Heh. Fair.

What?! My wonderings are off-topic? Never! :D

Good and interesting thread either way. I'm enjoying it.

:up:

I suppose I was thinking in terms of metaphysics and a more general notion of goodness. You know, a plague spore would be "better" than a prion, or a hurricane "better" than a rock.

point is that we shouldn't be beguiled by the idea that a loss of connection with a particular older tradition renders the entire discipline incoherent. Make Philosophy Great Again? I don't think so.

I don't think this is MacIntyre's point. He goes into great detail on why he thinks the collapse into emotivism happens with a series of case studies. The thesis isn't that "only the classical tradition is coherent and so moving away from it results in incoherence." Rather it is "these developments led to incoherence because of x, y, and z (with particular attention to and affirmation of Nietzsche's critiques of ethics)," but these problems do not apply to the tradition.

But then the sub-thesis is that the abandonment of the tradition has helped lead to this incoherence precisely because our moral vocabulary was developed in the context of the old tradition, and we continue to lean on this vocabulary even when it has been uprooted from the context where it makes sense. For example, he talks about equivocation in lists of the virtues in philosophers, but also in Jane Austen, Benjamin Franklin, etc., and the further equivocation as vice becomes the "vices" of the "vice unit" (i.e. primarily prostitution, gambling, drugs, and alcohol) and virtue becomes a sexually loaded term for women.

I think it's a very similar to the arguments that Deely makes in "Four Ages of Understanding," and the "Red Book," re the shift in epistemology, the philosophy of perception, and semiotics in the early modern period and on. The claims are similar; terms like "objective" and "subjective" come to take on meanings that are in some ways the opposite of their original meaning and which lead to incoherence because their original framework has been not only abandoned, but forgotten. Some parts might be stronger than others; Deely seems to be on particularly solid ground on the points relating specifically to the philosophy of signs and signification.

I think you could probably write a similar book about metaphysics and terms like "substance."

Such historical arguments can of course be biased or oversimplifying, and they become less plausible when they rely significantly on relatively recent "new readings" of old thought.

Heidegger makes this sort of argument going way back with the "ontotheology" thing, and I think that, even if it fails as a historical piece, we might consider that it applies to much philosophy, if not all the philosophy he thought it applied to. Gadamer has a pretty good critique of why Heidegger's history might be thought to fail a bit (basically, it assumed that the late scholasticism with which Heidegger was most familiar—e.g. Suarez—was representative of all scholasticism or even the whole of "classical metaphysics," but it isn't really.)

Then you have your out and out polemics, such as Weaver's "Ideas Have Consequences." These can still have value, but tend to run into much more simplification and bias. Another example here might be the many attempts to frame Aristotle and Plato as essentially representing the empirical/rationalist (Anglo/Continental) divide, when they really don't fit these neatly at all.

Yes, this is a good corrective to my somewhat peremptory rejection of MacIntyre's claim, as I understand it. But at the same time, isn't his whole argument based on a supposed "incoherence" in some monolithic thing called modern ethical philosophy? Is a "collapse into emotivism" supposed to be characteristic of how current moral philosophers think about ethics? That would be news to Bernard Williams or Thomas Nagel or Martha Nussbaum. That's what I meant when I said he was engaged in a degree of cherry-picking, naming approaches he particularly dislikes and making them exemplary.

the further equivocation as vice becomes the "vices" of the "vice unit" (i.e. primarily prostitution, gambling, drugs, and alcohol) and virtue becomes a sexually loaded term for women. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Sure, that's exactly what they are -- equivocations, with a highly political purpose. But incoherent? I don't feel I have any trouble understanding the competing meanings of a term like "vice," nor do I think it affect my ability to engage in ethical thinking that is independent of the Aristotelian framework.

The irony here, for me, is that I actually rely more on virtue ethics than any other semi-systematic theory. I just don't feel it needs the kind of support MacIntyre wants to give it.

terms like "objective" and "subjective" come to take on meanings that are in some ways the opposite of their original meaning and which lead to incoherence because their original framework has been not only abandoned, but forgotten. — Count Timothy von Icarus

This is the vision of cultural transmission as a game of "telephone". @Wayfarer frequently makes such suggestions.

Two questions though:

(1) Is the original message necessarily the most important? (Dewey, for a counterpoint, talks about philosophical problems not being solved but abandoned, passed by, because they are no longer "live" to later generations.) The word "necessarily" provides an easy out; make it, why should we think the original is important at all, except as a matter of historical interest?

(2) How much time-place-language-conceptual-scheme-culture relativism are we committed to? Just enough that certain people "no longer understand" the old ways, but not so much that the dedicated scholar can't "recover" or "reconstruct" what has been lost?

