Hence, I do think in arts there must be some kind of standard/criteria on what consists of an artwork (poem, novel, song, etc.) — Eros1982

I am saying that there are those standards, and we know what they are from looking at the best. but every now and not too often, a playwright will break the rules and set a new standard and paradigm - and the standard changes. If you judged Waiting for Godot or Under Milk Wood by the standards of conventional theatre of the day, you would not look at either of them twice. We understand classical painting, but you cannot use that understanding to look at a Rothko. But when you start to appreciate Rothko, you develop a new standard.

In other words the work has priority, and the standard is just the current theory and standard - a post hoc justification and teaching aid.

Can we agree on properties that give beauty or harmony in objects, humans, artworks and phenomena? — Eros1982

To a considerable extent we do agree; and to a considerable extent we disagree. But any consideration of what properties are shared by beautiful things is like music theory, it comes after the event. First we make the sounds we like, and then we work out theories of harmony etc.

Furthermore, some things become fashionable, and go out of fashion, but other things do not. There are generational sensibilities and concerns, and evergreen classics. All this is annoying for philosophers who like things tidy and consistent.

The Crimean War started with Russia's invasion of the Turkish Danubian principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia (now Romania). Britain and France both wanted to prop up the ailing Ottoman Empire and resist Russian expansionism in the Near East. — google

Mumble mumble, forced to repeat, mumble.

When I am an alcoholic, if you will not sell me your finest ethanol, I will have to go to the hardware store and buy meths. No tax on meths!

Of course you are your brother's keeper, but if you are also a shopkeeper, you need yourself the support of the community. Easy enough to tell the miserable addict to go away, and impossible to really be responsible for his plight. How can you help me, addicted as you are to your respectability?

Advertisement doesn't work on me so... — Darkneos

Yeah, I saw that one too.

Are we essentially just brainwashed by society and nothing more than puppets in our lives or is there more than that? When I ask other people no one seems to think that just because emotions are cause and effect that it means they aren't genuine. But if you are being affected or influenced by something else then it's not genuine, you're being controlled. — Darkneos

Both. If you had no feelings, then it would be hard to brainwash you into having them. But given that you have fears and anxieties, needs and desires, you can find them being manipulated. Panic not though, the manipulator, 'society' is just some other people like you, pretending to be the illuminati.

Try unenlightened's advertisement meditation: whenever you see an advert, analyse it carefully and you will find in every case that it will first seek to provoke in you a negative feeling, and then offer you a solution to make you feel better.

Because we can feel hunger, and feel sated, we can have hunger provoked in us; so it is worth a little consideration to discover whether the hunger you feel arises because you need sustenance or because McKellog needs to sell some more carbohydrates. But it is also worth discovering whether your feeling of being manipulated is also being provoked in order to manipulate you into supporting a party that promises to "take back control".

The price of freedom is eternal vigilance. — political advertising

Thanks for sharing.

As it happens, though, you are not just an insignificant speck, you are every insignificant speck, and every sentient being for all time. So make yourself comfortable, because you're going to be here a while.

It's all a question of identity; what is reincarnated. what Karmic baggage is carried from one life to another. So try the flavour of this, and add a pinch of salt to taste.

Consciousness, gathers accretions in the form of memories, habits, and associations. But in itself, and apart from its contents from time to time, consciousness is featureless, and therefore everywhere the same. "It ain't no use a-talking to me. It's just the same as talking to you.", as Bob Dylan sang. Or as Jesus put it, "Inasmuch as ye do it unto the least of these my brethren, ye do it unto me" When I am more awake, I tell myself these things; that the persecutor is always persecuting himself in another incarnation, and there is only an illusion of separation between us. I/you can look forward to/back on 10,000,000 deaths in the concentration camps and however many lives saluting the Fuhrer and goose-stepping across Europe, etc etc. We don't have to carry the Karmic baggage, it is always right there waiting for us.

If it isn't the belief in racial groups that motivates the discrimination against their members, perhaps you can name something else that is. — NOS4A2

Because they can, and advantage can be gained from disadvantaging others.

Does (non-violent) racism (dislike, mistrust, prejudice) in the minds of “white” people EQUAL the same type of racism in “black” people?

In other words:
(Does White racism = Black racism ? ) — 0 thru 9

I think I can help out on this one. There is a vast difference between the prejudice of the empowered and that of the disempowered. The very simplest illustration of this is the racist violence perpetrated by black police officers against a black man recently.

