It doesn't exist anywhere, it just exists. There's no reason to assume that everything has a location. Spacetime exists; where is it? — Pneumenon

The questions can spiral inwards a bit though if one uses the word 'exists'. For some reason when I hear the word 'exists' I reach inside my space-time continuum. I quite take your underlying point.

I'm saying that understanding the cultural mileau of the issue of truth requires understanding stuff like the legacy of Descartes, how indirect realism is assumed by scientists, and catching sight of the high-wire act of Fools trying to avoid Nihilism that characterizes contemporary life.

In other words, the stakes are a lot higher than they might seem to be on casual observation. It's all Philosophy of Mind. Is the universe alive? Or is it dead and our intuitions about ourselves.. just illusions? — Mongrel

I do agree. The next bit of my journey is to see whether there's anything in the suggestion that this is rather like what Heidegger was worrying about. With 'being' for 'actuality'. Wouldn't you say?

I hope someone in this thread will explain the importance of truth. As a latecomer to philosophy, I still haven't grasped why it matters so centrally. But I feel like the village idiot sometimes in looking for ways of saying this, ('In what way is language about truth-conditions?') because it seems so obvious to so many people that it's central. Still, I'm going along with the idea to the extent that I have to go and study Logic for a day or two now :)

I suppose I am rather basic and haven't outgrown Wittg-ness. Metaphysically we encounter resemblance and difference. From these we build. How we classify our elaborations doesn't greatly matter as long as, given who we're talking with about what at the time, we understand each other. I don't see why micro-physical properties matter any more than forms of love, or any given classification of species, taking a wider view.

If a 'universal' physical property exists, where does it exist?

In my not-so-brilliant career as a writer of fiction and drama, I did as a self-reflective person enjoy inserting meta-fictional references. Who can create good fiction without reflecting on its nature and meaning?

But then, the audience enters the fictional world knowing it's fictional. So isn't it condescending and a bit author-preening to keep reminding them?

I feel the ambivalence of holding both positions about meta philosophy. I get the subtext: Sellars say (thanks to those here who have pointed me at him, my current reading) has thought about meta questions maybe as much as Heidegger, but he's decided to dive in to The Project of current philosophy and dig deep. I don't want everyone digging around in their own presuppositions.

But sometimes one gets jaded, as I am with fiction now, and only elaborately intellectual fiction will please me. All the tricks look tired. That's when musicians, for instance, seek out fresh collaborators. New genres. Investigate the meaning of bum notes.

I dislike that characterization. I don't believe I am "yelling emotively" in the argument I presented. I think I am emotively appealing to people's senses of fairness and empathy. Their "better angels", if you will. If you want to be fatalistic, and think that no believer ever changes their minds (that's what I'm hearing here), that's a sort of sad way to go, but that's up to you. I don't understand why you would want to try to impose that bleak view on anyone else though. — Reformed Nihilist

Sorry, RN, there is a failure of tone, which must be mine. I wasn't meaning to be accusatory, but to be friendly but wry, hence the randy Newman song. I didn't think you were 'yelling emotively', though your own self-characterisation came close to that :) Nor do I think that 'no believer ever changes their minds'.

I don't however regard religious faith as 'personally and socially unhealthy belief'. I am a convinced atheist, but I don't draw lines as you are doing between the religious/non-religious. That was what the serious part of my remarks were meant to say. I fear the atheist Stalinist and the dictatorial Pope, and I tend to feel close to the meditative religious person and the atheist with an aesthetic or spiritual sense.

Appeals to fairness are usually emotive. Try giving a candy to one 5 year old, but not to his twin brother, and I promise you, you will hear a very emotive appeal to fairness. Why are we outraged (an emotive response) about the rich "1%", or the lobbying power of corporations? We perceive their level of influence as unfair. "Those fuckers!" we think. Can you reasonably expect appeals to fairness not to be emotive? — Reformed Nihilist

Well I suppose so. I was attempting to tease you into lightening up the argument really. I quoted Randy Newman in the rest of my post, I think to say ironically: I believe you are on a fool's errand here. Any argument you come up with, a witty theologian will turn into an argument for God if they're that way inclined. One of my oldest friends (sadly dead now) used to waylay atheist me with absurdity-as-proof arguments for his deep Christian faith, and in the end we smiled at each other and moved on.

