains vivid yet undecipherable or is terminated by accessing those ideational media available within the fetters of the specific thought process, a substantial component of the mind’s ideational function and capacity.

Knowledge is effectively affective. It is a modem modus vivendi as we communicate daily to the benefit of each party. It makes its imprint as an impish imperative and imprimatur. It laconically and illocutionally leads to lost luminosity and lets lassitude lithesomely last. It makes its mark metonymously, masking munificent and remunerative money. And mainly, it mars mentionable and mercurial musts as it makes metatheory mutate and maintain a moiety of many. The epexegesis of hermeneutic apocrypha may be elucidated by the eclectic hagiography of apotheosized and ecumenical ecclesia.

Knowledge is now. When we judge one another, whether in a courtroom or a TV game show, we are gaining knowledge. However, much is determined on the present moment. This is due to change. People change, for better or worse, in good or bad health, financially adequate or not, smart enough or anything with or without the four main extremities or a reasonably well-developed mind. When we have some free time to take it easy and relax, we think of others, and especially because it affects us in some way, shape, or fashion. If the prettiest girl at school approached you and put her hands on your chest, then these memories are valuable, and you wish you had more of it. If learning was cupidity, we’d all be guilty of sinning. We want to know the other’s business, like what they have done and what they should have. In Harper’s, there was a comment: Nothing makes us feel so good as to know that one is an evildoer. People want knowledge, not so much money.

Shamans, seers, and sages tend to have the wisdom that is so desirable and worthy of an elder who just glows with radiance. Everyone tends to value such an interpersonal ability to know so much and impart anything but evil. A fool can have wisdom too. Yet no one wants to be a fool although they have some valuable and utilitarian aspects to their credit and certain attributes that others can benefit from. One man’s loss is another man’s riches.

Intellectuals are a class of literati, congnoscente, and avant-gardists. They are a class of brilliant minds, diligent, hungry for knowledge and modern versions of Greek deities like Persephone, Perseus, and Diana the huntress. In Aristotle’s design of a utopian society, there are three classes of citizens: the aristoi (the intellectuals), the slaves (the working class), and the warriors (the guardians of society). There are dillitantes, those that dabble in the arts and who are not doyens yet resemble intellectuals. Knowledge isn’t wasted on the residents of a society, as it keeps us tempered and aware so that we can stay in check with newness, potential harm, and modify the effects of estrangement, immorality, and malfeasant transgression. Knowledge is righteousness and tenability.

The righteous promulgate their brand of credence as it pertains to the way social and political agenda are addressed. They desiderate to ameliorate deficits such as bias and greed, and preach their ethics for a universality of omnigenous constituents, as a communion of moral, spiritual, and ecumenical focus from the alone to the all one. The Christian movement universalizes the masses to join ranks so that it will synergistically devour the global totality into an individual Holy Synod.

Unfortunately, knowledge can be a pitfall. Have you ever read poetry that a poetaster concocted? Or have you ever played a game of inferior crambo? And then sometimes you absolutely need to contain more of it, like the television show Jeopardy, which requires a pasil of omnigenous awareness. However, whether a desideration for or a fastuous dislike, it evokes within us a need to balance the two. Sometimes things come in pairs, such as good and evil, two books for a course of study, or three’s a crowd or a couple of friends, a married duo, or two kidneys to an individual.

Knowledge of something is knowing its true nature or understanding the elements of the particles that when combined lead to absolute truth, validation, and/or reality. When we conclude a nomothetic or any arbitrary piecemeal or the validating orismology of a simple concept, haecceity, or word, we utilize the means, actually the proving ground that distinguishes one entity from another, or, as far as meaning, is a reputable and veracious mainstay. With the appropriate mix of parameters, we can elucidate, clarify, or expunge valuable or worthless material.

Knowledge is for scrupulous and impeccant concern, from the banal, jejune, and mundane aspect to the ascension of a transcending or superintending phenomenology of the moment, to an eternal perpetual. And as we evolve from eon to epoch, we modify our understanding because we are evolved and a mutated form from our initial bearings. We change knowledge as we want to change. Does knowledge improve our lot or change us for improvement? Does a good man do good works, or does good works make a good man?

Back to knowledge. Knowledge is formative as every day of its inculcation we learn, memorizing, utilizing, and gaining incrementally as a focus and function of its consuetudinous and temporal aspects. Knowledge, if organized and systematized, can enable us to retrieve and recall information from our memory banks as well as logical demesne that concatenates in its linear and associative demeanor, attribution. If it had avoirdupois, it would be worth its weight in gold, as it would reduce upon itself all that is necessary and valuable. Diamonds in the rough.

Aren’t you glad you have a mind? I’m glad I do, due to the necessity of righteousness, the comeuppance of being thrilled, ratiocinative, and desiderative. I hope tomorrow will connect with all that is requisite, impartial, and continuous as thoughts are diminutive, appreciative, and partial. I hope certain platitudes present as obtuse, banal, and ordinary, while deep impressions present as fixtures of our convoluted psyche. On occasion, pristine and supernumerary solvents base as alkaline, corrosive and vitriolic entities and reduce to producing generative, semelfactive, and attritional complexes. Apparently, the supererogation of sententious psychology seeks and fortifies fugacious nugacity.

Knowledge is opulent. Without it, half of the entire planet would be under raps, with no consignment between a bucket that is full, leaking information, or pouring frothy tidbits of a character’s iota. The media changes our perspective, understanding, and memory of truths, anything from an archaeological dig to a leaf falling off a tree to