When can you validly disregard the law of non-contradiction, for example? — Bob Ross

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dialetheism/ for example

But you can see its challenges in the very article, so maybe it is not "validly".

But this seems like you are agreeing now with me that you cannot define being. — Bob Ross

Definition is a matter of linguistic practice, which is different from the actual contents of our mind. How much some definitions reflect contents of our mind is what makes a definition accurate or inaccurate. Perhaps we cannot accurately define being, as it is as basic or more than any other concept we have — I was thinking of making a thread on this topic —, but we can give a functional definition of it, which is what I presented.

Since we are sharing splits, here is my PPLU for 4 times a week:

Incline bench press
Leg extension machine
Cable flat press
Chest press machine // calve machine
Tricep extension // lateral raises
French press

Pull-ups
Leg curl machine
Row
Barbell bicep curl
Face-pulls // Abs on cables
Hammer curls

Squats
Romanian deadlift
Leg press 45º // lateral raises
Leg curl machine // hammer curl
Leg extension machine // sissy squats

Light flat bench
Bicep curl // abs
Incline dumbbell press (deep)
Lateral raises // tricep ext
Shoulder raises cable // hammer curl
French presss

If I am out of time, I cut the U out and keep PPL 3 times a week.

Interesting split you got there. Most people typically don't do more than two compound lifts in a single day.

I would put lunges together with squat for increase in quad size.

The other subjects, especially mathematics, already stimulate critical thinking. I was taught philosophy for my last three years of basic education, and the content was the main thinkers of philosophy throughout history and their ideas, as it should be.

The curriculum of basic education, at least where I come from, is more or less optimised to teach basic knowledge (geography!) at the alloted time — hence a teacher may be called propedeuta. Introducing subjects such as "Critical Thinking Quests" like an extra-credit college elective is far from a good suggestion.

Jolly greetings to all Canadians! :lol:

For anyone who had some doubt (clearly many were convinced by drivel), here is the confirmation:

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/81402A555B9BBDC8988B3DDE881E3A58/S0031819100050580a.pdf/in-defence-of-selfish-genes.pdf

The first four pages of this article are enough, but what follows is also good — Mary Midgely is quite the Mental Midget.

She doesn't only misunderstand Descartes, but a field that she claims to be a scholar of — ethology. Again, her education stopped short of a PhD, though her intelligence much shorter than that. She is not a specialist in anything. In fact, she became a professor at the same university as where her husband had been lecturing for 13 years then. Nepotism?

Perhaps.

:rofl: — Banno

I guess Wittgenstein would be counterevidence to that. But then again, he is not that popular outside of his own school.

There are several books and articles that address this. — Fooloso4

That is true. I think the book specifically I was thinking of was by Walter Soffer.

To sum it up in a sentence, he displaces God with the "I'. — Fooloso4

About that, this section of the SEP is very important https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/descartes-epistemology/#DoesCogiCounAtheAvaiPerfKnow

Something interesting is seen in the Third Meditation:

And we cannot say that this idea of God is perhaps materially false and that consequently I can derive it from nought [i.e. that possibly it exists in me because I am imperfect], as I have just said is the case with ideas of heat, cold and other such things; for, on the contrary, as this idea is very clear and distinct and contains within it more objective reality than any other, there can be none which is of itself more true, nor any in which there can be less suspicion of falsehood.

He argues that the idea of God he has is not materially false (does not represent something real) because its objective reality is greater than any other (represents an infinite substance). I think we see the issue with this argument by just thinking of Anselm. But then he says:

for although, perhaps, we can imagine that such a Being does not exist, we cannot nevertheless imagine that His idea represents nothing real to me, as I have said of the idea of cold

The rest of the paragraph is even more iffy, appealing to the idea of God being "clear and distinct" and whatnot.

I think bringing Spinoza into this is the right move.

He says in the Principles 1.54:

We can also possess a clear and distinct idea of an uncreated substance that thinks and is independent, that is, of a God, as long as we do not think that such an idea represents everything that is in Him and that we do not add any fiction of our understanding[;...]

It seems that church dogma could be framed as fiction of our understanding — it is possible that Descartes actual understanding of God is more along Spinoza's line. He talks a lot about god, but little of Jesus. He said in a letter to a protestant priest: "My faith is my king's faith". His loyalty to Catholicism seems significantly cultural, instead of truly theological.

In any case in the Second Meditation we have:

Is there not some God, or some other being by whatever name we call it, who puts these reflections into my mind? That is not necessary

And also at the end of the Fourth:

And it is easy for me to understand that, in so far as I consider myself alone, and as if there were only myself in the world, I should have been much more perfect than I am, if God had created me so that I could never err.

