Your rehearsing vacant general questions. Follow the conversation to learn what philosophy is. — InternetStranger

Mods, please.

huh?

If this were true there would be no need to discuss moral issues. the 'implicit assumptions' would be uniform, and they are not and will never be, quite simply because some people believe in faeries and magic and 'free-will' and God and the like. — Marcus de Brun

This is a non-sequitur. Why must people agree en masse for morality to be objective?

Any philosophical position has its default with an agnosticism. Is morality objective or not? Before anything else, there is the question and the answer has yet to be found.

The moral realist, in this debate, simply presents his evidence; evidence which is intrinsically resistant to doubt. This takes front and center stage because without this evidence, what we mean by "morality" would be fairly meaningless. The debate starts from moral perception, and revolves around whether this perception is or can ever be veridical.

Classifying moral or aesthetic facts as "subjective" is usually just a prejudice. There's nothing spooky about morality or aesthetics, though (is mathematics spooky?). I do not think there is anything fundamentally different about descriptive and evaluative perceptions. That lighting a cat on fire is immoral is a clear and immediate perception, in the same way it is clear and immediate that there is an external world, other people exist, my thoughts exist, that two plus two is four, that certain forms of art are objectively better than other forms, etc.

It seems to me that the skeptics are the ones who need to explain why moral facts are either always false or not truth apt, because upon immediate reflection it seems precisely the opposite. Unless we have a good reason to doubt, why shouldn't moral claims be truth apt and at least sometimes true?

In practice, moral anti-realism falls flat on its face. How many moral anti-realists continue to argue for a moral position? Moral realism is implicitly assumed by anyone who wishes to seriously and sincerely discuss a moral issue.

But yeah, no, staring up at the ceiling for three hours every night trying to fall asleep is no bueno.

A lot of the time, consciousness is simply waiting. Enduring. Since we can't just turn ourselves off.

Consciousness is an ever-vigilant insomnia. There can be a certain nobility to it.

Evil and the God of Love by John Hick.

You presume the nuclear family. What 'ought' to happen is a much more collaborative child-rearing, shared between siblings as aunts and uncles, grandparents, and the older kids learning to look after the younger ones, and so on. What is wrong is that one can reach puberty and start a family with no experience of caring for children or anyone else. — unenlightened

Haha, I suppose you are right. I have no interest in helping others raise their children, personally. Chalk it up to my personal psychology, moral beliefs, or whatever: I do not enjoy being around children. From my perspective the nuclear family hides the child because it fundamentally was a mistake to have a child in the first place.

However I can see the value of collaborative parenting and how this would be better than the traditional nuclear unit. Especially with the integration of the child into society, exposing them to multiple perspectives (instead of just the nuclear parents') and letting them choose their path in life. To a degree, society will always been indoctrinating, but some forms are less bad than others I imagine.

Unfortunately when one talks of standards and qualifications one is starting from the worst possible place, that of the mechanisation of childhood. — unenlightened

Well, I certainly don't want the state to get involved in parenting. I would like to see social attitudes change, though. Path of least resistance can do a lot without any involvement of the state.

Everyone thinks their child will be the ones to achieve happiness on all levels of human endeavors when, in reality, most people reach a mediocre life at best.. — schopenhauer1

Yes - everyone thinks their child will make up for their failures and succeed where they did not. Children are a mini-me, a proxy immortality.

Along the same line is the idea that people are indoctrinated into having children, especially women. Women's bodies are seriously screwed up after having children, yet there's this nauseating culture surrounding motherhood. I cannot speak of this with people in real life, just as I cannot speak of antinatalism, without legitimate fear of repercussions. You can't raise any questions. Motherhood is the aspiration of so many young girls and it often simply leads to stagnation.

Maybe 15% of the heterosexual population in the world are just too fucked up and would be well advised to not marry and not have children. — Bitter Crank

LOL.

Those who would make good spouses and excellent parents should be given financial encouragement. — Bitter Crank

Some might see this as a form of discrimination. Depending on what we see as determining "good" and "excellent" parents.

I am not recommending the state get involved in this. Get rid of the state, ideally. Better to simply heighten awareness of a serious issue. The moral concern exists, but I and the state especially have limited rights in how far we're allowed to intervene.

