Concepts like subjective and objective aren't arbitrary concepts. — Sam26

I didn't say they were. I said attempts to give them substance in the absence of any conceptual motivation would make them so. The OP is one such attempt. It is preferable that people disagree on the use of terms when motivated by different problematics, than trivially agree on such uses without being productively constrained by a need to address a well-founded set of issues.

Again, the question is what any of this has to do with subject and object. I'm not saying no answer can be given. I'm just saying that one needs a specific set of articulated conceptual motivations. The idea of just arbitrarily coming up with 'working definitions' out of the blue is a useless exercise in philosophical triviality.

As for Witty, he had the acuity to realize that most so-called 'epistemological concerns' were just stupid uses of language taken much too seriously.

I don't doubt any of that. I'm just saying that these problems were not articulated in terms of subject and object. Any translation of ancient Greek which uses the word 'subject' in the modern sense is trash. It's a Latin word that has no correlate in classical Greek, the closest of which is the word hypokeimenon, which has very different resonances.

Same concerns humanity has had since the ancient schools of philosophy in India, China and Greece, if not earlier. — Marchesk

The subjective/objective distinction didn't even exist until the 18th century or so, so even if one were to try and employ it to address 'the distinction between reality and appearance', there's a great deal of conceptual work needed to articulate the junction between these ideas. There's nothing more philosophically naive than thinking that the terms in which problems are posed are obvious, clear, and well-founded. Most of the time, the problems themselves are rubbish.

Wasn't Wittgenstein trying to dissolve issues like solipsism by arguing for the necessary public nature of language? — Marchesk

Yes, but in a way far removed from this kind of arbitrariness. And 'warding off epistemological concerns' is meaningless. What concerns? And why are you concerned to begin with?

that we should at least be able to agree upon a working definition of what the concepts subjective and objective means. — Sam26

Why? Without some conceptual motivation to which the distinction responds to, it's just an arbitrary excercise. Kant, Scotus, and Poinsot all had a set of conceptual motivations which made their employment of the terms non-arbitrary. In the absence of this, its just a trivial bit of language wringing. Linguistic engines on idle.

An objective fact, for example, is that which is mind-independent. — Sam26

I will never not take joy in pointing out that 'objective' used to mean exactly the opposite, and that for the Scholastics, that which was objective was that which existed for - and only for - a mind: "For [Duns] Scotus and [John] Poinsot, something was an 'objective being' to the extent that it existed in awareness. The sun and the sea were 'objective beings,' but so were unicorns - they also existed 'in' our awareness. So, within experience, all beings were by definition objective beings. However, not all of them were physical things or events." (Bains, The Primacy of Semiosis). This being the case for the 'subject' as well, which used to mean that which is precisely independent of someone (as in: 'the subject of analysis'). A silly distinction.

Not given, I think: Bronia helped Marie get an education, but it's not mentioned whether or it was Bronia's financial contribution that helped Marie (as distinct from connections, knowledge, etc). The earnings in question in the passage are Marie's.

Originally posted by @Iwanttostopphilosophizingbutikant:

"The evidential problem of Evil can be understood as the following argument:

In many sad events, we can’t see what good features would outweigh the bad features.
Therefore, it is likely that there are unjustified sad events (the good features do not outweigh the bad features)
Therefore, it is likely that: if God exists, then he allows unjustified sad events.
God would never allow unjustified sad events.
Therefore, it is likely that God does not exist. (3, 4 MT)

I object to premise four that God would never allow unjustified sad events. We do not know, in the absolute sense, what kind of god God is. He could have designed us and the world as we know it, but walked away and took His hands off of his creation to allow it to grow, change, fall, or stay stagnant depending completely on the independence, or lack thereof, of the world. In this sense, God is not allowing unjustified sad events happening, they just are happening as a result of the nature in which he gave our world.

Another case could be that God could have made the world differently, as in there is the possibility of a world without disease, hunger, poverty, sadness, sin, and whatever else one wishes to rid the world of. According to counterfactuals of creaturely freedoms, the problem is not that this ideal world could not exist, it is simply that God cannot make it exist because of our free will ability. No matter what people will always make the same choices in the same circumstance regardless of the world in which it is set. According to Tomas Bogardus, Adam and Eve will always choose to eat the forbidden fruit. There is always the possibility that they could choose to drop the fruit; however, we know that they will not ever choose this because this could only occur if we change their human nature (or instinct). "

All of them.

