It might be better to say "metaphysics" is, whatever people who work and study on this subject say it is.

That will lead to some poor quality New Age stuff, but that's unavoidable.

But these posts will continue to arise. I suppose I kind of like them.

Existence of the universe, existing universe. That's probably a term that would lead to less troubles than causes or reasons.

Yup. :up:

The argument that I'm making is that yes, the universe could be finitely or infinitely regressive, but that there logically can be no cause for why this should be. Many people say, "The universe could not have formed on its own," but my conclusion is, "The universe necessarily formed on its own". — Philosophim

The best we can say is that the universe is all there is, unless the multiverse theory happens to be true, which is difficult to test at the moment.

If it is infinite however, it was never formed, it just is.

We have some evidence for a Big Bang, so maybe that happened and nothing occurred before that. In either case, I agree, I don't see why something other than the universe is needed, save the multiverse, which just pushes the question further away.

Ideally, that would be nice.

If there exists an X which explains the reason why any infinite causality exists, then its not truly infinite causality, as it is something outside of the infinite causality chain. That X then becomes another Y with the same 3 plausibilities of prior causality. Therefore, the existence of a prior causality is actually an Alpha, or first cause. — Philosophim

Maybe this is the case, maybe it's not. We have to "stop the buck" somewhere otherwise we go down an infinite chain of postulates. We don't know enough to say either is the case.

An argument could be made for both needing a first cause (or an uncaused cause) or not needing one, in the case the universe is actually infinite.

Depends on how we think of cause. It's not impossible that the universe came into being for no reason or cause. Someone can say that makes no sense at all, but it could be the case for all we know.

I share the intuition that something must be the cause of the universe, but maybe there are no causes when we get to issues of this depth.

:up:



The universe doesn't give a damn if it follows our logic or not.

Things remain the same. People will continue to speak about metaphysics and you'll be limited to speaking about "C-metaphysics".

It's good you found a solution.

It seems the problem with the term is here to stay.

Depends on which field you want to go in. Most analytic philosophy, if not a good part of it, is rather technical focusing often on extremely narrow topics. There are exceptions of course and there are other traditions you could follow.

I personally had to take classes belonging to the European phenomenological tradition, though not much Husserl, more so Michel Henry and Patojka and a few others I forgot, plus some of the classics.

I ended up doing my own thing, that is, I did my work for each class, but for research and projects, I already found interesting people not belonging to the mainstream. So in the end it will boil down to what attracts you and how much freedom you are given to pursue your own interests, given that you don't like any of the established schools already.

Perfect, I'll likely do the same then. :up:

Didn't get around to reading it today. I'll continue tomorrow.

It's definitely Plato's hardest dialogue.

The notion of there being greater and lesser degrees of reality is, I contend, something that has dropped out of modern philosophy. — Wayfarer

Susan Haack picks up on that in her The World According to Innocent Realism. She discusses fiction and how it relates to the world and concludes that reality comes in degrees or parts. But you're right that it's not a subject much dealt with at the moment.

It should be mentioned that when Galileo overthrew Aristotelian physics, the Aristotelian notion of 'causation' was rejected along with it - the idea of formal and final causes, or the reasons for a thing, in the sense of its telos. — Wayfarer

Yes. So these things need a rearticulating of sorts.

That's the problem. We have many definitions, sometimes incompatible with each other, so we have to choose one. Or leave the topic ambiguous.

I think that if we want to keep the spirit of Aristotle's "being qua being", metaphysics has to be reinterpreted epistemologically. Our physics would today, be Aristotle's metaphysics back then.

The goal of metaphysics was to explain the world. Now we know that we can say less about the world than was thought in antiquity. Aristotle wanted to (for example) show what a house was. Today we'd say that a house is mind-dependent not a aspect of the world.

If we want to talk about houses, or statues or clocks or people, we have to elucidate how these things appear to us, how do we think about them (is a cave a house?) and what can we say about the world for people (are colours a property of the world?, is our ordinary picture of the world misleading?, etc.).

That's what I concluded after looking at this for some time, but, like anything else in philosophy people are going to disagree.

