Vance is growing on me. He's in favor of monarchy. Can you imagine? Think about how easy it would be to do something substantial about climate change if we had a king. Wall St's power could easily be broken. The US becomes hyper isolationist. Let China and Russia do whatever they want. Project 2025? I'm asking why not? For real. — frank

I'm pretty sure that a monarchy arising out of a Trump-Vance presidency-become-king would not result in addressing climate change, or addressing problems of class, or make the US hyper isolationist.

I was told to watch it by all sorts of people but never did. :grimace: — Leontiskos

I recommend it if you're in the mood for a comedy which dances across various philosophical distinctions in constructing a plot, as one does ;)

It's good! check it out!

Yep, and probably also because it is impossible to express all the nuance of certain things. In that case to even try is to show that you don't understand what you're dealing with. — Leontiskos

Yeh.

Though every once and again a bright idea pops up.

well the interesting thing about "the old book" is the presuppositions that are brought to it. I don't wish to reduce the value to those presuppositions, but when a text is approached as sacred or inspired it eo ipso comes to possess an unmatched power to express nuanced ideas, such as parables. — Leontiskos

Heh. I call it "the old book" because I'm not comfortable calling it the good book. But that is part of my presuppositions that I'm bringing to it.

I don't know if it's sacred or inspired, but I definitely see its poetic value -- which in my way of looking at the world is a very high place to put it, though my understanding might disappoint some interpreters.

But the parables are great touchstones I think just by virtue of how the book is treated. In some sense its poetic value is derived from how it's treated, to dovetail with your:

This is something like Kierkegaard's idea that the believer measures himself against the infinite, and for that he stands taller. — Leontiskos

This strikes me as a strawman, but perhaps we can let it stand as a warning. Perhaps you wish to warn, "You may not be doing this, but be sure that you do not do this." This is fine as far as it goes, and I have said similar things:

Truth be told, PDE is an unwieldy principle. There are cases (such as the hysterectomy) where it seems to obviously apply, but it has often been noted that in other cases the principle can be easily abused. Our topsy-turvy discussion in the other thread got at some of the nuance involved.
— Leontiskos

This is the sort of ambiguity that seems to always follow the PDE, namely cases which are hard to decide. So this is in line with the tradition of the PDE, and I think it is good to recognize such limitations.
— Leontiskos — Leontiskos

Yup. We agree there, and that's basically what I mean with the story. It's just an introduction to a thought with a funny conclusion, not an argument or anything of that sort.

A more current but exactly the same example is Chidi from The Good Place :D

Now a parable is able to do what a rational argument could never do, and parables certainly have their place in ethics. Yet as I see it, this parable of yours stands, but only on one foot. In the world of parables, it feels a bit flat and one-dimensional, perhaps because its roots go no further than satire; its target has no more depth than the determinist or monomaniac.

The better parable as I see it is not Buridan's Ass, but Balaam's Ass. At times wisdom will speak through the beast, from the source it is least expected, and it will cut through the rationalizing foolishness of the rider. Granted, there is no good reason why Balaam's Ass cannot speak through Buridan's Beast (and yet we have now left syllogistic).

Lastly, I will point out that lessons and parables and warnings have their place, but of all things they are least helped by repetition. To beat the drum of a parable or a warning again and again does no good, especially if it stands only on one foot. It will tire and collapse, and lose what efficacy it might have had. Confusing the parable for a philosophical example causes it to fall prey to this form of repetition. — Leontiskos

(You often give voice to a tongue that should not be foreign to philosophy but is nevertheless opaque to the analytic philosophy that dominates English-speaking forums like this one. Your style of pacifism is a potent example. I am not averse to speaking in this tongue, but only rarely would I expect it to bear fruit in a place like this. It's hard to speak about parables in a place like this.) — Leontiskos

Thanks that's very high praise :) -- It's all just me working out my own thoughts that I'm willing to share, though, and it's part of what I consider to be in fair trade: I like to read others' thoughts, and so share in kind.

Parables are hard anywhere I think. What makes them difficult is what also makes them attractive. I'm very much attracted to stories, though, because I think they set out nuances better thanwell even though the difficulty is that the nuances aren't specified and there's a certain amount of interpretation that has to go into them.

