But they might say that when you look at a cup, what you are seeing is the cup — Banno

Suppose there is a tribe that does not have cups. What do they see when shown or given a cup?

You need more than just identifying a table as a table in visual perception. — Corvus

I think this is a good point. In the case of a table, and perhaps more clearly in the case of a pen or cigarette, what we see in not simply an object in passive perception, but something culturally and conceptually determined. In a culture without tables or pens or cigarettes what is seen is not a table or pen or cigarette. But neither is what is seen "sense data".

If, to take a rather different case, a church were cunningly camouflaged so that it looked like a barn, how could any serious question be raised about what we see when we look at it ? We see, of course, a church that now looks like a barn.

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I agree with Austin that what we see is not something immaterial, but I do not think it a matter of course that what we see is a church that looks like a barn. It is only when the camouflage is removed that what we see is a church. What it is and what we see are not the same. What we see is what it looks like to us.

Actually if you read the OP you will see that Epicurus had a strong notion of unnatural human desires. — Leontiskos

Actually I have read the OP and more. Why would you think I haven't? What did I say that runs contrary to this?

The Greeks used the term phusis ('nature') to distinguish it from what is by convention or law or custom (nomos). When applied to ethics, what is by nature is universal, true for all human beings by virtue of human nature.

In Judaism, however, no appeal was made to nature but to God. Rather than a nature man has "ways". Some ways are straight, others crooked. Some God approves, others he does not. Some men are on the path, others stray.

Christianity inherits both opposing views. On the one hand God's Law, and on the other, through Paul, man is born in sin and powerlessness against it. Augustine goes further with the belief in original sin. What is most natural becomes the source of sin.

I’m saying that those aspects of Wittgenstein’s philosophy are not propositional but still conceptual. — Luke

Sorry, I did not catch that you were shifting gears. The passages you cited are helpful in making the case for conceptual seeing. It cuts across the neat division between seeing and saying in the Tractatus.

Yes, the sun. One type of thing. — Antony Nickles

There are several issues raised including what a law of nature establishes, the problem of induction, contingency and necessity.

It is unclear what your "this" is referring to. — Antony Nickles

Contingency, certainty, science, nature ...

My guess is that you are imagining every example leads to a conclusion about our approach to everything (that there is only one form of skepticism: the problem of a foundation for a particular criteria for knowledge). — Antony Nickles

You should be skeptical of imagining what I am imagining. What you are imagining that I am imagining is wrong.

I take you to be framing it that he only has one "picture of knowledge", and, for that matter, that there is only one sense of "certainty". — Antony Nickles

Again, you are wrong. It is counterproductive to make conjectures and argue against them rather than addressing what I have actually said.

The problem of skepticism can be framed in terms of the question of what can be known, which leads to the question of knowledge. If you are interested in what I have said, the thread An Analysis of "On Certainty" would be a good place to start.

That is to say that I don't find where this is relevant to the matter at hand. — Antony Nickles

Based on the title of the workshop:

‘Disappointment with criteria – Cavell, Rush Rhees, and skepticism’. — Antony Nickles

I don't see why you would think that what I quoted from Wittgenstein is not relevant.

And it is satisfied in the case of the sun (as with believing it is raining outside), because we can know whether we are right or not when the sun comes out (or checking on the rain). — Antony Nickles

We can know that the sun rose today, but can we know that the sun will rise tomorrow? It seems clear that he did not think we could.

a picture of knowledge. — Antony Nickles

I think his picture of knowledge takes this into consideration. Perhaps his best expression of this is the river of knowledge from On Certainty.

Did Wittgenstein change his mind on this:

T 6.36311 That the sun will rise to-morrow, is an hypothesis; and that means that we do not know
whether it will rise.

T 6.37 A necessity for one thing to happen because another has happened does not exist. There is only logical necessity.