(2) is particularly "fraught," as the kids say. When you dip into such a debate, you'll first read someone claiming that the original meaning of such and such was this, because in their conceptual scheme blah blah blah. And you think, wow that's really interesting, and the shift in perspective is exciting. But then you find out that every little detail is subject to endless debate among specialists, and it gets harder to believe anyone really knows the "original". -- And all that comes before considering whether you're even capable of entering into the worldview of a thousand or three thousand years ago, given a mind stuffed with 20th- and 21st-century ideas. How alien are the ideas you're supposed to be able to grasp? How can you know you've done so, that you haven't just played another round of "telephone"?

I think you might be misjudging the sense in which these terms become "incoherent." MacIntyre does take a very broad approach, which has some deficiencies, but his paradigmatic criticism of Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment ethics is Nietzsche, whose attack on ethics is particularly broad, but which has also generally been accepted as applying broadly (i.e., a serious challenge, even if it can be overcome).

He is not claiming that all modern ethicists are emotivists. This would be a silly thing to try to argue, because of all the counter examples that exist. He is claiming that the emotivists, or those reducing ethics to power, etc., actually have very strong arguments vis-á-vis contemporary ethics. It is indeed a weakness of the book that it doesn't really get into these critiques as much as one might hope. I don't think MacIntyre initially imagined how popular it would become, and probably figured people would be familiar with the references. But then another feature of modern ethical debate he focuses on to make his point is the inability of people to agree on almost any principles, and how this differs from earlier thought


In terms of contemporary thought, he looks to the analytic tradition a bit, focusing on Moore for a while, but since he was a Marxist, Marxism comes in for particular critique. The contemporary example he uses towards the end of the book is how the debate between partisans of Rawls and Nozick is interminable because of the historical issues he traces through Hume, Kant, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche.

I think Charles Taylor's "A Secular Age," is a useful corrective here because of the dominance of what Taylor calls "subtraction narratives" of the emergence of secularism. These basically say: "We inherited all sorts of maladaptive, superstitious dogmas. Secularism is just what emerges when you cut all that garbage out." Taylor's main point is that this is a false narrative. Secularism was positively constructed, and in particular it was positively constructed on religious grounds in a theologically informed context. This is relevant to the idea that the problems of modern ethics—their shape and structure—were in some way inevitable once the "historical baggage weighing us down" was jettisoned. But the book also takes a broader look at how notions of human flourishing evolved in ways that make doing ethics difficult.

That's what I meant when I said he was engaged in a degree of cherry-picking, naming approaches he particularly dislikes and making them exemplary. — J

I think there's a real question whether supposed views of the past are ever really in play in a contemporary debate, or are people staking out contemporary positions in that debate but using the past to give their position the lustre of authority.

Or, on the other hand, to associate the position you oppose with the past well lost.

saying something is more complex is different to saying it is of greater worth.
— Banno

Curious then that murder charges apply only to the killing of humans. Although that may be an inadvertent illustration of the consequences of a flattened ontology. — Wayfarer

If it was because of complexity, I suspect there would be a chart on which all living things are placed in order if complexity, with different punishments for killing members of different levels.

I think, rather, what makes us unique is the reason the charge of murder applies uniquely to us.

Btw, it was started to give you a platform for explicitly discussing and defending an idea you often mention in passing, an idea you feel is often rejected out of hand. — Srap Tasmaner

In that case, my difficulty with the OP is that we are trying to get degrees out of the substance/mode binary. Maybe that can be done, but at face value it is implausible. Unless there are only two degrees.

The further purpose was to specifically not reject the idea out of hand and encourage others not to, and to set an example by trying to make sense of an idea I don't naturally have much affinity for, in my own clumsy way, of course. — Srap Tasmaner

And I appreciate that, too.

I find that sort of thing awfully interesting, but this thread is about what sort of existence properties have, whether things that have more property-types have more existence, and whether there's a truer realm beyond this one. — Srap Tasmaner

Okay.

Don't tempt me. I'll start a thread in your honor next. — Srap Tasmaner

:grimace:

Really, though, I've been egging you on to start a thread on logical pragmatism for awhile now. I am willing to oppose that, and you also have a stake in it.

What's in it for me? (See what I did there?)

my difficulty with the OP is that we are trying to get degrees out of the substance/mode binary. — Leontiskos

Which btw I didn't see coming. I think that comes from @Wayfarer's stuff about the 17th century.