I agree they cannot be counter-examples or examples, so much as stories which set out an idea. Sometimes that idea can be as powerful as Balaam's Ass. I think that a stronger story than Burridan's, at least :D -- at least for thems who like the old book, which I do when I can use it as a touchstone.

Though maybe the distinction is between the sublime and the humorous? Chidi Anagonye, at least, is a lot of fun to watch, and there's something to him that we can relate to (unlike the ass, since we'd surely not die but make a choice)

I never thought to interpret Balaam's Ass like that, though, which adds an interesting layer: "Get out of your head, dork!" is the kind of message I imagine which unites these. (EDIT: Not that I'd know anything about that... ;) )

That's not how I understand virtue ethics. It's claim is more like that we ought be charitable, we ought be courageous, we ought be forgiving, and that's an end to it; there is no further step to duty, no "because". — Banno

I think this relevant due to

I think in Aristotle there is a "because", but it's based upon roles -- and the only roles he considers as truly eudemon are the politician and the philosopher. (and, in the end, notes how the philosopher is actually better lol)

The bit where I get hesitant is where he considers the slave as having a properly moral place within society, and that the master ought have slaves to direct them towards their good.


EDIT: At least with respect to virtue-ethics that focus upon character to a point where you can have what are almost two types of being among the same species due to one being the ones who say "bar bar bar bar" and the others being clearly virtuous.

I think that I'm getting along with the satire, though?

Basically rationality can't just be reduced to a set of deterministic rules. Though I'll admit I've not read the original text or anything -- it's certainly an example that's been "handed down" to me that I think through as an example that demonstrates how one cannot hold to just one principle or two principles or something along those lines. At one point we may find ourselves in contradiction and if all we do is hold to two contradictory principles we'll do nothing but compute them (if that is our true desire), and die.

Since we fall into contradiction, at least strictly logical determinism is false?

That might be (but actually isn't) an interesting game, but it is no longer chess. Allegedly, rugby was invented when some idiot was supposedly playing football and picked the ball up and ran with it. A few other things had to change before it became a game worth playing.

There is a card game called "52 card pick up", in which the dealer throws all the cards up in the air, and leaves their opponent to pick them up. It's faintly amusing. Once. — unenlightened

I'll admit that that's not my favorite game. And there are only so many times I can play it.

Though what becomes shit was at one point food

Derivative problem. If you are a platonist, you think math is discovered, if you are a nominalist or conceptualist, you think math is invented. — Lionino

Hrm. What's it derived from? "How does math work?" ?

heh. I certainly am murikan, and have no knowledge of the ass/arse distinction lol

Banno's thesis is that maths is invented, not discovered, just as games like chess are. Well then it is very easy to invent some rules for a game or some rules for a mathematics, and there are lots of them. But most are dull or unplayable. — unenlightened

This, though, is the stronger point.

If the King is in check then the other player can swipe away the peices, but this is rude (and so it goes with the other games; the dull and unplayable games seem to proliferate, and the interesting ones are the ones we ought go for)

I think math is probably like chess, but that chess was built upon mathematics: so the metaphor is good, but starts on the wrong side.

A better win might be if we could come up with a new form that was consistent and incomplete, but not isomorphic with arithmetic or something like that. I don't have a better set up that would encourage that, unfortunately. — unenlightened

Me either.

Though I think your insight here is worth preserving:

So the thread itself is badly set up as a game that doesn't have much interest or significance, because posters can, and nearly always do, take the nuclear option and pretend they have "won" — unenlightened

The nuclear option -- contradiction -- is something like the fruit on the tree in paradise?

no worries. I'm not ready to commit to a reading group until I finish my thread on Marx, anyways.

Random posts or convo is where I'm at with Sartre. I'm motivated, but I have other thoughts too :)

Yeah. I think that's true -- and his positivity is often missed because of his brutal honesty.

I mean, I'm like that too :D -- I'm attracted to Sartre for a reason, but I've come to see some limits to his thinking and I continue to think through that.

People can live decent, honorable lives and still be out of touch with what Chuang Tzu, one of the founders of Taoism, calls one's "Te," "virtue," "intrinsic virtuosities." — T Clark

I agree.

Going into a metaphilosophical tangeant:

Sartre follows the virtue of honesty to self and others -- to a fault if you have any other virtue on your list of worthwhile habits.

