Spiritual disciplines and philosophy conceived in this way are not concerned with discussion and the pursuit of discursive truth so much as they are concerned with altering consciousness and experience. — Janus

I'm reading an excellent book, Schopenhauer's Compass, Urs App. Schop was extremely critical of the other German idealists - specifically Schelling and Fichte (not Kant, but as is well known, scathing about Hegel) - for confusing mysticism and philosophy. He fully recognises the reality of higher consciousness - he called it 'better consciousness' - as being outside time and space, but he says that philosophy as a rational discipline can't be aimed at that. He accuses Schelling and Fichte of confusing theology with philosophy. Schop is saying that philosophy's task is purely critical - in the Kantian sense of making us aware of the limitations of discursive reason. It 'drops you at the border', so to speak.

But at the same time, Schopenhaur's is a 'soteriological' aim - liberation from cyclic existence, very much in accordance with his reading of the Upaniṣads, of which a Persian edition was one of his main sources of inspiration. He's resolutely atheist throughout, although not in the sense of 20th c atheism, because he still recognises, in fact strives for, 'the sacred'. So I would think that he certainly acknowledges the reality of 'the imperishable', although I'm only up to the first few chapters of the book.

What kind of a thing is it [mind]? I'm not sure.... — T Clark

What I said :-)

It's just hard to engage with you because every argument you present quickly morphs into all of your arguments. We start out changing an oil filter and end up taking apart the whole car. — Srap Tasmaner

Fair point, I'll take that on board.

I've never not been working in a mixed environment where science and philosophy are complementary rather than antagonistic. I just don't recognise this culture wars divide at the coalface of ideas. — apokrisis

Fair enough, but I have observed in your case that your approach to philosophy has been that it provides alternatives to Cartesian dualism for the purpose of modelling and understanding organic life, rather than for its own sake. I mean, your over-arching model of the primacy of the second law of thermodynamics basically reduces life to an efficiency measure, don't it? :wink:

Pop culture is IMO way too visceral-mythic for any 'serious' intellectualizing. — plaque flag

I learned in Buddhist studies about 'picture men' in traditional India, who used to travel from village to village with scrolls illustrating scenes from the Indian epics - the Mahābhārata and it's various sub- narratives. They would put up a stand under a tree and put the scrolls up on them, entertaining the populace who would all gather around to hear their telling of the great mythic stories. I suppose early Greek drama was another example. Heck, even today the cinemas are full of 'super-hero' stories which project archetypal themes (per Joseph Campbell) using unbelievably realistic CGI. It's all culture. It all filters through (although unfortunately a lot of today's is junk.)

there are people like Sellars and Brandom and Braver, to name just a few. — plaque flag

Fair enough, although I think it's fair to say that the bulk of their work is directed principally or solely to their academic peer group. I don't know if much of it will filter through to popular culture.

We aren't outside of it, and it isn't in us. Co-given, entangled. — plaque flag

Right. And would you agree that this insight is more typical of phenomenology and existentialism than Anglo philosophy?

I'm open to being convinced there's another approach available, but I'll tell you what's not going to work for me, that it just comes down to choosing sides. — Srap Tasmaner

Fair enough. But aside from a few places in the thread about the argument from reason - particularly in the discussion about the distinction between physical causation and logical necessity - a lot of what you write in response to my posts is not to me, but about me, presumably as a demonstration to others of what you regard as my bad form. This thread has sure seemed like that. I acknowledge that my general stance is contrarian with regards to philosophy as it is nowadays understood and taught, and I also readily acknowledge the shortcomings of my education and training with respect to many subjects that are discussed here. But I will continue to try and make the anti-materialist case.

In some ways, proper science is an escape from the treacherous mud of the most radical thinking (which turns like a snake to bite itself constantly.) — plaque flag

You're no doubt aware that the Hegelian (and generally German) approach to science is radically different from modern scientific method - the Germans have that nice word, 'Geisteswissenschaften', often translated as 'sciences of the spirit', for which English doesn't have an equivalent. Of course, Hegel's work collapses under the weight of its own verbiage and I don't want to involve discussion of him, other than to say that, unlike modern scientific method, his notion of science includes consideration of the nature of the subject, in a way that, up until recently, modern scientific method has not. It is beginning to change with systems theory, embodied cognition, phenomenology, and so on, but that implicit exclusion of the subject is still influential in science and culture.

But this is more “bad history”. — apokrisis

I don't agree. This sense of the division of self-and-other, the Galilean division of primary and secondary attributes, the Cartesian division of mind and matter - these are huge influences in today's culture and commentary on them is voluminous. It is not bad history, it's simply history.

the problem is not the application of history to philosophical argument. — apokrisis

You're quite right. The problem is the attempt to apply scientific criteria to philosophical problems.

A: We should take the car.
B: Train.
A: Why should we take the train? — Srap Tasmaner

You don't make any point by trivialising the argument. The issues at stake are considerably more subtle, and more significant, but I won't try to explain them again.

