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I have been debating a person on various threads on another forum.

I think, although not 100% sure, that the person is a Democratic Neo-Traditionalism
A subset of the Traditionalist School.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traditionalist_School

Any suggestions on how to deal with that kind of philosophy?

Reviving a nine-day-old thread, asking for assistance in a debate, no substantial contribution to the thread topic? Your post is going up to Debating Help; think twice next time you resurrect a thread just to beg for help.

Just point him to the "fallacy of appeal to tradition" of logical fallacy sites.

Sorry about resurrecting the thread, trying to wrap my head around several different concepts.
In the future, I will start in new threads in the debating area with problems like this.
A person enmeshed so much in tradition is hard to get my head around.
I am the type of person who tries to examine something to see if it is good or bad, old or new concept. I guess the real problem is not finding stuff to refute it but just understanding his ideas.

Kitsune wrote:Sorry about resurrecting the thread, trying to wrap my head around several different concepts.
In the future, I will start in new threads in the debating area with problems like this.
A person enmeshed so much in tradition is hard to get my head around.
I am the type of person who tries to examine something to see if it is good or bad, old or new concept. I guess the real problem is not finding stuff to refute it but just understanding his ideas.

Generally it is hard to understand because it isn't coherant. After all, he wants some traditions and not others and probably took the position to hold onto the ones he likes. After all, he uses modern technology

Have you had any personal experience debating with people who are "Traditionalists"
I mean, I think many of us have blind spots towards tradition. I know that I took - as far as computers - a long time to upgrade to XP.

Reluctance to upgrade operating systems is hardly comparable to philosophical traditionalism, which seeks to undo the advance of empiricism in modern philosophical thought.

In past eras, you could have elicited serious debate by questioning whether physical matter is any more "real" than spiritual revelation. Today, that kind of thinking elicits only laughter and derision except from an extremely marginal fringe of society. Philosophical traditionalists believe we have lost something precious, something important in this transition. The problem is that they can't justify this belief other than to state it a priori.

Ordinary social traditionalism is driven by fear of change. Fear of change is quite natural; it is related to fear of the unknown, and we know that if we change things, we can't be sure what will happen. Ergo, fear of the unknown translates directly to fear of change. But these people described in that link are different: they want to change things back to a state which existed hundreds of years before they were born. That's not fear of change; that's a twisted delusional belief that the philosophical methods of our barbaric past were superior.

There has been a wonder and mysticism that has been lost. But the view that wonder is somehow inherently better is quite literally childish. Children believe in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and other nonsense that is mystical and wonderful and delights. As adults we sometimes wish we could have back the sense that the world is a place of magic. But to couch yourself in it is just irresponsible.

We lost these philosophical traditions precisely because they couldn't stand up to rigor or logic, which was the origin of philosophy to begin with. To find ideas that withstood these and be able to use them to understand the world.