It greatly matters to me if believers inculcate children with falsehoods or anti-evidential ways of thinking, or oppress women in the name of faith, or if they bomb other people because those people don't share their beliefs - sometimes such oppressors believe in religion, sometimes they are atheistic Stalinists or idealistic zealots. In short, I think God or gods are a stand-in for a different underlying problem, and an atheist yelling emotively at religious people isn't going to help what matters to me.

(btw I'm a little over halfway through Sellars' "Some Reflections on Language Games" & while I'm like viscerally enjoying its subtlety and precision, I'm a little confused about how it ties in with what's presented in the essay being discussed. — csalisbury

I found 'Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind' illuminating - in a way - in relation to this brassier paper, and that's what I think Street or another poster directed me to. I think we should start a thread on Sellars actually :)

I was just in Scotland, an appropriate place for Hogmanay, Hi jamalrob, did I pass near you on my way to and from Edinburgh? Happy New Year to the forum !

If, on the other hand, I am wrong, and there is an eternal judgement, I will be punished with eternal damnation for simply believing what makes most sense to me and speaking honestly and openly about that belief. That doesn't seem very fair at all, does it? To put it bluntly, what kind of an asshole god would punish someone for believing and expressing what the brain they were "given" concludes? If such a god did exist, would it be moral to worship it? I don't think it would be.

So therein concludes my emotive argument for atheism. Thoughts? Critiques? — Reformed Nihilist

Can you reasonably mix appeals to 'fairness' with 'emotiveness'? If I invented a species, I must say I'd expect them to have done better with their brains than our contribution to this world we're in, however benevolent I was on the first seven days. In a capricious world why might not a god be capricious? 'How we laugh up here in heaven, at the prayers you offer me...You all must be crazy to put your faith in me...That's why I love mankind, you really need me,' as Randy Newman's God puts it: (Which I think is close to Kierkegaard's God, and for all I know, Landru's if he's about.) Not that I'm any kind of believer. Confirmed atheist. But I think you'll have to box cleverer than that, R N :)

I'm amazed, incidentally, at the number of posters who claim to know authoritatively what large numbers of other people think and believe, especially in order to despise the others' purported beliefs, a trait I can't see as awfully philosophical. Meanwhile here's Randy:

Who runs Syria is none of 'our' business. Massive humanitarian aid to neighbouring countries, a welcome to refugees and the services of skilful diplomats to bring warring factions to the table - thats what this mysterious 'we' could do.

Thanks to both Willow and Aaron. I need time to reflect on all this. Happy Christmas.

Yet, it seems, there are objects we don't know about all the time. How can there be meaningful objects outside experience when, it seems, meaning is only given in experience?

In taking objects as primary, we side-step this dilemma completely. Objects, since they are defined in themselves, no longer require a "present" concept (i.e. be experienced) to be. Perhaps more critically though, the infinite meaning of concepts is unattached from states of existence. — TheWillowOfDarkness

I see that this is your case, and is a case that can be argued. (a) I don't see how Brassier argues this without your help :)

(b) I don't see how you're not presuming the answer in your analysis. If objects were indeed 'defined in themselves' they would be primary. I don't see how an object is so defined, though. Objects are defined by their properties and relations. This idea of being 'defined in themselves' seems to me part of the 'myth of the given', what Sellars is arguing *against*. He has a much more convoluted argument for the primacy of our talk about objects and thence for 'objects'. Or am I misunderstanding this 'myth of the given' stuff?

Here's my favourite Christmas song, from Tom Lehrer. Best to all.

Has this discussion finished? Perhaps it's only me who went on to read and reread Sellars' essay 'Empiricism and the philosophy of mind'. I'm left with a feeling of some unfinished business.