All in all, Descartes is constrained by his times. What we can do read him critically and learn all we can, and carry on without the constraints.

It seems to me that the virtue ethicist and the consequentialist will agree that if volition is involved, then what is occurring may be immoral — Leontiskos

I don't think the virtue ethicist will agree that it is a vice to do something you did not know had negative consequences, as humans we are always learning after all. In fact, that is another issue with consequentialism. Most people would not say a child touching a stove is immoral, it did not want to harm itself obviously. That a moral theory does not get along with moral human intuition and with human semantic intuition (what linguistic subjects the predicate "is immoral" can apply to) is an indication that such moral theory is flawed or at least redefining what "moral" really means.

but many other consequentialists would disagree — Leontiskos

How so?

I think all moral theories are capable of coming to the conclusion that alcoholism is not necessarily non-moral — Leontiskos

The triple negative took me a while. Yes, I suppose that for every mainstream ethical theory there would be cases where alcoholism is immoral. Some ethical theories would say that alcoholism is necessarily immoral. But others will say that alcoholism is not always immoral, I argue that virtue ethics is one of those. The issue is that the OP is not clear:

You may bring up the example of touching a hot pan, which involves ignorance surrounding a topic, but OP includes the verb "want", which implies that the subject is conscious of the context he is in. — Lionino

If we agree that the OP's premise includes awareness of the consequences of an action, for pretty much any ethical theory — including virtue ethics —, there would be no difference between things that are immoral and things you shouldn't want to be the kind of person that does them. Because the "shouldn't want" basically collapses to "is wrong", which is "is immoral" in others words. The "should" verb brings morality into the second part of the question anyway.

It would be another story if the OP said "between things that aren’t immoral and things you don't want to be the kind of person that does them". Then it would become an aesthetic issue, which is why Amadeus is nagging you here:

Aesthetic disagreement is not moral. — AmadeusD

See the appendix to Arthur M Melzer's "Philosophy Between the Lines" which contains numerous first hand accounts by philosophers. — Fooloso4

Thank you for this. There is a book that investigates whether the God-elements in Descartes' meditations are fully sincere. I have forgotten the name of the book.

It does seem that Midgely has a track record of purposefully(?) misunderstanding, she has done so before with Dawkins:
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/philosophy/article/in-defence-of-selfish-genes/81402A555B9BBDC8988B3DDE881E3A58

It is funny how so many people here have taken to defend that the half-satirical take of a largely irrelevant "scholar" actually stands up against the father of modern philosophy in a way that 300 hundred years of philosophy does not.
Scholar, though apparently she never even earned a doctorate.

she may not be wrong about how the hegemony of the solitary white male has mislead philosophy — Banno

Any hegemony in a field like philosophy is due to simply better ideas. All you are saying is that non-whites and women are incompetent at philosophy. But it is not like the historical track does anything to disprove that.

Indeed, things have been so much better since the patriarchy was dismantled. — Banno

Did you dye your hair blue this past week or is this your new style of trolling? Being racist against the most successful groups is very 2017.

I thought it was great — Moliere

I liked it too. I just can't get into the main cast. Thimotee and Zendaya for main characters in a movie like this is just...
I will probably watch the miniseries eventually

In the past year or two — Vera Mont

The pandemic did a number on the brain of all of us.

What this means is that, in assessing alcoholism, it doesn’t matter a great deal whether alcoholism is viewed in terms of acts, intentions, or habits. — Leontiskos

I think it does matter, because that is the central distinction between consequentialism and non-consequentialist ethics. For the virtue ethicist, alcoholism, or any sort of self-harm would generally not be deemed as immoral if the subject did not know of the facts surrounding alcoholism.

The consequentialist will say that it is immoral for an ignorant child to touch the hot stove.

At the end, this is a matter of semantics as to what situations the word "moral" applies to or not, but it remains that it is not desirable to put our hands on a hot stove. Therefore, OP's question boils down to "what normative ethical theory do you subscribe to?".

The point now, is that for Aristotle, "to subsist", therefore to be substance, is to have form. And, form does not require matter, so this validates the substantial existence of immaterial forms, i.e. the subsistence of immaterial forms. — Metaphysician Undercover

Understood. I thought you were disagreeing. Thanks.

Every statement? Every POV? Every belief? — Vera Mont

Yes. Unless those agree with me. Then they can remain unjustified. The justification is already found within me.

I would say that ↪Lionino is correct. — Leontiskos

The answer lies on whether one sees morality in the act itself or in the person/intention. If the former, alcoholism is immoral as it involves self-harm, besides being a waste of money and whatnot. If the latter, alcoholism is only immoral if the person is already made aware of the consequences of his action.