Some sentences, hell - some paragraphs - in this post were not 100% serious. — Bitter Crank

:smirk:

What methods of parenting do you use that are different than others?

Is casual sex immoral?

Yes but not because it's casual but because it's sex. :smirk:

Pragmatism offers the quiet exit door from these kinds of standard pathologies of thought. Walk out now and never look back! — apokrisis

Why?

Again, my OP wasn't about whether or not truth itself exist. I'm not that silly to fall for that circularity, although certain versions of skepticism adeptly navigate around this (re: Sextus Empiricus and the difference between the utterance of global skepticism and the declaration of it).

My point, rather, was that there is no value to truth qua truth. There is always something else that truth is in the service to that makes it valuable, and that this is intimately associated with either delusion, masochism or megalomania in the case of self-appointed lovers of truth.

The point was that the search for truth is fundamentally conditioned by the psychology of the person. Whether or not truth is valuable cannot be determined apart from the person themselves, and to assert otherwise is to trample over others in power relations. Truth cannot be separated from its source in the power structures of society, nor from the psychological dispositions of its adherents.

I thought that laurels were worn on one's head, not one's shoulders — Bitter Crank

:rofl: shit

I am not criticizing truth in this circular manner, I am simply saying that truth as it is truth in and of itself is worthless.

Does cognitive dissonance leave you any better? or fallacious reasoning? or reductive? — Monitor

This isn't really about that per se, it's more about beautifying truth into something it's not.

Do you see yourself as a genuine lover of truth who is willing to let their ego be trampled and pulverized to powder, ? Forgive me but your username is deceptively ambiguous in this regard.

I am extremely skeptical of there being anyone in existence who has ever pursued truth in an impartial manner, independent of their own egological concerns, which ultimately comes down to the maintenance of their self-esteem. What about truth makes it worthy to search for in and of itself?

Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Nietzsche by Lev Shestov.

A commentary of the three philosophers by a severely under-recognized philosopher.

"[...] the tortures of Macbeth are not ordained only for those who have served 'evil' but also for those who have devoted themselves to the 'good.'"

"Morality showed itself impotent precisely where men would have been justified in expecting of it the greatest manifestation of its power."

I had the same thought about this as well. A best of both worlds: anterior posteriority: the-before-and-behind. :smile:

Somewhat relevant, though it's difficult to explain exactly why: one of the best memories I have is when I had the opportunity to go scuba diving through the BSA in the Florida Keys. Humans are not suited to live underwater for extended periods of time and so it can be disorienting at times. When you're underwater, noises seem to come from nowhere. It's an utterly surreal experience, the deep, gaping blue surrounds you, 360-degrees in all three axes. You are suspended in an impossibly large medium, and while nearby it is transparent, beyond a variable distance it turns into an opaque blue (or black, if you're night diving - I both recommend and do not recommend doing this, it's almost nightmarish). So you're gazing around, and all you see is blue and you're not sure how far away from you what you are looking at is. It's not until an entity, a fish, or a turtle or something else suddenly materializes that you can gauge how far away you can see. I remember instinctively curling up into a fetal position out of fear a few times, it kind of gets to you.

When you are swimming around the coral reefs, the world is domesticated, even if the terrain is different. In shallow waters, the reef (solidity) is primary, the water is secondary. But when you are beyond the reef, where the shelf drops off into the deep and all that remains is the water, you get this feeling, and it really is just a feeling, that reality is far, far more strange than you could possibly wrap your head around. Familiarity is not the norm. It seems to warp your mind. Beyond is the great blue and you realize you cannot go there, it is off-limits, there are no discernible landmarks that could make it familiar, it's just a never-ending abyss. Consciousness must be different for the fish, since the only objects encountered are other living creatures - the ocean, the water, must not even be recognized. Consciousness must be more specialized and advanced, closer to the shore where there are objects that can be manipulated. Fish do not have being-at-hand.

At this point, you hear the bubbles coming out of your respirator, but it sounds funny, it sounds different, almost like you can separate the noise from the ocean, as if the noise exists elsewhere, echoing in the recesses of your mind. It's a very peculiar experience, bordering between panic and awe. It's hard to describe, all I know is that it was simultaneously one of the most real and surreal experiences of my life, definitely something I would classify as "spiritual".

Interpret this as you wish.

(Different video, found a better one):

Thus the conversation starts to have a meaningful direction. It is getting somewhere. It is becoming clear that to exist is to persist, to be formed, if not in fact in-formed. — apokrisis

I agree that the individuated would seem to need to come from the unindividuated. Plurality, diversity, individuality, all come from a breakage of uniformity. The basic, fundamental "theater" is a single unity. Lately, I prefer to simply call this the posteriority. There is the puppet theater, and while the illusion is that the puppets are operating on their own, we understand that there is something "behind", pulling the strings. There is the anterior appearance, and the posterior ... "whatever".

In space-time, we can always move beyond. There is always more. But the posteriority, by its nature, cannot be finite, there cannot be anything further behind it. It is where we move to once we move beyond all else, including space-time itself. It is infinite, but dimensionless. When we talk of nothing existing, we may say that there are zero entities. Yet zero is still a description, an entity. So paradoxically, one comes before zero. There is before there is not.

Is this fundamental reality what we mean when we refer to Being? Do entities Spinozistically participate in Being as clumps of transient solids participate in a non-Newtonian liquid?

Or, to use another representation from a favorite album of mine:



If this is true, it is true only in a qualified sense, in a metaphorical or allegorical sense, because Being is not an entity, nor is it a process, state or event. All of these have Being, but they are not Being itself.

Options that are not already individuated themselves, which is obviously precluding plurality, individuality, identity, etc. Being, irrespective of what has it. I'm not looking for a causal explanation because causality implies Being. What does it mean for something, anything, to exist?

Yes, interesting stuff. However, this is still within the realm of the ontic, i.e. science. "Cancelling waves" are still beings, they still exist. A partition is a thing, stillness is a state, formation is a process.

I want to know what the being of these things are, though. I want to know what it means for a thing, state, or process to be rather than not, as it exists in and of itself.

Philosophy is dead only insofar as humans have lost the interest in thinking philosophically.

But they haven't - philosophy just goes by different names these days. When people like Stephen Hawking think philosophy is dead, they think a certain kind of philosophizing is dead (and I think they're wrong on that account as well).

From my understanding, second-wave "radical feminists", specifically "TERFS" (or trans-exclusionary radical feminists), oppose the transgender movement (not transgender people, though their rhetoric makes it difficult to believe this) primarily on the grounds that it supports an institution - gender - that, according to radfems, ought to be abolished.

From what I can tell, radfems believe gender is a patriarchal institution that oppresses women (and also men, to a degree) by forcing them into artificial categories that suit the needs of those in power. When a transgender person "switches" genders, then, they are implicitly affirming the gender institution. They feel the need to call themselves a different gender, thus reinforcing the notion that gender is a legitimate category. Instead of a man wearing "feminine" clothing, he may call himself transgender and/or a woman. But the whole point of radical feminism is to liberate women from this oppressive schemata. Transwomen, to a radical feminist, are "invading" (so to speak) the biological class of women, and are bringing along the baggage of patriarchy. From a radfem perspective, this can obviously be seen as threatening: men can now be women (and vice-versa), there is no distinction between the two now, and so the oppression of women becomes evanescent. Now anyone can be a woman!

To a degree I think these radfems are correct. But it's also clear they do tend to harbor a deep suspicion of men, which is not entirely undeserved.

Very interesting stuff, would it be accurate to describe yourself as broadly Kantian? Objectivity defined as inter-subjective agreement with an agnosticism to the nature of the noumena? This is roughly where I see myself.

Yes, this is how I like to treat philosophy, like a work of art, it either means something to you personally or it doesn't, but like art, there'll always be those who think that what it means to them had some universal applicability. Apparently most children have developed a theory of mind by the age of six, it seems in some fields it only lasts a few years before they abandon it. — Pseudonym

As Nietzsche observed, the greatest failure of philosophers is their lack of historicity. Often they take the current position they hold as the position they will always hold. Or they mistake the current position with the final position.

Whereas philosophy is fluid, dynamic, relative, individualistic. A coming-to-terms-with-oneself, philosophy as autobiography. That philosophy be reduced to an either/or, right/wrong severely limits its potential. Dialectic is the medium in which philosophy exists, but not its essence.

