Interestingly, Saint Augustine's semiotics are extremely similar to Peirce's Hegel-inspired semiotics, and his method is De Trinitate is very similar to Hegelian dialectical. I wonder whether either read his work; I imagine Hegel would have as a theology student.

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From a paper I am working on:

Despite being absent in De Magistro, this tripartite structure reappears implicitly in De Doctrina Christiana (426) and De Trinitate (419 or 426), with a much larger role for the Holy Spirit. In De Doctrina, a mature Augustine turns to the problem of the interpretation of the Bible, an issue of paramount importance for his theory of signs. Here we see the Spirit with a key role in the transmission meaning. It is the “implanting of the Holy Spirit,” which “yields the fruit… love of God and neighbor,” and this love is essential to draw the correct meaning from the Scriptures.1 More overtly, it is the “Holy Spirit [who] ministers unto us the aids and consolations [that come from] the Scriptures.”2

Similarly, Augustine, citing Mathew 10:19-20, admonishes those preparing to preach to seek the guidance of the Spirit, that they might understand the will of God.3 Thus, the Spirit has a twin role, both aiding the reader in properly interpreting what they read (a task accomplished solely by Christ in De Magistro), and in guiding the authors of the Scriptures as they infuse the words they set down with meaning. The Spirit helps us interpret the words, while “[Christ] is called the Word of the Father because it is through him that the Father is made known.”4

In this model, the Father is the source of all knowledge, the thing about which all signs ultimately refer, the ground of being; the Son is the Word, the mediating symbol through which all things are known; and the Holy Spirit is the meaning, the interpretant, that which indwells the soul and interprets. Thus, a model based on the Plotinian hypostases, with their necessarily hierarchical nature, gives way to a model where all three parts are equally necessary components for meaning to exist.

Augustine expands this model further in De Trinitate, where he explores how our souls are themselves trinitarian in nature, having been created in the image of God. In Book 11, Augustine describes the process of semiosis using the example of sight. For sight to occur we must have, “the object itself which we see,” “vision or the act of seeing,” and “the attention of the mind.” In Book 8, we see another example that hews even closer to Peirce’s model, where the Trinity is described as a Lover, the Beloved, and the Love between the two. At first glance, this example seems more dyadic than triadic, but it in fact closely parallels Peirce’s triangle of Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness. Firstness is the ground (the Lover/the Father); Secondness is reference or reaction, (the Beloved/the Son); and the thirdness is “that wonderful operation of hypostatic abstraction5 which… furnishes us the means of turning predicates from being signs that we think or think through, into being subjects thought of.”xi

Augustine’s mature semiotics is able to find a distinct role for all the persons of the Trinity, while at the same time De Trinitate shows how the Trinity maps on to essential elements of experience. This shift allows Augustine to explain how signs convey intelligible meanings in a way that avoids having to rely on a necessarily hierarchical Neoplatonic model, while also arguably making Augustine’s model more compelling by tying it to the nature of experience.

Anyhow, also relevant to how Hegel's thought developed is that he read a lot of Christian mystics. I note some similarities here re: self-generation and eternal return/becoming/circularity.

Instead of considering the divine darkness as a final point of rest beyond the Trinity, as Eckhart had done, Ruusbroec identified it with the fertile hypostasis of the Father. The Father is darkness ready to break out in Light, silence about to speak the Word. Having reunited itself with the Word, the soul returns with that Word in the Spirit to the divine darkness. But it does not remain there. For in that point of origin the dynamic cycle recommences: “For in this darkness an incomprehensible light is born and shines forth—this is the Son of God in whom a person becomes able to see and to contemplate eternal life” ( Spiritual Espousals III/1). Ruusbroec’s vision not only leads out of the impasse of a consistently negative theology; it also initiates a spiritual theology of action. The human person is called to partake in the outgoing movement of the Trinity itself and, while sharing the common life of the triune God, to move outward into creation.

-From Light to Light - anthology edited by Louis Dupré and James A. Wiseman

The "darkness" also shows up in Pseudo-Dionysus' "Darkness Above the Light," the Ein Soph of Kabbalah, and the Unground of Jacob Boheme. The influence of mysticism is most clear in the fact that Hegel essentially cribs the first moves in the Greater Logic from Boheme.

If we ask why we should believe that knowledge of our own awakening should give us a key to understanding God, Boehme would answer that God is a conscious being (indeed, the conscious being). But consciousness arises only through opposition. Consciousness is consciousness of something. Furthermore, self-consciousness only arises through the encounter with otherness. It is only through encountering an other that opposes or frustrates me in some fashion that I turn inward and reflect on myself. “Nothing may be revealed to itself without opposition,” Boehme tells us.13 If God is a conscious being, then something that is not God must stand opposed to him. The obvious implication is that God requires creation to be conscious. Further, Boehme’s logic dictates that God could only be self-conscious through his encounter with this other...

It is, in fact, precisely by positing distinction within God that Boehme attempts both to explain God’s self-consciousness, and to uphold the traditional Judeo-Christian doctrine of the transcendence of God. Boehme does very often speak as if God achieves consciousness through creation. And yet equally often he retreats from this, for this position leads to two problems. First, it suggests that prior to creation God is not conscious, which in turn suggests that God, the supreme being, creates under some kind of compulsion – clearly an unacceptable conclusion. In addressing this problem, Boehme walks a fine line, on the one hand positing a dark, unconscious will within God and simultaneously insisting on God’s absolute freedom.

Second, Boehme’s position seems to suggest that creation “completes” or perfects God – another dangerous idea. And this implies, further, that creation is part of the Being of God. In Aurora, Boehme states that “you must elevate your mind in the spirit and consider how the whole of nature ... is the body of God [der Leib Gottes].”14 On the other hand, he tells us elsewhere that “The outer world is not God.... The world is merely a being [Wesen] in which God is manifesting himself.”15 Of course, there is no real contradiction here: Even if the world is God’s body, there is a distinction between the body and the spirit, the animating soul. Nature is God’s body, but the body is not all. In Signatura Rerum (1622), Boehme compares creation to an apple growing on a tree: Obviously, it is not the tree itself, but it is the fruit of the tree.16

And yet questions linger. Isn’t it correct to say that producing the fruit is the telos (end or goal) of the tree, and that with the emergence of the fruit, the tree completes or perfects itself? Yet in the same text Boehme insists that God did not create in order to perfect himself. This leads to a further, deeper question. Boehme makes it clear that nature is an expression of the Being of God, in the sense that the basic principles informing nature are analogous to the aspects of God’s Being. But if nature is an expression of God’s Being, what is God apart from this expression? The unexpressed God would seem to be inchoate, merely potential. In short, incomplete and imperfect. Boehme’s first step in addressing these problems looks typically kabbalistic: He distinguishes between God as he is in himself and God as he appears to us, or God manifest. “God as he is in himself” Boehme calls Ungrund. Literally, this means “Unground” or “Not-ground.” Sometimes it has been translated as “Abyss.” Like the Ein Sof of the kabbalists, Ungrund is completely withoutform or determination of any kind. Grund immediately calls to mind “ground of being,” and this is precisely what we expect God to be. But Boehme’s choice of Ungrund warns us not to predicate even something this indefinite of God.

Indeed, Ungrund is not a being at all. In Mysterium Magnum (1623), Boehme tells us, “In his essence [Wesen] God is not an essence [Wesen].”17 The German Wesen can be translated as “essence” or as “being.” Hence, Boehme may be understood here as saying “God in his essence is not a being” (or, “God in his Being is not a being”). In other words, as he is in himself God is not. In the same text Boehme states, “in the dark nature [within the Ungrund] he is not called God.”18 But how can the supreme being not be a being? How can God not be God? The answer to these riddles is to be found, again, in Mysterium Magnum. Just after telling us that “God in his essence is not a being,” Boehme writes that God as Ungrund is merely “the power or the understanding for being – as an unfathomable, eternal will in which all is contained, but the same all is only one, and desires to reveal itself.”19 Boehme tells us elsewhere that God “hungers after and covets being [Wesen].”20

The only Being that God possesses as Ungrund is becoming: a pure potentiality for becoming a being (i.e., a thing or substance). As Ungrund, God therefore hovers strangely between Being and not-Being. We cannot say, for example, that God as Ungrund “is” in the sense of “existing” in some primitive sense, for “to exist” literally means to stand forth, emerge, become manifest. But God as Ungrund has not done any of that yet. We are faced with what appears to be an unfathomable mystery: Ungrund, as the primal essence of God and the ground/not-ground of all, is and is not. Boehme says of God “in himself,” as Ungrund, “he is nothing and all.”21 While the Ungrund is utterly indeterminate, it contains (potentially) all determinations; it is non-Being, and potentially Being and all beings.

The will to manifest, to become present, can only express itself from a prior condition of concealment or absence. Boehme calls this darkness (Finsternis), whereas the will to manifest is light (Licht). But the darkness is not simply a state of concealment, it is an opposing will or tendency toward hiddenness. There are thus two conflicting wills within God. Boehme also uses the language of “contraction” and “expansion” to describe these wills, and “indrawing” and “outgoing.” The dark will is contraction: God draws into himself, unconscious and refusing manifestation. This is the “negative moment” within God, and it is also obvious that Boehme is describing the psychology of radical selfishness.

What is remarkable here is the idea of negativity within God. For Boehme, God subsumes not just the negative, but absolute negativity: the primal will to close, withdraw, refuse. But, as Pierre Deghaye writes, “Darkness means suffering.”22 God suffers in the dark aspect, as do all beings that are dominated by this quality of selfish, indrawing negativity. But this is a necessary moment in God, and in any being: Beings – of whatever kind – are only individual and substantial by virtue of possessing a “will” to separateness and coherency (i.e., “contraction”). Something is an individual being only in virtue of possessing some aspect, which can change from moment to moment, of hiddenness or absence, out of which it manifests or gives itself. Thus, “closing” or contraction (darkness) is matched by “opening” or expansion (light).

But how does God turn from the darkness to the light? How is this transition made? Through trial by fire. After all, how can there be light without fire? “Fire is the origin of light,” Boehme says.23 This brings us to another aspect of selfish will not touched on earlier: anger. Since Boehme’s methodology is to argue by analogy from human psychology to theology, we must consider the relation of selfishness and anger in an individual human soul. Very often we find that part of the negative psychology of selfishness is a destructive wrath directed at whatever is not the self, at otherness. Indeed, the desire to harm or destroy that which is other simply because it is other is the essence of evil. And, yes, the “absolute negativity” described above as a moment intrinsic to God is, indeed, evil.

Thus, for Boehme, the indrawing, dark will kindles a fire within God, and this fire is God’s wrath or anger (Grimm, Zorn). But just as light emerges from fire, so can love emerge from wrath. In human psychology, this happens when the nihilating wrath that follows the anguish of extreme, solipsistic selfishness essentially exhausts itself. What must occur in God for him to become God, and what can occur in a human soul, is an exhaustion of selfish will, leading to a kind of surrender to the light. The light, again, represents an outgoing will to manifest, to “give oneself.” This surrender is the birth of love (Liebe) within God, but it is also a kind of death.

So far we have discussed two of Boehme’s “three principles,” darkness and light (although as should now be clear, he has multiple ways of describing them). We have seen that these principles conflict with each other, but that this conflict is necessary and ultimately results in a kind of reconciliation. The third principle, in fact, just is the reconciliation of the first two. Deghaye refers to the “perpetual alternation” of light and darkness as itself constituting the third principle, which is also “our universe.”24 Nature as a whole is to be understood as “attunement” or equilibrium of the two opposing principles. But these three principles are also present in every individual being. If Boehme believes that the Being of God involves his expressing himself in the created world, in an other, this is only possible if the other truly isother. As I have said, this is only possible if it is characterized, at the deepest level, by self-will, by the desire to exist for itself. Thus, the dark principle is inherent in the Being of beings; the root of self-will, and the evil that inevitably springs from it, are necessary to existence, and to the self-actualization of God. If God had created all things so that they must turn from darkness to the light, then those things would entirely accord with the light-will of God and would not be truly “other” than him

Jacob Boehme and Christian Theosophy - Magee

Actually reminds me of some interesting stuff from the philosophy of information as well- the idea of lack of ignorance = lack of any suprisal, and thus any information, the way a 1 or 0 of itself, lacks any information, just as an infinite series of just 1s or just 0s does as well. There is definitely something to be written comparing the Science of Logic with information theory.

Sure, that's the dominant modern interpretation of Kant today (at least in English), so it's no surprise that Chat GPT spits that out. What I'm pointing out is that it is unclear if the positions here:

The Critique constantly maintains that bodies exist in space and time, and maintains that we have immediate non-inferential knowledge of them.

