@TheWillowOfDarkness It is a mistake to understand that for the sake of which as something like a Kantian imperative we are somehow bound to follow. I get it that you don't like this as a description of human nature, or that you simply don't accept the notion of a human nature at all. There's no need to keep saying it.

The human telos, and the purposes and intentions of human action deriving from it, have nothing to do with a "grand outside rule".

So far, no. I'm asking again for the "ignore list" function the next time I send a list of feature requests to the developers.

I don't know if I have the energy or ability to mount a critique of your posts, because I can't see how to do so without the hard job of correcting what appears to me to be your mis-characterization of virtue ethics and teleology, and without the even harder job of arguing fully for virtue ethics (or some kind of virtue ethics). On the one hand I agree that "there is no separation between the world and its moral significance", but on the other hand I disagree that virtue ethics is or must be contrary to this. Generally you seem to view telos as akin to Kantian duty or an appeal to God standing over us and outside us. This is not how I understand it at all. Maybe you're equating virtue ethics with its Thomist version?

Looks backwards to me Willow.

So, is the concept of a moral fact any more odd than the concept of any fact? For me, @Wayfarer and @Moliere are looking at this the right way:

Awareness of the distinction between objective and subjective is very much bound up with the rise of modernism — Wayfarer

Whether it be odd or not would just depend on our expectations. So if we live in a universe which has moral facts, but believe that there are no moral facts, then it would be odd to find a moral fact. — Moliere

The idea of moral facts does seem a bit odd, but rather than supporting the case for a moral subjectivism or emotivism, it might rather be evidence that the idea of a fact in general already carries with it an implicit exclusion of morality and the human attitudes and language relevant to it.

We can understand this historically and sociologically, and the imperative to take this approach is supplied by the history of philosophy. In Aristotle, meta-ethics and normative ethics, fact and value, are integrated; but in the twentieth century meta-ethics and normative ethics became separated, and fact and value got divorced some time earlier. So I don't see how one can address the question of moral facts without paying attention to how the question came up in the first place, and like MacIntyre, I think this is a properly philosophical endeavour (it's not so much that philosophy is necessarily secondary to and derivative of history and society, but that philosophy is too rarely historical and sociological).

For the middle ages mechanisms were efficient causes in a world to be comprehended ultimately in terms of final causes. Every species has a natural end, and to explain the movements and changes in an individual is to explain how that individual moves toward the end appropriate to members of that particular species. The ends to which men as members of such a species move are conceived by them as goods, and their movement towards or away from various goods are to be explained with reference to the virtues and vices which they have learned or failed to learn and the forms of practical reasoning which they employ. Aristotle’s Ethics and Politics (together of course with the De Anima) are as much treatises concerned with how human action is to be explained and understood as with what acts are to be done. Indeed within the Aristotelian framework the one task cannot be discharged without discharging the other. The modern contrast between the sphere of morality on the one hand and the sphere of the human sciences on the other is quite alien to Aristotelianism because, as we have already seen, the modern fact-value distinction is also alien to it. — MacIntyre, After Virtue

Aristotle had a teleological view of human beings (and of the other things in nature). For him, it is essential to what a human being is (so we seem to be talking about facts) that it has certain characteristic goals and thus values.

But the Enlightenment rejected teleology to produce a mechanistic understanding of nature and increasingly of human beings as well. This annexed the realm of facts. To take the mechanistic stance on human behaviour is to remove any talk of reasons and purposes, which means that insofar as there are facts about human beings, they cannot involve reasons and purposes, thus they cannot be about morality as traditionally understood. Which leaves the idea of moral facts looking rather...odd.

Thus the alienation of morality from what it is to be human, of values from facts, makes it almost inevitable that morality will then be seen as either eternal, like mathematics, or else illusory or subjective.

The radical upshot is that most modern moral philosophers, paying no attention to this history, don't know what they're talking about. And this is not just about the history of philosophy; it is about the changing meaning of morality in changing historical and social circumstances.

