I've tried to use the technique in this post:
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/510890

The common view is that pain and pleasure are representations of nervous input. We don't know how awareness and representation work. This view goes back to Descartes with the plucked strings.

There's a contradiction at the base of this view, though, so it's probably a good idea to take it with a grain of salt. — frank

What would be this contradiction?

In mammals, the female is the sex that bears the offsprings. It means they have an organ called a uterus that allows the growth of new individuals of the species, inside the body of the female.

I choose what to measure and how to measure it. But when I do so, that I measure three atoms in a water molecule doesn't depend on my mind, it depends on the water molecule itself. — Andrew M

Using Collingwood's presupposition analysis:

1) You are assuming there is such a thing as "the water molecule itself", as opposed to, say, one single Schrödinger equation describing the whole universe.

2) You are in your mind conceiving ONE such molecule, so you are already counting right from the start.

3) You are assuming that this ONE molecule is composed of atoms that are still somewhat countable within the molecule, rather than, say, thinking of the molecule of water as the result of atoms fusing into a coherent whole described by one single Schrödinger equation.

4) Once you have (unconsciously) assumed this ONE, INDIVIDUATED yet GENERIC molecule of water BREAKABLE into countable pieces, you are then defining the unit of measurement itself (the atom), ie the "countable pieces". The atom itself is a concept. Nobody ever saw one.

5) You are assuming that all molecules of water have the same structure and are composed of the same number of atoms. Chemists actually disagree. In its liquid form, they often write it down as H3O+, and see it as formed of 3 atoms and a half. (with H+ counted it as half an atom of hydrogen).

6) Finally, you are assuming that the counter is English-speaking and uses base 10. A computer would count 11 atoms in a molecule of water. A Frenchman would arrive at the result "trois". So what is the mind-independent number?

Otherwise aren't you effectively saying that the world isn't real, but mind-dependent?

No. If one considers one's own mind as real, then things that are mind-dependent can be perfectly real so the distinction "mind vs real" does not apply.

All I am saying is that numbers are concepts. They are made in the mind. Otherwise, who's counting?

So logic about forms is, basically, logic about things that we investigate naturally. For example, what-is-it-to-be a human being? Well, what differentiates us from other animals is our language and reasoning capabilities. A word signifying that might be "rationality", i.e., what-it-is-to-be a human being is to be a rational animal. So that's a definition. But note that rationality isn't itself something substantial like a Cartesian mind. It is instead a formalization of one class of things (human beings) in terms of a broader class of things (animals), with a differentiating criterion (rationality). — Andrew M

My question is not about how to use logic on forms, but how does logic itself emerge from the geometric (spatial) shape of things.

keep getting the feeling that I need to read what I've already read, yet again — creativesoul

Same here. It is a very original and funny text. I like it a lot. And in fact I am already using his technique (which is similar to 'deconstructing') in analysing Collingwood's own presuppositions. That's how I discovered that he had absorbed more Freud than he cared to say.

So yes, I'd be please to experiment further.

The temptation is to think that because the grammar is the same, the pain is a thing in the way the iPhone is. — Banno

In what way is the iPhone a thing, exactly?

But when you have hundreds and thousands of subjects it’s difficult to believe they’re all lying to troll you. And besides, no one has a reason to call a red apple green. — khaled

It's not to troll, it's to protect themselves.

If they're not lying ... — khaled

There is no reason to assume that people always say the truth. I my experience, they often say a fair share of the truth but rarely everything there is to say.

Sad music makes us sad regardless of our race and culture the same way that joyous music make us, welp, happy. — Nagel

I used to agree with this idea that the emotional charge of a given piece of music was "obvious" or "objective" for all to hear but it is not the case. There are tunes that one listener finds sad and another finds happy. It still surprises me when it happens. So counter-intuitive!

Another interesting experience is the sharp differences of musical taste that can exist between friends. You get to ask yourself: how could anyone in his right mind find this beautiful? Like Collingwood who found the Albert Memorial ugly and struggled to understand how one could find it beautiful.

Who is the political right? — synthesis

The neonazis and their leader who almost toppled the US democracy are extreme right. FAUX News too.