Kant is not a strong phenomenalist, in that his position is that there are objects outside the mind.

...are incoherent or contradictory when paired with the rest of his philosophy. That it might be incoherent is a critique offered up by Kant's contemporaries. This is how Prichard, Strawson, Bennett, and Wolff can contend that Kant was a subjective idealist (although I think they are wrong here). "Kant was a Realist not an Idealist," is, of course, still debated, but my point is more about whether he has an opening to call himself a realist without resorting to dogma. I'll allow that I think he does want to be a realist.

So, Kant is an indirect realist of sorts. My question would be: "should he be? Can he justify that position and remain consistent?" I am not sure he can.

(Also: being a realist does not preclude being an idealist. Not all idealism is subjective idealism. Hegel is definitely a realist, but also definitely an idealist. )

Hamann argued that Kant’s entire project labored under a mistaken abstraction, a vain attempt to liberate reason from history, experience, and language. Kant postulated a self-sufficient noumenal realm set apart from everything belonging to the phenomenal realm; one concept generated another, creating arbitrary dualisms: “Receptivity of language and spontaneity of concepts! From this double source of ambiguity, pure reason draws all the elements of its doctrinairism, doubt, and connoisseurship.” Hamann was sarcastic, but also penetrating. He protested that when Kant was finished abstracting, he was actually proud to have nothing but a purely formal transcendental subject, which Hamann called “a windy sough, a magic shadow play, at most.” Hamann countered that Kant’s object, a special faculty called reason, does not exist. What exists are rational ways of thinking and acting in specific languages and cultural contexts. Kant’s Platonism, however, stood in the way of dealing with anything real. This critique was not published until 1800, after Hamann had died; he was sensitive about offending Kant in public. But it had a significant subterranean influence, as Jacobi and Herder mined it for insights.99

Kantian Reason and Hegelian Spirit – Dorrien

And hence we have the rest of German idealism seeing itself as a way to "clean up" Kant's dualism problem here. My view would be that Kant absolutely did not want to fall into subjective idealism, and seems aware of his problems in his revisions.

But to explain the reality of the external world, one has to establish some kind of dualism between subject and object; otherwise objects are not really independent of our subjectivity. Kant’s rich, twisting, turgid, and conflicted wrestling with this problem yielded what Beiser aptly calls “a synthesis of subjectivism and objectivism in transcendental idealism” and a wide array of competing interpretations of what he said, yielding similar readings about the post-Kantian alternatives that succeeded him…

In both editions Kant described the noumenon as the idea of a thing-in-itself that is not an object of the senses and is not positive in any way. Essentially it signified the thought of something in general, in which one abstracts from everything belonging to sensible intuition. A noumenon is a thing so far as it is not an object of sensible intuition. But what kind of thing is that? How can it signify a true object by Kant’s principles? In the first edition, Kant reasoned that for a noumenon to signify a true object distinct from all phenomena, it is not enough to free one’s thought of all conditions of sensible intuition: “I must likewise have ground for assuming another kind of intuition, different from the sensible, in which such an object may be given. For otherwise my thought, while indeed without contradictions, is none the less empty.” Kant admitted that he could not prove that sensible intuition is the only possible kind of intuition. On the other hand, he also could not prove that another kind of intuition is possible: “Consequently, although our thought can abstract from all sensibility, it is still an open question whether the notion of a noumenon be not a mere form of a concept, and whether, when this separation has been made, any object whatsoever is left.”68

In the second edition he wrested more control over his most elusive concept by eliminating the transcendental object, at least in the most relevant sections. Any suggestion that the noumenon has a positive content or sense must be eliminated, he urged. To apply the categories to objects that are not appearances is to assume that some type of intellectual intuition exists. But sensible intuition is the only type that we know, and the Transcendental Analytic made no sense if the categories extended beyond objects of experience. Kant allowed that perhaps there are intelligible entities to which human sensible intuition has no relation. But since the concepts of understanding are forms corresponding to our sensible intuition, it is pointless to speculate on the subject; there is no knowledge. Kant realized that his critics would say the same thing about the thing-in-itself, but he needed the idea of the noumenon to account for the given manifold and the ground of moral freedom. The idea of a thing-in-itself that is not a thing of the senses is not contradictory, he assured. It is crucially important, wholly negative, and a thing of pure understanding.69

This idea cast a long, ironic shadow over modern theology. Kant conceived his unknowable Ding an sich as a brake on metaphysical speculation in philosophy and theology, which it did for Kantians. Yet his dualism of known and unknown worlds also sparked an explosion of high-flying metaphysical systems claiming that the world exists as the externalization of consciousness.

-Kantian Reason and Hegelian Spirit – Dorrien

The second problem is this: is Kant actually progressing critically and undogmatically as he claims? Fichte and Hegel thought not, and this is where they think the problem starts.

On the surface Hegel’s charge that Kant simply assumes that understanding is judgment appears to be too hasty. But closer examination of Kant’s position in the Critique of Pure Reason proves Hegel to be right. Indeed, one of Kant’s strongest advocates, Reinhard Brandt, confirms Hegel’s view. In the First Critique, Brandt writes, “it is assumed as obvious that the understanding is a faculty of knowledge through concepts, [and] that concepts can be used to obtain knowledge only through judgments.”8 Hegel is also right to claim that Kant simply takes over the various kinds of judgment with which he is familiar from formal logic and does not derive them from the nature of understanding itself. Indeed, Kant states explicitly that such a derivation is impossible to provide:

...for the peculiarity of our understanding, that it is able to bring about the unity of apperception a priori only by means of the categories and only through precisely this kind and number of them, a further ground may be offered just as little as one can be offered for why we have precisely these and no other functions for judgment or for why space and time are the sole forms of our possible intuition. (CPR 254/159 [B145–6])

All Kant can say, therefore, is that “if we abstract from all content of a judgment . . . , we find (finden) that the function of thinking in that can be brought under four titles” (CPR 206/110 , my emphasis)…

So far I have suggested that what motivates Hegel in the Logic is the desire for necessity. Like Fichte, Hegel wants to find out how basic categories have to be understood, not just how they have in fact been understood. This can only be discovered, he believes, if we demonstrate which categories are inherent in thought as such, and we can only do this if we allow pure thought to determine itself—and so to generate its own determinations—“before our very eyes” (to use Fichte’s expression).

-Houlgate - The Opening of Hegel's Logic

Fichte maintains that Kant himself “does not derive the presumed laws of the intellect from the very nature of the intellect,” but abstracts these laws from our empirical experience of objects, albeit via a “detour through logic” (which itself abstracts its laws from our experience of objects).16 In Fichte’s view, therefore, Kant may assert that the categories and laws of thought have their source in the spontaneity of the intellect, but—because of the way he proceeds—“he has no way to confirm that the laws of thought he postulates actually are laws of thought and that they are really nothing else but the immanent laws of the intellect.” The only way to confirm this, Fichte tells us, would be to start from the simple premise that the intellect acts—that the intellect is “a kind of doing and absolutely nothing more”—and to show how the laws of thought can be derived from this premise alone.

-Houlgate - The Opening of Hegel's Logic

I guess the point was…better to rob an old word with its altered implications for which a reader might adjust himself, than to manufacture a new one for which he can’t.

Indeed. The problem with making up a new vocabulary is that it acts as a barrier to communications. Although, using existing terms in a specialized, technical sense, especially if it's a compound phrase of multiple words, also tends to clog up our prose and make things less readable. I am not sure what the right play is here.

I originally thought one of the best arguments against the "presuppositionlessness" of Hegel's Greater Logic was that the language he is using necessarily presupposes many things. This brings to mind Nietzsche's critique that we allow the structure of grammar to shape how we think the world should be.

I have since decided that this argument against Kant, Hegel, and others, and the entire "linguistic turn," while it makes some good points, suffers from the tendency to expand theses into a maximalist version of themselves. The evidence for the "Sapir–Whorf hypothesis," the idea that the language that we speak fundementally shapes how we experience the world, turns out to be quite weak. Yeah, you have some statistically significant differences in how speakers of different languages can recall colors based on the way their language divides up the visible spectrum, but the distributions largely overlap and the effect is mild. Eskimos having so many words for snow is better explained by how their language is structured. The "cognitive shaping," of language turns out to look fairly mild. This seems like an instance of making a mountain out of a molehill; the Whorfian view was so readily embraced because people wanted it to be true.

Moreover, modern cognitive science suggests that the systems we use to understand language, to visualize prose, to glean syntax from incoming messages, is exactly the same systems we use for sense perception used in largely the same ways. Visualizing prose is done by running information through the same processing areas that we use for visualizing sight. Disorders like associative agnosia, where people can draw an object they see perfectly but can't recognize what the thing is, or is called, shows how modular cognition is, relying on a bunch of specialized systems.

This says to me that the division between "sense perception," and "language," is overblown, we have bleed through everywhere. Nor does there seem to be one "private language," of thought, but multiple "private languages," for different specialized systems to communicate between one another.

This doesn't counter the post-modern insight that the same messages mean different things to different people. That's true, it's just not true in virtue of the nature of language. The same message, same environments, also mean different things to us at different times to use based on trivial differences like being hungry, our emotional state, etc.

From the very birth of semiotics, with Augustine, there has been the question of how we can possibly communicate when we are all "locked in" to our own phenomenal bubble. Locke sees this same problem. Thus, I don't really think Kant changed much on this front, and fears of his dualism on the grounds that it "cuts us off from one another," seem misplaced. Nor does language "cut us off from one another," quite the opposite. Expressionist semiotics seems to miss that we essentially construct/hallucinate our enviornment, and we use the same natural processes to construct/hallucinate other's views of their enviornment when we communicate with them. It's not a categorical difference.

For example, taking from the SEP article on Belief the following appropriate words: symbol - hot water - mind - particular fact - entities - representationalism - mass of water - memory - accessed- proposition.

We can then put them in one random order and then grammatically connect them to give...

IE, as long as the terminology is appropriate, it is often the role of the reader to make sense of the article rather than the role of the writer.

But you haven't just grammatically connected them after mixing them up, you've kept the semantic meaning roughly the same, or in your later example, flipped the tone. An actually random process wouldn't keep the semantic content largely unchanged, because there are far more ways to throw those words into grammatically correct gibberish than to keep largely the same semantic meanings in tact within them.

I'm not sure if this is magic so much as the trivial fact that words have meanings but that that sentences also carry emergent forms of meaning, and that, by mixing up your words you can write different sentences.

This isn't 'people operating with a different set of facts and constructing their own meanings from them.' That is a phenomena that does exist, but this is more just an example of how language works, a good analogy maybe.

Chaos magic teaches that the essence of magic is that perceptions are conditioned by beliefs, and that the world as we perceive it can be changed by deliberately changing those beliefs.

Only to some degree. I can believe magic will let me drive my car through a wall, but when I try it, I presume my perceptions will not match up to my past belief.

Maybe we are thinking of a different "chaos magic?" Chaos Magic in Liber Null and Psychonaut and other sources I am familiar with I found to be essentially just grifter nonsense. Not that I found it to be all that different from Crowley and Evola in some respects, but then again, I also think those guys were mostly grifters.

The entire modern business enterprise of "magic," seems to rest on a bait and switch between the idea of magic as in "you can control the weather, shoot fire balls, brew love potions, summon demons," and "here is this really obscurantist philosophy. If you are a 'patrician of the soul,' you will find it to be incredibly deep and this proves you are exceptional. If you find it dumb it simply proves you do not understand it and are a plebian of the soul."

I find esoterica to be very fascinating, but boy does it also bring in a lot of predatory folks and obscurantism.

I also might be biased because my limited experience with "esoteric societies," convinced me that their main magical abilities are the transmutation of US dollars into drugs, and drugs into nothing. Which is fine, just not very impressive. I had friends who mastered that from middle school on, but hours of smoking pot and entering "trances," only seemed to give them magical skills vis-á-vis Street Fighter, Mario Kart, and Wayne Gretzky's 3D Hockey, along with an encyclopedic gnosis of horror movies and Dragon Ball Z episodes. Then again, in retrospect, that their girlfriends stuck around for all that... maybe they did have magic they weren't telling me about lol.

The human mind is so hyper-ready and prepared to find meaning in any way possible, that it will find one in the most obtuse and obscure sources. It will anchor in prior knowledge (pace Vygotsky) and use schema to fit into their own umwelt framework.

Sure, but in my experience of Chaos Magic and modern magic more generally, this insight is stretched into farcical territory, where writing down and meditating on sigals can help you with any goal, or you can imbue your sigals with personality until they become daemons, etc.

whatever they are beyond our cognitions of, and cogitations about, them seems to be obviously beyond the scope of our experience and understanding.