So my answer is: yes and no. On the one hand, moral facts do seem a bit odd to us moderns, but given a different way of living, they need not.

To expand on @The Great Whatever's concise answer...

I have trouble distinguishing between analytic and a priori for example. Do they just have the same meaning with 2 different ways of saying it or is there some other distinction? — ladyphoenix86

Good question. Some philosophers have believed analytic and a priori to be coextensive, and the same goes for synthetic and a posteriori. From this empiricist point of view, whatever is analytic is a priori and whatever is synthetic is a posteriori, and vice versa.

But they have different meanings. Analytic-synthetic is semantic, and a priori-a posteriori is epistemological.

Analytic-synthetic is about what makes a proposition true. Analytic propositions are true by virtue of what their words mean, and synthetic propositions are not true merely by virtue of what their words mean. One of Kant's ways of thinking about the difference is that analytic truths don't tell us very much, i.e., they are explicative, whereas synthetic truths can tell us something new, i.e., they are ampliative.

A priori-a posteriori is about how we know things or how we justify our knowledge. A priori knowledge is known independently of experience. A posteriori, or empirical, knowledge is known from experience. The thing to note about a posteriori knowledge is that because it is confirmed or disconfirmed by experience, it tells us what happens to be the case, and not what must be the case, i.e., this kind of knowledge is about what is contingent. In contrast, a priori knowledge is neither confirmed nor disconfirmed by experience, and so concerns what must be the case, i.e., this kind of knowledge is about what is necessary.

As you've noticed, some philosophers think there is synthetic a priori knowledge.

why is 'synthetic a priori' different to 'analytic a posteriori'? — ladyphoenix86

To know a synthetic proposition a priori is to know something that is not true merely due to the definitions of the terms involved, and to know it independently of experience too. This is important because, if such knowledge is possible, then we can have substantial, ampliative knowledge (from the synthetic component) that does not depend on experience, i.e., that we attain using our own reason unaided by experiential confirmation.

Analytic a posteriori knowledge, on the other hand, seems impossible. It doesn't make much sense to say a sentence that's true by virtue of the meaning of the constituent words can be known from experience. If you understand it then you know it's true already, without any perception or investigation of the world.

The main thing I haven't really addressed here is what "independently of experience" precisely means, because it can be interpreted strictly or loosely.

Eek. My first instinct is to say that there is no barrier in principle to the creation of artificial persons, or agentive rational beings, or what have you (such vagueness precludes me from coming up with a solution, I feel). Do you think there is such a barrier? Putting that another way: do you think it's possible in principle for something artificial to possess whatever you think is special about human beings, whatever it is that you think distinguishes a person from an animal (or machine)? Putting this yet another way: do you think it's possible in principle for something artificial to authentically take part in human community in the way that humans themselves do, without mere mimicry or clever deception?

Would help to know if there were a real 'I' before trying to replicate it artificially. — Wayfarer

Hey, nice dodge. ;)

See, I don't think that any element, nor the totality, of those systems, has the reflexive first-person knowledge of being, or experience of being, that humans have, or are; it is not an 'I'. So, sure, you could feasibly create an incredibly clever system, that could answer questions and engage in dialogue, but it would still not be a being. — Wayfarer

I guess the question is, could there possibly be artificial "I"s? Computational A.I. might not get us more than clever devices, but why in principle could we not create artificial minds, maybe some other way?

(I'm just being provocative; I don't have any clear position on it myself.)

Are you joking? I already said:

The computational theory of mind is one philosophical view among many, and it's been heavily criticized. If it's your position then cool, but don't pretend it's not a philosophical issue. — jamalrob

Yeah, recently I've been feeling like reading Schop again, and I never thought I'd say that. I never did read much of volume 2.

That was an important book in my philosophical education, the one that suddenly made transcendental idealism click. It didn't detract too much from it that his characterization of the will is probably off the mark, as discussed here on the old PF.

Though they're old-fashioned in media terms, I thought the Magee videos were wonderful. Not black and white, not all men, and not all wearing ties. Marcuse didn't wear a tie, for instance. Figures.

