By 'culture wars' I'm referring to the perceived conflict, widespread since the Enlightenment, between science and religion, and the sense that science has undermined the traditional basis of spiritual values in Western cultulre. — Wayfarer
Pinker's essay on this topic sparked a long debate (in which he was supported by Dennett) with Leon Wieseltier, who had previously writen an incendiary review of one of Dennett's previous books in the New York Times. Suffice to say, I side with Wieseltier (and that review conveys what I think is the gist of the debate). — Wayfarer
So, to the extent that traditional (or pre-modern) philosophy was in some fundamental way linked to the Greek-Judeo-Christian theistic tradition (and granted that this link is multi-valent), then the rejection of theistic religions, and the attempt to ground human nature in a purely naturalistic account of the world, constitutes what I see as the fundamental divide underlying the 'culture wars' (or at any rate, that is the conflict that I am generally commenting on.) — Wayfarer
From your comments on the meaning of this term, it's clear that we understand it very differently. I have been criticized over my use of the word 'ontology' but I do base it on the dictionary definition, which says that the word 'ontology' is based on the first-person participle of the Greek word for 'to be' - the first person participle of which is 'I am': — Wayfarer
So 'ontology' was originally intended as 'the study of the meaning of being', but even more specifically, the meaning of being in the first person. That distinguishes it from the characteristically 'third-person' view that is fundamental to naturalism. — Wayfarer
(Heidegger differentiated the study of the meaning of being from the domain of the natural sciences. It's a fundamental distinction, because ontology is not concerned with 'what exists' - that is the role of the sciences - but the 'meaning of being' as a philosophical question and in the context of the human condition. It is precisely that understanding which he says has been generally forgotten or obscured by a fundamental error in Western metaphysics.) — Wayfarer
You see, that is why I am saying that 'being' is fundamentally different to 'entity' or 'thing'. Entities or things are disclosed to, or appear to, or for, beings. — Wayfarer
Being is the primary ground or reality, being is what truly is. — Wayfarer
But being is never an object of perception, it is invisible to us, in a manner analogous to the blind spot caused by the optic nerve. — Wayfarer
So even though 'the meaning of being' seems obvious to us, in fact it's obscured or misapprehended by a kind of cultural 'blind spot' which we tend to look through, rather than at. — Wayfarer
You know that you can actually detect your blind spot by holding a piece of paper with a dot on it at a certain distance from your eye, at which point the dot becomes invisible. Well, the human blindness to the 'real nature of being' is analogous to that, although it's a lot more far-reaching. That is the import of the argument from the 'unseen seer, the unknown knower'. That is pointing out that 'being' which is the ground of all existence, is not actually disclosed by analysis of phenomena. (This is an ancient idea in philosophy.) — Wayfarer
And that is also why dogmatic materialists such as Dennett are obliged to deny that the first-person perspective has any particular significance, and to insist it is something can be completely accounted for by science (which he claims to do in books such as Consciousness Explained. Materialists are generally obliged to deny the existence of the unconscious on the same grounds.) — Wayfarer
In contrast, Dennett's opponents insist that the 'first person perspective', the 'experience of being', is of a different order to what is disclosed in third-person terms (as per Chalmer's essay Facing Up to the Hard Problem). That is where the ontological distinction between 'things' and 'beings' shows up in the contemporary debate. (Dennett's response basically amounts to dismissal, which I am saying is another manifestation of the 'blind spot'. Have a look at the abstract, and Table of Contents entries, for William Byers, The Blind Spot.) — Wayfarer
That's an extremely well-chosen passage from Plato. — Wayfarer
Socrates is asking, what is it that 'sees reason'? What is it that discerns sameness and difference? You see, I think whenever you make a truth statement -that 'such and such is the case', or 'such and such is not the case', then you're straight away in a domain that is only visible to the rational intelligence, namely, the domain of reason. — Wayfarer
It is because the faculty of reason that humans can see and abstract likeness and unlikeness, or similarity, or equals - an ability that is intrinsic to the nature of rational intelligence. What is the origin of 'rationality' if not the ability to perceive 'ratio'? And it was the ability to perceive 'ratio' and 'logos' that was at the origin of the Greek conception of rationality (and indeed science). — Wayfarer
Thank you, that is very kind. I know I've gotten into deep waters here, and I've made many contentious statements. That's my problem, I tackle these issues from too general a level instead of picking one or two aspects of a problem and working on them, and I tend to go in 'guns blazing'. But regardless, I hope I have made the point about the distinct meaning of 'ontology' and the distinction of beings and objects a bit more clear. — Wayfarer
We might say Kant and his contemporaries thought of themselves as engaged in that same task. — Cabbage Farmer
If science, according to you and Heidegger, is distinguished by its concern with what exists, then what is the study of the meaning of being concerned with? — Cabbage Farmer
Consider some philosophical problems that will be familiar from introductory metaphysics classes: Does the table that I think I see before me exist? Does God exist? Does mind, conceived as an entity distinct from body, exist? These questions have the following form: does x (where x = some particular kind of thing) exist? Questions of this form presuppose that we already know what ‘to exist’ means. We typically don't even notice this presupposition. But Heidegger does, which is why he raises the more fundamental question: what does ‘to exist’ mean? This is one way of asking what Heidegger calls the question of the meaning of Being, and Being and Time is an investigation into that question. ...
According to Heidegger, the question of the meaning of Being, and thus Being as such, has been forgotten by ‘the tradition’ (roughly, Western philosophy from Plato onwards). Heidegger means by this that the history of Western thought has failed to heed the ontological difference, and so has articulated Being precisely as a kind of ultimate being, as evidenced by a series of namings of Being, for example as idea, energeia, substance, monad or will to power. In this way Being as such has been forgotten. So Heidegger sets himself the task of recovering the question of the meaning of Being. In this context he draws two distinctions between different kinds of inquiry. The first, which is just another way of expressing the ontological difference, is between the ontical and the ontological, where the former is concerned with facts about entities and the latter is concerned with the meaning of Being, with how entities are intelligible as entities. Using this technical language, we can put the point about the forgetting of Being as such by saying that the history of Western thought is characterized by an ‘onticization’ of Being (by the practice of treating Being as a being).
So far as I can make sense of it, your distinction between "beings" and "objects" is just another way to express a distinction between "sentient things" and "nonsentient things" — Cabbage Farmer
I would distinguish animal rationality from the peculiar practice of giving and taking reasons. If we can understand the power of "reason" in terms of that practice of "reasoning", we might say it's a special form of the puzzling and problem-solving we have in common with nonhuman rational animals. — Cabbage Farmer
Isn't it obvious that animals perceive and act on the basis of generic concepts? That they react -- and learn to react, and react intelligently -- in similar ways to similar things, and in different ways to different things? — Cabbage Farmer
Can't we train [animals] to sort or select on the basis of generic similarities and differences? — Cabbage Farmer
I am fairly confident that the picture painted by the evolutionary psychologists is true. But I am also confident that it is not the whole truth, and that it leaves out of account precisely the most important thing, which is the human subject.
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