But that's exactly what the noumenal world is, and why some philosophers reject it in the first place. Saying our perceptions are somehow "knowing," these things begs the question. How could we possibly prove that our perceptions are actually "of" these noumena? If we can't, why bother positing it? Once you start positing unknowable entities, why stop at any one point? Why not posit an infinite number of shadow realms?

And, if noumena can be known by phenomena, then why do the attempts to map the noumenal world as such, the "view from nowhere," run into so many problems?

In any event, the other critique is of Kant's entire process. It isn't undogmatic, it jumps from judgement to assuming, dogmatically, all of Aristotle's categories. So there is a methodological critique as early we Fichte.

The alternative to thinking there is something "behind" phenomena would be phenomenalism, and to me that cannot explain how it is that we share a common world.

It's an alternative, I don't think it's the only one. Hegel's Absolute Idealism for example supposes there is something "above," not "behind" subjective experience, something that subsumes both experience and nature.

As an Indirect Realist, having an innate belief in cause and effect, I may not know the cause of an appearance, but I know that there has been a cause.

Sure, but just asserting that as so begs the question re: whether Kant is talking nonsense or not. Of course it isn't nonsense if the noumenal is the cause of the phenomenal. However, that's assuming the thing in question is already true. What epistemic grounds can Kant have for the proof of such noumena that don't rely on presuppositions—on dogma? He can't have any empircal support for such things, by his own admission.

The question is about if Kant has any grounds at all for saying that the noumena exists. I don't think "how else could we all see the same things," works given his critical project. You can't pull an entire shadow realm out of your hat as an ad hoc explanation for a question brought to us by empirical experience. This falls victim to a form of the old John Edwards Cosmological Argument. Once we have things we can never know existing "behind," the phenomenological world, why stop with one set of things? Why not posit an infinity of inaccessible worlds sitting atop or below our own? This gets into Delarocca's 10,000 glass spheres sitting atop each other territory.

Put in more modern terms, we can ask whether the noumena has any explanatory power at all and why we should even consider it? I don't see a good "critical" argument in Kant. It's there as a dogmatic given by both our history and our faculties. If the noumena's existence or non-existence is the same, always and forever for all observers, then its being and non-being are coidentical for all observers, always and forever. So, why posit it?

A noumena is an unknown something that causes an appearance. Therefore, the referent of a noumena is the unknown something that causes such an appearance.

Alternatively, the referent of the noumena is simply a thought structure of a person who buys into the idea that phenomena are caused by things we can know nothing about. That is, one solution to Kant's implicit dualism is to simply say that the person thinking of noumenal is simply referring to their own delusions. If the noumena's being or not being are always and forever coidentical for all, why bother positing it.

This turn is normally credited to Fichte but IIRC Jacobi gets there first by recognizing how Kant's Copernican Turn re: the noumena can lead to nihilism. I might be wrong about that, I am not an expert in German idealism. What I find interesting though is that a lot of Nietzsche and later 20th century existentialist critics is already in Jacobi, just from a more critical point of view.

IMO, I have never really gotten the point of mixing assertions of the existence of the noumenal with anti-realism ala Kant.

I think of this whole thing as giving the lie to the libertarian (or anarcho-capitalist) worldview that trade and commerce and markets are natural and self-sustaining.

It would have been nice for the Western leadership to figure this out before investing trillions into Chinese high end production facilities and granting them trillions in technology transfers.

Fo example, China told Boeing and Airbus that they'd have to do technology transfers in order to have access to the cheap Chinese labor market. And what do you know? China's aviation industry has since grown by leaps and bounds and they now have a parastatial competitor airliner production firm coming out, while the J-15 shows a marked improvement on the Su-33, the J-10 shows an upgrade over older block F-16s/the abandoned Lavi, and China is now the second country producing fifth generation stealth fighters and has its own version of the B-21, the H-20 due out. Funny how that synergy between private incentives to chase higher profit margins despite being oligopolies already and an authoritarian regime building up its military power works out...

On the bright side, we're not alone. I have Egyptians tell me they think "made in China," is probably stamped on the bottom of the Pyramids by now.

It's all so depressing, men with power who want more, men with money who want more.

This view is arguably true for autocracies where one person is able to weld a tremendous amount of decision power. But when it comes to things like the American oil market the problem is in some ways worse. The structures in place counter any one person's attempt to make reforms. A CEO or board president who attempts socially minded reforms will just see themselves replaced. Any one company that attempts to reform will simply lose market share, and others will exploit the opportunities they do not.

I think there has long been two problems in economics. The first is to think that markets are magical. That the "invisible hand," is something unique to economics, not simply a good description of complex dynamical systems that have feedback loops and equilibrium points. This has led to a fear of regulation based on the fear that it will "kill the magic," when in fact the same sort of argument against intervention from complexity would apply equally well to medicine or ecosystems.

The other problem is a faliure to see that the invisible hand supersedes the decision-making of individuals and may cause as many negative outcomes as positive ones. Individual leadership is replaced by a group mind. However, this group mind is not highly evolved at the outset. It isn't self-conscious and reflective, it's more a "lizard brain," driven to pick up new traits by selection pressures, grinding its way towards survival goals.

This is why removing "bad people," and putting "good people," in doesn't fix systemic issues in more complex organizations. The organization's have their own priorities and are adapted to their own survival. And, if you think group minds are a metaphysically dodgy concept, you can always just take it as a metaphor.

The state is so important because it is (one of) the most evolved systems out there, but even moreso because its survival needs line up with those of its citizens in the way a corporations' won't. A state will tend to evolve systems that promote the welfare of its citizens for the same reason that bodies will tend to evolve capacities that meet the needs of their cells (although this doesn't stop things like cancer from existing in particular instances).

That's sort of the dynamical systems take on what Hegel lays out in the Philosophy of Right, and I think it's a very good insight in the big picture, even if his details end up wrong.

Seldom if ever have I stumbled upon someone agreeing and defending Francis Fukuyama.

Yeah, that's true. But seldom does one ever find anyone who actually engages with the actual theory advanced by the book (and updated since) instead of a utopian strawman.

I would absolutely defend the claim that Fukuyama has been 100% correct on no major, international rival claimant emerging to challenge liberal democracy, which is itself pretty remarkable given the history from 1780-1980.

To be sure, you have radical Islam as a political movement, but this is:
1. Not a global phenomena.
2. Has made appeals to the norms and sources of legitimacy of liberal democracy almost everywhere it has actually claimed any real political power. E.g. Iran is a theocratic republic, drawing legitimacy from both liberal, nationalist, and socialist sources along with the religious.

Morsi likewise appealed to the norms and standards of legitimacy of liberal democracy while trying to push Egypt away from secularism. Jordan's monarch likewise justifies his rule through the precepts of liberalism, pointing to the dangerous of radicalism to excuse his grip on power (the same applies to the Saudi's as well). The Islamic State doesn't fit this mold but they also only managed to rule a small area for a short period before being crushed.

More generally, regimes opposed to liberalism make "what about arguments," claiming the liberal democracies don't live up to their own goals (and that their states do a better job), tacitly ceding the point on sources of legitimacy and state goals (Russian messaging is a great example of this).

That is, there are challenges to liberalism from within liberalism, the positive feedback loop of wealth concentration in the absence of crises documented by Piketty, etc. but it's hard to see how Radical Islam or Russian "Oligarchical Kleptocracy" are the type of rival movements that would cause liberal democracy itself to change in response.

China is the one potential counter example. They are a successful authoritarian state capitalist nation that also still has major communist elements to its state. The PRC could represent a successful challenge to the liberal system. Could be the optimal word as they have yet to be successful in internationalizing their vision, and the rule of Xi risks seeing the project collapse into a sort of dull, oligarchic kleptocracy, we see in Russia. Time will tell I suppose; Xi needs people to restrain his worst instincts or China needs Xi to stop being emperor for life.

Likewise, neither Trumpism nor the Great Awokening challenge the core tenents of liberal democracy, they simply disagree on how to actualize them. Trumpism is a form of democratic populism, their key problem with the status quo is a disagreement on the amount of socialism the state has imbibed and the contours of the nationalism from which it gets it's legitimacy. It wants to limit who qualifies as citizens, but it still embraced the Constitution, liberalism writ large, and even social welfare programs provided they go to the "deserving." Likewise, Social Justice Warriors generally still hew to ideals of liberalism, they just reject that such ideals can be actualized without strong positive action made to subvert existing systems of oppression, fascism, sexism, etc.

Exceptions exist, for sure. I've spoken to hyper woke folks who think legislative seats and court spots should be given out based on stark racial lines, e.g. Black citizens elect Black legislators/judges who have a share in Congress equal to their share of the population, sort of a pre-breakdown Lebanon situation, people would go to a judicial system of their race, etc. But even most people far to the left on these issues find such proposals completely abhorrent precisely because they have drunk so deep from liberalism's waters.

Plus, 99% of critical reviews ignore the Last Man thesis, which has been far more prescient. Which reminds me, I should post that part I guess.

An interesting problem here is the fact that a given neuron (or group of neurons) involved in reading a message can alternatively be mapped to any of the five components in Shannon’s model of communications depending on how we choose to analyze the process. That is, there seems to be something fundamentally subjective about what we decide to call an information source, a signal, a channel, a receiver, etc.

I am still thinking this through, but I am starting to see the outlines of what I think is a good argument for a Kantian "Copernican Turn," in the philosophy of information. Which is funny, because the small field has been pretty focused on solutions to this problem via formalisms and attempts to "objectify" information, so maybe I'm just going 100% in the wrong direction from reading too much continental philosophy lately lol.

Yeah, the Gnostic Paul and Gnostic John are sort of her big early theses. I am not surprised that she revised them. Despite being ancient history, gnostic scholarship is pretty rapidly developing due to new finds in the last 70 years or so, right up through the 2000s. I'd imagine Beyond Belief might benefit from that. I've only read her early stuff.

Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that Plato's type of Platonism is still alive and well in modern philosophy and physics, rather, more reified versions exist. E.g. quarks and leptons are the fundemental forms and everything else emerges from this austere ontology. Most of the popular Platonist-like conceptions of physics center around things being fundementally mathematical. E.g., of quarks Wilzek says "the it is the bit," as they only exist as spaceless mathematical entities.

Penrose is probably not the best example of this; I thought of him because he actually uses the words "realm of Platonic forms," in one quote. Tegmark's form of ontic structural realism is the most obviously Platonist I can think of. Pancomputationalism isn't necessarily Platonist, but it definitely can be as well.

The variety of people who hold on to universals is actually quite surprising. Russell is in there too. IMO, the more interesting question is what defines an object? Is an object just the sum of all the universals (or tropes) it instantiates? I.e., an object just a bundle of traits? Or do the traits need to attach to some sort of bare substratum, a pure haeccity?

Bare substratum sounds ridiculous, but if you ditch it then it becomes hard to justify why two identical red balls aren't the same ball, or why a things identity doesn't change when it moves. This sort of puzzle always interested me.

BTW, this topic has made me think, "what do people consider overtly Christian? "

I have had two different arguments over whether or not the musical adaptation of Les Miserables is a Christian play/film. With an evangelical and an atheist, both of whom didn't think it was a Christian work for largely the same reasons:

-it was done by Hollywood as a major theatrical release
-it has dick jokes and a sex joke involving Santa Claus
-it has a socialist revolution it casts in a largely positive light
-it doesn't beat you over the head with its message to the degree that it becomes hackneyed (e.g. the film "God's not dead.")
-a protagonist is driven into prostitution
-it has a largely unhappy ending, with most of the characters dying while not achieving what they wanted to
-the most ostentatiously devote person commits suicide

To my mind, I don't see how any of these preclude a work being Christian. And in any event, the whole play is the story of a man who has his life turned around by the kind actions of a priest and who lives a life focused on redemption.

And this is finale, how it ends:

On this page
I write my last confession
Read it well
When I, at last, am sleeping
It's the story
Of one who turned from hating
The man who only learned to love
When you were in his keeping


Come with me
Where chains will never bind you
All your grief
At last, at last behind you
Lord in Heaven
Look down on him in mercy

Forgive me all my trespasses
And take me to your glory

Take my hand
I'll lead you to salvation
Take my love
For love is everlasting
And remember
The truth that once was spoken
To love another person
Is to see the face of God...

Do you hear the people sing
Lost in the valley of the night?
It is the music of a people
Who are climbing to the light
For the wretched of the earth
There is a flame that never dies
Even the darkest night will end
And the sun will rise

They will live again in freedom
In the garden of the Lord
We will walk behind the ploughshare
We will put away the sword
The chain will be broken
And all men will have their reward

Will you join in our crusade?
Who will be strong and stand with me?
Somewhere beyond the barricade
Is there a world you long to see?

