You mistake me - I didn't say that 'the world is unintelligible'; I said that it may well be the case that something as abstract as 'the world' doesn't submit to the criteria of intelligibility at all - that it may well be neither intelligible or unintelligible; the very notion of intelligibility may not even apply to something as strange as 'the world' - whatever that even means. Put it this way - I know what it means to 'make sense' of this or that phenomenon: 'how does that work?', 'what contributes to function of that process?'; but when you ask these questions of 'the world', the questions themselves start to lose any cogency. — StreetlightX
This is just like Plato's "the good". The good, as described in The Republic, is what makes intelligible objects intelligible, like the sun makes visible objects visible. It is as you say, that background set of interests, the purpose, which directs the intellect toward understanding this, and not toward that Whatever it is which becomes intelligible to an individual intellect, is dependent on one's interestsFor one thing, to make something intelligible is always to do so against the background of a certain (set of) interests - for whom, for what purpose, to what end is the intelligibility of the thing sought? Things and phenomena are not simply 'intelligible' tout court; there is no intelligibility-in-itself; it is always a question of relevance - in what context and under what circumstances does intelligibility come into question? — StreetlightX
Right, measurement must be viewed with skepticism. All forms of measurement are methods of comparing one thing to another. The validity of such comparisons must be analyzed. This means that all forms of measurement should be scrutinized.If measurement is the only way of understanding the world (what I see as empiricism), then either is must be shown how philosophy utilizes measurement, or it must be seen with skepticism. — darthbarracuda
But calling measurement objective is a little ironic given that it is so completely subjective now in being dependent on understanding the world only in terms of dial readings. Science says, well, if in the end there is only our phenomenology, our structure of experience, then lets make even measurement something consciously a phenomenological act. — apokrisis
I'd still like to know what you think are examples of bad metaphysics. — darthbarracuda
Also, contemporary realist metaphysics is largely concerned with ontology and not with the broader metaphysical stories. — darthbarracuda
It's far more conservative than your version of metaphysics, with the only notable things I can think of being discussions of supervenience, grounding, causality and semantic meaning. — darthbarracuda
What you might be talking about just keeps getting muddier to me. — apokrisis
It's hard to be particular because the ways of expressing the generalised confusion of romanticism are so various. But anything panpsychic like Whitehead, or aesthetic like SX cites. I don't mind theistic approaches because they stick to a Greek framework of simplicity and so can deal with the interesting scholarly issues - right up to the point where God finally has to click in. — apokrisis
The late E.J. Lowe, Jonathan Schaffer, Tuomas Tahko, Ted Sider, Susan Haack, Michael J. Loux, the late David Lewis, Peter van Inwagen, Timothy Williamson, Amie Thomasson, Sally Haslanger, David Chalmers, Kit Fine, D. M. Armstrong, Trenton Merricks, Eli Hirsch, Ernest Sosa, Daniel Korman, Jaegwon Kim, etc.
The analytics. — darthbarracuda
You read Heidegger, Husserl, the idealists? — darthbarracuda
Yep. Most of those I would be in deep disagreement with. But now because they represent the reductionist and dualistic tendency rather than the romantically confused.
That is why I am a Pragmatist. As I said, reductionism tries to make metaphysics too simple by arriving at a dichotomy and then sailing on past it in pursuit of monism. The result is then a conscious or unwitting dualism - because the other pole of being still exists despite attempts to deny it. — apokrisis
Not with any great energy. I'm quite happy to admit that from a systems science standpoint, it is quite clear that the three guys to focus on are Anaximander, Aristotle and Peirce. Others like Kant and Hegel are important, but the ground slopes away sharply in terms of what actually matters to my interests. — apokrisis
On the other hand, many immaterialists and anti-realists don't like it because it subsumes logical meaning into the world. — TheWillowOfDarkness
Sensation and experience were never separate to logic or the world in the first place. They don't need to turn into anything to be there. If logic has always been the terrain, it doesn't need to shift from a map to terrain. — TheWillowOfDarkness
Also, I think you might find interest in at least some of what the analytics have to say, particularly Koslicki, Loux, Lowe and Tahko (hard-core hylomorphist neo-Aristotelians). — darthbarracuda
I don't get how logic is sensation then. I'm all ears. — schopenhauer1
So if the world is logically structured, then that is the structure sensation needs to develop to be aware of the world.
And the world itself must be logically structured as how else could it arrive at an organisation that was persistent and self-stable enough for there to be "a world", as opposed to a vague chaos of disorganised fluctuations? — apokrisis
Strictly speaking, sensation isn't logic exactly, but rather dependent on logic. Our experiences and feelings are the result of many systems constraining in a symbolic way. Sensation has a structure of logic. — TheWillowOfDarkness
Sensation "just is" part of the same realm of logic and everything else, rather than being "just not" of the same realm under mind/body dualism. Sensations aren't separate to the world and logic. They are all part of the same system. — TheWillowOfDarkness
Sensation and logic are what then? The same part of what system? — schopenhauer1
Well, that is not sensation, that is the structure in which sensation works within, not the sensation itself. — schopenhauer1
Logical realm-- things of the same type which are connected and interact. Sort of like either "mind" or "body" in substance dualism. Or "material" under materialism. Only it has a triform--logic (semiotics, symbols), body (objects) and mind (experiences). — TheWillowOfDarkness
So you say. But good luck with a psychology which is not focused on a structure of distinctions as opposed to your panpsychic pixels. — apokrisis
Panpsychism doesn't say matter is mind (that would make it entirely idealism). It says any matter has mind (experience). This distinction is sort of important. It considers mind and body as distinct. All matter has some sort of experience, rather than all matter being experience. — TheWillowOfDarkness
The semiotic theorist doesn't agree with this. A symbol is not a mind. The pixels on the screen might by symbolic, but they are not conscious beings. Experience might be a brute fact, but it's not a brute fact everywhere (and most critically, for the semiotic theorist, these brute facts have a logical structure; there can't be these facts without the first having the logic). — TheWillowOfDarkness
How is the panpyschist that different from a pragmatic semiotic theorist if both take experience as a brute fact? — schopenhauer1
Get involved in philosophical discussions about knowledge, truth, language, consciousness, science, politics, religion, logic and mathematics, art, history, and lots more. No ads, no clutter, and very little agreement — just fascinating conversations.