even in the highest levels of noesis, contemplation and thinking only with intelligible objects, elements of eikasia, opinion associated with one's practise, enter into the knowledge. No theory (intelligible object) can escape the influence of practise (the visible world), and no practise (activity in the visible world) is free from the influence of theory (the intelligible realm). — Metaphysician Undercover
Well, it seems to me that this is a defense of naive realism. I'm sorry to say that I think the first sentence verges on the nonsensical, as it implies that you are whatever you are looking at - chair, tree, or whatever. — Wayfarer
As I tried to argue several pages back, the act of cognition is a complex, whereby a whole range of different kinds of stimuli and judgements are integrated into a whole. And in that act there is also plenty of scope for error. — Wayfarer
So they're all looking at the same paddock but seeing different things; and furthermore, their differing perspectives don't really conflict - it's not as if the real estate developer's view is the right view, and the farmer's the wrong one. — Wayfarer
if you go right back into the origins of the 'dialectic of being and becoming' with the Parmenides, then we will see that the Greek philosophers really are questioning our instinctive sense of the reality of sense-perception. — Wayfarer
Plato, et al, really did distrust the testimony of the senses; in that, he was more like the Vedic sage who sees the world of sensory experience as 'maya', — Wayfarer
I think the 'ultimate reality' is the only subject of interest for philosophy — Wayfarer
hatred, greed and delusion ... condition our every perception, so we don't 'see things truly'. — Wayfarer
It means you don't see the tree; you see the light. (And you never, ever, did see the tree.) — tim wood
I don't understand what you are saying here. Would you explain how separation can flow out of identity? — Dfpolis
Aristotle was still a religious contemplative by today's lights. Maybe he was less mystical than his teacher, but when he talks of 'contemplation of the eternal ideas', he's not talking about anything utilitarian. Another John Uebersax page, Contemplative Life is Divine and Happiest. — Wayfarer
Are you familiar with the two forms of identity? You'll find them on SEP referred to as qualitative and numerical. — Metaphysician Undercover
Qualitative, what logicians use, implies that a thing is identified by what it is, but this really refers to a logical subject rather than an object. — Metaphysician Undercover
The thing's identity is what we hand to it, what we say it is. — Metaphysician Undercover
Having temporal extension is what gives existence to a "thing". — Metaphysician Undercover
Every aspect of the thing itself is essential to it, making it the unique, particular thing that it is. — Metaphysician Undercover
Aristotle on the other hand provided us with a law of identity which identifies the thing itself. His law of identity states that a thing is the same as itself. What this does is create a separation between the individuation and identity which we hand to reality (we individuate and identify "a chair" for example), and the identity which things have, in themselves. — Metaphysician Undercover
I don't understand what you are saying here. Would you explain how separation can flow out of identity? — Dfpolis
Again and again and again, in forms that shift with the breeze. It isn't about existence. It's about knowledge. No one questions that perceptions are caused by something. But you jump from the fact of a cause to knowledge of the cause. No one questions that as a practical matter we have lots of knowledge. The question is, again, how it works. Kant's answer is that knowledge is partly constructed by mind*.The obvious question that follows is, if it's mind-constructed, how do you get beyond the mind? Kant's answer: you don't. You say you do, but you give no account of how, except by resorting to practical knowledge in ever more fantastical forms.As I've pointed out, everything can't be perceptions because a perception is always perception of an object by a subject. — Dfpolis
Aristotle in his Nichomachean Ethics, provides a simplified and I believe a more realistic version of the principal divisions of knowledge. He divides theory from practise, such that in comparison to Plato's divisions, theory is assigned to the intellectual realm, practise to the visible. (...) — Metaphysician Undercover
So, my commitment to determinism in the realm of physics does not commit me to determinism in the realm of intentional operations of knowing subjects. — Dfpolis
I think you get biological teleology wrong. The way you describe it, teleology arises from individual organisms' striving to achieve a goal, much like Lamarck thought that when a giraffe reaches for higher branches its neck grows progressively longer with each generation (he even hypothesized a causal mechanism for this: a "nervous fluid"). We know that this is not how evolution works (for the most part). Fitness does not increase as a direct response to organisms' strivings and desires. — SophistiCat
Well, it seems to me that this is a defense of naive realism. I'm sorry to say that I think the first sentence verges on the nonsensical, as it implies that you are whatever you are looking at - chair, tree, or whatever. — Wayfarer
But if we rather consider this 'object' as the content of the perceptual experience, and this content is conceived as being propositionally articulated, then it makes sense to say that the content of the experience is identical to what it is that is being experienced, in the case where there is no illusion or misperception. — Pierre-Normand
if the proper knowledge of the senses is of accidents, through forms that are individualized, the proper knowledge of intellect is of essences, through forms that are universalized. Intellectual knowledge is analogous to sense knowledge inasmuch as it demands the reception of the form of the thing which is known. But it differs from sense knowledge so far forth as it consists in the apprehension of things, not in their individuality, but in their universality.