Do you hear the people sing?
Say, do you hear the distant drums?
It is the future that they bring
When tomorrow comes!

I mean, case closed, right? But the question is, why is there a tendency to see Christian art only as that which is highly sanitized?

IMO, it comes from a trend in American Evangelical Protestantism that is extremely unreflective and sees itself as the one true expression of Christianity while also being unaware of its minority status or modern nature (modern fundementalism is highly unlike the early church, which was full of allegorical, non-literalist readings of the Bible). This trend has remained at the cultural forefront even as Roman Catholicism has become by far and away the largest denomination and the share of Orthodox and Coptics living in the US also swells.

I can't quite put my finger on what the phenomena is, but it is a tendency to represent the faith in a highly stylized, highly sanitized, kitsch, hyper real fashion. Hence, I've also had the same debate over whether or not Bob Marley is Christian praise music.

Is Christian music only for bands that only make Christian music? What about Let It Be, the Virgin Mary coming in times of trouble seems overtly Christian, right? Bob Marley seems less equivocal:

Jamming:
Now we're jammin' in the name of the Lord.

Holy Mount Zion
Holy Mount Zion
Jah seated in Mount Zion
And rules all creation ya...

Three Little Birds:
...saying praise and thanks to the Lord and it will be all right.

So Much Things to Say:
Well, INI no come to fight flesh and blood
But spiritual wickedness in high and low places
So while they fight you down
Stand firm and give Jah thanks and praises
'Cause I and I no expect to be justified
By the laws of men, by the laws of men
Whole jury found me guilty
But prove, truth shall prove my innocency

There are other examples. Bob Dylan's "Every Gain of Sand," Foster the People's "I Would Do Anything For You," get played at nightclubs and sounds like a love song, which it is, just towards God, Johnny Cash's"When the Man Comes Around," is mostly cribbed from Revelations, Collective Soul's grunge classic Shine, even Queen's less ambiguous "Jesus." I don't even think an X religion song needs to come from a member of that religion, it just needs to seriously express its message in a serious way. That's sort of an example of "understanding the cultural/emotional/spiritual context without having to buy into all doctrines."

Why shouldn’t we treat idealism as any other ontology? At some point we should, no? Maybe we’re convinced by it and grant it special importance, but that’s further down the road — and definitively not simply because it was the ideology of our family.

Sure. We absolutely should be prepared to treat our beliefs to the same rigorous analysis we subject other's beliefs too.

My point is simply that your point generalizes beyond religion. Believing something just because you have passively absorbed it as part of the culture you grew up in is:

A. Inevitable to some degree. (E.g., I didn't grow up in Chicago so I don't call pouring sauce and cheese into a bread bowl "pizza.") - a joke, I like a good deep dish lol.

B. Not a good justification for any belief, religious or otherwise.

But you seem to be commiting the "fallacy of equal knowledge," i.e., "if everyone had the relevant information they would agree." This isn't true for religion though. People don't necessarily only belong to a religion because they grew up in it, nor do many (most I think) go through their entire lives without seriously questioning their beliefs to some degree. E.g. I know someone who spent their early to late 20s thinking Christianity was just a myth they had learned as a child, and spent some of that time as a practicing Buddhist, who later returned to Christianity, albeit in a different sect.

Of course, some people do never question the beliefs they were brought up with. But this applies to areas outside religion as well, e.g. jingoistic nationalists who never consider if their country might be on the wrong side of some issues.

The fallacy as I see it is twofold. First, to assume that those who are religious haven't engaged in any sort of rigorous analysis of those beliefs or serious praxis, i.e., practical engagement with that tradition outside of cultural ritual. Second, to assume that someone must be a "believer," to find value in examining religion.

To the second point, consider just how much of philosophy and general work in the humanities is simply engaging the process of grappling with the culture one grew up in, trying to determine why it has the traits it does, what its essence is. People who aren't Christians still have plenty of reasons to be interested in church history and theology, just as Christian theologians have gained much from dialogues with Muslims and Jews. There has been a ton of work on this front.

The opening view also seems to discount perennialism, the idea that all religious traditions get at some set of essential truths, out the gate.

Finally, I'd just point out Saint Augustine's "believe so that you might understand." We can be skeptical of anything. How do we know who our parents are? Only by the authority of others? How do parents know that their children are their children, that they weren't switched at birth? Generally, this is often something we have to take on authority. One can't learn a subject if one doesn't take it seriously and take some things on authority. You can't learn physics if you think it is nonsense and question everything from the begining. Likewise, I don't think you can truly understand a faith, a philosophical camp, a literary tradition, etc. without some level of "believing to understand," even if it isn't an absolute belief, but more a suspension of disbelief.

Surface level just leads to a caricature and of course that caricature looks like it will shake apart with any level of rigour.

I'm less familiar with the Gospel of Mary, but IIRC scholars tend to think it was set down after the Gospel of John and the Pauline epistles due to seeming references. I think the earliest versions we have date to a good deal later.

I would think that this makes the date a bit flexible because, while Paul's letters can be dated fairly well, John cannot be, leaving a large window for it.

I do recall that scholars cautioned about reading later Gnosticism into the book simply because it had originally be found in its most complete form in a compilation of later Gnostic texts. This isn't surprising, as later Gnosticism still used canonical texts in many cases for exegesis and the Canon itself wasn't fully closed until after Gnosticism declined, although we see Canons being recommended from very early on (e.g. Origen).

In any event, I agree with Pagels assessment that John itself is a "Gnostic," Gospel, if we define Gnostic as: 'a form of Christianity with a focus on enlightenment/gaining special knowledge, and a strong undercurrent of Platonist and Stoic thought." The problem here is that I don't know if the term "Gnostic," is that instructive here, because this would seem to make Saint Augustine, the key figure of solidified Latin orthodoxy, a "Gnostic," as well, with his pansemiotic interpretation of reality and his highly Platonist cosmology.

My first in depth encounter with Gnosticism was a history that spoke of Christians who would read Euclid's elements in church and study the Stoics, following their conception of Logos Spermatikos, looking to peel back the curtain on reality. I found this intensely interesting. However, as I learned more about the early church, I realized this sort of description could as well be said of non-Gnostic theologians, e.g. Origen (granted he was condemned as a heretic, but only centuries later, and his works weren't suppressed), Ambrose, or Augustine.

So, it seems to me like the term Gnostic is more useful if we limit it to either traditions with Neoplatonic-like emanations, the Aeons (e.g. the Ogdoad) and the esoteric Hermetic-inspired systems that came with it, or simply to demiurge traditions, which are radically different from orthodoxy.

A similar problem comes up when we talk of "Protestantism." It's hard to talk about Anglicanism, Lutheranism, the Charismatic Movement (e.g. Pentacostals), Mormonism, Evangelicals, Quakers, Amish, Jehovah's Witnesses, Behemism, and Unitarians as anything like a unified movement outside of the purely historical sense. They have different Bibles to a degree, radically different doctrines, with some rejecting the Trinity and embracing a sort of Arianism, etc., and some won't use electricity.

I think the risk is that we can conflate the different types of "Gnostic," and confuse something like Sethian "Gnosticism," with its Yahweh as the demonic figure Yaldaboath, and its retelling of the Genesis story with a focus on Yaldaboath and his Archons gang raping Eve and spawning Cain, with the "Gnosticism ," of John, Paul, and Thomas. The former is anachronistic in the early church, not the least because it had no canonical Bible. Thus, the Hebrew scriptures weren't necessarily included, and you had efforts like the the Gospel of Maricon to compress the relevant story without the heavy reference to the OT.

Writing retellings of the OT only makes sense as a religious project once mainstream Christianity has come to accept the OT is canonical and begins building a systematic theology atop it though.

The tension with Peter shows up in Acts and in the Epistles as well. It's clear that Paul and Peter had a falling out, although it also appears like they likely made up and agreed to disagree. Paul has a more Greek oriented brand of Christianity, and more of the Gnostic themes, although without the hard dualism. Peter and James hew more closely to the Jewish tradition. John gives us a more Gnostic-like view, and also a more dualistic view akin to later Gnosticism (in the Johannine epistles, not the Gospel of John; these likely were written at different times, or even by different people). So, it makes sense that it shows up in non-cannonical early texts as well. Pseudepigrapha attributed to Peter seems to take his camp to a more hardline place.

I have no doubt these books influenced early doctrine. The Gospel of James, while not Canon, clearly had a huge influence on the veneration of Mary and the idea of perpetual virginity and immaculate conception. After all, there was no early Canon. Although it is also remarkable how quickly a core Canon congealed, with Hermas and Barnabas being the only two very widely cited books that get dropped in the NT.

As to my view that Jesus and the Christian Church are in many ways antithetical, do you find reason to affirm the Jesus and/or his teachings are not in direct opposition to the stringent hierarchy of religious power which was to later become full-fledged Christianity?

IDK. There are a lot of ways to read the Bible. It isn't a rule book, and it tells the same events in very different ways. I think there is definitely plenty of support in the Gospels for some sort of hierarchy, although most of how the "church," is supposed to work comes from Acts and the Epistles. These support the idea of an organized church and a leadership, but also a fairly flat, non-hierarchical structure. Paul is a leader in Acts, but not an official one, and he writes like someone doesn't want to get authority simply from formal authority in his letters (all the Epistle writers do, none lean on authority). The analogy of the Church as a body allows for some hierarchy and organization, there is a head, eyes, heart, etc., but we have times when our hands or teeth dictate behavior too (think of a toothache and how it guided us). First Corinthians lays out how different people have different gifts and different needs, and how flexibility is important.

So, the example of the Papacy does seem very far from that, but it's also worth noting that the Papacy of 200-500 is not really like what it evolved into. The Pope was originally a first among equals, like the Patriarch of Constantinople, but grew in the chaos left by the collapse of the Western Roman empire. Plus, the Roman Catholic Church still allows a huge amount of autonomy; it has to with its size. It had its own charismatic movement, people's liberation theology, simultaneous socialist and reactionary movements, etc. The churches hyperbolic power doesn't really show up until it bans marriage for priests in order to stop parishes from becoming hereditary fiefdoms. This was really a blow against the nobility.

The hierarchy can definetly be a negative thing, we have so many examples of that. But it also allowed the Church to be independent and stand up to recalcitrant elites on behalf of the common people. You have Ambrose forcing Emperor Theodocius to wear penitents garb after massacring civilians (and in one telling, crawling up the church stairs). You have Gregory VII forcing the Holy Roman Emperor to walk barefoot through the snow in a hair shirt for attempting to make the Church a political instrument. With power came corruption, but power also did allow the Church to intervene for the good in some cases (e.g. particularly rapacious lords being chastised by their clergy, the Pope stopping a war between Argentina and Chile in the 20th century, etc.). It seems like a sort of impossible balance, the need to wield temporal power but not be corrupted by it.

Last thing I'd add is that the undercurrents of Gnosticism never really go away. They just change shape to conform with orthodoxy and develop more. You see them in orthodox forms in Augustine or Eckhart, or flaring up is schisms like the Cathars. The Christian mystical tradition really keeps the core of Gnosticism, if not the demiurge tradition, quite alive. Even the esoteric system comes back by way of its influence on Judaism and the advent of Kabbalah later (Schloem is excellent on this), which then spreads back into Christianity in the Renaissance.

On Husserl's the Origin of Geometry:

Simply stated, Husserl's central argument is that if
the origin of geometry is forgotten, then one forgets the historical nature of such disciplines. But why is that important? It is important because geometry expresses in its most pure form what Husserl calls "the theoretical attitude', which is the stance that the natural sciences take towards their objects.

Husserl's point is that to reactivate knowledge of the origin of geometry is to recall the way in which the theoretical attitude of the sciences belongs to a determinate social and historical context, what Husserl famously calls the "life-world" (Lebenswelt). Husserl's critical and polemical point is that the activity of science has, since Galileo, resulted in what he calls a "mathematization of nature," that overlooks the necessary dependence of science upon the everyday practices of the life- world. There is a gap between knowledge and wisdom, between science and everyday life.

This is the situation that Husserl calls "crisis," which occurs when the theoretical attitude of the sciences comes to define the way in which all entities are viewed. The task of philosophy, in Husserl's sense of the word (i.e. phenomenology), is to engage in a critical and historical reflection upon the origin of tradition that permits an active and reactivating experience of tradition against the pernicious naiveties of our present image of the past.



Matters are not so different in the early Heidegger's conception of Destruktion, the deconstruction of the history of ontology, which is precisely not a way of destroying the past, but rather of seeking the positive tendencies of the tradition and working against what Heidegger labels its "baleful prejudices."