Are you likening that to Russia hankering for Kiev without consulting them? — Paine

I'm likening the arguments about legitimacy. I am saying borders are never legitimate or illegitimate, they are merely established or disestablished and stable or unstable.

If your Chez is actually attacked, and you choose to fight the attackers, that could reasonably be called self-defense. — Paine

I think it would be called "resisting arrest" by the enemy. and I think they would call my UDI illegitimate. This is the difficulty that you do not seem to have grasped - my neighbours have an interest and a claim to be consulted over their national borders, that I have created without consulting them.

Isaac has repeatedly argued that Ukrainians are not enough of a self-identified group to say they are making a decision to act in self-defense together toward a common enemy. So anything you might refer to as "moral" on those grounds witl have to be excluded in order to be considered. — Paine

Such arguments have as much force as one wants them to have. A group's right to self determination has, necessarily, to be allowed before it can be even tested. My declaration of unilateral independence for Chez unenlightened has been studiously ignored by the UK government despite the unanimous vote of a 100% turnout in a free and fair referendum. It is an outrage, and I am asking for your donations of arms so that we can defend our small country, particularly from the invasion of foreign goats. Poor Scotland has been refused permission to even having a referendum, but I was smart enough not to ask.

Stable borders are the pre-requisite of a democracy and they therefore cannot be established democratically.

the notion that Ukraine sans Russia will be some kind of peaceful, democratic paradise as opposed to the Orwellian nightmare of Russian puppetry is completely without merit. — Isaac

Indeed. The notion that any country is some kind of peaceful, democratic paradise is without much merit. Nevertheless, one has to make a judgement about whether Ukraine sans Russia might be better or worse than Ukraine as Greater Russia over all, allowing that there will be winners and losers either way and that nobody knows the answer for definite to such hypotheticals. And then presumably one has to weigh that benefit or loss against the costs of a war to achieve whatever option is preferred - also incalculable except in arrears to an approximation.
There is also an incalculable risk of 'letting the aggressor profit from their crime' in encouraging others to chance many other folks' arms.

So it is not a great moral victory in any particular situation, to think the war option is not worth the cost. Opinions can legitimately differ, and nothing more than suggestive reasons can be given either way. Unless one is a pacifist non-utilitarian, and then there is no need to labour over it. Everyone lay down your arms, and if the other chap wants to kill you, that is his problem not yours. Given there is a war, the casualties are always the other chap's fault anyway, everyone agrees about that at least.

But here I’m trying to get an analysis specific to recent Western philosophy in particular. I never particularly warmed to Gilbert Ryle — Wayfarer

He was a prick. And it is the nature of a prick to misunderstand himself when right as supporting himself when wrong. He was right about category errors, and the notion is important for disentangling some of the muddles of philosophy. But in characterising mind as the 'ghost in the machine' he paved the way for a reductionist mechanistic thesis that still permeates much of the West.

Because nobody believes in ghosts, right? And philosophy runs on slogans more than arguments.
But we believe in 'measurements' like anything, don't we? And measurements are relations between the thing measured and the thing measuring. So the mind of man is the measure of all things, we might better say.

Perhaps a reconsideration of Ryle might even bear some fruit in the way of a rapprochement between the analytic and continental schools?

The idea is just unhinged... — Isaac

War is always unhinged. But talking of price, one sees a high price being paid for peace, or at least a ceasefire, being paid by the citizens of N. Korea for example. It seems that there are fates worse than death - Orwell's "a boot stamping on a human face forever". What price are you willing (for others, obviously) to pay for peace? And on what hinge do you hang it.

what Ryle said was the correct view of the matter — Wayfarer

Mind is not a thing but a relation, a pattern, an interaction, an event, a movement.

You only exist in relationship. — J.Krishnamurti

Not a brain state, but a(n embodied, active) brain's relation to the environment. The university is what the people do in the buildings. If people are not studying, the university has died, or is asleep at least.

The difficulty, as I see it, is that we tend to fall into, is that even starting with this clarity, that consciousness is the relationship between an embodied brain, and the environment, taken as two 'things', even as I lay out the categories of things and relations, I am establishing a new relation between consciousness and itself, the understanding of which tends to establish it as another thing. And I am back where I started with the wretched thinking thing. Hence meditation, to try and stop that circle of self-concern.

