You're calling Plato a mystic.
I recognize metaphysical reductionism, therefore I believe there to be a prime substance.
At what point does something go from vague to crisp? Is it vague, vague, vague BOOM crispness? Why does this happen? And how does this happen outside of time?
Why is it of no real interest? Because you don't find it exciting or personally interesting? Because it's not useful?
What I don't understand is, if this great narrative of naturalized metaphysics was so successful, why it's not well known today.
What seems to be the case is that these people you speak of have literally left behind these questions in favor of ones that are more useful or stimulating while continuing to use the term "metaphysics" when they're really doing philosophy of science or science itself.
But if our categories and hierarchies are not merely arbitrary then they do "reflect the way the world that we move through is ordered." Of course, I am not claiming that the reflection must be perfect, just that there must some reflection if our categories and hierarchies are not to be completely arbitrary. — John
Metaphysics began with Anaximander taking just such a hierarchical view of nature and has relentlentlessly followed the same path ever since. So from a historical point of view, there has only been the one story.
To shrug your shoulders and say "lucky accident, hey", is supremely optimistic as an argument here. — apokrisis
So sure, my argument is that everything is "made of apeiron", which sounds like talking about a primal stuff.
But the difference is that your notion of this stuff is that it is already concrete. It is already formed. It already obeys a conservation principle and a locality principle. — apokrisis
I'm not interested in your narrow definition of what counts as metaphysics. I merely point out that I defend the very first important metaphysics model in philosophy - Anaximander's hierarchical symmetry breaking tale of the apeiron. — apokrisis
The idea that metaphysics began with Anaximander and goes in a straight line, however relentlentlentlessly, to here would not be supported by most historians of ideas...
I'm sticking with my view that physicists and who-knows-who in 400 years' time won't have the same sort of categorisations of the world we move through as we do. Of course, it's a tricky proposition to test empirically. There you go: this is a metaphysical debate. — mcdoodle
That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about primal material. It's not concrete, you can't hold it. Concreteness is complex, prime material is simple. Phenomenologicaly it is vague, metaphysically it is as simple as it can possibly get.
As Plotinus said, the "One" can only be arrived at by figuring out what it isn't. And so the same thing applies to the Aristotelian Substance, for it cannot be predicated upon but merely identified as a necessary component of Being. — darthbarracuda
Half the folk go off in a spiritual direction, thinking there is some deeper, or at least other, mind-stuff. The other half go off for the material dualism that is atomism. — Apokrisis
Supposely, logic imposes "constraints" on existence, such that one state is present over another. — Willow
You misrepresent the point I was making. What I said was that metaphysics - as rational inquiry into the nature of existence - got started by understanding that a hierarchy of constraints was what was naturally logical. And that is the vision that has been consistently fruitful, presumably because it is right. — apokrisis
If you can make a rational argument for why hierarchical organisation is somehow against nature, or that there is empirical evidence that natural philosophy has strayed from it in the past, and so may do so again in the future, then please provide that. — apokrisis
The "rules" of physics are not a constraint on the world. They are an expression of what it happens to be doing at a moment. — TheWillowOfDarkness
For me the point is that nature contributes to our categorial perceptions and judgements; more than contributes: categorial perception and judgement is itself an expression of nature, just as we are. The further point is that we are, by no means, all there is to nature.
Methodological naturalism is just the tendency to discount supernatural interventions that contravene natural law. But then I think it's also necessary, when trying to understanding the more indeterministic spiritual side of things, in relation to both the animal and the human, not to abandon naturalism, and devolve to supernaturalism, but rather to greatly expand our conceptions of what is both natural and possible. — John
But I think you show a non-historian's excess confidence, especially in your response to Wayfarer, in believing you know what Anaximander said (we only have a fragment and others' commentaries), and then what others in the Greek world thought or didn't think. — mcdoodle
My argument is that hierarchical categorisation is how human thinking works, however 'nature' works, and that human thinking in any given place and era is historically situated. — mcdoodle
You imply that beyond methodological naturalism lies only 'the more indeterministic spiritual side of things'. But what about the arts, politics, ethics and the social sciences? — mcdoodle
'Naturalism' is an irrelevant category in the arts, for instance, or refers to something quite different in artistic creation and judgment than it does when the scientific method is involved.
In ethics, how shall we make judgments? By finding something appealing in evolutionary biology? Not for me.
In short: I'm not a believer in metaphysical naturalism. But if we circumscribe science to the realm of methodological naturalism, then we can do science together and apply it all over the shop and have a whale of a time.
When we do, we find categories there, and sub-categories of categories, and so on. Is that categorical forking resident in what we find, or in how we undertake and understand the finding, or a mixture of both? I'm arguing for a mixture of both.
I can't say I enjoy these debates when this tone arrives in them. I certainly didn't mean to be rude, so I'm sorry if I was, but please don't be rude in return for a perceived slight. I still think your account of Anaximander is very sweeping, and reads to me like someone enthusiastic for an idea seeking confirmation in history, rather than a historian's account of how Greek metaphysics developed. I come late to all this philosophical stuff, but I try to be scrupulous in my judgment, and rely on a little more than Google searches. I've worked outwards from Aristotle and Plato to the Stoics and Epicureans then backwards to the pre-Socratics in the last year, but I don't claim to be well-read in this stuff, just trying to understand it.And you judge my understanding of Anaximander, the result of many years of study, having just done a hasty google search?
If you dispute my interpretation, of course tell me your specific concern. But please drop the superior attitude.
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So all you are doing is waving the banner of social constructionism and hoping it counts as a position. Lazy. — apokrisis
Can you tell me exactly what "metaphysical naturalism" consists in — John
I certainly didn't mean to be rude, so I'm sorry if I was, but please don't be rude in return for a perceived slight. I still think your account of Anaximander is very sweeping, and reads to me like someone enthusiastic for an idea seeking confirmation in history, rather than a historian's account of how Greek metaphysics developed. — mcdoodle
Really, I think this 'universals' debate ends in stalemate: one finds oneself of one inclination rather than another for reasons grounded in something about one's character, rather than in rational argument. — mcdoodle
If you imagine a world of dynamical processes where those processes are free to unfold over any spatiotemporal scale — apokrisis
Thanks for your explanation mcdoodle, it seems then that we mostly agree, but use different terminology; what you call "metaphysical naturalism" I would call 'scientism'. — John
The one intelligible theory of the universe is that of objective idealism, that matter is effete mind, inveterate habits becoming physical laws.
Absolute idealism is an ontologically monistic philosophy chiefly associated with G. W. F. Hegel and Friedrich Schelling, both German idealist philosophers of the 19th century, Josiah Royce, an American philosopher, and others, but, in its essentials, the product of Hegel. It is Hegel's account of how being is ultimately comprehensible as an all-inclusive whole.
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