The question is whether the mind is an algorithm, meaning the human mind, which m-theory is suggesting might be one of the philosophical implications.

It's certainly an algorithm (what else could it be?) — tom

The computational theory of mind is one philosophical view among many, and it's been heavily criticized. If it's your position then cool, but don't pretend it's not a philosophical issue.

Well thanks everyone that had the foresight to start a new place for the community to migrate to then. — m-theory

On behalf of the original TPF crew: you're welcome. @Hanover was our guiding light, of course. Now there's a true visionary.

(Y)

Note that we use a hosted service called PlushForums, which is based on some kind of fork of Vanilla Forums, so I'm not actually a developer of the software. However, the developers do respond to feature requests.

But you only see it if you go to "Mentions" in your profile menu, don't you? Or is it that you're not clicking on the notification and it's still telling you in the title bar that you've got mentions?

You mean clear the items in your list of mentions? Not that I know of. Why would you want to do that?

I owe more to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in terms of influencing my recent thought and my political persuasion than any philosopher. — Sapientia

I think I'd class them as philosophers too, though they didn't pursue it thoroughly and decided to change the world instead. There's a fantastic book about Marx specifically as a philosopher: Karl Marx by Allen W. Wood. It's very clear, and it's critical but broadly sympathetic. It's sort of like Eagleton's Why Marx was Right with philosophical meat on the bones (I seem to recall you saying you read that).

Marx is a writer who is constantly struggling with facts and theories of all kinds – Nietzscheans should admire him for the way he seeks out enemies. To read him in a dogmatic spirit, as if his writings were some sort of holy writ, is to miss what is best about him: the terrifying openness of mind represented by his own way of thinking and by the intellectual position into which he forces his readers – especially those who remain unconverted by his theories. This is why Marx should be loved by everyone with a philosophical mind. — Wood

As for the effect of philosophy on my life, it's definitely changed the way I approach anomalous monism and transcendental phenomenology.

His philosophical method is historical and owes a lot to Marx and Kuhn. He says that there are no transhistorical standards to appeal to in assessing moral claims, yet he is not a relativist: the world is always there to test against.

If you mean to ask exactly what facts and assessments lead him to the conclusion, have a look at After Virtue.

Yes, I did notice that bit, and I agree it's not satisfying. Really it's a different way of putting the point at issue. May say more later.

Chalmers survey results — shmik

You beat me to it.

On the other hand, most atheists are not philosophers, and we might get a better picture of things by looking at the wider secular culture. MacIntyre says we have a "culture of emotivism", in which moral claims often in effect either express mere personal preference or are used to manipulate others. In other words, emotivism, though wrong as a general theory of the meaning of moral language, is correct as a theory of contemporary use. There's surely no question that this only became possible in disenchanted modernity.

I'm a bit confused. Would anyone like to try setting out exactly why a meta-ethics based on an empirical concept of the human form of life is such a bad thing? Why, for example, the position automatically falls at the hands of Moore and Hume.

I said that our normative naturalists are marked off by the central place they give to the concept human in practical philosophy, as its highest concept and the index of the generality of its most abstract principles. This feature of these doctrines has been greeted with alarm by the larger literature as introducing something empirical or even biological into ethical theory. — Thompson

I understand the concern about biologism, but the empirical as such doesn't seem too threatening.

Ha! Yeah I hate it when people respond to my posts before I get a chance to correct them.

Thanks @Pierre-Normand.

I don't have time for a lengthy reply now, but I may make a few tentative suggestions now and maybe elaborate later on. I anticipated that most readers would find it puzzling that formal concepts that find application in experience could be known a priori. My suggestion would be to understand judgments that ascribe a form to an item of experience as being expressed by synthetic a priori propositions. Maybe my comments in those earlier two posts about the distinction between those elements of knowledge which arise from experience, or which begin with experience, may be relevant. I would suggest that only the latter, not the former, can be properly called empirical. — Pierre-Normand

As you're using Kant's phrasing, shouldn't this be the other way around? "There can be no doubt that all knowledge begins with experience [but] it does not follow that it arises from experience." That is, some knowledge that begins with experience actually arises from the mind, and only knowledge that arises from experience as well as beginning with experience is empirical. But that's a minor point; we're probably better off without "arises from" and "begins with", which are ambiguous out of context. I understand what you are saying.

