Interesting Kant developed this a bit. He wasn’t much of a mystic or an artist. Was this where he talked about beauty and the sublime? — Fire Ologist

This is what I have in mind: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aesthetic-judgment/#Disi

The "interest" is "beautiful" or "sublime" -- but the judgment is somehow disinterested, which as I understand it means we hold the judgment to hold for others.

In that spirit -- as I understand Disinterested Interest it's obviously paradoxical on its face.

Another way to put it might be a trained interest. So dis-interested in the sense of "I hopped off the left side of the bed today rather than the right side" as not being relevant at all, amongst other more controversial claims, and interested in the sense of "I know this or that is what they are looking for and in that interest I shall apply my talents in this or that way"


"Applying my talents" it's a bit of a stretch with respect to aesthetic attitudes, but I just mean that the judger of art applies their knowledge in judging the art-work. So it goes with any profession -- you wouldn't believe how much shit I've heard talked by one tradesman on another, whereas most of the world wouldn't care at all if the blahpideebip was bent krongy or left-Burly.

Could be. I'm invoking Kant's use, as I understand it at least.

Ultimately it wouldn't matter who where what when as long as we understand one another.

Your process of looking at pleasure as repulsive is a good exercise in thinking through aesthetics, I think.

It'd take the attitude of disinterested interest to be able to judge that way, I think?

But I'm specifically asking after if you or everyone else reading along have heard that term in the philosophical sense. By "that term" I mean "Disinterested Interest"

It has a specific meaning in aesthetics due to -- you may be shocked here ;) -- Immanuel Kant.

It may help here to steal an idea from the study of the arts. There, you don't get an answer to the question what makes some novels or pictures, etc. better than others. What you do get is a collection of examples which have been widely accepted as good examples. The expectation is that you will not be limited to imitating them (although that might be a useful exercise). The expectation is that students will be enabled to create new work by developing a critical judgement from those examples. The examples are collectively known as the canon.
True, there are various theories about what makes one work better than another, and students are taught these, or some of them. But they are taught as theories, subject to criticism. Again, the expectation is not that those theories will dictate what students will do. It is that those theories will be the basis of developing new ones. — Ludwig V

This is very much how I look at training in philosophy.

I think people misunderstand how much training and discipline goes into the arts when they react against this comparison.

Hey fellow traveler.

I can certainly see why I'm attracted to the existentialists -- Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus has provided comfort in many circumstances for me when dealing with my feelings of depression in particularly harsh times.

I think most philosophers would prefer not to deal with such topics -- they'd push it towards the psychologists or therapists and such.

Now, if someone is asking for help, I think that's the right thing to do. I'm not prepared to help someone on that level.

But I actually find it therapeutic to reflect on my experiences with depression, or at least what has been diagnosed as such.

For instance, Matthew Ratcliffe has written extensively about depression from a vantage that draws from Sartre, Husserl and Heidegger as well as embodied cognitive theory. Ratcliffe discusses the personal accounts of depression of such writers as Sylvia Plath and William Styron. What he concluded from these accounts is that depression is not just about feelings of despair but the loss of the ability ton discern salience and relevance in the world. — Joshs

I'd be interested in reading those writings of his, if you'd spare a reference for the best place to start.

I think it's clear this is not Williamson's view at all. — Srap Tasmaner

Yes, I agree.

The part that makes me wonder is -- while "knowledge" might mean different things to different philosophers, I'm not sure there's a philosophy which aims at understanding as opposed to knowledge. But then I'd accept 's example if it's important down the line.

Though something to add to that -- I'm wondering if people are familiar with the idea of a disinterested interest?

I think it could do work with respect to distinguishing between when a layperson does philosophy and when a trained philosopher does philosophy -- i.e. @Srap Tasmaner what you call the real work of philosophy.

This is a great reflection. So, yes, this is the sort of thing I'm thinking through. What I'd call your two different thinkers are two different aesthetic attitudes -- that is, the sort of attitude one adopts in coming to judge what is to be judged. I'd been avoiding the term up until now because I wanted to make sure we were all on board with the notion that "aesthetics" is a legitimate philosophical domain in this more general sense than the classical sense.

At least, legitimate enough to think through.


Upon doing so my thought was to try and introduce aesthetic attitudes as a means for distinguishing ways of doing philosophy.

And you went right out and gave a full fledged theory with that thought all on your own, saving me all the work. Thanks! I enjoyed reading through your reflection!

Now you're just tempting me to point out we have a choice :D

I'll follow along with the not-family-resemblance interpretation.

It's not that these boundaries are all that important, but if what we're doing at the moment is trying to understand what Williamson is up to, we want to know what analytic philosophy is, rather than what it looks like. — Srap Tasmaner

I have no problem with that. I'd hand it to the analytic philosopher to provide this knowledge, too. And I'd accept their rejection of odd counter-examples to take care of the worry. (I tend to think that all research programmes end up finding odd counter-examples that are besides the point -- we're just overgeneralizing)

It's important enough to know for understanding what he's doing and what we're up to.