Anyway, all this is too "deep" for me as far as my knowledge, memory and interest about mythology are concerned. And I don't know if I should take a plunge in the deep waters of mythology. — Alkis Piskas

Sorry, I cannot resist just pointing, in case anyone missed it, to the relationship between mythology -"we're not much concerned with all that these days", and prejudice and inequality unfortunately persisting in the world, even - dare I say it? in philosophy departments. (Misogyny is the necessary tool of patrilineal descent, and thus of the vaunted nuclear family, etc etc etc.)

As for the "Triple Goddess" she has nothing to do with the main Greek goddesses, Hera, Athena and Aphrodite. — Alkis Piskas

That's right. Or at least to an extent it is. but then the Triple Goddess has aspects of virgin, mother, and crone with the associated colours , white, red, and black. And I think Aphrodite for love, Hera for marriage and Athena for the wisdom of age fits quite neatly. It's a complicated topic, and I am not wanting to press it here.

As to the influences, we are talking about a widespread and very ancient religion that was likely varied and widespread and will have lasted longer in more isolated places. But Graves was very much the Classics scholar, and he detects the influence of the Goddess repressed, as it were in the Greek and Roman pantheons, and relegated to minor and largely negative roles. It gives a context to the later take-over by the ambitious mouse god of the Hebrews, that we now know as Jehovah, or Allah, or simply God,

Death is not taboo is simply uncomfortable to talk about and creates the sense of dread the terror comes first upon self awareness — MojaveMan

There are many people who have never seen a dead human. When you see the dead, they do not terrify, any more than a sleeping human terrifies. They are rather boring as they do not wake up.

Psychology is full of theories of this sort that are long on explanation and short on justification. Freud also had a theory about the importance of death in the unconscious, and he went so far out of fashion as to be almost unmentionable. That this is just another plausible but out of fashion hypothesis is well supported by this comment:

Psychologist Yoel Inbar summarized the popularity of the theory:

I can not explain to people who were not around during this time - which I would say was roughly 2004 to 2008 - how much everything at the time was about terror management theory. You would go to SPSP and it seemed like half of the posters were about terror management theory. It was just everywhere. There is just an explosion of terror management theory stuff. And then it sort of receded. And now you barely see it. Which is also kind of weird. We were obsessed with this for a period of 3-5 years, then we moved on to other things

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terror_management_theory#Criticisms

It doesn't say much for psychology as a reputable science that this sort of thing goes on; I have argued elsewhere that there are particular features of the human sciences that make such errors almost the rule.

Religious authorities, with the support of state authotities, were always and still are persecuting non-believers! — Alkis Piskas

I'm not sure that was true, particularly of the many gods religions. It is true of the religions of the Book. All that 'begetting' is very much the record of patriarchal lineages, though I'm told there are vestiges of a matrilineal system somewhere in the Hebrew traditions. But between the Greek and Roman gods there was something between a translation and absorption :

Zeus= Jupiter
Poseidon= Neptune
Hades= Pluto
Hera= Juno ( No children)
Demeter= Ceres
Hestia= Vesta (No children)
Ares= Mars
Aphrodite= Venus
Athena= Minerva
Hephaestus= Vulcan
Hermes= Mercury
Dionysus= Bacchus
ETC.
This seems quite natural - "Oh you call the love goddess Venus, we know her as Aphrodite." As opposed to "My god is the only god, and all your gods are false, and your worship thereof sacrilege."

More equivalences here

Robert Graves had an interesting theory that "The Old Religion" worshiped the Triple Goddess. This was based on the more natural matrilineal society. The Greek myths retain the traces of this religion in the muses, the fates, and so on, and tells the story, in code, of how the patriarchal takeover happened. Patriarchy implies patrilineal inheritance, and that necessitates the control of women's sexuality, and hence their subjugation.
The White Goddess

He also has a retelling of the Gospel stories, King Jesus, which is also worth a look. A sadly neglected controversial scholar.

Ryle's purpose there was to illustrate what is meant by the phrase "category mistake". — Andrew M

My usual example is "three ducks in a row"

duck, duck, duck.

There are the ducks, and there is the row. When you have seen the ducks, you have seen the row. But there are not four things. Yet the row is no ghost.

For me the known too comes in a wide variety of flavors. Some knowns are quite pleasant while others are the converse. — javra

Yes, that is how I characterise the unknown - by reference to the known. Because there is no other character I could conceivably give it. And hence no particular response it can evoke, except by association with something known. So if one arrives at a fear of death, it can only be by associating it with something known and feared - a fear of abandonment perhaps. Which is the loss of relationship. Whenever one imagines one's death, one imagines being alive to it, and that is where fear can arise.