I sometimes think we tend to kneel beneath the god of engineering. — plaque flag

Only sometimes? :lol:

The birth of analytic metaphysics placed the meaning of words and their correspondence to the state of things as the essential character of the relationship between thought and being, or action and environment. The problems of metaphysics thus become articulated in terms of the connection between language items and world items. ...

Thus focussing upon whether the cat is on the mat, as a paradigmatic example of the form of truth seeking dispute, brings with it a set of assumptions that render alternative problematics of the connection between thought and being next to impossible. They cannot be justified in the tacitly demanded terms. — fdrake

:100: I say this is because the 'illusion of otherness' is a deep but unstated premise in post-Enlightenment philosophy, arising with the ascendancy of individualism. Natural philosophy, in that context, acts with the implicit presumption of the division of subject and object - hence the emphasis on objectivity and replicability as the sole criteria, assuming a correspondence theory of truth. The profound underlying difficulty is, however, that we're not actually outside of, or separate to, reality, as such - an awareness which is found throughout phenomenology and existentialism (not to mention non-dualism) but rarely, it seems to me, in Anglo philosophy.

You posed a question, then you said (presumably to me):

I'll leave you to address the question in your own way — Srap Tasmaner

So I went ahead and did that. Your response was:

what effect was the history of the history of ideas supposed to have on me? — Srap Tasmaner

So, no response to anything I actually said, but then,

For purposes of this thread, I don't care what you think — Srap Tasmaner

The content of the argument is of no interest to me — Srap Tasmaner

So in response to:

Am I being clear enough? — Srap Tasmaner

Answer: definitely not, but don't go to any further trouble.

Let's say I believe we ought never to have given up belief in and worship of the Greek gods. — Srap Tasmaner

Why did you choose that as a hypothetical example? Is it because you have me pegged as a religious-or-spiritual type, therefore this must be typical of the way that I think? Because otherwise, I'm completely failing to see your point, although I suspect that finally your actual motivation is coming out.

So, to go back to your original post:

So here's the question: what sort of point are you making when you post something like this? Is it only sociological? — Srap Tasmaner

No - it's soteriological. My claim is that, from the outset in Plato, down to the end of the 19th century, there was a soteriological element in Western philosophy. (Of course, that is a rather obscure and academic word, so I should define it: concerned with doctrines of salvation. So the response might be, what is that, if not an outmoded religious myth? Hence the comparison with belief in the Greek gods, right?)

To which my reply is that it is the way that religion developed in Western history that makes it susceptible to that criticism. My view is that, regardless, there is something real and important in the religious consciousness, and that includes the religious aspects of philosophy, which for many reasons has been forgotten, misunderstood or abandoned in the transition to modernity (hence my criticism of 'scientism'.) In the most abstract form, stripped as far as possible of the accretions of religous dogma, that is what I referred to as 'the vertical dimension' of existence. There is a qualitatively real good, if you like. If you recall the Robert M. Pirsig book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, a lot of it concerned re-discovering a metaphysic of quality. I will go further and say that encoded in the traditions of philosophical spirituality, there is a vision, or an intuition, of a different domain of reality, or a different way of seeing reality, which reveals that qualitative realm. I suppose it is that which puts me on the religious side of the ledger, although I would describe it more in terms of philosophical spirituality. The point of the history of ideas is to trace the geneology of that understanding, which has considerable provenance.

As it happens, Wayfarer is hostile to explanations of an agent holding a belief in terms of causes of any kind; beliefs are explained solely in terms of reasons — Srap Tasmaner

If someone frequently responded to my posts with sarcasm, hostility and pointless emojis then that would cause me to believe that their posts were not worth the bother of responding to. I would think of that as an example of a rational cause. If my thinking was however influenced by an underlying neurological disorder or by intoxication, then I would not regard that as a rational act, but the consequence of a physical influence. This is based on the distinction between logical necessity and physical causation, which I think is perfectly defensible. Do you think that is a valid distinction? Furthermore, that the only empirical examples we can observe of such rational causation must be exhibited by rational agents.

As for historical and social causes - it is of course true that we are to some degree influenced by all of those as well, but I would dispute that we're wholly determined by them.

The history of an idea can also show where a tradition when wrong in ways that simply looking at where the current tradition is today can't. — Count Timothy von Icarus

As it happens, that is very much my reason for invoking it.

You understand the historical development in terms of a simple realist vs idealist ontology. And you have picked a side that ought to be monistically the winner in the end. So you seek to assimilate Peirce to that reading of the necessary answer to final philosophy. But you don't really appreciate Peirce as in fact the step that finally helps resolve the realism vs idealism dichotomy in Western metaphysics. Your history telling is wishful rather than factual. — apokrisis

I see 19th century idealism as representative of the maintream in Western philosophy. But then, idealism has re-appeared in cultural discourse in part due to the discoveries of early 20th c science, although as Banno points out, it is still very much a minority view in academic philosophy.

