Well, the initial point of entry in Aristotle's discussion of perception is commonly regarded to be his comment in De Anima, 418a3:

"That which can perceive is, as we have said, potentially such as the object of perception already is actually. It is not like the object, then, when it is being affected by it, but once it has been affected it becomes like it and is such as it is."

Welcome to some of the most hotly contested particles of ancient Greek. In this and his writings in Metaphysics there is talk about an "alteration" that allows things as they actually are to be present to a life through an alteration of that life. Something like TS Eliot saying: "You are the music while it lasts."

Now there is plenty of healthy disagreement to my thumbnail view and I hope they don't know where I live. *Valentinus removes battery from smartphone*

I always think about Aristotle on this topic. He noted that an incredible amount of work went on behind the scenes to allow something to just be what it was a you perceived it. And I suppose that is why artists of all kinds speak of "making it look easy"

Wittgenstein isn't exactly a continentalist, though. I agree that he's a weird fit for the analytic "school," but he makes much more sense to lump in with the analytics than the continentalists, especially given his association with the Vienna Circle, which is hardcore analytic philosophy. — Terrapin Station

I think of Wittgenstein as challenging both approaches. There is an impatience with playing dumb about calling for certain explanations and then saying "ah ha!, quid erat demonstratum" that appeals to me. Fool me once, etcetera.....

Differences in taste about kinds of explanations can be substantial barriers to dialogue.
Slab!

John, thanks for the download but really thanks for the website.
I feel like a kid in front of a pile of leaves.

By calling for the two commands to be seen together, I wasn't thinking primarily of whether "theism" was necessary for the love of ones neighbor to be conceivable. I was thinking of how much was being demanded of the lover, all of their heart, all of their soul, and all of their mind. In the context of being asked about Law, Jesus is usurping a conversation about what traditions to follow by demanding everything they are capable of giving. I think it would be fair to say that such a demand is unavoidably "theist."

That level of engagement makes the love of the neighbor bound up in what is being given to the Lord. The meaning of "as yourself" becomes a bit of a mystery. "ὡς σεαυτόν" doesn't mean "as much as yourself" or that your neighbor is the "same as you" The lover who is completely engaged with the loving is not in a place to make comparisons. The Delphic imperative to know thyself "γνῶθι σεαυτόν" becomes entangled with the people around you.

If you going to consider the commandment, don't forget the one preceding it:

"You are to love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind. This commandment is first and foremost. And the second is like it: You are to love your neighbor as yourself. On these commandments hangs everything in the Law and the Prophets."
Matthew 22

Pondering whether one should or can obey these directions involves keeping them together as they were given as an answer to the legal expert who asked: "Teacher, which commandment in the Law is the greatest?"

Do you have any recommendations for a companion to use alongside the PI? — Posty McPostface

That is a great challenge. I need to think about that.

My experience may be a bit of an outlier.
I read Philosophical Investigations before I even knew about or had read the Tractatus. So my engagement with the work is not concerned with completing a project or something like a replacement to other systems. The charm in PI, if you will allow me the expression, is the possibility that we need not be captive to certain problems.
In saying that, I am not dismissing Tractatus. I am not interested in establishing a circle of the only things that can be said.
The idea that we can stop repeating certain arguments is attractive.

I am interested.
Sam26 has done an excellent job but he just left the forum. I am slowly reading that thread.
I guess my first question is why you want to start over.

Well, it is funny that the one seeking advice is no longer a part of the discussion and what remains are disagreements about the value of reading the Republic.

If the original poster is still around, I encourage them to just read the damn thing. Do not prepare yourself. Don't approach it through all the reductions and filters developed by those who defended or opposed what is said there. You, the one who is listening to the arguments for the first time, is the one who is being addressed.

hks is just repeating what your fucked up therapist said.

Whoa, who knew you had a whole theory of why people were evil. I am glad I asked.
But your answer regarding a solution assumes that we are in a place to just fix the problem because everything needed to determine that has been determined.
How did you get from a list of what is favorable to retraining people for thinking badly?

You made a claim.
Defend it against the one you dismissed as having no value.

Other people who do not suffer your problem suffer something that is connected to it.

The reason people started talking about good and evil is not about sharing a list of what most people desire.
It started because evil people do really awful things that demonstrate, what shall I call, a different source of motivation, from other people who recognize they need to find a different reason to do things than those truly crazed people.

I am proposing a negative to a negative, not a table of shared positives. Creatures adapting to a specific environment, if that floats your boat.

Hmm, I think this is sound advice. But, I'm a finicky guy so some people need to feel that they are in control over what's happening in my life, when they assume that God-awful responsibility.