T 6.375 As there is only a logical necessity, so there is only a logical impossibility.[/quote]

255. The philosopher's treatment of a question is like the treatment of an illness.
— ibid. 255

Not what you want to hear riding the gurney. — Paine

Compare this to 133:

The real discovery is the one that enables me to break off philosophizing when I want to. a The one that gives philosophy peace, so that it is no longer tormented by questions which bring itself in question. - Instead, a method is now demonstrated by examples, and the series
of examples can be broken off. —– Problems are solved (difficulties eliminated), not a single problem.

Physician heel thyself.

Not propositional, but still conceptual. — Luke

Does Hacker discuss Wittgenstein on what might be called conceptual seeing - seeing as, seeing aspects, seeing connections?

PPI 251. We find certain things about seeing puzzling, because we do not find the whole business of seeing puzzling enough.

PPI 257. The question now arises: Could there be human beings lacking the ability to see something as something a and what would that be like? What sort of consequences would it have? ... We will
call it “aspect-blindness” - and will now consider what might be meant by this. (A conceptual investigation.)

PPI 261. The importance of this concept lies in the connection between the concepts of seeing an aspect and of experiencing the meaning of a word.

Since the primitive people interpret what they hear, the difference is that one uses language and the other does not. There is, however, a difference in their form of life. More specifically, the way of life of philosophers (savages) and that of ordinary language users. The gap would be closed by philosophers not imbuing language with metaphysical meaning.

Does the project to dissolve as many problems as possible actually do that? — Paine

I don't think so. The assumption is that philosophical problems are grammatical problems. In some cases they are, but by treating language as the key it would seem that Wittgenstein is among the savages.

The reaction might be, at least in part, biological. There are several animals that play dead and other animals that will not eat or in other ways come in contact with dead animals. In some cases it might be a fear of the dead. Disease is a common cause of death. Perhaps there is something in the DNA of some animals, including humans, an impulse to avoid dead things.

I read through that thread, including your response.

With regard to it:

It should not matter whether one is a philosopher as long as one is reasonable. But even if restricted to philosophers worthy of the name we do not find agreement with regard to the question of reason itself let alone agreement on the existence of God.

Culture and history should not make a difference unless reason is historically determined and God is not transcultural.

I'm anxious about relying on the concept of nature. — Moliere

As well you should be. Concepts of nature can be a reflection of perverse desire that things be a certain way in accord with one's opinion of how they should be. We can see this clearly when nature is appealed to as authoritative in moral disputes. For example, the claim that homosexuality is unnatural. Of course when we look at what occurs in the natural world what we find is that the facts do not support the claim.

What distinguished what is natural from what is unnatural? As the example above shows, it cannot be an appeal to what we find in the non-human world.

This might be a good place to start. What quickly becomes evident is that his interpretation of Wittgenstein is grounded on the problems and analysis of propositions, as can be seen in such claims as:

It [philosophy] is concerned with plotting the bounds of sense.

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What philosophy describes are the logical relations of implication, exclusion, compatibility, presupposition, point and purpose, role and function among propositions in which a
given problematic expression occurs. Philosophy describes the uses of expressions in our language for the purpose of resolving or dissolving conceptual entanglements.

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There are other aspects of Wittgenstein's philosophy, such as seeing aspects, that are not propositional. It is here that we can see continuity between the Tractatus and his later work. It is also here that the limits of Hacker's interpretation of Wittgenstein can be seen.

But some do.

There are no examples of reason completing itself. Although Thomists might believe it does in some limited way, because they believe that through it we can know that God exists, a great many highly capable and reasonable people do not agree.

Why the lack of agreement? If it were simply a matter of reason there would be no such disagreement.

I do not know what to make of ‘from quantity to quality’... — Banno

It is not simply a matter of motion but of responsiveness.

Not at all sure where this is going. — Banno

Me neither. I think it clear we do not know what happens when we die. All the rest is story telling.

You are committing the fallacy of affirming the consequent, claiming that because reason is ordered to truth therefore (all) truth must be derivable from unaided reason. — Leontiskos

Nope. What I am saying is that if, as you assert, there is a telos of reason, then it has to date failed to complete or realize itself.

