I've never been impressed with Nawaz's approach because he treats it as if change in Muslim culture is to be driven by what Westerners say and demand of it. Sort of an extreme extension of the patronising "Stop your guys blowing us up" that gets blasted all over the Western media whenever terrorist attacks are discussed.

The truth is the Muslim community has no more ability to stop such attacks than ourselves. By the time someone's performing attacks the are outside the influence of everyone just saying "don't blow people up."

Radical Islam might stand unopposed within many Islamic circles, but people are not usually considerate of how this occurs. Is because no-one condems terrorist attacks in the Western media? No, it's not. That happens all the time, even from Islamic leaders.

Rather, the issue is about Muslim cultures internally, about how they see themselves separately to Western societies and their values. Change is not a question of how loud the West can scream Radical Islam is terrible, but whether there is a change in Muslim culture, one which sees concern for social environment overtake the authority of tradition and text.

That's the very reason to say God does not exist. Or rather cannot exist. The significance of such value is the infinite, something beyond the whim and change of the world, that which means and matters regardless of what happens in the world.

Attributing this to an existing god puts it into the same position as human will: it is made a function of some state of the world, which may pass or be destroyed - replaced even - by the whim of some other existing god, to knock him off or grab the attention of believers. God is nothing more than another person in this situation, a whim which get's to decide value until the next whim of power replaces it, an utter contradiction with the infinity of value.

The Left in the sense of the political force which has the lives of working class at its heart. Nowadays the Left appeals to the rich/elite/comfortable with a social conscious more so than it does advocate for the economic well-being of the working class. Even Sanders is more or less of this category. He might talk about some socialist economic policies, but these a distant from the lives and identities of the working class who's livelihood have disappeared with globalisation and mechanisation in the last forty years.

Strictly speaking, the Left isn't dead. It's just stopped being an expression of the working classes like it used to. Now it speaks in terms of the socially conscious (e.g. issues racism, sexism, even the "capitalist system" ) rather than in terms of worker's identity and livelihoods (e.g. provision of services, worker's rights, protecting the economic means of the working person).

Trump has only brought out what was more or less already there, but the point is many of the people he appeals to were not being served by the Left anyway. Not even with promises of "socialism," because the economic and political conditions have severed the link between "socialism" and the livelihoods of sections of the working class. Trump isn't leading the Left to die. In this context, the Left is already dead and has been for decades.

Perhaps Sartre's radical freedom, or being authentic, is actually just the playing out of what one's character actually wants. It is finding the motivations which actually suit one's character. — schopenhauer1

Pretty much. Sartre's philosophy is a reaction against essentialism. The motivation is to attack the idea people are "naturally" anything, such they are free to be who they are, without having to conform to some standard of who they are "logically" meant to be.

But Sartre's radical freedom also has an interesting relationship to metaphysics, specifically logical possibility. It's basically a statement of radical contingency, the non-necessity of any state of existence, as explored by people like Meillassoux and Brassier.

We might say the world has radical freedom, in that any logical possibility might occur, such that there is no logic which allows us to say what the states of the world must be.

I'm neither a Heidegger expert nor a fan (I think he worships the idea of human experience and certain traditions associated with it, rather than respecting its existence.*), so others would probably be better at describing it, but Heidegger is worried we have abandoned concern for Being and the experience it enables.

Under substance dualism (which most of Western philosophy of mind uses, even apparent monists such as idealists and reductionists), experience is thought to be separate from the world of bodies in which we take action. Experience is considered to be "over an above" or "just in the head." Consciousness is viewed as a consequence or irrelevant with respect to the world at large, rather than something in the world. Heidegger wants to bring mind back into the world, such that experiences are recognised as event which happen, rather than being pushed aside as something immune to the world (idealism) or irrelevant to the world (reductionism).

Heidegger hates the modern approaches because (it appears -- I think Heidegger gets this gravely wrong.** ) to throw away respect for human experiences. In the face of technology and progress, what human think and feel is swept aside for the worship of the mechanical (and now digital). We split human experience away from our understanding of what is important, and so readily cast it aside in our interactions with the world.








* Heidegger is still desperate for a ground. Erik alluded to this earlier:

Being is nothing, literally no thing. But this no-thing is what allows for our understanding of anything, which is what makes us human in fact, and so lies at the heart of our existence. A frightening thought perhaps. We try to conceal this groundless ground (Heidegger's term) which allows for anything to come to 'be' in the first place. — Erik

A groundless ground? Heidegger is still trying to ground our existence, to conceal the nothingness of Being, by turning the no thing of Being into a thing on which beings depend for existence. He's treating Being as others do God, Ideas, Will, Consciousness, Progress, etc., etc.

Like all those before him which he criticises, he tries to starve off terror by grounded ourselves in the eternal. In the face of the nothingness of Being, Heidegger has turned it into something to avoid the realisation that we are entirely finite and are given by nothing at all.

** It certain traditions, and so the associated human experience, which the modern approach has no respect for. The experiences and traditions which constituted our communities and individual experiences prior to the vast social and economic changes brought by the Industrial Revolution and further technological development.

Sartre is, like Schopenhauer, interested in the reason for being more so than states of the world. Human freedom is a measure of how logic cannot define our meaning. No matter what anyone says the world must mean, our experiences or understanding may say otherwise. Since existence, logically, has no essence, we cannot be said to mean anything by our existence, as the various essentialists would say (i.e. "by nature, you must mean...)."

The problem with Sartre's existentialism is it's still, deep down, thinking like an essentialist. Human nature, the "meaning" of what humans are meant it be, is still sought be Sartre. "To be authentic," to reflect to one's nature, is the goal. Existentialism is unsatisfying because Sartre has (correctly) blown away the idea there is any human nature, any "reason" for states of existence, but he then goes on searching for it, as if man essential nature was a container which needed to be filled. He's still trying to define existence through a logical reason, even though he's pointed out this cannot done.

Sartre more or less makes the reverse error of Schopenhauer. Instead of mistaking the infinite for time and space, Sartre mistakes the time and space (humans) for the infinite. The infinite of freedom is considered the essence of human existence, so much is that human existence in time and space fades into irrelevance.