It may be pointed out that this relativism is an absolutist position and thus self-contradictory. But I think a charitable interpretation is that it is less a belief and more of an attitude, or skillful orientation, to the world.

Yes, I too think skepticism can be defeated this way. I think extreme relativism can be defeated similarly, there's so much agreement as to the rules of the game that progress can still be made within broad parameters, it just gets problematic when we try to overstep the limits of inter-subjectivity. — Pseudonym

I don't know if they are so much defeated, or refuted, as much as they are overcome. The theoretical attitude that skepticism draws from is a complex spurring from a more basic attunement to the "world".

In other words, the Other is systematically disintegrated and assimilated into the Totality. The world is domesticated.

As I say, no academic philosopher I've ever met actually speak like that, but it seems entirely de rigueur here, and that's a disappointment. — Pseudonym

Very true, the internet is a hub of narcissism.

I'm personally convinced of the therapeutic interpretation of Wittgenstein's meta-philosophy (not necessarily convinced that that is what he intended, just convinced that it's right). I think there is value in philosophical propositions which aim to provide a story to help make personal sense of the world, and I think there is value in discussing these propositions in the way someone might try on clothes to see which they like. There's a value in showing how the angst that the 'big' philosophical questions can cause can be dissolved by proposing that they are mostly just linguistic misunderstandings, and lots of philosophy attempts to do that. — Pseudonym

Brilliant, making personal sense of the world is valuable. But making sense of the world, with the intention that this human perspective count as the cosmic perspective, seems to me to be outrageously narcissistic. That something makes sense to us, or to me, is all that matters, all that could possibly matter (to us, to me...). Excellent!

Nietzsche is just as valid a target of your argument as Kant, or Lewis. It doesn't matter what the target of his philosophical propositions were, nor the result of an 'understanding' of them, it is still your understanding of them, It is still monumentally narcissistic of Nietzsche to write (especially in such a obscure manner), with the intention that his understanding of the world (even Nihilistically), actually means anything other than as an insight into his own mental state. — Pseudonym

I suppose, although I would make the case that Nietzsche was extraordinarily self-aware and knew he was contradicting himself in places. But I like Nietzsche because he puts an emphasis on personal truth over any sort of contrived objectivity. In a sense, Nietzsche has spoken and I have listened and appropriated certain ideas into my own sense of life, meaning, etc. The fact that Nietzsche resonates with many people is not evidence that he is "objectively right" but that he simply resonates with a lot of people.

It's only when we assume certain parameters and rules in the games we play that we can start making any dogmatic claims about the universe at large, I think. That intersubjective agreement is evidence of objectivity, that a valid syllogism is an indicator of truth beyond the sensibilities, that thoughts have meaning and are not arbitrary, We get so caught up with the game of objectivity that we forget about these assumptions. But as long as we recognize that these are just games and that they're inescapable in some sense, then skepticism is without a clear target. The search for objectivity gets reinterpreted as the search for human-comprehensible truth, which is by no means necessarily human-independent truth.

Good points, my critique of dogmatic philosophy is too vague.

The general idea is that rational demonstration has not been rationally demonstrated to be a reliable indicator of anything at all. That things "make sense" is a consequence of them cohering to the habits of thinking, such that when we feel as if we understand something, this has no relation to whether we actually do indeed understand something. Yet this is the final resting place for thought. We believe things because they make sense to us - but making sense to us may be and perhaps is a meaningless criteria for truth.

Divorcing understanding from truth makes things more relative. People believe things because of reasons and we have no way of knowing if any of these reasons are even good, because the criteria we use to evaluate other's reasons are based on our own reasons. Everything ultimately comes back to the person themselves and their impressions.

Furthermore because of this, any theoretical belief has to be dogmatic and narcissistic, because the person holds absolute trust in their own sense of reason. They trust themselves, they listen and heed their own voice of reason. They feel entitled to their opinion because it makes sense to them. But nowhere has anyone demonstrated that something making sense to you has any relationship with it being true. What is felt is what compels us to do things, but the experience of understanding could very well be only that, an experience and nothing more, signaling or meaning nothing beyond its immediate existence. "I understand" - but that literally means nothing but that you feel as if you understand. You have associated feeling a certain way with actually understanding and this has no necessary connection. There is no way of knowing at any given point in time whether what you think has any importance whatsoever.

