Gurus, yogi’s, monks…contemplating the universe and life's deep meanings and questions without a dialogue. Thats not philosophy? What is it then? — DingoJones
Descarte wasnt doing philosophy in his solitary meditations? When you say “inherent”, wouldnt that make it a pre requisite for philosophy? So what was Decarte doing in his cave, if not some kind of philosophy? — DingoJones
So….it’s fine to disbelieve in Kantian transcendental logic, which presupposes a fair understanding of what it is, but how is Hegel’s logic any less transcendental?
Heh. You're asking the wrong person. Tobias would be a much more sympathetic voice if he's willing to pipe up on Hegel.
Hegel is certainly a German Idealist. — Moliere
I can imagine a better analogy with a relationship to the perpetrator's belief, not merely what he said in an operational sense. Consider someone who sells a medicine that is actually is a chemical that makes people sick. He is accused of fraud and tried in court. Evidence is presented that he was given data, repeatedly, demonstrating that the medicine didn't make people better but made them sick. Yet he kept selling it and advertising it as a medicinal cure. Those who worked for him and demonstrated this were fired or resigned. He sought out people to work for him who would tell him what he wanted to hear about how the medicine worked. Meanwhile, more and more people got sick from his medicine as he got wealthy from selling it. His defense in court is that he "really believed" it was medicine, and so he wasn't lying he was simply exercising his free speech by advertising what he believed was true.
A Universal is the Idea, which is Concept, which is Absolute by way of Notion. — Gregory
"But what we have here is the free act of thinking putting itself at the standpoint where it is for its own self, producing its own object for itself thereby, and giving it to itself." Spinoza, as for as I know, never said we were God. So my question on this thread is how we can know whether we are finite or infinite and what this means. — Gregory
Yes. In large populations, that can't be helped. In small ones, each person can be considered individually, as can each situation. But even in a systemic procedural, the prosecutor has a degree of autonomy in considering each case on its merits and some flexibility is accorded to the jury in its deliberations and to the judge in sentencing. In a very large, unwieldy, badly designed and corruptible justice system, people of good will can still apply the law more fairly than people with axes to grind. — Vera Mont
No, and that can be helped. As immigrants need to take a fitness test for citizenship, so could all prospective voters. Unfortunately, that, too, is corruptible. Of course, civics should be a standard subject in school anyway. — Vera Mont
That's nothing to do with meritocracy or equality under the law. — Vera Mont
As stated earlier, I don't think punishment is the correct answer at all. I'm in favour of putting a lot more effort into preventing the causes and occasions of crime before damage is done. — Vera Mont
Justice and fairness require that persons be classified into groups and judged according to a uniform standard for each group. A child, or adult with the mental capacity of a child, would be judged according one set of criteria; fully competent adults by a stricter one; the mentally ill, differently again. — Vera Mont
Justice and fairness require that persons be classified into groups and judged according to a uniform standard for each group. A child, or adult with the mental capacity of a child, would be judged according one set of criteria; fully competent adults by a stricter one; the mentally ill, differently again.
It doesn't require that people within a legal category be equal in any other way; only that they be treated the same under the law: accorded the same rights and burdened by the same degree of responsibility for their actions - which also mean, being tried by the same legal process, by the same rules of evidence, and given the same amount of leeway for mitigating circumstances if they're found guilty. — Vera Mont
You would think this should be obvious, but it isn't, even to some lawyers. O.W. Holmes, Jr. famously noted that we have courts of law, not courts of justice. — Ciceronianus
In this thread I will aim to distill in this broad topic of what constitutes justice, its basic operation in society, implications and its deliverance by laws.
1. Is Justice part of Natural Law (John Locke), Divine Command, Social Contract, or Utilitarian Agreement (John Stuart Mill) or combination of all four of these ?
2. Is justice karmic in nature or does injustice highlight a discrepancy in man made laws?
3. How should retribution be applied through court of law in secular society for punishable crimes such as murder? Would capital punishment be fitting for the most serious of crimes? (Genocide, serial killers etc)
The above principles are the main points for which most justice systems are based upon including international courts of law with the added ambiguity of remaining neutral in regards to the sovereignty and claims of state actors.
