• Morals made simple
    ↪jorndoe
    :lol: As Aristotle taught: 'The Geek Life'.
  • Inmost Core and Ultimate Ground
    The YouTube video:
    Anahata (Heart Centre) Experience Sarvapriyananda #shorts
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oM3_lPPYbnw&list=LL&index=3     — Art48
    Consider this interview with philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel ...

    ... about the unreliability of introspection (like a brain trying to perceive (e.g. feel) itself or an eye seeing itself. :eyes:) esp. @ 25:00, 31:00 & 48:30

    :chin:

    Has a person who is completely blind from birth ever reported "seeing the uncreated light"? If not, and if such a phenomenon is reported by others, then why hasn't anyone born blind ever "seen the inner light"?
  • Heidegger’s Downfall
    i suspect you aren’t too crazy about Foucault, Rorty, social constructionism, Derrida, Deleuze, Nietzsche or Husserl either when it comes to ethics. — Joshs
    Clearly, you're mistaken, Joshs. Foucault, Nietzsche & Deleuze have much to say about ethics (re: "care of the self", "master / slave morality & revaluation of all values" and "anti-oedipal desiring-production", respectively).
  • Heidegger’s Downfall
    @Mikie @plaque flag @Arne @Joshs
    Basic to the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle is the desire for and pursuit of the good. This must be understood at the most ordinary level, not as a theory but simply as what we want both for ourselves and those we care about. It is not only basic to their philosophy but basic to their understanding of who we are as human beings.

    Phronesis, often translated as practical wisdom, is not simply a matter of reasoning toward
    achieving ends, but of deliberation about good ends.

    For Heidegger consideration of the good is replaced with the call of conscience. The call of conscience is not about what is good or bad, it is the call for authenticity. Its primary concern is not oneself or others but Being. He sees Plato's elevation of the Good above being, that is, as the source of both being and being known, as a move away from, a forgetting of Being.

    In more general terms, how severing reason from the good is nihilism can be seen in the ideal of objectivity and the sequestering of "value judgments". Political philosophy, for example, is shunned in favor of political science. The question of how best to live has no place in a science of politics whose concerns are structural and deal with power differentials.     — Fooloso4
    :fire: :100:

    My own less learned supplement to your wise précis, Fooloso4:
    As specifically relates to H, "resolute" (i.e. subjectivist aka "ownmost") "being-towards-death" makes for "authentic Dasein", reminiscent of soldiering (kamikazi-like), that resonates with a Kierkegaardian "knight of faith's" fervor rationalized by the theodicy of death at the drum-beating heart of H's SuZ. "Authenticity" – purportedly the highest subjectivist (and historicist) goal – is the hymn of this Absolute (which for H's Dasein is (my) "death") invoked as en-chanting (i.e. "jargoning" Adorno suggests) in lieu of, or over above, public reasoning. — 180 Proof
  • Martin Heidegger
    ↪plaque flag
    I'll stick with Freddy's less charitable premonition of Heidi's willful lack of clarity.
  • Martin Heidegger
    ↪Tom Storm
    H promotes "misunderstanding" both with the obscurant sophistry of his texts and rare, explicit statements such as
    Those in the crossing must in the end know what is mistaken by all urging for intelligibility: that every thinking of being, all philosophy, can never be confirmed by ‘facts,’ i.e., by beings. Making itself intelligible is suicide for philosophy. — Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), Notes 1936-1938

    Note N's prescient criticism sixty-something years before:
    Those who know that they are profound strive for clarity. Those who would like to seem profound to the crowd strive for obscurity. For the crowd believes that if it cannot see to the bottom of something it must be profound. It is so timid and dislikes going into the water. — The Gay Science, 173

    (Emphases are mine.)

    https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/637153
  • Thinking different
    DO NOT FEED THE TROLLS — on a sign in the Agora
  • Thinking different
    Still spending more time on style over substance but what do I know. — invicta
    Res ipsa loquitur. :roll:
  • What are your philosophies?
    ↪Tom Storm
    Thanks.
  • Thinking different
    Eat an apple; you know what an apple tastes like. — EnPassant
    In this sentence "you know", it seems to me, only does the work of "you experience".

