More books and notes on a few I recently recommended

I have two books about Octopuses arriving Thursday (from Amazon). They are pictured here.

I'm fascinated by the creatures and became re-invigorated by current writings intimating that an alien [ET] species might look like octopuses. (The sci-fi movie Arrival depicted the alien presence as octopus-like.)

These two books -- along with a few on Determinism (which broaches my inclination toward the "Our reality may be a computer simulation)" -- may not be your cup o' tea but a few I mentioned the other day should be.

Brent Raynes new book on John Keel, which is loaded with new and corrective material about the man we've all read and find fascinating.

Paul Kimball's 2012 The Other Side of Truth is flush with Paul's take on the Paranormal and UFOs, plus the people involved with both. You can't know how the current UFO community thinks and acts without an understanding of where it's been. And there is no more saner view of the paranormal world that Paul discusses in his book.

And you know my feeling about Steven Connor's The Madness of Knowledge. While it has the patina of philosophy, it isn't a philosophical tome by a long shot. It's a breezy rumination on knowledge and why we humans seek and need it, no matter how woozy it makes us.

RR

UFOs may be unfathomable

Copyright 2019, InterAmerica, Inc.

As YouTube musical selections were playing on my smart TV, Schubert’s 8^th Symphony (the Unfinished) came on.

It made me think this…

Mozart and Puccini, both, died before finishing works; The Requiem for Mozart and Turandot for Puccini.

But other composers have provided finishes for each, taking into account what Mozart and Puccini had composed previously and where they were going with composition when then died.

But Schubert’s symphony was and is unique, totally outside his compositional style and what he had composed previously and afterwards. (Schubert didn’t die before finishing his symphony; he just laid it aside.)

No one has attempted to finish the work, at least not in a format that has come to classical music’s mainstream. (I’ve never heard or read about a compositional completion of the work.)

Why hasn’t anyone made a bona fide attempt to complete the work? Because it is unique and totally mysterious, and odd. It is one of a kind. Nothing compares, as I hear it.

This is exactly the case with UFOs.

The explanations for UFOs have been a plethora of odd and mundane speculations but nothing so out-of-the-norm that UFO enthusiasts have accepted one as a real possibility for what the enigma, the phenomenon may be.

UFOs, like Schubert’s unfinished work, may well lie outside a plausible denouement.

I’d like to think some genius might accomplish a finished rendition of the Schubert work and another kind of genius might, someday, provide a rational, actual explanation for UFOs.

But I’m not holding my breath.

RR

For UFOs, Philosophy is useless; but so is science?

Copyright 2019. InterAmerica, Inc.

Edward Feser [Professor of Philosophy at Pasadena City College, California, author of Aristotle’s Revenge] opens his review in TLS (July 26, 2019, Page 32) of polymath Raymond Tallis’ LOGOS: The mystery of how we make sense of the world with this:

"Postmodernist skepticism and triumphal scientism … share [a] scorn for philosophy’s traditional claim to provide  objective knowledge …" And “that science alone [doesn’t] get hold of reality – as scientism claims [and] postmodernism alleges."

Feser tells us, that what Tallis has [among] “his other virtues is the unacademic elegance of his prose” – something lacking in much that you read nowadays from the philosophical community.

The review goes on to cite the many flaws in Kantian philosophy and states that “Tallis is no Cartesian dualist” preferring the views of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas.

What’s my point?

That philosophy, as expounded by a few visitors here and amongst the UFO rabble, is not up to the task of clarifying or explaining the UFO mystery, and science is at a loss to do so also.

Moreover, there is an academic stance that is riddled with hubris and error(s) that confound the issues ufology has to deal with.

In my recommendation of The Madness of Knowledge I’m not recommending the book as a panacea for philosophical error. but for Professor Connor’s view that knowledge is flummoxed by the corruptions of epistemology, especially in the postmodern era of philosophical thought.

And with the Tallis book one can see that those espousing philosophical conundrums in the UFO arena are leading us to ignorant perdition.

Ignore those forswearing philosophy as a way to get at the UFO enigma and take the so-called scientific approach with a grain of salt. Neither science nor philosophy are up to the task of explaining UFOs, are anything else for that matter.

UFOs need an “out of the box” approach, that I’ve long advocated. Look for such “wayward” schemes in the writings of some UFO enthusiasts, and you may come up with something much more worthwhile than that UFO canard, UFOs are ET craft.

RR