"They say that the name metaphysics is almost accidental, it was just the book by Aristotle that came after the book called ‘Physics’, so it doesn’t really have a meaning, but it’s not very difficult to say what it is, it’s just the attempt to study the most general characteristic of what is or may be and what must be”

- Galen Strawson

"Metaphysics... business is to study the most general features of reality and real objects.... Here let us set down almost at random a small specimen of the questions of metaphysics which press, not for hasty answers, but for industrious and solid investigation:... Whether there is any distinction between, other than more or less. between fact and fancy? Or between the external and internal worlds?... What external reality do the qualities of sense represent in general?

- C.S. Peirce

"I take metaphysics to be about the world, not just about our concepts, conceptual schemes, or languages; and to depend on experience—not, however, on the kind of specialized, recherché experience on which the empirical sciences call, but on close attention to familiar, everyday experience."

- Susan Haack

"Metaphysical enquiry employs the same cognitive power as is employed in commonsense and scientific judgements about the world of experience: the very same principles of reasoning as are employed in empirical judgements about tables and atoms, are employed in a purified form, in metaphysical judgements about God and the soul.”

- Sebastian Gardner

Well, I suppose this is why we are in philosophy forum, to argue till' we're blue in the face.

It only gets bad when we start arguing about trees existing or not. We're not there yet.

It's all good. I see you are busy here. Chomsky is a personal issue to me, so I couldn't resist a comment.

You have plenty to argue here anyway.

Saying something like that about Chomsky is quite remarkable...

They respected him deeply.

I suppose the appeal here is that the idea of one-ness is simple and difficult to argue against. Like if someone says there are many. Yeah, ok, but what about them? We look for similarities.

Do you think that it's possible to argue against the idea of "the one" as presented by Parmenides?

Funny that I saw your reply as I was typing, otherwise I would keep postponing.

By this point, it's impossible not to have our ideas contaminated by modern theories and other philosophers. I think that what can help with this distinction of time being an illusion vs time feeling very real to us, is that one is how time is independent of us (in some respects) and the other is time, as we experience it.

We obviously add much to time, that is not found in the universe. Ideas of "slow", "fast", "before" and "after" are meaningless to the universe. But not to us.

Well I'll start by saying something, otherwise it's easy to get intimidated and not say anything. Because this text is really dense and difficult. I've read a part of it, maybe a third or so, and highlighted some passages (copy pasted them actually) so that I could have something to build on.

As I read more and finish, and re-read, this may all radically change.

A lot of it is made more difficult due to the fact that we are in very different intellectual/cultural climates, so it's hard to understand why there should only "the one":

"if, on the other hand, one were in itself, it would also be contained by nothing else but itself; that is to say, if it were really in itself; for nothing can be in anything which does not contain it."

that which contains must be other than that which is contained? for the same whole cannot do and suffer both at once; and if so, one will be no longer one, but two?

It seems to me as if "the one" postulated here is rather rigid concept, such that anything which could possibly show a flaw in the concept of the one would be taken as part of the one, but the one cannot have parts.

Then we have the problem that a subject can think of the one, while being of the one, so the person cannot escape being part of the one.

I'd say the subject is one thing, the thought of the one is a different thing, while admitting that, in some very obscure sense, everything is part of a single "thing".

This thing could be the universe, or quantum fields or even the-thing-in-itself.

So initially, it looks like whatever this one is, for it to be rendered intelligible, must be the kind of thing which appears as many. And as appearances, they are different and multitudinous. So in this sense one could say that there are many things which at bottom belong to one.

These are my initial thoughts anyway.

It's "built in" to the way we experience the world. We just can't enter into the head of another person, we can only see bodies.

The closest analogy of getting inside someone else's head is to read a high-quality novel, which may give a rough impression of what you are pointing out. But even in this case it's only a distant approximation of actual experience.

Or so it seems to me.

"While we can isolate the element of the given by these criteria of its unalterability and its character as sensuous feel or quality, we cannot describe any particular given as such, because in describing it, in whatever fashion, we qualify it by bringing it under some category or other, select from it, emphasize aspects of it, and relate it in particular and avoidable ways."