One almost never decides anything. Are you a waiter? Well, only if you choose to be in the moment. Even if you are standing in front of people serving them food in a restaurant, you still lack essence. In that moment, you could be anything else if you wanted. Just make the choice. Sartre appears to be giving us libertarian free will, where we have absolute power over ourselves at anytime, such that we are never really anything at all (this is somewhat uncharitable to Sartre, as he is quite aware of the material restrictions people are under, but it is where we end up if we read human existence as "freedom" ). Obviously, this is just utterly nonsensical to anyone who's interested in describing the material existence of humans or is interested in the meaning of how human life is constrained (as Schop is).

Whether someone thinks Sartre or Schop gets closer to the human condition more or less comes down to whether are more interested in the expression of freedom or the expression of restriction. The former gives freedom as the reason for our horrors (we all chose it... "Hell is other people"), the later supposes the reason for our actions is a restrictive force of inevitability which which we always carry (Will).

In other words, time/space/the world as representation cannot come AFTER some originary period where all is Will. That makes no sense if Will is temporal and there is no before/after (and thus no causality). Rather, space/time/ the world as representation must "exist" (words do no justice here) right along side Will. It was there all along doing its time/space thing. However, that is a conundrum because time obviously has a beginning- which according to Schop happens with the first representing-making creature (something about "first eye opening" as a metaphor). Since time/space must have always been there (as there is no before/after as stated earlier), and since that occurs with first organism, there must have been an ever-present organism where time/space can always exist. — schopenhauer1

I am always myself. Where I do these begin or end? We can't really say where. One does not live to experience their conception. Nor does one experience there death. In the being of representation, there is no beginning or end. While existence may begin or cease, no instance of being does. I be and never do anything else. So does, from their own subjective point of view, anything else in the world. Even the rock, in terms of its own presence, never gets to experience its beginning or its end. It's either not yet there or ceased to be.

The distinct act of description (often termed "third person," though "first person descriptions are the same) is always accompanied by being which has no beginning nor end. Every moment of existence is "timeless" so to speak. A moment which is never captured by any other, no matter how much is known about it.

Schop almost understands this in Will. It a much better handling of the infinite expression of finite states than found in some other philosophy, such as that which suggest that humans have power over such expression. He's still doesn't quite grasp it though, for he views it as a consequence of representational experience (a state of space-time) rather than understanding it as a thing-in-itself. He's still thinking of the infinite in terms of space-time. Supposedly, it needs us (or the ever present organism) to be. He's given it a beginning (life) and an ending (death) when it doesn't have one. Not even in us, for we don't be at conception (we are yet to be made) or in death (we have ceased to be).

So from this empirical perspective, it is true to say that the "first open eyed" organism is necessary in order to account for the world as representation, but only from this limited perspective. — Thorongil

How can this empirical perspective (causality) be brought in if Schop is only interested in logical expression (reasons)? Moreover, how can there be an account of the world as representation (empirical) without making this category error? In either case, it is to be suppose Will must be given by space-time, by a state of the "first open eyed" organism.

I don't miss Kant's point about the thing-in-itself verses the world as representation, I'm pointing out is a grave error. One of the biggest in Western philosophy. Our world is representation. In the end, anything we don't know always comes back to the world or representation. Unknown forces split our bodies apart. Some unknown things is deep space sends out a single which makes it snow all over the world. Everything always comes back to us, to what we know, to how we are affected, no matter how distant or stage it might be. Even the time before our universe is linked in representation to us, whatever it was: prior to us casually, the state of the world we are referring to now, something we lack information about. To be non-temporal and non-spacial it to be apart from the word in which we exist, no matter how distant or obscure. The "thing-in-itself" cannot exist. It can only be idle because it cannot pass in and out of existence, it cannot move or change: a logical expression which is never any state of the world.

Will is not simply every action though, but the underlying striving below the surface. It's context in language-dependent and situation-dependent instances are simply minor variations on the same theme. — schopenhauer1

This criticism misses the point. Will was never said to be every action. It cannot be. Since Will is an infinite, it cannot be any state of the world, any action we have willed. Since it is not language or situation dependent, it cannot be any act action or instance of striving.

No doubt Schopenhauer views it as a striving, but he is confusing the infinite expression of Will given by any action (i.e. any action involves someone trying to do something, a striving, a burden to get something done), for the instances of action and striving themselves. He then miss reads Will as a prior foundation for human action, desire and striving, as if Will was the ground in which our actions, desires and striving grew.

Our attention is shifted away from what constitutes any instance of our world, that it exists rather than not, and we become obsessed with the supposed "universal," Will, which grounds us all together. We start thinking of ourselves being put together be pre-existing universal of Will, rather than recognising we are always separate states of the world, linked with other states of the world, which express a whole, together. Just as Kant did before him, Schopenhauer is coveting the infinite, trying to turn our finite world into the infinite, so he can say it is, and is known beyond, how it appears in finite representation.

You are eating your own tail here. Schop's (and Kant's) point was you cannot use empiricism to ground empiricism. — schopenhauer1

I was never trying to so. The empirical has no ground. There is no reason why any state must exist or not. Schop and Kant are chasing something without any relevance. Absolute certainty about empirical states is not something required. In fact, it's incoherent. To have such certainty, we would need to posits states of the world as logically necessary, such there was no possibility there could be different states.

For us to do that we would have to be able to use empiricism (knowledge of our world) to ground empiricism (that our representations must always be correct). The inability of empiricism to ground empiricism is also why we cannot (as Kant and Schop want to) use logic to ground the empirical either. Since the presence of an empirical state is defined by whether or that state exists, no logical expression, such as Will or the thing-in-itself, can be used to ground the presence of any empirical state. Trying to do so is to commit a category error. It is to suggest that Will or the thing-in-itself are individual states of the world, such that their presence can be used to say that an individual empirical state must exist.

The problem with using a priori is it takes an empirical state (us, in the world, in each moment) and tries to turn it into the infinite. Will is idle because, in forming that universal idea, it leaves out where the action occurs, in each moment of existence, where every little thing is distinct and change occurs.