Heh, fair.

And so that'd be another case I'd have to make.

Yes and no. An analytic philosopher can talk *about* values, the roles they play in discourse, all that sort of thing, but by and large is determined not to offer a "wisdom literature." So it might be able to "clarify" (hey Banno) that it's the values at stake in a dispute, rather than something else, but it's not, as a rule, espousing a set of values — Srap Tasmaner

True, it's not as wide as what "wisdom literature" captures -- especially with respect to the axiological.

In a way I can't help but see that commitment to clarity as something cared about, though. It's something I care about too. And I think that the value of clarity operates at a different "level" than the values under discussion so that it's not necessarily in question when employing non-moral values.

But, then, for myself it's not such a big deal to acknowledge "in this conversation I shall adhere to the rules of analytic philosophy where this, that, and the other "move" are unpersuasive for x y z reason" -- it's almost like saying the obvious to me to the point that I begin to wonder why it was ever controversial to say.

It's like asking "Which language game are we playing then?"

Yes. And that might be down to your values. You might hope (as Tarski did, on the eve of World War II) that promoting logic and clarity would help people talk out their differences rather than kill each other. But the norm itself is just fit to purpose, like showing your work, making your arguments. It's what the community needs to do what they've set out to do, even if that thing turns out to be a huge mistake. — Srap Tasmaner

Right. I think that these are two different values -- there's what's fit to purpose (Clarity is fit to the purpose of logic), and then there's a reason beyond this purpose which justifies the selection of the purpose, or at least explains (since I don't think we need some overall Reason to justify any particular investigation -- investigations into clarity and logic for their own sake are perfectly acceptable)

Somehow that collective norm doesn't cease to be a value just because we call it "function" to my mind -- but then I ought say I'm not a professional, again, and I could easily accept that I'm simply wrong about what Williamson is getting at and it's my own little itch that's not going away, but it's not relevant.

I think it's a distinction worth calling attention to because this is exactly what people hate about analytic philosophy, and why they'd rather read Nietzsche or the Stoics or Camus. — Srap Tasmaner

So naturally what I'd say is "within the tradition of analytic philosophy values are quarantined. In its place is some non-value term called "function" "

But this is seen as a good thing so that people with different values can communicate. That's perfectly acceptable when it's not the values which are the reason people are miscommunicating, though. :D

Though I also don't think it's as much of a hellscape as perhaps the analytic philosophers imagine.

Still, I say this from outside the tower. How the professionals conduct their business is certainly less of my affair than Williamsons. If anything I'd have to be consistent in saying "the professionals say it is such and such, and so...."

But then it seems we have to agree, ahead of time, to this analytic norm in order for it to function -- we'd either have to want to escape the hellscape, or at least acknowledge that there are other ways to make appeals within analytic philosophy which more or less attempts to circumnavigate the norms of reason such that there's no choice, there's just what a professional would do.

↪Moliere

I'll try too:

We decide to build a bridge because we believe it would make our lives better, and the sense of "better" there is colorably an aesthetic judgement. Life with the bridge would be preferable, simply in terms of what we want our lives to be like.

That's persuasive, but we still have the problem that the bridge's capacity to improve our lives is instrumental; it has to succeed as a bridge, and can be judged to succeed or fail as a bridge, without any consideration of our motive for building it, and without considering whether we were right that the bridge would improve our lives in the way we wanted.

(Oh! Spectacular movie reference for this: Stanley Tucci's speech about his bridge in Margin Call, 2011.)

You can always take a step up like this, and examine anything by placing it in a wider context, but while you will gain new terms for evaluating the thing, you'll lose the ones you had before. — Srap Tasmaner

So the part I'd focus in on is "...can be judged to succeed or fail as a bridge", because this utility is what I'd say are the sorts of we'll call them interests that the engineer and builder have to keep in mind. It can be judged to succeed or fail insofar that we have some standards of utility to judge it as successful or a failure.

But since we can't see the bridge as true we have to have some standards of judgment by which it is successful. One of those standards will include things like "the builder used the best knowledge we have today in justifying the techniques employed in the building of the bridge", and that in turn is where truth comes in, I think. That is, it sort of takes care of itself in a manner of speaking about judgment. We all want truth, but we have to make inferences to get there -- and when participating on a collective project like building a bridge those standards of inference will change not just between bridge builders and philosophers, where we'd expect a difference, but between bridge builders -- or even between sites of the same bridge builder.

This will be due to various details thus far seen as worthy of consideration when building a bridge.

