It's odd that you think a straightforward account of Catholic doctrine is an attack on Christianity. smh

frank said so. How could it not be true? — Leontiskos

Well, it is true.

Where are these premises coming from? I don't know of any Catholic theology which says, "Father = God and Son = God..." — Leontiskos

That's the Trinity, dude.

If the trinity is a mystery, then leave it as such, without trying to make it fit into this or that logical frame. It just doesn't fit. — Banno

I'm curious how far some will go trying to make sense of it. :grin:

Oh I see! Thanks for explaining that.

Someone told me Russian speech pervasively pictures properties as external things, impinging on the subject, where in German, the speaker owns the properties, so instead of the cold is upon me, it's I have cold. Do you think that influences the respective philosophies? Germanic languages conjure a huge inner landscape.

The Trinity is a mystery. It's three persons, each of which is fully God. I think you're trying to waffle on whether it's a contradiction or not. I'm not sure why you would want to do that. That it's contradictory is what makes it a mystery.

I may be mistaken, but I dont think Christian neoplatonists were big on revolution. — Joshs

Freemasons were. Their belief system was Neoplatonic. As you may know, many of the founders of the USA were Freemasons.

Hegel radically historicized the platonic absolute. — Joshs

When you talked about shifting foundations, I thought you were talking about dialectics. Becoming analyses out to Being and Non-Being, and that brings us to Heidegger's What is Metaphysics, one of my favorites. :grin:

Western philosophy after Hegel shifted its attention away from unchanging foundations and towards a discourse of evolution, revolution and becoming in which foundations become relative, contingent and impermanent — Joshs

Hegel's roots were Neoplatonic, which is the philosophy Christianity is built on. Maybe he was instrumental in bringing it back to the academic scene, but it had been around for centuries.

. If a triadic structure is taken to be essential for a meaningful cosmos, this can be used for a transcendental argument vis-á-vis the threeness of God. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Maybe. Likewise, the four gospels correspond to the four elements. Matthew is earth, Mark is fire, Luke is air, and John is water. This, multiplied by the three states: mutable, fixed, and cardinal, equals the number of apostles, the number of the tribes of Israel, and of course, months of the year. There are numbers all over the place, such as the birthmark on my scalp: 666. :grin:

It might not really be that relevant here though because the idea isn't that the sign relation, nor any of the other triads, are perfect models of the Trinity. — Count Timothy von Icarus

They aren't models of the Trinity period. It may be that Pierce read Augustine, but the notion that his philosophy should be understood in the context of Christian theology is incorrect.

I spoke about as a general property of philosophical discourse, where even attempts to talk about becoming remain within the framework of the substantialist habit. — Astorre

I think you're saying phenomenology is a kind of fraud. I think it is in some cases, but ontology is an empty building in my mind. Nobody lives there, and it's fairly important to me that it stay that way.

Let’s talk about identity. What is the role of time for you in the determination of identity? In my way of thinking, identity requires temporal repetition. The first time, the emergence into unconcealment of something, is a difference. To emerge is to address a past within the moment of appearance. Think of a line or hinge. It subsists in a contrast, a before and after, an outside and inside, a then and a now. This is one moment of time. Wouldn’t there have to be a second moment in which that which emerges as a divide or hinge reproduces itself as itself? A=A implies temporal repetition,. — Joshs

So the world is like a movie. Notice that there is no motion in a movie. It's just one picture after another. X only seems to move from place to place. But poor X is obliterated in the junctions between the pictures. It's not moving because there is no static background against which to mov(ie). :gasp:

And even when Joshs spoke about Heidegger, who, as he correctly noted, grounded "is" in the event of "unfolding," this was, in essence, an effort to find that very first principle, that "root" of our being. — Astorre

For Heidegger, the phenomenology of Being starts with recognizing the psyche's response to the concept of nothingness, which he describes as a dread.

It's in this same phenomenological spirit that Heidegger turns to the nature of Being. He's not doing cosmology. He's not trying to find the root of Being as if we could send out a drone and document that.

All we're doing with Heidegger is coloring inside the lines of phenomenology. Straying outside those lines will result in nonsense.