Damien Cahill & Phillip Toner (eds.) - Wrong Way: How Privatisation & Economic Reform Backfired

Essays by various authors on the Australian context specifically, covering everything from healthcare to education to public engineering projects. I've been looking for a book like this for about a year now, and this is perfect.

Hannah Arendt - The Human Condition [political philosophy]
Andre Leroi-Gourhan - Gesture and Speech [anthropology]
Alicia Juarrero - Dynamics In Action: Intentional Behavior as a Complex System [systems science]
Alva Noe - Action in Perception [philosophy of mind]
Eva Jablonka and Marion Lamb - Evolution in Four Dimensions [evolutionary biology]
Daniel Dor - The Instruction of Imagination [linguistics]
Raymond Geuss - Changing the Subject [philosophy]
Giovanni Arrighi - The Long Twentieth Century [political economy]
Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin - The Making Of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy Of American Empire [political economy]
Eric Hobsbawm - The Age of Revolution/Capital/Empire/Extremes (tetraology) [history]
Fernand Braudel - Civilization and Capitalism, 3 Vols. [history]

Missing some sociology, literature, and art, but not familiar with anything that's general enough.

Heh, you'll be surprised how much you can get through if you set aside just an hour of undistracted reading a day. Like, if it takes about 2 hours to read a chapter (conservative estimate), and if a book (of philosophy) is usually between 4-7 chapters, you can almost certainly get through a book and a bit a week. Once you develop the habit, it's very possible.

There's alot of equivocal writing about Lacan's 'three orders', but the best writing I know on the topic is Anthony Wilden's collection of essays in System and Structure. The basic idea is that the three orders relate to different ways of treating relations, that correspond in the following ways:

Real : Difference
Symbolic : Distinction
Imaginary : Opposition

That is, relations can be treated in terms of differences (real), distinctions (symbolic), or oppositions (imaginary). They are like different 'grades' of relations. Importantly, these grades of relation are hierarchically embedded, so that all imaginary relations are symbolic and real (i.e. all oppositional relations are distinctions and differences), and all symbolic relations are real (i.e. all distinctions are differences). As in:

Relations: {Real{Symbolic{Imaginary}}} ; Or:
Relations: {Differences{Distinctions{Oppositions}}}

The idea is that types of relations are characterized by a hierarchy of ascending generality, with differences at the top (the most general kind of relation), distinctions in the middle, and oppositions at the bottom (the least general kind of relation). If that makes sense, the next question concerns what characterizes each level of generality.

Starting from the 'bottom', imaginary relations, relations of opposition, are characterized by terms which are (mutually) exclusive (A ∨ B), and particular. By exclusive I mean that terms in this relation obey the logic of either/or: either A or B. To understand particularity, it's useful to contrast it with symbolic relations, which are relations of distinctions:

Symbolic relations are first of all not characterized by oppositional terms, but only distinctive ones. A father is distinct from a child, a chair is distinct from a desk. These terms do not oppose each other, and are not mutually exclusive (unlike imaginary relations). Furthermore, symbolic terms are not particular terms: a chair can be any chair, and does not refer to 'this' or 'that' concrete chair in the here and now. This is why the symbolic order is the order roughly correlated to language: in a language, we can make all sorts of distinctions that do not necessarily correspond to any particular thing or set of things.

The real is the hardest and most ephemeral to discuss so... I won't. Anyway, this is a very schematic way of treating the three orders, drawn roughly from Wilden's take on them. The psychoanalytic literature will tend to discuss these in other terms like desire, the Other, the mirror stage, the phallus, father-mother-child, and so on, which are all in fact appropriate and necessary to get the full sense of how these terms interlock, but this schematic rendering is hopefully helpful.

Wilden's work is hard to find, but two other works that I've found useful are Bruce Fink's The Lacanian Subject and Charles Shepherdson's Lacan and the Limits of Language. Zizek doesn't often do a good job explaining Lacanian concepts, imo. anyway, yeah, the abstraction and obscurity of the distinctions make them hard to explain, which is why there's so much waffle on them. Anyway, hope this helps.

So I'm about half-way through and I'm liking it alot. The title 'Spinoza and Politics' is actually deliciously ambiguous: it refers not just to 'Spinoza's political theory', but quite literally, the politics of Spinoza's time, and how the political events of the day in Dutch republic profoundly shaped Spinoza's writing. It's also fairly lucid, and treats the both of the Tractati as seriously as it treats the Ethics, treating the whole oeuvre holistically, rather than distinguishing between a 'metaphysical' and 'political' Spinoza. It's fairly fast-paced, and condenses alot in a small space, which makes it a very rich read. Good if you want a study that brings out the uniqueness of Spinoza's approach and situates it with respect to his time.