The waiter can live a decent, honorable life in bad faith. This goes a bit into what I was saying about Sartre earlier, at least with respect to B^N: he's describing a problem and giving a solution to it in the same book. I don't thinkit has anything to do with knowledge or ethics, (Well, it does, but it starts at "ontology" rather than the others is what I mean) though of course that's part of The Background given it's a work of philosophy or rather a work on ontology (or metaphysics -- I reread it a few times and I think I ought to have said "ontology" rather than "metaphysics" -- my head-cannon getting in the way of communicating clearly)

BUT:

Sartre is cruel with himself and thereby cruel to others as well, because it's justified and consistent I suppose.

I like his philosophy for being clear, but I really feel a certain cruelty to it. Hence Levinas, ethics, all that stuff.

And to read Flannel Jesus' posts is to realize that he did not intend the OP in any special sense. I see no evidence that he was specifically speaking about material implication. — Leontiskos

Yeah, looking at OP at least, I can see how there's ambiguity there: whether material implication, or some other meaning, was meant isn't specified in the OP and so whatever meaning was meant there's still ambiguity there (which may explain some of the divergence here that I'm surprised to find)

The part where "A" is used as a variable is what made me jump to propositional logic.

Your points about the difference between two versions of contradiction was interesting and I was thinking about it then got sidetracked in reading the back-and-forth.

Formal logic is parasitic on natural logic, and "logic" does not mean "formal logic," or some system of formal logic. — Leontiskos

Yeah, we agree there. I think @TonesInDeepFreeze does too, given the various caveats they gave in their posts about different forms of logic.

And again we come back to: as long as the people doing philosophy stipulate definitions they agree :D

This forum is populated by all kinds of people, yes. But I would ask you to remember that you're posting in the logic subforum, and "@TonesInDeepFreeze has responded with that in mind: and done so with precision and accuracy, so I'm grateful at least for their help.

"most people's general sense of seeing" -- I mean we all have places we come from and thoughts we start at, but if you walk into the chemistry department and start talking alchemy someone might correct you.

Then surely the sum of any two integers is 0, and we must accept that two rules can be combined and that all can be used more than once

Or we must never reference a previous rule to even your post, and the sum of any two integers is the sum as we understand it from the textbooks.

And, having said this, the first is the assertion, the second the negation, and now I'm wondering -- what's the negation of the negation?

Which antecedents?

I think it's a good story to highlight how we can get into a bind about decisions if all we do is follow some rules in the mode of obedience to them: sometimes the rules tell us to do both things which cannot be done. What is the rule to follow when we find ourselves in contradiction?

If we reject those rules then we won't die -- but it'll take an act of creativity and choice.

Burridan's Ass, at least as I mean to use the story, is meant to highlight how you have to make choices that don't appeal to rules (such as which rule to follow, or what rule to introduce to resolve tensions -- such as when you'll die by following a rule)

EDIT: Also, I ought say: I think it's a good story for highlighting a problem in rationality. That's the real conversation.

On the Ass:

I think it's a good story for introducing a problem to rationality.

The "ass" can be just any decision-maker at all. It's not particular to the animal.

The important bit is that the ass only holds to a few principles or rules in making decisions.

So as wiki points out: the ass dies because the ass holds one principle (eat when hungry, drink when thirsty, and follow the shortest path) that they starve to death. The "ass" is hungry and thirsty and the pile of hay is equidistant, with respect to the ass, as the pool of water.

Or, the example I think of first: if the ass follows the principle "Go to the closest pile of food with the most food" and both piles of hay are equitable, and the ass cannot introduce another principle (here the important bit is that the ass is an animal following a particular code of rationality which cannot be changed -- ie like an animal, in the traditional sense where humans and animals are distinct) then the ass will die while following a particular rendition of rationality.

The problem becomes: insofar that rationality is following rules, how do you introduce new rules? If there is a rule for rules, then it will fall to the same point Burridan's Ass is meant to bring up.

The idea is: Don't be an Ass.

But how to not starve while still being rational?

Yeh, later. And I'm interested, later, in corrections -- it was a thought I had held onto and felt like I ought share.

