In your opinion, then, what accounts for the fact that thousands of first-rate philosophers have taken D & K seriously, devoted enormous scholarship and brainpower to investigating the pluses and minuses of the Cartesian/Kantian tradition, built upon this tradition to explore many modern philosophical questions, etc.? — J

It's astonishing, I know. I don't know if it can be attributed to only one or even a few causes. I think we find some of the answers in the Analytic and Ordinary Language philosophy that developed in the 20th century--that is to say, the fact that the intelligence of philosophers was bewitched by means of language, as Wittgenstein said. That bewitchment may result from reification of concepts, for example. Another factor may be an adherence to a correspondence or spectator view of reality, criticized by Dewey and others, or the dualism resulting from the claimed mind-body distinction. There may have been a tendency to distinguish "ordinary" or "common sense" knowledge from "pure" or "absolute" knowledge, a kind of aristocratic view, drawing a distinction between practical knowledge (requiring consideration of probabilities and exercise of judgment) and knowledge of unchanging truth, available only to the wise.

e all have the concept of a chair in our minds, and we only know what a chair is because in our minds is the concept of a chair. — RussellA

I would say there is no "thing" called a concept floating about in a thing called a "mind." Concepts and minds all exist in the same world as chairs. What we call "concepts" are a consequence of our interaction with the world of which we're a part. We'd have no concept of a chair but for the fact that, as living organisms of a particular kind in an environment, we found it useful and desirable to sit on something different from the ground or a natural object, and we call what results from that a "chair."

it is not a contention with transcendental idealism; as it is a necessary and perfectly anticipated consequence of it. — Bob Ross

Anticipated by whom? Not by Kant, I think, or whatever Kant-in-himself may have been.

For my part, I blame Descartes for this adventure in the preposterous, and much else for that matter. He started the ball rolling, and doomed otherwise fine minds to the remarkably silly task of determining whether they and all they regularly and continually interact with every moment really exist and are what they are shown to be while we interact with them. To Kant, though, is reserved the claim that there is, e.g., some thing which I call a chair and sit on all the time, which although it is in all respects a chair as I understand a chair to be and I use it as such, cannot be known.

You'd be the life of any party.

Whatever the things are in-themselves is entirely impossible to know. — Bob Ross

In which case, they should be of no concern to us. Not exactly a contention, I know, but an entirely reasonable judgment.

Not a big Jung fan, I'm afraid, although I admit the thought of God defecating on his creation has a certain charm. Perhaps defecation represented the act of creation; I can't recall how he or others interpreted this vision.

It's odd how different the monotheism, if we can call it that, of the Abrahamic religions, led to an interpretation of God which differed so from the interpretation of the pagan philosophers who acknowledged that there was but one God and considered the many gods of traditional religion to be aspects of the one God. I tend to agree that those of the pre-Christian West were largely unconcerned with the notions that have bothered and worried us since, some of which you enumerate, and think they were better off for it.

I confess I'm perplexed by the outrage against Harvard's leadership for, it seems, not being sufficiently anti-Hamas and not identifying students so they can be blacklisted by certain corporations. It seems particularly ill-advised to criticize others because they've been insufficiently fervent in their condemnation of Hamas or because they've failed to cooperate in efforts of leaders or corporations to take vengeance against students who are anti-Israel.

That's because they kicked ass. — frank

That they did. Especially after they took Constantinople in 1453.

When was the last time the region was at peace? — frank

My guess would be around the time before 1914. It was Ottoman territory for about 400 years before then, and I think Ottoman rule was relatively undisrupted before WWI.

The other position is that they needn't justify their right to exist any more than any other nation. — Hanover

Say that's true. It's creation would nonetheless remain an injustice.

When never knows where one stands with Perfidious Albion, it's true. But there was the Balfour Resolution, announcing support for the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, and I think that's when the existing mess began to take shaper. Certainly, the British shifted support between Jewish and Arab organizations as it felt was in its interests after 1917 and through WWII, but the Resolution was never revoked; it became a question of who got what, and when.

