Off a cliff, preferably. Along with the rest of Greek philosophy. But those labels I think obfuscate more than they clarify. As Banno relates, asking if numbers are 'real' or 'nominal' seems to be a bad question to begin with. One should refuse the question, not pick an answer.

Forget minds. Minds are overrated and largely uninteresting. Think in terms of behaviour, action, practice. Math is a practice.

I mean that the question is inappropriate, and that you're not paying close enough attention to the context of the use of 'here' in your statement. There's no 'philosophical conundrum' here - just a false problem caused by an inattention to grammar. A linguistic triviality confused for philosophical profundity. As with the whole issue of math, which is not an abstraction of the 'mind', but an abstraction of the sign.

If you have to ask, you need to get a better grasp on the English language.

First, would it be a reasonable summary to say that a subjectivity is a role (say being a pedestrian) that a person can engage in? I mean, would it be a mistake to speak of subjectivities if we are not dealing with persons? — Dfpolis

I don't think this would be the right way to put it: in a strong sense, the subjectivities we inhabit are constitutive of who we are as people: your ability to walk, as distinct from another who cannot, contributes to making you the person you are. To speak of 'roles' is a little too 'distant', as though people could swap and change roles as if costumes. Or, if we want to play etymological games, it's worth remembering that the word persona means mask: the person is the mask, and not some already-constituted agent standing behind it. Or, differently again, we could say that subjectivities are not roles that people engage in; rather they are roles that engage people in them.

Could you give a few examples of the implications being discussed so that we could see how this projection of human activity illuminates political philosophy and ethics? — Dfpolis

Well, a basic question might be something like: what kind of subjectivity does this particular social and political arrangement foster? Which would translate to something like: what kind of capacities - opportunities, risks, limitations, powers - does this particular socio-political arrangement enable or disable? If we take the street-walker as a hopefully uncontentious example, one can track the history of how roads, which were initially made for people, gradually became car-orientated; this is actually a super interesting history, one not often told: of how, when cars started to occupy streets, it was considered something of a travesty -

(Except from a Smithsonian article on this: "Things changed dramatically in 1908 when Henry Ford released the first Model T. Suddenly a car was affordable, and a fast one, too: The Model T could zoom up to 45 miles an hour. Middle-class families scooped them up, mostly in cities, and as they began to race through the streets, they ran headlong into pedestrians—with lethal results. By 1925, auto accidents accounted for two-thirds of the entire death toll in cities with populations over 25,000. An outcry arose, aimed squarely at drivers. The public regarded them as murderers. Walking in the streets? That was normal. Driving? Now that was aberrant—a crazy new form of selfish behavior.
“Nation Roused Against Motor Killings” read the headline of a typical New York Times story, decrying “the homicidal orgy of the motor car.” 'When Pedestrians Rules the Streets)

This change ramifies on the subjectivity of the street-walker: the road, no longer made for the walker, becomes engaged with in a very different way: one's walking is regulated like never before: traffic lights, pedestrian crossings, the shrinking of thoroughfares available for mingling. This has massive impacts on the ways cities are structured, which have effects that themselves ramify on the flows of capital, on distributions of class, power, educational opportunities, and so on (see, for example, the recent efforts of multiple cities around the world to keep cars out of the city centre in order to have more public space: eg1, eg2). These efforts can have effects on, as is well known, the quality of a democracy (eg1, eg2), or else the quality of a city's environment, and so on.

These efforts and debates can all be seen as - although they are not simply reducible to - revolving around the question of what kind of subjectivity ought to be offered to the street-walker. What kind of opportunities should people have to claim the streets as their own, without cars everywhere? And what kind of ramifications do these considerations have on environments? Democracies? Urban planning? Populational well-being? These are all questions bound up in political and ethical considerations. What kind of society do we want? Who or what do we valorize on the streets? What scarifies and compromises do we make to ensure safety, efficient transport, and happiness? I'm not saying that all these questions are themselves reducible to questions of subjectivity: only that taking into account subjectivities offers another perceptive on things, something else to take into account: by making a certain change in how we approach our streets, do we diminish or enhance the subjectivity of the street-walker? Would this change be a good one? Balanced against what other considerations?

