If you prefer to do it by yourself, then we'd best leave you to it.

So what was Decarte(sic.) doing in his cave(sic.) — DingoJones

Amusing himself, one supposes.

Hmmm... not so much. Depends on how you were taught to read. Those who learned only on the bible tend not to be so critical.

:grimace:

Shouldn't we have a single, perpetual thread for this question?

@Jamal?

Yep. Those who get past first year do so by criticising what they were told in first year. Those who get past being an undergrad do so by criticising what they were told as undergrads. Hopefully.

When someone nails their flag to the mast, say by using the name of their favourite philosopher as their moniker in an on line forum, they will feel obligated to come to the defence of said favourite at every turn. Makes for an inability to learn.

literature first — Tobias

...maybe.

:wink:

The most common congenital deformity of philosophy is "making shit up". The remedy is exposing one's ideas to criticism. The natural home of philosophy is the symposium, not the text.

It's "arse".

That's the way it is presented in neophyte philosophy classes, sure. We know better.

Yup, that was my point. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Oh, yes, understood.

I don't much mind, so long as you do not take 's advice.

Philosophy of mind still breaks down most theories at the university level into materialism and dualism. — schopenhauer1

Fucksake. As if materialism and dualism were juxtaposed, and paralleled idealism and materialism.

That's just poor . The sort of thing you might get by granting authority to a bullshit-generator instead of thinking for yourself.

Nuh.

Philosophy involves dialogue. It's inherently social in a way not captured by your four points.

Materialism has been out of fashion since Newton.

The absurd presumption is that we are obliged to choose between two defunct cannons.

I ran a thread demonstrating the odd discrepancy between professional philosophers and the dabblers around here.

Kant wrote before Dalton's atomic theory and the wave theory of light. I suspect that if we could show Kant the LHC, he'd say something along the lines of "Well, bugger me with the root vegetable of your choice, I got that wrong!"

Ok.

I've nothing to say here that I haven't said previously. Idealism has been moribund since the end of the century before last, and of little more than historical interest. That it is so popular in this forum is a peculiarity of the forum.

Again, not the approach I would adopt. There are good reasons to think physical reductionism wrong - to say the least - without having an alternative readily to hand.

As we've discussed elsewhere, different aspects of the world entail different narratives. In particular, physical explanations are distinct from intentional explanations.

Why are we going over this again? I think your question is muddled.

it is that paradigm which is the target of criticism by idealists, phenomenologists, enactivists, and others. — Quixodian

Sure, and many an analytic philosopher, too. Apart from the favourites of the retired engineers hereabouts, few folk would advocate that sort of reductionism.

And there are problems with naively supposing that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Using poor arguments to defend a position that has otherwise powerful arguments is ill advised.

There are better ways to deal with intentionality, as seen in Anscombe and Midgley and Nagel and so many others. I still think you've thrown out the babe.

Yeah, it's a puzzle. I mention the problem of other minds and you post in answer stuff about rules.

Regardless of Frank, I remain in the dark as to relevance.

The Principle of Relativity urges that we look for explanations of such generality that they are consistent for all observers. That is not an unreasonable injunction, especially in combination with the Principle of Charity.

As I've said before, We're not looking for the view from nowhere, so much as the view from anywhere.

If there is one, it should be set before us clearly.

You have a unitary Will and the Representation of Will as represented by all the objectified manifestations individuated. — schopenhauer1

Oh, right....

I'm not seeing the relevance of your quotes.

Other minds have always been a problem for idealists.

Banno might be pointing to the idea of things such as time/space being in a sense no more ancient than the first animal, or the first consciousness, or something like that. — schopenhauer1

No.

he replaced god with will, descending into incoherence.

Don't change the subject. — Quixodian

Too late for that.

Trouble is, it’s so unclear what idealism is. That’s why the discussion moved on to antirealism. But yes, idealism has difficulty in avoiding solipsism, as I’ve explained previously. It usually needs God’s help.

...necessarily... — Quixodian

In every possible world?

No, you wouldn't.