As by my first answer, the answer to the OP is surely "no" if one is an utilitarian or perhaps even a deontologist.

From your questions it is clear that you just don't get it. Let's agree-to-disagree.

I disagree.

This seems to boil down to the same topic as https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/14597/what-can-i-know-with-100-certainty

Praying for ultra Trump dictatorship.

I think we know exactly what being is: I just don't think we can properly explicate it. Knowledge isn't just the sphere if explicable information. — Bob Ross

That smells like contradiction.

But this seems like you are agreeing now with me that you cannot define being. — Bob Ross

Not that you cannot, you can, but perhaps not properly, as in like you define other concepts.

Midgely recognizes some good reasons for choosing Descartes' model, but thinks that a different model will avoid some big issues with Descartes' solution of the problem he sets himself — Ludwig V

I think you are making out more than there truly is in this article. It is a silly, poorly-written article. It is not a treatise, nevermind philosophy, the editor is correct. It does not offer in any way an alternative to Descartes' six Meditations, or to his Principles, or to his Discource. It is not rigorous.
Even after Descartes' extensive writings on his method and replies to objections, people still try to find fault within him. It would be fine if they happened to find actual faults. Let's apply that amount of scrutinity to Mary's article then.

Compare the existentialists' shift to focus on the human condition - the world as we are thrown into it - as opposed to Descartes' search for a clean sheet and an indubitable foundation - probably modelled on Euclid. — Ludwig V

Those are naturally different topics. Afaik, existentialists are not arguing against Descartes, Descartes not against what would be the existentialists.

I'm afraid I didn't take that comment - or the poll - at all seriously. — Ludwig V

They are not supposed to be.

Not to speak of that horrible last paragraph in the article. Whatever college it was she lectured at, I will be far away from it and its professors.

Until the next game.

Agreed.

But I'm not sure whether that's enough to refute the argument. — Ludwig V

Banno himself said Midgely is using Descartes as a rhetorical device. If that is the case, there isn't really an argument.

This thread would not have come to be had the lenghty discussion about Descartes in the "100% centainty" thread not taken place — that thread motivated at least two other threads in the last two weeks in fact. I can only imagine by what mechanism one thread motivated the other, but the connection is evident. It is a sarcastic OP, as we can see from the poll that was added at the end and this comment.

I sadly revisited the article and it actually goes on for four fairly long paragraphs.

Her point is ultimately about empathy and motherhood. You say in the OP "Here is a critique of Descartes' Cogito, amongst other things". Is this a rhetorical device too?
If so, you must be making the same point as Midgely about motherhood. Are you pregnant?

This OP is another episode of you trolling.

I find it curious that folk are so defensive of Descartes. — Banno

The same people might be curious as to why it is Descartes that is put under unreasonable scrutinity so often around here, but not Plato or Hegel.

Granny Midgley is obviously using him as a rhetorical device. — Banno

She could have made the same point without dedicating more than a whole paragraph pretending to put on an obviously failed counterargument to Descartes.

Isn't that what practically any sound person believes? — Wayfarer

Many sound people believe and believed in an immaterial soul. You seem to be objecting that there is "something" immaterial, something beyond just matter, but I know that is not your persuasion, you are not an emergentist.

Latin has a perfectly good equivalent for ousia, "being" in "esse" — Ludwig V

I imagine you are referring to essentia. That is also one of the translations of usia. It is in fact the literal translation of usia to Latin, coined by Cicero. Substantia is in fact a post-classical translation of hypostasis, but later it came to be often used to translate usia. This comment might be of interest:

But in fact the Latins (generally but not uniformly at first, but eventually universally) used "substantia" to translate "ousia" and such terms, and "suppositum" or "persona" to translate "hypostasis" or "prosopon". So sometimes the Greeks were confused when looking at Latin works which used "substantia" and thought it meant "hypostasis", and suspected the Latins of error. — https://lyfaber.blogspot.com/2010/01/substance-and-hypostasis-in-trinity.html

and has its roots in the medieval Latin term ex(s)istere, which means to stand forth, to appear, and to arise." — Ludwig V

That does not seem to be the case. Exsisto with the meaning of being is registered since republican times, before Christ:

ut in corporibus magnae dissimilitudines sunt, sic in animis exsistunt majores etiam varietates — Cicero

«As in body the differences are great, even greater differences exist when it comes to character»

si exstitisset in rege fides[...] — Cicero

«If there had been faith in the king...»