Important to my mind, at least, is that this will hold for any profession. Though scientists are participating in a collective project, there are also specific standards of any given lab or study or what-have-you. Much effort has been put into making these uniform, and there's just a point where choices have to be made (the standards of medicinal research are different between the United States and Europe, though there's a good deal of crossover in purpose and resemblance of the kinds of rules). These can be at random, or they can be by a trained sort of judgment -- and generally insofar that we're not dealing with some new creative effort it seems to me that it's this trained judgment of a given profession which fits within this kind of non-moral, value-based judgment.

Here for instance you didn't have to take the word "good" to have an exclusively moral sense, and I feel quite certain than Count Timothy von Icarus would not. I think your use of "aesthetic" (or maybe "beautiful" in the mooted non-traditional sense) has noticeable overlap with his use of "good". — Srap Tasmaner

True. Though that's because I am trying to figure out a way to explain this other "kind" of judgment, or capacity of thought. There's the concept of truth and knowledge and being, and there's the concept of ethical goodness (today generally thought to apply to rules-following, consequences, or character) -- and somehow these judgments differ from both of those.

So, sure, "good" does not need to be so strictly defined -- it's only because I'm trying to highlight non-moral judgment as something more than particular whim, and that this is how the practical affair of making knowledge gets done. Truth doesn't get defined by aesthetics, but truth sort of takes care of itself in the process of judgment.

I think Williamson is only demanding that philosophical theories succeed as theories, to some recognizable degree. Whether they make our lives better or worse or give us a warm fuzzy, he's presumably going to consider a separate question.

OK, I think that's a fair ask. I'd go further and note how "succeed as theories" requires specification, though, and continue the same line of thought as above -- but then I may not be countering Williamson at all. I like standards, I just think they change, and so need specification and agreement and collective understanding and such.


****

So how does that sit? Do I manage to capture truth in the process sufficiently well to your satisfaction, or does it still seem like a stretch not worth making?

Sometimes the standards purport to be more than, or different from, aesthetics, no? Plain old pragmatics, for instance. To say that all standards come down to aesthetics requires some justification. — J

They do, and mayhaps my recent reply to Srap in the Williamson thread goes some way to bridge a gap here.

Yes, classically aesthetics is about the beautiful and the sublime, works of art and their judgment and so forth. But in the broader sense aesethetics is about value judgments which are non-moral, and yet still binding on others in some sense -- i.e. not strictly personal preference in the manner we say "I like vanilla ice cream, but you don't have to"

Basically,yes it's an extension of the category -- but it's reasonable on the basis that we make value judgments which, while there's no fact to the matter, and it's not really something that reflects on one's character or actions, we still hold it to be valuable for others in some sense, or choose to be binding to it.

Because it isn't?

I'm genuinely puzzled why you'd stretch the word "aesthetics" to cover, well, everything. — Srap Tasmaner

I'll give it a shot to make a case of some kind here.

Now if you wanted to talk about value or utility or something, you'd have an argument. — Srap Tasmaner

How is that different, exactly?

Utility -- it's not something we ought pursue in a ethical sense. It's not strictly true, either, because it's relative to one's desire. We have to want to build a bridge for some reason or other, and it's not an ethical value, at least not on its face. I wouldn't say someone is morally good for building a useful tool. I'd say it's useful.

Since it's not true, and it's not good -- well, maybe it's not beautiful in the old sense of the aesthetic, but there is this broader sense of "beautiful" which is that which is judged worthy, but not on moral grounds.

Basically the judgment of values which are not-moral falls into the aesthetic. Sometimes we like to say these are "epistemic values", or some such, but even there there are are choices between which epistemic values one makes appeals to.

At least, insofar that these judgments are held for more than one person. We say we like vanilla ice cream, but we don't hold that others should like that -- it's something I like.

But these other value judgments tend to be binding for practitioners -- the elegance of a mathematical theory persuades, and so forth.

EDIT: Perhaps another way: I think it makes sense to try and make appeals to what is attractive to a body of people. So here, with Williamson, in order to respond I'd have to do better than I really can, at the moment -- but the way I'll figure it out along the way is to see what it is Williamson cares about, what he finds persuasive, what arguments he allows, and so forth. I'll be looking for his taste in judgment: which arguments does he deploy? Surely they're all valid, but there's many arguments one can make. What topics are worthy? That sort of thing.

Philosophers only like truth. — Fire Ologist

I think this is a misunderstanding of philosophers that can be remedied by looking at Plato. Truth is important, but the triumvirate between the good, the beautiful, and the true is important to Plato -- he likes all three.

What does that make of your OP placing the aesthetic as prior to the ideas one is attracted to? — Fire Ologist

Hrrm, not prior. Only in the frame of. My suspicion is that there's more significance, but ultimately I don't think that insisting on truth is a very tractable solution to comparison since all philosophers claim truth. They all care about it so this doesn't serve to differentiate the reason for emphases.

I think the examples that are particularly interesting here are one's that aren't necessarily talking about the same thing. Sure, all philosophers are interested in truth and being. So why do some talk about epistemology, some talk about metaphysics, some talk about ethics, and so forth?