It is an abstraction of meaning expressed by states of the world. Desire might be everywhere at all times, but no instance of it is the same as another. Will is not what acts. It's merely something expressed in any action. Those actions differ vastly. One soldier is Willed to fight. Another soldier is Willed to flee. Different consequences, different meaning, an understanding of which is not dependent on understanding Will (i.e. that everyone is willed to act), but rather on the states themselves.

The so called "it-in-itself" is a red-herring. With respect to the world, it gives us understanding of nothing, for it only refers to the infinite expression found in any state. It our escape from the world into an abstract realm free of finite difference and change. About the world and its relationships, it says nothing at all.

And that's why a "reason" cannot be found for Will. It doesn't have one. To pose the question is to ask, "Why is making a post making a post?" Unlike states of the world, where existence defines whether or not something occurs, Will contains no action and cannot be said to be or not be. The infinite nature of Will means it cannot have a reason. It's necessary. No matter what we do, Will is still expressed.

I don't think there is much ambiguity at all. All those words are really just saying: "and then was thing" in a manner which does little more than the simplest language would. The "ambiguity" is in difficulty reading unusual words and convoluted structure. Mystery and excitement are missing.

With long, messy and ambiguous writing, I expect to be taking on a dance through ideas and feelings. The strength of such writing is it can bring together details in a way concise writing can not. Means' writing doesn't take that advantage here.

The voice feels really strange to me. Some of it sounds like it wants to explore an active aesthetic experience (e.g. "The wind eased through the weeds, pressing on both sides of the track, died, and then came up again hinting of seaweed " ), but it's surrounded by a passive chronicling of past events.

I think the absent topic is the worst part. What is the paragraph meant to be about? The railroad? The Hudson River? New York? Our contortionist hero, being drowned by the wind delivered spray of the moon powered sea? Means jumps all over the place, switching to one topic then back again, never seeming like they've finishing saying anything about one thing or another. Not ambiguity, but difficulty saying anything about the things listed. It all feels rather empty as a result. Good messy writing does the opposite, gets ambiguity from firing of many clear ideas, to a point where you aren't so sure how all those meanings fit together immediately.

I'm not sure if it ever reaches the level of a dilemma. To me it seems like the Epicureans are engaged in some wistful imagination. In their "wisdom" they've noted how the world could be great even if it was still filled with the coercive actions and situations we find everyday. It strikes me as an game of pretend which quells fear of pain or failure, sort or like how people sometimes refer to God's plan or goodness to reduce fear of tragedy or pain.

I don't think they care whether or not they remove pain form their lives entirely. It's all about an idea which sometimes comforts in less immediate situations, but really does nothing (by their own admission) in situations like being tortured. Their target would seem to be more general, a question of how someone thinks about an approaches the world in daily life, more so than handing out magical torture immunity. I think the Epicureans have other more pessimistic philosophies in their eye, rather than immediate relief from any pain. I'd say it is just a fantasy and that's all the Epicureans ever wanted it to be.

A core is hard to compromise when it wasn't there in the first place. The Epicureans are certainly guilty of presenting a imagined miraculous future as if it is real, but then what does logical coherency mean in the face of life? If the Epicurean outlook makes them feel better, mainly in general terms, what use is the more accurate descriptions of human experiences like the Cyrenaics? The distance of philosophy sort of gives the Epicurean outlook a space to work.

Well, it's effective insofar as pleasure becomes present. The Epicureans are aiming to produce pleasure through the value and significance of the past. They have knowledge of the absence of pain or what it takes to "endure" painful activity, pleasure, and are trying to produce that state in ourselves by referencing our memory. Quelling present pains isn't the point. Replacing them with something else is the goal.

Epicureans' absurd call to feel pleasure in anything, even torture, is sort of an exaggeration to the imagined maximum benefit in the world. If we are stuck in this world with so much pointless and terrible pain, then the best we can do is to remove it as much as we can. If we are stuck being tortured, the only way to improve things replace the pain with pleasure, as much as it is possible. If one could enjoy torture, then their inevitable future would cease to be suffering. It's just not very effective. An idea to the benefit of the people imagining the world without suffering (not even from torture!!!) rather than to anyone being tortured.

I think it's wrong though. Pessimism as described there is just another example of "finding meaning in the large." A case of saying "there is no perfect world" as a means of distracting us from our boredom or pain. It's Will coming to understand itself and then stewing in it's own juices.

The strength of pessimism is the seriousness with which it takes suffering and lack of perfection, but it is still only a moment of thought. It doesn't somehow render our moments of joy trivial and pretend. Will can be abandoned, such that someone is content, even as they desire something. The trick is stop thinking one must get anything particular. Just be what you are at any given time.

I don't think he does per se. He's too close to the rhetoric of reductive materialism. For him it's a matter of clearly asserting the non-existence of qualia due to its claimed ineffable nature. I'd go has far as to say he lacks the concept of qualia to state the argument I did. His rhetoric comes out saying "qualia" does not exist, so it rubs people interested in moments of life the wrong way. He's saying moments of experience don't exist.

My point was, however, is Dennett is doing something other than merely asserting qualia doesn't exist. He's deconstructing it say that, as proposed by the immaterialists, it doesn't make sense because they are suggesting the ineffable has description. He's attempting to break down a mistake in our understanding of consciousness.

The reason his position appears confused is becasue he's rejected qualia while still holding there is consciousness to describe. In his deconstruction of qualia, he's realised it's not needed to describe consciousness, so he's happy to say he is conscious without qualia.

Taken literally he's saying he's conscious (has experiences which are described) without his experiences ever existing (no qualia, no moment of experience). He leaves out the indexical pointer ( "qualia") to moments of experience. It like if I was to say: "I don't exist" but than say: "Willow is making a post of thephilosophyforum." It looks like he's saying things exist in description but never in the moment.

In the end he doesn't quite grasp consciousness, he says "qualia doesn't exist" when he should say "qualia cannot be described, so it has no relevance to describing our experiences."

I don't think it's insight into the female soul, more like a rant against being connected and responsible to anyone.

TGW is right about the social expectation that women will be protected, whether we are talking women as the property of a man, man as the family provider or feminism's demands on society to give women rights and a place, the work of men is expected to serve women in a certain way not expected of men.