Anyway, that's just one example, hardly exhaustive, but hopefully illustrative.

"I am who I am" might offer a certain reinforcement to one's identity. — Banno

Agree, but then, it's not functioning as a proposition, a bearer of truth.

:up:

"A thing is identical with itself."-There is no finer example of a useless proposition, which is yet
connected with a certain play of the imagination. It is as if in imagination we put a thing into its own shape and saw that it fitted".

Yup. Science journals get all sorts of rubbish published in them all the time. And for anyone without an ideological axe to grind, the issue is a social and institutional one distributed all across academia, thanks to a mix of institutional pressure and the politics of peer review in general (here, here). It doesn't help of course that most journal articles are never read, let alone cited. So what wonders what the big hash is about when the whole damn enterprise is rotten from top to bottom.

They won't get it from science because free will is a conceptual knot. It will be dismantled by conceptual means. Or possibly political ones. And besides, science's job is to prove positive hypotheses; not negative ones, which is impossible in principle (at best it can prove null results).

Yeah and it's all shit.

The confusion of freedom with free-will is one of the greatest philosophical tragedies ever staged. It has as much to do with freedom as foreclosure has to do with doors.

In my opinion what happens after this realization is a dramatic shift in treating individual problems as societal problems. The drug addict is no longer viewed as a hedonist or escapist; but, as a set of problems arising due to unaddressed societal issues. In my view, this shift in perception would enable talk about devoting more resources to societal issues such as crime, drug addictions, even murder. Instead of maximizing personal welfare, some people would tend to agree that more resources should be directed at the betterment of society instead of the individual. — Posty McPostface

You don't need any half-assed concept of 'free will' to defend this view. You just need a half decent understanding of how society works. Dan Dennett - who otherwise is mostly insufferable - makes nice use of Dumbo's feather as a parable for why the whole overblown kerfuffle about free-will was never relevant to begin with. Just as Dumbo could always fly without use of his feather, we don't need any 'free will' to start treating societal problems on a social level. And any policy maker who cites 'free will' as a reason for doing so - and not good ol' sociological fact - ought to be hounded out of office for metaphysical idiocy.

Only Americans think free will has any bearing on social policy issues. Most of the rest of the world who know better than the swallow the mud-pill of American individualism don't need to wrangle over arcane metaphysical debates to understand how to govern properly.

There are no convincing arguments for or against God's existence; there is no arguing the case for a malformed question. The effort itself is abortive.

Free will has to be a deterministic process or it wouldn't be free will. — Benkei

:ok:

He's not the Messiah! He's a very naughty boy!

Baden's being modest. The long term plan is to have the forum become one giant super thread where we don't even have opening posts any more. For efficiency.

Hmm, I think you've misread, or I was not clear enough in my exposition (or a bit of both): it's not that names were of pure objects to begin with; quite the opposite: it's acknowledged that names of significant events were often bound up with the sacred: "For every act and situation that could be important to the men of that time, special gods were created and named with distinct verbal coinages: in this way, not only are the acts and situations as a whole divinized, but even their parts, singular actions, and moments" (Usener, quoted in Agamben). The argument is instead that what tends to happen is that the names become pure, they lose their connection with the objects and events from which they were initially bound, such that Gods become (or rather, are shown to always have been) their names.

So the passage is the opposite to the one you seem to have read into my post: it's not that words were non-divine in origin; rather, words were often divine in origin, and what they shed was their reference to the event or action with with they were originally bound up with, to become even more so ("as we have seen by means of the Sondergotter (special Gods) the proper name of the god and the predicate that describes a certain action (harrowing, fertilizing, etc.) are not yet divided. Naming and denotation (or, as we have seen, the assertorial and veridictional aspect of language) are originally inseparable"); but they become separated, and the God or Gods attain the pure status of the name alone. This being made most explicit in Christian tradition where God announces his own circular coincidence (i.e. immidiation) with himself: "I am who I am".

In any case, the recourse to language here was simply meant as an exemplification of the aspect of immidiation which I find useful in characterizing the divine.

