Talk:Sub specie aeternitatis

Philosophy: Epistemology / Logic Low‑importance

This article is within the scope of WikiProject Philosophy, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of content related to philosophy on Wikipedia. If you would like to support the project, please visit the project page, where you can get more details on how you can help, and where you can join the general discussion about philosophy content on Wikipedia.PhilosophyWikipedia:WikiProject PhilosophyTemplate:WikiProject PhilosophyPhilosophy articles

Low

This article has been rated as Low-importance on the project's importance scale.

Associated task forces:
/
	Epistemology
	Logic

Needs a lot of work[edit]

This article consists mostly of irrelevant quotes using the phrase and has nothing about its history. Languagehat (talk)

That's at least half true, Languagehat. In the absence of reliable sources tracing the development of the sub specie aeternititus concept, I think the quotes are very useful, but while each seems to capture a different nuance of the phrase, some are close enough that the less interesting of a similar pair might be dropped. Another approach might be to segregate the "pro- sub specie aeternititus" thinkers (let's call them the 'Platonists' and the "anti- sub specie aeternititus" thinkers (the 'Aristotelians') for purposes of comparison. The "pro-" thinkers would be in the majority, I assume, largely because only a few of the 'Aristotelians' would mention the 'other-worldly' concept by name but proceed to make their 'this-worldly' points straight away. Within the "pro-" camp are apparently two major schools of thought, the first being that seeing life sub specie aeternititus shows its meaningless absurdity and the second being that such a perspective lifts the mundane to the plane of the eternal. I hope my summary shows that the quotes are not useless for understanding the issues involved. I have today added a quote from Stephen Halliwell referring to Aristotle's changing thoughts on the subject.

I agree that this article needs a historical survey as well a philosophical one and I have found one scholarly paper on the subject which may contain references that can take us further: "The Meaning of Life Sub Specie Aeternitatis" by Iddo Landau, from the Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 89, 2011, Issue 4. Unfortunately the full paper online is behind a pricey paywall, but other editors may have access: "The Meaning of Life Sub Specie Aeternitatis" [1]

Update: I found a page at philpapers.org cataloging Landau's paper with a bibliography including Landau's references and other books and articles on the sub specie aeternititus concept: "Iddo Landau, The Meaning of Life Sub Specie Aeternitatis - PhilPapers" [2] —Blanchette (talk) 20:46, 8 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Talks with T.G. Masaryk by Karel Čapek:[edit]

This bit is in almost comically ungrammatical English - even google translate does better these days, so I have no idea _what_ happened there! 2A01:CB0C:1704:9A00:9464:82B0:BAC4:D7C6 (talk) 07:45, 14 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]