I don't think I have trouble with the notion that "formal concepts that find application in experience could be known a priori". It's just that I doubt--or am unclear about--the a priori status of these particular concepts, i.e., the claim that Thompson is arguing.

It is a general feature of Thompson's work, as it is of Sebastian Rödl's (who travels a parallel path) that when he speaks of forms of judgment, the forms at issue belong to metaphysical logic, such that they characterize the way elements of thought are joined in a predicative nexus -- making up determinate judgments. Correlative to the form of such judgments (that is, to the way elements of the judgments hang together) are the metaphysical categories. Thus, a judgment that ascribes a category to an item of experience (e.g. a substance or a quantity) is a synthetic a priori judgment since it expresses how such an item can be joined to other items of suitable categories in order make up a determinate judgment. (In Haugeland's fremework, we could say that the set of constitutive rules (synthetic a priori judgments) that determine a specific empirical domain express the tacit theoretical understanding a subject must bring to bear a priori to experience in order that her observations be intelligible and contentful. For one to come progressively to master a paradigm, and thus to come to see things aright, is for one to gain an a priori knowledge that "begins with" experience. When one has amassed a sufficient amount of such knowledge -- which adds up to understanding -- then, and only then, can one gain genuine knowledge from experience (that is, understand what one sees). — Pierre-Normand

Seen in the context of his other work, then, Thompson's argument in the paper can be seen as arguing for the inclusion of the concept of life form, or the judgments wielding this concept, among these synthetic a priori judgments, yes? My doubt, I suppose, is about how and whether the life form concept is one of these formal concepts (I know it's in the name, but still), because I can't see exactly how the life form concept differs logically from other concepts that Thompson admits are empirical, such as mammal.

However, I'm not especially committed to this line of criticism.

Here's what I'm thinking about Thompson's argument. I want to agree with the conclusion that we can interpret moral judgments naturalistically, i.e., that virtue ethics could have a sound meta-ethical basis. But I'm not convinced by Thompson's arguments against the empiricist propositions, and I'm not even clear on what the propositions really mean. That leaves me either looking for a way to make room for the "autonomy of ethics" and natural goodness within a framework of empirical concepts, or beset with doubt over the distinction between empirical and a priori.

So in this post I'm going to dodge the jellyfish and look at the section headed "Against the empiricist propositions".

These are the empiricist propositions:

• The concept species or life form is itself an empirical concept.
• Concepts of particular life forms (moon jelly, umbrella jelly, white oak, horse- shoe crab, human) are invariably empirical, or observation-dependent, concepts.
• Singular representations of individual organisms are invariably empirical rep- resentations.
• Substantive knowledge of any given individual organism (propositions of types A, C and D) can only arise from observation.
• Substantive knowledge of the character of a given species or life form (propo- sitions of types B and E) can only arise from observation.

And these are Thompson's counter-propositions:

• The concept life form is a pure or a priori, perhaps a logical, concept.
• The concept human, as we human beings have it, is an a priori concept attaching to a particular life form.
• A mature human being is typically in possession of a non-empirical singular representation of one individual organism.
• Individual human beings are sometimes in possession of non-observational knowledge of contingent facts about one individual organism.
• Human beings are characteristically in possession of some general substantive knowledge of the human life form which is not founded empirically on observation of members of their kind, and thus not ‘biological’.

In this post I'll probably just look at the first proposition and counter-proposition.