'How the world actually is' is a phrase Glahn uses. I remain puzzled about the supposed primacy or focal importance of 'objects' in this actual world. The Sellars' argument is rich and thoughtful: partly, that the very idea of 'inner episodes', of individual knowledge and reflection, depend on mutual discussion and understanding. This is part of the attack on the myth of the given, as I'm reading it, that the old idea of sense-data pinging on the individual perceiver is mistaken. I believe I've inadvertently understood some of this through reading McDowell who regards himself as following Sellars in some way.

Nevertheless, Sellars focuses on a 'red triangle' as his exemplary concept. What of the other ideas infants and children learn alongside ideas about objects? I am thinking of properties/qualities - is a 'mother' the object who claims that title, or the sort of person who does 'mothering' things? I am also thinking of the mini-politics of any life: the child learns, for instance, mine/Mummy's/for general use, and the implications of appearance and actions - what might happen if Dad has that look on his face? Some of these may be said to be 'about' objects, but they are non-physical, and are also about processes, qualities, emotions. In what sense are objects supposed to be more primary to our concepts than these other notions, except to physically-based sciences?

I am seguing to Brassier here. He doesn't really put an argument *for* objects, does he? His argument is some sort of ground-clearing about other matters, which does not make any kind of clear case for the importance of 'objects' - as against, say 'properties'.

I would welcome comment/criticism if anyone else is still interested in this topic :)

I think it's useful to try and generalise about what what impels the human being to act. Why does one try to act at all? And if one does, to what end? Is 'need' is at the heart of this? How do people in general act on the human predicament? Is it susceptible to such sweeping generalisation?

Wiki seems to argue that when surveyed people in different cultures identify two sorts of need, but the sorting varies according to the culture. That seems an odd idea, but I think I tend to assume two sorts of need: some kind of Cartesian division in me, whatever my theories :)

Recently I have turned more and more right-wing, and I am interested to discuss with members of this forum, many whom I know to be leftist/socialists. The way I see it, the left takes certain values, such as equality for all, freedom against culture/norms, etc. and then imposes these over the rest of the world, and anyone who doesn't respect them becomes a misogynist, racist, sexist, etc. The left claims to be tolerant, but only for things which respect their fundamental values; towards anything else, absolutely intolerant. But there are so many different ways of life under the sun. — Agustino

In my experience when people describe themselves as becoming more right-wing, they often have to posit some sort of imaginary leftist position that they feel they can measure their shift against. The use of 'etc.' seems like a lazy marker to me of this. The rise of the movement for 'rights' is a largely centrist product of the coming together of free democracies, and of indigenous developments in those democratic countries, sometimes aped then by autocracies who want to appear to join the democratic club.

I am 66 years old and so remember in my own country, the UK, when racism was rife, women were second-class citizens and homosexuality was illegal. I regard it as a fine achievement that in matters of race, gender and sexual preference, the UK is a more liberal and tolerant place than when I was young, and that this is often nowadays not a right/left issue: the British Conservatives introduced gay marriage, for instance.

Are leftists from here trying to impose these values on unwilling foreigners on their own soil? I see no sign of this, but would welcome evidence. Is there some?

I see no evidence actually that leftists have much power anywhere at present, South America excepted.

I also feel it's not inevitable that as one gets older one shifts to the right. I haven't, although my views have changed considerably. Do you mean that at heart you too would like to be racist, sexist and homophobic, or what? What are your specific complaints, and who are specific examples of the perpetrators? Without specifics this is all rhetoric.

But beyond that particular question, one observation I would make is that, if a realistic or naturalistic attitude to life is perfectly satisfactory, what then does philosophy consist of? What difference is there between those who ask philosophical questions, and those who don't? Just a turn of phrase? A way with words? — Wayfarer

Thank you for your generous remarks. You are always remarkably calm in the face of angry naturalism, I must say :)

I don't find a 'realistic or naturalistic attitude' 'perfectly satisfactory', myself. I like Nelson Goodman because he accepts, indeed argues for, pluralism, for there being multiple shared 'real worlds', depending on the language community. He also sees the arts as equally important and insightful with science and philosophy, and that's an area where my recent interest in analytic philosophy has amazed me: how little analytic philosophers refer to the arts, how little humility they show towards artists, indeed how oddly self-important their pronouncements are. Most of this stuff will blow away on the wind, leaving Picasso and Shostakovich and Toni Morrisson and Adrienne Rich to testify to the future about how we thought in our time. (Indeed, sociologists may understand more, though only Continental philosophers admit they exist, most of the time!)

