That's a good answer. And your stance on the mind/body divide? Are they also interdependent?

I've oscillated on that question a lot. There's a relationship of some kind, because whatever we call mind influences the body and whatever we call the body influences the mind, but I don't know what that relationship is.

But, with respect to knowledge, I'd say that knowledge is situation outside of an individual mind-body, and that mind is separate from knowledge -- I'd situation knowledge socially rather than mind-centrically. (just noting this bc of the previous question. Not sure if that's what you were after, but I thought it worth mentioning)

All states are material though, whether they be rocks or experience. There's no gap in causality which logic needs to fill. (i.e. idealism or anti-realism). — TheWillowOfDarkness

How do you justify such philosophical naturalism?

Kantian - 'thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind'.

Regarding 'all states being material', explain this: a set of materials can be arranged to mean something. For instance, you can write a sentence, or a formula, in chalk or pen, binary code, carve it in stone, or hire a skywriter to draw it in vapour in the sky. In each instance, you write the same thing, although not necessarily in the same language. Now obviously the material states are all completely different - but the meaning is the same! Hence, meaning can't be reduced to material states.

A man so extraordinarily brilliant, quite possibly the greatest philosopher ever — John

Have you yet started praying so that Schopenhauer won't see those words? ... X-)

Being immanent has no such connotations for me. Immanence is the being of things; being cannot become an object for a subject, to say that is to evince an incoherent dualistic mode of thinking, that is, if you intend it to carry any significance beyond being merely a convenient mode of locution; to repeat: being is immanent in both subject and object. — John

Yes but Being itself is different than any particular being. Being is transcendent relative to being.

Thus, there are no possible new questions now, that is. — John

Why would this not hold true in the time of Aristotle? Voegelin's vision would be the possibilities of consciousness are always there - whether in Aristotle's time, or Hegel's. Thus history cannot be divided into blocks, or assessed linearly.

Now, with modern science being where it is, spiritual science is possible; which will yield endlessly new knowledge in the spiritual evolution of humanity, if all goes well. — John

This seems to be a very gnostic structure - I'm not sure what will actually happen - I don't know the end of history, and I think it is a mistake to think we do.

So what about the place divinity holds in your views? — Mongrel

Divinity, divinity, divinity... drums fingers on table. What place?

I've tried several methods of incorporating divinity into the physical system.

The divine (God) infuses everything. The divine and the material interact.
The divine (God) is utterly apart from the physical world. No interaction.
The divine (God) and the physical world are side by side, but do not interact.

Mostly now I think God doesn't exist. No divinity, the material is all. This is not an entirely happy conclusion. I had liked the presence of God in my universe.

Not even a little shrine to Astarte? OK.

I was looking into Rescher lately and it opened my eyes a little bit to just how much of experience is mediated by the rational. Look around the room you are in. You know what those objects "are." You have names for them. You can put them to use. You know where they came from. Crucially, you can include them in your plans for the future. "Bare" experience is an unthinkable limit, perhaps. I find this in Kojeve, too. History haunts our objects. To fully understand the presence of a table is to got back to the factory and then to the creation of factories as well as the evolution of the trees or metallurgy involved. All of this is present for us as we follow the train of our thought, sitting in our chair. And yet none of this thought would have evolved (as we know thinking) if not for embodiment, hunger, ambition, lust, etc. We had to tear into the environment, our own minds, and the bodies of others to build this kingdom of thought.

But to answer your question: my "higher" or most fun self goes in for grand theories. I love math. I love philosophical visions. That's why I don't find pragmatism too dreary or unromantic. Pragmatism is the shoes on my feet. I still want diamonds in my eyes.

Now obviously the material states are all completely different - but the meaning is the same! Hence, meaning can't be reduced to material states. — Wayfarer

I agree. There's something "holy" or "eerie" about concepts. There's something at the heart of math, too. We have to recognize a symbol as the same symbol even though it's always written differently, even by the same hand. We have a inborn ability to recognize intelligible unity. Any attempt to reduce mind to matter (if that even makes sense) is going to have to use this ability, concepts. It's going to exist as a "truth" within the realm of concepts. The sign is that ill-named thing...that escapes the instituting question of philosophy: what the hell is it? Is it a thing or the condition of possibility for a thing to be a thing or...etc. etc. " [It] is."

Have you yet started praying so that Schopenhauer won't see those words? ... X-) — Agustino

Can he see them, you know, being dead and all? Why would I care in any case?

Yes but Being itself is different than any particular being. Being is transcendent relative to being. — Agustino

Being is the being of beings, so how transcendent?