Aquinas and I are in agreement that reason has a limit. Where Aquinas and I differ is with regard to where to draw that limit. Although I cannot say where to draw that limit I can say that he allows for it to extent much further than I do. Where he claims that the truth of God is known to reason, I deny it.

You stitched four clauses together and added a double serving of non sequitur for taste? This is why I don't often respond to your posts. — Leontiskos

No need to stitch together what for Aquinas belongs together.

So Fooloso's assumption that anything that comes from Aquinas must be revelation-based is not only faulty reasoning, it is also almost exactly backwards. — Leontiskos

I have made no such assumption.

You seem to have lost the thread of the argument. You claim that reason is teleological. By teleology you say you mean how the term is understood within the Aristotelian tradition. You go on to say, that it is Aquinas who says that the human being is intrinsically ordered to truth.

Teleology is the movement toward something's completion. The completion of reason accordingly would be the truth. Aquinas, however, says that God reveals things that transcend human reason. In other words, the completion of reason does not yield the whole truth. For this revelation is needed.

All this is very far from what you accuse me of. I suspect your defensiveness is getting in the way.

The ubiquitous account is that something has left the body, implying a dualism. My point was that it is of equal validity to say that the body no longer does what it once did, avoiding the dualism. — Banno

I agree. At the risk of continuing to go in the direction you would rather the discussion not go, I will point out that this is not a modern or contemporary development. It can be found in the ancients as well, and in both roots of the Western tradition.

the simple fact that a dead body is different to a live one. — Banno

I was wondering about the visceral reaction.

Quite often it is ordered [...] to what can be made to seem to be true...
— Fooloso4

Yes, as often as Sophists operate. — Leontiskos

It is often overlooked how close the sophist and philosopher are.

More generally, the problem is our inability to make the distinction between what seems to us to be true and what might be true.

Who said anything about revelation? — Leontiskos

I put these pieces together:

the Aristotelian tradition. — Leontiskos

But as a Christian — Leontiskos

The intuitive opinion follows Aquinas in claiming that the human being is intrinsically ordered to truth — Leontiskos

Summa Theologiae, — Leontiskos

For the Thomist the Aristotelian tradition is typically the Thomist tradition. Even without reference to Aquinas, I recognized the claim as Aquinas' rather than Aristotle's. It occurs often in the argument of Thomists.

You're engaged in axe-grinding. — Leontiskos

Nope. Just following where that ordering leads.

You can attempt to give an argument for such a conclusion if you like. — Leontiskos

You miss the point. That reason does not lead to the truth of God cuts both ways.

I'll take your word for it, although I recall reading a similar account elsewhere, with Plato writing differing accounts for various audiences. — Banno

I have said this several times. For example:

here

Just as Socrates spoke differently and said different things to different people, Plato manages to say different things with the same words.

here

Socrates spoke differently to different people.

here

The two depictions of the soul in the Republic and the Phaedrus do not match up. Different stories for different occasions. Socrates says the he speaks differently to different men depending on their needs.

here

Socrates spoke differently to different people depending on their needs.

I don't recall the source I relied on though. Perhaps @Paine knows.

What's curious is the way in which talk of division or of a spirit leaving the body comes so easily. — Banno

The Greek word translated as soul is ψυχή (psykhē, Latin psyche). The Hebrew is רוח (ruach). Spirit comes from the Latin spiritus. In each case the terms mean breath. At death breath leaves the body. It is from this natural observation that these terms go on to develop mythologies, metaphysical meaning,

I want to draw attention to what is a visceral difference between how one sees a living and a dead body. — Banno

This raises an interesting question. Hunters do not react this way when they kill. They may even have the body preserved and displayed. This may have something to do with the body not being a human. Or it may be that the visceral reaction has been suppressed. How do warriors react when the kill is human? Friend or foe might make a difference. The reaction might also change with frequency.