Having a referent occurs in language, and so is public. Hence of course a purely subjective approach - such as "will" - cannot explain it.

But yes, I'm pointing out what Schop did wrong, and what the OP asks for is how that wrong-headed stuff can be made coherent.

So I'll leave it there.

:grin: I don't much care what he thought.

The simple point is that the world is often other than what one might have willed.

That sometimes the direction of fit is the reverse of will-to-world.

More another outbreak of solipsism.

~~

The basic idea is that there is a real essence, defined by a real definition, and the real definition is approximated by a nominal definition. So when someone says, "A is a better (definition) of X than B," they must be approximating some real essence with their nominal definition, A. — Leontiskos

That's an extreme sort of realism. I don't see how you could maintain a differentiation between real and nominal definitions. Seems to me that all definitions are nominal; that is what definitions do.

As i said,

To "It is impossible to exaggerate the damage done to philosophy and cognitive science by the mistaken view that "believe" and other intentional verbs name relations between believers and propositions" I might append "...in that they find themselves searching for that relation as if it were a thing in the mind, or worse, in the brain". — Banno

You mean the stuff about Jesus is just shit people made up for their own ends?

Well, yes.

Does the blessing include those who make junket?

Schulze’s critique of Kant is essentially the following: it is incoherent to posit as a matter of philosophical knowledge – as Kant seems to have done – a mind-independent object that is beyond all human experience, and that serves as the primary cause of our sensory experience. — SEP: Schopenhauer’s Critique of Kant

Schopenhauer does not believe, then, that Will causes our representations. His position is that Will and representations are one and the same reality, regarded from different perspectives. They stand in relationship to each other in a way that compares to the relationship between a force and its manifestation (e.g., as exemplified in the relationship between electricity and a spark, where the spark “is” electricity). This is opposed to saying that the thing-in-itself causes our sensations, as if we were referring to one domino striking another. — op.cit.

Trouble is, reality does not care what you will, inflicting itself on you without regard for you desires. In that way it's not unlike like Schop's mum.

Or the appallingly poor thinking on display in parts of this thread.

Granted that we all call fire-engines red... — plaque flag

It seems to me that those who attempt to reject the old-school Aristotelian approach are often already presupposing the very things they putatively reject, only without realizing it. — Leontiskos

Seems to me those with a background in Aristotelian logic tend to view things through essentialist glasses. So:

If Searle says, "A is a better X than B,"* then he is already committed to the entailment that there is some essence of X that can be approximated with more or less success. — Leontiskos

looks to presuppose essence. You seem to be making use of some as yet unstated transcendental argument, along the lines of the only way one account is better than another is if it is closer to the essence...

And I don't think that works. But I will not pursue that here, not unless you are able to set out with much greater detail what sort of thing an essence might be. For my part, I'd more likely drop the term. Too much baggage.

That was an interesting and clarifying post. — Leontiskos

Yeah, does that. There's more going on here, though, as Davidson's truth-conditional semantics explicitly deals with beliefs. We'd have to get how he does this clear before concluding that he was wrong; that would be a substantial bit of work.

I'm contemplating a thread about Davidson's project. It would be a long one.

But you didn't rule out the unknown or unknowable reality. — frank

There are things we don't know, yes.

(Odd, this, the entry of realism. Realism is the view that there are true statements that are unknown. Antirealism says that unknowns are neither true nor false. But I'll choose to say that it is either truth that the socks with the guitars printed on them are in the draw, or they are not, and I don't know which, and to reject the antirealist view that the it is neither true nor false)

That's not language on holiday. Antigonish is, though.

Not much more might be involved than a choice of ways of speaking about the unknown.

How can you tell the difference? — LuckyR

Well, on the one hand, you thought you knew where your keys were but you were mistaken.

You can only properly be said to "know" something if it is true. Otherwise you allow folk to know things that are false, and our use of "know" becomes inconsistent. Of course, we can muse about such inconsistencies, but only by keeping at hand the clear and consistent use with which they contrast.

It's a bit of basic philosophical grammar. A convention, if you like.

Only realism works.