Men are envisioned as isolated agents who command and form the world around them. Women are seen as belonging to a social context, who are served by others or the world around them (and frequently, they are seen to serve it). In some ways this is a myth: men frequently serve other men in a social context, it's just tends to be characterised as an expression of their agency and power (e.g. work of the "free man" ). Likewise, many women aren't given social protection, assuming they lack particular value (e.g. old women, women raped in the serve of male sexual dominance, distain for sex workers, etc., etc.).

Here TGW is really talking about our discourses about men and women. It's more about the suffering, isolation and pain we justify through our valuing of men and women. In this respect, he isn't exactly wrong about, for example, feminism. It is outright protective of women at the expense of (certain) men. The divorced man has no recourse to keeping his former wife. If she wants to leave, he has to suck it up. The male desire for relationship, sex, loyalty and (in some cases) punishment is denied for the protection of the woman's agency. In some cases, the man even loses much of his economic means and freedom (to sure she is not left starving on the street or incapable of providing for children).

Feminism's entire premise is the limit of male action and desire to some degree, to build a society in which women have particular freedoms. In this sense, it does "hate" men: men who break these limits are immoral, are acting in ways which shouldn't exist. Pretty much criminals or monsters, in metaphorical (and sometimes actual) terms. Some of us just think this is more or less good because the notion of isolated people free to do whatever they might want is an illusion with terrible consequences.

Not that different from a sailor lost in heroic dreams who realizes, at a crucial moment, he's failed his ideal and his treasured self-image no longer protects him against the world — csalisbury

I think the crucial difference is still there. The sailor's virtue his own. He failed at his ideal. It lacks a social dimension. The "fallen woman" may have failed her own ideals, but she has also lost her virtue in the eyes of society and is now there to by exploited or punished as anyone sees fit.

Put it this way: the sailor who failed his ideals isn't presented, of his own guilt ridden volition, to be publicy and violently fucked by groups of passing strangers.

I think there is a close example with sailors: the responsibility of duty and sacrifice to their fellow sailors, which is considered cause for public shame and retribution. Or even just the wider notion of sacrificing yourself for the community. We've sort of lost that in our individualistic culture though. We tend to consider those failures of individual action rather than of a person's "manhood" and failure to sacrifice. And even these ideas of sacrifice tend to be about men protecting or working for other men, not about men or women in relation to each other. The discourse that women are meant to protect men is still missing.

I don't think we can, at least not in this sense it's proponents want. "Qualia" is more a less a placeholder for living the moment of consciousness. Since any description we give is only that, it always fails to amount to any moment of quaila. There is no such thing as a "what a likeness" because description is distinct from living. Our descriptions are only ever pointers to life, never the lived moment itself.

Dennett sort of alluding to this I think. We are readily fooled into thinking qualia is about describing. Supposely, it's the great failure of materialism and why the immaterialist is reflective of our experience. The immaterialist is thought to account for our lived experience to a greater extent.

The direction Dennett seems to be going is that this is an illusion. Since the lived moment is never description of that moment, there can be no account of quaila which IS the qualia of in question. The supposed strength of immaterialism, it's accounting of qualia, is a delusion because no such account is possible.

Given this, the supposition qualia needs to be described and that descriptions fail if they are not qualia fall into incoherence. No description was ever trying to be life. If are describing, we are always settling for something less than a lived moment of consciousness. By the inability of description to account for the lived moment, the supposed failure of materialism is shown to be an error based on the immaterialist's equivocation between description and life.

There are not "first person" and "third person" we experiences . All experiences are lived ( what "first person" is trying to talk about) and any description is different to what it is describing ( what "third person" is trying to speak about). The very idea of having a description which is life ("what is a likeness") is nonsensical and has us trying to replace life with mere description.

I'd speculate (and it is only that) so for a lot of animals, if only because they don't talk in terms of sex.

If someone doesn't use the category of sex, they have no sex to change. Even someone who thought they ought to have a different body would, rather than identifying with another sex category, just express a desire for a bodily states.

Agustino's approach here is damning of his argument. The fact animals lack denial of their nature (we are assuming) shows that "nature" is not found in the presence of specific biological states, but rather in the language. In such circumstances, animals to not even have a concept of "nature" to deny. It's a feature of language found in highly-self aware species concerned with organising society into specific categories.

A pitiful response.

You are factually wrong here. Someone's body is not language used to talk to them. A baby being born is not a statement of their sex. The existence of states hormones, organs and chromosomes is never such speech. Any talk about the body is a separate and distinct state, which has no impact upon it.

You can't possibly know that. The requirement of hearing animal thoughts is impossible. "Denial of nature" is entirely a lingistical. It's about what people say about each other, about where they tell each other they belong. Since you don't have access to interpersonal animal language, you can even start to speculate on what they might be saying to each other.

No-one is born with any sex. It's a category of language we use, we apply to someone with a body.

People are no doubt born with biology, with a body with specific parts, but this is not the language we use to talk about them. We are free talk about anyone as part of any catergory, all while niether being ignorant of their biology or pretending it is something else.

He's committed statistic sorcery by catergoy error. Here he is treating transition (biological) as if it were THE answer to all of a person's dissatisfactions and fears, as if it were going to turn them in people who were bouncing off the walls at how great their live now. But that's never been the case. Transition (biological) has only ever been less than perfect measure against disphoria. It never been a "Magic Pill" which is meant to make someone utterly content with their lives or a solution to all their problems.

It's all sort of beside the point with respect to the specific topic of the thread though, as that's about transition (social), not biology. Hormones and surgery aren't needed for someone to be valued as part of the gender or sex the identify. That takes no alteration of biology at all.

Your false philosophy makes you agree with all sorts of statements we know a priori to be nonsensical. The serial killer simply cannot be "good" sub specie aeternitatis. In fact, the serial killer cannot exist sub specie aeternitatis. What exists in the world, does not exist, in the same way, sub specie aeternitatis. What exists sub specie aeternitatis is that which is beyond time. — Agustino

That's a lie, Agustino.