Inevitably I found myself wondering: what is an empirical concept? Thompson describes it as an "abstract precipitate of observation", and this seems like the standard view. Kant's view is interestingly different. On the one hand, Kant agrees that an empirical concept is a general concept derived and abstracted from appearances. But he has another, more original way of describing empirical concepts. Using a fortuitous example, he says this about empirical concepts:

The concept of a dog signifies a rule according to which my imagination can trace, delineate, or draw a general outline, figure, or shape of a four-footed animal without being restricted to any single and particular shape supplied by experience. — Kant, CPR A141

An empirical concept is a rule that can be repeatedly and consistently applied to appearances to achieve a general representation. In this example, the concept of a dog is a rule whereby we can bring particular dogs in experience under the general representation of dog as a class or form. (Whether Kant really does identify the concept with the rule doesn't concern me now).

...whereas all intuitions, as sensible, rest on affections, concepts rest on functions. By function I mean the unity of the act of bringing various representations under one common representation. — CPR B93

Concepts are active, not passive. In a certain sense they order our active experience. An empirical concept on this view seems something more than just an "abstract precipitate of observation".

Thompson's first point against the first empiricist proposition is that the five judgments can apply to things that are "utterly different from one another in material content":

The umbrella jelly, the hayscented fern, the spirochete, the human being, slime molds, turnips, tarantulas: how much more different can things get? Yet in all cases our five forms of judgment find a foothold. We see nothing unintelligible in imagining even more violently different forms of life arising on other planets, or even under different regimes of fundamental physical law. It seems that a very abstract grammar finds a place in the description of all these things, the grammar we found by reflecting on your study of the umbrella jelly. This intellectual structure is not a response to a common empirical feature of things, but is somehow carried into the scene. — Thompson

It seems to me that although there may be an intellectual structure carried into the scene, it doesn't follow either that this structure is not empirical, or that the relevant structure is that of life forms. Don't we carry the concept mammal, which Thompson accepts is an empirical one, into observations of both dolphins and monkeys? And if we also agree that there is an a priori intellectual structure carried into the scene, couldn't we say that this structure is not that concerning life forms, but is rather that which lies behind these concepts, pure a priori concepts such as universal and particular or form and individual?

Next, he says that the reciprocal interdependence between natural historical judgments about life forms and vital descriptions of individuals, described in the first part of the paper, lends support to the a priority of life forms.

... almost everything we think of an individual organism involves at least implicit thought of its form. — Thompson

To me this doesn't seem to carry the point. For one thing, I imagine many of his critics could agree. He says that the life form concept is "everywhere at work" and that we "arrive at an explicit conception of it by reflection on certain of the forms of thought of which we are capable". I think he is suggesting that the implicit nature of the life form concept entails that it is a priori. But can't one absorb an empirical concept such that it becomes part of the way one implicitly structures experience? Is this enough to make it a priori? (maybe it is, as Thompson is using these terms). Alternatively, the life form concept may be no different from the concept of a mammal, in that the implicit a priori structure is what lies behind it, allowing us to distinguish generally between form and individual.

It's at this point that I begin to lose my grip on the a priori-empirical distinction, wondering if empirically formed concepts can become a priori. The concept of a life form may develop from experience based on a person's socialization combined with primitive a priori concepts or faculties; and indeed, based on the formation of personal identity and the "I".

Does it matter? Thompson seems to accept that if the human form of life is an empirical concept, then virtue ethics is biologistic or may as well be. But I don't quite see why this should be, because describing the human form of life requires more than just biology.

Nice post McD, and quite familiar to me.

I recently noticed Peter Hitchens arguing for the use of the term Judeophobia to describe present-day anti-Jewish sentiment, to distinguish it from the anti-Semitism of the Nazis. I agree that the prejudices are different today, but personally I think the term anti-Semitism is fine, because as it is we use it variously to describe, for example, the racialism of the Nazis as well as the religious bigotry of the Russian pogroms.

Note that I moved this thread to the Feedback category. We aim not to moderate Feedback at all, so you're free to say what you like here. As it happens, my original moderator action was not in response to the view you expressed--even though I think it's obnoxious--so much as your reluctance to defend it or even explain it properly, which in the end amounted to low post quality.