- C.I. Lewis

We can't say what aspects of our own thought are futile. Maybe we realize that thinking about X was a waste of time or, one becomes aware that what one thought was misleading turns out to be correct.

What's more likely still is that we were wrong all the time and never found out. Might be the case given the history of thought.

What's a waste of time for one person, is the lifeblood for another.

And, we all die in the end. So futility is kind of built-in anyway. So... who knows?

There's all kinds of traditions, views and personal quirks. So I assume there are some who think so.

Like solipsism, it's not a question that can be refuted by arguments.

Welcome to my world. :naughty: :halo:

Never mind, poor attempt at mock surprise

Sure.

Here a link to the dialogue:

http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/parmenides.html

Hell....there might not even be an “external to this world” to contain things, — Mww

:scream:

I don't know about Eastern Traditions to be able to say much about that, if that's what you have in mind when speaking of having no self. Though galaxies and/or quarks still are representations, that can't be done away with. And we have good reasons for thinking these things belong to the world.

I think you are both a subject and on object. You are a subject so long as you have experience and are an object so far as you have a body.

In any case, both are required to do science as we now do it and philosophy too.

The world is related to how we think about ourselves and not necessarily an aspect of the world independent of us. — T Clark

I'm not sure I understand. If you were to say the world is related to how we think about it, then that's fine. If we are thinking about ourselves the world is of secondary importance at best.

That's a tough one. That would be the case if the self "T Clark" is a metaphysical entity.

It seems to me that selves are epistemological entities related to how we think about ourselves and not necessarily an aspect of the world.

However, we are part of the world too. So it's nebulous. There is a sense in which, narrowly defined, you can use metaphysics to refer to the world and epistemology to people. But, complex.

Capital punishment still exists in Japan and South Korea, not only the US. Of course, this doesn't make it right, but other "developed countries" have it as well.

And I can understand wanting to kill someone who murdered a family member or raped a loved one. But to give that power to the state, is problematic.

Reply 2/2

What does the term "construct" mean in this context? I might prefer to say we notice and observe similarities in the look and feel of the wall's straight surface, in the sounds of two horses, and so on. — Cabbage Farmer

We take the sense data from the world and represent it as a wall. We don't experience how we do this, we automatically do so. It's after this process that we can speak about noticing similarities and differences.

I'd prefer to say: The objects affect us the way they do in virtue of our disposition to be affected by such objects thus. It seems an empirical question, which of our perceptual dispositions are innate and which are acquired -- or perhaps it's better to ask, in what respect is a perceptual disposition innate and in what respect is it acquired. — Cabbage Farmer

That's a good formulation.

I'm no more inclined to say that music is "mere sound" than to say that speech is "mere sound", writing is "mere ink", or animals are "mere molecules" — Cabbage Farmer

This is the difference between what science says about "sounds" and "molecules" vs our experience of them as intelligent, sentient creatures. If we describe the phenomenon of music such as Beethoven's 9th, then we speak about sound waves and amplitudes. The property "sublime", "creative", "moving" and so forth, should not figure in a scientific description of facts, I think.

I suspect that humans learned to recognize, construct, and speak about triangular things before they arrived at that mathematical idealization; and it seems the precise geometrical concepts were designed to help us measure, describe, and construct the real things, not to replace them. I'm inclined to say it's the original, rough and practical, concept of triangle, not the mathematically precise concept of triangle, that's ordinarily applied in perceptual judgment. I see no reason to declare that the shape of a real thing must be perfectly similar to an ideal shape in order to count as triangular -- for instance, a triangular plot of land, a triangular altar, a triangular plow. — Cabbage Farmer

We may say the word "triangle" before we have a clear conception of what it is. But if we did not have an innate concept of triangle, we would see three lines connecting and often not very well. We could call it that a "triangle", but I think that wouldn't tell us anything about them any more than calling a group of people a "nation" tells us about people.