I'm saying that because the fear of death is what drives humans to do everything. (Terror Managment Theory) — MojaveMan

Right. Well that's a load of codswallop, and maybe explains why you have everything backwards.

Most psychologists consider TMT to be a sort of evolutionary trait. Humans naturally became aware of dangerous threats as a means of preserving their lives and continuing their gene pool. The deep existential anxiety that comes with that knowledge is an unfortunate byproduct of this evolutionary advantage. — PsychologyCodswallop

Elephants have some awareness of death, and show interest in the bones of their deceased. But fear of dangerous threats is not at all the same as fear, or even awareness of death. Even a fly will try and avoid being squished. Proper psychology talks about adrenalin levels and the fight or flight response to such threats - this is the physiological response to threat, which does not distinguish fear from aggression.

And that response is on a totally different level (it is instinctive and physiological in origin), from any possible conscious awareness of death. To the extent that there is a specific fear of death, it is is much more likely to be social in origin. In civilised society sex and death are taboo. By custom they are kept hidden, not talked about, not to be seen by children. It is the hiding that invests death with particular significance and creates anxiety and the excitement of the forbidden.

Most psychologists consider CMT (Codswallop Management Theory) to be a valuable therapeutic tool in the management of psychobabble, the disease spread by the regurgitation of sensationalist nonsense composed of unsubstantiated claims mixed with random scientific terms to lend it some credence, such as 'evolutionary' and 'gene-pool', and 'existential anxiety'.

I've always thought that fear of death - for those who are so afraid - largely consists of fear of the unknown — javra

Well that's something I don't understand - the unknown as far as I'm concerned covers all manner of wonderful, boring, delightful, agonising, unimaginable curiosities that I cannot respond to in any way at all because it is all - unknown. What I think one can more successfully fear is the loss of the known, which seems to be more or less in line with @Vera Mont

So is this the suggestion - because we fear death we should want to die?

Non comprendo.

That is, the university is something we can see by virtue of being creatures with minds. — Andrew M

I think Ryle, (and certainly I,) would prefer to say that the university is something that we do together; if the building is lost, and the library burns, we can meet under a tree for a tutorial on whatever we can remember of the course. The ghost is the transient interaction that takes place in the machine of the facilities, which are there to facilitate the educational and researching goings-on, that constitute the university.

It is not synonymous with the problem of squaring mental states with brain states and physicality with non physicality. — Andrew4Handel

I think Ryle would say that talk of mental states and brain states is also confused talk. A brain that is in a state is a dead brain; a living brain is a brain that is interacting with itself, its body and its environment, and it is these interactions that constitute the mind.

It is an unfortunate locution for his thesis that the solution to the problem of the ghost in the machine can be easily formulated as "machines are real and ghosts are not." This is clearly not the conclusion he wants us to reach. To discover the real university is to join the university, not to do a tour of the buildings.

I see the husband and the wife, but where is their marriage?

But could there be any moral code or principle that all rational people would put forward? — Mark S

It's an invitation to ad hom argue. Anyone who disagrees with me, given certain conditions, is irrational.
But furthermore, if the conditions were so weak as to allow the inclusion of all or most of the generally accepted canon of moral philosophers, then it would be clearly falsified as a matter of fact.

Hume's dictum is not really addressed:

It is not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger. — Hume

Hence antinatalism. This is also why politics does not consist of a competition for power between the Good Party and the Bad Party, but between parties that rationally disagree about what ought to be done.

Is there anything more to this than an appeal to like-minded, (rather than rational,) people to go with the current moral zeitgeist and stop arguing?

What's the Beef vegan myco-protein meat substitute? It seems to happen, as might well be expected, that social inequalities and prejudices are enshrined in the languages we inherit. We all, here, inherit the language of the British Empire, and its legacies of racist, sexist, classist, and otherwise offensive attitudes. Overcoming these is difficult and has not happened just because the inequalities in the written law may have largely been removed. Old habits die hard.

But if you are quite sure that you can use this distorting language without succumbing to the sexism or racism or gender stereotyping that is implied in the grammar, then there is no problem, is there? "How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, That has such people in't."

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.” — Shelly

Consider the meaning of the sentence, "Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!" The context shows both the original boasting intended meaning, and the ironic emptied out meaning turned back on Ozymandias.

