Accordingly, I argued that ontology was, properly speaking, concerned with the nature of being (literally, 'I am-ness') rather than of 'what exists'. This distinction I held to be an example of what I considered fundamental to the proper distinction of 'being' from 'existence', which is hardly recognised by modern philosophers. I was told that my definition was 'eccentric' and completely mistaken. Finally, I was sent a link to a paper I mentioned to you before, 'The Greek Verb 'To Be' and the Problem of Being' , Charles Kahn, whom I was told was an authority on the subject. But I learned that rather than challenging my claim, this paper actually supported it, through passages such as:
[Parmenides] initial thesis, that the path of truth, conviction, and knowledge is the path of "what is" or "that it is" (hos esti) can then be understood as a claim that knowledge, true belief, and true statements, are all inseperably linked to "what is so" - - not merely to what exists, but what is the case (emphasis in original).
[The] intrinsically stable and lasting character of Being in Greek - - which makes it so appropriate as an object of knowing and the correlative of truth - - distinguishes it in a radical way from our modern notion of existence.
— Charles H. Kahn
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Finally, this conceptual divergence was definitively cemented in early Christian theology
— Astorre
hence Heidegger's critique of 'onto-theology', the 'objectification' of the being. While the basic fact of the matter is that Being is an act, not a thing. (Something that is hardly news to Buddhists.) — Wayfarer
An alien may as be different to us as we are to a cat.
Would a cat understand if we explained Sartre's theory of existentialism to it?
Would we understand if an alien explained what they know to us?
if such an alien were to arrive and tell us, we would likely have no difficulty in understanding it.
The secrets of existence may be very simple, like a biology lesson. We are just in the unfortunate position of being blind to this truth.
There may be sufficient information, or clues in the world we find ourselves in to work it out. That it just requires some clever, or intuitive thinking to work it out. — Punshhh
Yes, we are cumbersome and slow to learn new tricks. But this trick might not be so difficult. I think part of our problem is we have convinced ourselves that it is complicated. Simply because we have not worked it out yet. But this may be a mistake, the trick might be quite simple, but we are blind to it. Have we considered that we are blind, cannot see the obvious?We are confronted by aliens all the time: alien cultures, politics, ethics and philosophy. We have enormous difficulty in understanding these aliens, and they are right in our midst. They are our neighbors. Thomas Kuhn said that new scientific paradigms become accepted not because everyone is made to understand the new science, but because the old generation dies off.
The ‘I am’ , the self, does not pre-exist its relation to the world, but only exists in coming back to itself from the world. — Joshs
Why does this remind me of the Libet experiments? :chin: — Wayfarer
↪Joshs It just occurred to me spontaneously - don't want to make too much of it. — Wayfarer
For Heidegger, Dasein’s Being is its existence, but existence understood as the transcendence of a self, an exiting from itself in being ahead of itself in already being in the world. The ‘I am’ , the self, does not pre-exist its relation to the world, but only exists in coming back to itself from the world. The direction of this ‘act’, occurrence, happening, is from future to present, from world to self, rather than the other way around. In the happening of Being, what is the case is secondary to how it is the case, which is in turn secondary to why it is the case. The happening of Being always begins again and again from this wonder.
But rather, if such an alien were to arrive and tell us, we would likely have no difficulty in understanding it. — Punshhh
To me this suggests that the human being ‘I am’ identifies themself as a being in the world, ‘I am that’. This informs the personality which reflects on what it is (It is that which it is). Which results in when that personality is acting in the world, it acts as a thing (that thing it realises it is)*. But this personality is its own interpretation of itself, so is never actually being itself. It is always its own idea of what itself is. It is always acting out (as if on stage), what it thinks it is, or would be. This means that what is experienced as the self is all the baggage from the past, being projected into the future. A future which is anticipated to be a continuation of what happened in the past. — Punshhh
As I could never run a 4 minute mile because I am limited by the physicality of my body, all brains are limited by their physicality. Brains are physical things.
That the reason we haven’t worked it out might be for another reason. We are blinkered, or blind to it. — Punshhh
We largely speak a common truth. To claim solipsism with regard to other people is quite extreme.The truth may be staring us in the face, but we may well see different truths.
We largely speak a common truth. To claim solipsism with regard to other people is quite extreme. — Punshhh
We are clones from a common ancestor (small group of pre-mammalian predecessors)*. One continuous living lineage. It would be surprising if we saw different things, when looking at the same object.But on the other hand, when we both look at this "red postbox", how do we know our subjective experiences of the colour "red" are the same?
It would be surprising if we saw different things, when looking at the same object. — Punshhh
Even more impressive, the geneticists concluded that all human beings on Earth right now can trace their lineage back to the Eve gene, a single common female ancestor whom scientists called the Mitochondrial Eve. She lived around 200,000 years ago.
science.howstuffworks.com
Well we have a narrative of process, rather like our interpretation of ourselves, it is an interpretation. It can be refined through experience and trial and error during our involvement in processes. It can be analysed intellectually, but again this is an abstraction a narrative.Is it possible to identify a process? Rather than identify, it is more accurate to compare. Compare, but not with a thing, but with a process.
Agreed.Asking about "how I being?" we must have something as an example, an image, a template. In this way, one of the key signs of being (which I will propose later) is realized - involvement. That is, something can be itself only on the condition that there is something else or different, from which I deduce that any existence is impossible in a single instance, but is something exclusively in relation to another (Being together).
I had to make some simplifications to explain things to Russell. — Astorre
I am interested in the other question: whether there is something that is regardless of whether we speak of it, think of it, or conceptualise it. This is the difference between epistemology and ontology. — Astorre
I was just wondering how we can approach the ontology of being, something that is external to our language and thoughts, without using language or thoughts. — RussellA
The question of how to approach the ontology of being that which exists beyond language and thought—is a central one in philosophy, since language and thought inevitably shape our perception of reality. — Astorre
I believe that a discussion of this issue of language and paradox might provide a fruitful point of comparative philosophical dialogue between Zen Buddhism and phenomenological philosophy.
Ontological idealism of being is the view that being is fundamentally of the mind, where reality does not consist of mind-independent particles or forces, but is grounded in consciousness and reason.
Husserl's phenomenology is certainly that of ontological idealism, where any belief in the world's independent existence is put aside to focus on human experiences.
Heidegger's Dasein is also about ontological Idealism. It is about "being-in-the-world", in that we are not detached observers of the world but embedded in our experiences — RussellA
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