Philosophers are competent individuals in the art of communication. — Posty McPostface

Oh sweet summer child.

If you think a thread is not good, report it.

In this context it's usually a people-being-bad-at-communicating issue.

Don't ascribe to philosophy what you can put down to incompetence.

Anyway, I'm not here to debate this, this is your second thread on this topic, and if you aren't going to stick to addressing a particular mod-related line of inquiry here, I will merge any further discussion into your other thread.

How so? Is this just postmodernism being professed here? — Posty McPostface

No, it's just basic language 101.

Yes, that bugs me. So, what can be done about it? — Posty McPostface

Ask people to clarify what they mean, obviously. This is just trivial communication etiquette, not some philosophical mystery.

There is no such thing as a 'right' meaning. Unclear and odd, sure.

Who cares what anyone, ever, writes about God?

Philosophy is chock to the brim with 'stipulated definitions', and context ought to make clear when they are in effect. I trust members to call people out who aren't clear about their use of words, and it's really not our job to chase people asking 'but what do you mean by such-and-such?'. If a thread is bad, it generally speaks for itself. Appreciate the thought though.

Besides, all definitions are stipulated definitions until people forget that they are.

Etienne Balibar - Spinoza and Politics
Brian Rotman - Signifying Nothing: The Semiotics of Zero
Brian Rotman - Mathematics as Sign: Writing, Imagining, Counting
Brian Rotman - Becoming Beside Ourselves: The Alphabet, Ghosts, and Distributed Human Being

On a bit of a Rotman/Spinoza kick.

Neither. Read, or stop talking.

SX's argument is that MP cannot explain why our mathematics is but "an infinitesimal subset" of M. This again implies our interest. — Luke

This is incredibly silly. A failure of X to explain Y cannot entail that Z must in turn be implicated. That's just a basic failure of logical form, let alone content.

Idc which post you address; just asking that you do a better job of it.

The argument doesn't stand or fall on the question of interest, as I pointed out in the posts on the page previous to this. So I dunno seems a like a bad way to argue is to not read.

Except, as I detailed above, it does not.

I find affinities with (late) Wittgenstein's view, which in general I find the most appealing view on math. The emphasis on mathematical practice and on the selection principle are topics which preoccupied W. too. I'm curious if you're familiar with W's view as expounded by Rodych and of your opinion on it — Πετροκότσυφας

Yes! I think basically think that Wittgenstein basically hit the nail on the head with his reflections on math and that everyone else has more or less been playing catch-up ever since (and failing rather miserably, at that!). That said, I say this only having gleaned Witty's position from some selective reading of the Lectures and primarily the work of Bob Clark and Paul Livingston. I read the two papers you linked by Rodych, and while I have minor quibbles (I wouldn't call Witty a finitist - or an 'infinitist', for that matter, insofar as I think his position explodes the terms of that debate - in a productive manner), I really liked the way they tracked Witty's evolving thoughts on math across his work.

But yes, my enthusiasm for Rovelli's paper is partly coloured by the Wittgenstinian hue with which I bring to it.

That's not what it can't account for. Read again, I'm not helping you here.

That would be begging the question. And in any case, no self-respecting Platonist would agree.

That's why I removed any reference to interest, so it would be literally impossible to 'sound like' that. Arguments I can deal with. Hearing imaginary noises - not my problem.

To distill the argument most concisely, I'd get rid of any reference to interest at all, in order to clearly see the 'negative' import of the argument. So something perhaps like this:

P1. Any account of mathematics would need to explain why mathematics is the way it is.
P2. Mathematical Platonism is the view that there is a world M, that contains all possible mathematical objects and truths.
P3. Mathematics is but "an infinitesimal subset" of any such mathematical reality.
P4. Any account of mathematics would need to explain why P3 is the case, in order to satisfy P1.
P5. Mathematical Platonism has no way to explain why P3 is the case.
C1. Mathematical Platonism cannot satisfy P1.

Ergo, Mathematical Platonism fails to have any explanatory force with respect to mathematics.

I 'excluded' the question of interest because the argument works without it. 'Interest' is Rovelli's effort to provide a positive explanation that he finds lacking in Platonism. The negative argument works without any reference to it. Rovelli weaves both the positive and negatives aspects of the argument together in the paper, but isolating the negative aspect makes the 'argument against Platonism' easier to see, I think. I'm not super confident about my construction of syllogisms (it's not something I'm trained in, and I find it hard to think with them), but I'm happy to hash this out if possible.