All of which reinforces the point that medieval Latin is a dialect of Latin and very different from the language of ancient Rome. — Ludwig V

The idea that it is a "dialect" is not quite accurate, but I am not going to be uncharitable. In any case, I recommend the Master thesis dissertation "One, two, many Latins" by Kevin R Roth. The content of the thesis holds some (non-central) controversial statements because it bases itself considerably on the research of a scholar with some controversial claims, besides not telling the whole picture of some historical events eg giving more credit to some figures than it is due and none to some that deserve it, but besides it is a good and informative read.

But yes, Medieval Church Latin is quite different from Classical Latin. I can read many Classical texts with little help, but I have visited tens of churches in Rome, and I very often find myself cracking my head to figure out what some inscriptions say, especially when they put several nouns or adjectives one after the other with the same endings, not to speak of the numerous abbreviations.

I came here with the intention of asking if he is still orange, and this is the very last post I see on the thread. Hilarious, though I didn't really laugh.

( A1 ) Alcoholism is an illness. — fdrake

If we classify it as such, it would no longer fit OP's criterion of "not want to be a person who does it". We don't do diseases.

they may instead be foolish, irresponsible and other nice words for things which we shouldn't do for some reason — fdrake

Under many normative ethics, self-harm is considered immoral. You may bring up the example of touching a hot pan, which involves ignorance surrounding a topic, but OP includes the verb "want", which implies that the subject is conscious of the context he is in.

Is it immoral to want to be an alcoholic? No, but it is a rather silly aspiration. — fdrake

That seems to be dodging the implication that willingly being alcoholic is deemed as immoral by many as it involves self-harm by saying it is just "silly", doesn't it?

One thing I know for sure, for most religions, alcoholism is immoral.

but it seems like a mistake here to take experience as being decomposable into smaller and smaller intervals, with certain parts having to follow others in serial order — Count Timothy von Icarus

Beyond the possibility of a mistake, the task of decomposing thoughts on the axis of time is very troublesome, and I would be interested to know if there was ever a philosopher to undertake this task. For example, when we think "red car", does that take less time than if we were to think "the happy swimmer dove into the shallow lake"? Surely one has many more concepts than the other, but ultimately — at least for me —, both give one single mental image that can be realised at a given instant of time. So is it a single thought when we say "X therefore Y" because we are uniting these concepts or is it the thought of X followed in time by the thought of Y? I expressed this worry before in the thread:

Furthermore, "someone thinks therefore something is" is a phrase, it is hard to articulate (and perhaps that is the issue) how that phrase translates to thoughts, ¿is it a single thought or 2+ thoughts one after the other? If the latter, perhaps the first "something" is not the same as the second "something".
If the former, when we say "I think" in "I think therefore I am", we can be talking about "I think therefore I am" itself, then it can be taken as self-fulfilling. — Lionino

In any case, though Cardano's criticism is very much welcome and healthy, I pointed:

But then Descartes states not "I think therefore I am" but "'I am, I exist,’ is necessarily true whenever… it is conceived in my mind." — Lionino

Descartes' idea starts with an immediate intuition. And it may not even be that we need to know thinking implies existence to have this immediate intuition (the inference we were talking about). Everytime we think we are making sure that we exist, every thought comes with the experience of being there, of existing — a "da-sein" if you will.

Professor Hintikka in a letter put it as "ego cogitans existo" instead (I, who thinks, exists).

Understanding seems to occur as a sort of parallel, composite process — Count Timothy von Icarus

Surely it is a process, but going too far with this idea would have implications on our view of personal identity, which might not be something that I want to commit myself to. Specifically, if our understandings cannot be at any point analysed from one other, we are committing ourselves to a psychological continuity. I think that it is desirable to be able to separate the thoughts from Tuesday from the thoughts of Sunday, even though they are ultimately linked — the first and last link of a chain are distinct even if ultimately connected.

I think the issue might be conflating the process of developing a thought into a propositional form, and the experience of self-awareness itself. For example, in the passage from Augustine above he spends a paragraph unpacking inferences made from an experience of knowing and willing that occurs in an instant. These two are divided in propositional thought, yet if a line drive is hit to us while playing baseball, our experience doesn't seem to involve first knowing that the ball has been hit, then willing our body to move to catch it. We do all of these together, seamlessly knowing, willing, and acting. Likewise, in introspection we experience and experience our own experiencing together. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes, I think this is an important distinction. Even if an experience, physically, neurologically takes place in time, it is still a experience; putting it in words is a translation of the experience, aiming for communication with people whose minds we assume are like ours; but yet language does not exhaust thought. If I had to make a wild guess, I would say this conflation is more common in people who think in words rather than images.

But as before, I still think the experiences/thoughts of Tuesday and the experiences/thoughts of Sunday can and ought to be separated.

