I am a simple nominalist about universals. We are universalising creatures, and such universalising is indeed the only way we could make sense of events and objects. To differentiate is to deny identity; and then to quantify over properties is to universalise, from redness to sparrows. — mcdoodle
I believe nominalism claims that those things which particulars have in common are not independent of those particulars. There is no such thing as roundness in the absence of a round object. — Michael
The Ideas are not in space and time, and so are not causally efficacious. — Thorongil
I think you're actually advocating a subtle dualism here, though - 'ideas' being in a 'mental realm' which is causally inactive, i.e. can't effect changes, and the 'objective domain', which you presume is the really existent domain. — Wayfarer
But recall the Kantian insight that reality is not simply given to us, we're not passive spectators of an already-existing vista. The mind orders and constructs according to judgements and the categories of the understanding. — Wayfarer
Yes and no. Reality is actually given to us, according to Kant, it's just filtered by the forms of understanding. So the filter is constructed, not reality, though the filter then becomes reality for us." — "Thorongil
He's still treating as if the is an "unfiltered" reality out there we can never access. — TheWillowOfDarkness
What we filter is still mistakenly understood as a "flawed picture" rather than understanding of the world wider than ourselves. — TheWillowOfDarkness
More critically, he still treats the "unknown" as if it is outside our filter. — TheWillowOfDarkness
But this cannot be true . Since any unknown state if in relation to us, it must be within the filter, be something we might know. — TheWillowOfDarkness
The filter must be reality. — TheWillowOfDarkness
Everything must have an understandable from regardless of whether anyone knows about it-- that's why there is an unknown state. There can be no reality to know beyond how things might be filtered to experience. — TheWillowOfDarkness
I think that there are degrees of reality — Wayfarer
But that was very much what was lost in the transition to modernity, via the rejection of universals by the nominalists, as universals are part of that structure. — Wayfarer
...argues that individuals in "contemporary industrial culture" experience a "universal feeling of fear and disillusionment", which can be traced back to the impact of ideas that originate in the Enlightenment conception of reason, as well as the historical development of industrial society. Before the Enlightenment, reason was seen as an objective force in the world. Now, it is seen as a "subjective faculty of the mind". In the process, the philosophers of the Enlightenment destroyed "metaphysics and the objective concept of reason itself." Reason no longer determines the "guiding principles of our own lives", but is subordinated to the ends it can achieve. In other words, reason is instumentalized.
As a follow up, your question also reminds me that for some time I've had the thought that Aristotle may prove useful in further clarifying and possibly widening Schopenhauer's metaphysics. I wrote some brief notes to myself on it a while ago and can share them with you if you want. — Thorongil
Looked at this way the world is its own purpose; there cannot be some transcendent reason (a reason utterly beyond the world itself) as to why it exists, because, really such an idea can make no sense at all. — John
They go about their lives, meaning and all, without being haunted by existential dread because they aren't empty without purpose.
You treat some of the philosophically wisest people... as if they are ignorant. — Willow
As a follow up, your question also reminds me that for some time I've had the thought that Aristotle may prove useful in further clarifying and possibly widening Schopenhauer's metaphysics. I wrote some brief notes to myself on it a while ago and can share them with you if you want. — Thorongil
The mental and the physical are not two causally linked realms, but two aspects of the same nature, where one cannot be reduced to or explained by the other. — Schopenhauer, Arthur from IEP
The double knowledge which each of us has of the nature and
activity of his own body, and which is given in two completely different ways, has now been clearly brought out. We shall accordingly make further use of it as a key to the nature of every phenomenon in nature, and shall judge of all objects which are not our own bodies, and are consequently not given to our consciousness in a double way but only as ideas, according to the analogy of our own bodies, and shall therefore assume that as in one aspect they are idea, just like our bodies, and in this respect are analogous to them, so in another aspect, what remains of objects when we set aside their existence as idea of the subject, must in its inner nature be the same as that in us which we
call will. — Schopenhauer WWR Book II
The most counter-intuitive doctrine of process philosophy is its sharp break from the Aristotelian metaphysics of substance, that actuality is not made up of inert substances that are extended in space and time and only externally related to each other. Process thought instead states that actuality is made up of atomic or momentary events. These events, called actual entities or actual occasions, are “the final real things of which the world is made up,” (Whitehead, Process and Reality, 18). They occur very briefly and are characterized by the power of self-determination and subjective immediacy (though not necessarily conscious experience). In many ways, actual occasions are similar to Leibniz’s monads [link], except that occasions are internally related to each other.
The enduring objects one perceives with the senses (for example, rocks, trees, persons, etc.) are made up of serially ordered “societies,” or strings of momentary actual occasions, each flowing into the next and giving the illusion of an object that is continuously extended in time, much like the rapid succession of individual frames in a film that appear as a continuous picture. Contemporary commentators on process thought suggest that individual actual occasions vary in spatio-temporal “size” and can correspond to the phenomena of sub-atomic particles, atoms, molecules, cells, and human persons (that is, souls). Likewise, these individuals may aggregate together to form larger societies (for example, rocks, trees, animal bodies). According to this model, a single electron would be a series of momentary electron-occasions. Likewise, the human subject would be a series of single occasions that coordinates and organizes many of the billions of other actual occasions that make up the subject’s “physical” body. — Process Philosophy from IEP
Third, Whitehead retains the notion of final causation in the becoming of actual occasions, arguing that occasions are pursuing “satisfaction” or completion that they accomplish through the integration of prehensions in a novel and aesthetically pleasing unity. Consequently, it is the final cause that accounts for the becoming of an actual occasion in Whitehead. Where Whitehead attributes becoming to final causes, I attribute it to difference or disequilibrium. Objectiles become because they contain disequilibrium within themselves and disequilibriums are introduced into their being through interactions with other actual entities. Becoming is the resolution of these tensions or disequilibriums producing new properties or qualities in the objectile, but this resolution of tensions is not governed by final causality but rather by the mechanics underlying the internal organization of the objectile. The resolution of disequilibriums marks the death or completion of an objectile, though the dead entity can still function in the becoming of other objectiles through being prehended by these objectiles. — https://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2009/03/07/objectiles-and-actual-occasions/
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