I think there could be something to be said about the "spirit" of philosophy and its history. A. W. Moore calls the history of (modern) metaphysics as a history of sense-making. There is something noble and, as Descartes and Husserl (et al) noticed, an ethical dimension to the philosophical endeavor. That individuals have a duty to hold rational, well-informed beliefs is a core aspect of the philosophical spirit that differentiates it from rhetoric, sophistry or even science. It is this part of the philosophical spirit that I love, where nothing is held to be so sacred as to be beyond questioning.

But yes, I am less concerned with other forms of philosophy here than I am with others, you are correct about this. When speaking of philosophy I have in mind a certain kind of philosophy rather than "philosophy" in the abstract. Anti-philosophy is still philosophy, etc etc. I have in mind philosophers who evidently see philosophy as some kind of grand narrative that almost ought to be worshiped, its traditional problems as of utmost importance. Philosophy is used to banish evil ideas, solipsism, relativism, skepticism, "nihilism", etc. I think the general skepticism of this thread has not ever been refuted but simply passed by because there are "more important" things to do. There's no time for skepticism, it gets in the way of living. But for myself, at least, these sorts of things mean a lot. It's significant to me that we have no clear foundation for knowledge and that at the end of the day we really just have to hope that certain things are true.

I have little interest in discovering TRUTH. TRUTH is imaginary, but there are truths about x that we can discover. — Bitter Crank

Yes, I agree with this so long as we see these truths as relative to the terrain. They are not absolute propositions that humans must prostrate themselves in front of.

The only truth is that there is none. There are only relative truths, which may bring with them a relative objectivity.

:fire:

I agree we can go down the pragmatic route Heidegger does and see the essence of things in terms of what they are for dasein.

My chief concern here is with dogmatic belief, i.e. any unwarranted confidence, beliefs in things that are not justified through the use of pure reason. Everything we think has reference to our own sensibilities. We cannot think the unthinkable. Yet the unthinkable is precisely that which philosophers aim to discover. This is one reason why philosophy satisfies the criteria for narcissism: only the best, only the perfect, only the ultimate is worthwhile. This is an obscene act of auto-fellatio, because discovering the edges of one's sensibilities is mistaken as discovering the thing in itself.

Darth
I love your post! Seriously... even if it is a bit narcissistic? — Marcus de Brun

Yes, I anticipated this response. If philosophy is inherently narcissistic, then it's inevitable that what I write will be narcissistic as well. I already know that much of what I think is narcissistic just by nature of it being what I think, as if the fact that they are my thoughts makes them superior to others'.

It has not been shown that humans have the right to think about the world, let alone publish their crazy ideas. Philosophy should be seen as a form of self-idolizing graffiti.

However we humans are united in our humanity and we are united in our physiological interface with 'phantom reality'. In this sense there may well be ONE truth that may well be arrived at by the process of (human) deductive reasoning. — Marcus de Brun

Yes, in this case, objectivity is equated with inter-subjectivity. "Truth" is only conceptualized as Truth in relation to sensibility, because Truth is what Is rather than what is Not. Truth is constrained to the Law of Non-Contradiction, among other ad hoc presuppositions about the nature of reality.

"Do not say, "Why were the old days better than these?" For it is not wise to ask such questions."

Ecclesiastes 7:10

I didn't mean to imply they were always in dread and despair, just that the idea of a serene sage is a bit hard to believe. Greek philosophy is ancient and therefore has mystique.

I speculate that we hold ourselves, as individuals, in much greater regard than our ancestors held themselves. We think of ourselves as individuals more than they did. Think of the way we insist on "our rights" as individuals. Think of those who claim we have no duty to others, except perhaps the duty not to harm them directly. Consider the concern among certain of the religious with their own salvation. — Ciceronianus the White

There's also the possibility that the Stoics and Epicureans were talking out of their ass and were playing lip-service to an equanimity and serenity. The Greek peninsula gave birth to all sorts of philosophical life-coaches in the midst of political turmoil. These "sages" garnered followers and actually competed with other philosophical schools to gain adherents.