You haven't addressed what I said. If you're only in the discussion to spout your prejudice, don't bother posting again.

the analogy Thompson draws between his approach to 'life forms' and a linguist's approach to language — mcdoodle

Yeah, after reading that bit the first time through I chose to ignore it, as it just didn't seem helpful. I thought I had a decent enough grasp of what he was talking about without any analogy.

Incidentally, my only encounters with virtue ethics have been with Aristotle and MacIntyre, and I like the approach a lot. Although it's a side-issue, I'd be interested to see someone more knowledgeable than me compare MacIntyre with Thompson, Foot and others. I'd imagine MacIntyre's focus on history to be one of the distinguishing things about his version of virtue ethics. But one book of his that I haven't read is the one where, as far as I can tell, he sets out his own ethical naturalism: Dependent Rational Animals.

Thanks @Pierre-Normand for a great introduction.

The paper's argument is somewhat convoluted, especially if you're like me and you're not familiar with the literature. And, assuming familiarity, Thompson doesn't really tell us what he's getting at until half way through. So first I'd like to say what I think he's trying to do and then lay out the paper's structure.

The point

The point of the paper is to defend neo-Aristotelian ethical naturalism against a certain kind of criticism. Ethical naturalism of the neo-Aristotelian variety is the meta-ethical component or basis of virtue ethics, which is the revival of Aristotle in moral philosophy that began in the late twentieth century, and which is distinct from deontology and utilitarianism.

Neo-Aristotelian ethical naturalism...

... does not involve a non-natural source or realm of moral value, as does Kant's ethical theory, or Plato's or Moore's. For Aristotle, judgments of what are goods for a human being are based upon considerations about human capacities, propensities, and the conditions for successful human activity of various kinds. Thus, while it is not a scientistic conception of human agency or moral value, it also contrasts clearly with many clearly non-naturalistic conceptions of agency and moral value. Central to the view are the notions that there are goods proper to human nature and that the virtues are excellent states of character enabling an agent to act well and realize those goods. — IEP

http://www.iep.utm.edu/naturali/#SH3a

The fact that it's not "scientistic" should allay concerns that this is a naturalism that seeks to reduce morality to biology, as we might say about evolutionary ethics; or seeks to address ethical questions with an empirical "science of morality" a la Sam Harris. This is significant, because this claim, that the naturalism of virtue ethics is not biologistic in this reductionist sense, is precisely what Thompson is defending in the paper.

The following passages tell us what he's doing, and they're worth including here for orientation because they're buried in the middle of the paper.

The concept human as our naturalist employs it is a concept that attaches to a definite product of nature, one which has arisen on this planet, quite contingently, in the course of evolutionary history. For our naturalist, this product of nature is in some sense the theme of ethical theory as we humans would write it. But there is in the larger literature a kind of fear or dread of any appeal to this sort of concept in ethical theory, and this is what I want to address. The contemporary moralist is anxious to leave this concept behind, and to develop his theory in terms of ‘persons’ and ‘rational beings’, but if the naturalist is right the concept in question is everywhere nipping at his heels. There is in practical philosophy a kind of alienation from the concept human and the sort of unity of agents it expresses — Thompson

The theory he is defending...

...might seem, for example, to constitute a sort of vulgar evolutionary ethics: a system, in any case, which doesn’t know how to distinguish a mere ‘is’ from the genuine moral or normative ‘ought’ ... And such a theory might seem to give a wrong position to natural facts in the formation of ethical judgment, to turn ethics into a sub-discipline of biology, and thus to deny what is legitimately called the ‘autonomy of ethics’. — Thompson

More specifically, the issue for Thompson is this: virtue ethics rests on a notion of what is characteristically good for a human being, which in turn rests on the naturalistic concept of the human form of life (the form that is instantiated in individual humans). But if this concept is an empirical one, then whatever we identify as the characteristically human good, and whatever states (the virtues) are identified as being required for action towards this good, can be thus identified only on the basis of experience.