The original context was the suggestion on my part that Apokrisis has adopted those aspects of C S Peirce which are relevant to biology (namely, semiotics) in support of an overall naturalist philosophy. To which I pointed out that Peirce is often categorised as an idealist or even as a metaphysical philosopher - according to the SEP entry, one in the 'grand tradition' of Aristotle, Spinoza, et al. This historical point is that at the time Peirce was active, metaphysical idealism was predominant in philosophy generally, both in the US and Britain, but that with the emergence of the 'ordinary language' philosophy, Russell and Moore's rejection of idealism, etc - all of which is or should be common knowledge - that the idealist or metaphysical aspects of Peirce have become deprecated in favour of a broadly scientific (dare I say scientistic) attitude to philosophy.

The key philosophical point I wanted to make centred the quote by Edward Conze, referring to the characteristics of what is described as perennial philosophy, and also on the loss of the sense of their being a qualitative dimension and 'degrees of reality'. I feel these are important philosophical questions although nobody seemed to take issue with them.

Overall, another illustration of 'folks talking past on another'.

It's not though. That goes against the norms of reason we usually follow in argument — fdrake

But he asked the question! Srap Tasmaner asked me, quoting from one of my posts, 'why should we bother with history of ideas' and said it was a 'genuine question'. To which I did my best to provide a genuine answer. And the response was:

All very interesting I'm sure, but what effect was the history of the history of ideas supposed to have on me? — Srap Tasmaner

So - how can I answer that? Can I guess 'what effect it is supposed to have'? All I can do is try and explain why I think history of ideas is important. The impression I got was that either I failed to make the case that the history of ideas was important, or that the questioner wasn't really interested in eliciting an answer in the first place.

Further to that, I thought my initial response raised some pretty fundamental points about the question, the answer to which was basically 'so what'? So what flaming hoops did I fail to jump through?

@schopenhauer1 - as you’re interested Schopenhauer I will mention a 2014 publication I’m reading, Schopenhauer’s Compass, by Urs App. ‘Schopenhauer was the first major Western philosopher with a deep interest in Asian philosophies and religions. His favorite book was a Latin version of the Indian Upanishads-the Oupnek'hat-that he used to call the consolation of his life and death. Urs App explains in this book for the first time why Schopenhauer regarded this work as the most excellent in the world, how it is connected with the birth of his philosophy, and what caused him to list it even ahead of Plato and Kant as his major inspiration. This groundbreaking new introduction to Schopenhauer's thought and its genesis explains the role of Indian, Persian (Sufi), Neoplatonic, and mystical ideas as well as meditative states ("better consciousness"). But its focus lies firmly on the central dynamic at the heart of Schopenhauer's entire work: the inner compass that gave it its overall direction.’

I’m still in the introductory chapters, where there’s a detailed analysis of what Schopenhauer thought was wrong with Schelling and Fichte - mainly that their work is ‘theology pretending to be philosophy’, which seems apt. Also details his early influences from a couple of German mystical philosophers whose names are largely forgotten now. It really provides a great insight into Schopenhauer’s life and development.

I mainly agree with your analysis.

For me, concerns about climate change, pollution and other environmental factors, as well as issues such as worker pay, home affordability, wealth equality and issues such as my OP, are all examples against the idea of "progress at any cost". It's a bit more nuanced than being "against" consumerism, but could you explain how such ideas fit into your perspective? — Judaka

I think business, politics and science all need to involve themselves in this. It's something deeper than culture - it's an ethos, a life philosophy which recognises an alternative to constant entertainment and consumerism. I'm sure that's not necessarily an easy thing to pursue. And to be totally upfront, I'm no advertisement for such qualities, I'm a retirement-age boomer not particularly frugal in my ways. I think the younger generations, the Greta Thalburgs and her ilk, are the ones who will be driving it. And you can probably find examples of corporations attempting to embody such an ethos. (After all, Steve Jobs, who founded Apple Computer, has been described as a 'billion-dollar hippie'.) But there are also plenty who don't. Reminds me of one of those great 1960's slogans, 'be the change you want to see in the world.'

YouTube has many videos on minimalism, from personal journeys in anti-consumerism, to lengthy documentaries on the benefits of minimalism. — Tom Storm

Good tip, I'm going to look into that. I'm ideally placed to do it, really, just got to find the enthusiasm for it.

Source text. Scroll down to (1).

It seems that Kant is arguing that the space and time we perceive is not the space and time that exists independently of us. — RussellA

Correct, that’s exactly what he’s arguing.

Einstein thought Kant was wrong on that. Then again, he also thought quantum physics were wrong, on very similar grounds.

‘Does the moon….’ Etc

:up: :pray:

I think that Mr Watts was also influenced by Advaita Vedanta. — Existential Hope

:100: And also Zen. He was very popular in my youth (long time ago now) and has also enjoyed an Internet renaissance, not least because of the efforts of his son Mark Watts who has managed his intellectual property since Alan Watts’ untimely death from alcoholism in his 50’s.

Trey Parker, one of the guys behind South Park, also made a whole bunch of animations set to Watts’ Richard Burton-like voice, such as this one:

Something is monstrous if the "disturbance" happened from the state of Nirvana. Why the disturbance? — schopenhauer1

Believe it or not, Alan Watts has a popular interpretation of this idea. I tossed it to the oracle who responded: According to Watts, the Divine, which can be understood as the underlying essence of all things, is omnipresent and all-encompassing. However, in order to truly experience and know itself, the Divine must temporarily forget its true nature and engage in the illusion of otherness. This is accomplished through the process of incarnation, where the Divine takes on the form of individual beings and forgets its true nature (cf Plato ‘anamnesis’.)

Through this self-imposed limitation, the Divine embarks on a journey of self-discovery, seeking to find itself within the vast diversity and multiplicity of life. The game of hide-and-seek symbolizes this process, as the Divine "hides" from itself in order to eventually "seek" and reunite with its true nature.

Watts often emphasized the importance of realizing one's inherent connection to the Divine and breaking free from the illusion of otherness. He suggested that by recognizing the underlying unity of all existence, individuals can awaken to their divine nature and experience a profound sense of interconnectedness and oneness. (cf Dalai Lama to hotdog salesman: ‘Make me one with everything’. Also recommend the Michael Douglas 1997 movie, The Game, which reflects this kind of theme in the idiom of California’s ‘human potential’ movement. )

With respect to the convergences between Platonism, and Greek philosophy generally, and Buddhist and Hindu traditions, there was a ground-breaking book published around 2009, The Shape of Ancient Thought, by Thomas McEvilly, an art historian. It is a very long and detailed series of essays which argues that the convergences are due to exchange of ideas along the ancient Silk Routes (another example being the influence of Buddhism on Pyrrho, source of Pyrrhonian scepticism.) I think he successfully refutes the mainstream dogma that these two cultures developed in complete isolation from each other.

A brief introduction by the author (since deceased) can be viewed below.

Buddhism's central idea of the transience of the world, and the attainment of non-being — schopenhauer1

Not so. That is a nihilist view. Nirvāṇa is beyond the vicissitudes of existence but is not mere non-existence. This is laid out in a very long text in the Pali canon called the Brahmajala Sutta (the doctrine of the net of views), which details the various kinds of false nihilist view (that being one) and false eternalist views (the idea that one can be perpetually reborn in fortunate existences.)

Animals don't seem to have a need for this. — schopenhauer1

Because they haven’t passed the threshold of self-awareness and all that this entails and implies. Note that in the Buddhist tradition, with the implicit acceptance of the reality of re-birth, re-birth in the animal realm is regarded as both likely and extremely unfortunate, as animals are stupid and incapable of understanding dharma. (Don’t ask me how they get out of that condition, I’ve never been able to figure that out.)

The system with the metabolism. Don't pretend this is some tricky mystery. — apokrisis

So you would agree, then, that the appearance of organisms is also the appearance of intentionality and agency?

The model imposes its mechanical constraints in top-down fashion so as to ratchet the biochemistry in the desired direction. — apokrisis

Desired by whom? Actually your description contains other terms implying intentionality - life evolving its complexity, neurons that play tricks, and so on. There seems an implied agency here, which is noticeably at odds with the wording of the book’s description. Not to mention ‘top-down constraints’ - if molecular structures are ‘the bottom’, what is the origin of the ‘top down’ constraints?

I've told you I am a holist and not a reductionist and therefore don't buy the causal cop-out that is supervenience. — apokrisis

How do you see that book you refer to, Life’s Ratchet, as fitting into a holistic point of view? From the jacket copy:

Life is an enduring mystery. Yet, science tells us that living beings are merely sophisticated structures of lifeless molecules. If this view is correct, where do the seemingly purposeful motions of cells and organisms originate? In Life's Ratchet , physicist Peter M. Hoffmann locates the answer to this age-old question at the nanoscale.Below the calm, ordered exterior of a living organism lies microscopic chaos, or what Hoffmann calls the molecular storm, specialized molecules immersed in a whirlwind of colliding water molecules. Our cells are filled with molecular machines, which, like tiny ratchets, transform random motion into ordered activity, and create the purpose that is the hallmark of life. Tiny electrical motors turn electrical voltage into motion, nanoscale factories custom-build other molecular machines, and mechanical machines twist, untwist, separate and package strands of DNA. The cell is like a city, an unfathomable, complex collection of molecular workers working together to create something greater than themselves. Life, Hoffman argues, emerges from the random motions of atoms filtered through these sophisticated structures of our evolved machinery. We are agglomerations of interacting nanoscale machines more amazing than anything in science fiction. Rather than relying on some mysterious life force to drive them, as people believed for centuries, life's ratchets harness instead the second law of thermodynamics and the disorder of the molecular storm.

Isn’t that a reductionist (i.e. bottom-up) model?

what effect was the history of the history of ideas supposed to have on me? — Srap Tasmaner

That’s up to you. In the context that started this dialogue, I claimed that C S Peirce was part of the generally idealist attitude of the philosophy of his day. Per the SEP entry:

This notion of all things as being evolved psycho-physical unities of some sort places Peirce well within the sphere of what might be called “the grand old-fashioned metaphysicians,” along with such thinkers as Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Spinoza, Leibniz, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Whitehead, et al. Some contemporary philosophers might be inclined to reject Peirce out of hand upon discovering this fact. Others might find his notion of psycho-physical unities not so very offputting or indeed even attractive. What is crucial is that Peirce argued that mind pervades all of nature in varying degrees: it is not found merely in the most advanced animal species.

This pan-psychistic view, combined with his synechism, meant for Peirce that mind is extended in some sort of continuum throughout the universe. Peirce tended to think of ideas as existing in mind in somewhat the same way as physical forms exist in physically extended things. He even spoke of ideas as “spreading” out through the same continuum in which mind is extended. This set of conceptions is part of what Peirce regarded as (his own version of) Scotistic realism, which he sharply contrasted with nominalism. He tended to blame what he regarded as the errors of much of the philosophy of his contemporaries as owing to its nominalistic disregard for the objective existence of form.

But that this aspect of Peirce is routinely deprecated as incompatible with naturalism. I think it is at least germane to the OP.

(BTW a rather good Medium essay on current idealist philosophy came up in my feed just now. Don’t think it’s paywalled although I am a subscriber.)

So here's the question: what sort of point are you making when you post something like this? — Srap Tasmaner

Thanks for picking up on that. First of all, why is that paragraph 'weirdly factually wrong'? What exactly is wrong with it?

The history of ideas is a recognised academic sub-discipline, often associated with comparative religion. As I think I might have mentioned, it is associated with a 1936 book The Great Chain of Being: A Study in the History of an Idea, Arthur Lovejoy. The title conveys the gist well enough, it concerns the idea of ancient provenance of the heirarchical nature of being, the 'scala natura', extending from minerals at bottom, up through vegetative, animal, human, angelic, with the One/God at the top of the heirarchy, cascading or emanating the lower levels. (It is actually rather a turgid read, by the way.) I am of the view that the loss of the sense of there being a vertical, qualitative dimension of being, is a real loss, which has given rise to the 'flatland' or 'one-dimensionality' of modernity (note this paragraph about how even up to the 17th century philosophy accepted that there are degrees of reality. )

I learned about history of ideas as a discipline through Comparative Religion which was the subject of my undergraduate degree; one of our lecturers was adept in that approach, and we also read quite a bit of Mircea Eliade, the influential scholar of religion, who has a lot to say on it. It is also a theme in anthropology, which I studied alongside comparative religion (indeed anthropology and sociology of religion, Max Weber and Peter Berger, is another contributing sub-discipline). Then there were scholars such as Joseph Campbell, Huston Smith, Ninian Smart, and others, who cover world religions and also touch on the important themes of the philosophia perennis (a term coined by Leibniz denoting the idea that there is a current of perennial wisdom which surfaces in diverse world wisdom traditions.) I will also mention that I started my undergrad degree with a reading of Russell's HWP, which of course is very much an extended essay in history of ideas.

Another scholar I was introduced to was Edward Conze, a 20th century Buddhologist and likewise historian of ideas. He has this to say in an essay on Buddhist philosophy and its European parallels:

Until about 1450, as branches of the same "perennial philosophy, " Indian and European philosophers disagreed less among themselves than with many of the later developments of European philosophy. The "perennial philosophy" is in this context defined as a doctrine which holds (1) that as far as worth-while knowledge is concerned not all men are equal, but that there is a hierarchy of persons, some of whom, through what they are, can know much more than others; (2) that there is a hierarchy also of the levels of reality, some of which are more "real," because more exalted than others; and (3) that the wise of old have found a "wisdom" which is true, although it has no empirical basis in observations which can be made by everyone and everybody; and that in fact there is a rare and unordinary faculty in some of us by which we can attain direct contact with actual reality -through the Prajñāpāramitā of the Buddhists, the logos of Parmenides, the sophia of Aristotle and others, Spinoza's amor dei intellectualis, Hegel's Vernunft, and so on; and (4) that true teaching is based on an authority which legitimizes itself by the exemplary life and charismatic quality of its exponents

This last being the represented in figure of 'the sage' in philosophy. (Incidentally, Kant is sometimes referred to as 'the sage of Konisberg'.)

I suppose I will also mention Alan Watts whose books triggered my interest in this subject, cheifly The Supreme Identity and The Book on the Taboo on Knowing Who you Are. I won't try and recap his ideas in this post other than to say his overall thrust is that modern materialist culture kind of institutionalises or normalises what the Eastern sages would characterise as Avidyā or ignorance. This was of course a counter-cultural attitude.

I'll leave it at that for now, I have family commitments today which will keep me away for the rest of the day but will come back later. Thanks for the question.

Discursive or conceptual cognition operates by casting concrete particulars in symbolic terms, which relies on general concepts or universals. But there is always a gap between the ideal rational cognition made possible by symbolic thought and the concrete totality. — Pantagruel

Very interesting. Doesn't this reflect the distinction between mathematical idealisation and reality? The former allows for complete precision as a matter of definition, of which the reality is always an approximation. (I have in mind the argument from equality in the Phaedo.)

Cassirer characterizes intuition as a consonance of being and knowing which bypasses and transcends discursive understanding. It overcomes the limitations of discursive thought and is the basis of metaphysical cognition. I like this view. — Pantagruel

:100: Old school.

Amazon page, Lawrence Bonjour's Defense of Pure Reason (this was the philosopher mentioned in the OP):

This book is concerned with the alleged capacity of the human mind to arrive at beliefs and knowledge about the world on the basis of pure reason without any dependence on sensory experience. Most recent philosophers reject the view and argue that all substantive knowledge must be sensory in origin. Laurence BonJour provocatively reopens the debate by presenting the most comprehensive exposition and defence of the rationalist view that a priori insight is a genuine basis for knowledge. This important book will be at the centre of debate about the theory of knowledge for many years to come.

I know it's a book that I will probably never get around to reading, but it rings true.

Aren't there political, moral, cultural, economic, social and personal views and ideologies that fall outside the scope of consumerism? Don't people value being able to spend more time with their family, their physical & mental well-being and having free time to spend on hobbies etc? It's possible I misunderstood you, so feel free to clarify if that is the case. — Judaka

Sorry I hadn't noticed this question. See below.

Western nations aren't particularly materialistic, the countries are just generally richer and people can afford more stuff. Isn't that correct? — Judaka

It's not specific to any country - I was referring to modern liberal democratic cultures generally. I'm not anti-democratic or anti-scientific, but at a deep level, liberal democracy is predicated on the idea that material well-being and economic growth is the only meaningful political aim. And in some ways that is true - modernity has lifted massive populations out of agrarian subsistence into relative affluence. India, for example (and also China, although that is not a democracy, but has absorbed many of the aspects of industrial capitalism under single-party control.)

But the fact is that we are moving into a resource-constrained, over-populated world, where it isn't possible that whole populations can consume at the level that the developed world has been taking for granted. But there's no cultural rationale for anything other than that. This is what counter-cultural economics and philosophy has been saying for a long while, but it hasn't really sunk in. In a secular culture, it is difficult to envisage a philosophical rationale for renunciation, which was traditionally associated with ascetic spirituality.

A couple of books on the subject - Prosperity Without Growth Tim Jackson

The Value of Nothing Raj Patel

You have only seized on two words you think you understand - objective and idealism. — apokrisis

Condescension. I'm not here to pass tests set by you.

You make that sound like a complaint. What would you prefer your science to be grounded in? — apokrisis

Like I said - it's a Philosophy Forum. There are distinctions between the subject matters of science and philosophy, although those distinctions tend to be philosophical rather than scientific, meaning not easily discernable according to scientific criteria.

I have noticed with respect to Peirce, that whenever I bring up his categorisation as an objective idealist, you find ways to deprecate that or explain it away as not being what is important about his work. Peirce was active in the so-called 'golden age of American philosophy', roughly contemporaneous with Josiah Royce, William James and Borden Parker Bowne, all of whom were broadly idealist, in keeping with the zeitgeist. That was all to be rejected by the ordinary language philosophers of the 20th century and the ascendancy of scientific naturalism as the 'arbiter of reality'.

Plainly I've been born in the wrong century, although we all have to learn to cope.

I don’t believe in a science of consciousness as a thing. — apokrisis

Right - that's because it's not a thing. Which is what I said.

A lot of what you say is not science, per se, but metaphysics. You're building a general theory of everything, drawing on elements of semiotics, biology, and C.S. Peirce. But ultimately you return to physicalist explanations:

There is dissipative structure and then organisms that ratchet dissipative structure. — apokrisis

We're on a road to nowhere.

How people ever talked themselves into something as nonsensical as eliminativism, I'll never understand, — RogueAI

It’s the only honest form of materialism!

we are forced to stand back-to-back, fending-off the forces of encircling orthodox Scientism. — Gnomon

You might find this analysis of the Chalmers-Koch bet insightful. (The author, Gerald R Baron, is a theistically-inclined philosopher of religion who publishes on Medium. I find his material pretty good quality, see for instance his two previous articles on Arthur Eddington.)

Welcome to Philosophy Forum.

I think of 'intuition' as 'knowing without knowing how you know', which I think is consistent with Bonjour's use. He claims intuition plays a crucial role in the epistemic justification of beliefs, serving as foundational sources of justification, providing immediate and basic support for our beliefs while also recognising that intuitions need to be critically examined and subjected to reflective evaluation to ensure their reliability and avoid potential errors.

In any case, I'm with Bonjour. I take it that he's arguing for a rationalist view which accepts that there are necessary truths. Harman's response seems like typical modern relativism, which basically depends on the hypothetical argument that 'anything can happen' with the implication that there are no necessary truths. The idea of other possible worlds is often cited in support of that view, with the view of reducing what seems necessary truths to contingencies which just happen to be true 'for us'.

Finally, how could you discern if an intuition were really 'a neuron circuit'? Presumably such a circuit will not be labelled 'intuition' so you would have to judge what the 'neuron circuit' encoded or implied or meant by evaluating the data. And any such judgement would be, well, a judgement, which relies on just the kind of intuitive insight that Bonjour is arguing for.

The familiar world of material objects becomes something quite alien once seen from a more properly objectified perspective, with its quantum fields and relativity — apokrisis

Indeed. One of the principle reasons materialism has fallen into disfavor.

Do you agree, then, that psychology, insofar as it is the science of consciousness, is in principle capable of the same degree of precision and objectivity as is physics?

We infer things all the time without seeing them directly — T Clark

Of course. I acknowledged that we can infer that there are minds, but that the mind is not an object for us.

the Large Hadron Collider sends a bunch of particles into another bunch of particles, no one sees the actual collisions, they see readouts on a recording device. — T Clark

Right. And there is controversy about what these particles are, whether they're really particles or actually waves, or excitations in a field. Instrumentalists say, it doesn't matter, shut up and calculate.

But all of that is irrelevant to the question at hand. At least objects - a lump of matter, a marble or a bullet - can be described objectively. You and I can pick it up, weigh it, ascertain its attributes and qualities. But consciousness is nothing like that. You can say to me, I'm depressed, or I'm happy, and I will know what you mean, because I too am a conscious being, and I know what it is like to be conscious or happy, so I will infer that I feel the things that you feel. But none of those qualities are objectively real in the way that bullets or marbles are. I could put an object in a lunar lander and send it to the moon, but there is no way to pack and send a feeling, an emotion. It can only exist as a state of being, but what that being is, is precisely what eludes objective description.

Science – including psychophysics and cognitive neuroscience – can only address empirical givens by definition. — javra

FWIW, I'm in agreement, as I hope is also evident from what I've said above.

Useful crib on scientific method:

Modern science emerged in the seventeenth century with two fundamental ideas: planned experiments (Francis Bacon) and the mathematical representation of relations among phenomena (Galileo). This basic experimental-mathematical epistemology evolved until, in the first half of the twentieth century, it took a stringent form involving (1) a mathematical theory constituting scientific knowledge, (2) a formal operational correspondence between the theory and quantitative empirical measurements, and (3) predictions of future measurements based on the theory. The “truth” (validity) of the theory is judged based on the concordance between the predictions and the observations. While the epistemological details are subtle and require expertise relating to experimental protocol, mathematical modeling, and statistical analysis, the general notion of scientific knowledge is expressed in these three requirements.

Science is neither rationalism nor empiricism. It includes both in a particular way. In demanding quantitative predictions of future experience, science requires formulation of mathematical models whose relations can be tested against future observations. Prediction is a product of reason, but reason grounded in the empirical. Hans Reichenbach summarizes the connection: “Observation informs us about the past and the present, reason foretells the future.”

The demand for quantitative prediction places a burden on the scientist. Mathematical theories must be formulated and be precisely tied to empirical measurements. Of course, it would be much easier to construct rational theories to explain nature without empirical validation or to perform experiments and process data without a rigorous theoretical framework. On their own, either process may be difficult and require substantial ingenuity. The theories can involve deep mathematics, and the data may be obtained by amazing technologies and processed by massive computer algorithms. Both contribute to scientific knowledge, indeed, are necessary for knowledge concerning complex systems such as those encountered in biology. However, each on its own does not constitute a scientific theory. In a famous aphorism, Immanuel Kant stated, “Concepts without percepts are blind; percepts without concepts are empty.” — Edward Dougherty

At issue is the question of how this is applicable to the question of the nature of conscious experience (and remember, that is the question.) It may be asked, where is the rigour seen in scientific analysis, when it comes to the kind of first-person analysis that the objection is suggesting? David Chalmers does actually address this:

To explain third-person data, one needs to explain the objective functioning of a system. For example, to explain perceptual discrimination, one needs to explain how a cognitive process can perform the objective function of distinguishing various different stimuli and produce appropriate responses. To explain an objective function of this sort, one specifies a mechanism that performs the function. In the sciences of the mind, this is usually a neural or a computational mechanism. For example, in the case of perceptual discrimination, one specifies the neural or computational mechanism responsible for distinguishing the relevant stimuli. In many cases we do not yet know exactly what these mechanisms are, but there seems to be no principled obstacle to finding them, and so to explaining the relevant third-person data.

This sort of explanation is common throughout many different areas of science. For example, in the explanation of genetic phenomena, what needed explaining was the objective function of transmitting hereditary characteristics through reproduction. Watson and Crick isolated a mechanism that could potentially perform this function: the DNA molecule, through replication of strands of the double helix. As we have come to understand how the DNA molecule performs this function, genetic phenomena have gradually come to be explained. The result is a sort of reductive explanation: we have explained higher-level phenomena (genetic phenomena) in terms of lower-level processes (molecular biology). One can reasonably hope that the same sort of model will apply in the sciences of the mind, at least for the explanation of the objective functioning of the cognitive system in terms of neurophysiology.

