If noumena are instances of direct reality, why is it there is never an example of a noumenal object? — Mww

The difference between abstract and intuitive cognition, which Kant entirely overlooks, was the very one that ancient philosophers indicated as φαινόμενα [phainomena] and νοούμενα [nooumena]; the opposition and incommensurability between these terms proved very productive in the philosophemes of the Eleatics, in Plato's doctrine of Ideas, in the dialectic of the Megarics, and later in the scholastics, in the conflict between nominalism and realism. This latter conflict was the late development of a seed already present in the opposed tendencies of Plato and Aristotle. But Kant, who completely and irresponsibly neglected the issue for which the terms φαινομένα and νοούμενα were already in use, then took possession of the terms as if they were stray and ownerless, and used them as designations of things in themselves and their appearances.

The Greek word νοούμενoν, nooúmenon (plural νοούμενα, nooúmena) is the neuter middle-passive present participle of νοεῖν, noeîn, 'to think, to mean', which in turn originates from the word νοῦς, noûs, an Attic contracted form of νόος, nóos, 'perception, understanding, mind'. A rough equivalent in English would be "that which is thought", or "the object of an act of thought".

in thinking, the intelligible object or form is present in the intellect, and thinking itself is the identification of the intellect with this intelligible. ...Thinking is not something that is, in principle, like sensing or perceiving; this is because thinking is a universalising activity. This is what this means: when you think, you see - mentally see - a form which could not, in principle, be identical with a particular - including a particular neurological element, a circuit, or a state of a circuit, or a synapse, and so on. This is so because the object of thinking is universal, or the mind is operating universally.

Consider that when you think about triangularity, as you might when proving a geometrical theorem, it is necessarily perfect triangularity that you are contemplating, not some mere approximation of it. Triangularity as your intellect grasps it is entirely determinate or exact; for example, what you grasp is the notion of a closed plane figure with three perfectly straight sides, rather than that of something which may or may not have straight sides or which may or may not be closed. Of course, your mental image of a triangle might not be exact, but rather indeterminate and fuzzy. But to grasp something with the intellect is not the same as to form a mental image of it. For any mental image of a triangle is necessarily going to be of an isosceles triangle specifically, or of a scalene one, or an equilateral one; but the concept of triangularity that your intellect grasps applies to all triangles alike. Any mental image of a triangle is going to have certain features, such as a particular color, that are no part of the concept of triangularity in general. A mental image is something private and subjective, while the concept of triangularity is objective and grasped by many minds at once. — Edward Feser

If not Will for Schopenhauer, then what would he have "equated" with, say, Brahman or whatever stage of Buddhist translations' version of Tathagatagharba(?), or even Spinoza's Monism/God? What would Schopenhauer call that? Or is it utterly absent and there is only will and Representation, and will is not a being but a drive? — ENOAH

He's not saying this law is a feature of the universe, it's a feature of thought. We can't think beyond it, so it's like a signpost of the border of thought. — frank

definitely he (Schop.) places suffering in the category of the real being, and unlike Buddhism, not in the category of Maya/Samsara/Karma. That is, suffering for S. is not restricted to the "illusions" but also Buddha Nature (if that and S's "will" are similarly the ground of real being). — ENOAH

The better consciousness in me lifts me into a world where there is no longer personality and causality or subject or object. My hope and my belief is that this better (supersensible and extra-temporal) consciousness will become my only one, and for that reason I hope that it is not God. But if anyone wants to use the expression God symbolically for the better consciousness itself or for much that we are able to separate or name, so let it be, yet not among philosophers I would have thought. — Schopenhauer

This is getting very esoteric, but can it be argued that Schopenhauer's famous "denial of Will", is actually a sort of existence of unmediated existence? — schopenhauer1

Where below am I naive or inconsistent? — ENOAH

ditto with the classics. But with this qualification: they are all long dead and long gone. — tim wood

According to Schopenhauer, corresponding to the level of the universal subject-object distinction, Will is immediately objectified into a set of universal objects or Platonic Ideas. These constitute the timeless patterns for each of the individual things that we experience in space and time. There are different Platonic Ideas, and although this multiplicity of Ideas implies that some measure of individuation is present within this realm, each Idea nonetheless contains no plurality within itself and is said to be “one.” Since the Platonic Ideas are in neither space nor time, they lack the qualities of individuation that would follow from the introduction of spatial and temporal qualifications. In these respects, the Platonic Ideas are independent of the specific fourfold root of the principle of sufficient reason, even though it would be misleading to say that there is no individuation whatsoever at this universal level, for there are many different Platonic Ideas. Schopenhauer refers to the Platonic Ideas as the direct objectifications of Will and as the immediate objectivity of Will.