As I see it. Still, there is something there, to something to burrow deep down into and come back up to the surface with insight, or I wouldn't be digging myself! 'Something difficult to fathom, subtle' as you put it. What we call 'aesthetic' has something to do with it, for me. I'm not a Platonist, in fact the Plato of the Republic sometimes makes me shudder. My Greek hero is probably Euripides: a man who was as fascinated as his fellows by heroes and gods, who saw into human affairs bleakly but poetically and movingly. Among a certain arty crowd of whom I would count myself a member, it's remarkable how the Greek dramas speak to us, even now, and I love how Sophocles or Aeschylus or Euripides (to me) have insight beyond the neat systems of Aristotle or Plato into tragedy and love and hope.

Maybe there's an atheistic philosophy being built, but it hasn't had much time to grow yet. The idea of 'ecology' writ large certainly appeals to me as a systematic way of looking at things. And inside that, musical metaphors are usually my deepest level of explanation: a feeling of harmony, of the musics and movements of the worlds we know.

The various Islamic caliphates of the past were not anything near the utopias they imagine them to be. Islamists would also be surprised and appalled at certain facts about these regimes. Take Akbar the Great of the Mughal Empire, for example. He had Hindu wives and maintained cordial relations with the West. — Thorongil

For me though this is an example of how a term like 'islamofascist' is more descriptive of the society generating the term than of the movement it's trying to describe. Akbar introduced a quasi-Persian society into his rule. The Sunnis who form Al-Qaeda and ISIL don't think of someone like Akbar as any kind of hero, and the Shi'ites reciprocate: Iran is as anxious to eliminate ISIL as 'the West' is.

Yet the term islamofascist was widely used in the United States about *Iranians* for a period when Ahmenijad was running things there and occasionally dripping anti-Jewish venom.

There are many sorts of Islam about. For myself, I don't think of any of them as resembling fascism in any meaningful way. People will use the words they feel like using, but 'islamofascist' denotes to me an undifferentiated fear of Islam when that religion is allied with State power, and the word is a poor description of any of the political movements currently holding sway.

No doubt - but the value exists in the moment, not in the future — Agustino

Well, on the Aristotelian model one cultivates the habits of virtue by doing virtuous acts. One learns to live well by doing the things that enable a person like oneself to live well. Perhaps one savours the pleasure of them more, thanks to habit and deliberation. He's certainly not arguing for the 'momentary', which has a feeling of the appetitive, the hedonist. 'One day, or a short time, does not make a man blessed and happy.' (Ethics 1098a 17-19)

And now, we finally get to mcdoodle who has argued along with Aristotle that excellence is the goal of life, and for humans, this consists in character building (virtue), which is not accumulated over a life-time, but rather is something that exists in the moment. As such, virtue is what best enables one to enjoy life in the present moment; it is the skill with which one handles the present. Hence, as TGW tells us, ethics is not about specific ways in which to live your life, it's not a self-help guide. It is, I would say, a character building act, which ensures that one has the right character (as opposed to rule book) to handle best different situations. — Agustino

If I implied this momentary notion, I didn't mean to. Aristotle expressly argues that the state of character is accumulated over a lifetime, and is careful to speak of living well 'in a complete life'. He doesn't mean there's a calculus over a life, though. He means that experience over a complete life, and the deliberation you undertake based upon that experience, prepares you for the moments when your choice of action will matter to you, and to others.