I think a useful way to think about Gods is in terms of mediation; Gods express the desire for immediation or of the immediate - of doing things without recourse to a 'medium' or 'media' (from Greek metaxy or Latin medius, meaning 'in-between' or 'middle'). This ideal of immediacy may not always be absolute, but, when taken to the limit you get the three 'omnis' (omnipotent, omnipresent, omniescent), each of which expresses a dimension of immediacy: immidiation of power, immediation of space and time (and life), immidiation of knowledge (where nothing stands in the way in the exercise of power, movement, or knowledge).

Another way to understand this is in terms of Kant's distinction between 'intellectual' and 'sensible' intuition: intellectual intuition is where thought and thing coincide, where to think something is to bring it into being (this is the kind of intuition God has, says Kant. Humans only have sensible intuition, where thinking takes place first and foremost as a passive reception of what is already there: thinking doesn't bring the object of thought into being). The idea here is that for God, there is no gap or distance (no mediation) between thought and thing: thought is immediately thing.

---

In this sense the OP is right to locate naming as a central device of divine creation: in naming, nominata and nominatum (the name and the thing named) coincide absolutely (think here of Kripke's rigid designators, in which names resolutely do not describe, but, as it were, designate absolutely). Naming admits of no mediation. Giorgio Agamben, following the work of Hermann Usener, documents how divine names tend to originally be related to certain rituals and processes (the tilling of the fields, the invocation of rain), before becoming 'detached' from those processes and become pure names:

"Usener shows that even divinities who have entered into mythology, like Persephone and Pomona, were originally "special gods" who named, respectively, the breaking through of buds (prosero) and the maturation of fruits (poma). All the names of the gods ... are initially names of actions or brief events, Sondergotter (special Gods) who, through a long historico-linguistic process, lost their relationship with the living vocabulary and, becoming more and more unintelligible, were transformed into proper names. At this point, when it had already been stably linked to a proper name, 'the divine concept gains the ability and impetus to receive a personal form in myth and cult, poetry and art'."

As such, the process of naming is intimately linked to the divine: "The "name" the is the being of God, and God is the being that coincides with its name"; for Agamben, this is how one should interpret the 'ontological argument', in which essence and existence coincide (i.e are not mediated!): "The connection of the theological theme of the name of God with the philosophical one of absolute being, in which essence and existence coincide, is definitively carried out in Catholic theology, in particular in the form of argument that, since Kant, one is accustomed to defining as ontological." (Agamben, The Sacrament of Language).

This of course is simply the limit-case of immidiation, best exemplified by the monotheistic Gods (who absolutize the otherwise 'relative' immidiation of the polytheist or animist Gods, who only have certain powers of immidiacy and not others - thus Poseidon has power over the sea, Artemis over the hunt, etc, but never 'everything'). This fantasy of immidiation is of course primitive: part of the process of becoming an adult is to rely less and less on the mediation of others (to eat one's own food instead of having it being fed to one); 'Gods' are simply the fantasy of this process taken to certain or absolute limits. They reflect something in reality, but unbounded from it (hence the frequent invocations and associations of the eternal (unbounded by the mediacy of time) and the immaterial (unbounded by the mediacy of matter). Atheism is partly the insistence on the irreducibility of the medial.

There's an asymmetry underlying this question though — Wayfarer

So? People are insufferable fanatics. As if this is not all the more reason to marginalize and ostracize these monomaniacs - your description being an apt portrait of a Daesh fighter.

But from the believer's point of view, what is at stake is literally everything. Not understanding it correctly, or performing it correctly, or whatever is required by the particular faith tradition the believer belongs to, is literally a matter of life and death - even more than that. It's crucial, it's the most important thing about life. — Wayfarer

A general rule of thumb: if the publications you read don't frequently address questions of economic justice and power imbalances, and don't employ class as a central term of analysis, look somewhere else.

The justiceish system?

@Marcus de Brun was banned (a few days ago now, I forgot to note it here) for posting a whole series of pompous rants about 'censorship' of his posts, despite deletions of those posts for their poor quality. It was basically attempts at forum drama that have little to nothing to do with philosophy, repeatedly. In between all this there was just a generally low-quality thread on the 'devil' (deleted by another mod), all of which added up to a decision to ban him.

