A Litany of Fallacies

This oozed over the transom this morning and I had a difficult time pinpointing just how many it touched on, so I thought I would open it up to the cognoscenti to see what you all thought.

" Aristotle invented intellectualism the method of abstracting a fragment of reality and treating that fragment as reality itself. So our language is abstract generalizations. Take the word cow it can stand for any cow in any breed worldwide, billions of cows, and even stand for other animals such as sea cows.

Intellectualism is then a generalizing, abstract unreal way of thinking, so it should not be surprising to any that real beings such as spiritual beings are not understood by such surface thinking."

Go!

I'm guessing this is the part you think contains fallacies...

" Aristotle invented intellectualism the method of abstracting a fragment of reality and treating that fragment as reality itself. So our language is abstract generalizations. Take the word cow it can stand for any cow in any breed worldwide, billions of cows, and even stand for other animals such as sea cows.

Intellectualism is then a generalizing, abstract unreal way of thinking, so it should not be surprising to any that real beings such as spiritual beings are not understood by such surface thinking."

...but it seems more like pretentious waffle built on questionable premises, making it difficult to parse.

But I'll try.

For instance, the 'cow' example is a meaningless point, since 'cow' is merely a category in which the various breeds are placed. It is not trying to take a generic cow (think black and white ones you see on farms) and 'generalise' that as being representative of all cows, for example. The person is trying to say that 'intellectualism' is a failure because it overgeneralises but the example doesn't prove their point.

They then use this poor example to claim that spiritual beings cannot be understood by intellectualism, which doesn't follow.

The reason I've put logical fallacy (possible) is because this might be an attempt to make an unfalsifiable claim. If the person can deny 'intellectualism' (or reasoning) as a method of reaching truth, they can prevent their claims of the existence of 'spiritual beings' from being proven false...allowing them to maintain the claim even in the face of a lack of evidence.

1. The problematic part is the last paragraph. Specifically where it says "unreal way of thinking". This is unsupported, yet the author uses the word "then" previously ("Intellectuallism is then..." as if the first paragraph supports the claim of "unreal thinking".  Therefore since the conclusion does not follow from the premises I think it qualifies as non sequitur .
2. The "unreal" is also ambiguous. What is an "unreal way of thinking"? Later that way of thinking is also characterized as "surface thinking" - another ambiguous term. So I guess it could qualify as ambiguity fallacy  .
3. Lastly "it should not be surprising to any" that's alleged certainty to make the unsupported claim "real beings such as spiritual beings" appear certain. A sneaky attempt to hypnotize us into accepting that spiritual beings are real.
   
   Indeed a litany of fallacies!