The point about the "good" (sub specie aeternitatis) of the serial killer is that the state expresses an infinite meaning, in the coherency of substance, of infinite (ethically) evil. I was never talking about the serial killer in terms of an existing state, only in the meaning which is regardless of time - an expression of infinite (ethical) evil, which is always true of the serial killer.

Oh, and nothing exists sub specie aeternitatis, as is it is beyond time (finite states, existing states). There on no conditions of the world prior to the prior to time. The world has no "fall into time." Existing states have always been of time. That's what they are distinct from sub specie aeternitatis.

No it's not necessary for the world to be coherent - but it's a demand of our spirit. — Agustino

No, it's not. It's the demand of those who have not leant to deal with the pain of immorality, who think they are entitled to world in which there is no instance of immorality, who think they can somehow cage freedom such that immorality becomes impossible, who think they can get a perfect world by committing a genocide (I mean this both metaphorically and literally) of anyone who commits immoral behaviour.

It's a false idol. One where someone believes with all there heart in a perfection which is never there and who cannot see perfection when it occurs- they are always "trying for perfection" rather than doing perfection in an imperfect world.

Justice does not mean undoing the wrong. It means giving the wrong-doer what they deserve - that we can do. — Agustino

Indeed. But you don't fully believe that. All the time you treat justice as if it is compensation to the victims, as if it is enacted to allow them to make sense of what's happened, about returning "honour" to the victim or giving a justification ( e.g. "Ah, now the killing of our daughters make sense. It was all for the torture of their killer ") for the presence of evil. You should know better than that. Evil never has a justification.

That's still metaphysics though, just those of ethics, namely that there is never an excuse for immorality. It's always committed for no reason at all. Freedom is not, as people frequently treat it, something constrained by outside forces. It is an absolute, infinite aspect of every moment of our lives: the fact we have no reason for committing immoral acts.

My point was, following on from your impression that Spinoza's philosophy didn't "teach" ethics, is that he doesn't focus on inspiring any particular contention to an ethical way of acting, such as a code of law or specific ethical command issue to society. But... that this doesn't preclude Spinoza's philosophy from inspiring ethical will in some situations and certainly doesn't make it incomplete, for it was never meant to pass on knowledge in the form of ethical commands.

I disagree. If it cannot be taught, then the efforts of Socrates were for nothing. This, for a philosopher, is alike saying that Jesus's death was in vain for a Christian - blasphemy. — Agustino

You're not reading. I outright said the exact opposite: that understanding of virtue is frequently inspired all the time through writing and teaching. This, however, is has to be done. You can't just sit there proclaiming virtues, telling people to try for "perfection" and walk away thinking that's the teaching of virtue. People have to actually have to learn them.

My point is you are bewitched by the appearance of "teaching" virtue, substituting it for the learning of virtue. You are so proud of yourself for saying what's virtuous that you think it's enough to teach virtue. It's why your philosophical engagement amounts to boasting about your own wisdom and pulling proclamations from genius philosophers. You are in love the appearance of wisdom, but unwilling to move any further.

When people learn and respect virtue, there is only perfection in those moments, they have done exactly what they have ought to, so there is no "try." For the moment in question, they have DONE perfectly. They are virtuous.

This is why your "trying for perfection" amounts to a failure to understand ethics. You use the same misunderstood notion of "freedom" that you decry. You don't demand people act ethically (i.e. "perfectly" ), you treat as if their freedom is constrained by outside forces which give them a reason for acting immoral, such the merely trying to be ethical (perfect) is somehow good enough.

You have become quite obsessed by worthlessness - you have started to see worthlessness everywhere. It's not there, but you always read it in! Talk about projecting... — Agustino

I don't doubt that's what you think of the world I propose. In saying there is a world which is, sometimes, infinitely evil (i.e. immoral states which have no resolution), I am denying the perfect world you hold so dear, the world where evil can be resolved of paid for through future actions.

The world I am suggesting is, indeed, irrevocable worthless in a sense: immorality has no reason and can never be undone. So many act of expressing infinite evil all the time... a world full of worthlessness.

Yet, this does not make the world worthless. This is what you do not understand. You have not accepted that the world is sometimes worthless, but that we can nevertheless have moments of perfection (the ethical). You're always chasing a way to resolve worthlessness: retribution here, proclamations that we try to be perfect there, etc.,etc., rather than accepting that some state of the world are worthless and we cannot get around that, no matter how much death, torture, shame, apologies and virtue we might happen to use.

You don't respect the seriousness of immorality. Even you calls for punishment, are bound-up in somehow justifying the presence of immorality in the world, rather than stating how we ought to act towards someone after they do something. You are in love with the appearance of a world without worthlessness, with the myth that infinite evil can be undone, that it can be retroactively justified through our actions, such that everything might be "perfect. (well, as close as possible anyway)"

I am rather obsessed by worthlessness, namely recognising for what it is, rather than pretending it is all an illusion because I'm consumed by the thought that a world with immorality without reason amounts to the destruction of anything ethical.

Creation doesn't strike me as inherently good. I think you'd have to unpack your reasoning a bit. And if, sub specie aeternitas, good always triumphs, then how can there be such a thing as an actual threat to the nature of the whole of existence? — csalisbury

Agustino is mutilating Spinoza here. Sub specie aeternitas refers to the infinite, that which is eternally true (or rather: that which is true regardless of time). It's "good" is not the ethical good but rather the coherency of the world at any point in time. The "necessary good" is that the world makes sense, not that it is ethical. As such there is no "creative act," no change in the world, which is impossible or makes no sense. The "inherent good" in creation refers to the logical coherency of all existence states.

Even an adultery committing serial killer is "good" sub specie aeternitas, in that it is a logical necessity that state is itself and possible. There isn't a world which can be "protected" from the existence of such a entity. If existence presents an adultery committing serial killer, we are powerless in the demand for the world to be otherwise. No matter how much we might wish existence was otherwise, no matter how much our feelings might insist that such an evil state must be impossible, we are stuck with the adultery committing serial killer. This is a bit similar to "divine authority" in many theistic beliefs, the notion of the inevitable world which "makes sense," just without the delusion it's ethical.