    ... many ways of knowing
    I prefer to be less ambiguous, or colloquial, here: there are ways of knowing, believing, experiencing, remembering, imagining as well as ways of interpreting those ways. Only that which is '(in principle) publicly demonstrable – irrational to deny – by everyone' denotes knowing something as used in epistemology to distinguish from not-knowing something.

    and many facets of reality to know.
    And this expresses what you know? believe? experience? remember? imagine? ... interpret?
  • Thinking different
    ↪Metaphysician Undercover
    Non sequiturs. Wait till the dialogue plays out some more for more context.
  • Ontological arguments for idealism
    Wasn't Spinoza an idealist in all but name? — sime
    Spinoza isn't "an idealist" according to my reading.

    As for Epicurus, as an empirically minded philosopher, didn't he stress the epistemic primacy, if not ontological primacy of sense-data?
    Yes.

    I'm also not seeing any real points of disagreement between the ontological arguments of Berkleley and Epircurus.
    I can't help you with that. :sweat:
  • Ontological arguments for idealism
    Metaphysics by definition is prior to physics. — HarryHarry
    This is not how Aristotle conceived and taught his First Philosophy with respect to his Physics. The word 'metaphysics' literally means 'the book after the book on physics'. It is meant to consist of categorical generalizations about nature derived from studying the many domains and particularities of nature. In other words, one must know nature (i.e. physics) in order to understand the principles / limits of physics (i.e. metaphysics). I'm no Aristotlean (I'm much more of an Epicurean-Spinozist) but I'm sure Plato's best – most renown – pupil didn't put the metaphysical cart before the physical horse. That's clearly a modern idealist's (or p0m0's) mistake. :smirk:
  • What are your philosophies?
    Here's a more conventional reformulation of this breezy synopsis
    ↪180 Proof
    ...

    'My philosophy' has mainly consisted of these -isms:

    i. ontological naturalism – Whatever else the whole of reality consist in, reason is embodied in, or immanent to, an unbounded dynamic structure of causal relations and stochastic micro-events that constrains-enables its explicability to embodied reason. This immanently explicable, unbounded, causal-stochastic, dynamic structure aka "nature" (phusis, natura naturans, dao) is real in the maximal sense of manifesting the ineluctable conditionality, or contingency, of the totality of its constituents and, therefore, the entirety (such as it is) of itself.

    NB: From this ontology I derive the epistemic concepts of "material" (re: non-formal data) and "physical" (re: formally modeled non-formal data); I use both terms as non-reductive interpretations – descriptive-levels – of "nature".

    ii. ethical naturalism – Humans suffer. As a member of the same species, each individual has the same defects as all other h sapiens, which are learned as the 'theory of mind' is acquired by each of us. Deprivation or neglect of these species defects (e.g. hunger, thirst, shelter, sleep, touch, esteem, personal-social bonds, relaxation, health, hygiene, trust, safety, etc) causes discomfort, even dysfunction – suffering (or worse). These are facts of nature (re: h. sapiens); we cannot not know this. We can avoid, prevent or reduce deprivations & neglect; this fact we also cannot not know. Suffering itself solicits relief from, or help to reduce, suffering. Through practice sufferers develop habits which both help and do not help to reduce the suffering of other sufferers and/or themselves. Through reflective practice – ethics – sufferers can unlearn habits which tend not to help to reduce suffering, etc.

    Given this (barely sketched) naturalized ethical framework (tailored for 'beasts, not angels'), my normative morality is Negative Hedonic Utilitarianism (Right personal judgment & conduct reduces harm) and applied morality is Negative Preference Consequentialism (Right public policy reduces injustice). Reflectively exercising these moral practices daily tends to both cultivate adaptive habits which help to reduce suffering (i.e. virtues) and unlearn maladaptive habits which do not help to reduce suffering (i.e. vices).

    addendum:
    Psychological suffering from maladapting (re: stupidity) to ineluctable, physical change (re: entropy)

    iii. pragmatic naturalism – It's an effin' kluge:
    • Popper's falsificationism (re: knowledge) +
    • Haack's foundherentism (re: belief) +
    • Lakoff's embodied mind (re: cognition) +
    • Metzinger's self-modeling non-reductive physicalism (re: cognition) +
    • Hawking & Mlodinow's model-dependent realism (re: cosmology)

    iv. ecological-economic democratism – My secular, leftist critique of 'hegemonic neoliberalism' consists in proposing a hybrid of deep ecology + economic democracy or, in other words,
    an orderly, accountable process of de-centralizing 'scarcity-producing, shareholder dominance hierarchies' into (federated) regimes of stakeholder control (and/or ownership) of industry, finance & governance wherein local-regional-hemispheric ecosystems are also stakeholders (i.e. legal wards of local, regional or hemispheric (non-commercial) organizations) along with workers and affected communities.
    This proposal is not a political action-plan, or manifesto; rather, it is a secular, post-marxist attempt at critically de-naturalizing – subverting, even strategically sabotagizing – the status quo 'paralysis' of neoliberal pollutionists & diversionary identity-politricksters.