Or is it just willy nilly?

@ucarr

Tagging the author so he can see your comments.

And you do all this so that the choice between theories or approaches is not "merely aesthetic". (@Moliere) — Srap Tasmaner

What about "aesthetic" as opposed to "merely aesthetic"? -- the desire for results, success, knew knowledge -- how is that not aesthetic?

Isn't the attraction to results, success, and so forth very much an itch of the modern scholar?

I guess you're using "self-expression" in a very general way. A technical discussion of some point in modal logic, for instance -- you could say that Prof X, who holds one view, is "expressing himself" by doing so. But then what are we comparing self-expression to? What is not self-expressive? — J

With respect to philosophy, at least, it'd be non-philosophical self-expression. But then that'd be decided by some set of understood conversational rules or standards of evaluation or relations of significance.

But yes I don't mean it in terms of just saying whatever it is one wants because that's who one wants to express. Rather, within the confines of what is persuasive one expresses themself. They're working on the problem they're working on for a reason, yes? I don't mean it in terms of expressing their personality, but there's a reason that thinker or researcher is there.

So supposing Locke, for instance, in his treatises on government. He's going about describing a philosophical theory in that appropriate manner that philosophers did then, and he chose this topic because he genuinely opposes Kings.

In order to persuade people the expression will have to fit the norms of persuasion in said discipline and utilize evidence which is deemed worthy of consideration. But that whole "deeming worthy" part looks a lot like aesthetic judgment to me. It may turn out to be false and so discarded, but that choice to pursue some line of thought or deeming some evidence as relevant to the topic at hand -- that takes interpretation, which in turn takes standards -- i.e. aesthetics.

We know how this would go, in an artistic discussion, too. Artists like T.S. Eliot and Stravinsky claimed to be doing the very opposite of expressing themselves -- they wanted to escape from self, and focus on the work, appealing to the much older idea of art as involving making a good thing rather than expressing anything about the maker. But many have replied, "And yet something of yourself is surely being expressed, otherwise how is your work so immediately recognizable as yours?"

This probably hinges on exactly what we want the concept of "expression" to cover. In English, I think we tend to associate expressivity with the personal, the psychological. — J

Right, and that's not exactly what I'm meaning. Rather, there are subjective conditions of judgment which we then universalize -- expect others to hold a similar standard. Here meaning that there's someone that has to do the interpreting and thinking. It's a creative process, rather than something read off the evidence.

What T.S.l Elliot and Stravinsky claim I'd grant as within the area of aesthetics. Indeed, "reaching beyond" has often been something which inspires artists and attracts thought! What's important to reject is the notion that just because I say so so it makes it so, except fo the cases where this is not so :D

I think agreement does the work here. If people agree on a particular mode of judgment then people understand that there are some shared standards which guide the discussion.

How far does this parallel philosophy? Great question. (My hesitant answer: Not very far. But that's my taste again.) — J

Naturally, my taste is to say the opposite:

The debate in turn centers on whether self-expression is a key element of art; — J

Self-expression is a necessary element of philosophy.

Art might, at times, cross over into something more sublime.

But the philosopher is always speaking about themself, whether they like it or not. (At least, this is what I believe)

Might this be a poor criteria though? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes.

Praxis is almost absent from the academy, it's been wholly privatized by the dominance of philosophies of secularism. But on the view that praxis is a necessary prerequisite for theoria, being a professional, reasonable, etc. isn't enough. — Count Timothy von Icarus

But not for this reason.

Really you can substitute anyone in there -- any old expert will do as long as they have all the resources one could ask for in answering the question.


So for something non-secular -- compare the Buddhist monk to the Christian monk. Sometimes entirely praxis based, which is something I tend to favor, but still engaging in an interminable affair.

Not that this is bad, mind.

Only an indication -- at least if antinomies are a way to point to a wall -- that we're dealing with the limits of reason here.

I certainly think the perennialists often distort the traditions they appeal to in trying to make them uniform. Nonetheless, their point is not entirely without merit, and the convergence seems to me to be a sign of robustness, whereas a process that leads to endless fractal divergence bespeaks a sort of arbitrariness (particularly when the divergence occurs due to competing bare, brute fact claims or "givens").

At least, from within the traditions of praxis themselves, this is exactly what is predicted, so in their own terms, this is not a great difficulty. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Fair.

I'm afraid I find antinomies persuasive, for whatever reason. It seems like you have to pick one side and defend it, but it won't matter how you defend it just that you defend it because the other side will do the same.

I am not sure if this is a good example for what Hegel is talking about though. Presumably, you know that which is not human, and that's "the other side." Hegel is also certainly not saying one must step on the other side of an issue to express uncertainty about it. He is in some ways a fallibilist after all. Hegel is speaking to gnostic pronouncements about the limits of knowledge. This is isn't to proclaim something undecided, but rather to claim that one has decisively decided it. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Fair. I do think "God, Freedom and Immortality" are the examples Hegel had in mind, given his critique of Kant.