Why would this not hold true in the time of Aristotle? Voegelin's vision would be the possibilities of consciousness are always there - whether in Aristotle's time, or Hegel's. Thus history cannot be divided into blocks, or assessed linearly. — Agustino

No, the dialectical possibilities of philosophy must actually be unfolded along with the dialectic. The ideas of for example Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz , Kant and Hegel are all new. Hegel's master idea of the whole of philosophy as the logical shapes of spirit is unprecedented. It closes the circle and brings the whole tradition together. Any ideas since have been merely explication revisitations of ideas already inherent in the tradition; or reworking variations on Hegel's system such as we find with Peirce and Whitehead, for example.

This seems to be a very gnostic structure - I'm not sure what will actually happen - I don't know the end of history, and I think it is a mistake to think we do. — Agustino

Once philosophy as the unfolding of of all the logical shapes of rational/ empirical consciousness is complete, then the next step for spiritual science is into the supra-sensible realm of experience and knowledge. This makes perfect sense to me. although I do acknowledge that I am not personally clairvoyant, and I cannot offer any arguments that would convince anyone who is not already amenable to the idea.

Can he see them, you know, being dead and all? Why would I care in any case? — John

It was a joke :)

Being is the being of beings, so how transcendent? — John

Because there is an ontological difference to speak Heideggerian to you between Being and beings.

No, the dialectical possibilities of philosophy must actually be unfolded along with the dialectic. The ideas of for example Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz , Kant and Hegel are all new. Hegel's master idea of the whole of philosophy as the logical shapes of spirit is unprecedented. It closes the circle and brings the whole tradition together. Any ideas since have been merely explication revisitations of ideas already inherent in the tradition; or reworking variations on Hegel's system such as we find with Peirce and Whitehead, for example. — John

I have my reservations about this. What about Wittgenstein's philosophy? Or Heiddeger? What about speculative realism? What about Marxism? What about eliminative materialism? Many of these philosophies tackle quite new questions or have very new ways of approaching them.

Once philosophy as the unfolding of of all the logical shapes of rational/ empirical consciousness is complete, then the next step for spiritual science is into the supra-sensible realm of experience and knowledge. — John

Why do you think things have to continue in steps? There is an undiscussed assumption of progress underlying your discourse. And I'm not quite sure that assumption is justified, that's all.

It was a joke :) — Agustino

I know, but i felt like taking it seriously, just for fun ;)

Because there is an ontological difference to speak Heideggerian to you between Being and beings. — Agustino

If Heidegger thinks that makes Being (a word that is capitalized only on account that all proper nouns in German are capitalized, by the way) transcendent, then he certainly did not intend that to be taken in any metaphysical, but rather in a merely phenomenological, sense: Heidegger was very clear on his intention to make a distinction between Being and anything 'onto-theological'.

Perhaps we could say that being is not immanent to experience, (although even that is arguable: Do we experience being or beings or both, depending on how we frame the question?) so we might say that it is transcendent of experience. But in any case being is not transcendent of thought; without thought there can be no being, at least not for Heidegger, because being consists in aletheia or 'unconcealedness'.

I have my reservations about this. What about Wittgenstein's philosophy? Or Heiddeger? What about speculative realism? What about Marxism? What about eliminative materialism? Many of these philosophies tackle quite new questions or have very new ways of approaching them. — Agustino

Heidegger's philosophy, as a phenomenology, can be understood to be a reworking of Hegel's phenomenology. Eliminative materialism is essentially prefigured by Democritus. Marxism is not philosophy proper but economic and political theory, and Marx very clearly understood himself to be reworking Hegel's dialectic in terms of materialism, in any case. Speculative realism is not even coherent philosophy, in any sense beyond spuriously reworking garden variety realism, at least from what I have gathered by reading Harman, Meillassoux and Brassier, and listening to what others have said about them on this and other forums. Wittgenstein and linguistic philosophy; I see as a one-sided narrowing of philosophical concerns rather than as a genuinely new approach. Much of it is implicit in Kant. That said there have been genuine innovations in logic and semantics; but they are not really what I would consider as philosophy proper,in the sense of "love of wisdom'; because they have no ethical implications..

I think that Whitehead's characterization of all philosophy as "footnotes to Plato", is pretty much apposite, until Hegel's great dialectical synthesis (which was certainly not implicit in Plato).

Why do you think things have to continue in steps? There is an undiscussed assumption of progress underlying your discourse. And I'm not quite sure that assumption is justified, that's all. — Agustino

I would say there has definitely been a progression. Philosophy has become more comprehensive; we now have much more to draw upon. Would you consider that to be progress? Have things become better, though, within the academie? Not necessarily unequivocally, since there has been a widespread narrowing and re-focusing of philosophical interests onto what might well be considered to be inconsequential questions. But maybe all this is a matter of post-Hegelian summing up, necessary to go through before people feel ready to move on. I don't know.

Well, I get my intel from my senses (empirically), from then I make decisions about them through using reason (rationalism)...I don't I can separate the two like trying to separate the dance from the dancer.

Sure. I think you also know things about the world by way of reason, and use empirical justifications for decisions.