Again, this to me, is committing the bandwagon fallacy, and now you are showing more evidence of (or reiterating it rather), not countering that. — schopenhauer1

I think @Banno could make the observation without arguing/committing either way (but probably won't :grin:). Doesn't the observation stand on its own?

Two different directions:

the leap from the mental process to a somatic innervation — hysterical conversion — which can never be fully comprehensible to us — Sigmund Freud (Notes Upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis)

the puzzling leap from the mental to the physical — Sigmund Freud (Introduction to Psychoanalysis)

412. The feeling of an unbridgeable gulf between consciousness and brain-process: how does it come about that this does not come into the consideration of our ordinary life? This idea of a difference in kind is accompanied by slight giddiness — which occurs when we are performing a piece of logical slight-of-hand. (The same giddiness attacks us when we think of certain theorems in set theory.) When does this feeling occur in the present case? It is when I, for example, turn my attention in a particular way on to my own consciousness, and, astonished, say to myself: THIS is supposed to be produced by a process in the brain! — as it were clutching my forehead. — Ludwig Wittgenstein (Philosophical Investigations, Part I)

The two were contemporaries for half a century, apparently with fairly different approaches.

Can you demonstrate that idealists are less individualist or materialistic? — Tom Storm

That idealism is commonly opposed with materialism would be a good indication that idealists are less materialistic. Don't you think?

That idealism is commonly opposed with materialism would be a good indication that idealists are less materialistic. Don't you think? — Metaphysician Undercover

Not at all. I know rich socialists. It's a thing - we even have the expression Bollinger Socialism.

What matters is what people do, not the theories they claim to believe. Don't you think?

It technically goes back to Plato in the West. — schopenhauer1

My point is I don't think there was a tradition of uninterrupted idealism that was displaced in the 19th century.

But when did it start and what do we count as idealism? — Tom Storm

I think a fair case can be made for the ancestor of what was to become known later as 'idealism' in Greek philosophy - specifically Plato, of course, as the Ideas as fundamental constituents of being must be considered Ur-Idealism.

In the history of ideas, I think there are some major philosophers who can count as idealist - one in particular being Duns Scottus Eriugena. A scholar by the name of Dermot Moran has published a book arguing that Eriugena's philosophy, which was a subtle synthesis of neo-Platonism and Christian doctrine, was a formative influence on later German-speaking philosophy and was clearly visible in the German idealists (ref). And I don't think it's controversial to say that the last really influential idealists were the German idealists - Hegel, Schopenhauer, Schelling, Fichte. The British idealists, like Bradley, were very much part of the same overall movement. (In my view, Hegelian philosophy kind of collapsed under the weight of its own verbiage - you could gather a room full of so-called experts on Kant and Hegel and none of them would agree. It lacked the experiential dimension that characterises Buddhist culture in the form of a continuous lineage of monastic practitioners.)

Can you demonstrate that idealists are less individualist or materialistic? — Tom Storm

It's not a matter of individuals, people can profess one thing and do another altogether. But I'm a fan of various historiographic theories, like Oswald Spengler's, or Pitirim Sorokin - that cultures go through cyclical changes and have characteristic kinds of mentality. And I just don't think it can be disputed that secular western culture has a predominantly materialist attitude: not materialist in the sense of coveting material stuff, but as understanding the fundamental stuff of the world to be bodies in motion, governed by physical laws (which have now usurped the role previously assigned to divine commandments.)

Doesn't the observation stand on its own? — jorndoe

No. He's bringing it up. He is trying to say something with it. There are a lot of facts about the world. This doesn't mean I have to bring them up unless I am trying to say something with this fact. "Hey look at this..." implies "And so?"

Not at all. I know many rich socialists. It's a thing - we even have the expression Bollinger Socialism.

What matters is what people do not the theories they claim to believe. Don't you think? — Tom Storm

That's what I said early, there's a lot of hypocrisy involved when people classify themselves. It's better to judge by a person's actions rather than what they claim to be. So I said, despite no one confessing to be idealist, I've seen a lot of closet idealism in this forum. That is generally attributable to the fact that idealist premises produce the best arguments but idealism is associated with religion, which is frowned upon. So people tend to argue from idealist world views, and idealist premises, all the while insisting that they are not idealist. I think perhaps we can blame Wittgenstein for setting this example.