Guess we’ll never know. Sworn to secrecy and all. — Mww

They could tell us but then they'd have to turn us into mindless zombies like themselves.

I've read Spinoza a long time ago. It's not for me.

The problem with obtaining tips.

and I still maintain that — Gregory

And I still maintain that you don't know what you're talking about.

Who’s we? — Mww

The Illuminati.

Per the above example, the quantity of atoms is independent of mind (real), but dependent on the atoms (immanent). So the quantity doesn't have an independent existence. — Andrew M

This is a mistake. Before you can count anything, you have to set the boundaries of what you want to count. Those boundaries are not real, they are postulated, conceived by the person counting.

I think we can do better than Aristotle.
— Olivier5

Maybe, but it's worth noting that Aristotle's project was very different to Descartes' — Andrew M

Supposedly we can also do better than Descartes.

I like the Aristotelian idea of the form-matter duality. It fits with my bio semiotics. It is the shape of molecules that gives them their power. Stericiy. But that's as far as it goes. For instance, I fail to see how to ground logic on forms.

Kaballah makes the attributes be described in 10 ways, and although Spinoza doesn't say that, we still have to understand him with the Jewish culture he was raised in. Speaking of God's attributes in these ways was very Jewish (and foreign to the Catholicism of the time) — Gregory

I don't think so. In the prologue to his Summa Theologia, Thomas Aquinas wrote:

Question 3
De Dei simplicitate
... Potest autem ostendi de Deo quomodo non sit, removendo ab eo ea quae ei non conveniunt, utpote compositionem, motum, et alia huiusmodi. Primo ergo inquiratur de simplicitate ipsius, per quam removetur ab eo compositio. Et quia simplicia in rebus corporalibus sunt imperfecta et partes, secundo inquiretur de perfectione ipsius; tertio, de infinitate eius; quarto, de immutabilitate; quinto, de unitate.

Of the Simplicity of God
Now it can be shown how God is not, by denying Him whatever is opposed to the idea of Him, viz. composition, motion, and the like. Therefore (1) we must discuss His simplicity, whereby we deny composition in Him; and because whatever is simple in material things is imperfect and a part of something else, we shall discuss (2) His perfection; (3) His infinity; (4) His immutability; (5) His unity.


And then he goes on to explore each of these numbered attributes. This is 13th century, and inspired a whole catholic literature about God's attributes.

The Kabbalah revival was barely a century old at the time of Spinoza. Even if Spinoza could have possibly heard of this movement, the Zohar was a secret book, not be to shared around and its sefirot tree was not "in the culture" yet.

Spinoza was also a rationalist who considered the Torah obsolete. He was excommunicated for it. It's a bit rich to see him appropriated by kabbalists.

Right. Spinoza was not a cabalist and would have treated these sorts of things as superstition.

But that's a Jung quote, not a Spinoza quote.

Is there a connection between the sefirot of Kabbalah and Spinoza?

it's easy to start imagining minds and numbers as things with distinct and independent existence. — Andrew M

Yet a water molecule was composed of three atoms prior to the emergence of humans in the universe, violating that dependency. — Andrew M

Aren't you contradicting yourself in those two paragraphs? In the first you say numbers have no mind- independent existence, and then you say the opposite in the second para.

The point for me here is that the Aristotelian (holistic) conception of form and matter is fundamentally different to the Cartesian (dualistic) conception of mind and body. — Andrew M

Sure, and yet there is still a duality here: that of matter and form. No matter without form, no form without matter.

I kind of like the analogy too. It is pointing at a possible direction for an answer, but it doesn't bring you very far. The body already has a form, a structure, which seems quite different from what we call "minds". And if the mind is the form of the body, why does it need to go on holiday every 24 hours? Do wax impressions sleep???

I think we can do better than Aristotle.

IOW, the cogito.