We brace ourselves against this with ritual, seeking some sort of continuity or normality. But our grief recognises the loss. — Banno

Clergy might tell us that the deceased has gone to a better place, and some may believe this, and yet they grieve.

The other side of this is the loss of one's own life.

I figure that saying: "When we do philosophy" includes all the efforts Wittgenstein is making as much as it includes views he is resisting. — Paine

I agree.

Criticizing from the inside is different from criticizing as an outsider.

It seems like the wide variance of interpretations are a function of how that gets answered. — Paine

Cryptic. Can you elaborate?

Reason is surely teleological. — Leontiskos

And yet, when reasoning we do not all reach the same conclusions.

It is ordered towards truth. — Leontiskos

Quite often it is ordered toward defense or justification or persuasion, to what can be made to seem to be true rather than to demonstrate or determine what is true.

Thomists might like to think that the correct use of reason leads to the truth, but when there is doubt, an appeal to the authority of revelation sets things right. Even if reason is ordered toward the truth, it may not get us there.

Aristotle, of course, did not take recourse in revelation. But then again he did not rely on the authority of reason either. With regard to questions and problems, especially with regard to what is most fundamental, it becomes clear that reason can lead to aporia.

Even if we are ordered to truth it does not follow that what we say, even to ourselves, is what is true. It does not mean we even always want to know what is true.

The irony is that Aquinas' argument is ordered toward a conclusion that may be false.

gather you are asking about what happens at the point of death. — Banno

The question is perhaps as old as man.

The language "divided in two" is loaded with dualism. — Banno

It reflects the dualism that Socrates is responding to. Then as now the division of body and soul was common. As you say:

The common prejudice is that at death something leaves the body. — Banno

He uses the division of body and soul, and in doing so brings that belief into question.

I don't think that's right - rather the body stops doing stuff it once did. It no longer works in the same way. — Banno

That was observed. The question or questions, however, remain - what happens to the person? Socrates entertains two possibilities in the Apology -

1) The continued existence of the soul separate from the body
2) Oblivion. An endless, dreamless sleep.

In the Phaedo, however, he is silent about the second possibility. He does not state it explicitly, but the common assumption that underlies the first proves to be its own undoing. Socrates is not simply a soul attached for a time to some body. Socrates is a whole, a living being, that soon will no longer be alive. Soon Socrates will no longer be.

What is at issue here is not who said what. The philosophical issue is how we are to think about possibilities.

Socrates is this guy they know and love. This person they talk to and see engaged in conversation in the marketplace. What will happen to him when he dies?

It is easy to miss what Plato is up to here. The argument moves in two opposite directions.

The common assumption is that Socrates is attempting to persuade his friends that the soul is immortal. He thinks that for many such a belief is beneficial.

The philosopher, however, seeks the truth of the matter, to the extent that is possible. The second possibility of what happens to us when we dies is raised explicitly in the Apology, but here, as he is about to die, we must, so to speak, do the math. Rather than myths of rewards and punishment and reincarnation, we are confronted by the incoherence that arises when a single, unified person is divided in two and only one part of who he is is believed to endure.

Yes, you can.

Wittgenstein, however, is not attaching straw men. He is addressing problems that arose in his discussions with students and colleagues.

I mean individuation — Banno

Socrates presents the problem arithmetically in the Phaedo.

The overarching question of the dialogue is what will happen to Socrates when he dies. The concern is that the unity that is Socrates will be destroyed. In order to address this Socrates divides his unity into a duality, body and soul. It is by this division of one into two that he attempts to demonstrate his unity in death. If each is one then Socrates is two. But since he is neither the one (body) or the other (soul) then the two together must be a third.

How can there to be a logos or an account without a proper count? Is Socrates one thing or two or some third thing that arises from the unity of these two separate things?