Ok, I'm not really convinced - we've also had 2000 years of Christianity without much commitment to the Gospels or social justice and the creation of extremely materialist cultures within Catholicism and the inevitable schism of Protestantism. What people do is more important than what they say they believe. It's actually something @Banno helped remind me of.

And I don't think it's controversial to say that the last really influential idealists were the German idealists - Hegel, Schopenhauer, Schelling, Fichte. The British idealists, like Bradley, were very much part of the same overall movement. — Wayfarer

I know this and agree. But it's a blip.

Yes, well put. I agree with you. I find idealism fascinating and am not running a campaign against it. I might be an atheist, but I am not committed to scientism or have an obsession with reason. I think truth is elusive to humans and generally avoid people who think they possess it.

, observation, as the case may (or may not) be:
The forum has a (noticeably) different distribution than the world of academic philosophers in general.
If so, then how come?
Either way, I'm not going to pretend to speak on @Banno's behalf.

I know this and agree. But it's a blip. — Tom Storm

A blip could indicate incoming ordinance, so beware.

I was going to add, idealism nowadays has rather counter-cultural implications. Kastrup is still considered by a lot of people a crank. Realism is - you know - hard-headed, real world, scientific, modern. Idealism sounds to closer to mysticism.

I think truth is elusive to humans and generally avoid people who think they possess it. — Tom Storm

You'd better avoid me then, because I, as the antagonist of Socrates, happen to know everything.

I know this and agree. But it's a blip. — Tom Storm

I think a form of neutral monism or panpsychism has seen a rise in David Chalmers, Philip Goff, Galen Strawson. Then there are mathematical Platonists like Max Tegmark who argue for mathematical entities have some sort of reality (even though they are not physical).

observation, as the case may (or may not) be:
The forum has a (noticeably) different distribution than the world of academic philosophers in general.
If so, then how come?
Either way, I'm not going to pretend to speak on Banno's behalf. — jorndoe

I gave a theory.

I think at the end of the day, the mind/body problem becomes the nexus point by which both sides meet. Things like the Cartesian Theater fallacy will always bewilder the inquiring mind. I think of a blue cube in my mind, even if this comes from sense impressions earlier, what does it mean to be "in my mind"? Neurons are firing, etc. Neural networks are connecting and computing. Yep. But this mental imagery is taking place. What is "that"?

We constantly say stuff like "two ways of looking at it", as if rephrasing gets at it.

We constantly kick the proverbial can down the road when we say, "Well it's information integrating", but "whence" is this integration? Where and what is this? Then we make analogies to some computer and we realize the interpreter is already in the equation. So not that either. Then we are back to where we began.

Idealists have a problem that it is corresponding to physical events and cannot pose the problem of whence mental events. So, they say everything must be mind.

Realists have a problem that it is corresponding to the mental events and cannot pose the problem of whence mental events,. So, they downplay mental some sort of "illusion" or cultural artifact. However, illusions are still a phenomenon to be explained in themselves. And on and on it goes.

I sort of, kind of, agree. But I've become acutely aware of how 'post-Cartesian' our worldview instinctively is. Descartes is where the modern 'mind-body' problem comes from - along with a constellation of early moderns, notably Galileo, Locke, Newton, and so on, the division of mind and matter, 'primary' and 'secondary' attributes, religion and science. I see being modern as itself a state of being, a station of consciousness, shaped by these influences. Learning how to be aware of that is a big part of philosophy IMO. This is not to say that modernity, or Enlightenment rationalism, or what have you, is 'bad' or 'wrong' - sure prefer it to many alternatives - but the problems it has are like it's shadow, in the Jungian sense.

Also don't agree with the equivalence of materialism and idealism. Kastrup has a lot to say on that - materialism relies much more on abstractions than does idealism. Why? Because the concept of matter is itself an abstraction whereas the reality of first-person experience is apodictic. I don't have to copy in again that paragraph from Schopenhauer0 about how time and space only enter into reality through the brain.

So - not just on and on, around and around. There's light at the end of the tunnel, and I'm seeing it ;-)

I think of a blue cube in my mind, even if this comes from sense impressions earlier, what does it mean to be "in my mind"? — schopenhauer1

Right, what does it mean for something to be in the mind? It makes sense to say it, and everyone understands when it is said, but no one really seems to know what it means.