I don't think the evolution of philosophical concepts can be attributed solely to their intellectual content. Though I don't endorse a uni-directional reductionism, we have to look at the economic and social dimensions as well. I suspect a contributing reason to this change in perspective comes from the destabilizing effect the end of the Roman Empire had on the surrounding region, followed by the Crusades, the Mongol invasion and the Black Death, all of which left countless dead. Clearly, the intellectualism of the Stoics doesn't cure a bacterial infection.

People feared death as much in the past as they do today, I think. They were just better at sublimating that fear into an aesthetic existence, a way of life that was unsustainable, whose eclipse ran parallel with the introduction of the rationalism of Socrates.

When the wizard speaks, you listen.

Being is definite existence. — apokrisis

But what is existence?

Existence is a sum over histories. — apokrisis

Existence is a sum over histories. But a sum over histories is an entity, or a series of entities. I want to know what the being of this series is.

What I'm trying to hammer in is that every time science explains existence in terms of entities, it fails to capture the metaphysical distinction between being and Being. Being is not a "thing", it is not measured but is a necessary condition for something to even be able to be measured. Thus there is a difference between "four feet long" and "being four feet long."

Earlier, we briefly discussed how we both "felt" as though we may have existed in some form before we existed here on Earth. It sounds fantastic and the skeptical alarm bells are ringing loud and clear that this is magical woo, but a similar feeling arises in me when I contemplate Being as opposed to being. If the Scholastics are correct, and God is the eternal, infinite ground for Being, then the entire world could end and God would remain. God is, He always was and always will be.

That there is something more to the world than the world, that the foundation of the world permeates every facet while simultaneously extending beyond the finite, is an idea that I think is at the heart of religious sentiments.

Probably the most important part of this discussion is the ontological distinction between beings and Being. Science ignores Being, it has no place in the enterprise. But science is not metaphysics. We can have a scientific metaphysics, one that is compatible with and informed by science, but fundamental metaphysics is a separate mode of inquiry that exists somewhere in between the empirical disciplines and the romantic poets. It is a degradation of philosophy and metaphysics to reduce them to a "discipline", as if metaphysicians work alongside botanists, astronomers or geologists in the same frame of reference. But it is also a mistake to chalk this up to subjective "feelings" that have no relation to the world, to Being. So on one hand we must establish metaphysics as separate from science, and on the other establish that it is not illegitimate. Metaphysics has historically struggled with an identity because of this ambiguity of Being.

Being is not a thing, it is not an entity or a special kind of being. Beings have Being (yet it is not a property), they participate in Being, they come into Being. It is difficult to explain what Being is, yet we intuitively understand what it means to-be. This is captured in the cosmological question: why something, rather than nothing? And furthermore, in the Levinasian route, we understand the il y a, the "there-is" without anything being. As I noted before, every object could disappear and there would still be this Being.

A scientific explanation of the origins of the cosmos skips over the ontological distinction. There's nothing wrong with this, because it is not in the aim of science to inquire about Being. With science, we are led to theories of extravagant and alien things, processes, events - extraordinarily dense black holes, infinitesimally small "strings", mysterious quantum particles that have mirrors billions of light years away, symmetry breaking, entropic decay, etc. However, all of these already have Being and so are inappropriate to answer the question of Being. Metaphysics aims to find what makes it the case that these things are rather than not, beyond the causality that science describes.

Metaphysics is not looking for causes, but onto-theology obscures this in its search for the Ultimate Cause.

There's not 100% something in the metaphysical universe; there's some something, and some nothing. I hope that makes some sense; if not, let me know. — Noble Dust

This sounds Platonic. The things that exist participate in Being insofar as they instantiate aspects of the perfect Ideas, but these things are not in themselves perfect.

What I am thinking however is that nothingness implies somethingness. To say "nothing exists" is a malformed proposition, an incoherent idea, for the fact is that if nothing existed, then this includes the fact or proposition that nothing exists. "Nothing exists" is a performative contradiction. And "something exists" tells us something substantial that is not captured by science. It is not about whether a frog exists, or a star exists, it is about whether or not something exists tout court and what it means for this thing to exist, regardless of what this thing actually is. Its identity is irrelevant: all beings, despite empirical differences, nevertheless equally participate in Being such that we can say they exist without having to make any additions.