In the eyes of the philosopher is the existence of a perfect justice system possible or are all such systems unable to provide the deliverance of perfect justice either because of technicalities or other factors? — invicta
In that sense then there exist in society nuanced forms of unfairness such as unmeritocratic achievements when it comes to job access or a good environment to live in. — invicta
Insofar as "Hegel may have been trying to update Spinoza", I think he reconceptualizes one of Spinoza's infinite modes ("the world") as a 'meta-historicizing teleology' according to his own idealist dialectic ("Geist"). — plaque flag
I take this is a direct reference to Spinoza’s God. Hegel thinks it shocked the age not because, as is commonly assumed, threatening the status of God as distinct and separate, but because it threatens the status of man as distinct in his self-consciousness. — Fooloso4
It starts by introducing the idea that philosophy deals with opposites and then resolves those oppositions in various ways. Monism collapses the opposites into one another, dualism maintains them. Hegel's method is one of triads. — Toby Determined
Compare with the quote from the Phenomenology "The life of God and divine intelligence, then, can, if we like, be spoken of as love disporting with itself; but this idea falls into edification, and even sinks into insipidity, if it lacks the seriousness, the suffering, the patience, and the labour of the negative." — Toby Determined
Philosophy struggles to define its own field and methodology. This presupposes that the model of other disciplines, like mathematics and science. But that model doesn't necessarily apply There is a version of the history of philosophy that identifies it as the chaotic starting-point of all other disciplines, which have spun off from it as they have developed through the chaotic discussions of philosophers.
Philosophy is not unlike mathematics or science in some ways. But it is also like disciplines such as Literature or History, and like them, a small number of texts function as canonical. These texts open the field of philosophical discussion and show what it is like; they also provide common reference points for discussion as well as a mine of philosophical mistakes - and since there are so few philosophical successes, the mistakes are all the help we are going to get. I have even heard it said that in philosophy, getting it right is less important than being wrong in interesting ways. — Ludwig V
Consciousness
Mental imagery/mental representations/thought
Qualia particularly pain
Infinities particularly the infinite past
The nature of meaning/rationality/intelligibility — Andrew4Handel
:cool:IIRC, the last major change was over fifteen years ago – a radical shift in my thinking about and comprehension of metaphysics (thanks again, Tobias) — 180 Proof
He was one of those Gassadini1 guys. — Shawn
Agreed. A banning is never nice and no one likes to be ostracized. It is sad for the person to whom it happened Being gleeful about a decision which is needed perhaps, but sad anyway is not very nice. He is not in the position to defend himself as well.And it is. It reflects badly on those who participate. — T Clark
to make sure our delicate sensibilities don’t blind us to whatever substantive contributions are intertwined with a nasty delivery. — Joshs
How does one realise their autonomy?
They can't choose their genes, their parents, their country of birth, their sex and so on on.
A lot of theorists no longer believe in free will. How are autonomy and the belief in no free will compatible? — Andrew4Handel
I don't think that necessity to get a job or to work/strive to avoid starving is autonomy but brute necessity. — Andrew4Handel
If you need someone to assist and legalise your suicide that does not indicate autonomy either. — Andrew4Handel
At best committing suicide by your own hand is autonomy but not involving others and enforcing legislation that effects others. — Andrew4Handel
This topic can also be linked to the topic of personal identity which I made a thread about as well and who is it that persists over time. — Andrew4Handel
If, as I mentioned earlier, you are put in a coma before dying naturally does that person in a coma have interests? — Andrew4Handel
Peoples beliefs and identities change through time and this applies to peoples suicidality and value towards life. — Andrew4Handel
You can only safely stay out at night because of a social contract and a police service. — Andrew4Handel
Some people are attacked when walking at night so this doesn't prove you have an autonomy that is not provided or dependent by social structures. — Andrew4Handel
I think the theory of social autonomy leads to antinatalism and defeats itself because autonomy is not possible due to the nature of procreation and fundamental lack of consent. — Andrew4Handel
But they have done that. — Andrew4Handel
I think people have failed to defend the notion of autonomy. — Andrew4Handel
The people who have the most autonomy are the people with the most interventions and assistance and the most access to resources.