And this means that neo-Aristotelian ethical naturalism is open to accusations of the naturalistic fallacy and of an attempt to derive ought from is. I'm not so sure that the position would collapse under these criticisms if indeed the human form of life is an empirical concept, but Thompson takes it for granted, so I'll go along with him. But I'd quite like to see someone address this question in the discussion. For example, do we have to accept that is-to-ought entailment is impossible, and could we not arrive at a non-biologistic meta-ethics even on the basis of an empirical concept?

The criticisms, Thompson says, rely on an empiricist thesis, namely that form of life is an empirical concept. Breaking this down, he identifies five empiricist propositions to attack, against which he proposes five anti-empiricist propositions. I won't cover them in this post, because my aim right now is just to explain (or work out) what he's doing.

The structure

The way I see it, the basic structure of the paper looks like this:

• He begins with the example of a naturalist examining jellyfish, to reveal the logic of various types of judgments, based on observation, that we make about living things, identifying types A through E.
• Next he presents the empiricist propositions and his own anti-empiricist propositions, relating them to the types of judgment found in the first part, and then explains how the empiricist propositions function in criticisms of virtue ethics.
• These propositions form the basis of the rest of the paper, in which he argues against the empirical and for the a priori.
• Finally he concludes that we can indeed interpret moral judgments naturalistically, on the basis that ethical naturalism can rest upon a non-empirical concept of the human life-form.

Anyway, this post is just scene-setting, partly for my own benefit. I hope to delve into the argument in future posts.

So more like a philosophical appropriation or expression of politics, rather than a political appropriation of philosophy.

I can honestly think of no more morally repugnant and irresponsible idea than the notion that "nature doesn't contain its own cause." Have you ever once stopped for a moment to think about the implications of this idea? Can you imagine a more repressive statement for the affirmation of the status quo? The divine right of kings, which held humanity down in the shitter for so long, is nothing less than this idea. The idea that women are inferior, that sex is dirty, that the body is base, that manual labour is valuable, that white people are better than the rest of the world, all these ideas and more have found their basis in the awful, disgusting notion that 'nature doesn't contain it's own cause'. It's vile, a repudiation of any possible happiness other than what is mandated by some extra-natural Idea which would, if it could, make the world itself disappear so as to be frozen in the image of of Timeless Beautiful Utopia where no actual things ever happen. It's a hateful, inhuman idea. — StreetlightX

If I may: I don't disagree with your substantive points here, but I think there's another side to the story, which is that materialism has not--at least not so many have noticed--managed to correct "the chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism". Actually existing materialism demonstrates all the faults that @Wayfarer criticizes: it is crudely reductionist, it erases meaning, and it renders human beings as passive billiard balls rather than as active agents--thus it is just as supportive of the status quo as the philosophico-religious tradition you rightly rail against.

This means that a tactical alliance between mystics and progressive materialists might sometimes be a good thing, especially if those mystics are the only prominent advocates for human meaning beyond what we have. I mean, nobody in the realm of politics fits the bill.

Maybe, but I'm quite happy to use it too.

If I'm feeling particularly 'reductive', the whole history of philosophy is more or less the history of a hatred and fear of the world, an attempt, in its search for 'first principles' and so on, to deny the sticky, messy substance of the world. That's the dark side of what it means to be defined as 'footnotes to Plato'. — StreetlightX

This is an appealing idea, but maybe it's an unavoidable result of the nature of philosophy. The very practice of philosophy is a performative repudiation of the messy, sticky world--unless, I suppose, the philosopher is aware of this. Maybe if philosophy can be said to have progressed it's to the extent that it developed this self-awareness.

I know that's probably tongue-in-cheek, but let me interpret it as making a serious point, namely that one can uselessly call anything reductionist if it explains something in other, perhaps simpler, terms. But in saying that idealism is reductionist or vice versa, I'm being much more specific than that: I'm talking about the similarities between certain ontological positions, or views on what best explains the world.