Interestingly enough, I was reading a book on the "Continental vs Analytical," divide last night and it had a some similar examples to the post that sparked this thread. To paraphrase:

One simplistic way to put the divide is to say that analytics focus on problems, "the problem of identity," "the problem of free will," while continentals focus on proper names, "what does Heidegger think about identity," "how should Derrida's critique of Hegelian free will inform discussions today?" etc.

This is simplistic because continental philosophers do indeed focus on and specialize in problems, and analytics have started paying more attention to biography, but it does reflect a real distinction.

For the continental traditions, which sees man as essentially limited, fixed within his historical context, it makes no sense to "talk only about the problem," or "focus on just the argument." To do this is to presuppose a level of objectivity that isn't possible; a view from nowhere which must always be beyond man's reach.

Thus, how different camps progenitors are claimed by each camp, attempts to turn the idealist pragmatics into "analytics," is then exactly the sort of thing that is of key importance.

Of course, the for analytic, this seems in danger of "devolving into literary critique," or worse "being suspiciously French." :lol:

IDK, mostly stuff we already covered, but it was interesting how the history of the split is explained in terms of the (comic) British bipolar ambivalence about Europe (i.e., the fact that it seems like it's bound to demand that all citizens do their part to row it out into the Atlantic, or failing that, expand the Channel one of these days). This just sort of spread to the rest of the Anglophone world through common texts.

I don't know quite what you mean by 'taking the religious claims seriously?' Are you including their claims of witnessing supernatural events?

No, I just mean accepting some points for the sake of argument. We do the same things in proofs by double negation; assume x and see where that leads us. Taking a claim seriously just means not putting it on par with Santa Klaus and sports.

I personally think the platonic idea of the existence of such as an ideal chair or an ideal philosophy is BS. Do such proposals still hold value in modern philosophy?

I initially felt the same way. I still don't like abstract objects, but I can see why they are so popular now.

Things like Plato's forms, now called universals, are part of a larger class of entities in modern philosophy called "abstract objects." These include propositions (descriptions of the world with a true/false value), numbers and other mathematical objects, and some other types. They are still very popular.

They're even popular among physicists. Penrose has a quote to the effect of "the Platonic realm of numbers seems more real...," and you have theories like the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis, which posits that the universe is a mathematical object, or "It From Bit," that the universe is composed of information, which are quite popular.

Plenty of people have wanted to do away with universals but it isn't easy. Partly, this has to do with set theory and using properties to decide who goes in which set. But there is plenty of opposition to them too.

Any bigotry is projection on the readers’ part.

You were taught these stories as a child. Anyone who thinks them through, if they’re strong enough, will just let them go as cultural fairytales — on par with Santa Klaus and caring about the National Football League.

IDK, this seems to imply that the religious are simply weak minded simpletons, unable to let go of past conditioning. And in any event, it seems like a very narrow diagnosis seeing as how there are many people who grow up in adamantly atheist households who become religious in adulthood, or even middle age (and the reverse happens plenty enough too).

Plus, the comparison fails because Tom Brady IS a Greek God. Or at least a son on Zeus. Babe Ruth? Another obvious demigod, look at his slugging average.



Historical context matters in philosophy, particularly in the Continental tradition. I wouldn't want to paint Continental philosophy in too broad a brush, but one popular idea in the tradition is that history matters. History shapes how we do philosophy and the philosopher is a historical actor. Your initial post seems based on this first part; we are products of our culture, what comes before.

History and philosophy reveal man to be finite. There is no absolute standpoint from which to view truth, reality, etc. The Analytic "view from nowhere," is rejected. If such a view exists, we cannot have access to it. Thus, finite man must always be viewed contextually. We cannot look at "just the arguments," we have to look at the context.

So, on this view, someone asking about some made up God simply lacks the context that asking about Christ would have.

Why Christianity and not Hinduism? You're on an English language site, and Christianity is by far and away the most popular religion in the Anglophone world and it is the most relevant religion for Western philosophy. If you were on a Hindi site, you would see more references to Hindu Gods. No one is going to be particularly interested in a made up God who is only a stand in for some point about pluralism. This goes to the point made above re: context.

Just that they shouldn’t be treated as special — IF, and this is very important and maybe I wasn’t clear about, you assume Christianity is indeed one religion among others.

But if you are an adherent of a religion then you do think that your religion is special. This is just begging the question. I don't expect an idealist to treat idealism the same as any other ontology and I don't expect a Muslim to treat Islam like any other religion.

It's also pretty much impossible to discuss ancient and medieval philosophy without reference to the religions of the time. And I'd argue it's impossible to understand what these thinkers are saying, and engage seriously with them without taking the religious claims seriously.

At the same time, considerations of things like Heraclitus or the Patristics' conception of Logos, etc. will tend to show that philosophy still contains plenty of this flavor of speculation. I don't think you can have philosophy without it.

God and Christianity aren't special, I agree, but probably not in the sense you have in mind.

First, I think anyone with an internet connection and enough interest in philosophy to check out this site is probably quite aware that:

1. There are multiple world religions.
2. People often tend to have the faith that they grew up with.

But this is by no means a rule. Millions of people have professed some sort of faith, and then become atheists or agnostics, have been atheists and then converted to a faith, or switched between faiths. It seems a little strange to assume that all people who take a faith seriously grew up within that tradition.

Zen and Chan Buddhism have had wide ranging success in the West. Catholicism didn't get to 1.4 billion members by only appealing to current members, it has adherents from Korea, to Central Africa, to Latin America, to the Middle East (granted it has always been in the Middle East, but the Syriac Rite and Chaldeans joining the Roman Catholics is newer.)

Within the "alt-right," sphere, the resurrection of the works of Rene Guenon and Julius Evola have led to intense interest in Hinduism (and IMO, given the general beliefs of this segment of the web, this has been an overall positive influence, even if it does involve a very weird promotion of the caste system by Westerners, with all the young Western men reading this stuff clearly recognizing they must belong to the castes of warriors or priests, never the menial laborers lol).

You were taught these stories as a child. Anyone who thinks them through, if they’re strong enough, will just let them go as cultural fairytales — on par with Santa Klaus and caring about the National Football League. Others don’t — and that’s fine, but that’s religion and theology, not philosophy. Just as creationism is religion, not science

This same line of attack is leveled against science, or "scientism. These are also a set of "cultural stories," we grow up with as kids. Indeed, most of us attended public schools where we are drilled on these stories. And, at least in my experience, the narrative I was given isn't even one that is widely embraced by science itself anymore. I came out of my K-12 education, and my undergraduate studies in neuroscience with a view of the world that was most similar to mechanical corpuscularism: i.e., "everything is little balls of stuff that bounce around based on extrinsic laws, and all things can be explained by how the balls bounce around."

This is an ontology that had been essentially debunked for over a century prior to my having absorbed it as dogma. None of the problems with causal closure re: systemic overdetermination, causality as a transitive property, or problems defining supervenience were included in this instruction. Those issues were safely bracket off as "philosophy," (whereas what we learned was "science"), while the problems posed by quantum foundations were bracketed off as "irrelevant to anything above the scale of lone electrons." It seems to me that this view has been considered "good enough," and, since no one dominant metaphysics has come along to replace it, we just run with a cultural narrative that doesn't have good grounding in the empirical sciences anymore.

This is not to say that even bad framings of what science says about the world are equivalent with a religion. The point is merely that we all have ideas about the world that are grounded in cultural experiences we had growing up. If you want to appeal to other types of knowledge as being superior to the revelations of religion then you need an argument for why those types of knowledge are different, not the bald assertion that "anyone who is strong enough," will come to some one view.

A lot of stuff packaged with "science" is not the sort of subject matter we generally think science should concern itself with in the first place. The assertion that the world is essentially valueless and meaningless is a philosophical assertion. Assertions of physicalism are, to date, underdetermined vis-a-vis competing ontologies, and its questionable with ontology itself is the sort of thing science should be concerned with (I would say yes, but this seems to be a minority opinion).

Questions of a creator come up in the sciences all the time. The explosion of interest in multiverse theories are explicitly motivated by the fact that these theories are a way to solve the apparent "fine tuning" of the universe, i.e., what many see to be empirical support for some sort of design or teleology at work in nature. This isn't a problem that only interests the religion, atheists like Thomas Nagel have taken up this issue as well.

Point being, this post seems motivated by a fairly bigoted conception of religion. Not all religion is necessarily at odds with naturalism and science, so the dichotomy set up is a false one. The creator of the Big Bang Theory was a Catholic priest after all. There is a tendency I've noticed to equate all religion with the most outlandish versions of fundamentalism. That or to focus on a lack of nuance or consistency in folk theology, which, aside from seeming mean spirited at times, seems to miss that most folk explanations of science are similarly lacking in consistency, clash with current scientific thinking, etc.

Ed. Please note that the title was edited, to focus more on the esoteric traditions within Christianity. The esoteric ones may have influenced the exoteric ones, and the interplay is probably important, possibly within the organisational structure. Also, the esoteric traditions focus on inner development, and draw upon ideas from other sources beyond Western philosophy.

I would retract my earlier recs except for Light From Light than. That's a pretty good reader of the whose who in Christian mysticism. It tends to be more orthodox thinkers, but not confined to any one tradition. It has Origen, the Cappadocian Fathers, Augustine, Francis of Assisi, Teresa of Avila, Eckhart, etc. Google has some of the sections for free in a preview. https://www.google.com/books/edition/Light_from_Light/HlV06UetdzwC

Most of this stuff is free online in tons of places, so the main benefit is just the introductions and selection of excerpts here. A bunch of the originals are here in full: https://www.sacred-texts.com/chr/ , which is a great resource. It has the Cloud of Unknowing, etc. It has fewer texts that are considered more "orthodox," but it's not hard to find Augustine or the Cappadocians, etc. online in any event.

E.g., Augustine's big mystical (Neoplatonic-flavored) vision is documented in Book IX of his autobiography/prayer/philosophy text, the Confessions. Although his main theological text, De Trinitate, is surprisingly mystical and psychological, guiding the reader through a dialectical reading.

Gnostic texts are all available at Gnosis.org . The main benefit of Pagel's Gnostic Bible (best print edition I've found) is the introductions and the addition of Cathar works and Muslim "Gnostic-flavored" texts, as well as some texts from Hermeticism. Pagel's has some interesting stuff on how the Gospel of John can be seen as a "Gnostic" text, and how Valentinian Gnostics read I Corinthians as a Gnostic text, but TBH, I think this only works if we stretch the definition of "Gnostic" so broadly that it makes most of the Patristics, even the main developers of Nicean orthodoxy, into "Gnostics."



"He: Understanding Masculine Psychology," has a good Jungian analysis of the Grail myth from one of Jung's students. It's very short too. The same author also has similar works of Faust, and some other myths.

Similarly, Sanford has "The Man Who Wrestled with God," Jungian analyses of characters in Genesis, although I didn't like these quite as much.




With the exception of the Gospel of Thomas, which isn't "Gnostic" in the sense of embracing a demiurge tradition, having reference to Sophia, etc., the Gnostic texts date to a period after Christianity had spread throughout the Mediterranean and appear significantly after the writing of the canonical books of the NT or non-canonical, but widely used texts like the Shepard of Hermas and Epistle of Barnabas.

In terms of attempts to reconstruct the "historical Jesus," these generally aren't taken seriously because they represent major departures from prior tradition at a later date. Moreover, most of the Gnostic textual traditions aren't so much focused on Jesus, as they are on rewriting the Old Testament, so they are post dated by an even larger amount here.

I find Gnosticism plenty interesting, and we can always suppose that the "real" narrative of Jesus was very well suppressed for a long period following his life, but in general the idea that Jesus was a Gnostic is quite anachronistic as Gnosticism doesn't appear on the scene until later. Pagels, Quispel, Bauer, etc. seems to fall into the common trap of scholars who think their area of specialty can explain everything, with maximalist theses about the extent of Gnosticism in the early church that is essentially speculation given the dating of the texts we have. It's not unlike Magee, a specialist in esoterica, coming to the conclusion that Hegel was "primarily a hermetic author." This gets into the whole problem of publication bias in favor of unlikely findings.

In any event, we also have a veritable pleroma of different Jesuses in the orthodox tradition as well, with various levels of focus on the humanity of Jesus versus Christ's role as "the Logos," the Buddha-Jesus of far eastern Manicheanism, the Jesus that assiduously denies his divinity of the Koran, etc.

Claims to one narrative being "the real Jesus," miss the point I think. I'm inclined to agree with the polysemy of the Patristics and assume that divine revelation allows for different conceptualizations of the person of Jesus for different people, in different times, to suit their needs and this historical needs of an era.