Ehh... — Posty McPostface

Hmmmn. Responsibility is something one experiences so intimately that it is odd how easily it gets blended into other things.
Whatever you are going through sucks simply because you know it sucks. No further verification needed. There seems to be a problem with trusting our perceptions that is not isolated by any particular form of suffering. The differences are significant. But nobody rides free.

Good and Evil are not just the results of how one values one thing over another. It is not a list of items ordered in rank of descending value. You can go out and meet both right now. You can look for either and find it. A cautionary note is in order, however. You could die during the course of the investigation.

Let me know how it all turned out.

No, he was not correct. He was guilt tripping you just when you needed to disassociate what is happening to you from a decision tree that you were actively populating.

He was leaning into your shit just when you needed to be asking why You were leaning into your shit.

Yes, I already see a therapist and he asked me the fundamental question as to whether I am committed to getting better or stay the same. I told him that I am content with my crummy life as it currently is, and haven't spoken to him since. Does that mean that I can just learn to cope with it? — Posty McPostface

Your therapist was putting a lot on you as the master of your fate precisely when you didn't feel in control.
I would shop around for other resources.

You are a smart and gregarious person. Never give up on your strengths.

It is reasonable to expect time and a lot of problems to unwind between changes of legal status and changes in how we live together. Your observation weakens Fukuyama's argument that an entirely new desire has replaced the original one for equality and inclusion in the broader society. With the introduction of the element of time, it is reasonable to ask when the change in motive occurred. My asking whether the demands to be treated equally have been met is not a challenge outside of Fukuyama's argument, it is the missing piece he uses without mentioning. I am not the one trying to prove why people are doing things.

In regards to changes in law, per se, it should be noted that this itself is no simple thing and also takes place over long periods of time. I don't want to become verbose on this topic because I am not trained in the law but there is much to be learned in looking into toleration as a point of constitutional law and how it relates to equal treatment of people under the law. As a matter of full disclosure, I am strongly influenced by David A.J. Richards' Toleration and the Constitution.

One thing that is very clear in Fukuyama's approach is that his table of motives is not helping clear up what is a legitimate demand compared to one that has "gone too far." He cites Black Lives Matters as an example. Without arguing the validity or necessity of their political methods, I don't understand how any outcome of that debate relates to the initial and primary objective of having less unarmed black people getting shot. When Fukuyama describes a change in their motives, an insinuation of betrayal to their own cause appears. No politics there, right?

On the general topic of too much "victim-hood", it is not a dismissal of the topic to ask just how that is an assault upon inclusion and cohesiveness. That is not self evident to me.

One of the real genius judo moves of the "identity politics" meme is that it allows people to say that efforts toward a diverse society based upon equal opportunity taught white people how to self identify. I am not even going to bother refuting the idea. Some things are self evident.

As Machiavelli and Nietzsche later explained, government is the will to power and nothing less. — hks

Here is one of Socrates' answers to your claim:

"Come then, said I, examine it thus. Recall the general likeness between the city and the man, and then observe in turn what happens to each of them.
What things? he said.
In the first place, said I, will you call the state governed by a tyrant free or enslaved, speaking of it as a state?
Utterly enslaved, he said.
And yet you see masters and free men.
I see, he said, a small portion of such, but the entirety, so to speak, and the best part of it, is shamefully and wretchedly enslaved.
If, then, I said, the man resembles the state, must not the same proportion obtain in him, and his soul teem with boundless servility and illiberality, the best and most reasonable parts of it being enslaved, while a small part, the worst and the most frenzied, plays the despot?
Inevitably, he said.
Then will you say that such a soul is enslaved or free?
Enslaved, I should suppose.
Again, does not the enslaved and tyrannized city least of all do what it really wishes?
Decidedly so.
Then the tyrannized soul--to speak of the soul as a whole--also will least of all do what it wishes, but being always perforce driven and drawn by the gadfly of desire it will be full of confusion and repentance.
Of course.
And must the tyrannized city be rich or poor?
Poor.
Then the tyrant soul also must of necessity always be needy and suffer from unfulfilled desire.
So it must be, he said
And again, must not such a city, as well as such a man, be full of terrors and alarms?'
It must indeed.
And do you think you will find more lamentations and groans and wailing and anguish in any other city?
By no means."

Republic, Book 9, 577, translated by Paul Shorey

Along the lines of "natural law" as mentioned by diesynyang and matt, Diderot also spoke of dignity as a natural right based upon our likeness to each other. The element of equality prompts me to see the idea through the universal hatred to being humiliated. The idea is not just about the experience felt by each individual but how it let's us see other people's experience.