An injustice in a long line of injustices. It's not like the British mandate that preceded it was any more just. The region was regularly engulfed by war even before there were Muslims or Christians. — Echarmion

Yes, as indeed was most of the world. But nobody has ever claimed the creation of Israel was history's only injustice, and resulted in the only wars ever fought in the region, or anywhere else.

have any of Israel's neighbors ever offered peace or reversed their desire to annihilate the Israeli state and the people in it? — tim wood

If you reject the views that (1) Israel has a religious right to possess and govern the areas at issue; and/or that (2) the Jewish people have a non-religious right to possess and govern the areas at issue because it is their "homeland," then the creation of Israel was an injustice. That those who were displaced as a result, and that those who must live as its subjects though unwilling to do so, resent its creation and hope for its dissolution is unsurprising. Nor is it clear that its continued existence, from the perspective of the Palestinians, will be of any benefit to them, especially given the relentless "settling" of aggressive Jewish communities and the fact that Israel considers itself a place where Jews are to live.

I hold neither of those views, and tend to think of Israel as a creation of Western powers, primarily the U.K., which was bound to create hostility and has continued to result in violence since it was formed.

That said, Israel exists and is unlikely to go away. So, efforts to annihilate it are futile. I frankly feel a two-state solution is the only viable option, but doubt that is something Israel will accept.

Io capisco, I think, but I also think that using metaphors, while apposite in poetry, isn't useful in philosophy--nor is it necessary. In poetry metaphors may be witty or evocative but in philosophy they merely invite misunderstanding and, worse, reification. Minds, ideas, concepts may not be considered
things literally, but are treated as if they were things. Why resort to metaphor in philosophy?

Culture -- including philosophy -- is not a material object, is it? — Gnomon

No, nor is it a thing. Material objects may be constituents of a culture, though, like works of art or structures, and books. Culture may include dances and religions as well.

In philosophical Cosmology, the system of interest is the universe as a whole -- as seen from the outside -- including such immaterial elements as Minds, Ideas, Theories, Symbols, etc -- that are excluded from the Immanentist world. Such non-physical things are meta-physical, in the sense that they transcend the physical boundaries of material objects, and of proximate reality --- which Immanentism believes to be the only reality. — Gnomon

Sorry, but nobody sees the Universe from outside it. Someone may imagine something "beyond it", or speculate regarding something "beyond it" but that, of course, doesn't indicate there is any such thing. Thinking is something we do. It takes place in the Universe because we're there. It doesn't take place outside the Universe, because we're not outside of it. We think by virtue of our interaction with the rest of the Universe; thinking is something we do as active living organisms which are part of an environment.

Your reference to "non-physical things" which "transcend the physical boundaries of material objects" suggests you treat mind, theories, symbols or ideas as equivalent to "things," immaterial but nonetheless existing, like objects, and therefore existing somewhere; but somewhere else (outside the Universe). That's one of the peculiarities of philosophical positions that Analytic and OL philosophy has tried to address (e.g. Gilbert Ryle regarding "mind", addressing Cartesian dualism ).

I'm sorry if my personal philosophical vocabulary has caused you to be "confused" or "uncertain". Yet the problem may be, not the literal meaning of the words, but the polarized belief system (or worldview) associated with certain taboo words*1. It's certainly not my intention to "promote" confusion. — Gnomon

I haven't been referring to you, but to what I believe is the goal of Analytic and OL philosophers like Austin and others--Gilbert Ryle, for example--and the motivation behind their work. And I certainly don't think you're trying to deceive.

Let me try to explain my views regarding metaphysics. I'm not necessarily adverse to it, and have a respect for what has been called the "naturalistic metaphysics" of Dewey and other Pragmatists. But I think that there are limits to what philosophy and philosophers can achieve. There are certain matters which cannot be explained but must be shown, or felt, or evoked, or experienced.

Artists are good at evoking and showing, and in making us feel, through painting, or poetry, or music. Philosophers, in my opinion, are very, very bad at doing so. They become bewildered by our language to paraphrase Wittgenstein, and problems result.

For example, I'm a lapsed Christian of the Catholic variety. The reasons I left Holy Mother Church are many, but in part I did so because felt its doctrines to be inadequate reflections of the divine and contrary to our nature. That's difficult to explain in words, but I found it expressed wonderfully in art, specifically in the poem Sunday Morning written by Wallace Stevens.

I think this may have been the view of Carnap as expressed in the quote from him I noted earlier in this thread. He said that metaphysicians are like musicians without musical ability. They seek to achieve what art can achieve, if anything can, but fail because they're terrible artists.