If we deny-the-will to the point of getting beyond our own subject-object nature, we can perhaps escape. — schopenhauer1

Greek and Roman classics are not part of anybody's culture except the people who speak their languages — that doesn't apply to most here —, and the reason for that is exactly Scholastics — Lionino

LLMs are not conscious or intelligent, they're just "stochastic parrots." — fishfry

First, apologies to both of you. — ENOAH

It simply cannot be that that cat over there is independent and localized as normal perception tells us. — Constance

"Sariputta, do you take it on conviction that the faculty of conviction, when developed & pursued, gains a footing in the Deathless, has the Deathless as its goal & consummation? Do you take it on conviction that the faculty of persistence... mindfulness... concentration... discernment, when developed & pursued, gains a footing in the Deathless, has the Deathless as its goal & consummation?"

"Lord, it's not that I take it on conviction in the Blessed One that the faculty of conviction... persistence... mindfulness... concentration... discernment, when developed & pursued, gains a footing in the Deathless, has the Deathless as its goal & consummation. Those who have not known, seen, penetrated, realized, or attained it by means of discernment would have to take it on conviction in others that the faculty of conviction... persistence... mindfulness... concentration... discernment, when developed & pursued, gains a footing in the Deathless, has the Deathless as its goal & consummation; whereas those who have known, seen, penetrated, realized, & attained it by means of discernment would have no doubt or uncertainty that the faculty of conviction... persistence... mindfulness... concentration... discernment, when developed & pursued, gains a footing in the Deathless, has the Deathless as its goal & consummation.....

For Hadot...the means for the philosophical student to achieve the “complete reversal of our usual ways of looking at things” epitomized by the Sage were a series of spiritual exercises. These exercises encompassed all of those practices still associated with philosophical teaching and study: reading, listening, dialogue, inquiry, and research. However, they also included practices deliberately aimed at addressing the student’s larger way of life, and demanding daily or continuous repetition: practices of attention (prosoche), meditations (meletai), memorizations of dogmata, self-mastery (enkrateia), the therapy of the passions, the remembrance of good things, the accomplishment of duties, and the cultivation of indifference towards indifferent things (Philosophy as a Way of Life 84). Hadot acknowledges his use of the term “spiritual exercises” may create anxieties, by associating philosophical practices more closely with religious devotion than typically done. Hadot’s use of the adjective “spiritual” (or sometimes “existential”) indeed aims to capture how these practices, like devotional practices in the religious traditions are aimed at generating and reactivating a constant way of living and perceiving in prokopta, despite the distractions, temptations, and difficulties of life. For this reason, they call upon far more than “reason alone.” — Pierre Hadot, IEP

I have never been able to get on board with his Debbie Downer*1 "wanh, wanh, wah" Pessimism and Roseanne Rosannadana "it's always something" — Gnomon

But it shows that concepts are not empty things. They are palpable errors. As I see it, when we talk about the world, we are using categories of understanding. These are concepts, so when I see a dog, the particular dog in front of me is known because I have this schematic in my head about dogs in general, the universal that subsumes the particular. — Constance

It is the same world, but all along there has been this fundamental mistake at the perceptual level. — Constance

His work is opposed, as he once put it, to "the spirit which informs the vast stream of European and American civilisation in which all of us stand." Nearly 50 years after his death, we can see, more clearly than ever, that the feeling that he was swimming against the tide was justified. If we wanted a label to describe this tide, we might call it "scientism," the view that every intelligible question has either a scientific solution or no solution at all. It is against this view that Wittgenstein set his face. …

There are many questions to which we do not have scientific answers, not because they are deep, impenetrable mysteries, but simply because they are not scientific questions. These include questions about love, art, history, culture, music-all questions, in fact, that relate to the attempt to understand ourselves better. There is a widespread feeling today that the great scandal of our times is that we lack a scientific theory of consciousness. And so there is a great interdisciplinary effort, involving physicists, computer scientists, cognitive psychologists and philosophers, to come up with tenable scientific answers to the questions: what is consciousness? What is the self? One of the leading competitors in this crowded field is the theory advanced by the mathematician Roger Penrose, that a stream of consciousness is an orchestrated sequence of quantum physical events taking place in the brain. Penrose's theory is that a moment of consciousness is produced by a sub-protein in the brain called a tubulin. The theory is, on Penrose's own admission, speculative, and it strikes many as being bizarrely implausible. But suppose we discovered that Penrose's theory was correct, would we, as a result, understand ourselves any better? Is a scientific theory the only kind of understanding?