To borrow the quote I shared in the other thread from D.C. Schindler's the Catholicity of Reason that focuses on the major presumptions made by those who, out of "epistemic modesty" set hard limits on reason.

First, he responds to the idea that we never grasp the truth, the absolutization of Socratic irony as the claim that "all we know is that we don't know anything (absolutely)." — Count Timothy von Icarus

The second alternative above, namely, that I claim knowledge about things in a delimited area, but make no judgment one way or the other regarding anything outside the limits, is at least apparently less presumptuous than the first, ironically because it does indeed admit that some of its knowledge is true.

The difficulty is in fact twofold. On the one hand, as we observed at the outset of this chapter, one can set limits in the proper place only if one is already beyond those limits, which means that to the extent that self-limitation is strictly a priori, and not the fruit of an encounter with what lies outside of oneself [or language], the limitation is an act of presumption: one is acting as if one knows what one does not in fact know. On the other hand, and perhaps more profoundly, to allow oneself judgment on one side of a boundary and at the same time to suspend judgment on the other side is to claim — again, in an a priori way, which is to say without any sufficient reason — that what lies on the other side does not in any significant sense bear on my understanding of the matter or matters lying on this side. But of course to make this claim without investigation and justification is presumptuous.

I don't think that setting a limit is strictly a priori. And I don't think setting limits requires a presumption -- it's not like I'm saying "Tim, I've seen the limits of reason and these are it. Heed my call, or suffer the consequences!"

I'm saying "Hey, look over at that God debate that's been happening for thousands of years. Notice how smart people, people we would not otherwise question, disagree? Maybe there's a limit here"

On the other hand, and perhaps more profoundly, to allow oneself judgment on one side of a boundary and at the same time to suspend judgment on the other side is to claim — again, in an a priori way, which is to say without any sufficient reason — that what lies on the other side does not in any significant sense bear on my understanding of the matter or matters lying on this side. But of course to make this claim without investigation and justification is presumptuous. — Count Timothy von Icarus

So it's not this. "allowing oneself judgment" isn't something we can do. We judge whether we like it or not.

But the process of philosophy sorts out the good from the bad judgments. Or attempts to.

Also, I ought note that just because God lies on "the other side" in terms of justificatory knowledge, that does not then mean I think or argue that God is insignifcant.

Indeed, lots of my thoughts deal with wondering why the false is significant, or something along those lines. And not for a priori reasons.

Well, ironically, on the relativistic view, one is only ever in a fly bottle if one has already placed themselves inside it. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Only in the extreme version whereby whatever one person decides is right is what is right.

I think the notion of the fly-bottle is to say something like: the philosophy you espouse is clouding your judgment without you realizing it. You see the world and bounce against what you cannot see. But if you let go of your philosophical ideas, arguments, presuppositions, what-ifs, etc., and chase therapy you'll find that the world was always there all along, and it was the various ideas you had about it that stopped you from flying.

But then: Do we ever get out of the fly bottle? Was Wittgenstein outside it?

For some it's (almost) a reflex or bias. In so far as "aesthetics" is inherently philosophical, whether or not one makes aesthetic choices "in philosophy" seems to presuppose (an unconscious) metaphilosophy — 180 Proof

Yeah. Though I'm rather explicit about the importance of aesthetics in philosophy :)

Yes. I'm drawn to concise, clearly written, jargon-free texts on (suffering-based / agent-based) ethics and (naturalistic) ontology.

Why are you more drawn to particular philosophers, schools, styles, or problems?
They tend to focus on aporia which align with my own speculations or reflectively throw me into question.

Is there such a thing as bad taste in philosophy? If so, what should one do if we encounter bad taste?
I find 'essentializing' any form of bigotry, misogyny, homophobia, pedophilia, superstitions, academic quarrels, etc to be in "bad taste" and I tend to name and shame the culprit.

Likewise, is there such a thing as good taste in philosophy such that it differs from "the opposite of bad"?
As a rule, I don't 'essentialize' (i.e. reify the non-instantiated or un- contextualized) and avoid vague words or slogans as much as I can. — 180 Proof

Excellent. Those are very clearly stated philosophical aesthetics.

Good philosophy is clear and explicit. The topic is chosen due to the reader's position towards the topic such that it will result in aporia.

Bad philosophy utilizes the notion of essence to justify bigotry, misogyny, homophobia, pedophilia, superstitions, or academic quarrels and other such things. The appropriate way to react to this bad taste is to shame the person.

And, as a rule, reifying the non-instantiated or un-contextualized and using vague words or slogans is to be avoided as much as you're able.


Also, yours is a more "subjectivist" bent on an aesthetics --i.e. these are rules and attractions that work for you, but to each their own.


That's clearer than I can answer these questions for myself. :D Thanks @180 Proof

Some people have a decided preference for the new. Sometimes this is argued for, as Dewey does: the old ideas are dead, no longer suited to our time, and we need new ideas that suit our needs. Sometimes this is argued for as "the philosophy of the future", leading the way, changing the world rather than meeting the present need.

As some people want to be in the vanguard or the avant garde, some people want to stand athwart history saying, stop. Or, if they're not interested in a fight, they want to ignore whatever foolishness people nowadays are getting up to, and stick by the tried-and-true ideas of their forefathers. Some people are naturally suspicious of the new.

As I say, not a motivator for everyone, but I think for some people very important. — Srap Tasmaner

Yes, that's a good one. Nietzsche as the philosopher of the future and Burke as the lover of the tried-and-true.

That's an especially interesting category because I can see how it ties into the ideas of thinkers, too.

What if the aesthetic justifications we offer are such as they are on account of our culturally/ historically conditioned intuitions and preferences? I suppose genetics may also be in play. Anything else? — Janus

True, they're not necessarily disconnected. A person who likes French literature because their heritage is from France comes to mind here. Though then I'd put it that this isn't exactly an aesethetic justification -- it's why I like something like ice cream, but since not everyone has French heritage I wouldn't expect others to feel the same as me.

The aesthetic judgment is this universalizing of the subjective, in a way. I know that it's an affectivity and interpretation, but if only you'd watch this movie I'm sure you'd feel the same!

So why this one rather than that one? Rorty used to say that he just didn't have an itch where some philosophers wanted to scratch. And vice versa, I suppose. — J

Right! That's a great question.

I agree that I can usually find something attractive in a philosopher if I give it enough time.

The more general question might be interesting here too: "Why this philosopher and not that one, when both are good?" followed by "What is it about this group of philosophers/ies that includes them as the "good" ones? Just that I can find something interesting?"

How this fits into an aesthetic appreciation, I'm not sure, but "an idea that matters to me" seems to be square in the middle of why I'll read the next book I'll read. Oh and I guess I should add: The more I'm familiar with some particular conversation around an issue, the more I'm likely to feel that the next contribution to that conversation will contain "ideas that matter."

Yes, that makes sense. And good point in bringing up "mattering" -- in a way that's the question. What is this "mattering"?

I think familiarity helps for generating interest. In part that's because philosophers are constantly referencing one another, so if you find one thing interesting you'll likely be easily able to find another reference on the same topic with a different perspective.

Yes I think as a atheïst I'm looking for a sort of non-religious theodicee, like the first philosophers, that is an 'arche' or way to envision the world as one continuous whole.

I find that I side mostly on the side of the tragic/sensual/empircal and dislike most spirituality, metaphysics or over/mis-use of dialectics or reason.

Philosophy at this point for me is mostly about doing away with bad ideas, which is most of philosophy. — ChatteringMonkey

How do you do away with bad ideas, and how do you identify them as bad? Is it just that they don't provide a non-religious theodicy?

I'm guessing not because you go on to say "tragic/sensual/empirical" as something good whereas "spirituality, metaphysics, over/mis-use of dialects or reason" is bad -- in the aesthetic sense.

If no further answer then cool. We've reached the aesthetic terminus.

And I feel pretty good about it actually, maybe wish I had come to this conclusion sooner. I certainly wouldn't want to waste any more time on bad philosophy.

I think other people have to go through the process they have to go through, and maybe that involves trying out bad ideas, but mostly I think they are just misguided. — ChatteringMonkey

I think that's a common experience for people who read philosophy. Eventually you start to focus in on the couple of things that really interest you because there's just too much out there to be able to read it all.

But I like to wander around, still. I'm uncertain that much philosophy is truly bad, but only appealing to some other aesthetic. Not quite -- there are times where I don't think this -- but it's the idea that I'm thinking towards.

So, I guess I like people who can write in this way, not so much inspiringly, although that helps, but interestingly. Charles Taylor is a good example. He doesn't strike any high oratorical notes, but despite having great density of ideas he nonetheless writes more like a great historian, the opposite of dry or abstruse. William Durant's philosophy stuff is like this too, and he is also pretty pithy.

This can make a big difference. I don't know if I'd ever recommend reading Gibbon to learn about Rome, but he's worth reading for the prose and Enlightenment era philosophy splashed liberally within his commentary. Whereas I sometimes struggle with works when reading them feels tedious.

That said, I don't really like polemical works, even when I agree with them. They certainly aren't the same thing, style (even oratorical) and polemic. Nagel, Lewis, and Frankfurt are good in this way, as recent examples. Augustine is a master. Chesterton is too good at it for his own good. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Nice. That's the sort of reflection I'm thinking after.

Also, it'd be interesting -- upon identifying an aesthetic reason for such and such a philosopher -- to attempt to go from that aesthetic grounding to the ideas themselves.

I agree. Although I hope it doesn’t prejudice the way we view each other.

Just because someone is drawn to Nietzsche, but repulsed by Aristotle, might mean nothing more than they don’t really understand one (or both) of them. It might not mean they are anti-essentialist. — Fire Ologist

Sure. Though I'd more want to ask after what's attractive in each rather than the position of essentialism.

Rather than asking after the strict inference I'm noting that there's more to philosophical argument than deduction, argument, and inference. And it's not insignificant.

But it's hard to articulate, hence the questions.

Yes, but I would say, if the ideas are the focus, the ideas can reshape the aesthetics as much as the aesthetics might have pushed one towards a certain idea. — Fire Ologist

Sure. If I'm correct then there's not really a separating one from the other -- we're attracted to an idea for a reason, itself an idea.

Reason, itself, is attractive. That's why philosophers pursue it.

it is not as if austere empiricism or post-modernism don't rely on such appeals. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Definitely.

To bring up something I said earlier about the "limits of reason" in many contemporary philosophical camps—I would point out that the claim that reason cannot adjudicate between paradigms or world-views is, of course, a gnostic claim. One presumably knows this if one claims it to be so. Yet, as Hegel says, to have recognized a boundary is to already have stepped over it.

Now, if we claim that reason is in a sense isolated within "world-views and paradigms," we face the odd situation where some world-views and paradigms resolutely deny our claim. They instead claim that knowing involves ecstasis, it is transcendent, and always related to the whole, and so without limit—already with the whole and beyond any limit. And such views have quite a long history.

Our difficulty is that, if reason just is "reason within a paradigm," then it seems that this view of reason cannot be so limited, for it denies this limit and it is an authority on itself. Our criticism that this other paradigm errs would seem to be limited to our own paradigm.

The positive gnostic claim, to have groked past the limits of intelligibility and seen the end of reason (or immanence or presence) from the other side faces an additional challenge here if we hold to the assumption that any such universal claim must be "from nowhere," and itself issued from "outside any paradigm, " since it is also generally being claimed that precisely this sort of "stepping outside" is impossible. But perhaps this is simply a misguided assumption. Afterall, one need not "step out of one's humanity" to know that "all men are mortal." One can know this about all men while still always being a particular man.

So, that's my initial thoughts on the idea that reason cannot adjudicate between paradigms (which suggests an aesthetic answer perhaps). It seems this must remain true only for some paradigms, and one might suppose that being limited in this way is itself a deficiency (one that is both rational and aesthetic). After all, what is left once one gives up totally on reason as an adjudicator? It would seem to me that all that remains is power struggles (and indeed , some thinkers go explicitly in this direction). Further, the ability to selectively decide that reason ceases to apply in some cases seems obviously prone to abuse (real world examples abound)—in a word, it's misology. — Count Timothy von Icarus

If it were possible to establish some way of making appeals appealing then this might be a way towards a paradigm which isn't local -- not a view from nowhere, but a view from anywhere as @Banno puts it. At least if my suspicions are correct.

That is -- whether reason can or cannot adjudicate between traditions, or paradigms, is sort of an open question still. I wouldn't go so far as to claim I know that it cannot be so. Only that it's not so right now.

Especially with a few topics whereby otherwise reasonable people with all the resources one could ask for -- professors, philosophers, academics, in a word "experts" -- that don't reach termination.

I say "God, freedom, and immortality" as the obvious topics because Kant. And I disagree with Hegel where he speaks about having to be across a barrier to point to its limit. Like you note -- I know I'm mortal because I'm human. I don't have to know what it's like to be superhuman to know my limit.

Rather, we can point to a wall through the example of the interminable antinomies of philosophy -- realism/anti-realism in all topics.

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What's interesting to ask here is -- why does this philosophy argue the universe is finite, and that one argue that the universe is infinite if there's no fact to the matter that could settle the dispute?

It looks to me that there's an aesthetic element here: somehow the finite or the infinite are perceived as more "beautiful", and so the arguments which a philosopher will deploy comes from this beginning attraction.

If so then being able to explicate these aesthetic choices would be a way to build bridges between traditions -- i.e. journey towards the view from anywhere, but together; even if our traditions cannot both be universally true.

So, no, I'm not trying to abandon reason or something along those lines. "the appeal to reason" is what structures philosophy.

It's just a little more complicated than we thought.

Eliminitive materialism or austere behaviorism might seem absurd, yet they are unassailable given their own presuppositions. Yet I'd maintain that it is ugly and small regardless of this consistency and closure. Nietzsche's thought has a certain beauty, Milton's Satan is inspiring, yet these also suffer from a certain smallness and ugliness. Absurdity is in the end, not glory. So too the idea of a maze of fly bottle like games that thought is forever trapped to buzz about in. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Nice. These are the sorts of judgments I'm thinking about here. What is it about eliminative materialism or austere behaviorism that makes them ugly?