You can maximize the profits of a business because there's some quantitative measurement of profit, and a time during which it has to be accumulated. Pleasure isn't like that — The Great Whatever

I agree. Aristotle argues for a 'mean' as the 'virtuous' act, and for me there's also a mean in the taking of pleasure. A 24-hour marathon of Schubert might put me off for life. Each in its measure. And then a little light relief. Even frivolity, in your phrase, TGW.

The difference is, with the low pleasures, hunger will always be there to spice the food. Appreciation of music is a sort of frivolity by comparison, so the qualities that make it impressive are likewise frivolous. There is no bodily need to enjoy music that presses down on you torturously. I say this as someone who used to spend a good portion of his life devouring and loving music, and who just doesn't care too much for it anymore. Yet I still care about filling my stomach, because I have no choice. — The Great Whatever

Well, I think my and John's experience differs from yours: perhaps we're a lot older :) I think the question of 'caring' about something is what we're debating, and there is a quality to 'caring' about some things that, for me, has diminished as far as the appetitive pleasures go, and has become enhanced in respect of (for example) philosophy and more difficult music - including the difficulties of making and harmonising music.

...with the 'high' pleasures, they can genuinely peter out over time, and not as a result of simple bodily exhaustion. It is possible, through too fine an appreciation of music, to cease to enjoy music that you once loved, because your palette becomes too discriminating for it. Many people take a sort od aesthetic pride in this kind of devaluation. — The Great Whatever

I agree. This has happened to me and I feel anything but pride in it. I find prose fiction in general terrifically hard to enjoy - I used to write it, enjoy reading it and savour it - and for a while it felt tragic to me that I'd lost a taste for its flavour.

One reason I came to philosophy late in life was to try out a new taste. It's helped me to feel that one can find new 'high' pleasures - my tastes in music are somewhat different too, for instance - and yet still grieve sometimes for the old.

I haven't found however that the 'low' pleasures remain either. An appetite can get jaded. But maybe that's just me :)

Now, the kind of language you're after--of the story-telling variety--certainly presupposes our ability to experience things as red, and therefore presupposes that we already have in place a full-blooded system of language as thought for representing the world as it is. — Glahn

Thanks a lot Glahn. It's time I read more Sellars. I was by the way using the word 'scientific' in a rather broad way to embrace human empirical curiosity.

I quite agree that the redness of tables is background knowledge for most grown-up language, including story-telling. I hesitate in accepting that it's 'language as thought' exactly, but that's because I'm rather obsessed with language as dialogue (including dialogue with oneself), and therefore with language as intrinsically communicable, as anyone working from Witt outwards might be. I'm not clear how either thought or communication can be prior to the other, but I'm not disagreeing about this, just commenting.

However, there clearly is something to the question. What's important to keep in mind is that questions are artifacts of our very specific human linguistic faculty, and the appropriateness of a particular answer to a particular question turns not only on facts about the extra-linguistic world, but also on the structure of language itself. My suspicion is that the uncertainty that motivates this question (and neighboring questions, such as "Why is there something rather than nothing?") simply cannot be articulated as a question, for the reason that it does not admit (even in principle) of any answer. It obviously still indexes a very real and very important uncertainty that we all can be made to feel. It seems clear, however, that we're simply not able to think about the issue with any real clarity--or, at least, without mistaking it for either an explanatory or a justificatory question. It's simply never entirely clear what's being talked about. — Glahn

I'd like to add a metaphysical point I've been thinking about. One thing that has occasionally puzzled me, as an avowed and happy-to-be-atheist atheist, is that sometimes people of a religious background or upbringing ask me, But how do you manage without god(s)? Why the 'a' in 'a-theist'?

I've realized that this supposed deficit is in a related area to the o p. In our histories, some people have asked themselves some sort of question like 'Why are we here?' - and dug down through science and art to the bedrock question - and they have found an answer in a deity or a conjunction of deities.

Once such an answer has been conjured up, it seems to them like an absence - to some, an evasion - to say, as I would, 'There just is no answer to such a question as far as I can see.'