Given that any such search is only possible for us in media res (not from the "outside" or "beyond"), assuming some transcendent "outside, beyond", like searching "up" on a 2D plane, is both nonsense and imaginary — 180 Proof

Maybe this is included in what you state, but it also presumes that what is beyond the Universe or transcends it is similar enough to what is in it that we're capable of knowing it or making inferences regarding it, in some limited sense. Sometimes it's claimed that perfect versions of what we experience within the Universe are beyond it, or God (who is endowed with characteristics we recognize as existing, if only dimly or in a diminished form, in the Universe). But why should that be the case?

We immanentists agree on that much at least – i.e. Epicureans & Stoics, Kynics & Spinozists, Nietzscheans & Peircean-Deweyans!
an hour ago — 180 Proof

Yes. And so we should. How justify a search for "the real" outside of Nature, beyond the Universe?

Unfortunately, such a bureaucratic conceit would stifle the most creative philosophers. For example, I tried to read Whitehead's Process and Reality --- in which he conceived of a new school of Process Philosophy --- but found its novel technical terminology hard to follow. That's one reason I provide an extensive glossary & footnotes in my thesis and blog*1. — Gnomon

Creating new words is not an issue so much as misusing or redefining words commonly used, thereby promoting confusion and uncertainty. Words such as "real" for example. Or, like Heidegger, manufacturing "the Nothing" which, it appears, is something of a sort, but can only be known if one is "suspended in dread."

Austin in Sense and Sensibilia addressed the case of the pencil in a jar or glass of water. The example was used by some philosophers to support the existence of sense-data and the fact that our senses fail us and cannot be relied upon and, therefore, we can't see what's "real." That's because our senses indicate that the pencil appears "crooked" to us when placed in water--but, behold, it actually doesn't change shape. Austin points our that, first, the pencil doesn't appear "crooked" to us; that we aren't looking at a pencil which suddenly and inexplicably looks crooked, but in fact at a pencil in a glass or water. looking exactly as we expect it to look. We would think and be justified in thinking our senses were deceiving us only if the pencil appeared straight while in a glass of water, in fact. Other traditional examples of our senses deceiving us and preventing us from knowing what is truly the case or what is "real" are the one involving color-blindness and the fact objects appear differently when seen from different locations and perspectives.

These examples are persuasive, though, only if we define what is "real" in an extraordinary and unusual
way. We have to define it as something which cannot be known by humans or experienced by humans. In fact, it must be something which cannot be experienced by any living creature, because living creatures are limited by their characteristics (flies see what flies see; people see what people see; but no creature sees what really is). Presumably, for a believer, God can perceive what's real, but nobody else. And that's a position which has all kinds of implications.

To the contrary, I was distinguishing between Nature and Culture, not Nature and Reality. Nature got along for eons without Culture or Language, until artificial "human nature" -- in the last few ticks of Time -- began dominating natural Nature. Do you think humans are nothing-but Nature? In what sense is Culture or Language Real? Certainly not in the sense of this thread's topic, implying that Real is the opposite of Ideal, which is the exclusive purview of human thought, language & philosophy. :smile: — Gnomon

I would equate Nature with the Universe. We are parts of Nature. Our interactions with the rest of the world (including other humans and animals and objects) are parts of Nature--they take place in the Universe. What we create become parts of the Universe when they're created (just as anthills are parts of Nature/the Universe). It happens our interactions with the rest of the Universe encompass language and culture; they're not separate from the Universe; they take place in it.

T.L. Austin — Gnomon

J. L. Austin, you mean. Not to be confused with John Austin, the esteemed (by me) legal positivist.

has decreed that “a philosopher doesn't get to decide the meaning of a word”. Instead, he insists that we must deal with words as they are found in the wild, so to speak -- uncontaminated by philosophical sophistry. Since when does he have that authority? — Gnomon

Who has the authority to change the (commonly accepted) meaning of a word to accommodate their speculations and musings? It strikes me that if we're going to accuse philosophers of conceit, that accusation is more properly brought against those who disregard the meaning of a word, creating their own meaning for self-serving purposes.

I suppose it was when the Linguistic Turn*1 began to transform Philosophy into a passive observer of the world as it seems to be, instead of an active participant in interpreting the world of “appearances”, that Kant said was a mask over the unknowable ideal “ding an sich”. — Gnomon

Kant, schmant. That old mountebank was the most passive of observers, actually drawing a distinction between us and the world, rendering us incapable of knowing it (not that this makes any difference to us and our interactions with the rest of the world). We and our language are parts of the world. The problems arise when we think of ourselves as apart from it, as you do here:

But Language is the essence of human Culture, and hardly Real, in the sense of Natural*3. — Gnomon

You don't think we're part of nature? Or you think we're not real? Or perhaps you distinguish between humans and their language, one being parts of nature one and the other not? Perhaps you're using words like "nature" and "real" in a peculiar manner, though.

