Oh dear, that's ambitious for philosophy!I see ancient, original texts as openings for new disclosure, and therein lies their greatness. There are no definitive texts, only movement toward greater intimacy with truth at the level of basic questions. What is so important about Hinduism and Buddhism is that they presented an extraordinary efficient method for disclosing revelatory, intuitive understanding at this level. They presented a new intuitive horizon! And I believe it to be philosophy's sole remaining mission to talk about this, learn what it is. — Constance
That's just it: You want to understand and engage with Buddhism on your terms. You're ignoring or downplaying the importance of the living tradition, the living community of Buddhism, ie. the people who are actually working to preserve the teachings and make them accessible (from librarians to translators to those who pay for the upkeep of Buddhist websites to the monks who teach meditation and everyone needed for the system to function).If i were putting forward something to replace Buddhism, this would be right. I just want to understand what it has to say. At the center is not a doctrine for me. It is an existential engagement.
And you think you can do that apart from committing yourself to an actual Buddhist community?I just want to understand what it has to say.
Not all ad hominems are fallacious:That about Kierkegaard and his inherited wealth seems like just an intentional ad hominem.
I was talking about being areligious, not aspiritual.He was not aspiritual at all, quite the opposite
Sure. I'm saying it might have nothing more in common with Buddhism than the name.But then, this here is certainly NOT about the errors of the Pali canon at all! I mean, it is an interpretative expansion, but exploring meaning not unlike what it is to explore Jesus' words, only here, we have the "event" that is center stage, much more available for objective study. To me, meditation is a practical metaphysics!
If you follow that logic it leads to the conclusion that only you exist: solipsism. — Janus
if Kant was so sure noumena was not an intelligible idea, then why bring it up at all? — Constance
That is, what is the ground in the world that makes bringing it up not pure nonsense? — Constance
An excellent question, I think. — Constance
All in favor and on your side so far.So the matter turns away from what to do and how make principles of good behavior in entangled conditions, and it turns to metaethics: the GOOD. This is the beginning of the argument, pending your response thus far — Constance
If it wasn’t intelligible, he couldn’t have brought it up. He did, so it is. And he said so. He actually said, under certain conditions, the conception of noumena are necessary. That which is unintelligible cannot at the same time be necessary. In Kant, an idea is a concept of reason formed of notions by the understanding itself (A320/B377), and noumena are concepts thought by the understanding (B306). It follows that the question is necessarily predicated on a misunderstanding. — Mww
The ground for bringing it up is not in the world; if it were it would be incomprehensible anyway, which is the same as nonsense. — Mww
It is clear, that if understanding is that which thinks, then understanding can think whatever it wants for it is I to whom understanding belongs. Therefore, it is at least non-contradictory and at most entirely admissible, for understanding to think noumena if it wants. And it does want to, in metaphysical parlance, in assuming the possibility of non-sensuous determinable schema subsumed under the categories, which Kant terms objects-in-themselves.
Now it can be surmised why he had to bring it up: he’d already proven the categories only apply upon being presented with sensuous objects as phenomena, that is to say, under entirely empirical conditions and by that the means to cognize them, so it would have been catastrophic to allow a category to present objects to itself that can never be phenomena, after having allowed such objects to be legitimately thought, albeit under entirely pure a priori conditions yet maintaining validity in the cognition of them nonetheless. — Mww
At bottom, with no further reduction necessary, this is exactly how I do not contradict myself.
Easy-peasy. — Mww
It follows that the question is necessarily predicated on a misunderstanding.
— Mww
the question is, why isn't noumena dismissible as dialectic overreach, as delusion, with "the mere
dream of an extension of the pure understanding"? — Constance
the "it" so readily referred to — Constance
One way to say this is to yield to delimitation of the understanding, but in doing so admit there is an incompleteness, in metaethics, and in a full disclosure of world ontology — Constance
I will make an observation: in order to be in any sense of being free in any way, one needs security. I find knowledge and understanding of the Good to be a nexus of energy that supports and self-supports being in a secure way that facilitates that being. So I agree that while the temporal movement is from doing to being, as we grow in understanding of what doing both needs and entails, the logical movement is from security and being secure first, and then to doing. And what it is, exactly, about what we call "the Good" that makes it so in terms of itself and its efficacy, is no small question. — tim wood
Actually, it's one of the most popular theses in the self-help genre. So ordinary, actually.Not a popular thesis. No matter, I am right, my detractors wrong. I can argue this very well, and it is the genuine foundation for moral realism and the reality of the self. — Constance
I defend a rather impossible thesis: within the self there is the oddest thing imaginable, which is value. I claim that value, like the pain a spear in my kidney causes, is absolute, and the self is therefore absolute. — Constance
Oh dear, that's ambitious for philosophy! — baker
That's just it: You want to understand and engage with Buddhism on your terms. You're ignoring or downplaying the importance of the living tradition, the living community of Buddhism, ie. the people who are actually working to preserve the teachings and make them accessible (from librarians to translators to those who pay for the upkeep of Buddhist websites to the monks who teach meditation and everyone needed for the system to function). — baker
And you think you can do that apart from committing yourself to an actual Buddhist community?