Some people have also, if I offer a response like this, taken me for a prim, analytic-to-the-core, heartless Dawkins-loving atheist. Again, to me this is a surprise, for I love the arts, for instance, sex and good food and being involved in mutual political activity and deep enquiry. Some of these activities have caused deep, maybe profound feelings in me, of intellect and emotion combined, and I feel quite a correlation between these reactions and others' descriptions of religious feeling.

I don't know why, however, such feelings - which for some might go as far as mysticism, or obsession, or ecstasy - would have anything to do with the origins of the world around us, or of ourselves, and yet they do for many people of a religious persuasion. They seem to me very different phenomena. But there we are.

It does seem that scientific method needs some universalising terms, whatever you call them. 'Tropes' seems to be in fashion. You have to be able to 'quantify over particulars', it seems, or how will you be able to talk about regularities at all?

It is of course something of an oddity that scientific terms can shift in meaning quite a lot over time. 'Electron' is not what it was in Rutherford's day. 'Gene' is quite a different thing from when Dawkins wrote 'The selfish gene'. 'Species' is quite an uncertain beast. But perhaps that's my own hobby-horse and not this thread's :)

The problem that Sellars confronts is this: how do blind evolutionary contingencies generate purposeful rule-governed activity - i.e. conceptual rationality. This has to be explained. So how do human animals
learn to speak, use language, and therefore think? If concepts are rules, and rationality is the ability to follow rules, and concepts and linguistically instantiated function, then the key to understand the specificity of the human lies in understanding how an animal can follow rules. — Brassier quoted by StreetlightX

I'm glad AaronR has joined the discussion because one issue that may be a side-issue - but which trips me up here - is how the very idea of language that Sellars-Brassier are starting from is a 'scientific' idea of language. I got bogged down before in trying to understand 'objects' because of this problem: that Sellars-Brassier assume that the core basis of language is a kind of fact-finding, truth-seeking mission. That gives a certain shape to one's very notions of 'concept', 'language' and 'object' that I - coming from a lifetime of arts and communication - don't automatically share. I think of language as communication, story-weaving at its core. I realise that that way postmodernism (and possibly madness) lies, but I'm looking for the analytic route all the same :) I tend to think of this quasi-logical account of language as a subset of language as a whole, as one language-game among many, whereas they are treating the language of science as the exemplary basis of language, but making it look as if they're addressing language as a whole by using very simple examples about red and rot. (I hope I'm making sense in explaining this. )

I *am* confused about the *sequence* of Brassier's argument. When I quoted what I felt were odd presuppositions in paras 3 and 4 of the C & O paper, Sx, you answered with paragraphs from *later* in the paper as if they *preceded* what I was calling 'presuppositions'. It does feel to me as if the paper starts with his answer ('We gain access to the structure of reality via a machinery of conception') then rolls it out. But I think this may be to do with your wider familiarity with his work.

Many thanks for the chat about Sellars and links, to SX and Aaron. Even though I'm expressing reservations above, your remarks have made things a lot clearer to me.

Thanks to Aaron for the blog link which I'm surprised nobody has picked up on. Sorry I've been away but am catching up.

That the greatest good is living well is Aristotle's focus in ethics. For him good is grounded in acting with excellence and with virtue, over the course of a life. In this way of understanding pleasure/pain is secondary or even tertiary. To focus in them hedonistically is animal-like and not what humans are about. We have the gift of practical wisdom, and through deliberation can find ways to choose virtuous/excellent acts, exercised by practical wisdom. We can learn to find pleasure in certain things.

This seems like a good start to me.

Isn't Sisyphus a true Stoic? — Cavacava

He's at least a fine one :) We embrace the predicament, and reinvent it as pleasure.

I too think, a propos the op, you can't prove a negative. But who would want to? Consider how equations for fluid dynamics pop up in so many other places, or how there is music and language and dance and poetry and love in every known human society, or the immense self-organisation of living things, or... - to me we are awash with meanings, explanations, and this is a joy - I for one find great pleasure in analysing the apparent patterns of the worlds about me and in me where I find them -

But a plethora of meanings doesn't make any particular sense for the individual when they contemplate the abyss.