It is not a Natural state. We are not created through or with our autonomy. We are unable to care for ourselves for several years so cannot rely on our autonomy as we are reliant on parents and other adults. — Andrew4Handel
If we have a desire to be a doctor or pilot etc we need pre-existing societies structures like scientific institues, roads, money and welfare systems. The more of these societally created tools the more we can fulfil our desires. There are few desires we can fulfill if left alone in the wild. So we are in something of a social contract where we are provided services due to cooperation and giving up some freedoms for others. — Andrew4Handel
Assisted suicide is being pushed by people who are already privileged have increased autonomy given by others through societal innovation and support not the truly disenfranchised who have been the biggest victims of euthanasia and have lives determined unworthy. — Andrew4Handel
Lack of desire to live can often be associated with and induced by helplessness, learned helpless and disenfranchisement and that was my experience of feeling suicidal. — Andrew4Handel
Feeling pushed to die by suffering or fear of is an experience of coercion. — Andrew4Handel
The only real difference is optimism vs pessimism. I think we'll run out of time, resources and options before the [relatively; numerically] insignificant matter of suicide, assisted and otherwise, can be addressed in any systematic way. I think far bigger and more urgent matters will take up all our attention and efforts... — Vera Mont
... until the final collapse of our civilization. Many civilizations have collapsed before, and I'm pretty sure their comfortable middle classes also refused to contemplate the possibility that their own could go the same way. What comes after is open to interesting speculation. — Vera Mont
But you can imagine it: government that puts the needs interests of the citizens before those of its military or financial or religious or political elite, designs policy, enacts legislation and allocates funds with those priorities. — Vera Mont
It's not a question of how much we value life in general; it increasingly and inevitable becomes a question of how many can be preserved at all. — Vera Mont
I started this thread with examples including a 44 year old and 24 year old who had assisted suicides for mental health reasons not terminal illness and whose lives were shortened considerably. How is that valuing human life? — Andrew4Handel
No you are throwing millions under the bus and the integrity of the health and care systems and the value of life due to your desire to have someone help kill you — Andrew4Handel
I have already provided evidence of who is being affected by assisted suicide such as the poor, the lonely and victims of abuse from others. — Andrew4Handel
You want a law that effects everyone because of a personal preference. And you fail to comprehend the vulnerability of people who don't want an assisted suicide under your legal system. — Andrew4Handel
There are quick accessible ways to potentially painlessly kill yourself if you are able bodied. — Andrew4Handel
Several of the most prominent terminally ill assisted suicide campaigners died peacefully and or quickly in the end — Andrew4Handel
I can cite several more if needs be — Andrew4Handel
Would the thought everything exists except me qualify as a delusion? — Agent Smith
Not everyone has an accommodating Germany next door. And what, when all the well-prepared nations need the capacity for their own critically ill - who will take the extra old and infirm off your hands? — Vera Mont
So is climate change, but knowing that doesn't alleviate the present problem or mitigate the much larger future problem or increase the available resources for whenever the polity is ready to throw out the bums and install a civic-minded, smart administration. With every hurricane and coastal flooding. more infrastructure is destroyed. How many hospitals did Katrina take out? And she was a pussycat, compared to storms yet to come. — Vera Mont
I had alluded to the conservative parties - everywhere, not just in the US - moving rightward, striking down laws for personal autonomy and cutting social programs, including health services.
To which you replied:
Assisted suicide or euthanasia laws may play into that hand, because if we do not have to keep people alive, and it becomes socially not to, we can cut more beds.
— Tobias
By which I assumed you meant liberal governments' permissive suicide laws encourage conservative governments to cut health-care on the pretext that old people will have been killed before they need it.
I contend that this is not a cause-effect situation. — Vera Mont
I.e. They are not concerned with the value of human life, and never have been; their attitude didn't change when the law was relaxed. — Vera Mont
What they are interested in is central, lock-step power, protecting concentrated wealth. — Vera Mont
To which end they wooed and won the religious fundamentalist, the racist, the xenophobic, the economically insecure voter blocs by appropriating their simple, punitive values. — Vera Mont
I don't know how it came about (other than through the Middle Eastern debacles) in Europe, or how it will play out in each nation. You're in a far better position to see that side and predict what comes next. — Vera Mont
Hardly. Which politician orders up a flood or a snowstorm or a pandemic? Those are realities with which real, live, present-on-the-scene health care, rescue and emergency workers have to deal with. There are too many of those and too few of them. No politician is able to pull a few thousand doctors out of his hat. People with chronic debilitating illness don't have ten or twelve years - it would actually longer - for a new crop of graduates, even if higher were offered without tuition fees immediately. — Vera Mont
The 'because' doesn't fit. They were already doing it when they themselves legislated against assisted suicide and abortion, against gay rights and birth control, against science education and school lunches, against environmental protection and worker's safety - but for guns, prisons, executions, militarized police and even more tax-cuts.