The separation of form from matter requires two stages if the idea is to be elaborated: first, the sensitive stage, wherein the external and internal senses operate upon the material object, accepting its form without matter, but not without the appendages of matter; second the intellectual stage, wherein agent intellect operates upon the phantasmal datum, divesting the form of every character that marks and identifies it as a particular something.
Abstraction, which is the proper task of active intellect, is essentially a liberating function in which the essence of the sensible object, potentially understandable as it lies beneath its accidents, is liberated from the elements that individualize it and is thus made actually understandable. The product of abstraction is a species of an intelligible order. Now possible intellect is supplied with an adequate stimulus to which it responds by producing a concept.
the 'object' and the 'subject' are ontologically united without any epistemic gap in the sense that the actualization of the subject's power to perceive an object and the object's power to affect the subject's capacity for perceptual knowledge are the joint actualization of one single power, — Pierre-Normand
That doesn't sound nonsensical, but it is also not what I was commenting on. What I took the passage I was commenting on to say was that the hypothetical tree/chair/apple, the perception of it and the subject of the perception, are all one and the same - which I take to be a naively realist analysis. — Wayfarer
What the Brennan passage seems to say, and what I think is crucial, is that the forms of things are known directly and immediately, because of the innate capacity of 'agent intellect' to know forms (which is 'noesis'). But the sensible object is known only mediately, precisely because it is external, other, or separate from us, physically. So what is known directly is the form/type/essence which is not exactly the same as the material object of perception - hence, 'hylomorphic dualism'.
Now, there's another matter, which is the fact that objects appear to us as a unified whole, not as form on the one hand, and matter on the other. And that, I take to be the issue which Kant addresses in the 'transcendental unity of perception.' — Wayfarer
The distinction does not depend on who uses "identity," but what they mean in using it. Numerically identity refers to the selfsame object. Qualitative identity means distinct individuals have the same properties. — Dfpolis
I don't understand what you are saying here. Would you explain how separation can flow out of identity? — Dfpolis
This post is golden. There is much food for thought, and for further study, there. Thanks! — Pierre-Normand
This is yet a third meaning of identity. It is the thing as understood. For example, when we speak of gender identity, we mean what gender a person understands themself to be. If it is self-assigned, the result of self understanding, it is an intrinsic property. If it is "handed" to something, it is not intrinsic, but relational: the thing as understood by us. — Dfpolis
Dynamic continuity allows us to know that we are dealing with the selfsame thing, but it is not the source of the thing's existence. We know this because a thing must exist before it can have dynamic continuity. — Dfpolis
This is not quite right. As you point out, dynamical continuity allows me to say that I am the same individual at different times, yet many of my aspects have changed. I am no longer the same height and weight, nor is what hair I have left the same color, as when I was a child. So, some properties are "accidental" -- changing them does not make me a different individual or a different kind of thing. — Dfpolis
I don't understand what you are saying here. Would you explain how separation can flow out of identity? — Dfpolis
No one questions that perceptions are caused by something. But you jump from the fact of a cause to knowledge of the cause. — tim wood
Kant's answer is that knowledge is partly constructed by mind — tim wood
how do you get beyond the mind? Kant's answer: you don't. You say you do, but you give no account of how, except by resorting to practical knowledge in ever more fantastical forms. — tim wood
And the foundation is that Aristotle sez so. — tim wood
The point is that the representation is not the tree — tim wood
What does Aristotle say in response to Kant? — tim wood
You see a tree. Is what you're seeing a perception of the tree? Or the tree itself? — tim wood
If of the tree itself, how did the tree get into your perception? — tim wood