Yep. The universal acid, at work in math no less than animals. The death of God by caustic immolation across whatever asylum one wants to find for him.

The key passage is the following:

"Mathematics may be the investigation of structures. But it is not the list of all possible structures: these are too many and their ensemble is uninteresting. If the world of mathematics was identified with the platonic world M defined above, we could program a computer to slowly unravel it entirely, by listing all possible axioms and systematically applying all possible transformation rules to derive all possible theorems. But we do not even think of doing so. Why? Because what we call mathematics is an infinitesimal subset of the huge world M defined above: it is the tiny subset which is of interest for us. Mathematics is about studying the “interesting” structures". (my emphasis)

Note the identification of what is mathematics with what is 'important' to us; or, contrapositively, the exclusion of most of M as that which is not mathematics. Or more starkly still: most of M is not mathematics. It's not that we pick out some of interesting parts of math out of a wider set of math: it is that what we don't pick out is not even considered math. This is the import of Rovelli's metaphor of the sculpture and the stone: the stone really does 'contain' every possible sculpture that could be made from it, but what it contains is a kind of sheer potential, indefinite and undifferentiated such that the stone cannot be identified with 'every possible sculpture'. The stone is not a sculpture in the same way that M is not to be identified with math ("Mathematics... is not the list of all possible structures").

Importantly, this is not an assumption that Rovelli makes: this really is how math is, how it 'works'. So the question is: why does math look the way it does (and not otherwise)? What selection principle was employed to sculpt the indefiniteness of M into what is, in fact and in reality, considered math? What Rovelli essentially points out is that Platonism can provide no such principle, because it specifically divorces math from the practice of mathematical activity, which it considers something of an epiphenomenon, and which thus cannot play any constiutitve role in defining math. This is in contrast, Rovelli points out, to how math actually proceeds, wherein 'interest' provides just the selective principle that is missing from Platonism. And if this is the case, then Platonism cannot possibly be true.

That's the argument at play here; those who think that the paper simply proceeds on the basis of begging the question simply lack any basic comprehension ability.

If the Platonists had their way, what is 'real' would be the eternal, the changless, and the deathless: the diametric opposite of everything anyone would recognize as real; such is the Platonic hatred of the world and everything and anyone in it. And that people often take this inverted, hollowed out notion of reality for granted is a sad indictment on a certain intellectual poverty that still exists and cries out for eradication.

But "independent of our intellectual activity" is precisely what "real" means, assuming that "our" refers to any individual person or finite collection of people. — aletheist

No. That's what it is stipulated to mean. The idea that what is real cannot refer to things that are products of our activity is a malicious piece self-serving philosophical claptrap that Platonists have traded in since day one. I agree that it's the usual, most widely employed understanding of the term, but that only attests to the fact that people are not particularly bright.

Rovelli, who is happily a bulb above the rest, rightly avoids the whole semantic debate altogether.

Except I found the author to be saying that the tree is not blue, and he did not tell us why. — Luke

Indeed, the paper stands or falls on whether the world M is a fair interpretation of mathematical realism. The process then becomes our selection fo the interesting bits of M. — Banno

Exactly. The structure of the argument of the paper is that of a reductio. Those who see the paper as begging the question seem to miss this entirely. The paper takes place on the grounds of mathematical Platonism, and attempts to dismantle it internally, and not from some position outside of it.

Now that I think about it, to drive the point home, one might even consider taking into account the subjectivity of a cooperation, or the subjectivity of a state: what is the range of action of a state? What kind of thing, or what kind of things, do states and cooperation take into account? Flows of money, logistical pathways, media interactions, environmental impacts, points of transactions (voting, paying), need for accountability, market forces, and so on, each of which serve, in any particular institutional environment, to determine the different subjectivities at play in both states and cooperation.

The author appears to argue that 'Mathematical Platonism...the view that mathematical reality exists by itself, independently from our own intellectual activities' is false, and it is false because mathematics is dependent on our own intellectual activities — Luke

I'm not sure if you meant to phrase it how you did, but that... would be a perfectly valid argument ('it is false that the tree is blue because the tree is green - and here is why'). That said, that isn't the argument of the paper.

The argument straightforwardly conflates mathematical objects with mathematical practices developed using, or developed to describe, those objects. — Snakes Alive

It's only a 'conflation' if one assumes from the outset the Platonic position on mathematical objects. The point of the paper is to ask how tenable just such a distinction is, by setting out a disjunction ('dilemma'), the choices between which are claimed to put the Platonist in an untenable bind.