But note that Hacker said that asking what sort of entity a number is is a pernicious question. Which is to say, is it a question that is decidable according to some obvious or accepted criteria, or is it just a matter of deciding in favor of one's preferred philosophy (say, idealism or materialism)? — Andrew M

That is not how I read the word pernicious, which to me implies that there is something untoward in the question. Otherwise all questions of philosophy would be pernicious: they are all about what criteria to use to judge things or categorize them. So "what is a chair?" would be just as pernicious as "what is a number?".

I suspect Hacker has a specific problem with concepts.

So do you, apparently. In your example of the basket of apples, the basket functions as a set, whose cardinality is the number of apples. When you add an apple to the basket, you are adding an element to a set. And a set is a concept.

One's body and mind aren't entities that "work together" any more than the wax "works together" with the impression on it — Andrew M

It does. The impressions change the shape of the wax. Wax accepts impressions, can be impressed. Aristotle chose the example of wax for a reason: because among all the materials that he could think of, wax was the most easily malleable. A piece of wood (xyle in greek, a word which Aristotle often used for his concept of matter) would not "work" as well in this metaphor.

how to interpret the way they lived their lives without some acquaintance with their philosophies. — Joshs

Wittgenstein didn't write that much. There was very little in his prose that Heidegger could have used and I doubt he ever heard of Wittgenstein. In the other hand, Wittgenstein must have known of Heidegger. But one can think of a reason or two why he wouldn't have refered to him. Witt gravitated around the Vienna Circle. Those neopositivists did not fancy phenomenology at all. Also Witt had Jewish roots while Heidegger became a Nazi as early as 1933. This may have hampered collaboration...

the existence of mind and ideas can't be doubted. — RogueAI

Not by minds and their ideas, in any case.

To quite the contrary, he seemed to relish in the discomfort of others.

So was he a 'true gentleman'? That remains unanswered from my vantage point. — creativesoul

Having read two-thirds of the piece, I would like to make the following tentative remarks.

One is that I followed his reasoning and adhered to it, by and large. I share his analysis of presuppositions. I'm saying this just so my critiques below are taken for what they are: sympathetic overall.

You are right that there's lots of anger behind the sleek exterior of his prose. He lashes out at certain notions and thinkers in ways that sometimes may antagonize. I do the same here, often, so shouldn't I agree with his style?

The first element of response I find to his polemic tone is that this is an essay, and an essay is brief, written fast, and polemical. It's the nature of the paper and the circumstances of its writing (1940, on a liner sailing to Sydney) that explain the hastiness of some transitions, the approximations here or there, the hurried pace at which the writer proceeds.

The second, perhaps more interesting answer I am trying to figure out now is: Collingwood was on a mission. He took the fate of Western civilization very seriously, one of his assumptions was that it was threatened, and another that western civilization was grounded in good, systematic, logical thinking. Hence his defence of logic and metaphysics is ultimately a defense of civilization.

There is a parallel with Popper writing his defense of liberalism, the Open Society and It's Enemies during the war, in New Zealand. He too is dead serious about the philosophical enemies of liberal, western civilization, which he calls (or idealised as) the open society. And it is easy to understand why. Funny though that Popper lambasts Aristotle in his defense of liberalism, and tends to deride metaphysics as unempirical hence useless, in a facile and superficial way which Collingwood rightly ties to a trope from renaissance anti-scholastic thinking, while trying to rehabilitate poor Aristotle... So the two interpretations are radically at odd with one another.

Any attempt to draw a broad brush macro picture of the history of philosophy and tie this to the situation at the onset of the second world war is bound to get some details wrong. It is bound to be polemical, and urgent in tone. And it is bound to be highly biased.

One could ask whether the question "arises". It presupposes that 1940's geopolitics can be usefully explained or understood as a moment in the development of philosophy, and that philosophers contributed to it... Collingwood thought so and I agree, but my villains are not exactly his. E.g. I agree with Popper that there was a strong element of power-fetishism in Hegel, and that Marxism also contributed in a roundabout way (Mussolini and Hitler copied the mass organization system invented by the communists for instance).

I would add that from Luther to Schopenhauer and beyond, there is no shortage of illiberal German thinkers, rabbid antisemitists, nationalists and other complaisant believers in the superiority of German culture. It is perhaps not a coincidence that Germany was such a highly philosophical country AND YET failed at democracy. Or that Heidegger was a member of the Nazi party. Perhaps a certain strand of German (and other) philosophers did contribute to the rise of Nazism.