Btw, it's absolutely vital that this is primarily framed as a job interview, rather than a trial. In any other position if the employer were to discover that a job applicant may have committed sexual assault, they'd be dropped immediately as a potential hire. — Maw

Dunno why this seems so hard to grasp.

Anyone who think ethics and law are related has never, one imagines, had to deal with the justice system.

Moira Gatens and Genevieve Lloyd - Collective Imaginings: Spinoza, Past and Present
Brian Rotman - Ad Infinitum... The Ghost in Turing's Machine: Taking God Out of Mathematics and Putting the Body Back In. An Essay in Corporeal Semiotics

But what a dénouement though! Some real M Night Shyamalan stuff at the end there.

Really really. Religion is too weird, idiosyncratic, and personal/social. Best to let lying dogs lie.

If their belief isn't hurting anyone - ideally I'm not trying to ritually sacrifice myself - then I wouldn't really have any reason to. And if I am trying to sacrifice me to the Gods I think I have bigger issues than theology.

But "I don't give a damn about whether or not God exists" is not the same thing as "God? What is that?" (with or without the shrug). The first is true indifference. The second is curiosity. If your current example is supposed to replace the first one, then I have no further comment to make about it. (While still commending curiosity on all sides -- of all questions -- as the best intellectual stance, even though I recognize that we cannot be curious about all things, we must select, and selecting non-God stuff is a perfectly fine selection). — Mariner

If you say so. I just resent what I saw was the hinted suggestion that one cannot have any kind of autonomous space apart and extricated from the space of religious argument. As if this counted as some kind of intellectual 'handicap' or 'incuriosity'. As if people don't have a right (loosely taken) to ask religious argument to STFU and leave them alone, including (and sometimes especially) arguments from 'atheists' all too willing to play the God-game.

:groan: :sad:

That said these things usually go in waves. I'd just ride this one out.

I don't care to convince you, or anyone else. If you think questions about God make sense, good for you. I was simply stating my own preferred position on the topic.

Would it help had I phrased it "God? What is that? *shrug*" ? I was simply trying to emphasize that even having asked the question, our imaginary friends don't give a damn. An atheism that simply doesn't give a damn about whether or not God exists - I don't think, that against this, one can argue: 'oh but you should give a damn because curiosity!'; Well no, that's just being sucked back into the ambit of what it was trying to extricate itself from in the first place. I don't want more curiosity in those debates because I don't want those debates tout court - at least not as anything other than ossified intellectual archaeology (this, though, being a weird meta-debate which I'm allowing myself the luxury...).

I mean look, if one is trying to 'argue against' religion, sure, you ought to know what you're talking about. But if you just don't care, then I don't see why anyone should care. What I find 'antagonistic' is the asphixiating and fake bind where, if you're interested in arguments about God, then you should know the arguments, and if you're not interested in God, then you should also know the arguments. As if all roads lead back to knowing and investing time in the arguments. I think this is crap. Religion doesn't get to be the default ground around which everything else is arrayed as if derivatively and parasitically. There needs to be a space on the intellectual map where people are simply allowed to not give a flying fig about any of it and not be deemed 'incurious' or whatever negative connotation that goes along with not giving a fig. One can simply have better, more interesting, and more pressing things to be curious about than something that has no possible bearing on one's life.

As for the cliché thing - I was being dismissive of your dismissiveness. Not much more too it.

Well I'm antagonistic to the suggestion that atheism - at least an atheism for whom religion and God means nothing - ought to be more curious about religion. I think that's self-serving and unnecessary. It's very easy to claim curiosity as a virtue, but that's just the thing - anyone who has an interest in anything whatsoever and who would not like it dismissed would say the same. That was the only point I was trying to make with Quetzalcoatl. 'Be curious' - you may as well say 'don't be indifferent'. What kind of counter-point is that?