The majority of the Bible is history, and if God works through history before Christ there is little reason to see why God shouldn't do so after. Thus, an evolution in the faith, with various strands of interpretation moving through a dialectical process, doesn't seem out of line with the core tenents of the faith. Indeed, I think this realization is why Christianity has such a larger history of producing speculative/philosophical histories than other faiths, from Eusebius and those who followed his utopian vision of progress based on Isiah 2 (Ambrose, Jerome, etc.), to Augustine's "City of God," to Hegel.

As one example I take to be blatant, and not very controversial by comparison to many other possible observations: Whereas what we know about Jesus from various sources (the Gnostic Gospels very much included) doesn’t present Jesus as expressing or engaging in many hypocrisies, I know of no institutionalized religion that has historically been more hypocritical than Christianity. This of itself can substantiate that the principles taught by Jesus are by in large diametrically opposite to the larger sum of principles upheld by Christianity in general.

This is going to be true for any large historical organization versus the life of an individual. The same difference exists between the stories of the lives of various saints or non-Christian holy men and the organizational faiths in which they exist. I don't think we should expect any human organization of significant size to be "filled with saints." I am not aware of such a thing ever existing. This gets to the idea that the Church is a place for those who are sick, not those who are already well.

More cynically, it is easier to air brush the history of one person than the history of an organization, especially when people are fighting to control said organization.

Christianity didn't just wipe out paganisms, it also wiped out Christianity - forms of it that weren't seen as being in the service of the dominant account

This is true, but I feel like there is a tendancy the vastly understate the differences that existed within orthodoxy itself. When people were arguing with Pleagius and the Pleagians they were still all inside the "catholic," church. Gnostics also operated inside the church for a while and essentially gnostic (if we take a broad definition) teachings remain in the mainstream within Origen, Pseudo Dionysus, etc. Meanwhile, some of the splits and suppressions were between groups that were theologically virtually identical. E.g., the Donatists were essentially Catholics who had a disagreement about the apostolic succession. Granted, there were differences, because Northwest African Christianity was more "fundamentalist/realist," both Donatists and non-Donatist, while Greek Christianity was less superstitious and more Neoplatonist by this point. Even prior to Christianity, you have highly allegorical readings of the OT with folks like Philo co-existing within Judaism as well.

Likewise, movements similar to those of the Cathars/Albagensians, Bogomils, Hussites, etc. existed without reaching the level of open schism in many cases.

I'll have to check him out.

The language of complex systems can be linked to post-Hegelian dialectical strands of philosophy, but are subject to critique from a range of other, more recent approaches in philosophy.

Such as? I get that systems theory, cybernetics, etc. aren't anything new, but the big proponents of complexity and information theoretic understandings of phenomena always make it sound like they are the cutting edge. I'd be interested in any critiques. I have this sneaking suspicion that we haven't seen a full scale shift for reasons I'm not aware of, which aren't presented by advocates.

I am familiar with the "it from bit" approach, and was initially quite taken with it. However, it seems to turn "bits" into the new basic ontological entities (along with qbits), instead of positing that the processes by which bits get "flipped" are ontologically basic.

This seems like a problem IMO. Sure, maybe we can describe physics as cellular automata, but then why do they compute using the laws they do? (And how do we describe non-locality? A lattice won't do, I suppose networks work). This still seems to have the problem of why there should be change, why our bits interact. I haven't read any pancomputationalists who have been willing to make the full jump to "computing is what defines reality and the bits are just identical elements of a process." Perhaps the reticence has to do with the fact that this might reopen the door on infinite amounts of information being required to describe a continuous process? But I don't see how a process necessarily has to be continuous or else risk collapsing into a group of more fundamental entities interacting.

I somehow missed that there had been replies here.



Yes, exactly. And Hegel has a bigger role for the market as a whole as well. He was an early admirer and critic of Adam Smith, and arguably advances a sort of Keynesianism in the Philosophy of Right before Keynes (arguing that the state should engage in counter cyclical investment to offset recessions). The market is a place where the individual comes to see her fortune bound up in the fortune of others. Since the individual depends on the market, she must hope that others fair well so that she can fair well. E.g., a real estate agent wants the economy to do well in general so that people can buy homes, the maker of restaurant equipment needs restaurants to do well, etc. Through participation in the market, we become interconnected, and our success depends on the success of other free people. Indeed, our freedom, freedom from want and poverty, is dependent on their freedom.

So, Fukuyama's view tries to thread the needle between Kojeve seeing the Desire being addressed through different kinds of ritual and those who frame the matter as a balance of power.

Right, and the market also has a psychological role to play in the form of ritual. The market participant recognizes the will of another when they engage in transactions. Sales implicitly allow that others have a right to the property that they are exchanging with us, and this objectifies their will in an external entity. To think about how property helps create identity, think about browsing a bookshelf in someone's home and what it says about them, or what a teenager's bedroom posters are doing.





The craftsman has their identity in the things they are able to shape from the environment. But the lord only has their identity in bare ownership of the means of production. Thus, they can always be scared of losing this recognition, whereas the human capital possessed by the craftsman cannot be taken away.

I am more into thinking more about ideas of Christianity outside the mainstream and that which is not included in the Bible.

You might find Kant or Hegel's speculative religion interesting.

John Stewart's lecture on Hegel's philosophy of religion is pretty good: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8LzH62iODU

Bubbio's "God and the Self in Hegel: Beyond Subjectivism," has good coverage of both, and got a professional narration for the audio version, but I had a hard time following it in that format. This same poor woman somehow got stuck narrating this and a book doing a deep dive on the Logic. I assume she must have volunteered for these lol.

Yeah, although his philosophy seems a bit to "out there," to get mainstream appeal. What is weird to me is that there hasn't been a movement to replace current philosophy of science with a process based one. Instead, ontic structural realism, the "universe is math," (ala "Every Thing Must Go") seems to be the most popular solution here.

I have not seen a critique that process philosophy doesn't actually fix the problem of hard emergence. I am not sure if one exists. Given most of the special sciences have gravitated towards rejecting reduction, that seems like a huge point in favor of process.

A universe the same size as our visible universe that just happened to form from random fluctuations. The Boltzmann Brain was originally a criticism of the Boltzmann Universe, which was a popular way to explain low entropy conditions (paired with the Anthropic Principle). This view was popular before the Big Bang Theory and evidence that supported the Big Bang emerged. Theorists had tried to avoid a universe with a beginning because of intractable problems with the Cosmological Argument, but the eternal universe brings up the BB problem.

IMO the BB problem is less of an issue that the problems posed by a universe with a starting point though.

"Christianity the First 3,000 Years," is a pretty good survey of how Christianity was constructed.

Christianity is hard to summarize because it is so broad and influential. For example, Saint Augustine is probably the most influential philosopher on free will and has a huge influence on other areas of philosophy, essentially founding semiotics, and by some accounts creating the idea of the "will" itself. All his work is tied up with religion though. And that's just one example. Origen, Pseudo Dionysus, Ambrose, etc. all have had an influence on philosophy, not to mentioned later theologians like Saint Aquinas, or mystics like Boehme (who had a huge influence on German idealism, particularly Schelling and Hegel). Even Paul's letters themselves get into philosophy, along with books in the Bible like Ecclesiastes.

Light to Light is a really good anthology on Christian mysticism.

But, yeah, it's a very broad chain of influence. John Edwards for instance still has a huge influence on cosmology through his variant on the cosmological argument.

Further, if the purpose of western intervention was to send a message, who is listening? Independently-minded countries like the BRICS don't buy the narrative of an unprovoked invasion, and they have all refused to side with the US over this issue.

Uh huh.



At best they've managed to avoid outright condemnation, but even that has failed. South Africa told Putin not to come to the BRICS summit as they would be forced to arrest him for war crimes. ثرثى ؤاهىش هس مخسهىل حشفهثىؤث

Making inferences from such experiences is only works if:
A. You are not yourself a Boltzmann Brain
B. We are not inhabitants of a Boltzmann Universe

If Boltzmann Brains are vastly more likely than any other sort of brain then the fact that we have experiences is evidence for Boltzmann Brains being common, since such experiences are likely to be caused by Boltzmann Brains.

Me, I like to assume I'm at least in a Boltzmann Room, and the when I open the door I will fall out into a nebula.

Right. Thanks for the numbers. So in about 17 months we've had nearly 100,000 dead, 6.3 million refugees, $143 billion in damage, wheat and fertiliser production almost causing the starvation of another 10-15 million... and what have we got. Ukraine are nearly half way to wearing down Russian ability to cause more damage.

So after another 100,000 dead and nearly $300 billion in debt they maybe equalise...?

I'm not sure who "we" is supposed to be here. Ukraine opted to ignore Western advice on committing to a maneuver warfare-centric offensive and instead focus on attrition, particularly of Russian artillery systems. They considered the losses they would sustain in a more rapid push to be unacceptable, and wanted to focus more on destroying Russian resources that could be used for future offensives.

This seems totally rational to me. The West and Ukraine have different priorities. Ukraine is far more than "halfway" in reducing Russia's supply of artillery systems, and given Russian morale issues, it seems unlikely that they could conduct a significant offensive without a large artillery advantage.

In any event, given Russia just had a rebellion and Putin is going on air to warn about collapse and civil war, admitting that he is in a weak negotiating position vis-a-vis Prigozhin in the press, it seems possible that Russia is more than halfway to a defeat. In attrition warfare, you don't win in a linear fashion. One side gets exhausted and then collapses.

Big picture, it's hard to see how this war has improved Russia's security situation. They are going to end up with Finland and Sweden in NATO, very likely Ukraine in NATO, and Georgia is significantly more likely now too. Moldova also looks more likely than before, or might at least join the EU. China has gained tremendous leverage over them and has made huge strides in pulling the Central Asian states into its orbit.

Moreover, Russia has reneged on its defense export deals around the world and the war has been an absolutely abysmal advertisement for Russian hardware. China sits ready to fill the void, with the T-96 and T-99 being superior vehicles that can be produced far quicker, and a true LO fifth gen multi-role, carrier capable fighter on the way out with export models likely to follow. They even got Pakistan to pivot away from the US and go for the J-10 as well by offering to help them with indigenous production of the JF-17. Point being, China is very likely to replace Russia as the main arms exporter that isn't US aligned and without exports Russia cannot afford anywhere near the same R&D efforts. This was going to happen anyhow, but they've sped it up very quickly, as previously China's focus on high end air defense, MRLS, and its navy meant they weren't as interested in the export market since they didn't want capabilities leaking on AD/MD, and they were also making stuff outside most nation's price points, e.g. nuclear subs, war ships, carrier-focused ballistic missiles, ABM, etc. (combat drone aside, which they do dominate sales of).



Mearsheimer is good when he sticks to a small scale. It's his attempts at big picture theorizing that really go off the rails. I appreciate that you have to "go big" to move the ball along on theory, even if it means getting a lot wrong, but the problems in "The Tragedy of Great Power Politics'" Offensive Realism are such that I think it's worth questioning if it was worth publishing. It makes the realist camp in IR look like a caricature, and got basically every prediction about the post-Cold War era wrong.

But it's instructive on how he sees the world. I recall Hal Brand's comments on Mearsheimer and Walt's "The Israel Lobby," at a conference being" "a fairly banal account of how foreign lobbying works that is spiced up by some antisemitism," which is about right IMO. In my experience, I haven't seen anything to suggest Israel's efforts are particularly more successful than say, Saudi ones, and of course similar books have been written about the Saudis, Russia etc.

Point being, you don't even have to assume he is biased, because either way he is just frequently wrong.



Yes, but there are other costs to giving Putin what he wants, e.g. an increased risk of Russian aggression in the future. Forcing Russia to burn through its entire Cold War stock of hardware and ammunition greatly reduces their ability to wage future wars. Even at current wartime production levels it will take Russia well over a decade to put together anything like the force they initially invaded with, likely far longer.

Count Timothy von Icarus Your prose is always a model of clarity, and this piece is very well written, but I wonder if it is too much information (speaking of information!) for a forum post. I don't know if you write on Substack or Medium or any of the long-form prose platforms that are beginning to proliferate, but I suspect a piece of this length and density might be better suited to those media.

Yeah probably. I have been meaning to look into those.

I don't know if this allows for the all-important role which Kant assigns to the synthetic a priori. A purely deductive truth, that if a man is a bachelor he must be unmarried, is indeed kind of trite, if not scandalous, but the role of the synthetic a priori is a different matter. Einstein's theory of special relativity could be considered an example. Concepts like time dilation, length contraction, and the equivalence of mass and energy (E=mc²) were not deduced purely from logical analysis but were derived from a combination of theoretical reasoning and empirical evidence. However, they are a priori in the sense that they hold true in all inertial frames of reference and do not require direct empirical verification for their validity. There are countless other examples in science (one classic being Dirac's prediction of anti-matter on the basis of mathematics.)