This is a vital point. Really think about it. — baker
Walton has argued that ad hominem reasoning is not always fallacious, and that in some instances, questions of personal conduct, character, motives, etc., are legitimate and relevant to the issue,[30] as when it directly involves hypocrisy, or actions contradicting the subject's words.
The philosopher Charles Taylor has argued that ad hominem reasoning (discussing facts about the speaker or author relative to the value of his statements) is essential to understanding certain moral issues due to the connection between individual persons and morality (or moral claims), and contrasts this sort of reasoning with the apodictic reasoning (involving facts beyond dispute or clearly established) of philosophical naturalism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem#Criticism_as_a_fallacy
Kierkegaard applied this to himself when he broke off his engagement because he thought he wasn't good enough to marry.
And I think that his lifestyle and his not integrating himself with an actual religious community disqualifies his opinion in religious matters. He was an armchair Christian. — baker
You're right that this is an impossible thesis. Value is by definition relative, as the worthiness of something is always dependent on a purpose, or something other than itself which it is judged in comparison to. How do you conceive value as something absolute? — Metaphysician Undercover
If we think about it enough, we realize that the relativity of relativity is relative. Which is just a snarky way of saying that, for example, while a dollar is worth a dollar, and that relative and subject to all kinds of adjustments, never-the-less there is something absolute about the idea of that value, and even its quantity.Value is by definition relative, — Metaphysician Undercover
Pain as such, pain simplciter (...) is not a contingent "bad" but an absolute. — Constance
I defend a rather impossible thesis: within the self there is the oddest thing imaginable, which is value. — Constance
Out thereness itself MUST be in here, point to my head. I know you want to affirm an scientist's world of the assumed understanding of an exteriority in the standard sense, but what good is this if it depends entirely on an assumption that cannot be explained at all, that in fact, on analysis, reveals exactly the opposite, for one can never conceive how a brain can "know" what is not a brain and phenomenology is the only recourse. — Constance
if you are going to work with the common assumptions of empirical science — Constance
t is not at all that there is "nothing out there" but rather what that IS cannot be said, realized, at all. This makes objects of the world very mysterious, transcendental, impossible! at the level of basic questions. — Constance
it is not a conscious event, but is autonomic. — Constance
One has to read Husserl, Heidegger, Kierkegaard, Levinas, back to Kant, — Constance
not to be found in the theoretical paradigms — Constance
what givenness IS — Constance
the most powerful argument for the self lies not in ontology, but in metaethics — Constance
Ethics is about value, in its essence: If you want to really get the center of ethics, you have to give it its due analysis, after all, an ethical case is a thing of parts. — Constance
The question is, what makes the ethical shoulds and shouldn'ts what they are? Ethical goodness and badness, and we will simply call this ethical value and, are not like contingent value and judgment. A good knife is good, say, because it is sharp and cuts well, but this virtue entirely rests with the cutting, the goodness, if you will, defers to the cutting context. But change the conditions of the context and the good can easily become the opposite of good, if, e.g., the knife is to be used for a Macbeth production. Here, sharpness is the very opposite of good, for someone could get hurt. This is how contingency works, this deferring to other contextual features for goodness or badness to be determined. — Constance
Ethical value, on the other hand, is very different, for once the context is taken away, and no contextual deference possible, there is the metavalue "presence" remaining. — Constance