I think it's a Derrida idea that the world of decisions is a world of madness. It seems to me to be so. We go on. Why? There is only the existential leap, (I'm stuck on Sartre as I was a fan of his when I was a lad) the leap that will make meaning of my life by my expressing myself, instead of the (inauthentic) mere living out of a life as others might expect it of me.

If you're up for a Big Read, the late John Haugeland ('Having thought') was both existentialist and analytic philosopher. His view of the prevalence of a scientific world-view, for instance (to caricature in summary), was that it requires the existential commitment of a substantial community of scientists to sustain itself.

If you drill down through any notion of meaning, the bedrock is some sort of set of intuitions. Are these 'emotions'? I don't know what they are. To rebuild from there, there will always be acts of faith of one kind or another, or so it seems to me - as a firm, non-Dawkins atheist,

If I could return us to the Brassier essay...

Aaron kindly directed me, the other week, to an essay that I think relates to the Brassier project. It's by Peter Wolfendale, a 'transcendental realist', which is here: https://deontologistics.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/essay-on-transcendental-realism.pdf

My struggle is that to me this new approach to 'realism' in Brassier and in Wolfendale among others puts the cart before the horse. In para 4 of his essay for instance Brassier says:

We gain access to the structure of reality via a machinery of conception which
extracts intelligible indices from a world that is not designed to be intelligible and is
not originarily infused with meaning. — Brassier

It does seem to me that if this among our presuppositions, if we think this to begin with, we will inevitably end up with this gulf between concepts and objects, and an underlying notion of the 'reality' of 'objects'.

I have an eccentric fondness for Nelson Goodman's irrealist views. As I read it, Goodman's arguments are that there are 'many worlds' in an intellectual sense - all of which acknowledge an Otherness but don't find a unifying theory-of-realness - so we may posit that there are different world-views, where concepts vary from view to view. But at the same time we don't fall into the potential cess-pool of postmodern anything-goes, because each world-view requires intellectual rigour and a unity of its own.

But whether you like Goodman or no, I would like to ask that we get back to Brassier. Has he pre-decided his metaphysics with the para I mention above? More generally, is this object-oriented approach the way to go? There are some sideswipes at 'process' views which aren't backed up by any specific argument, and I haven't understood just what is such a good idea about renewing our focus on 'objects'. As compared say to 'events': for any object left out in the sun for long enough transforms in concert with what's around 'it' :)

his wonderful discussion of Stove's Gem, which he uses not so much to establish realism, but - in keeping with the ground-clearing mode of the rest of the paper - to disqualify approaches which aim to diffuse realism as an issue from the get-go. Here, both Berkeley and Fitche are taken as targets, with Meillassoux also critiqued for buying too easily into the Gem. Again, it's not a 'positive' argument that Brassier is advancing here, but a negative one - or more precisely, an attempt to negate a negative (against the idea that thought cannot track the real). — StreetlightX

A lot hinges on how one feels about David Stove and his Gem as applied to Berkeley. (These are paras 31 and 32 of C & O)

It does seem to me that one wouldn't know from Stove or Brassier that Berkeley said, for instance:

By the principles premised, we are not deprived of any one thing in Nature. Whatever we see, feel, hear, or any wise conceive or understand, remains as secure as ever, and is as real as ever. There is a rerum natura, and the distinction between realities and chimeras retains its full force...[W]e have shewn what is meant by real things in opposition to chimeras, or ideas of our own framing. — Berkeley

'...or any wise conceive or understand...' There are things we don't know yet; the good Bishop feels that God the first cause is holding them in readiness for when our measuring apparatus improves. I don't say I'm a Berkeleyan. I only mean I don't accept the supposed force of Stove's argument against such idealism, which is here a surrogate for an argument in favour of the analytic and against the continental. The perennial problem for a critic of Berkeley seems to me to say, OK, what's your alternative to always seeing oneself in one's own mind's eye? And Brassier doesn't offer that; he is, as SX says, clearing the ground as he sees it, and relying on passing references to Sellars to come up with the positives.