    v. antitheism – An argument against the sine qua non claims of theism and not against g/G itself.
    The theistic g/G-type is shown to be empty, therefore its g/G-tokens are fictions.
    I'm persuaded by the Apophatics: How is it that anything but silence with respect to a g/G-token of theism is not indistinguishable from idolatry (or even, in theists' own religious terms, "blasphemous")? I am, however, agnostic about any g/G-type that does not consist of theism's sine qua non claims (e.g. "Deus, sive Natura").


    :death: :flower:

    https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/843433
  • Aesthetic reasons to believe
    Humans are able to reduce human suffering, so the antinatalist remains a boring defeatist imo. — universeness
    :up:
  • What is a good definition of libertarian free will?
    A good definition of libertarian free will?
    Ex post facto confabulating rationalization aka wishful thinking (e.g. "I could have made another choice that I didn't make" ... without also changing the prior unknown conditions which had constrained whatever had caused you to have made the actual choice :roll: ).
  • Ontological arguments for idealism
    ↪HarryHarry
    Your 'argument' equivocates the word "view", thereby conflating/confusing conception and perception.
  • Martin Heidegger
    It depends on what you want to count as philosophy, I guess. — plaque flag
    :roll:
  • Are sensations mind dependent?
    ↪jgill
    :smirk:
  • Martin Heidegger
    ↪plaque flag
    And what do Heidi's "tool ... transparency" and "explicit worldhood" insights clarify philosophically? Maybe these insights are anthropologically or psycho-cognitively interesting ... but I think they are philosophically trivial (i.e. redundant with respect to e.g. (early) pragmatism).
  • Heidegger’s Downfall
    ↪Fooloso4
    :up:
  • Martin Heidegger
    1 The world is everything that is the case.

    1.1 The world is the totality of facts, not of things.

    1.11 The world is determined by the facts, and by these being all the facts.

    1.12 For the totality of facts determines both what is the case, and also all that is not the case.

    1.13 The facts in logical space are the world.

    1.2 The world divides into facts.

    1.21 Any one can either be the case or not be the case, and everything else remain the same.     — Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 1921 (completed 1918)
    I think 'Witty's facts' (sinpliciter) are synonymous with actual relations. Anti-cartesian/platonic ontology (à la Spinoza ... Epicurus ... Laozi ...)

    So what additional, clarifying insight does the cryptic "In-der-Welt-sein" offer? :chin:




    https://www.wittgensteinproject.org/w/index.php?title=Tractatus_Logico-Philosophicus_(English)
  • Heidegger’s Downfall
    ↪Ciceronianus
    :100:

    There is a direct connection between his concept of time and his acceptance of Nazism and its atrocities. He called it "hearkening to Being". — Fooloso4
    :fire:

    Being and Time should be read by all serious students of philosophy and is worthy of being course subject matter. — Arne
    Agreed, as I advocated on an old thread ...
    I've been grateful to Heidegger, nonetheless, since my earliest philosophical studies in the late '70s for his monumental oeuvre as a/the paragon of how NOT to philosophize - or think-live philosophically (as Arendt points out) - as manifest by the generations of heideggerian obscurant sophists (i.e. p0m0s e.g. Derrida, Baudrillard, Lyotard, Rorty et al) who've come and gone in and out of academic & litcrit fashion since the 1950s ... — 180 Proof
    Certainly in Freddy Zarathustra's sense, "serious students of philosophy" ought to study intellectual diseases (e.g. Heidi, p0m0, woo-woo, etc) in order to learn how to, like surgeons (Rosset), incisively diagnose and excise cultural illness (e.g. decadence, resentment, nationalism, antisemitism, historicism / utopianism / eschatology, etc). :mask:
  • Thinking different
    There are different kinds of knowing. — EnPassant
    Such as??? :chin:

    (Please, no equivocating uses of "knowing". Thanks)
  • Aesthetic reasons to believe
    What motivates you to 'reason' something, surely you must have been 'inspired' to? — universeness
    No. It's an efficacious habit acquired through learning and experience. What "motivates" reasoning? Survival. No doubt though, creative (non-instrumental) uses of reason are "inspired".