In the context Agustino is talking about, ethics, the world is not necessarily good. Frequently, the "good" sub specie aeternitas is an ethical abhorrence.

Alas, Agustino has not learnt this. He still thinks we can use logic to inoculate the world against evil, that ethical action is necessary for the world to make sense. He cannot accept there is sometimes evil and we can do nothing to stop it. That's why he treats ethics as if it is a question of "paying for" or "resolving" injustice, rather than of acting ethically.

The delusion we can so something which wipes past injustice from the world is the only way he can avoid the glare of the nasty truth: we cannot do anything about injustice; when injustice occurs, the moment is spoiled forever and nothing can fix it.

To truly understand Spinoza, one must retrace his steps by himself, and the moment Spinoza is used without understanding the origins of his symbols within your own experience, without appropriating him, he has been misunderstood. And so Spinoza fails at that Socratic mission of teaching virtue - of being a midwife - he HAS virtue, no doubt, but he can't teach it or share it, which ultimately reflects in Spinoza's relatively isolated life as an outcast - he didn't convince anyone, because reason alone is not sufficient to generate conviction - the will must also be moved. — Agustino

The statement of someone who lacks conviction and is still looking towards philosophy and myth to provide it. Virtue cannot be taught, only enacted. Neither philosophy nor art teach virtue. Both, including any sort of dry philosophy, may inspire virtue, by generating understanding and action within people.

Here the illusion is that any form of knowledge was meant to be all encompassing in the first place. Spinoza doesn't lack self-awareness. He just knows he is talking about something specific about, metaphysics, and tells it to its fullest extent. What he claimed was never all encompassing knowledge, but knowledge of the all encompassing logical expression (Substance).

His philosophy (along with many others) only fails if YOU mistakenly bring in the flawed expectation philosophy is going to be all encompassing and "save" us from worthlessness. The myth is in you, not Spinoza. Like any instance of media, Spinoza's philosophy is just a description of meaning. It's one of the many instances of knowledge which may inspire our will. It can "teach" (inspire) virtue in people, particularly with respect to metaphysics and our relationships to them.

I am the one imagining the monster am I not? Others are imagining the monster near me. I am the one in the room when any such monster is seeking to eat my grandmother ashes. How does it make any sense for such a moment to be without relationship to myself and my grandmother's ashes? Real or imagined, it's linked to me and I to it.

How exactly is there to be a monster interested in eating the ashes of a grandmother without any link to a person with grand children? It would be to miss the relevant meaning entirely. As if, in trying to imagine a monster interested in eating the ashes of grandmothers, we denied the monster could have any interest in eating the ashes of grandmothers.

It would certainly come as a surprise to the guy in the apartment that there cannot be an acorn in one part of the yard without the possibility of there being a squirrel. Why just yesterday, the day before the squirrels arrived, he looked down and saw acorns in one section and not the other! What's more - this poor uneducated soul didn't know that there existed any creatures that ate acorns! He just thought they were the (aesthetically satisfying) seeds of a particular species of tree. Had acorn-eating beings never existed, could there be no acorns? As far as I know, gold-eating beings don't exist. Is there no such thing as gold? — csalisbury

I'm not sure about that. Is possibility of something is same as its existence? Does the squirrel need to be there when he looks down for it to be true there might be a hungry squirrel present?

Or perhaps, to put this back into the earlier context of knowing events, how does he know there isn't a squirrel in the yard? Even if he thinks so and sees no squirrel, he can't eliminate the possibility he might be wrong. Maybe he just missed a squirrel which was there. Our observation is only good insofar as the world we observe. The truth of this possibility doesn't change if he happens to be right and there is no squirrel.

Seems to me that it's always possible there is a squirrel in the yard, even when one isn't there. All squirrels, both real and imagined (the squirrel that might be there is suggested in the world he experiences), are bound in relation to him and the world he encounters. Even a giant prehistoric squirrel eating gargantuan acorns, whether only imagined or not, is bound to his world of experience. And he to the world of the squirrel, for he sees or thinks the acorns that any real or imagined squirrel is hungry for.

Take what you will or want to. I'll return to silence now.

What prevents the poor black, the poor white, the poor African, Asian, and South American immigrant, the poor illegal alien, the poor Aboriginal American, from becoming a "success in his own eyes and the eyes of his fellows", is access to wealth, real opportunity, real avenues to pursue advancement.

Poverty keeps the oppressed oppressed -- not racism. — Bitter Crank

Racism is an expression of an economic system which leaves particular racial or ethnic groups economically disposed. It is not cause of oppression, but it has plenty to do with it. Within any economic system, there is still the question of who is getting the slices of the pie, even in more equal distributions. Just because, for example, we concentrate on giving a workers better pay and conditions , it doesn't mean everyone gets to see that benefit. If an ethnic groups is, for example, segregated out of gainful employment, it won't matter how many rights and benefits are given to the workers.

Identity is still has critical relevance in the context of economics dominate role in oppression. We can't just say: "Well, make man economically equal" because it doesn't take into account who society considers a man at the time. Universal values are not found in the absence of identity, in "equality" sans race, sex, gender, age, body, etc.,etc, but rather in the presence of identity, in the understanding that people of identities, be the black, muslim, white, gay, non-passing, etc., etc. are deserving of the same respect and value.

Your charge against the ineffectiveness of modern day activist is sprinting the wrong direction. The privilege arguments aren't mistaken or ignorant of history (just because other people and culture exploit doesn't change what we are doing now), but merely crippled in making difference to oppression on the ground. They only talk about how oppression is present, limiting their effectiveness to a small category of discursive prejudice. The problem is the failure to act on policy to make a large scale difference.

A challenge to this failure, a demand to work against the privilege we are so good at talking about, is required. We need to stand up and say that all this talking isn't doing much about racial privilege, that there are whole host of economic and social policies (that don't race) which are important to the oppression of the people in question, not turn on each other with injured white pride and dismissal of who is oppressed.