But you haven't defined what it means to exist — Bob Ross

Yes, that is what I am trying to say. What is the definition of existence? It seems, as your post brings up, it can only be defined circularly, which is no definition. We can have an idea of what it is to be, but we can't say exactly what is its essence. But there is one thing we know about it: it is counterfactual to any action or state of a subject. Defining a concept by its consequence might be better than not defining it at all.

From Aristotle, "something that exists by itself", is commonly translated as "subsists", and this is understood as "having subsistence", therefore "exists by itself" is a predicate. — Metaphysician Undercover

Ok?

The dude was a mathematician and a natural scientist surrounded by all kinds of scholasticism and dogma — fdrake

Not only that, but he was afraid of the Church punishing him for his ideas, as he implies a few times in his books.

He was ultimately accused of atheism anyway — in the Netherlands I believe. He eventually went to Sweden somewhat against his will to teach the genius queen of Sweden Kristina under her invitation, whose tomb in the Vatican I had the pleasure of visiting these days.

I don't think concepts are culturally relative. — Bob Ross

I didn't say othewise.

So 'that thing exists' = 'that thing is necessary for any subject to undertake an action'? — Bob Ross

No, it is necessary for a thing to exist for it to undertake an action. The hypernym of all verbs therefore.

which is true, but not a valid definition of what it means to exist — Bob Ross

I would have to ask what you mean by "valid definition". As I noted, this definition of the concept seems to come after the fact that we already grasp it, instead of the usual «defining a concept before we can grasp it». It may give some grounding to what it means to be, other than a word without good definition.

Thought is essentially processual — Count Timothy von Icarus

It is. Cardano's point is that the earlier part of the process might belong to a subject other than the one that says "I am".

Here is my reference for this derivation. If you have an alternative derivation, do tell. — Wayfarer

We have gone over this, some five times now. Including this "source" that does not back your statement.

The word is not "ouisia". It does not come to English from Latin, there is nothing Latin in English, it comes from French, as you would expect, as English is half French, especially the sophisticated vocabulary. And it simply means in scholastics "something that exists by itself", there is no problem conceiving something immaterial that exists by itself unless you are a close-minded physicalist.

Perhaps some words reflect the innate primitive concepts we have as a human mind. If those concepts are discovered to be culturally universal, we could investigate why it is that they are primitive to us as humans. Beyond the matter of coincidence (being the configuration of our brains), it could be that some ideas/thoughts are necessary operations of the mind for it to work as a human mind; whereas a mind without the ideas of "part" or "being" would not be something we call a (human) mind.

Some of these concepts are analyzable however, though still circular, as they come in pairs. The part and the whole, the cold and the hot, the light and the dark.

Speaking of cold and hot, those are, except for those with hereditary sensory neuropathy, primitive concepts that are linked to experiences given to us by our human bodies. Can we analyze raw subjective experiences? I don't think so. Yet we don't throw them out.

(1) capable of non-circular definition — Bob Ross

To be could be defined as that which is necessary for any subject to undertake an action. Though that would come from our already existent concept of what it means for something to be.

This anomaly comes from the translation of the Greek 'ouisia' into the Latin 'substantia' and then the English 'substance'. — Wayfarer

Your insistence on claiming this with the same misspellings over and over is quite something.

It's sometimes mentioned that Augustine anticipated Descartes by centuries: — Wayfarer

Descartes talks about that in a letter to Colvius:

“Vous m’avez obligé de m’avertir du passage de saint Augustin, auquel mon Je pense, donc je suis a quelque rapport; je l’ay esté lire aujourd’huy en la Biblioteque de cette Ville, et je trouve veritablement qu’il s’en sert pour prouver la certitude de nostre estre, et en suite pour faire voir qu’il y a en nous quelque image de La Trinité, en ce que nous sommes, nous sçavons que nous sommes, et nous aymons cét estre et cette science qui est en nous; au lieu que je m’en sers pour faire connoistre que ce moy, qui pense, est une substance immaterielle, et qui n’a rien de corporel; qui sont deux choses fort differentes. Et c’est une chose qui de soy est si simple et si naturelle à inferer, qu’on est, de ce qu’on doute, qu’elle auroit pû tomber sous la plume de qui que ce soit; mais je ne laisse pas d’estre bien aise d’avoir rencontré avec saint Augustin, quand ce ne seroit que pour fermer la bouche aux petits esprits qui ont tasché de regabeler sur ce principe.”

But then Descartes states not "I think therefore I am" but "'I am, I exist,’ is necessarily true whenever… it is conceived in my mind.". It is not that the memory of something allows us to know that we exist, but that everytime we think we are sure of our own existence.