    As for reclaiming words, I take your point, universeness, however, I don't think epistemic concepts and bigoted slurs are comparable. I don't care that the religious claim "faith" – I prefer trust instead since that term doesn't connote 'worship' or 'make believe'. Also, as I discern it, science consists in 'belief that' statements methodologically in contrast to 'belief in' convictions (biases). Magical thinkers' vocabulary simply doesn't concrrn me to the degree many of their public-facing 'fairh-based practices' do. :mask:
  • Aesthetic reasons to believe
    ↪Janus
    'Neither true nor false', to my mind, also makes a purported truth-claim demonstrably untrue.
  • Does God exist?
    Why ask "why"? — Gnomon
    Indeed – the only ultimate answer to "Why?" which doesn't beg the question is that there is no ultimate answer. Philosophers are often 'bewitched by language', as Witty points out (& Freddy too), uttering words that only look like, but do not function as, questions.
  • Martin Heidegger
    ↪plaque flag
    I enjoyed Braver's book but disagree with his thesis for at least the reason (re: "average everydayness" @Mikie) I mention in this old thread about "the difference between Wittgenstein and Heidegger" ...
    https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/509613
  • Are sensations mind dependent?
    The common sense view also says the Earth is flat and stationary. — Art48
    :100:
  • Aesthetic reasons to believe
    So, if I make a statement like 'I give a high credence level to the basic premise of string theory,' PARTLY because I am attracted to it's aesthetic (or it's beauty). Would I, in your opinion, be as guilty of being 'romantic' about science, in the exact same way that I might accuse a theist of being irrational/romantic/unreasonable, about the credence level they assign to the existence of their god? — universeness
    No, not at all. The latter is about an underdetermined, or stop-gap, idea (i.e. cipher) and the former concerns a precise mathematical model of nature with, so far, an unknown truth-value. There are more grounds than just "aesthetic reasoning" to favor e.g. string theory.

    Do you agree that some equations are more aesthetically pleasing than others?
    Of course. Symmetry and parsimony, for example, are salient indictators of 'beauty', conceptual or otherwise.

    If an aesthetic, inspires a person to learn more about a topic, is that an 'aesthetic reasoning,' that we should always guard against?
    I don't equate "inspires" with reasoning in any sense. For instance, motives themselves are not beliefs or judgments.

    Hitchens saw value in the word numinous as well, whereas I have always associated that word with other rather woo woo words like transcendent.
    I prefer terms like sublime or, even better, ecstatic to more woo-like words "numinous" & "transcendent".

    Theists often claim a calling which is 'higher than any other calling,' including any call to human science, and I think we should NEVER forget to totally challenge that arrogant, unjustified claim.
    The only claim about theism I think is worthy of sustained, principled challenge is to the demonstrably untrue claim that 'theism is true'.
  • Are sensations mind dependent?
    ↪Manuel
    :smirk:
  • Thinking different
    So I don't "know" what we know, but it doesn't matter. — EnPassant
    An ode to blissful ignorance?
  • Are sensations mind dependent?
    ↪lorenzo sleakes
    :roll:
  • Misunderstanding Heidegger
    ↪Joshs
    Gadamer was certainly entitled to his (biased) opinion.

    ↪Arne
    :up:
  • Aesthetic reasons to believe
    Do you think reason and faith have nothing between them other than hostility? — universeness
    I don't understand the question.

    Is there any value in faith being the equivalent of a measured credence level, you assign to a particular proposal?
     
    It's not clear to me what you're asking here?
  • Aesthetic reasons to believe
    ↪Tom Storm
    I think "aesthetic reasoning" can be used, at best, to rationalize "morality and meaning". It's actually akin to fideism, no?

    ↪universeness
    :fire: :100:
  • Are sensations mind dependent?
    you are stating current dogma — lorenzo sleakes
    On the contrary, I've stated a demonstrable biological fact (re: cell biology). Feel free to refute it with more than mere speculation.
  • Neuroscience is of no relevance to the problem of consciousness
    ↪180 Proof
    Sir I appreciate your understanding, your education and admire your patience     — Nickolasgaspar
    Same here. Thanks!
  • Ontological arguments for idealism
    ↪Ø implies everything
    I compared naturalism to idealism, not "dualism". Also, I did not mention "common sense as a factor in theory creation".
  • Martin Heidegger
    I'm a bit surprised to see Hume on the list. — plaque flag
    I don't think Hume is a dualist (or Cartesian), do you?
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