I see no reason to suppose that "empirical concepts" like "horse" and "star" are likewise "innate and implicit". To the contrary, it seems clear that we acquire such concepts only through acquaintance with instances of the corresponding objects in experience; and empirical sciences like biology and astronomy depend on the investigation of those particulars. — Cabbage Farmer

This is an extremely difficult topic to talk sensibly about, in my opinion, one that could very well lead to an entire different thread. The best way I can talk about this topic briefly would be to ask you to consider at an early age, when you found out what a "horse" and a "star" was, how many times did you have to see it and for how long did you have to be experiencing such objects such that you could see another one of its kind and call that other thing a "horse" and a "star"?

I think that if we attach "learning" or acquaintance with experience, it would take us forever to walk through a hallway, much less a beach or a forest.

The things science studies are postulated as being mind-independent. Our ordinary notion of "star" and "horse" do not apply to the science. I think this video explain the outline rather well, you may want to see all of it on 2x speed, but the relevant idea begins at minute 4:38:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ozZdrFQfTU&t=127s

He seems to suggest that a "mind" must be "one with that which it perceives" in order to "know or comprehend it". That mysterious criterion is fleshed out by the accompanying claim that a mind cannot "know or comprehend" anything "at a distance". This sounds way off the rails to me. Perhaps the passage puts egregiously unwarranted spin on the term "comprehension". I'm tempted to conclude that these extraordinary formulas are signs of Cudworth's ignorance of the integrity of the physical connections, revealed by empirical investigation since Cudworth's time, which link perceivers to distant objects in exteroception. — Cabbage Farmer

He's very wordy and can often be obscure. What I think he says is that by just sensing the object, we don't get any ideas from them. It's only when we think about the phenomenon carefully, that we're surprised to discover things about them. We see apples falling down, we use to believe that this meant "apples going to there natural place". But when Newton became puzzled by this and started thinking "why do apples fall instead of going up" he discovered important things about the world, through his experiments and calculations.

We can only experiment on what we have available to us as inquiring creatures, for instance, we could not do physics if we had no mathematical capacity, which is innate. That's the rough idea.

And our culturally mediated conceptual capacities play an extremely important role in determining the character of the perceptual judgments we're disposed to make on the basis of perception. — Cabbage Farmer

They certainly do to an extent, especially in folk psychological explanations of the world. It's quite interesting.

It seems to me that I say all this on purely phenomenological grounds, without extraneous "metaphysical" commitments or implications. — Cabbage Farmer

Yes. We can do most things in philosophy without metaphysical commitments. We can put that aside for these discussions.

Wow. That's some reply. I currently don't have the puzzlement that caused me to create this over a week ago, nevertheless I have to answer some of the things you bring up. :cool:

Reply 1/2

It's hard for me to understand what it could mean to claim that "there's absolutely no resemblance" between the subjective character of an exteroceptive experience, and the objective features of that experience. That there is some such resemblance seems perhaps most evident when considering changes, variations, and other differences that appear in the course of experience. — Cabbage Farmer

Though Reid was generally critiquing Hume, in this area I think he has in mind Locke, but I'm not certain. Locke's primary qualities suggested that these properties belonged to the object, that is, they were essential to the objects existence. Secondary qualities are inessential to the object existence.

Odor would be an inessential property of an object, not existing if we did not exist to smell them. The only reply I can come up is what I've said before, beforehand, it would not be evident that grass would smell the way it does when one looks at grass. When we look at grass, I can't imagine another way it could look, other than what appears to me. It could smell like bacon for all I know, but it couldn't look like a pig.

On the other hand, if I only smelled grass, having my eyes closed, and not having seen it before, I might be surprised it looks as it does, though perhaps I would associate that smell with some kind of plant.

there's "something it's like" for the look of an apple to change as ambient light gets bright or dim; and "something it's like" to behold variations in color along the surface of an apple, or to note changes in the look of the apple as I rotate it in my hand. — Cabbage Farmer

Yes, absolutely. Our sight of the colour will depend on lighting conditions, seasons, etc.