What Austin and others were doing (including Wittgenstein) was pointing out that the misuse of language--the contrived use of it--leads us to make unwarranted conclusions and sends us on expeditions without purpose.

"Metaphysicians are musicians without musical ability."

Rudolf Carnap

It's a prime candidate for a fixed thread — Banno

We've been pretending to question the reality of what interact with nonchalantly every second of our lives, for millennia. When will this affectation cease? Thanks for the Austin quote. Such a sensible fellow.

Something to pass the time. Do tell about the lion! Does he eat Daniel this time? — Vera Mont

That was another lion, I think. Do you know the story? I'm quite fond of it.

The donkey told the tiger, “The grass is blue.”

The tiger replied, “No, the grass is green.”

The discussion became heated, and the two decided to submit the issue to arbitration, so they approached the lion.

As they approached the lion on his throne, the donkey started screaming: ′′Your Highness, isn’t it true that the grass is blue?”

The lion replied: “If you believe it is true, the grass is blue.”

The donkey rushed forward and continued: ′′The tiger disagrees with me, contradicts me and annoys me. Please punish him.”

The king then declared: ′′The tiger will be punished with 3 days of silence.”

The donkey jumped with joy and went on his way, content and repeating ′′The grass is blue, the grass is blue…”

The tiger asked the lion, “Your Majesty, why have you punished me, after all, the grass is green?”

The lion replied, ′′You’ve known and seen the grass is green.”

The tiger asked, ′′So why do you punish me?”

The lion replied, “That has nothing to do with the question of whether the grass is blue or green. The punishment is because it is degrading for a brave, intelligent creature like you to waste time arguing with an ass, and on top of that, you came and bothered me with that question just to validate something you already knew was true!”

Why are people engaging with this person? Remember the story/fable of the donkey and the tiger. I'm not sure whether that's one of Aesop's or someone else. But there's nothing to see here. I can be the lion, if you like.

People should read Heidegger all they like. I don't seek to ban his books. I myself am inclined to avoid whenever possible those who, inter alia, think and are determined to tell everyone that certain groups of people (including themselves) are distinctive in spirit, or have a special place in the world, are especially a part of or have a unique understanding of "Being" or who knows what else is said to qualify as the kind of mystical-religious-philosophical locus of ultimate reality some of us need to manufacture, which in any case cannot be defined or understood through the use of reason; who think reason itself is detrimental to attaining what's true or real, and believe that it should be replaced by something or other like dancing, or marching, exercising, working (because it makes us "free") or running about the mountains in lederhosen pretending to be a peasant. Particularly when they are, also, unrepentant Nazis.

I didn't know him. You were fortunate.

Ciceronianus’s mistake is subjective individualism, which downplays the social shaping of individual subjectivity. — Joshs

So, Heidegger was only following orders of a sort--social orders, as it were? In that sense, so were they all, one would think.

Two centuries ago slavery was a social norm widely embraced and even more widely tolerated. So whom from that time period should we exempt from moral censure? — Pantagruel

Certainly nobody who actively argued in its defense, like John Calhoun. Or does the "intellectual" nature of his speeches/writings in support of slavery preclude criticism of him, as it seems Heidegger's speeches and writings in support of Nazism precludes criticism of him?

You should listen to Tom Lehrer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEJ9HrZq7Ro

I suppose it could be. Unless, of course, we find H's "Dewey Notebooks" establishing he shamelessly plagiarized Dewey's work. That's intended as a joke, by the way.

Joseph Margolis told R.W. Sleeper Dewey made the remark after Margolis asked him to read some of Heidegger's work.

However there are people walking around today committing atrocities that would make Hitler blush. — Pantagruel

Ah. Now we learn Hitler wasn't that bad a fellow, after all. Loved dogs, they say.

should we allow situational moral issues to to dictate philosophical interpretation. — Pantagruel

There's a kind of magnificence in your extravagant, blithe dismissal of Heidegger's support for attempted genocide and a Germanic master race. If you read or listen to Wolin's book, by the way, you'll find that these positions have their basis in his philosophical musings (primarily in the Black Notebooks and his letters to his brother). As for his philosophy, such as it is, it seems to me that Dewey's alleged observation that Heidegger "reads like a Swabian peasant trying to sound like me" describes whatever is of worth in it, by my understanding, if we subtract H's mysticism and Romanticism.