I sort of, kind of, agree. But I've become acutely aware of how 'post-Cartesian' our worldview instinctively is. Descartes is where the modern 'mind-body' problem comes from - along with a constellation of early moderns, notably Galileo, Locke, Newton, and so on, the division of mind and matter, 'primary' and 'secondary' attributes, religion and science. I see being modern as itself a state of being, a station of consciousness, shaped by these influences. Learning how to be aware of that is a big part of philosophy IMO. This is not to say that modernity, or Enlightenment rationalism, or what have you, is 'bad' or 'wrong' - sure prefer it to many alternatives - but the problems it has are like it's shadow, in the Jungian sense.

Also don't agree with the equivalence of materialism and idealism. Kastrup has a lot to say on that - materialism relies much more on abstractions than does idealism. Why? Because the concept of matter is itself an abstraction whereas the reality of first-person experience is apodictic. I don't have to copy in again that paragraph from Schopenhauer0 about how time and space only enter into reality through the brain. — Wayfarer

Yes, I know the rejection of the Cartesian thing. I get it. Essentially he just re-introduced the Platonic skepticism of what we deem as "real", and made it more solipsistic (mind) rather than outward-facing (Forms, matter, etc.). However, the problem was there, whether he introduced it more blatantly or not (in my opinion). We must get through the Cartesian problem. I don't think there was a pre-Cartesian "better". But it may be just a stage to deal with.

A way through (not necessarily endorsing but just providing an example), could be an extreme object-oriented realism whereby objects have ways of connecting whereby realization takes place (actualization from potentiality). And lo and behold, this philosophy starts looking like Whitehead's process philosophy. So maybe there is a framework there (not necessarily everything he posited, but the basic idea).

Right, what does it mean for something to be in the mind? It makes sense to say it, and everyone understands when it is said, but no one really seems to know what it means. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yep.

Very droll. — Banno

Why thank you...?

Interesting that folk seem to feel the need to address themselves to me, personally, rather than the topic at hand. — Banno

Just another one of life's illusions...

It's interesting to me that most of what comes out of discussions like this seems to hinge on the significance of the extents to which our understanding (our models, in my terminology) are constrained by external forces. — Isaac

Right, anything we understand must be a part of the model and not of the purported "external forces". We know we are constrained by external forces, we just cannot say just what they are.

The realist sees the existence of constraints as the most significant element, the idealist sees the degree of freedom within those constraints as the most important bit. — Isaac

I don't know that it's so neat as that. The Berkeleyan idealist could be as determined by God as the realist is by brain chemistry (for example).

I have sometimes thought that Kant has his characterization of his philosophy as empirical realist and transcendental idealist backwards. We know the empirical world only via ideas; as I like to say the empirical world is a collective representation and in that sense it is ideal. About the transcendental we have no idea, except that if it is at all it must be real.

I can't see a way around the problem, myself. Certain methods of dealing with data qualify as being 'connected' to the world and so produce what we might call 'reasonable' theories - as opposed to merely guessing, or making stuff up. But within that canon, there doesn't seem to be any reliable process for choosing between them. If they meet the criteria of not being overwhelmed by evidence to the contrary, then then seem to all be equally fair game. — Isaac

I think your post hits the nail on the head. There can be no justification of any discursive dualistic kind (as all our knowledge is) that comes out of meditation or revelation. I've been labouring this point on these forums for years, but the idea that such spiritual methodologies can yield discursive knowledge seems to be very hard to let go of for some. (That said, I think we each believe (or should) what serves us best (and I don't mean what's most comforting, although I suppose for those whose primary need is for comforting, what is comforting may indeed serve them best)).

On the other hand I can know something non-dually, but it is more of a sense of profound satisfaction in knowing that which cannot be communicated. It is, admittedly, merely an affective state, but it can profoundly transform one's life, leaving one in a state of no-doubt, but since this is impossible to translate into discursive terms such experiences can never be evidence for anything, or convincing
to those who don't have like experience.

Both, I think, ultimately (assuming model-dependant realism) find themselves in the same statistical quandary of wanting to associate truth value with popularity. The scientistic wants the 'consensus' theory to have more weight, the religious want the 'serious' religions to be taken...well, more seriously. But neither can have what they want out of this model (and so both are dissatisfied). Despite intuitions which may seem to tell us the opposite, there's no mechanism (in this model) to connect popularity with truthiness. — Isaac

Schopenhauer claims that we can know the reality of the "in-itself" introspectively as Will. But this is purely speculative; for all we know it might be true, but since we could have no way of knowing it to be true, it would seem to be of little use.