However, it's no easy matter to articulate the claim in question, as it's notoriously difficult to say anything informative about such "sensory qualities" without thereby implicating objective features of the experience in which these sensory qualities appear. — Cabbage Farmer

Most of the times, yes. How about hallucinations or dreams though? In these cases there's literally nothing external in the world to point to and say "this tree is the cause of my seeing it as brown and green."

Nevertheless, it will be pointed out, that dreams take stuff from the world, so we are reproducing it without extraneous help in these instances.

Then again, I suppose any two things in the world may be called similar in some respects and different in other respects. What should we make of the claim that there are some respects in which the "sensory qualities" of an experience do not "resemble" the objective features of the same experience? What's at stake in this claim for us, or for philosophers in the bygone days of Reid? — Cabbage Farmer

What's at stake? Not much by the way of practical affairs. For me it's more about being quite puzzled as to why we interpret the objects the way we do. We take our "world-building" as a given. It's only when we are puzzled that we got into modern science. Once you notice that what seems evident is problematic, then everything can be quite surprising. Which is an appropriate philosophical attitude to have, at times.

It seems to me that we learn far more about phenomena, including those "sensory qualities", by investigating all the ways in which they appear to be "connected", than we do by merely noting their "resemblances". — Cabbage Farmer

Absolutely.

It's C.I. Lewis I have in mind, not Kant.

Good post. I’d like to read you when you’re a lot better, rather than a bit. I’m sure I’ll learn something. — Mww

Sounds fair. :up:

Perhaps, psychology broadly considered, yes. It's a massive topic and not our most developed science by any means.

"Physics" has overwhelmed "Metaphysics" and no human intuition can add any value to the understanding of reality without a good understanding of present physics.
Epistemology is still interesting as much as it connects with philosophy of language and cognitivism... — Raul

In terms of Aristotle's original conception of metaphysics, absolutely no doubt about that.

Which is why many "metaphysical questions" like, "what is the self", "how can we best consider causation", "are events more primary than objects", "is free will impossible" are actually questions about how we interpret the world and not about the world itself. With a few exceptions.

But QM is obviously way to complicated for us to understand too well, at the moment anyway.

Philosophically relevant, but try telling Mr. or Mrs. Suburbia that thing just put on the curb isn’t actually a trash can. Even his media-crazed Gen Z offspring isn’t likely to put out the lawnmower when coerced into the minor chore of putting the trash can on the curb. ‘Course, he’d probably put it out too late for pickup, but still..... — Mww

It is a trashcan, but a trashcan is a concept imposed on the thing, it's also a human concept "trashcan", not a natural kind, which exist mind independently.

It sounds like you’re saying we reduce sensations, but I don’t think we actually do that. Whatever the sensation is, is what we use in determining an object, so it would seem we need the entire sensation, and I’m not even sure how our physiology, that upon which impressions are made, would simplify sensation anyway. Our eyes don’t tell us we didn’t see green when perceiving the blue sky. — Mww

Let's say, we order the given. But there are different ways this sense data can be ordered, it's not necessary that our way of constructing the world is the only way there is, in terms of our common sense understanding of it.

There's a bunch of stimulus "out there" for us, we form it into a certain picture. But not all the sense data is tended to.

I'm a bit better today. Then again, we are arguing over which version of "transcendental philosophy" we prefer version 1.1 or version 1.12. :grimace:

Confessions of a Philosopher by Bryan Magee

Ah, always with the easy questions with you eh? :sweat:

It's difficult to pin down. We may have similar epistemological concerns in terms of truth, reliability, fallibilism, etc. But we radically disagree on what this knowledge amounts to. Is this knowledge only ideal, that is, does information we get from the world solely mental? If so, how do mental things relate to non-mental things? If science tells us about the mind-independent world, where does that leave our "folk psychological" "manifest image"?

If only people who actually do quantum physics understand it in any detail at all, should we even be able to talk about it at all, being that most of us aren't experts? How can human centric-knowledge be capable of applying to the world at all? Is there any evolutionary advantage to being able to do science as opposed to not?

And on and on and on.

Thanks.

*The author accepts no liability from the comments and corrections that henceforth will come from Unenlightened and Banno"