In that case, my difficulty with the OP is that we are trying to get degrees out of the substance/mode binary. Maybe that can be done, but at face value it is implausible. Unless there are only two degrees — Leontiskos

True enough. But I wonder if some of the oddities coming out of quantum theory might lie in that nebulous zone between the two extremes. My thoughts range from virtual incredulity at action at a distance to speculating that somehow mathematics materializes in a strange way.

Which brings up a question. How is logic related to definitions of reality?

I think that comes from Wayfarer's stuff about the 17th century. — Srap Tasmaner

Which, recall, originated in the discussion about whether and in what sense philosophy can be considered "higher" (and why the scare quotes around the term.) Which then leads to the question, along what axis, what dimension, is that distinction meaningful? Higher in what sense? So, rummaging through my grab-bag of things I've read, that statement about degrees of reality in Liebniz et al came to mind: 'the less dependent a thing is on other things for its existence, the more real it is'. That maps against my hazy conception of 'the unconditioned' as the domain of absolute truth.

I still find it interesting that ordinary people routinely think truth can land on a spectrum, that there can be more or less truth in what you say.

And in a similar way people describe ideas, accounts, views, as more realistic or less, on a spectrum like accuracy (which fdrake brought up).

I find that sort of thing awfully interesting, but this thread is about what sort of existence properties have, whether things that have more property-types have more existence, and whether there's a truer realm beyond this one. — Srap Tasmaner

Like 'folk wisdom'? I'll own up that one of the books that considerably influenced me was Alan Watts' last book - The Book: On the Taboo against Knowing Who You Are. Later there were other books in popular Vedanta - Vivekananda, Yogananda and Ramana (and let's not forget The Beatles). They are strictly speaking outside the bounds of philosophy proper, at any rate, outside the Western philosophical corpus. But they have the distinct advantage of still being a living philosophy, propagated by living adherents, not confined solely to glass museum cases or library shelves. And I also think they're a strong implicit influence in much of contemporary discussion about philosophy of mind and consciousness.

Anyway, that's where I think the idea of self-realisation comes from. And the salient idea there is indeed that that of a 'truer realm', which is what 'the sage' has come to realise (in both senses of understanding to be true and bringing to fruition.)

But that sits awkwardly against talk of 'what property-types have more existence'. Nevertheless I think it's the implicit background for the idea expressed in the 'great chain of being', which is where this started.

Even in pre-modern western philosophy the outlines of similar ideas can be discerned - like one of those satellite photos where archaeologists can make out the outlines of an ancient city which is no longer visible on the ground. The hoi polloi, the ordinary man (i.e. you and I) is distracted by passions and petty concerns, bickering over opinions and thirsting after pleasures. Through the philosophical ascent we 'come to our senses', as it were, and begin to 'see truly'. (I notice that one of the interesting cross-cultural scholars I read, Raymond Panikkar, did one of his three PhD's on a comparative study of Thomas Aquinas and Ādi Śańkara.)

Is this version any more accurate than MacIntyre's? — J

I think the fragmentation and pluralism of today's world is necessary and inevitable. It's a consequence of the globalisation of knowledge and culture. Another of the Eastern philosophy books that impressed me was subtitled 'seeking truth in a time of chaos'.

”Water is an undividable primitive" is the sort of supposition that is open to empirical investigation. No doubt, we could easily reformulate these models (or something like them) using new, ever smaller primitive elements, as materialists did. In some sense, they are unfalsifiable in that we can always posit ever smaller building blocks at work in a "building block ontology," but we might have other empirically informed grounds to reject such a view. — Count Timothy von Icarus

From a very high level of description, isn’t what happened, in the aftermath of Descartes’ division of mind and matter, that res cogitans was to become rejected as an oxymoronic conception, a ‘spiritual substance’, a ghost in the machine? Leaving the other half of his dualist model, extended matter, which proved so amenable to prediction, control and manipulation through the emerging new mathematical physics, that it came to be seen as the only real? And that is what finally precipitates the loss of the vertical dimension and with it the hierarchy of values. What is of value then becomes a matter for the individual conscience.

Alan Watts — Wayfarer

My oldest son and his friends have read it, along with Nietzsche, Marx, Camus. The hippy reading list is alive and well in some quarters.

the salient idea there is indeed that that of a 'truer realm', which is what 'the sage' has come to realise (in both senses of understanding to be true and bringing to fruition.) — Wayfarer

it's the implicit background for the idea expressed in the 'great chain of being', which is where this started. — Wayfarer

Through the philosophical ascent we 'come to our senses', as it were, and begin to 'see truly'. — Wayfarer

I think you're right to see all these dots as connected, and right to think people reject the whole package because they reject a particular dot, for they see them as connected too.