But, if you want to use this language, value-qualia is certainly not nonsense, for apply a lighted match to your finger for a few seconds, review the experience, and remove all contingencies, all talk that could contextualize it entirely out of the analysis, and there is the remaining "presence" of the non natural quality of value/ethical badness and goodness. It cannot be observed, but that burning finger is more than Wittgensteinian "fact" (and Wittgenstein knew this) like the fact that my shoe is untired of that the sun is a ball of fusion. — Constance
If we think about it enough, we realize that the relativity of relativity is relative. Which is just a snarky way of saying that, for example, while a dollar is worth a dollar, and that relative and subject to all kinds of adjustments, never-the-less there is something absolute about the idea of that value, and even its quantity. — tim wood
And the way that seems to work is to acknowledge a framework or set of rules within which the value is absolute. Outside of the framework, maybe not. — tim wood
Sure, we’re all imbued with a sense of value to be assigned. But value assigned is itself contingent on the object to which it is assigned. — Mww
Yes, that is true, though it does overstate the case, doesn't it? Wittgenstein and Kant famously refused to give sense at all to such things as the "out thereness" beyond logic, intuition and language, using forms of the term "transcendental" to refer to them, if such referring were to be allowed at all (there is the transcendental deduction, but this is open ended merely, not something metaphysical. And Wittgenstein says explicitly he only brings up the matter to say we should pass over it in silence). — Constance
It's contradiction pure and simple. — Metaphysician Undercover
Are you familiar with Plato's Euthyphro dilemma? We could ask a very similar question here, concerning the relationship between value and ethics. Is value based in ethics, or is ethics based in value. The answer would determine which of the two is more likely to be absolute. We have to consider the conditions carefully before we answer this question. We cannot just refer to examples like pain and pleasure, and conclude that value is primary, because Plato has already demonstrated that there is no necessary relationship between pleasure or pain, and value. So for example, an athlete will subject oneself to pain in training, for the sake of a goal which is valued. So pleasure and pain might be things which are given a positive or negative value, but this doesn't say much about value itself. — Metaphysician Undercover
So you are proposing a "metavalue" which you call "presence". I assume that this would be the end to all ends, like Aristotle suggested happiness as. Is "presence" like existence? The problem with this type of proposal is that we already have presence, and we might already have happiness. So this type of end cannot incline us to act morally, because actions as means, are carried out for the purpose of bringing about the desired end. If we already have what is needed, presence, or happiness, then there is no need to act morally. So as much as you might insist that there ought to be a metavalue, or ultimate end, the absolute within which value is based, I think that this is just a pie in the sky ideal, imaginary, and without any bearing on real people living their real lives. — Metaphysician Undercover
And I don't see how your example of torturing children is relevant. — Metaphysician Undercover
As I said above, it's been a well known fact, since the time of Plato, that value is not grounded in pleasure or pain. It is something distinct from these, as we will forego pleasure for something of value, and we will also subject ourselves to pain, for something of value. Therefore your example, which says something about the "presence" of pain, would only be misconstrued if it were taken to be demonstrating something about the nature of value. — Metaphysician Undercover
"The map is not the territory". There is the common model, the "in-hereness" of shared human understanding of the world, as distinct from the "out-thereness" of the cosmos. And then there is the indivdual model, the "in-hereness" of the individual understanding of the shared human understanding of the world as distinct from the "out-thereness" of the shared human understanding of the world. "Tanscenedence" is a relative term; the transcendence of the territory in relation to the common model, and the transcendence of the common model in relation to the individual model.
