'Trust me guys, if you just do [some difficult thing] then you'll see how right I am!' It's like asking a stranger to read your novel. In theory, you are possibly right, and maybe you are best friends with god. But there's something iffy about gesturing to prerequisites on a forum. Lots of people are eager to share their religion. It's a thing. And most people have come to some decision about it by now. — norm
Kidney function: people talked about their pees, but they could not talk about their kidneys producing the pees.
Who invented philosophy then? — Isaac
Philosophers invented science and philosophy. Isaac Newton was a philosopher, he didn't call himself a scientist. Neither did Galileo. Plenty of others. Copernicus. Kepler. — Dharmi
I doubt It's much influenced by Kant though. The majority of scientists I know just tend to get on with what they do and any underlying assumptions and broader frameworks are questioned (when they're questioned at all) by their own intellect - coffee room discussions. They don't feel the need to borrow the intellect of an eighteenth century German. Just weird like that I suppose. — Isaac
Pointing to oneself and recognizing this as a unity body requires an intersubjectively shaped concept of one’s body. Before looking in a mirror, a child’s model of their body is piecemeal. The reflection for the fist time shows the body as a unitary phenomenon, but it also requires that the child recognize that others see them in this way, from the outside in. Schizophrenics often lose the ability to know where their body leaves off and the world begins, and many brain injuries can change our sense of whether and how our limbs belong to us. Now can this be? It is because concepts concerning the unity of the body involve complex correlations of perceptions and actions in the world. The unity of the body is an achievement , not a given.
He also dissolves the self and yet still speaks in terms of perceptions, clinging to the image of a single something that perceives, that is separate from the world. — norm
I think ordinary language should be the default starting position. J.L.Austin explains why:
— Andrew M
Yes. Start with that and the familiar world which doesn't even have to reduce to mind or matter or anything else. Why take such a project for granted? Especially after so many have shown what's questionable about it... Call it the 'lifeworld' or whatever. It's where we talk and what we talk about. — norm
Careful scrutiny of the use of the word ‘mind’ will enable us to resist, at least pro tempore, the temptation to answer the philosophical question ‘What is the mind?’ by giving a definition. ‘The mind’ being a nominal, ‘What is the mind?’ is commonly construed as ‘What sort of entity is the mind?’ But this is as pernicious a question as ‘What sort of entity is a number?’ It raises the wrong kind of expectations, and sends us along the wrong paths before we have had a chance to get our bearings. So the first step to take is to examine the use of the noun ‘mind’."
...
What then is the relationship between the mind and the body? The mind/body problem is insoluble. For it is a hopelessly confused residue of the Platonic/Augustinian/Cartesian tradition. It cannot be solved; but it can be dissolved. The mind is not an entity that could stand in a relationship to anything. All talk of the mind that a human being has and of its characteristics is talk of the intellectual and volitional powers that he has, and of their exercise. — Human Beings – The Mind and the Body: Wittgensteinian-Aristotelian Reflections - Peter M.S. Hacker, 2007
What my position is, is very clear: whether we come to know the meaning/purpose/nature etc. of existence or not, we shouldn't give up on that question. — Dharmi
It's possible that getting that answer is impossible. But that doesn't mean we throw in the towel, and accept nihilism. — Dharmi
It seems like you're just a usual academic obscurantist. — Dharmi
This really isn't a language problem, thought. I know full well what I mean by "it hurts to stub my toe" and I also know full well the meaning of "how does matter produce my subjective experiences?" There's no vagueness there. Even if I can't communicate to someone else what my subjective experiences are like, I certainly know what they're like for me. So the question "how does matter cause subjective experiences?", for anyone who has subjective experiences, is a meaningful question that needs to be answered. — RogueAI
Okay, but then making things even more unclear doesn't help anyone solve those problems. This is one thing Wittgenstein is right about. Trying to conjure up obscurantistic vocabulary to bewilder and confuse, doesn't help one get closer to the truth. — Dharmi
Really we can zoom in on any word and find a hollowness. They make approximate sense working together in a specific practical context. Float away from that and it's poetry, sometimes good sometimes bad. — norm
hat's not what I said. What my position is, is very clear: whether we come to know the meaning/purpose/nature etc. of existence or not, we shouldn't give up on that question. In other words, the whole point of existence is that question. If we never come to knowledge of the answer, that doesn't mean we give up. You seem to believe that "philosophers and philosophy can't answer that question, so that question is unsolvable, so I'm done with philosophy and good riddance." Well, I don't accept that.
I might not have the answer, nobody might very well have the answer. It's possible that getting that answer is impossible. But that doesn't mean we throw in the towel, and accept nihilism. First, that is a logical non-sequitur to say "because we cannot know x, therefore there is no x." That's a fallacy. Second, that's not the point of philosophy. The point of philosophy is to know the Good, know the Truth, know what is Real. Socrates went to his death asking those questions, and all should model his life in that regard. He never said, "I don't know the answer yet, so I guess I'll just stop asking the questions." That's laziness. That's a cop-out. That's what I'd call philosophical suicide. — Dharmi
That's a very dramatic way of phrasing the dilemma but it seems appropriate and I like your wording. I also think sometimes people give up by finding the answer - one that satisfies but is really just a holding statement of sorts. "I'm an X..." — Tom Storm
Yes, but if that is meant to refer to norm’s comments here concerning the relation of language in a Wittgensteinian sense to issues like mind versus body I think it would be missing the point of his argument. — Joshs
But this is as pernicious a question as ‘What sort of entity is a number?’ — Human Beings – The Mind and the Body: Wittgensteinian-Aristotelian Reflections - Peter M.S. Hacker, 2007
The mind/body problem is insoluble. — Human Beings – The Mind and the Body: Wittgensteinian-Aristotelian Reflections - Peter M.S. Hacker, 2007
and this range of contexts has a certain stability , at least enough of one to appear to him to indicate grounded truths. — Joshs
He is likely hearing you saying that we have to dissolve that stability( thus the accusation of nihilism), when in fact to follow Wittgenstein here would be to respect that relative contextual stability and show how we can see our concepts as intertwined in much more intimate ways as interpersonally founded events than as the abstractive templates that dualist thinking sees them as. So what you are doing isnt substituting chaos for his ordered truths , as it appears to him, but enriching and interrelating his
notions. The problem , though , is that the most superordinate understandings that we carry with us are very resistant to transformation. — Joshs
You're right, he is not addressing the point as such but then both guys are talking past each other, which seems the necessary end result of competing epistemologies like this. I am more in sympathy with Norm's worldview than Dharmi's. — Tom Storm
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