I agree that Parmenides, the philosopher is a philosopher in all possible worlds where Parmenides is a philosopher. — RussellA

Right. That would help explain how a person could talk about profession as if it's an essential property. This contrasts with transient states like coldness or hunger. On the one hand, they may realize that Parmenides could have been a sailor, but they still speak of his profession as if it's necessary to the object they have in mind. I think you have to pay attention to context to discern what properties are essential. Doing that is more valuable (to me) than laying open metaphysical possibility.

If I refer to Parmenides, the philosopher, then my reference will only pick out people who are philosophers. Parmenides, the philosopher is a philosopher in all possible worlds in which that object exists.

I don't see how that works, though. Augustine explains in De Trinitate, that the sum of the Son and the Father is not greater than the Holy Spirit. In other words, it's one thing with three faces. In semiotics, the sign, object, and interpretant are clearly distinct things. We aren't supposed to imagine them as one. So it's not really the same thing, is it?

What this means is that "is a philosopher" has changed from being an essence of Parmenides to being a description.

Being born in Elea, Magna Graecia is not a necessary truth of Parmenides but a contingent truth. Parmenides could have been born in Constantinople, he may not have written the poem dactylic hexameter and he may have been a statesman rather than a philosopher

In the expression, "Parmenides is a philosopher", the copula "is" is not establishing "philosopher" as a fixed and static essence of Parmenides, but rather describing a contingent rather than necessary truth. — RussellA

Philosopher isn't metaphysically necessary to Parmenides, but if I refer to Parmenides, the philosopher, it would appear that anyone who isn't a philosopher is not the person I'm talking about. So I can turn philosopher into an essential feature by way of my intention. Kripke introduced the idea of possible worlds as a tool for talking about that kind of essence.

It means to be inclined toward luxury

It's a good question. Freedom and power were traditionally understood in terms of actuality, potency itself being nothing, and so inherently most static in that it is wholly incapable of moving itself. There is often a reversal here though. Potency becomes least static, freedom becomes the potential to do or be anything. Yet this only makes sense if potency is in some way actual, if it can spontaneously actualize itself, e.g., explanations of our contingent reality as simply 'brute face,' or of reality as primarily, of fundamentally will, a sort of sheer willing. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Do you think of life as having to do with freedom and power? I mean, algae don't really have either one, do they? I think life is more about an organism's purpose to reinforce itself in the face of entropy.

If we have a block universe, change is just about the way consciousness is configured.

If stasis precludes life? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Would it?

But once the choice is made, there is a truth. That's the point of the choice. — Ludwig V

Yep

That seems about right to me. But I would have to add that change and stasis are relative. Heraclitus' river has constantly changing water relative to the bed and banks. But the water itself, not to mention other factors, cause the bed and banks to change constantly relative to the landscape it flows through. — Ludwig V

Right. We could pick a point in the steam and build a frame of reference around it so that the surrounding landscape is in motion around the stream. There's no truth of the matter about which one is in motion. It's a matter of choice.

By the same token, it is not true that the whole universe is in motion, waiting for us to pick a frame of reference. Again, there is no truth regarding change and stasis until we orient ourselves.

I agree.

hat is a good summary of what we get from Einstein. Do you want to treat physics as the ground floor of your understanding of the world, — Joshs

I don't have a ground floor. I have a very principled lack of ground floor.

like me, see Einstein’s thinking as the expression of an era of philosophy which has since been surpassed — Joshs

It sounds like you're saying you understand Special Relativity, you just think it's been surpassed by something else. I think we could find common ground if you explained what you see as its flaw?

Einstein said all motion is relative to a chosen frame of reference. You declare a point to be unchanging at the same time you perceive change.

It's not that everything is changing before you declare a frame of reference. There simply is no change without stasis.

Can there be certainty without stasis? — Joshs

Can there be change without stasis? Aren't they two sides of the same coin?

This does not follow. Wittgensteinian linguistics is metaphysically agnostic because it refuses to speak of it. It does not hint one way or the other what lurks within. It talks about language and what can be expressed through language.

How could his theory possibly hold sway if it were defeated by simply pointing out we all have internal feelings? What he's getting at is the futility in discussing that which cannot be discussed. — Hanover

Imagine a realm of pure sensation. Think of it as a dark ocean and the mind is a flashlight, bringing this in view, focusing on that sound, or just relaxing without focus as colors bleed into each other, patterns appear, tones mix with undescribed feelings like the earth touching your feet.

Wittgenstein asks how language could be used to nail down some section of this ever turning ocean. If we picked a word, like red, how could we confidently say it properly attaches to this rather than that? What we can do is look to the way people behave. The word has no meaning that can endure over time until we see that it's attached to that rose, that berry, those lips, by the actions people take.

So Wittgenstein was not saying we don't have sensations. He's saying that words like pain don't gain their meaning by referring to a particular section of the ocean of sensations. There's no way to throw a dart of reference and hit something in that realm. The meaning comes from our primal connections with one another.

Do you agree with that?

Assume the feeling I have when I'm at the park I self refer to as "burj." I speak this word commonly to myself, often out loud, but no one ever hears it. What this means is that I cannot check for my consistency in use of the word and it cannot be verfied that today's feeling of burj is yesterday's. I engage in ten years of this self-talk of burj, and on year 10, it is discovered that the park had audio-taped my coversations unbeknownst to anyone.

On this day, a community listens to my recorded speech and it decides I have used burj consistently and subject to a rule. It is now a word retroactively. Before, not.

This makes the point again: The reason "burj" was not a word yesterday isn't because it was simply isolated in my head. What made it not a word was that no community had evaluated it. In this thought experiment, the community did not get into my head, but it was the usage of the word that fell into the previously silent world. Use arrived late, well after the word spoken, but its use made the non-word of yesterday the word of today once it was used.

The provocative question: Were the mutterings prior to the tape recording being heard what we properly call qualia? It, to be sure, had ontological status. Why not name it? — Hanover

I think the 10 years of talking to yourself made it a word, though as you say, of somewhat dubious meaning. The group who hears the recordings will debate amongst themselves what it means. If they come to a consensus, it's probably because of that one lady who talked really loudly while other people were trying to say something, so she got her way because they were like, fine, whatever.

I just assume your functional consciousness is accompanied by qualia. In other words, as your body navigates around the park, there is something it's like to see, hear, smell, and feel the world around you. I assume you're that way because I am. There may be a little bit of dubiousness to naming various aspects of the experience, but that's par for the course for language, most of the time.

The people who introduce doubt about qualia are usually aiming for eliminative materialism. They're basically saying we're like robots who claim to be more than robots, but we're wrong, we're just robots.

:up:

:up:

We had made all the arrangements to visit, then covid-19 happened. — RussellA

I read a biography of Catherine a long time ago. I'd love to go. Some other lifetime. :smile:

Maybe. I don't know.

It's a quote from a french movie called Pandemonium.

I don't know, but I betcha I know what color this building is painted: it's goluboy. This is Catherine's Palace in St. Petersburg.

I agree you can see them. Without the numbers, you would have a harder time picking one out reliably. Some people would be able to do it. Some couldn't.

BTW, this is a documentary on the color blue. It's more fascinating than I would have thought. :razz:

It would indeed be strange if we could only perceive those things in the world that we happen to have names for. It would mean that if we had no name for something, then we couldn't perceive it, and if we couldn't perceive it then we couldn't attach a name to it. — RussellA

I think it's more that naming helps fix the mind on something, and remember it. If your visual field is filled with color, you'll remember the aspects of it that you have associated with a name.

Humanity is evil by nature and must atone for its sins.

For the most part, the far right is not interested in reform. They believe the establishment has failed.
— frank

Seems so for the far-left also. This is to be expected, and I'm unsure why there are discussions about understanding absolutist and destructive ideology (on it's face, anyhow) from either side. Why not ignore hte idiots and move forward with reasonable people in the discussion. But that's a pipe dream, I know, and not necessarily 'right'. — AmadeusD

Exactly. The far right and left have become so similar that we might expect to start seeing them voting as a block against the establishment, represented by Democrats.

What do you mean by "move forward with reasonable people in the discussion?"

My main focus these days is futurism, like around the year 2100. I think climate will be one of the main drivers of events at that point, so I watch Trump's attempts to make the US independent from the rest of the world, his statements about annexing Canada and Greenland. I think it's super ironic that Trump will probably be thought of as visionary one day. Life is strange.

As for wokism, it's in things like a recent failed Disney movie called Snow White, in which the titular character was played by a fairly dark-skinned Latina, and according to this actress, we shouldn't think of this folktale as a love story, because Snow White doesn't need a man. :grin:

Is that what Nick Land’s accelerationism is about? — Joshs

Yeah. For the most part, the far right is not interested in reform. They believe the establishment has failed.