Pass me the whip then please X-)It's pointless arguing against convinced unbelief. It's the mirror image of the conviction that it denies. So it amounts to holding an anti-religious attitude with religious conviction. 'Beasts are driven to the pasture by blows', said Heraclitus. — Wayfarer
But when it comes to 'what is the point of survival, really' - which is another way of asking the question, 'what does life really mean' - science doesn't have anything to say. — Wayfarer
Because the fact that drinking the milk will eliminate the discomfort of hunger is not an a priori given, but must be taken on faith. If the child did not have this faith, they would refuse the mother's breast, and would not drink the milk. — Agustino
Yes, this unremarkable, mundane and uncontroversial kind of faith is the same as religious faith. The only difference is the object or person of that faith. — Agustino
In what sense are they different in practice, apart from the faith being directed towards a different person/object? — Agustino
Yes, but the point is that we know this directly without having to believe anything about a "higher" meaning of life. — Janus
That's the same thing worded differently. That he instinctively desires one thing is just the same as he trusts that it's good.You assume the child trusts that it's good, not merely that he instinctively desires it. — Buxtebuddha
The ideals invite you to trust them, just like your mother invites you to trust her that the milk she gives you is good. You trust the one, but not the other. Why? Because in the meantime, you've learned to distrust.A baby's trust in its mother is not the same as one who has faith in some religious ideal. The ideals tell you that they're good, and you ought to trust them, the baby trusting its mother is blind. — Buxtebuddha
That's the same thing worded differently. That he instinctively desires one thing is just the same as he trusts that it's good. — Agustino
The ideals invite you to trust them, just like your mother invites you to trust her that the milk she gives you is good. You trust the one, but not the other. Why? Because in the meantime, you've learned to distrust. — Agustino
We may define a metaphysical sentence as a sentence which purports to express a genuine proposition, but does, in fact, express neither a tautology nor an empirical hypothesis. And as tautologies and empirical hypotheses form the entire class of significant propositions, we are justified in concluding that all metaphysical assertions are nonsensical. — A J Ayer, Language Truth and Logic
You will acknowledge that the 'experience of the sacred' is indeed real, and carries intrinsic authority - but only in a subjective or first-person sense. — Wayfarer
If anyone lacks a lexicon I would say it is you, because you do not seem to have actually read the modern philosophers and perhaps not even the medieval and ancient philosophers, but instead seem to rely on Wiki quotes and book reviews to get a sense of what they are all talking about. This inevitably leads to a distorted picture, I would say. — Janus
That is always said with the apparent conviction that none of the religious literature of the Judeo-Christian tradition actually constitutes evidence. I mean, it is simply swept off the table with the gesture of it 'not being empirical science', as though it is thereby settled that nothing in it ever happened, that the whole corpus is simply the superstitious accretions of the pre-scientific mentality. Never mind that it is read out at weddings and funerals, and that billions of people still live by it; there's no 'evidence'. — Wayfarer
Yeah, this is an important point. Many times I've first read Wiki and other secondary sources before diving into a philosopher, and it turns out that by reading them I got a completely different impression than by reading the secondary sources. One such philosopher was Spinoza, or why not, even Wittgenstein. Sometimes I do wonder how come the Wiki is so far off the actual philosopher.but instead seem to rely on Wiki quotes and book reviews to get a sense of what they are all talking about. This inevitably leads to a distorted picture, I would say. — Janus
Such experiences cannot coherently be objectified in the kinds of ways you seem to want to objectify them: in terms of "realms" or "higher authority" or "transcendent being". — Janus
It’s simply your mindset against anything you deem ‘supernatural’, which includes an awful lot. — Wayfarer
Do they have any place in philosophy at all, then, or they simply passed over in silence? — Wayfarer
I don’t claim to be an authority in philosophy. What I do is refer to such materials in support of a general approach or perspective, which I believe that overall I present quite coherently. — Wayfarer
[In respect of the Biblical tradition] I'm not sure what evidence you're referring too, and what conclusions can be reasonable drawn from this evidence. — Sam26
So, Wayfarer, of what use is metaphysics? Because it seems to me that one can read and become acquainted with many many metaphysical theories, and still not "feel" any differently about his or her life. — Agustino
In his Confessions, Augustine reports that his inability to conceive of anything incorporeal was "the most important and virtually the only cause" of his errors. The argument from De Libero Arbitrio shows how Augustine managed, with the aid of Platonist direction and argument, to overcome this cognitive limitation. By focussing on objects perceptible to the mind alone and by observing their nature, in particular their eternity and immutability, Augustine came to see that certain things that clearly exist, namely, the objects of the intelligible realm, cannot be corporeal. Then he cries out in the midst of his vision of the Divine Nature, "Is truth nothing just because it is not diffused through space, either finite or infinite?" he is acknowledging that it is the discovery of intelligible truth that first frees him to comprehend incorporeal reality.
But we have to realize with Kant and Wittgenstein that our speculations are just that; they don't give us any firm knowledge of reality comparable to how science can. — Janus
Hence the key paragraph 6.522 in the Tractatus:
“There are indeed things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical.”
In other words, there is a categorically different kind of truth from that which we can state in empirically or logically verifiable propositions. These different truths fall on the other side of the demarcation line of the principle of verification.
Wittgenstein’s intention in asserting this is precisely to protect matters of value from being disparaged or debunked by scientifically-minded people such as the Logical Positivists of the Vienna Circle. He put his view beyond doubt in this sequence of paragraphs:
6.41 The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is and happens as it does happen. In it there is no value – and if there were, it would be of no value. If there is value which is of value, it must lie outside of all happening and being-so. For all happening and being-so is accidental. What makes it non-accidental cannot lie in the world, for otherwise this would again be accidental. It must lie outside the world.”
In other words, all worldly actions and events are contingent (‘accidental’), but matters of value are necessarily so, for they are ‘higher’ or too important to be accidental, and so must be outside the world of empirical propositions:
“6.42 Hence also there can be no ethical propositions. Propositions cannot express anything higher.
6.421 It is clear that ethics cannot be expressed. Ethics is transcendental.”
Young philosopher Frank Ramsey, who helped to translate the first English edition of the Tractatus, remarked that to describe ethics as ‘nonsense but important nonsense’ is too much like having one’s cake and eating it. This is surprisingly glib coming from Ramsey, whom we can assume had read Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (as Wittgenstein certainly had), and would know the famous line in its Preface: that Kant had “found it necessary to deny knowledge, in order to make room for faith.” By this Kant meant that he denied an exclusively scientific worldview – a worldview that the Vienna Circle, including A. J. Ayer, had taken for granted. Kant’s purpose was to justify our conceiving of ourselves as rational agents who can through free will freely govern ourselves by the moral law. For Kant, for free moral choice to be possible, our will must not be constrained by the deterministic grip of the laws of nature that apply to the physical world. So our moral choices must be made independently of nature. So for both Kant and Wittgenstein, ethics is definitely transcendental. There are mysteries beyond the reach of human reason – totally beyond it, so that even all theological explanations are necessarily wrong. The most we can hope for is that our words may make our ignorance known to ourselves.
Janus: But we have to realize with Kant and Wittgenstein that our speculations are just that; they don't give us any firm knowledge of reality comparable to how science can.
Wayfarer: With all due respect, here I think is where you are mistaken. Because science can only give us certain knowledge of either those things that we are capable of treating in objective terms, along with what can be mathematically proven; of the domain of phenomena. But that is not all there is to reality. — Wayfarer
Mystical experience cannot provide such a testing ground, because mystical experiences tell us nothing solid about metaphysics, about reality and lest of all about any purported "higher reality". — Janus
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