It seems myopic to criticize someone for being on the wrong side of a socio-historic movement — Pantagruel

Yes, we are all too quick to criticize those who supported Hitler and the Nazi regime and referred to the Holocaust as the "self-annihilation of the Jews." The "wrong side of a socio-historic movement," forsooth.

A form of elevated Volksgesinnung? — Tom Storm

Elevated, schmelevated. It's difficult for me to think of his silly rhapsodies regarding the German Volk without picturing him as one of the performers of Springtime for Hitler.

I finished Wolin's book, and even I, unrivaled as I think I am in my loathing for Heidegger, was astonished by the scope of his odiousness.

There is no meaning of life. — niki wonoto

Well, if that's so, there's nothing to be concerned about. Tu ne quaesieris as Horace says:

no one’s allowed to know his fate,
Not you, not me: don’t ask, don’t hunt for answers
In tea leaves or palms. Be patient with whatever comes.
This could be our last winter, it could be many
More, pounding the Tuscan Sea on these rocks:
Do what you must, be wise, cut your vines
And forget about hope. Time goes running, even
As we talk. Take the present, the future’s no one’s affair.

Materialists do not see reality like this...

The earth, in a very real sense, is our mother. We are born from this mother, from Gaia; we are extensions of the earth and the cosmos of which it is a part. This means that our conceptualizing and our spirituality also extend from the spiritual dimension of the cosmos and the earth.
— Thomas Berry — Athena

Doesn't seem to follow though, does it? That "spiritual dimension" sneaks into the picture. Is that "spiritual dimension" a part of Nature? If so, a Naturalist may accept it as a part of reality, like everything else, including energy. The question would then seem to be whether if it's part of the Universe it is corporeal.

"Everything" which causes changes is material, ergo "energy" is material, no? — 180 Proof

Sounds rather Stoic and, therefore, preferable as such things go, to me at least. All that acts or can be acted upon are "bodies" and therefore part of Nature, or the Universe. There are different kinds of bodies, though.

The significance of the Stoic view is that it posits immanence; there ain't no supernatural or transcendent (I admit the Stoics may not have used the word "ain't"). We don't need no stinkin' supernatural or transcendent, in fact (they may not have used the word "stinkin'" either). Being part of Nature (the Universe), inextricably, all we can know is part of it.

The concept of energy and even what we know of the quantum world fits in rather well with Stoicism, I think, though not with its view that the pneuma (of which they would be a part, I think) is the intelligent, rational as well as generative guiding principle of the Universe.

Well, consider you may be less than clear. Your wrote:

I thought of another thing I could have put in the essay. I have heard that from the psychological perspective, the conversion from polytheism to monotheism meant that people imagined themselves to be one (at least in ideal) whereas they had not thought like that before. — Brendan Golledge

The second sentence seems to include a statement that "the conversion from polytheism to monotheism meant that people imagined themselves to be one (at least in ideal) whereas they had not thought like that before."

I'm not sure how "from a psychological perspective" impacts the meaning of those words, nor am I sure what it is people thought when they did not "imagine themselves to be one." Did they imagine themselves to be many, or at least more than one, when polytheistic? Did they imagine themselves to be one, but in a lesser or different sense than they would once converted to monotheism?

I've always suspected that people long to learn what I think about most anything, but am shy.

I thought of another thing I could have put in the essay. I have heard that from the psychological perspective, the conversion from polytheism to monotheism meant that people imagined themselves to be one (at least in ideal) whereas they had not thought like that before. — Brendan Golledge

People imagined the human race to be "one" long before Jesus was a twinkle in his immaculately conceiving mother's eye. It was the position of more than one ancient school of philosophy (think of the Stoics). The concept of the logos, which you referred to previously in a post, was borrowed by Christians from the ancient pagan philosophers. The early Christians were very adept at borrowing. They borrowed even many of the gods of the ancients, in fact, and called them saints.

But If we believe in just one God that is to be properly worshipped, then our best and highest selves (what a Christian probably identifies as his conscience) is just one, and everything not in alignment with that needs to be reformed or cut off. — Brendan Golledge

Or burnt, or stoned, or hung or otherwise executed, or tortured, etc. The belief in one God fostered intolerance and exclusivity, neither of which were characteristic of polytheism.