Criticism of Plato and Socrates is one of the activities that has been going on since those writings appeared. If you want to argue the matter on your own account as a post upon the forum, then please do so. To discourage somebody from studying something because it is useless to you is an attempt at excluding them from whatever informed your opinion.
Socrates discusses this problem in his many rebukes of Thrasymachus in the Republic dialogue.
Your point of view is argued in the Republic in a more expert fashion than you have done.

Just wanted to say that this has been a very interesting discussion with great observations made from many points of view.

I'm not familiar with your definition of "public shared space". But I take it to be an idealised notion of a commons where we all get serviced by a standard civic infrastructure and show some standard balance of tolerance~consideration. So get up close, and does this public shared space rightfully carry the higher demand that we recognise, celebrate and even perhaps love all our differences? Doesn't this in itself undermine the public right to form your own communities or in-groups in the "usual way" - the usual way involving what you as a community stand against, as well as what you stand for? — apokrisis

In terms of the Establishment of Religion clause, the shared commons is the absence of a state religion in any civic capacity. In that context, we do not need to celebrate a difference to permit it. Nor is permitting a form of self identification a celebration of it.
When Fukuyama says:
"Marginalized groups increasingly demanded not only that laws and institutions treat them as equal to dominant groups but also that the broader society recognize and even celebrate the intrinsic differences that set them apart",
how is the distinction between the "institutions" and "broader society" to be understood? The intention behind setting up our polity to create a secular commons is that those two spheres of activity have a lot to do with each other. Any distinction to made here puts some burden of proof upon the distinction maker if that maker is basing their entire argument upon it. Fukuyama speaks as if the difference is self evident.

In regards to your questions, the lack of distinction given in the matter makes it impossible for me to imagine what Fukuyama is saying when he says marginalized groups are demanding more than equality. This is why I said in my first response to ssu that:
"What Fukuyama leaves out of this account is whether the demands to be treated equally were met. It also leaves out the unpleasant fact that a "celebration of intrinsic differences" is what the "dominant" group has been doing for centuries."
Where can I find this "broader society"? If the "marginalized group" is both an equal part of it and outside of it at the same time, this discussion of motives that Fukuyama embarks upon seems like a blame game about an invisible offense.

If I understand your question, it is something like: is freedom meaningless without the power to change things?

I agree with your argument for a balance between homogeneity and diversity.

In regards to Fukuyama's argument, my point is that it is not simply a matter of people either seeking forms of self identity or agreeing to a single culture. As you point out, some people can pat their heads and rub their stomachs at the same time.

Therefore, why should it be axiomatic that "marginalized groups" cannot do this balancing act too? Or to put it another way, how is wanting to be recognized an attack upon the "public shared space" by default?
Fukuyama treats the matter as a self evident truth. It is not self evident. He is inviting the reader to overlook the only interesting thing to consider.

But aren't churches different because they express the other side of the coin rather strongly - the push for identity-suppressing social cohesion? They are tools for conformity and so "safe" in that sense. — apokrisis

They push for cohesion within their group but that can stand in varying levels of tension with the "shared public space" that is specifically kept free of the workings of any particular voluntary community.
One of the obvious points of tension relate to the education of our children. Religious education is permitted but does run into restrictions developed through the norms of secular society and legal limits when the practices become criminal.
The other large area of tension regards involvement in means of production. The Amish of Pennsylvania are not competing for resources in the same manner as the Hasidim in Brooklyn.

Over time, the latter strategy tended to win out: the early civil rights movement of Martin Luther King, Jr., demanded that American society treat black people the way it treated white people. By the end of the 1960s, however, groups such as the Black Panthers and the Nation of Islam emerged and argued that black people had their own traditions and consciousness; in their view, black people needed to take pride in themselves for who they were and not heed what the broader society wanted them to be.

Martin Luther King Jr. didn't demand to be treated like white people, he demanded that black people be treated as equal to white people. The signs the activists held to their chests said "I am a Man." They did not say "I am White."
Now Fukuyama argues that some people added a demand to this first one when they spoke of already having a culture and form of life that had its own value. For most of those who advocated for that message, it was bound up with the original demand to be recognized as a human being.

Fukuyama sells his idea of an added demand by saying that later generations had not experienced what the former generation had. After this, its just a bunch of complainers who are tired of being treated like white people.

Cue Newt Gingrich.

Another fatal flaw committed by Fukuyama through assigning a divisive animus to all forms of self identification, per se, is that it provides no explanation why all forms of life protected by the Establishment of Religion clause have failed to destroy the country yet. The whole point of setting up a shared public space this way was in order to allow groups to withdraw from it as much as they like as long as those actions do not cancel the shared public space.
By Fukuyama's measure, there is no way to distinguish between the desire to be an Amish person and the desire to be a self identified Nazi.