But these are just relative ways of talking; there is no absolute transcendence to be discovered. — Janus
The argument here places the need for training in a matrix of concerns that are contingent, all such concerns ultimately beg the value question. It runs not unlike those irritating deconstruction questions run: Training? Why train? to be great at football? Why this? and on, and on. The non question begging answer appears only when contingencies are abandoned and inquiry finds it mark: I do it because it is fun, enjoyable, pleasureable, blissful. ALL are bound to contingencies in the living experience, but here, I am doing with value what Kant did with reason: reason is always, already entangled in the very language used to talk about "pure" reason. But one abstracts from the complexity to identify the form just to give analysis. Here, I identify the very mysterious metavalue In the pain, and it is not the form ofethical affairs, but the actuality, the substantive presence. — Constance
The emphasis is on the way the value dimension of an ethical case is unassailable to competition and objections: no matter what alternative one can imagine to bring against the choice of choosing the one child's welfare, the "badness" of the torture is undiminished. — Constance
I am identifying something that is not relative, but "absolute" acknowledging that this term is rather self contradictory because language itself does not possess the possibility of absolutes, all propositions being contingently bound to others. The claim rests on the premise that there is something transcendental about ethics that lies at its essence that is nondiscursive and intuitive. One is being invited to simply observe the pain simplciter, observe--- not weigh, compare, contextualize. — Constance
Yours is pedantic foolishness. When you go inside, are you absolutely inside or only relatively inside? When you pay your bus fare, do you discuss whether your coins are of relative or absolute value? and the answer is that these are foolish questions. — tim wood
If you wish to argue the relativist position, that everything is relative, nothing absolute, be my guest, but I won't attend, for the arguments quickly become absurd, ridiculous, and a waste of time. — tim wood
We have already affirmed that the absolute as a practical matter is always already established within some framework. — tim wood
And don't forget to hit the relativity of relativity paradox above that you ignored - that at least and for sure you will want to smash. — tim wood
Do you know how many ideas there are about what "the meaning of Buddhism at the basic level" is? As many as there are people willing to entertain them.But an inquiry into the meaning of Buddhism at the basic level is a very different matter. — Constance
Four years ago, I discarded all the books I had of his and all the notes I made. So I'll just summarize: I was not impressed with his work. Affirming God over reason seems quite ordinary to me.You've never read anything by Kierkegaard, have you? I mean, quite seriously, you haven't read a thing of the man who affirmed God over reason. Armchair?
*sigh*And you spend so many words on justifying ad hominem arguments?
Off the deep end, I'd say.
No matter, I am right, my detractors wrong. I can argue this very well, and it is the genuine foundation for moral realism and the reality of the self. — Constance
As I said, Plato demonstrated long ago, that we do not base value in pain or pleasure. I gave an example, as to why a person's attitude toward pain does not provide a good represent of one's attitude toward value, therefore pain cannot be used as a metavalue. There are many more examples, but it seems like you are in a condition of denial, so I don't see the point in producing a list of examples. — Metaphysician Undercover
try to see that this isn't about a personal perspective. Consider the matter as one would consider qualia. My opinion, attitude, regard for qualia is completely off the table. Arguments that deal with this look to the possibility of apprehending something in the pure, uninterpreted phenomenon. Here, the claim is that the flame on your finger carries a non empirical, non discursive or irreducible intuition of a metavalue, i.e., an ethical badness.Yes, your state of denying the example, and also the reality about value, demonstrates this unassailability very well. However, the fact that one's personal perspective on value appears to be unassailable does not demonstrate that it is absolute. It just indicates that it appears to the person who holds the unassailable perspective on value, that value is absolute. — Metaphysician Undercover
The problem though, as I explained, is that a person will subject oneself to pain, for the sake of something valued in some circumstances, yet at other times the same person will avoid pain because in this circumstance avoidance is seen as more valuable. Therefore pain does not suffice as evidence for any sort of absolute value. — Metaphysician Undercover
Four years ago, I discarded all the books I had of his and all the notes I made. So I'll just summarize: I was not impressed with his work. Affirming God over reason seems quite ordinary to me. — baker
When one grows up as the only non-Catholic among Catholics and is bullied by them, and tries to make sense of it by reading a lot of Catholic literature, one begins to consider many things as ordinary that other people probably don't. It's a long sordid tale."sigh" ! You found the Concept of Anxiety ORIDINARY?? Not possible. — Constance
Oh, I took to Buddhism because it promised enlightenment, and I thought that once I'd be enlightened, I'd be able to figure out which religion is the right one, specifically, whether Catholicism is true or not. Needless to say, that didn't work out so well.One cannot be interested in Buddhism and think Kierkegaard is a bore.
Probably because I don't approach religion with self-confidence and in the hope to find a solution to existential problems.There has to be a radical misunderstanding somewhere.
When one grows up as the only non-Catholic among Catholics and is bullied by them, and tries to make sense of it by reading a lot of Catholic literature, one begins to consider many things as ordinary that other people probably don't. It's a long sordid tale. — baker
Oh, I took to Buddhism because it promised enlightenment, and I thought that once I'd be enlightened, I'd be able to figure out which religion is the right one, specifically, whether Catholicism is true or not. Needless to say, that didn't work out so well. — baker
Probably because I don't approach religion with self-confidence and in the hope to find a solution to existential problems.
Which also happens to be why moral realism makes so much sense. — baker
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