Right, empirical evidence is crucial for coming up with and vetting the equations. The Scandal has to do with the fact that given any algorithm A and an input I, A(I) = O, the output, with probability = 100%. This is true even for non-deterministic polynomial time problems because the way you search the sample space doesn't matter, so long as it is deterministic. Non-deterministic computation would indeed introduce new information.

The idea isn't that we don't get new information by combining deduction and induction, it's that deterministic symbolic manipulation specifies its output with p = 1, which implies no information gain. But to take this a step further, Russell and the Vienna Circle largely held that mathematics as a whole was tautological in this way. I have seen some efforts to get around this that are quite elaborate and I think it misses the point, which is that the meaning is what we're out to discover, and that doesn't all come with the formal symbol manipulation.

Of course, J.S. Mill had a great rebutal the the "deduction does not tell us anything new," line, which was a deadpan: "one must have made some significant advances in philosophy to believe it." :rofl: He thought all deduction was still empirical because it's still experienced, but of course he lived before digital computers.

I don't think the fact that cognitive science can identity such an entity detracts from the all-important role of judgement in the reception of information, nor does it account for the subjective unity of consciousness, which is the lived reality, even if cognitive science can't account for it. As you go on to say:

There is plenty of evidence against the Cartesian Homunculus/Theater outside of cognitive science. You see it in phenomenological accounts too. Hume describes a bundle of sensations and thoughts as opposed to the unified I of Descartes, Buddhist anattā gets at the same sort of thing, and Nietzsche complains that the "I" should be thought of as a "congress of souls." The Patristics had a similar conception; Saint Paul fights a war with "the members of [his] body," while one of them, I forget which, needs Christ to quell the uproar of the "legion within" (obviously recalling the exorcism in Luke; might be Basil the Great).

This tracks with behavioral data. You have the observations of split brained people that show they seem to almost have two minds that are working. Asking them to write down their ideal job yields a different answer from each hand (each hemisphere of the brain). You have blind sight, where people with intact eyes but damaged occipital lobes no longer experience or remember sight, yet can navigate a room avoiding objects, or even catch a thrown object, presumably due to the direct connections between the optic nerve and the motor cortex.

So, even if you're coming from an idealist or dualist leaning, I think there is plenty to support the idea of some sort of mind/body interaction that in turn makes perception less than unified. IMO, physicalist philosophy of mind always seemed better supported than physicalism as an ontology, and I don't think they even necessitate one another (e.g., Kastrup's idealism seems like it would work fine with physicalist phil of mind).

That information is not only 'in the brain'. I don't know If you're aware of the cognitive scientist and philosopher Alva Noë. In "Out of Our Heads," Noë argues against the view that consciousness is solely a product of the brain's activity. He contends that the traditional approach of trying to understand consciousness by studying neural processes within the brain is insufficient and ultimately misleading. Noë proposes that consciousness is not something that happens exclusively inside the brain but emerges through dynamic interactions between the brain, body, and the external world. As such he is aligned with enactivism or embodied cognition which explores how our perception and experience of the world are shaped by our embodiment and interaction with our surroundings.

Agree 100%. Isn't this the "embodied cognition," thesis? Brains in a vacuum don't do anything; a vacuum is going to be instantly fatal. That's an important point to highlight. So, at first, we do have the outside world, because we are thinking of the signal coming in from "outside," but of course there is also plenty of communication going on "inside" as well.



Right, I use Shannon's Theory because it is so pervasive for trying to understand this sort of thing, although it is often used in modified forms. We have logical information, Kolmogorov Complexity, Carnap-Bar Hillel semantic information. I think it's worthwhile trying to make sense of this using the major quantitative theory because so much work has already been built around it. We can answer some questions about philosophy and perception without having to first solve the Hard Problem, which I don't see being done any time soon.



I'll respond more later, but I guess the problem here is that we're already defining information in terms of correlations. If we can't talk about what it tells us in terms of statistical probabilities, i.e. "the probability of X given message M," information theory doesn't work the way we want it to. But, because it has been so successful, we have good reason to think it is describing something right.

I think you're right that work has to be done and that entailments need to be computed. But a tricky thing is figuring out how to formalize that. E.g., if we see one angle in a triangle is labeled 90 degrees then we know it is 90 degrees, no need to talk about extra computing outside what vision and understanding takes. But if we're also asked to answer a geometry question, then there is more that must be done.

Which gets at something absolutely crucial I totally missed-- what gets calculated "automatically," and what we have to work through in consciousness is itself determined by our individual anatomy, past experiences, cultural conditioning, etc. It's a sort of Kantian transcendental, but only for some incoming perceptions, and it varies by person. E.g., I speak a bit of Arabic, but I have to focus to read Fusha. With English the connections are totally unconscious, I can't help but understand.



I feel like it's true in a limited sense. Anything only has information vis-a-vis how it interacts with other things. I don't know if self-reference is really required for that, it just needs to be self-contained. I have thought of a short story where aliens in another dimension find a magical portal on their world that is just a black and white screen that scrolls through all of Wikipedia. Since it is correlated with nothing in their world, it can never say anything to them. However, because the symbols correlate with one another, they can see self-referential patterns.

But obviously we can string together words to say novel things about other words, and that can be informative. This makes sense, since the data source is, well, us. Likewise, the source of a dictionary is a set of editors, and we can learn things through the text in that way. For instance, just the words in a dictionary could tell you what century it is from.

Thank you.

primarily due to what I take to be the exceeding ambiguity, and possible equivocations, to what is meant by the term “information”

Yup, and it is a huge problem precisely because information theory has been so successful across so many fields. You see information invoked in physics, biology, economics, psychology, etc. and it also gets held up as a bridge that can even translate across these fields. For example, there is the idea that gold became a standard currency in so many places because of its physical traits, namely that it is scarce enough without being to scarce, and because its malleability gave it cryptological significance. That is, since you couldn't fake it, it said something about your real willingness to live up to trade obligations.

But everyone admits the term is loaded and lacks a clear definition. Attempts to operationalize it in different ways haven't necessarily done much to fix this. I think part of the reason for this is because we have been looking at the formalism in terms of quantification only, and not so much the model that goes along with the formalism.

Every understanding (else here expressed, “meaning”) – this as one example of what we can intend to consciously convey – which we seek to express to others via perceptual means (these most often being visual, auditory, or tactile signs among humans) shall always be understood by others via that body of ready established understandings which each individual other for the most part unconsciously holds in a ready established manner. This will of course apply just as much to all understandings others intend to express to us.

Exactly. While I am not a fan of eliminativism, I have always been a big fan of R. Scott Bakker. While I don't think his Blind Brain Theory does what he wants it to, it made me realize how unconscious processes play this absolutely tremendous role in cognition that it is very easy to ignore. I will probably try to flesh out this set of ideas with those from this prior thread:

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/11154/blind-brain-theory-and-the-unconscious/p1

It can thereby be safely inferred that, most of the time, the meaning we are consciously aware of and intend to convey to others via signs will end up in the other’s mind being a hybridization of a) the meaning we hold in mind that we intend to convey and b) the ready established, largely unconscious, body of meaning which the other is endowed with. And, so, in most cases it will not be understood by the other in an identical way to our own conscious understanding.

Exactly. And this flows with Gadamer's "Fusion of Horizons," theory very well. I actually think there is a ton of good work that can be done by mining the insights of continental philosophy and other humanities and attempting to put them into a framework that will play nicely with the sciences. Obviously, this will involve losing some things in translation, and some will complain that this necessarily "corrupts" the original sense in which the theories were offered.

I am not too worried about that. Some, obviously not all, continental philosophy has some incredible intuitions spelled out for us. However, the huge gulf between the two main branches of philosophy, and the (IMO currently healing) gulf between (mostly analytic) philosophy and science has kept these from being more widely dispersed. I think information theory and complexity studies in particular give us the language to begin a translation process. E.g., I'm also working on trying to put Hegel's theory of institution/state development, laid out in the Philosophy of Right, into the terms of the empirical sciences.

(And of course, part of the reason for the gulf is the "linguistic turn" leading continental philosophers to begin making up slew of new compound words and phrases, so as to avoid "cultural taint," but IMO this has mostly had the effect of making them unintelligible to people outside a small niche).

Yeah that's it. But the move isn't just to assert that the scandal is resolved "because we are finite," but to show how the foundational model in information theory generates this problem by having a Cartesian Homunculus hidden in plane sight.

And given the amount of ink spilled on this topic it does not seem like it has been easy for people to disambiguate mathematical relations as abstract/Platonic entities and computation as a description of how physical systems or abstractions based on them like the Turing Machines, differ in fundemental ways.

The other part is how semantic meaning is not contained in messages themselves, which is why several semantic theories of information have failed. The problem is a too simplistic formalism of how cognition works rather than allowing that you're talking about a formalism that is estimated to best be represented digitally by a thousand-million-million floating point operations per second (and potentially far more).

IMO, a reason for this disconnect is the fact that the amount of information entering conscious awareness appears to be an extremely small fraction of all information being processed by the brain at any given point. Thus, the complexity of producing meaning from signs is all hidden from us, causing people to either propose wholly insufficient formalisms to account for semantics or to posit the necessity of dualism or idealism to explain the disconnect.

But actually, most of the post is how some theses in post modern philosophy fit with the information theoretic model of cognition.

I have no idea how you got that out of what I wrote or what you quoted. I was making very close to the opposite point, that you need to commit to an interpretative presentation for the history lesson to hook into a larger argument. Reciting only facts leaves out how those facts contribute to the argument and why what they contribute matters (unless that's clarified elsewhere, obviously). It turns reasons into non-sequiturs.

I was agreeing with you, sorry if that wasn't clear. My point was, people turn their arguments into lists of facts because of a widespread perception that objective = accurate. The type of bad argument you're describing is the result of forgetting why we want to be objective in the first place.

I was just adding that this is a bad thing to do not only because it isn't persuasive or clear, but also because objectivity itself gets you further away from accurate representation. More a "yes and," point.

BTW, I'd love to give you a clearly stated thesis I feel comfortable defending on this topic. I have been equivocal because I don't have a well-developed theory re: the history of ideas writ large. I don't mind defending speculative history, e.g. this post, but the topic of how philosophy progresses seems more difficult because lone individuals can have such a huge effect on the discipline.

However, one thing I would note is that the problem you mention here:

Let's put it another way: suppose you're making some argument and you have in mind a particular interpretation of the 60s that would support your claim; but instead of presenting that version, you present a scrupulously neutral presentation of the 60s at the point where your tendentious interpretation would hook into the larger argument you're making. The reader either gets what you're (not) getting at or they don't.

But what you've done is suppress your reason for referring to the 60s at all by moving to the scrupulously neutral version, and you've done this instead of just not reaching for the 60s in making your argument. You're trying to have your cake and eat it too, and violating Grice's maxims. It's not about whether the point you're making is persuasive or worth considering or 'legitimate' in some sense; it's the roundabout way of (not) making the point that is at issue.

..seems like it stems from the common tendency to conflate "truth" and "objectivity." This is hardly surprising given the continued influence of logical positivism, which advocated the position that objectivity does get us closer to truth, and that complete objectivity becomes equivalent to truth at the limit.

I don't think this is true though. Statements can be objective, but also flat out false, while it's also possible to give a biased account of a phenomenon that is true. We tend to think of truth in terms of a binary, something is true or it is not (the law of the excluded middle), but objectivity is something we define by degree. IMO, your example is a good indication of how people tend to undermine themselves by seeking a standard of "objectivity," that it isn't worth aspiring to. Sometimes trying to be more objective can actually drive us away from truth. The "view from nowhere," is a contradiction, one doesn't see without eyes and one doesn't understand without judgement.


So, I think you make a good general point about ways in which arguments can be poorly formulated-- poorly written, but I think it also touches on a larger issue, that there is a tendency to pursue objectivity at the expenses of accurate representation. E.g., I think "The Twilight War," is in generally a quite accurate, well-researched description of the contentious relationship between the US and Iran since the Iranian Revolution.* However, it is also quite biased, it largely looks at the relationship through the lens of how the US saw the conflict, using largely declassified/leaked US documents, interviews with members of the US government, etc. The books is also biased because it ignores the larger context in which the events it documents occurred. Due to its scope it can't explore the foreign relations of either nation as a whole, the Iran-Iraq War, etc. But, would we be better served by a book that attempts to get closer to the truth by eschewing interviews and documents, or issues of "intent" and instead limiting itself to quantitative analyses on relevant metrics? Absolutely not. We're describing international relations, not a math problem.

(For the interested, "Guardians of the Revolution," and "The Shia Revival" are good English-language takes from the Iranian perspective).