Well, you might ask, what other kind is there? Wittgenstein's answer to that, I think, is his greatest, and most neglected, achievement. Although Wittgenstein's thought underwent changes between his early and his later work, his opposition to scientism was constant. Philosophy, he writes, "is not a theory but an activity." It strives, not after scientific truth, but after conceptual clarity.

And yet when I tell you I think it all comes down to faith and feeling and that nothing discursive can be known via meditation, intuition or enlightenment you disagree and label me a positivist — Janus

I am wondering why I should care. It's just that we always seem to come back to quesions about what is true and how do we know it. — Tom Storm

When you consider the transcendental, what frame do you find helpful? It strikes me that your form of idealism (as articulated in your article) has some commonalities with Husserl and phenomenology. — Tom Storm

With apologists it always comes down to "you must not understand" if you disagree with them and/or present arguments they can't cope with — Janus

Dirac's derivation is no more than that. — Banno

The religious temperament is not common among analytic philosophers, but it is not absent. A number of prominent analytic philosophers are protestant, catholic, or jewish, and others, such as Wittgenstein and Rawls, clearly had a religious attitude to life without adhering to a particular religion. But I believe nothing of the kind is present in the makeup of Russell, Moore, Ryle, Austin, Carnap, Quine, Davidson, Strawson, or most of the current professoriate.

The Theological Origins of Modernity, Michael Gillespie — tim wood

Our issue was, what sort of things are numbers? And one answer is that they are real, like trees, sticks and rocks, but that they are in a special world that makes them unavailable for examination in the way that trees and sticks are available. Roughly, Plato's world of forms. — Banno

Forms...are radically distinct, and in that sense ‘apart,’ in that they are not themselves sensible things. With our eyes we can see large things, but not largeness itself; healthy things, but not health itself. The latter, in each case, is an idea, an intelligible content, something to be apprehended by thought rather than sense, a ‘look’ not for the eyes but for the mind. This is precisely the point Plato is making when he characterizes forms as the reality of all things. “Have you ever seen any of these with your eyes?—In no way … Or by any other sense, through the body, have you grasped them? I am speaking about all things such as largeness, health, strength, and, in one word, the reality [οὐσίας] of all other things, what each thing is” (Phd. 65d4–e1). Is there such a thing as health? Of course there is. Can you see it? Of course not. This does not mean that the forms are occult entities floating ‘somewhere else’ in ‘another world,’ a ‘Platonic heaven.’ It simply says that the intelligible identities which are the reality, the whatness, of things are not themselves physical things to be perceived by the senses, but must be grasped by thought. If, taking any of these examples—say, justice, health, or strength—we ask, “How big is it? What color is it? How much does it weigh?” we are obviously asking the wrong kind of question. Forms are ideas, not in the sense of concepts or abstractions, but in that they are realities apprehended by thought rather than by sense. They are thus ‘separate’ in that they are not additional members of the world of sensible things, but are known by a different mode of awareness. But this does not mean that they are ‘located elsewhere,’ or that they are not, as Plato says, the very intelligible contents, the truth and reality of sensible things. — Thinking Being - An Introduction to Metaphysics in the Classical Tradition, Eric D. Perl, p28

And we build on this. "7" counts as seven, and with a few extras we can write "3+4=7". These count as numbers. — Banno

Ask Wittgenstein how it is with value experiences. — Constance

6.41The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is and happens as it does happen. In it there is no value—and if there were, it would be of no value.

If there is a value which is of value, it must lie outside all happening and being-so. For all happening and being-so is accidental.

What makes it non-accidental cannot lie in the world, for otherwise this would again be accidental.

It must lie outside the world.


6.42 Hence also there can be no ethical propositions.

Propositions cannot express anything higher.


6.421It is clear that ethics cannot be expressed.

Ethics is transcendental.

(Ethics and aesthetics are one.) — Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

It's an interesting area because it ties in with the radical transformation of views on freedom. Freedom goes from primarily being defined in terms of actuality (the ability to do the Good) to bring primarily defined in terms of potency (the ability to choose anything). This has ramifications throughout philosophy. — Count Timothy von Icarus

If a god created us did it have this chatter in mind? If we are organic beings formed by the evolution of cells, is the chatter a formation of cells? — ENOAH

So I agree that humans have a running narrative of reasons and explanations and goals and emotional responses, etc. etc. that come from having a linguistic-based mind, and the dynamics of our brain. This indeed does make us distinct from other animals. However, I don't see how it could ever be different for the human animal. — schopenhauer1