I would have said that thoughts exist but are not real, as realism typically is about an external reality beyond the mind. — darthbarracuda
I agree and I probably only diverge in that I equate being with existence and that I do not think being exhausts reality. I would say there is also spirit ... — John
... and that it is on account of spirit that there can be final and formal causation, and beauty, goodness and truth as well. — John
Are you suggesting that spirit is somehow not being? Peirce characterized spirit as "disembodied mind," and hence Thirdness; it is real and has being, but (strictly speaking) does not exist. — aletheist
Peirce held that final and formal causation are also manifestations of Thirdness, while beauty, goodness, and truth are the proper ends of feeling (Firstness), action (Secondness), and thought (Thirdness), respectively; i.e., the subject matter of the normative sciences, which are esthetics, ethics, and logic (semeiotic). — aletheist
Sure, but it's a duality of kinds of experience. That there are these kinds of experience I think is simply irrefutable. But we don't need to, and I believe are not justified in, drawing any metaphysical kinds of conclusions from the fact of the different kinds of experience. — John
Peirce characterized spirit as "disembodied mind," and hence Thirdness; it is real and has being, but (strictly speaking) does not exist. — aletheist
The point of philosophy is to draw such distinctions. Otherwise why not just be positivist about it? — Wayfarer
"Tangible" or "material" simply means tangible to human percipients. The spiritual is real insofar as it is experienced. The material exists insofar as it is experienced as such. — John
If you give credence to 'spiritual experience', then what is the 'object' of that knowledge? I might agree that there are such experiences and that they're significant, but if there's an entire domain of such experiences which seems not to be known to science, then what is its basis? — Wayfarer
However, the 'experience of the material' can be made subject to quantitative analysis. But where is that kind of objectivity in respect of spiritual experience? There seems a noticeable lack of unanimity about such matters in the history of religion and philosophy, — Wayfarer
I think Critique of Pure Reason is the most important metaphysical text of our day and I would hope not to be in conflict with it. — Wayfarer
Kant calls the world of appearances “empirical reality”—it is real in the sense that it’s a given, something we have to come to grips with. But even though space and time are therefore “empirically real,” they are not for Kant a feature of things as they are in themselves apart from our experience. They are, rather, the necessary form in which our faculties of perception present objects to us in experience. Kant captures this idea by saying that space and time, while empirically real, are transcendentally ideal. That is, they are a real part of the empirical world (the world of phenomena) but not of the noumena that lie behind or beyond the empirical world.
If all of this is correct, then “ultimate” reality is unknowable. And, as I pointed out in the last post, this implication of Kant’s thought was not one that others were prepared simply to accept. In the intellectual generation immediately following Kant, there were two towering figures in philosophy and theology who, each in his own way, sought a pathway beyond the wall of unknowability that Kant had erected around the noumenal.
I’m speaking, of course, of Schleiermacher and Hegel. Both thought that Kant had missed something important—namely, that the self which experiences the world is also a part of the world it is experiencing. Rather than there being this sharp divide between the experiencing subject and things-in-themselves, with phenomena emerging at the point of interface, the experiencing subject is a thing-in-itself. It is one of the noumena—or, put another way, the self that experiences the world is part of the ultimate reality that lies behind experience. ...
...consider how Schleiermacher dealt with the...conundrum--that is, with fact that even if I am a noumenal self, the self as I appear to myself may not be all that similar to what I am in myself. Schleiermacher dealt with this conundrum by privileging a distinct mode of self-consciousness, one in which all attempts to make the self into an object of consciousness—that is, all attempts to come to know the self—are set aside. When the self is made an object of study it becomes a phenomenon, and as such is divorced from the noumenal self. But it is possible to simply be—to become quiescent, if you will, and simply be what one is rather than attempt to know what one is.
And in this place of cognitive stillness, one discovers in a direct experiential way an ultimate reality that cannot be conceptualized or made into an object of study. This is the domain of mystical experience—and even though it is ineffable (that is, even if it cannot be made into an object of knowledge) it brings with it a kind of insight or enlightenment.
Right, so all the processing power of similarity gets re-located to the mind. The external world is just some amorphous deserted blob and it's cut up and structured by the power of the mind. — darthbarracuda
..consider how Schleiermacher dealt with the...conundrum--that is, with fact that even if I am a noumenal self, the self as I appear to myself may not be all that similar to what I am in myself. Schleiermacher dealt with this conundrum by privileging a distinct mode of self-consciousness, one in which all attempts to make the self into an object of consciousness—that is, all attempts to come to know the self—are set aside. When the self is made an object of study it becomes a phenomenon, and as such is divorced from the noumenal self. But it is possible to simply be—to become quiescent, if you will, and simply be what one is rather than attempt to know what one is.
And in this place of cognitive stillness, one discovers in a direct experiential way an ultimate reality that cannot be conceptualized or made into an object of study. This is the domain of mystical experience—and even though it is ineffable (that is, even if it cannot be made into an object of knowledge) it brings with it a kind of insight or enlightenment.
Pretty much my belief exactly - interesting that Schleiermacher is a major figure in what is called 'liberal theology'. — Wayfarer
Peirce characterized spirit as "disembodied mind," and hence Thirdness; it is real and has being, but (strictly speaking) does not exist. — aletheist
I'm interested in any philosophies that make this kind of distinction. — Wayfarer
Beauty, goodness and truth are unanalyzable and so cannot be the subject matters of discursive inquiry, rather they respectively make the different kinds of discursive inquiry associated with them possible and so must simply be presupposed, in my view. — John
If so, then the question of universals is the wrong question. It's not why things are similar, it's why they're different that needs explaining. — Marchesk
Universals aren't celestial things - abstracta or Platonic ideals - but names we give to physical regularities or states of constraint. — apokrisis
I think that Platonic dialectics demonstrate that these things are analyzable. What he did was to analyze the different ways in which each of the different words is used, in an effort to determine the thing referred to by the word. — Metaphysician Undercover
I don't think that beauty, goodness and truth are rightly thought of as the "subject matters" of aesthetics, ethics and logic, but as the foundations of those disciplines, whose real subject matters are our judgements of beauty, goodness and truth. — John
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