And to be clear, theological debates are great and even fascinating. I think they have alot of value, and have alot of lessons to teach (primarily about how not to think...). I'm indifferent in the same way I'm indifferent about the present king of France. You can wring alot of great philosophical points with some sustained attention to the topic - as Russell did - without actually thinking you're talking about the present king of France. Or to use a nice distinction - I'm curious and think it's healthy to be curious about God and religion de dicito and not de re. And not caring about religion or God de re - that's the indifference I think is worthy of a healthy atheism. One that isn't 'invested' in debates about God's existence, while perfectly able to entertain such debates as the cultural artefacts and intellectual curiosities they are.

that it is interesting. — Moliere

Interest doesn't make engagement with religion a baseline. I'm not arguing that you (or anyone) shouldn't be interested in religion. One can be interested all one likes. I'm just saying, one shouldn't pretend that interest is, or ought to be, some kind of default, from which deviation is some kind of intellectual dishonesty or unseriousness. That's self-serving bullshit. Curiosity and intellectual openness is not owed to every position. It's self-aggrandising crap to say, without clear motivation, that 'oh, look at you, if you don't care, then you're closed minded'. Every-two bit conspiracy theorist ever has argued along the same lines. Religion doesn't get to claim intellectual defaultness by fiat. To speak of indifference as a handicap is just self-serving waff. I mean really - how is the refusal of engagement any more arrogant than the demand for it? - along with the subsequent attempt at intellectual shaming.

I too like Mariner's posts on religion, which are generally thoughtful and interesting. But claiming the intellectual baseline - "engage with me/religion or you're 'handicapped'" - is the equivalent of intellectual blackmail, and it's a load of hogwash. If religion has no bearing on one's life, and if one is equally not trying to engage the religious, then one has every right to ignore wholesale the entire enterprise without being blackmailed into the idea one is thus unserious. I don't give a flying hoot about Hathor, and I imagine most who claim to believe in some religion or another today don't either. And that's perfectly fine. Your God - whoever 'you' is, and whichever God is in question - ought to be subject to the same standard of utter indifference. Entirely and completely ignorable.

The comparison to Mayan Gods was dismissed as a cliche. Why? Because one's own personal God-pick is somehow arrogated to a status of not-cliche, the real-deal-God; "'My' God is not like those primitive Gods, and cannot be spoken about in the same breath. That's silly talk. My God is special - not like those Gods - and is deserving of non-cliche engagement". Well, no. They're all the same, and it's a failure of imagination to think comparisons to other God artefacts is just some kind of cheap-shot. It's only a cheap-shot if one really thinks those other Gods really are cheap to begin with, in comparison to yours. If it's ridiculous and cliche to invoke Quetzalcoatl - and of course it is - I don't see how any other God or Gods is miraculously exempt from the self-same ridiculousness. It is no more arrogance to not care about every other backwater unheard-of religion than it is one's favoured God artefact.

This handicap of modern atheists is not even realized by them (and no wonder, if even their smartest representatives try stuff like "just one extra god" rather that engaging the subject). — Mariner

But I don't understand what gives you licence to dismiss my own nonchalance as 'quips' or 'not taking it seriously'. Why is the default position that religious ought to be taken seriously? Why is this the baseline from which discussion ought to proceed? It's easy - much too easy - to call my own position arrogance - which, sure, for the sake of ease of discussion, I'll take. But I don't see why it isn't equally arrogant to assume that taking religion seriously simply is the default? As if religion is a position that a priori is owed any dignity of engagement. Call it a tu quoque if you like. But I don't see why your God or Gods are owed anything more than the anthropological interest owed to Zeus or Naga. What makes you special? What makes your belief exempt from being just one in a long line or other curious beliefs, that, like all other belief, will be seen as a mere historical artefact in the light of time? Call it an 'internet meme argument'. That's no less arrogant dismissal as far as I'm concerned.

Yeah. When you're so privileged that not being granted more privilege is a grevious injustice.

I'll try to later. Pushed for time atm.

I really don't know. It seems slim pickings atm, but any anything could happen. I suspect the democrats need to have a good and proper implosion before anything interesting will happen.

I'm serious though. Of the multitude of artefact Gods, the majority of which, presumably, you don't give due consideration to either, I simply feel the same about one extra God than you. Presumably, the question of the existence of Naga doesn't move you either (happy to be corrected on this). Don't see why you get to think you're sincere and believers of Quetzalcoatl 'cute'. You're just culturally and historically in the most convenient time to take your sincerity for granted.

If either Flake or Warren are nominees I'll eat my hat, tassles and all.