In some sense, and maybe this is the analytic side in me, I feel like Sartre is doing description more than "how to know" type stuff. After describing the fundamental ontology -- especially given that egos come after being-in-itself/being-for-itself -- we can some to ask how to know.

Or, in another philosophy you can do the opposite -- it's just I think Sartre is starting on the metaphysics side rather than the epistemology side.

The one bit I didn't say earlier is that Being and Nothingness is a work of ontology, but you're asking -- at least what I'd call -- a question about epistemology.

I'm aware enough about B^N that knowledge somehow connects the Being-for-itself to the Being-in-itself, and that it's a materialist philosophy.

But I'm cautious to put it in terms of epistemology because Sartre's work is much more in the vein of ontology as primary to epistemology, and "ontology" here is defined in the phenomenological tradition.

ahhh yup. You're right.

I'll add a link to your post here to the original post.

Eh, I'd say the formal logic is built upon natural language, but we can get by with specification of meaning -- and when the OP is in the Logic sub-forum it makes sense to default to trained logic, especially when it's using the language of "A", like a variable, so it's already abstract and not a natural language construction.

The obligation is disappointment, at that point I think. That is, there is a causal relationship between the obligation and feeling (presuming you wanted the marriage at least). Just because obligations cease to be doesn't mean they never were, right? Changing ones mind doesn't really work when it comes to the truth of a statement: What about obligations makes them different?

Seems to me that the social setting is more important than one's mind: so if you promise something, you're under an obligation because that's how we understand one another and that has causal properties.

Contradiction!

Proof:

The sum of any two integers is zero. — jgill

No two rules can be combined and none can be used more than once. — I like sushi

Rule 1: The sum of any two integers is 0. — Lionino

What does "simply a language issue" mean?

PM'ed my response, and just glad Sartre is coming around as a point of thought on the forums.

I read page 27, tho I'm not sure what to say in response.

All rules prior to this post are not to be followed after this post.

All posts ought to follow the rule: share your favorite (philosopher, artist, food, or quote)

But what is the plan? Beyond being polite and amiable to your fellow human? — apokrisis

I mean, that's at least step 1, yes? If you can't be polite and amiable to your fellow humans, then it's unlikely anything will come of our efforts (though possible, in the case of the smarties out there who luck out)

I'm tempted to go anarchist here and say "Plan?! There is no plan -- only the impulse towards freedom and figuring out how we get there, but together!"

But really I don't mean that.

I'm somehow trying to figure out my own anarcho-marxism, whatever that amounts to. I suppose it's my own dialectic.

He famously stated that "existence precedes essence". As I understand this the very premise Sartre works from is that of atheism. The paperknife is an object created for a purpose, where the purpose is its 'essence'. Humans have no 'essence' because they were not created.

The term object can be attached to a being-for-itself in the realisation of an individual being among other individuals. He terms this as the 'Other'. — I like sushi

The small disagreement I have is I'd sayis that "The paperknife" is more meaningful than "Being-in-itself", at least within my head-cannon right now (I've recently been going back to Sartre)

Yes, Sartre is an atheist. Though I don't think it's a starting premise.

I want to suggest that the free individual could choose to find Hazel Barne's translation online, then discuss it -- Sartre has been coming back to my thoughts a lot recently, and I was very happy to see a thread trying to grapple with him. I've at least read Sartre's introduction and Barne's introduction, with some selections in Being and Nothingness.

I'm excited to see what comes of this.

True.

Maybe that's why it's confusing? It's an implication of two implications, and material implication is already confusing . .. lol see I confused it even in response.

Awwww ... there are minds out there who think like this, and if I'm in the habit I can -- but it's not my normal way.

Is what I get. (EDIT: I made a mistake, as pointed out by )

Since the last column is not all "F" it's not a contradiction, I believe. (though I see I confused myself earlier, looking at the T-table)

Eh, that's a bad reference, just the name that came to mind. Material implication is what I mean.

hrmmm checking now on paper.

I'm using https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Morgan%27s_laws though I've made many mistakes so I could be wrong...

Who is this "we"? I've put a lot of effort into the literature that exists to explain history, politics and society this way. — apokrisis

I was thinking "all of us", though understanding we could be wrong.

So perhaps you understand social organisms. I don't, and so the "we" is thems who don't understand it very well like me.

Maybe you don't. But maybe that is because you can take your lifestyle for granted as something that is just magically there as a stable foundation.

Or maybe you are instead disillusioned with the world as it is given to you, but have little hope in changing it? Philosophy has to be a comfort, a solace, rather than a plan of action. — apokrisis

I have little hope, because I know we can change it. But the knowledge is not a scientific knowledge -- it's a historical knowledge.

Philosophy is certainly a comfort and a solace, but if it were not a plan of action then I could not claim Marxism. To do so I want to answer your:

A pleasant sentiment. But how do you in practice aim for it? — apokrisis

Here (on TPF, on the internet, in conversation) I think all we can do -- materially speaking -- is exchange ideas, and that such places are rare anymore. We can be respectful towards one another's histories and find out just what and why others are saying what they do, insofar that we trust one another enough to do so in a public space.

Marxism, as you may be aware, is not exactly popular. :D -- it doesn't need to be by my reckoning of philosophy, but I can say that I've always benefited from spaces like that where we can exchange ideas and learn together. The point of the old problems is that they teach people and connect the young to the older and create a point of reference: they may be wrong, but we at least understand one another.

I would agree that civilisation does seem to be on its own mindless path. It does exceed our control. Oil just wants to be burnt and it doesn't care about us except to the degree we serve to accelerate that entropic purpose. We opened the Pandora's box and we are being swept along by the larger forces that have been unleashed.

But my attitude is that you only have the one life. And right now is the most spectacular moment in human history. We can see how the whole metaphysical deal got put together. So sit there and understand what is going on right before our eyes. Fluffing about with philosophical distractions is a waste of an opportunity when this is the moment that reality is becoming properly known to us for what it metaphysically is.

I think we have different attitudes, but not contradictory ones.

I only have one life, and so I like to help and see the future grow -- there will always be difficulties, and the horrors of the future scare me, but we can see it through.

I'm definitely coming at the question from the point of view of propositional logic -- something basic because it's already confusing enough as it is :D

Would that make a difference? 0/1=F/T as I understand it.

Can anyone think up a real world example where you would point out that A implies both B and not-B except for saying something along the lines of:

"A implies B and not-B, therefore clearly not-A." — Count Timothy von Icarus

That's not the same as "(A implies B) and (A implies not-B)" -- that'd be "(A implies (B and not-B)).

A real world example is often hard to parse into material implication -- sometimes, yes, but sometimes it's hard -- the conjuncts of disjuncts, while they can be claimed, is even rarer :D

Though after we dismiss "B and not-B" as always false, we can see that the truth of the proposition will only rely upon A, since "implies" is logically equivalent to "not-A or (B and not-B)", and the truth of a disjunct is true if one of the propositions is true -- so if not-A is true then it is true, and if not then it is false -- since not all results in the truth-table are false it is not a contradiction.

I appreciated the Truth-Tables.

I like this post because it's getting into why we might be tempted to say they contradict.

I think, at least in philosophy though maybe there's some other argument this stems from that I'm not aware of, that we should separate out implication from modality -- so when you introduce "possibility" and "necessity" those are entirely different operators from implication.

Though if there's some other argument going on I'm not aware of then you can link it -- I'm surprised to find so many people saying "Yes". lol

So a grander view was being asked for than a parochial one. Then Bono unhelpfully heaped on his confusion with a trite depiction that seemed to argue that equality and fairness are different things, or perhaps not. Not even a parochial clarification was attempted.

But as a case in point, we can see that it touches on a valid difference in terms of notions of "fair and just" life opportunities and "fair and just" life outcomes.

So we have then a problem of how to square the two. In the real world, people come with their biological variance and their social variance. In the old days, we were foragers. The biological variance was Gaussian and the social variance likewise. For a million years or so, bodies only evolved a bit, lifestyles only changed a bit.

Then we had the agricultural revolution. Folk still had the same genetic balance of equality/inequality. Luck could make you smarter or stronger than the average. But steadily populations grew and social outcomes became more of a hierarchical competition. You had the explosive growth of empires rising and falling.

Then the industrial revolution and now social outcomes could be hugely varied. And indeed, political structures were rejigged to make that part of the game. Liberal philosophy advocated for all to have the opportunity to get fat and rich, every person getting the just desserts they could earn.

But unfettered capitalism doesn't work. Some kind of balancing in the other direction – an evening out if outcomes are too uneven – has to be built into the politics. Marxism was one such response – but better institutionalised by social democracies than communist autocracies.

So yes, there is some ethical meat in this. "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs". We can see that as the kind of formula which connects the biological variance and sociological variance, that connects the distribution of opportunities to the distributions of outcomes in the hope of approaching some happy medium.

But then the rub. The happy medium is in turn dependent on the underlying entropic foundations of that society. There is a burn rate that the political thermostat is attempting to regulate. The populace must produce – or these days consume – at a rate sufficient to keep the system on the road and growing, while also paying for the matching social safety net (including its state security apparatus) that stops the social fabric tearing itself to shreds.

If you neglect to discuss this deeper thermodynamic dimension to human affairs – what it means to have moved from foraging, to agriculture, to fossil-fueled industry – then it will seem as if social settings are decided within some ethical bubble. Politics can ignore the burn rate it exists to control and can just fluff about debating good vs evil, Marxism vs Liberalism, your whatever vs my whatever. — apokrisis

If you neglect to discuss the. . . material conditions? :D

I think the social setting is not an ethical bubble, I agree -- I think of societies as organisms, but ones which we do not understand very well. That is, I don't think their patterns are just abstractions, though it's very easy to get lost in abstractions because there's not a very easy way to build falsification into social description: there isn't a science of history.

Which puts me in trouble with some variants of Marxism, and again, I really only mention it to put my cards on the table in answering the question: one could say I was giving the Humanist Marxist response, though there is this other, materialist-scientific side to Marxism that I believe your account gets along with fairly well: just in the place of "thermodynamic dimension" it's "Capital", which in a sufficiently generalized theory would probably have some kind of equality relations, but I don't think we're there yet. That is, I think when talking about Justice, Fairness, or even describing the political situation without reference to our ideals that we're still in a parochial bubble, rather than in the realm of scientific inquiry.

That is, I think we're doing philosophy in the vein of wondering about what is not known. Or, perhaps in light of current events, repeating ourselves because it's our value or something like that -- i.e. we might be doing politics rather than reflecting or some such.

But then, that gets to the deeper philosophy of Marxism, which changes what constitutes the real point of philosophy is to change the world rather interpret it. (but then, "Change it to what?" -- after you answer that, then we can speak of the use...)

What use are these fools who insist on the abstract purity of their ivory towers. — apokrisis

What's the use of use? :D

Beauty, not use, is my stated aim. I at least think it's important.

I don't even need philosophy to be true to be worthwhile, much less do I need it to be useful. But that's a metaphilosophical point that will surely diverge from the thread topic

Now let's get back to more pragmatic issues like the trolley problem and anti-natalism.... :grin: — apokrisis

Well, I'm calling for less pragmatic issues, though those two are first boring and then ugly, so not my bag either. :D

Ha! My commonsense solution to the Fairness & Justice problem would be to have a single-sovereign-supreme-superhuman judge to arbitrate between human definitions of My Justice and Your Fairness. Something like Molière's Tartuffe, relocated to heaven. But, since I gave up my religious solution years ago, I just don't worry about it. I'm certainly not a Marxist, except in the sense that he specified the problem for his day & time. His solution was missing the heavenly father to make the children behave. At my advanced age, I'm willing to let those who are more-concerned-&-more-able work-out the details of the next Utopia. :cool: — Gnomon

Utopia's shmopeya's :D -- the no place will not be as far as I'm concerned.

But I'll note that your commonsense solution runs into another commonsense solution: That Fairness and Justice would have to leave the supreme-superhuman judge out of our affairs, since we disagree on what the supreme-superhuman judge says, and so we should separate out church from state, and grant equal rights to all citizens.

I just mention my Marxism to lay my cards out on the table. There's a sense in which you could argue the opposite, that what we have can't be described as either just or unfair, but is just a process on its way to the next stage: to reject it for its injustice would be an idealism, whereas to struggle for a future freedom would be a materialism, or something along those lines.

Because Tartuffe tells us pretty things in order to seduce our daughters this lesser, material fairness is sought after as the highest real justice, even if it doesn't match what heaven is portrayed as.