Not because of erosion of humane values, but because the things they were for required lots of gullible votes and they presented their platform of 'againsts' as the moral choice. — Vera Mont
As the waves of crisis - influenza, fire, flood, windstorms, blizzards, power outages, road accidents, emotional trauma: more emergencies - keep coming, the resources, notably medical staff and hospital beds, are never replenished, let alone expanded to meet the need; patient backlogs keep building up. — Vera Mont
I'm beginning to think the pro suicide people lack values and morals. — Andrew4Handel
I think killing someone or allowing them to die is at odds with valuing human life and we are not just animals to be put down in a mercy killing or put out of our misery. — Andrew4Handel
If you have nihilist, spiritless values I think people are entitled to impose value on you because by rejecting value you have no argument they should value your opinions. — Andrew4Handel
People fought against the Nazis to end the Holocaust. The transatlantic slavery was ended. Apartheid ended. Women got equal rights and so on. We continue fighting not euthanising people because we no longer value life because we have given up on our species. — Andrew4Handel
If someone intends to kill themselves they consider their life has no more value so society does not have responsibility to agree with that, like I said earlier it is not autonym to end your existence which would lead to a state of nonexistence and hence no autonomy. — Andrew4Handel
It is absurd to protest against the state keeping you alive. — Andrew4Handel
Political suicide is an expression of ones values is unethical in my opinion. And bringing in laws that endanger other people to me is unethical. — Andrew4Handel
So, if governments make it illegal to help people die, they will be helped illegally - as before - or stored away somewhere until they die, in whatever conditions, whatever agony - as before. — Vera Mont
Laws are necessarily made in the abstract. But they're also made within a political and economic framework of what is possible. In a culture strongly influenced by religious factions, certain ideas cannot be considered for legislation - as had been the case with birth control and gay rights. In a debt/profit economy, the source of funding for any proposed legislation determines its viability. — Vera Mont
Even the best health care systems are already under severe strain. One more round of the current pandemic will collapse even the most robust. — Vera Mont
I am not withholding medicine from anyone I am opposing the legalizing of physician and government assisted suicide because of a wide range of concerns that I have outlined already. I am not advocating prosecuting anyone for assisting a suicide either except on a case by case basis which already occurs in countries with assisted suicide when the suicide is suspect. — Andrew4Handel
I am not advocating prosecuting anyone for assisting a suicide either except on a case by case basis which already occurs in countries with assisted suicide when the suicide is suspect. — Andrew4Handel
I personally think that once you have created a life you have created a responsibility to make that life flourish. — Andrew4Handel
Most antinatalist are strong supporters of assisted suicide so I am in a minority. I think the only way to avoid suffering is not to create more people, once you have created them suffering is inevitable and assisted suicide often happens because of suffering. — Andrew4Handel
It is extreme to go against the current wide spread acceptance of private property. — Andrew4Handel
By extreme I did not mean incorrect but making claims that would challenge norms or suggest we need to change our views or action radically. — Andrew4Handel
I think nihilism makes the meaning of philosophy fail. We accept certain meanings to communicate. — Andrew4Handel
Philosophy attempting to make things intelligible or does it have no boundaries on what position is reached or defended? — Andrew4Handel
No doubt there's entanglement, but I'm unaware of any replacement. To me we should distinguish carefully between calling out hypocrisy and attacking rationality and science itself (presumably in the name of something tribal or esoteric?). — Pie
In my view, there's no need to cling to the sacredness of private property, for instance, if we want to maintain individual freedom. No particular, frozen understanding of freedom is sacred. I understand our current notions of freedom ( and of rationality) to allow for an internal critique that allows for their modification. We inherit the norms that govern their modification, and we pass those modified norms on. Repeat. Note that this means Enlightenment rationality is not static, and I refer to it as a handy starting point, though one could also go back to Socrates and Democritus. — Pie
As Brandom might put, how are autonomous humans, who now live beyond God, supposed to have binding norms which we ourselves reserve the right to change ? To what degree does this require or imply a story or stories of progress? — Pie
I think of us as having a second order tradition of stories, some of them about physics and biology and others about rights and rationality. Then there are philosophical stories that are largely about stories themselves and the dominant role they play for creatures like us. This tradition is second order to the degree that no story is sacred or final, excepting perhaps the meta-story or attitude toward stories that we might call Enlightenment rationality. — Pie
Notice that Karl Marx went on to practise this form of dialectic, by negating Hegel's fundamental principle. Marx negated Hegel's proposal of "the Idea" as the basis of human existence in the social setting, and replaced it with "matter" as the kernel, or foundation of human existence in the social setting. From this perspective, the purpose of the state is to provide for the material needs of the individuals, rather than the Hegelian perspective, which places the purpose of the state as to provide for the Idea to know itself. — Metaphysician Undercover
As I understand it, it is the state of being of the virtuous person that is actualized. This is the case whether one acts on that knowledge or not. But yes, it would be wrong to consider virtue in the absence of action. — Fooloso4
I might do something considered virtuous but that does not make me virtuous. My reason for doing it might have nothing to do with virtue. — Fooloso4
One must be in the proper state, be a beautiful soul, in order to perceive the beauty of things as they are. More specifically, to know that these choices and actions are beautiful and those ugly. — Fooloso4
I imagine from there we can generalize and conclude that there is more to virtuous action than knowledge. So it seems virtue is not equal to knowledge.
And now we have also distinguished between wisdom and knowledge. So it seems the conclusion for now is: wisdom is equivalent to virtue but not equivalent to knowledge. — Hello Human
The right thing to do is indeed to get rid of the phobia, but is knowing that you must get rid of it sufficient to get rid of it, or are there other factors other than knowledge at play ? — Hello Human