I posted a very bare summary of what I think the article is about here: http://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/155/what-the-hell-is-ray-brassier-trying-to-say#Item_1 I hope other people will improve upon it then we can start discussing.

I'm not clear if your intention is that we should begin discussion here, or over there, where the 'reading' thread is.

I'm ignorant of Brassier's work apart from this essay, so hope others more knowledgeable will take up the flame, but I have read this specific essay several times, initially to try and get a grip on ideas about 'reality' which I was exchanging with another poster in another thread. Briefly...

I think Brassier proposes that there is an inevitable gulf between 'meaning' on the one hand and 'being' on the other, thus between 'concept' on the one hand and 'object' on the other. He argues for the independence of the object, the thing-in-itself, and that 'scientific representation' is an attempt to articulate in conceptual terms what that object can be thought and therefore be said to be. (para 29 and 45)

He believes that most continental philosophy (exemplified by Latour) mistakenly has this in reverse. They have elevated the concept over the object and so lose sight of the real. They are the bastard descendants of Berkeley and Fichte, whose arguments he believes can be boiled down to an erroneous refutation of mind-independence: he summarises their position as being that you can't escape the vicious circle of a mind only being able to conceptualise about products of the mind. He's disappointed that Meillassoux praises this 'strong correlationism'. He sees an approach derived from Sellars as a promising way forward, since it acknowledges the problematic relationship of observation to conceptualisation, but nevertheless holds to a version of objectivity (I infer, I didn't spot this word in the article) or object-independence.

How's that for starters?

I have no issue with religious faith of whatever kind, provided it is not fundamentalist, in other words provided that it is acknowledged as being simply faith (that it is purely affective and not propositional) and no more. Of course usually, and sadly, that is not enough for people; and we all know what the consequences are.

Anyway, none of this mystical stuff, however moving it might be, has anything to do with philosophy; being ineffable it simply can have no application. — John

And yet (I hope you'll all pardon me for jumping in) if we go back to the point of this thread, the meaning of human suffering, its causes and if any its solutions, it does seem to me - a downright atheist - that many religions and many religious people have a good stab at confronting this sort of question. Indeed it's somewhat in the nature of religion to grapple with the nature and meaning of suffering. So it seems to me that religion, notably religious experience, has 'application' to this sort of question in a way that, say, referring to our place in the evolutionary scheme of things offers no help or insight. We must go on. Fail better. Bleakness. A regime of feel-better pills.

I think there is also an honourable tradition of mysticism from William James onwards which doesn't demand transcendence or belief in divine beings. I don't personally sympathise with telling religion to get back in its box labelled Faith; people with religion have often thought more clearly about their intellectual commitments than the non-religious, and my version of liberalism works with those of all creeds and none. People who believe they have been granted unique insight into the rational by virtue of their atheism and superior intellect have, in my experience, been as intolerant and frustrating to work with as 'fundamentalists'.

Not that I'm thinking of becoming religious any time soon! To me mutuality in kindness, through societies and groups of people, can provide a similar sort of community to the one a religious person might find.

We can be considerate, in these bleak times, towards each other, including the women among us who probably get put off posting by sexist crap.

I am more deeply into Aristotle at the moment, more of a practical reason, phronetic fellow than his erstwhile teacher. They both sought a path to eudaimonia, living well, through reason and wisdom. It's the manner of the inquiry that seems to count. What would certainty be for? How would it survive an afternoon in a good dialectician's company?

I think we need to distinguish more clearly that fascism and nazism are two different ideas and movements. They entered into an alliance, but the prototypical fascism of Mussolini's Italy, and later of Franco's Spain - which survived long after the 2nd world war, Spain was still fascist when I was a young man - is quite a different beast from Nazism. It's fiercely Statist, nationalist, reactionary in that it upholds existing class systems (whereas Nazism for instance was not so clearcut about class, because it thought 'race' was everything), finds strong support in the Catholic Church in Catholic countries.