Collingwood seems to be faulting other people. Mainly other professors in Oxford, or perhaps also in Cambridge. And beyond of course... broad brush it is, his "enemies" are far less defined than Popper's.

Long story short, RGC is arguing that positivism is the ghost haunting Europe. I am broadly sympathetic to this POV but I agree he's overstating it

To come back to your point, his anger is not focussed enough for a true gentleman, I agree.

One striking contradiction I noted is in his relation to psychology. He is careful to state that it is valid as a science of feelings but not as a science of thought, which is logic and other 'criterioligical sciences'. But when he attacks the anti-metaphysicians, one type after another (ch. XIII), he repeatedly makes use of fear and even unconscious fear as a factor explaining their thought, as expressed in their books. And later on, in chapter XVI he comes back to similar argument about the fear of metaphysics.

In doing so he recognizes implicitly that feelings and emotions can alter and even motivate even our highest philosophical thoughts. Therefore, 1) a science of feelings would be tightly connected to a science of thoughts, not independent, and 2) beside logical presuppositions something else shapes our conscious thoughts: unconscious desires, fears and phobia. The very thesis of Freud...

Talking about explosive joy, la Vie en Rose, from the same era as Trenet, is here played by Cyrille Aimée and the Emmet Cohen Trio. The music is as deep and surprising as her cleavage.

"The greatest enemy of Truth and Wisdom (philosophy) is the Tooth of Wisdom. If it aches, you can't think straight." - Ashleigh Brilliant — god must be atheist

This guy is err... brilliant.

The cultural debt to Trenet is acknowledged in this documentary, where generations of French singers speak of him, and sing his songs. It's not a biopic, more a tribute. I am at 10:00 mn, they go on to discuss love and sex ... but don't even explain he was gay. Cocteau was his pygmalion early on.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UROJR63Nv1Q

Juliette Greco drops the bomb at 18:45: C'était une période d'interdis. Pour ne pas paraître éféminé, il falait être le "fou chantant".


Charles Trenet, by Jean Cocteau

his light, irreverent lyrics express a joie de vivre typical in French popular music produced during the late 1930s... — Amity

He largely invented this genre, this mix of poetry and optimism that others started to copy. Until Trenet, the scene was dominated by realist songs about working class life, to simplify a bit. You had to be moody to be successful, or so was the cliché. When he started to perform his songs, aged 20 or so, he was fairly unique. Joie de vivre doesn't even start to describe the explosive hilarity and frantic marvelling that he displayed in his shows and songs. They called him le fou chantant.

What does Luke mean by 'private' that I've thus far misunderstood. — Isaac

Something like: there's no such thing as telepathy. You're not Luke, you don't really know what he feels or thinks, you only know what he reports to you, and he could chose to report or not whatever he fancies.

La Mer by Julio Iglesias — Amity

Charles Trenet reinvented la chanson francaise. There is an era before him and another after him.

That you disagree with my thinking about numbers doesn't prove I am wrong, though. You don't actually argue a rival category: you don't say what type of entity you think a number is, and thus your disagreement with me could be disingenuous. It is for now mere posture, a declaration of intent, if not a knee jerk rejection. Maybe there's no other rationale for it but internet spite...

I am not saying that anyone who disagrees with me is disengenous, just that you will need to argue your case if you want to be taken seriously. "Well, I disagree" is not enough.

A problem can be insoluble if it is badly formulated or has false assumptions. In this case, the mind/body problem has Cartesian assumptions which can be questioned and potentially rejected. — Andrew M

Yes, it is possible to prove that a problem, as stated, makes no sense or allows for no solution. Which amounts to solving it, mind you. For instance the problem of how many unicorns live on earth has been solved, at least to my satisfaction, and the solution is zero.