These two were the expressions of both sides of a dilemma. Kant resolved it. — tim wood
Physical systems therefore are of special interest to physicists but aren't ontologically fundamental. — Pierre-Normand
Their evolutionary consequences cross-over to the time frame of phylogeny because, while the sorting action of natural selection is, in a sense, blind to the organisms' strivings, the raw material that it is selecting amongst doesn't merely consist in variations in genotype but rather in variations in effectiveness of the (teleologically structured) phenotypes for achieving whatever it is that the organisms already are striving for. — Pierre-Normand
if the properties are judged to be the same we say that it is the same object. — Metaphysician Undercover
Do you see the difference between this and numerical identity, which identifies the self-same object, through temporal continuity? — Metaphysician Undercover
I don't understand what you are saying here. Would you explain how separation can flow out of identity? — Dfpolis
You apprehend that there are two forms of identity. Why do you not see this as a separation? Do you see the difference between a logical subject, being identified by it's properties, and an ontological object, being identified by temporal continuity? — Metaphysician Undercover
Sorry Df, I somehow missed this part of your reply. — Metaphysician Undercover
This is the Kantian distinction. the properties are not of the thing itself, they are how we perceive the thing. — Metaphysician Undercover
Everything which could be identified as a property, of any existing thing, is essential to making that thing, the thing which it is. — Metaphysician Undercover
Do you see the separation between identity by essence, and identity by accidentals? — Metaphysician Undercover
That's broadly the disjunctive conception of perceptual experience (and knowledge) defended by John McDowell, among others. — Pierre-Normand
We do not "know" an object, rather we "know" (perceive) some of its properties in some epistemic context. — Relativist
The ontological identity between Phosphorous and Hesperus is not identical to the epistemic stance because the epistemic context is different. — Relativist
I don't see this. There is no reason we can't have two different objects with identical properties, say two atoms or two molecules. — Dfpolis
Yes, but distinguishing the meanings of identity is not the same as physical separation. — Dfpolis
This is a result of not understanding that there can be no sensation or cognition without the ding an sich being sensible or intelligible. In sensation and cognition we become one with the object perceived and known because of the joint actualization of sensible or intelligible and of the subject's capacity to sense or to be informed. — Dfpolis
Only at one instant in time. As I noted, over time many properties can change without a loss of dynamic identity. That is why some aspects, such as life, are essential, while others, such as hair color, are accidental. — Dfpolis
Oh. I see. I use "separation" to mean physical distance and "distinction" to mean logical difference. What you are calling "separation" I would call "distinction." — Dfpolis
In Kantian metaphysics though, "the object perceived" is the phenomenon — Metaphysician Undercover
just like in Aristotle's epistemology, the knower becomes one with the abstracted form, but the matter, or thing in itself remains separate — Metaphysician Undercover
We hand identity to the abstracted form, the perception, so the perception, the abstracted form, has an identity. — Metaphysician Undercover
Now, as Aristotle insists, we need to go beyond this, and allow that material things, what Kant calls noumena, also have an identity in themselves. — Metaphysician Undercover
Do you understand the need for this separation, or do you deny the need for it. — Metaphysician Undercover
Only at one instant in time. As I noted, over time many properties can change without a loss of dynamic identity. That is why some aspects, such as life, are essential, while others, such as hair color, are accidental. — Dfpolis
No, it's not a case of "only at one instant in time". That's the whole point, a thing, or object, has necessarily, temporal extension. — Metaphysician Undercover
to be the thing that it is, any thing, or object, must have the exact same properties that it has, at every moment in time, or else it would not be that thing, it would be something else. — Metaphysician Undercover
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