I conclude that meaning is not limited to the intent of the speaker or the understanding of the listener, but permeates the whole of space and time and is affected by the desert wind and the traveller's tent, and has the power to inform even a modern philosopher.

Oh, and as it happens, it's a command, not a proposition.

The image of cheerful philosophers torturing lawyers is just too delicious; we'll just slowly pour the whiskey into the bottle until the flyster either flies or floats out.

Thanks for that. I have come across a few refugees from the Witnesses, and the rigidity of that society does seem to lead to a performed 'acceptable' interaction whose unreality can become unbearable, and yet so ingrained that one cannot any more find one's authentic being. As if inauthenticity were infectious. So the veil between you and the world becomes also a veil between you and yourself.

And from there, it is more understandable that @fdrake's implied denial of the existence of an authentic self would seem brutal. In old-fashioned psychological terms, one needs to establish an unproblematically robust ego first, before considering a philosophy that negates or transcends it.

maybe we don't understand one another at all. — frank

Have you said something about yourself and I missed it?

At some stage in this confessional thread one might start to see a pattern; so far the obvious pattern is that philosophers like to display their examined lives, and think it serious and worthwhile to do so. And who am I to disagree? Everybody's looking for something. Sweet dreams are made of these.

Family: youngest of 5, and only boy: an accident at the end of the family, father ex-Wee-Free, ex communist, mother ex-military. hence the contradictions of middle-class socialism backed by determinist authoritarian Colonial Victorian morality.

Me therefore, more like an only child of many mothers, both spoilt and neglected. Physically, slow to develop, poor coordination, rather poor memory, but some talent for pattern recognition. Therefore, good at mathematics, where writing is minimal and understanding is king.

At age 11, expelled from the womb of the ultra-feminine family, into the harsh world of an all male boarding school. Became psychologically homeless and politically revolutionary. Therefore rejected the natural path from Maths Physics and Chemistry A-levels to a science or engineering degree, and resorted to philosophy and psychology knowing nothing of their content. Found philosophy congenial.

TL:DR Contrarian falls into snake-pit of philosophy, cannot be bothered to climb out.

Alas, the hundred acre wood will be a quieter sadder place without Tigger. But there will be more strengthening medicine for the rest of us.

And yet in the mouth of (most?) believers these days, "God" is just a three-letter epithet (or crutch) for ego ("why"). — 180 Proof

Yes, I'm glad you appreciate the close connection. Ego is the zeitgeist of the age brought on by, I suppose a century of material 'progress'. Hedonism is ego as virtue, and as you are aware, often wins the popular vote in politics in these parlous times. Where religion is disconnected from politics, one might, even now, find a more significant expression.

Speaking of Stoicism, I noticed this book:

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/604070/how-to-live-a-good-life-by-edited-and-with-an-introduction-by-massimo-pigliucci-skye-cleary-daniel-kaufman/

Which suggests in the introduction that a philosophy and a religion both necessarily have a metaphysics an an ethics, (and possibly a practice), and that the difference is vague. Not a new thought of course, but probably new to a certain modern incarnation of zealotry.

I have said before that everyone has something at the centre of their life that they live for, and that is their god, whether it is a football team, knowledge, ego, power, love, pleasure, rationality, sex, or whatever. "With my body, I thee worship."

this was "unenlightened's" whole argument...You need to believe in order to believe in god. — Nickolasgaspar

Not quite. My argument is that you need to stop believing in yourself in order to believe in God. And you have quite clearly exemplified this for me. What I have not done, that you have not seemingly noticed, is presented any argument for God, or professed any belief in God.

But you have seen in me the antagonist just like a good Christian seeing the devil in an atheist. You have displayed your irrationality and your blind faith in a cause, that of your own superior rationality. It's quite amusing.

do you feel hurt or threaten when someone exposes the irrational nature of a claim you subscribe to?? — Nickolasgaspar

Do you? Or do you not even allow yourself to become conscious of how you have exposed your own irrationality, so quick you are to project it onto me?

As it happens I answered your question 2 days before you asked it in another thread:

Say you call me an idiot; I tend to deny it, and then be afraid that everyone will think I'm an idiot and then blame you for being so rude, and call you an idiot back. All this is a resistance, I don't let the idea in, and so it remains there pricking at me.

But if I simply accept that I am an idiot, there is no problem - it is only the image I had of myself being smart that has taken a knock. — unenlightened

I am focusing or better observing and analyzing the irrationality in humans. — Nickolasgaspar

Oh, my apologies, I thought you were a human.