I think we should have a conversation about the truer realm, because that intuition -- that this world isn't all there is -- is so persistent across cultures and ages. In the modern world, we've mostly corraled it into religion, but the intuition itself is interesting.

So here let me ask you: my hunch is that this intuition, that there's something else, something more, comes first and beliefs about the other realm after. Do you think that's right? Or do you think that people, maybe a smallish number, have experiences that are, well, unusual, that they take as experiences of another realm -- that such experience comes first? I could see either. What do you think?

So here let me ask you: my hunch is that this intuition, that there's something else, something more, comes first and beliefs about the other realm after. Do you think that's right? Or do you think that people, maybe a smallish number, have experiences that are, well, unusual, that they take as experiences of another realm -- that such experience comes first? I could see either. What do you think? — Srap Tasmaner

You're on the mark with the observation about it having been 'corraled into religion'. That is why there is a taboo about this subject. But then, for a lot of European history, the consequences of challenging ecclesiastical orthodoxy were extremely serious. 'Orthodoxy' means 'right worship' or 'right belief', and the penalties for straying were severe. This has left a kind of shadow, something like a repressed memory, in the European consciousness, which affects much of what is said and thought about it.

About there being other realms, I would say cautiously yes. But there is a principle in Mahāyāna, that Nirvāṇa and Saṃsāra are not separate realms, but the same realm viewed with different eyes. Through the lens of clinging and aversion, the world is fragmented and suffering (dukkha). Through the lens of insight the same world is seen as interdependent, luminous, and spontaneous. Not that this is easy to realise in practice, and popular presentations of Eastern wisdom have often turned out to be another means of self-deception or ways to exploit the gullible. But it retains a kernel of truth.

I think there is such a thing as revelation in the sense of an intuitive vision or insight into the real nature of existence, and that the Buddha did possess such an insight, which is why (perhaps contrary to secular interpretations) his was a revealed religion. There are others as well (Parmenides comes to mind), but notice in Buddhism the emphasis on insight, as opposed to belief, which is why the first article on the eightfold path is 'right view', a subtly different thing to 'right belief'.

Anyway enough of a digression into points East, but that explains a bit about why I came at the question from the angle I did.

Thank you for your patience. I'll have to reread AV. Your engagement with it is deeper than mine, and I suspect more accurate as to the arguments. I liked Whose Justice? Which Rationality? very much, though.

the same realm viewed with different eyes — Wayfarer

I like this.

Through the lens of clinging and aversion, the world is fragmented and suffering (dukkha). Through the lens of insight the same world is seen as interdependent, luminous, and spontaneous. — Wayfarer

That certainly has the ring of truth!

It does also sound like the sort of difference that you might attribute to affect or mood.

But that can go either way: you could also say that your mood derives from "which world" you're seeing.

intuitive vision or insight into the real nature of existence — Wayfarer

There's just too much literature on all this for us to do more than scratch the surface.

I'll add something else, which is a little closer to your point about self-realization. There's another sort of insight which maybe concerns something like freedom. I've acquired a sort of homegrown Buddhism: when I'm worried about something (and there is so much to worry about), I tell myself "This is just a thing that is happening" and I can let go of the feelings I attach to those worries. I tell my son, "You gotta be Taoist about this shit." -- Henry Miller used to talk about being a happy rock, that the river flows over but cannot move or change.

I think there's a real question whether supposed views of the past are ever really in play in a contemporary debate, or are people staking out contemporary positions in that debate but using the past to give their position the lustre of authority. — Srap Tasmaner

Another possibility: Some (not all) of those who make arguments using the past, want to persuade us of a narrative in which society (almost always Western society) as a whole has gone down the tubes since whatever the Golden Age was supposed to be. In this version, the decline in philosophy doesn't stand on its own, but is part and parcel of a decline in values, culture, and spirituality. We're meant to see the latter sorts of decline as obvious ("Just look around!"), and infer from this that the older philosophy must have been better too. We might even see a causal connection. I suppose if you have a grand narrative in which the West has declined, this doesn't fit well with a belief that philosophy has progressed, or at least not gotten worse.

Absolutely. And it can go the other way -- you can guilt-by-association traditional philosophy, art, religion, anything of the past if you think society is so much better now than it was in the bad old days.

I should add, I don't think it's a matter of "reducing" someone's philosophy to their politics, or their aesthetics, or vice versa. But I do believe William James was right to sense that there were different temperaments, I guess we could say, and that attitudes toward various things tend to come in clusters. Or if not temperaments then styles, different ways of approaching things, of defining and trying to solve problems.