When it comes to first-person data, however, this model breaks down. The reason is that first-person data — the data of subjective experience — are not data about objective functioning. One way to see this is to note that even if one has a complete account of all the objective functions in the vicinity of consciousness — perceptual discrimination, integration, report, and so on — there may still remain a further question: why is all this functioning associated with subjective experience? And further: why is this functioning associated with the particular sort of subjective experience that it is in fact associated with? Merely explaining the objective functions does not answer this question.

I think the moral is that as data, the first-person data are irreducible to third-person data, and vice versa. That is, the third-person data alone provide an incomplete catalog of the data that need explaining: if we explain only third-person data, we have not explained everything. Likewise, the first-person data alone are also incomplete. A satisfactory science of consciousness must admit both sorts of data, and must build an explanatory connection between them. — Can we construct a science of consciousness? David Chalmers

I think that this is what Edmund Husserl was proposing with his model of the 'phenomenological reduction', perhaps @Joshs might comment on that.

Again, I'll reply to you, because dialoging with 180 is like talking to a snarky wall. — Gnomon

Totally hear you on that. But your use of the metaphors of information and information processing introduce many difficulties from a philosophical point of view. My own approach is more oriented around 'history of ideas' and understanding how ideas influence cultural dynamics and entrenched attitudes, leavened somewhat with my engagement with Buddhist praxis. I try and situate what I write against that context. I am not much in favour of 20th century Anglo-American philosophy which overall is oriented around scientific naturalism and armed to the teeth against anything suggesting idealism (although there is a healthy idealist strain in current culture also.)

(The) Materialistic worldview seems to be based on pragmatic scientific Reduction — Gnomon

I'll take a step back. How modern physicalism, naturalism or materialism evolved is, I think, not very difficult to discern. The watershed was René Descartes, and the confluence of his work with Newtonian physics and Galileo's cosmology. This sets up the modern worldview (bearing in mind we're now situated in a post-modern world, but I'll leave that aside for now.) The 'universal science' at the heart of this method, based on precise analysis of measurable attributes using Cartesian algebraic geometery and calculus, is the basis of the success of the modern scientific method. The famous Cartesian description of the mind as 'res cogitans', literally, 'a thinking thing', however, has had calamitous consequences, as it seemed very difficult to establish what, exactly, it means. Meanwhile, the concentration on the purely measurable and quantitative aspects of the universe in the discovery of modern scientific method provided many astounding breakthroughs. Within that context, scientific materialism is the consequence of attempting to apply the very successful methods deployed by science to the problems of philosophy (in the absence of any real insight into what those problems are.) That's it in a nutshell, as far as I'm concerned. (I think in all likeliood, phenomenology and existentialism is far nearer the mark than anglo-american philosophy, but I'm not well-schooled in that either.)

As regards mathematical platonism - I had a minor epiphany about that. It was simply this: that whilst every material object is composed of parts and has a beginning and an end in time, this does not apply to numbers and other mathematical objects (although later I realised that only prime numbers are strictly indivisible.) At the time of this realisation, I thought 'aha! This is why the ancients held mathematics in such high esteem: they're nearer the "unconditioned origin of being"'. And the fact that the intellect is able to grasp these ideas is evidence for a kind of dualism, although not of the Cartesian kind. (I've attempted to follow that thread through the labyrinth, but the subject matter is arcane and difficult, and demands a much greater knowledge of all the classical texts than I will ever have.)

One of my all-time favourite Buddhist texts was subtitled 'Seeking truth in a time of chaos'. Don't loose sight of the fact that modernity - actually, post-modernity - is chaotic. There's a lot of turmoil, vastly incompatible opinions and worldviews all jostling one another for prominence. Learn to live with it, but I recommend not trying to tame the waters. It's beyond any of us to to that.

mind is never an object to us
— Wayfarer

This is certainly not true. There are more than seven billion human minds that are objects to us — T Clark

You never see anyone's mind. You can see their behaviour or hear what they say, but you never see the mind except for in a metaphorical sense.

I may not be able to treat my own mind solely as an object -- though I can surely take it also as an object -- but it's not obvious what the barrier is to me treating your mind as an object of my study, and since it is your mind, not mine, I can only take it solely as an object and never as subject. — Srap Tasmaner

Right. You can treat the mind as an object in a metaphorical sense: 'her mind was the object of my enquiry'; 'the subject's mental state was extremely confused'; 'that individual had a brilliant mind'; and so on. But mind itself is not an object, unlike any of the objects which you will see if you raise your eyes and glance around you. I think this is habitually overlooked or ignored, but it is the realisation behind both behaviourism and eliminative materialism which arise from a very similar insight: that the mind as such is not scientifically tractable in the sense that phenomenal objects are.