Should your average woman, for instance, be expected to not bat an eye when she finds somebody who is obviously male but dressed as a female in the women's toilet? Should she be expected to celebrate their gender diversity, and figuratively pat the man? woman? boy? girl? or whatever on the back? (No Touching!) I don't think so. — Bitter Crank

Yes. Here the point is being made against this form of gender (and sex category) discourse. The point is to remove the automatic assumption and prescription if gender (and sex category) discourse, so that people won't automatically assume the "non-passing" individuals are the gender (and sex category) normatively assigned to the appearance of their body. Why should someone be respect for their gender even when they don't "pass?" Becasue identity is not a question of appearance and expectation others have predicted to you regardless of who you are. No-one ought to assuming that someone's body or identity "must be" because of their appearance.

There is no question of "getting good" at gender because whether someone legitimately belongs to a gender (or identity) is not defined by their appearance or mannerisms. There are no "oddballs." The devaluation of people on the fact they appear "odd" is the prejudice being targeted here. It's a resetting of our values and expectations in the order of assuming someone is a "savage" because of their appearance.

I'm not dealing in questions. I'm commenting on what both your accounts are missing and why you keep stumbling over questions of determinism and indeterminism.

TGW's approach to determinism in their last post is pretty good. Though, I don't think it will satisfy you becasue it doesn't go into the metaphysical indeterminism which accounts for the possibility of any logically coherent existing state at anytime. Your aversion to TGW's analysis seems to be the idea determinism eliminates possibility.


Anyway, if you just want to keep going in circles with TGW, I'll leave you to it.

Such analysis is doomed to failure becasue you are treating moments as if they all together in one moment of a linear timeline.

To this question there is no "when." You are either wrong or right. In the moment of tomorrow, it either rains or it doesn't. There is no point where you change form being possibility right, to possibly wrong, to right, or to wrong.

At any time, you are both possibility right and possibly wrong (as it may or may not rain tomorrow) and either right (if it rains) or wrong (if it does not).

As stated here, I side with neither (or both), for they are both wrong (and right).

The determinist is right because what ever happens in the future will happen. There is always a truth of what is going to happen. We just don't know it most of the time. Yet, the form of determinism you seem to be discussing here is also wrong, because those future events are not an inevitable outcome of what happened before. At any time, anything may or may not happen. The future which will happen is only defined in the moment of its occurrence.

Just as the non-determinist argues, what happens is always in the process of becoming. They are, however, wrong there is no truth about what will happen in the future. In a world where an artifact is created in 1966, the truth of that moment remains even in previous years, for it is about what happens at that point in 1966 rather than anything that's true about a past year.

TGW is smuggling in the future perspective there: he knows the artifact came into being in 1966, so he is aware that in 1955 it was true the artifact would come to exist in 1966.

There is one truth here: is the artifact come into being, there was a moment when it was there, in 1966. Our knowledge of the event or what happened prior doesn't matter to this truth. Logically, it was that moment defines the presence of the artifact in1966. The presence of the artifact can't be cited as necessary (inevitable, going to happen in the future) be any prior state or moment on a linear timeline.

For the realist, it is not the quantifiable time at stake, but rather the moment of the past. The states of the world, which we sometimes talk about, which were present before any quantified them or experienced anything about them.

What's at stake in the case of a fossil is the moment when it when its creature lived, not that's been quantified (that's done entirely in the present).

Schop doesn't take the argument far enough. It's not just our present which has no beginning or end. That's true of every moment, including the lives of fossilised creatures, the formation of planets or the presence of mountains. Realism is concerned about the existence of things without the presence of experience (which we sometimes know of in our present) not whether they are quantified or not. You and Schop are still stuck treating these lived moments as if they are points on a linear time.

You are confusing the causality of many of our thoughts with being logically derived. We have many ideas caused by our perceptions. Our body is that that it responds to perceiving something by have ideas about it and sorting out meaning which is committed to memory.

Once we have perceived a blur, we are caused to investigate it further, which causes new ideas to emerge in our head, which then are committed to memory and cause further ideas in the future, and so on and so on...

At no point is the emergence of an idea in your head logically derived. It's always a brute inspiration which has nothing to with saying the idea comes out of some previous idea or state. Indeed, to derive in such a manner is impossible because, prior to having an idea, we know notthing about it. Setting up the deduction is impossible because you aren't aware of the conclusion yet. You can't say that you will now get this new idea of "chair" from looking at a thing in front of you because you don't yet have the idea of chair. In attempting to derive the idea of chair from perception, you make exactly the error you chastised Sapientia for: holding you have the idea before it is actually present in your mind.

This is why you cannot separate the chair from its environment to discover it. To do that, you would have to already have the idea of chair, such that you could distinguish between what was the chair and what was not. You do not have this.

As with any idea, the realisation has to come form you, a brute realisation of a meaning. You have to have a moment where you realise the separation of chair all at once. You can't reason through a deduction to arrive at the difference of chair form everything else. You don't know a chair is "XYZ" such that you can look at the many things in front of you and say: "Well, that has XZY so it must be a chair." Nothing performs a separation. You just appear with the separation.

Yes it is. Certain structures are required for perception to be at all possible, as Kant clearly and irrefutably (by the way) demonstrated. This is one of the things he got right, and I do disagree with Kant on quite a few points. But not this insight. — Agustino

Kant gets this entirely wrong. What he talks about is not possibility. Like many people what he is deeming "possibility" is actually a question of what existing things are required to produce a causal outcome.

We sometimes say, for example, things like: "It's impossible for humans to break diamond by hitting it with their hand." In such cases, we are operating on the idea there is a specific state required to produce a casual outcome. Supposedly, for example, some other from of human existence would be needed for breaking diamond with our hands to be possible. Here we are confusing possibility with actuality.

It's actually always possible, by definition (i.e. an infinite, logically necessary), for humans to break diamond with their hand. All it would take is an existing human who could. The fact no-one we know has so far had the ability doesn't change this. Someone without the ability might wake-up tomorrow with the power to break diamond (viz Hume, Quantum Mechanics). Even those who can't break diamond still might have. They just didn't.

Similarly, particular structures are not required for perception to be possible. Not even our space-time, for it is possible perception might with all sorts of of different things, many of which are not like our space-time at all. Just because our perception and space-time are one way, and are not without it, it doesn't mean that's required for perception to be possible. Those are only needed for the actual states of our perception. It doesn't have any impact on possibility.