But I find Hacker's attempt at deconstructing the mind-body problem laughable in its casuistry and naivety. To wit:

But the body that a human being is said to have, when we speak of human beings as having beautiful or athletic bodies, is not the kind of thing that could be said to possess intellectual and volitional abilities. For we speak of a human being’s body thus when we focus upon corporeal characteristics that the human being in question has. These characteristics, the very distinctive range of corporeal features of a human being that we assign to the body he has, are not the kinds of thing that could make up their minds, call things to mind or change their minds. — Human Beings – The Mind and the Body: Wittgensteinian-Aristotelian Reflections PETER M.S. HACKER, OXFORD

And yet people also say that a body has appetites, desires, a preservation instinct, and that in this sense the body wants certain things.

Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point. -- Pascal

The mind a human being has and the body he has are not the kinds of things that could stand in any relationship to each other in the sense in which Jack and Jill (or London and Paris, or a man and his property) may stand in a relationship to each other. The apparent relationship is comparable to the ‘relationship’ between the meaning of a word and the phonemes Into which the word can be analysed – both being abstractions from the meaningful word in use. The English word ‘cat’ has a meaning (it means the carnivorous quadruped Felix domesticus), but does not stand in a relationship to its meaning, any more than I stand in a relationship to my mind.

If the English word 'cat' has a meaning, its relationship to its meaning is one of having... :smirk:

Similarly, my body does not have a mind and does not stand in a relationship to my mind. (I have a mind – and a body; what would my body do with a mind?) One might compare the question of how my mind is related to my body with the question of how the value of five pounds is related to the colour of the paper on which the note is printed. For here too one might explain that the five pound note has a value of five pounds, but the colour of the paper on which the note is printed does not stand in any relationship to the value of five pounds. So the mind-body problem as traditionally conceived simply evaporates.

Again, the color of the five-pound note codes for its value, allows people to quickly spot the note's value, is a proxy for it, so there is a relationship there between color and value.

Likewise, if Hacker has a mind and also has a body, these two entities ARE in a relationship with one another, an indirect one, via the entity called "Hacker". He has both of them so they are two things Mr Hacker happens to have.

One could still validly ask: how come Mr Hacker has a body AND a mind, and how do these two work together (or not) within the entity called "Mr Hacker"? So the problem has not disappeared at all. It was just a slight of hands...

I swapped my innocence for pride
Crushed the end within my stride
Said I'm strong, now I know that I'm a leaver
I love the sound of you walking away, you walking away
Mascara bleeds the blackened tear, oh
And I am cold
Yes I'm cold
But not as cold as you are

I love the sound of you walking away
Walking away, hey, hey
Why don't you walk away?

No buildings will fall down
Don't you walk away
No quake will split the ground
Won't you walk away
The sun won't swallow the sky
Won't you walk away
Statues will not cry
Don't you walk away
Why don't you walk away?

I cannot stand to see those eyes
As apologies may rise
I must be strong, stay an unbeliever
And love the sound of you walking away
You walking away
Mascara bleeds into my eye, oh
And I'm not cold, I am old
At least as old as you are

And as you walk away
My headstone crumbles down
As you walk away
The Hollywood wind's a howl
As you walk away
The Kremlin's falling
As you walk away
Radio Four is static
As you walk away
The stab of stiletto
On a silent night
Stalin smiles and Hitler laughs
Churchill claps Mao Tse-Tung on the back

This board is a reminder that intersubjectivity often fails.

Sei fortunato. — Amity

Da vero.

Radio Freccia
https://play.rtl.it/live/17/radiofreccia-radiovisione/

I'm a French guy in Rome.

I recommend:
Radio Freccia for the undergroundy, rock 'n roll worshipping, free radio vibe (without advertisements)
Dimensione Suono Soft for the 'regular' (commercial) Italian fare (with advertisements)

About the relations between philosophy and music, this TED talk by Cyrille Aimée, in French, cannot be translated here but is really good. Cyrille (accompanied by guitarist Michael Valeanu) shares her experience as a jazz singer facing improvisation. The 3 keys of musical improvisation also are three keys of existence... The music starts at 17:00, after the lecture.

“Con te Partiro” opens up the ears in the morning alright.

Excellent! A hidden gem.