Must glory be the result of philosophy, or could it just be an inspiration?

And if we hop out of one fly bottle and into another, no matter what, then wouldn't that be nice to know that there is no "outside the fly bottle"?

Oh, sorry -- I should add an answer to your question directly @SophistiCat -- astronomy would not serve the purpose I'm intending for the example. It's something that does have predictive power, that does look for where it's wrong, and continues to generate new questions and answers and observations and knowledge.

I wonder why you picked astrology as an example, rather than astronomy? Would you consider them more-or-less on the same footing, and if not, why not? — SophistiCat

I don't think they're on the same footing. I think that's because astrology's purpose isn't to describe, but it's in the language of description. It "works" at a descriptive level because it's complicated and vague enough that any example can be explained. But then that's just why it's a degenerative research program: they're not trying to figure out which part is wrong, but rather it's a constant quest to demonstrate what's right about it.

The reason I use astrology is because it's an example of a coherent language game that people claim has descriptive power, but I interpret it as a language game which people play to talk about themselves and others and their interpersonal lives that only has the appearance of describing people.

Basically it's possible, even if something is useful and coherent, for it to be entirely false even though we see a pattern there and we think it's due to features of the world.

Well... I think I disagree with that formulation a bit.

I think aesthetics have an influence on the ideas that are produced, rather than being a byproduct.

It looks like a biproduct, but:

I wonder if anyone can really answer this. We all like to think we know what makes our gut our gut. — Fire Ologist

I don't think we can definitively answer it, but it is the sort of question we can share answers with one another, and thereby get a deeper understanding of one another's perspectives.

Fair question.

It's not necessary necessary.

And if we can find ways to get along that don't include killing one another then that's a good example.

Usually we're not killing one another: that's another good example.

And yet.... if we look at what people call politics...

Yes. All political philosophies which actually do something -- the point of politics -- get down in the mud.

In this interpretation Stalin and Mao were heroes? — unimportant

Yes.

Much like George Washington, especially with respect to Mao -- they both "relinquished" power.

US revolutionaries would poor molten metal into people's throats that agreed with the brits. They were not kind people. It was a revolution.

And yet we remember George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine....


Just like us in the US where the 1 dollar has George Washington's likeness, so do the Chinese printed currency have Mao's likeness.

So can it be said the end jusifies the means and that all states have blood on their hands but communism at least aims for a better end goal? — unimportant

That's been a common justification, yes. So it can be said.

I'm a little skeptical because it looks like what every government says: just keep on killing motherfucker, then peace will come.

Maybe because the person is left-handed. Not “just” because I looks pretty to someone. — Fire Ologist

Maybe.

But in the "usual" table manners:

I would say, we are forming this consensus both because we each know how to make things up really well, AND because they reflect something true and ordered in the world. — Fire Ologist

You would, but I wouldn't. ;)

So if we have consensus that we don’t “just” make order up, we have consensus that there is “order in the world”. We draw on observations that we can point to, each of us separately and both of us together, in the world, and from those, fashion an ordered description. — Fire Ologist

We have consensus on the first point, but no the implication.

Just because I see the stone drop 20 times every time I drop it that does not then mean that "there is order in the world" -- most specifically thinking here with respect to "the world".

There's order in the world could mean something small, which I agree with, and something large, which I disagree with.

The "large" thing I disagree with is the notion that nature behaves according to law.

In the most literal sense -- there is no government which passes laws that make our universe. This is to interpret the universe in terms of our governments. While useful sometimes, it's not true.

I think my answer to that is pretty idiosyncratic. — T Clark

My expectation is that all of our answers will be pretty idiosyncratic, at first -- but perhaps through that expression we can find paralleles and bridges.

I've talked about it on the forum before. I carry a model of the world around inside me, in my mind - intellectual but also visceral. I visualize it as a cloud lit from within. I stand in front of it and I can see everything. Dogs and trees, but also love, ideas, and experiences. Myself and other people. Neutrinos and the Grand Canyon. Things I know well are more in focus while those I know less are foggier and vague. Then there are things not included at all - things I'm not aware of.

I judge the truth, value, or interest of something by how it fits in with my model. Things that fit well help bring things into more focus or might expand the cloud. Things that don't fit well might cause me to reexamine my ideas and might make things less in focus. Things that don't fit at all, and that includes much of philosophy, I'm not really interested in.

Makes sense to me.

In my experience, this is where intuition comes from. If you want to simplify, I just you could just say I pick the ideas I'm interested in intuitively.

So this is the part that I want to probe -- and you need not have an answer that satisfies the aesthetic question -- why am I picking the ideas I'm interested in intuitively? Is there some further philosophical reason for it, or is it "Cuz it's pretty to me"?

I tend to think that we terminate our thoughts in aesthetics, so this question has wider implications than I've said up front. If they terminate there then we're pretty much in agreement.

AH! That helps. lol.