What Kant deems "ideas" of space-time are really actual states of our world, the existing objects which interact, which expresses a particular relationship of space and time.

Impressions are structured by the mind through the ideas. We become aware of ideas through perception. Ideas exist prior to perception, even if we may be unaware of their existence - they are what make perception possible in the first place. — Agustino

More like ideas (meaning) are so regardless of perception (and existing states) and they do not exist. Plato's forms - that which is like existing things but never them- are sort of an allusion to this, only he mistakes them as a foundation for existing things when they are just infinite meanings.

In this respect, you are a Platonist extraordinaire. Your notion that ideas are the foundation of states of existence is basically a carbon copy of Plato's forms. You say there is an meaning, say triangle, from which all existing triangles are derived.

Explain. How can I see a chair if my mind does not individuate a smaller set of impressions from the much larger set of impressions currently available - thus making possible the experience of a chair as opposed to the experience of "patches of color"? And how can it individuate it except through the idea? — Agustino

Because you don't ever individuate in such a manner. When you recognise a chair, your mind has not done individuating form a larger set of impressions. There is only the idea of the chair. You didn't derive anything. You just had the idea of chair. It came entirely from you, in that you existed with the idea of chair.

Something "making it possible" is incoherent. You seeing the chair was merely possible by definition (you might look at a chair and have the idea of chair) and it happened (you had the idea of chair while looking at a chair).

You don't answer the question though. All you state is "happiness," "perfection" or "expanding ponential"." In your arguments you hardly ever talk about a living happiness (or otherwise). It's all distant potential someone supposedly reach, bound-up in the heady rush of saying how perfect we'll all be.

The lived happiness is not going about saying how happy everyone will be. It's in one's connection, interactions and sense of self worth with respect to their own works. Family, friends, building, honesty and expression of one's goals. It's never "happiness," "perfection" or "want."

Bitter Crank can't say what he wants because the question is absurd. One cannot reduce a life to a moment or happiness or celebration at getting a single moment where a desire is fulfilled. The "happy" life premised in your argument is an empty one. A life so unknown and unexamined it substitutes in this notion it is all for "happiness" where description and comprehension of moments should be.

I can say I most certainly do not want your "perfection," "happiness" or "expanding potential." Going off your proclamations I have no idea if this means having a joyful relationship my family, turning my sibling into a social pariah because them had sex with five people or gleefully laughing at my mother's funeral becuase happiness is the constant for everyone. You are all a whirlwind of worshiping "perfection". Observing lives as the are lived is sadly missing from your approach.

It's your obsession with perfection and then it's supposed demonstration through your arguments.

Hanover's point is you use your arguments to proclaim just how much better and wiser than everybody else, a gigantic stroking of you own ego and its love of being superior to everyone else.

Rather than egaging with people as they live, you ignore them, belittle them, misunderstand their motivations and values, all because you are caught up in listing all the thoughts and experiences which have saved you from the lowely life of the rest of us philosophical plebs.

Your misunderstanding motivations and expressions of sex is a good example in this thread. You acted like casual sex was purley about feeling sexual pleasure, as if it could be replaced with masturbation if people only understood what they really wanted.

Yet, the need for another was there or along. Casual sex, even in it most crass an exploitative form, involves a need for someone else, something masturbation cannot fulfill. You spend paragraph supposedly giving us grand insight to the motivation of casual sex, but you utterly miss a basic point about its motivation.

Your "theoretical framework" which supposely gives us the grand insight into humainity, which "explains" us, is pointless. If you are describing sex and its motivations, you are talking about what people do. There is nothing to fit into the world of human sexual behaviour. It's only a matter of describing people and their behaviour themselves.

You are talking about a time "before the fall" though. The story itself does so too. Upon the eating form the Tree of Knowledge , humans and/or the world become fallen. A change. A fixed arrow of time where the world changes from not fallen to fallen. This is a contradiction with a "timeless world" of freedom. The world before the fall was always progressing to the change of the fall.

Sure, you can imagine a world where time doesn't progress but undergoes change, but it doesn't make sense. Your "metaphor" is nonsense. It only serves as an expression of meanings in your head, not as any analysis of a world as it might exist.

I agree with a large part of your post. However, I would say, with the Stoics, that the one thing we do have control over is our own character, and our own moral life. That we do have control over. And that, not our external circumstances, are what we should aim to perfect. In fact, no good and evil exist apart from moral good and evil, for which we are solely in control. — Agustino

I go even further than that: we are frequently in control of many external circumstances too, as the decisions we take affect the world.

And this is what make original sin laughable as analysis of our ethics and worth of the world. It removes ethical responsibility from our immediate actions. We have no worth in our own moral life because we can't make the world perfect. No matter what we do, the world occupies the same fallen state. Why does it matter if I do good in my own life? Myself and the world are still fallen to the point of absolute worthlessness. The fact that actions are finite becomes lost.

We lose perspective on what matters in the context of of any action. Instead of worrying about whether a finite action we take will make the world better or worse (or both), we obsess it it all terrible because we can't act to make the world perfect. Your reading of the Stoics is still carrying this mistake here.

We should never aim for "perfect" because we don't have the power to create it, even in our own lives. The very idea of "perfection" is dubious because it entails the obliteration of anything that doesn't meet a precise standard. I mean what are you going to do with all those immoral promiscuous people? Would you wipe them out or lock them up to save society form their immorality if you had the power? Lock them out of economic means and social relationships to serve as an example for everyone else? The underside of perfection is genocide: the value those who don't meet a standard deserve to be obliterated.

I disagree with this conclusion. I think original sin serves to remind us that control over the world is not in our power - we should rather focus on our characters, and even there, control is often outside of our control. — Agustino

But that's a contradiction. Our character is part of the world. The actions we have control over are not separate to the world. Control of the world is frequently in our power. Original sin drags us away from our own responsibility for the finite. It turns away from the actions we are responsible for, distracting us with lamenting the world is not perfect. We become so obsessed with "perfection" and how it is not being met, that we forget ethical responsibility to ourselves and others in the finite moments of our lives.