PI 194 begins:

When does one have the thought that a machine already contains its possible movements in some mysterious way? Well, when one is doing philosophy.

and ends, as you quoted:

Though we do pay attention to the way we talk about these matters, we don’t understand it, but misinterpret it. When we do philosophy, we are like savages, primitive people, who hear the way in which civilized people talk, put a false interpretation on it, and then draw the oddest conclusions from this.

Between them we find:

And what lures us into thinking that? The kind of way in which we talk about the machine. We say, for example, that the machine has (possesses) such-and-such possibilities of movement; we speak of an ideally rigid machine which can move only thus-and-so.

Rather than give a false philosophical interpretation he is thinking like an engineer:

PI 193:

... We talk as if these parts could only move in this way, as if they could not do anything else. Is this how it is? Do we forget the possibility of their bending, breaking off, melting, and so on? Yes; in many cases we don’t think of that at all.

But it is not just the engineer who know such possibilities. The ordinary person familiar with machines knows this. Rather than the philosopher's ideal picture of a machine as something rigid, the ordinary picture of a machine is of something that will require maintenance and repair in order to move in the ways it was designed to.

[Although I am not prepared to pursue this line of inquiry, the picture of the universe as a machine supports the idea that the universe is deterministic. If, however, the universe is not an "ideally rigid machine" then we should not rule out chance.]

But my point was that perhaps there is a difference in kind. — schopenhauer1

The claim that there is a difference in kind between an organism and a computer program is quite different that the claim that there is a difference in kind between organisms. Even so, I suspect that with the continued advances in AI just where those differences lie may become less and less clear.

And the same goes for any other mental image (M) that one has; it is the image of (M) and of nothing else. — Luke

As I have said before, saying that a mental image of X is an image of X and nothing else, says no more than saying a physical image of X is an image of X and nothing else.

Or, the Eiffel Tower may be slightly different to how you imagined it, but you say it's exactly how you imagined it. — Luke

My point was, that would be a mistake. My mental image of the Eiffel Tower need not be an image of the Eiffel Tower.

Moreover, why suppose that a mental image is required in order to use the name "Eiffel Tower" correctly — Luke

You seem to have lost track of the argument. It is not required. The question is whether the mental image must of the Eiffel Tower and nothing else. You supported the claim that it must. I have been trying to provide examples of why that need not be the case.

Comparing my mental image to what I mistakenly think is the Eiffel Tower does not correct the problem.
— Fooloso4

You seem to be suggesting that you can "correct the problem" by comparing your mental image to (what you correctly think is) the Eiffel Tower. — Luke

Why would you think I am suggesting that when I said the opposite?

What object is being referred to at PI 389? — Luke

According to the interlocutor (and you(?)), whatever object the mental image is of is what the object is.

And the same goes for any other mental image (M) that one has; it is the image of (M) and of nothing else. — Luke

If M is the mental image then M is not the image of M. It is not a mental image of itself. It is not a mental image of a mental image.

If I have a mental image of N then it is my mental image of N. But this does not mean that my mental image of N, whatever N is, must be more similar to N than any picture.

We have been over all this before. Repeating the same points is getting us nowhere.

Not necessarily, because it depends on how you would conceive of, or define, "something". — Metaphysician Undercover

Do you conceive of, or define "you" and "we" as something?

Some years ago, when Lawrence Krauss published A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing those who are well versed in both philosophy and physics were highly critical. They pointed out that his "nothing" was not nothing. Despite the title what he described is a universe from something,

I am agnostic as to whether AI will ever be conscious. It was not too long ago that it was generally believed that a computer program and associated hardware could pilot a car. Such a thing was thought to require consciousness.

If there is something, absolute nothingness is impossible. Last I checked, there is a whole lot of something, in fact, a whole lot of a lot of things. That there is something is a necessary condition for speculating about nothingness.

Father Copelston's Thomistic misreading of Spinoza — 180 Proof

Copleston is a good example of why we should not rely on secondary texts or comprehensive stories of the history of philosophy.

In my opinion, anyone using Copleston as the primary text for a philosophy course, even for an introductory level course, is guilty of a dereliction of duty.