Making that distinction is Augustine's purpose for writing The City of God. There are many places where the nature of the earthly city is compared to that of the heavenly one. It would be misleading to see the matter as being addressed fully in a single place.
Your example of "music lovers" doesn't capture the tension between the two cities that is demonstrated by the different kinds of association they rely upon. In Book 19, you will find the following:

"This heavenly city, then, while it sojourns on earth, calls citizens out of all nations, and gathers together a society of pilgrims of all languages, not scrupling about diversities in the manners, laws, and institutions whereby earthly peace is secured and maintained, but recognizing that they all tend to one and the same end of earthly peace."

Fukuyama says the desire to accepted as equal in a society is a cohesive agent and the desire to develop a distinct identity is divisive:

"Marginalized groups increasingly demanded not only that laws and institutions treat them as equal to dominant groups but also that the broader society recognize and even celebrate the intrinsic differences that set them apart."

What Fukuyama leaves out of this account is whether the demands to be treated equally were met. It also leaves out the unpleasant fact that a "celebration of intrinsic differences" is what the "dominant" group has been doing for centuries.
Without those elements kept in view, Fukuyama's account gives the impression that the marginalized groups got the equality they asked for and are now crying out for something more. A little extra pudding, please.

That syllogism has been a right wing talking point for decades. So, what does that make Francis Fukuyama?

You cover a lot of ground there, Wayfarer.
Without making an argument about anything else, one element Robert Wallace did not touch upon in his interesting article is how the "self-consciousness" that is being discussed developed through interactions between other "self-consciousnesses." The primal events Hegel is looking for in his Phenomenology of Spirit is an argument about why things are the way they are but also the introduction of a new way to represent experience. By way of example, Kierkegaard argues against aspects of the psychology being introduced but also writes Sickness Unto Death which uses the same dynamic of a consciousness going through changes when they encounter unavoidable problems. Marx is an example of someone who took the dynamic in a different direction.
If Kierkegaard and Marx are in the same lobby in another plane of existence, I bet the only thing they agree on regarding the works of Hegel is that Berkeley has withdrawn from the field of battle.

Any physical determinism that would have made the choice is terminated at the point when the digit intervenes and makes the choice. — EnPassant

The choice to set up choices to be followed by this procedure is the only "free" one in the system.
Strictly speaking, a view of all events being predetermined concerns whether everything is caused or not and how those causes relate to each other. It doesn't distinguish between the mathematical and the physical, or at least by itself alone.

For me this is a good sketch of the futility of taking categories like 'realist' or 'idealist' seriously. Their quasi-timeless content offers only a bare suggestion. I need to scan quite a few paragraphs of a poster on this forum, for instance, to even begin to learn his/her somewhat-private language as a 'system' or whole --the only way science/knowledge does (and not merely 'ought' to) exist. In the real world we do this all the time. We meet personalities as personalities, 'systems' grokking 'systems' as systems in order to make sense of this or that emission against a background understanding which is crucial. The naked result is almost nothing without its history/context. It cannot trap all the meaning that led up to a pithy summary. The summary is enjoyed (and meaning-rich) only after its engendering is repeated in the listener's mind (approximately repeated, since 'perfect' clarity is a ghost too quick for us.) — macrosoft

I think your reading of Hegel accurately reflects his method but also hints at how difficult it is to proceed in a manner that provides "the result along with the process of arriving at it."
The Gregory Bateson essay I mentioned earlier in this thread does a particularly good job at showing how "comparisons of differences" cannot be a reduction to a single scheme.
In trying to "grok" different systems, what is being discussed looks different if being understood as bringing something to an end, a last word that does need further thought, or as directions on a map, suggesting we travel in a certain direction.

The book I linked to has all the books.

I recommend this translation: by Joe Sachs
The Republic has 10 books.
It sounds like you are looking at editions that publish one book at a time.
Kerr published his work in 1918. He uses conventions that might not be familiar to you.
I suggest you try looking at a range of translators on the web or at a library and find one that seems most natural to you.

Where is this mind you speak of? Is it located only inside your skull? How can you tell if you know so little of what is outside of you?
If you are able to provide a proof that the mind is only inside you, what difference does it make from not being able to? I understand that a map differs from the territory. But why bother with making maps if they are never engaged with the territory?
I suggest reading this essay by Gregory Bateson: Form, Substance, and Difference. It puts the uses of reason in a context.

Trump has found his crowd. He taunts them to taunt the others. Pretty simple, really.
Existentially, the choice is about finding who will support you or cut you down.
Once you do that sort of thing, the question is open by default. Trump wants everything to be fought out in a cage.
Just step in.

Spinoza's Ethics (part 1 and 2)
Maybe it is bullshit. But it so successfully circumvents other peoples' bullshit that it gets my attention.