What is really important, in my view, is what convinces you (or me or her). We are all convinced by different things, all driven by different presumptions, but what is important is that our ideas enable us to live more fully, a life as rich as possible. Everything else is a waste of time.

But your selective quotation of the passage then omits the grounds of Schopenhauer's 'defense of Kant', as he puts it. You then go to a peremptory dismissal: 'Obviously Kant doesn't know either'. But I don't think the 'sage of Konisburg' can be dismissed so easily. — Wayfarer

I did not omit on purpose the part where Schopenhauer's name appeared. There's nothing in that paragraph that would make it any stronger. Here it is:

Schopenhauer's defence of Kant on this score was [that] the objector has not understood to the very bottom the Kantian demonstration that time is one of the forms of our sensibility. The earth, say, as it was before there was life, is a field of empirical enquiry in which we have come to know a great deal; its reality is no more being denied than is the reality of perceived objects in the same room.

I'm not denying that time is a human construct -- at least I'm not arguing here against that notion. I don't care about that issue.

What I'm pointing out is that the claims of the idealists, such as Magee and Kant, are themselves delivered as "what actually is" about humans. So then my question is, why are Magee and Kant so privileged as to occupy a position wherein they could be both idealist and make claims like that. They're contradictory.

I think the point of the argument is the reference to Kant's view that time and space are fundamental intuitions of the mind - *not* things that exist in themselves. In other words, space and time are not purely objective in nature but are grounded in the observing mind. And this has also dawned upon at least some scientists. — Wayfarer

We've passed this. The point of our argument now is the fact that idealists can make claims as to the condition of our perception (we don't know the world out there, only the construct created by our mind), as to the anthropocentric nature of time and space, etc.

My question to you is, what do you make of the claims of the idealists? Are those knowledge? Are they truth? Why should we believe them when the realists could say, well, we may be only perceiving, but the causal relation of the world out there with our senses makes it clear that we know the world. There is this mechanism, that escapes our direct observation, but whose functioning makes it possible for us to see the sun and the stars in space. If this is not true knowledge, then what is? Why are we even talking about truth, knowledge, theories, the sage of Konisburg?

And oh, btw, gravity is not a mental construct.

IIRC, the 'idealism' of Parmenides (or Pythagoras) preceeded Plato by a century or so.

"As far as I'm concerned" ... i.e. a cop-out. :roll:

Idealism sounds to closer to mysticism. — Wayfarer

Such as your references to "Buddhist idealism" and Upanishads ... :sparkle:

You'd better avoid me then, because I, as the antagonist of Socrates, happen to know everything. — Metaphysician Undercover

I enjoy reading your perspective. We may disagree about some things, but I'm no philosopher and I'm here primarily to understand more about world views different to my own and the reasons/arguments people provide in defence of them.

A blip could indicate incoming ordinance, so beware.

I was going to add, idealism nowadays has rather counter-cultural implications. — Wayfarer

Sure, by blip I wasn't talking about potential future dominant world views.

As far as I'm concerned" ... i.e. a cop-out. — 180 Proof

You asked a question:

I just don't see how nonduality prioritizes "mind" "subject" "experience" over above "world" — 180 Proof

I answered with a passage from a canonical text of Advaita non-dualism, saying that 'outside the atman, nothing has any sense'.

What about that exchange is not clear?

I think a form of neutral monism or panpsychism has seen a rise in David Chalmers, Philip Goff, Galen Strawson. Then there are mathematical Platonists like Max Tegmark who argue for mathematical entities have some sort of reality (even though they are not physical). — schopenhauer1

Agree. And Roger Penrose. My point was idealism has not been constantly mainstream in the West since the Greeks - it had fashions, especially the Germans. Whether it becomes dominant again in the near future is not for me to say.

The lady doth protest too much, methinks. But prey, continue.

My point was idealism has not been constantly mainstream — Tom Storm

Idealism IS the mainstream. All else is degeneration. ('Footnotes to Plato' - remember?)

So the poll is simply a reflection of the fact that we live in a degenerate age - something Plato would no doubt vigourously agree with. But then, Popper did call him an enemy of the open society.

:lol: