:chin:

There is good philosophy and there is bad philosophy. But I don't think there's one single model for what good philosophy is. I recognize good philosophy when I see it. I'm not sure what essential features there are about good philosophy that aren't also features of good science, good religion, or whatever.

Well, you turned out to be a disappointment. :shade:

Come back when you learn how to read.

In terms of evidence, and thus reason to engage in argument regarding the existence of either, there is none for either entity. Debating the existence of God is not philosophical it is engaging in petito principi and shouting tu quoque at whoever disagrees with you. As long as there are atheists willing to be drawn into this quagmire theists will have their own existence guarenteed.

Only by ignoring it will we be able to free ourselves of theism. — jastopher

Isn't this just a massive petito principi? Aren't you just begging the question against theism? You come here with an already pre-made picture of what God is, what theism is, what religion is, and what philosophy of religion must therefore be. No wonder people don't take your atheism seriously. If you aren't even open to discussion then there's no point in even engaging with you as an atheist.

The fact that you have such a shallow, narrow and overly-hostile attitude to theism shows you are not familiar with the literature surrounding philosophy of religion, and clearly are unaware of sophisticated forms of theism that are compelling and serious. This is not the courtier's reply: this is you just not reading, and going into a gunfight armed with a toothpick.

An atheist is one who attempts to disprove the existence of God/gods, but there is also a group who have no reason whatsoever to believe in supernatural beings or have no interest in what those who do believe in them have to say on the topic, and consequently don't waste their time in trying to disprove that which there is no reason to believe in in the first place. I suspect that most of those categorised as atheists fall into this group, but calling them atheists seems wrong since one need not be opposed to something that one considers does not exist. — jastopher

Then these people are not doing philosophy, and thus are not philosophical atheists. Call them what you want - irreligious, non-believers, whatever. If they consider the existence of God a worthless debate that wastes time, then I have the right to ignore them. They are not participating or contributing.

Atheists play into the theists hands by according them respect and a platform. The category to which I refer accords theists about as much attention as the Easter Rabbit. — jastopher

Yup, as I said before. When you treat a debate about the existence of God as akin to a debate about the Easter Rabbit, you have forfeited your right to be listened to. It's disrespectful, a straw man, and a waste of everyone's time.

Oh, I can't remember. It might not even be in that thread. But I distinctly remember dealing with a few self-proclaimed "agnostic atheists" on this forum and others.

So then you do see them as separate paths? — Jeremiah

Do I see philosophy and science as two separate paths? No, absolutely not. Neither one has full hegemony over the field of inquiry. Additionally, I would include religion in the mix.

There is bad science. There is bad religion. There is bad philosophy. In other news, the sky is blue and I hate cucumbers.

Here.

Actually, this has come up several times here in the past.

If we are doing philosophy of religion in the analytic sense and arguing about the existence of God, then there are precisely and only three basic positions to take: theism, atheism and agnosticism. I cannot tell you how many times I have encountered vitriolic idiots claiming agnostic atheism is not only a coherent position but also the "default" position.

BOTH theists and atheists have a burden of proof. If you are an atheist, then you believe God does not exist. You don't have to be extremely confident about this - it's fallacious to assume beliefs can only be held with absolute certainty.

In my experience, "agnostic atheism" is a veiled attempt at naturalistic question-begging. The reason why "agnostic atheists" claim to be the "default" position is because they take naturalism (and oftentimes scientism) to be true as a given, when the reality is that naturalism just is the argument. Hence why they tend to get so goddamn touchy when this presupposition is questioned - it means they actually have to start doing philosophy and provide arguments! Naturalism just is an argument for atheism - but "agnostic atheists" don't want to have to argue for it. They want naturalism to be a given, and thus force theists to have all the burden of proof. Nonsense question-begging.

Just like anything else, if you believe something then you ought to have reasons for believing what you do. It's very, very simple. Atheists need to provide reasons just as much as theists. The agnostics have the default position, not the atheists. All this talk about "lack of belief" and "default positions" is quite literally nothing but question-begging nonsense on behalf of the atheistic crowd.

If we move away from analytic philosophy of religion and into previous forms of philosophical religious discussion (such as Scholasticism, or post-modern theology), then we arrive at different ways of construing the debate. Scholasticism will still accept atheism as a valid position but will absolutely demand the atheist provide good and compelling reasons for believing atheism to be true. And post-modern theologians might scrap the whole "debate" as misguided and re-construe the positions in terms less "metaphysical" and more social, moral and phenomenological.

Thanks, I'll check it out.

Plato: “No one is more hated than he who speaks the truth.”

Very true quote, the ignorant will always get angry attack those who expose their ignorance.
On the contrary you should thank me for trying to step up the philosophical skills amongst these cozy chatters, to evolve humankind from the stone ages to information age. — HexHammer

Something-something persecution complex; disagreement misinterpreted as hostility and transformed into self-righteous ego-inflation.

Boy, aren't you masculine! 8=========D

Intellectuals have an over-inflated sense of the importance of their discipline and make broad, sweeping generalizations of other disciplines they are unfamiliar with? :gasp:

There will never be a cohesive and inclusive model for inquiry. Everyone thinks that their favorite philosopher, or their chosen scientific field, is the be-all-end-all pinnacle of everything, and fuck everything else. Echo-chambers exist throughout the sciences and humanities. One person may doubt another person's self-evident truths. et cetera, et cetera, ad nauseam. At the end of the day, nothing changes, nobody has learned anything, and we all go home just a little more disappointed in others.

If I had to criticize philosophers and scientists for one thing, it's that they tend to make things into a big narrative, with philosophy or science being the "ultimate" that eclipses any other discipline. Philosophy does, in my opinion, technically hold the cards as the "ultimate", but it's often so impotent and slow-moving that you might as well just give the torch to someone more competent. If science is to be the model for everything and anything (as naturalism wishes it to be), then scientists need to be philosophically literate. Before, we had scientist-philosophers, who really were the model intellectuals, and who held a deep respect for philosophy. Nowadays you just have douchey wannabes spouting racist and sexist hate-speech and pretending it's science, parading around and T-bagging dissenters. Rah-rah, we're the best! Rah-rah!

Well, color me embarrassed.

Sure, yeah. You could try reading Being and Time alongside a companion guide, Richard Polt's Heidegger: An Introduction is quite good in my opinion - you can probably even read that first without Being and Time, even.

Heidegger is obscure and could have written more clearly in some places. It is what it is, but I think the charge of obscurantism is over-inflated. Heidegger is hard to read but he's not that hard.

This describes relative nothing, which is similar to, as you say, the hyper-thingness of God in Aquinas. God is not a thing, and so "nothing," but not non-existent either and so not absolutely nothing. — Thorongil

I have never heard of relative nothing apart from in this discussion. But again, by comparing "relative" nothing to absolutely nothing, you are still making judgments as to what absolutely nothing is.

But Peircean semiotics gave a credible model of being as pure naked spontaneity. It supplies a mathematical, hence scientific, image. That gives a better purchase on the issue than a poetic description. The poetic view already presumes an experiencer as part of the equation - the story of this vague nothingness that is beyond any determinate somethingness. — apokrisis

But of course - Dasein is the allegedly-privileged mode of understanding Being. It is where the question of Being arises. At least in some.

"Spontaneity" has a metaphysical ring to it but fails to offer a suitable replacement for Heidegger's Sein. It's still ontic, it's still scientific and thus cannot fulfill the requirement necessary to answer the question of Being. Akin to using metal detectors to find plastics.

Yes, this eloquently describes the trap I spoke of. When we speak of absolute nothing, we're not talking about "something" to which these words refer, because an absolute nothing cannot be referred to by definition. Absolute nothing is not a funny kind of something. It is the complete absence of anything and everything. I wouldn't call this a contradiction so much as a paradox or a quirk or language. — Thorongil

But again: you tell me that "absolutely nothing" cannot be referred to by definition, yet all around do just exactly that. It's not a funny kind of something. It is the complete absence of anything and everything.

It seems clear to me that when you say we cannot refer to absolutely nothing by definition and thus cannot be referred to at all makes the same error the atheist does when insisting the god of Thomas Aquinas adhere to man-made languages. It is inappropriate to see the nothing as something - yet it is still "something", just as God is not a thing but is still "something".

Where does he refute it? This interests me because Schopenhauer is adamant that being is merely a linguistic copula (although I'm not sure he's consistent about this). — Thorongil

Most prominently in his magum opus Being and Time. The ontological difference is crucial to his entire system of thought.

Language is playing tricks on you. Absolute nothing cannot strictly be thought or even spoken of. — Thorongil

Yet here you speak of it. Clearly we can speak of something about absolute nothing, if we are to say it cannot be spoken of. For this to be true would require that there be something about absolute nothing that makes it impossible to think or speak about. If we cannot speak about nothing, then we cannot speak about how we cannot speak about nothing, because the fact that we cannot speak about nothing is, itself, about nothing, so we have fallen into a performative contradiction,

As it stands, Heidegger was acutely aware of the charge that Being, the is, is merely a linguistic copula. He obviously denied and in my opinion thoroughly refuted that view.

To address this bit, what are you actually experiencing but some counter-image, some umwelt, of your own imagining? It doesn’t escape the charge of being idealistic. — apokrisis

Nor was it supposed to. Specifically, the il y a refutes egological idealism, procedural solipsism in which something only is when the ego assimilates it into the totality. That there is Other that resists this assimilation is what is understood via the il y a. It is a "primordial", pre-theoretical encounter with something transcending ourselves. Dusk is a good time for such an encounter since it's often filled with shadows, representing objects that cannot be fully seen. There is mystery, unknowability. There is a world that eludes our total comprehension and which will always be alien in some way. That dusk is a good time to experience the il y a does not mean it is a psychological illusion rooted in some way to contingent states of the world. I only use dusk as a example.

The il y a identifies that which cannot be assimilated to our conceptual system. We can talk about Big Bangs, supermassive black holes, vibrating strings or strange quarks, but we are still talking about something. Something that exists. We "know" what existence is - look outside! See all the things that exist!, you may say. Yes, many things exist, but I want to know what it means to exist. What the Being of a being is.

You are probably aware that Heidegger and his contemporary philosophical phenomenologists were aware of semiotics and worked on sign theory themselves. Semiotics is not a replacement for the question of Being, although it certainly is relevant.

I don't, that's the point. And not only don't I know it, I can't know it. — Thorongil

So because you can't know it means it is...what? Nothing? What do you mean by nothing?

I want to know what you mean when you say something is nothing, i.e. what it means to not-exist. That we can coherently predicate certain things that do not exist is clear enough - for we can already say that such-and-such does not exist, or that it did exist but no longer does, or that it never existed. Many factual claims depend on the reality of nothing.

What I want to know is what this nothing is. Distinguishing between a being and its Being is necessary for this question to make sense. For even if we say something doesn't exist, i.e. it is not, we are still saying something about the being in question.

The point I'm trying to make is that "nothing" is still "something", just not the something we are used to in the everyday world of existing things.

How do you know what a square circle is, then? Fine, let me ask you this: do you recognize the ontological distinction between a being and its Being?

Right, but I wanna know what nothing is. If a square circle is synonymous with nothing, then what does nothing mean? What is nothing?

Nonsense. A square circle never has, nor does, nor ever will exist. It is not a possibility. — Thorongil

Then what exactly is it? You said it yourself: "It is not a possibility." Then what is it?

People think this a really esoteric metaphysics for some reason. :) — apokrisis

Probably because, as Heidegger says, all metaphysical questions put the questioner themselves into question. That the world exists "over there" and we exists "over here" is the duality from which the mind-body problem arises. So yes, a synthesis of mind and matter dissolves the problem, as does eliminative idealism (since we can be sure that we exist). It is this egological idealism that is immediately punctured by the il y a and our knowledge that the world transcends a total understanding.

Ask yourself what it is you're "talking about." — Thorongil

Possibility.

We can speak about things that have existed but no longer do, but we can't speak of that which never was, nor is, nor ever will be. — Thorongil

I think we can. That which does not exist and never has is possibility. That which existed but no longer does is a failed possibility.

Yes, this is why I said that the hard problem cannot be "resolved" given the current vogue metaphysics; it must be dissolved as a non-question through the re-interpretation of what "matter" is (by either merging mind and matter or reducing matter to mind).

Even granting this (which I do not; I would have to know more about what is meant by and how Levinas argues for this notion), it would only refute a certain type of idealism. — Thorongil

I grant this. Levinas attempts to refute egological or solipsistic idealism, the metaphysics of the totality where everything that exists must be discernible by the understanding. That there is Other that resists this assimilation into the totality is what Levinas is focused on.

I don't think we can make either claim here. If the nothingness spoken of is absolute, then we run into the argument of Parmenides on the impossibility of such a sojourn (which is another defeater of materialism, by the way). If it is relative, then the goal should be to determine if there are modes of contact between this mysterious reality beyond the world and the world rather than throw up one's hands at the suffering and absurdity on this side of the dichotomy. — Thorongil

Can you elaborate? I don't see anything wrong with talking about non-existence. The fact is that some things exist and some things do not, but we can still talk about either.

I think the unreasonableness of math and the study of its patterns in nature since Galileo has made science compelling, so I can see why there is so much confidence. Also, technology seems to indicate validation of some sort of its rightness. — schopenhauer1

Mathematics has fascinated people for longer than Galileo's rhetorical success. Pythagoreans worshiped mathematics. Mathematics was the model Platonic form and somehow was integral to the entire cosmological scene.

Yes, we have global communication networks and vaccines, transistors and atomic bombs. Good job everyone, rah rah rah, we're the best, I guess.

So it turns out Mephistofeles might be a neo-nazi group. :lol:

Which sucks, because I really liked this one song by them:

The Divided Self (An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness) by R. D. Laing.

"When I certify someone insane, I am not equivocating when I write that he is of unsound mind, may be dangerous to himself and others, and requires care and attention in a mental hospital. However, at the same time, I am also aware that, in my opinion, there are other people who are regarded as sane, whose minds are as radically unsound, who may be equally or more dangerous to themselves and others and whom society does not regard as psychotic and fit persons to be in a madhouse. I am aware that the man who is said to be deluded may be in his delusion telling me the truth, and this in no equivocal or metaphorical sense, but quite literally, and that the cracked mind of the schizophrenic may let in light which does not enter the intact minds of many sane people whose minds are closed. Ezekiel, in Jaspers's opinion, was a schizophrenic."

Should a proposal to eliminate men from society be allowed on the forum — T Clark

My initial view is that yes, even something as extreme as this should not be disallowed in virtue of it being extreme. Censoring bad ideas doesn't solve anything and only opens up the possibility of censoring good (and perhaps also extreme) ideas.

To a certain extent I think having a thick skin is a necessary requirement for having free speech. Let the stupid people talk. Smart people listen and know it's stupid.

Thank you all for the suggestions.

Thanks.

I agree! We're getting lots of rain here in CO. Perfect weather.

Easily their best song.

You can't have free will if everything is random. That's not free, that's random.

If you don't do it, someone else will and they might fuck it up.

:up:

In my experience, it's not antinatalism that makes people queasy, but its pessimistic undertones. Antinatalism reminds us of the awfulness of existence. Some form of asceticism or melancholic life seems to me to be the obvious consequence.

Apokrisis has failed to provide a convincing reason why we should see nature as fundamentally agreeable and right.

Yeah. And what would Nature be diametrically opposed to here. The Artificial? The Unnatural? The Supernatural? Which of these is your chosen basis for moral imperatives? What makes them better, exactly? — apokrisis

I might ask the same of your naturalism. There's a common trend in philosophical trends around the globe that see the Good as transcending the material and/or natural realm, often in a spiritual way. Morality is a system of imperatives that manifest as commands from afar and beyond. I think there is something atomically inescapable about this phenomenology, that it has not from what we consider to be the natural world around us. As I see it, if morality doesn't come from beyond the world, it certainly aims at it.

Antinatalism, in a philosophical pessimistic sense, is a spiritual position in that it tries to deny the immanent, natural world in favor of an alternate reality - typically Nothing. The world is bad, says the pessimist, but there is a good thing we can do, a right thing to do. The soteriology is to cease reproduction, and thus escape and stop the cycle of suffering. This helps form the basis of the antinatalist's rationale.

You'll never understand something like antinatalism if you refuse to acknowledge the legitimacy of a moral criticism of life. Do you ever think all the suffering on Earth since day uno of its inception maybe isn't a good thing? Do you ever wonder what a God might say in his defense if asked why he made the world?

A constraint??? :gasp: — apokrisis

Yeah a constraint might be a good word for it, although it's imposed by a supernatural rather than a natural entity.

God constrained morality, enough so that society may operate effectively (so that religion was and is an essential feature of capitalism). It was really just humans all along.

Alternatively, there is Naturalism. Wave goodbye to the Big Daddy in the sky, say hello Mama Nature. — apokrisis

Soooo ..... rejecting a mistaken impression of monotheism for an environmental chad pantheism?

Mama Nature rejected us.

Why wouldn't we want to understand life and mind, hence even morality, as natural phenomena? What good argument do you have on that? — apokrisis

Because morality is oftentimes diametrically opposed to the natural. With the advancements in the biological sciences came a renewed fervor for the problem of evil based on the sheer magnitude of suffering in the natural world.

I've said this already, secular societies inherit the problem of evil from their theological ancestors. A morality based on the natural world would be a non-morality, akin to basing morality on a deity that, by any modern standard of morality, is a twisted psycho.