The quotes below might be relevant as well:

Explaining human behaviour prompts us to reflect on the nature of objectivity, because it raises questions about the form objectivity takes once we go beyond the natural sciences. Consider the case of an anthropologist studying a rain dance. We can safely assume that rain dances could not actually cause it to rain, and that the lack of correlation between the dances and rainfall would be evident to any disinterested observer. Yet the dance is always performed at times of drought. What are we to make of this? Assume that there is evidence that, in times of drought, social strife and uncertainty about the nature of authority increases. Because the dance does not bring success in what the dancers consider to be its aim, we might argue that the reason for the dance should be given in functionalist terms: it secures social cohesion at a time when this is at risk. But there is also a sense in which this explanation is a wholly inappropriate: the dancers perform the rain dance only when they want it to rain, and their reason for performing it is clearly that they believe that it will increase the chance of rain. Are we sacrificing explanatory plausibility in proceeding with a functionalist explanation?

Suppose we are trying to explain the rain dance to someone who is completely unfamiliar with the phenomenon: could we be said to have offered something informative if it did not even mention the intention on the part of the dancers to make it rain?

Yet there is something unsatisfactory about denying any objectivity to the non-functionalist anthropologist’s localized account in this way. To highlight the issue, consider the case of a particularly crude functionalism, where it is simply a matter of imposing a universal grid on a broadly identified class of rituals, without any investigation of particular cases. Chemistry might be taken as a model here: if someone mixes hydrochloric acid and sodium hydroxide, we know the reaction will produce sodium chloride and water. There is nothing of an individual nature about the reagents, and we do not need to investigate the particular physical reaction to understand what is happening. So too the idea is that variations in rituals are superficial, and their core is always functional: social cohesion is paramount in any society, and rituals are one of the most effective ways of achieving this, especially in a primitive society.

...

The claims of functionalism to objectivity rest very centrally on the analogies between the way in which it deals with its subject matter and the way in which the natural sciences deal with their subject matter.

...

A second kind of response to the problems raised by functionalism is to abandon the claim that this is the only kind of account that can proceed objectively, and to insist that objectivity might actually require us to adopt the values of the participants. To return to the rain dance example, the argument is that the functionalist account fails to – indeed cannot but fail to – capture the thought that motivates the participants in the dance. One way in which this contrast is sometimes expressed is in terms of the distinction between reasons and causes: giving the reasons someone has for doing something (or interpreting the behaviour) and giving the causes of their behaviour are two different things. The difference is between appropriate interpretation of the behaviour and appropriate explanation of it. The former has to answer to how the actors themselves conceive of what they are doing, whereas the latter does not.

The idea that objectivity in modern science consists in the elimination of arbitrary judgements is a useful move beyond that of objectivity simply consisting in the elimination of prejudice or bias... The problem facing properly trained scientists is not usually a general one of bias or prejudice, but something specific to the kinds of investigations they carry out. [E.g. having to remove artefacts from an electron microscope scan, standardizing a model of the human skeleton to remove individual defects or evidence of aging/past injury, etc.]

For example, during the heyday of logical positivism, some textbooks on mechanics came out that proudly proclaimed that they lacked any diagrams. Everything would be explained in terms of equations, because equations, being more abstract, and allegedly less subject to being shaped by the human sensory system, were thus more objective (and so closer to a "true" representation). However, there is no obvious reason I can think of why a bunch of algebraic statements should be a "truer" representation of what the world is actually like than a diagram.

I guess this sort of gets at what @Isaac was saying before about some presentations being more convincing. Maybe mathematical arguments are more persuasive, this is certainly a reason why the social sciences and modern management leans into quantification and data collection so heavily. The question is, should they be? Might the process of turning complex social phenomena into a series of values in some SQL database actually get us further away from accurate representations?




I'm not a huge Clayton fan so much as I think his book addresses issues of major import for the sciences that had not previously been addressed in an accessible way.

In terms of things being "more likely to be true," I tend to think of this in the Bayesian/subjective probability sense, i.e., "what level of certainty can we put on each hypothesis," and "how are our hypotheses related, does evidence against one cause a cascade that makes us doubt other hypotheses."

However, unlike Clayton, I don't think Bayesianism solves all the problems we're facing. These problems seem fairly intractable, to the extent that I've started to wonder if it would be worth simply advancing as sort of "virtue epistemology" for the sciences. Something Aristotelian like "if you want to be a good scientist, these are the traits you should aspire to." Rather than keep searching for a foundation that doesn't exist, and building new foundationalisms on sand, we admit that the problem is open ended and instead try to build a set of different foundations that we can use in a context dependent manner.

I think this gets at the "Treadmill Effect," for certain words, whereby if a world is used for a marginalized group, regardless of whether the group first applies the name to itself, it eventually gains derogatory connotations. Then the term must be replaced by a new one. Longer terms like "sex worker," fair better here because long, generic sounding terms don't make for good slurs when slinging invective around.

E.g., the NAACP, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, wasn't trying to be derogatory with the term "colored people," which only later became widely considered inappropriate. Of course, more recently, "people of color," became popular again, so now it seems more acceptable again.

I encountered this in my work with people with developmental disabilities and brain injuries. Some state departments still use the term "retarded," in their name, largely because no widely appropriate term has come to replace it. Retarded grew to have negative connotations, to the extent that it is even awkward to talk about "retarded economic growth," or "the Principle of Retarded Action," in physics. IMO, this grows out of childhood experiences of being told that certain words are wholly off limits, which then taints the word for all contexts, even if it has previously been used is contexts that no one finds offensive. "Oriental," is another such a term.

We also have some turns of phrase that sour even if they aren't derogatory. E.g., William Durant's Story of Civilization is a broadly liberal and open minded project, but the early works (from the 30s-40s) seem quite awkward when they refer to Europe as "the white man's world," or even "Christendom."

This sort of thing is different from out and out slurs, which never were proposed as acceptable terms.

Of course, if you think prostitution is wholly inappropriate, then arguably "sex worker," is also doing the same thing that a term like "collateral damage," is doing. It's trying to make something morally repugnant more abstract so that people don't think about what the term actually entails.

Personally, I'm on the fence. I get the argument that sex work shouldn't not be seen as necessarily different from therapy, which also involves close intimacy for pay, or massage therapy/physical therapy, etc., which also involves close physical contact for pay. I just don't think it totally works, precisely because how prostitution is normally preformed and because reproduction is necessarily more intimate than other forms of physical contact.

That said, if I was going to make one thing illegal, prostitution, where people interact with another living person in some regulated, controlled environment, versus pornography, which I'd argue objectifies people even more and often tends to gravitate towards less respectful depictions of sex, I'd make the pornography illegal first. Plus, it's not like the porn industry isn't known for being generally morally bankrupt either. Prostitution seems less alienating for both parties to me.

In my agential realist account, scientific practices do not reveal what is already there; rather, what is ‘‘disclosed’’ is the effect of the intra-active engagements of our participation with/in and as part of the world’s differen­tial becoming. Which is not to say that humans are the condition of possibility for the existence of phenomena. Phenomena do not require cognizing minds for their existence; on the contrary, ‘‘minds’’ are themselves material phe­nomena that emerge through specific intra-actions.

Barand's theory is interesting to me, as is the idea of merging epistemology and ontology. I had a similar idea re: a relational ontology, although it seems Carlo Rovelli beat both of us on applying it to quantum mechanics by 10+ years, and as he points out in his book, John Wheeler led him to the idea, and Lu-Trub Nāgārjuna beat us all to this sort of relational conception by 1,800+ years ("there is nothing new under the sun," after all.)

But the problem is I couldn't make heads or tails of what an agent, the core of the theory, was supposed to be for Barand. Are interacting bits of space dust agents doing "cuts?" Are our dirty socks agents as they interact in our washing machines?

I take it that agents ≠ individuals (at least not exclusively) given her comments on how the subjective/objective distinction goes wrong by placing us outside the world. Could agents be higher level emergent social structures as well, e.g. states, corporations, etc.?

This is key for me because in many situations it seems that we are more akin to the individual ants in the any hive or lymphocytes in the immune system, while our institutions play the role of the larger, active system. That is, in some respects we are not agents, but parts of a greater agent that supervenes on us.

Could her theory accommodate this? Do agents necessarily have first person perspective?

I couldn't figure this out. I read several reviews and criticisms and didn't see an answer. Then I downloaded the book and went to the main chapter on Agential Realism and that didn't help either (although I didn't give it a particularly close read).

So my main problem was: how are we to make this epistontology of inter-action performative vis-á-vis our interactions with technoscience and naturalcultural phenomena if we can't figure out what the theory is because it's buried behind an avalanche of continental-speak?

This isn't so much a dig at Barand, she's writing for her audience, and got me genuinely interested. It is more a dig at some areas of continental philosophy for making itself so opaque as to have become transparent for the average person (transparent because no one sees it...)

But I also think relational theories in general have a problem in explaining how, if only interactions exist, only certain types of relations seem to show up a certain times and places. If things only exist to the degree they interact, then they essentially cease to exist when they stop interacting.

That's fine, but then presumably, sometimes, they later interact with something again. Now if relations can spring out of existence like this, what causes them to be one type of relation instead of another? This is the old John Edwards "Cosmological Argument," which I don't think non-eternal cosmologies have ever adequately addressed, except now it pops up everywhere.





This isn't the first time I've read one of your posts and been very intrigued. You wouldn't happen to have a helpful reading list around, would you?

I was mostly interested by:

That is, quantum indeterminacy is the placeholder for whatever potency we can imagine lying beyond the Planck scale of our Cosmos. Our Cosmos is then fundamentally a dissipative structure – a self-organising entropy flow with emergent spacetime order

I.e., the idea of the universe as self-organizing. I found Jantsch's "Self-Organizing Universe," online, and it generally had good reviews, but it's also 43 years old and my fear was that it might be a bit dated. (Plus the opening was pretty polemical, which I generally don't like).

Then I was reading Basarab Nicolescu's book on Jacob Boheme's cosmology of self-organization, but this was too esoteric and mystical for what I was looking for, although I might return to it.

Biosemiotics interests me too, but I've found it pretty hit or miss. I have really enjoyed some of Terrance Deacon's papers.

Connectionism is much closer to where it's at when considering the way human thought really works. Perhaps it is harder for most people to think in connectionist terms though.

Just happened to come back to this. I imagine it's because we have defined what computers can do and we also know that relatively simple cellular automata can do anything a computer can. I think the move to thinking of the mind as (or the result of) a computer is another example of "looking for the keys under the streetlight."

To date, it is unclear that cellular automata, neural networks, or the like can do anything that Universal Turing Machines cannot. But this seems like a replay of the old Meno Paradox. We can't check if these entities can do something novel and possibly related to consciousness until we know what that "thing," is so we can go look for it. .

Probably true in most cases, but there is a place for strategic ambiguity if it's done right. Heraclitus, Zen Koans, Biblical poetry, Hegel- ambiguity can allow a work to be more dynamic.

E.g., given his background in theology, which let him see how the Bible was interpreted and reinterpreted over millennia, his love of Heraclitus, and his expectation that his own words would be studied by future generations, I get the feeling that Hegel sometimes intentionally wrote like such an asshole.

Maybe philosophers writing in mystical poems will make a comeback some day... we could turn to the renewable energy source of Russell spinning in his grave.

Exactly. This is true with the sciences too. If we want to challenge the existing paradigm in any way we need to make more theoretical arguments. If we retreat to only looking at the well-verified, replicated empirical observations, we can only say certain types of (generally uninteresting) things.

You can't explain empirical results coherently without some degree of theory-ladenness in the first place. If you avoid making any theory-laden claims then at best you implicitly cede the role of explanation to the dominant theories, at worst you just have an incoherent list of observations.

But I also get why people simply make historical links between ideas without advancing a theory. I think the appeal here is due to how our cognition functions. When I read, "Spinoza," or "Descartes," there is a whole rich web of interconnected concepts attached to those names. I don't have to unpack all those concepts to use them. Sometimes it's easier to do analysis on compressed data (e.g. it is easier to see that 10*10^900 > 10*10^899 in this format than by looking at the numbers written out in decimals). The names become a vehicle of tremendous data compression. Which is just to say that "x also thought y," may be able to do a lot of heavy lifting in tying together concepts, but only if people actually share the same reference points, which they often don't in philosophy because the field is too big.

IMO this works because the "parallel terraced scan," does indeed explain how the mind works in key respects. This is also why sentences in specialized sub-disciplines sometimes appear to be saying completely trivial things as an excuse to drop in names or arcane terms (granted, this also happens to paper over lack of substance or due to bad writing skills).

I also think people like historical narratives of how science, math, etc. develop because we are innately geared towards remembering people, conflicts between people, social interactions, etc. as a social species. Hence the desire to "tag" abstract ideas to some individual or group.