• Jackson
    1.8k
    Why did you read a lot of Kant if you found him boring and pedantic?Janus

    I like to be informed about my judgments.
  • Jackson
    1.8k
    You may not, but traditionally metaphysics was understood according to that definition.Janus

    Aristotle defined metaphysics as "first philosophy." Where a philosopher discusses his basic principles of philosophy.
  • Jackson
    1.8k
    No, it is traditionally considered to be that which is absolutely existent (as opposed to what appears to us to be existent).Janus

    One definition, yes.
  • Janus
    16.5k
    I like to be informed about my judgments.Jackson

    If you think he is boring and pedantic it wouldn't have taken you much reading to discover that you think that, would it?
  • Jackson
    1.8k
    If you think he is boring and pedantic it wouldn't have taken you much reading to discover that you think that, would it?Janus

    Part of course work for my graduate degree.
  • Janus
    16.5k
    One definition, yes.Jackson

    Can you offer some other traditional definitions of metaphysics?
  • Jackson
    1.8k
    Can you offer some other traditional definitions of metaphysics?Janus

    Stated it several times.
  • Janus
    16.5k
    Stated it several times.Jackson

    Where? Remember I'm asking for traditional definitions, not your definition.
  • Jackson
    1.8k
    Where? Remember I'm asking for traditional definitions, not your definition.Janus

    I wrote Aristotle's definition. Even the SEP entry on metaphysics starts with Aristotle.
  • Janus
    16.5k
    I wrote Aristotle's definition.Jackson

    Where? Write it again or link to it; I couldn't find it.
  • Jackson
    1.8k
    [reply=
    Where? Write it again or link to it; I couldn't find it.Janus

    "Janus;681633"]

    That's okay. Read the thread and you will see it stated explicitly.
  • Janus
    16.5k
    This is becoming boring and pedantic, so I'll leave you to it.
  • Joshs
    5.8k
    In "How Emotions are Made," Lisa Barrett describes how children learn concepts, names, of emotions by observing their own internal states, other people's emotional expressions, and the use of words for emotionsT Clark

    This is true. I dont agree with the predictive processing f model of emotions, because it hasn’t transcended its behaviorist roots sufficiently. Affect and intention are much more intricately intertwined than pp recognizes. We dont have some general body-maintenance feedback first and then have to decide how to explain its meaning by relating it to a current situation. Emotions come already world-directed. There is never just some generic arousal that then has to be attributed. Feelings emerge from within experiences that are relevant to us in some way. We are never without a mood.
  • Joshs
    5.8k
    You may not, but traditionally metaphysics was understood according to that definition.Janus

    Not anymore , or not since Nietzsche( and Husserl, Heidegger , Derrida ,etc)
  • 180 Proof
    15.4k
    And Kant was simply doing metaphysics under the guise of epistemologyJackson
    :up:
  • Janus
    16.5k
    Right, but I would say not since Kant.

    And Kant was simply doing metaphysics under the guise of epistemologyJackson

    Or was it epistemology under the guise of (a new kind of) metaphysics or proto-phenomenology? Do you think it is possible to reflect on and know what characteristics any possible experience or judgement must have?
  • Jackson
    1.8k
    Or was it epistemology under the guise of (a new kind of) metaphysics or proto-phenomenology? Do you think it is possible to reflect on and know what characteristics any possible experience or judgement must have?Janus

    No such thing as the condition for any possible experience.
  • Janus
    16.5k
    Why do you say that? What about the necessary conditions for any actual experience (which is the same thing expressed differently)?
  • Jackson
    1.8k
    Why do you say that? What about the necessary conditions for any actual experience (which is the same thing expressed differently).Janus

    I can explain my objection. But, basically, experience is an event. We cannot determine all possible experiences.
  • Janus
    16.5k
    We cannot determine all possible experiences.Jackson

    What do you mean "determine all possible experiences"? Are you saying we cannot think of the necessary general characteristics of any experience? That seems just plain wrong; since time, for one, certainly seems to be necessary for any experience.
  • Jackson
    1.8k
    What do you mean "determine all possible experiences"? Are you saying we cannot think of the necessary general characteristics of any experience? That seems just plain wrong; since time, for one, certainly seems to be necessary for any experience.Janus

    What is time? Sequence? We can't understand the world without framing it by sequences? Even Leibniz knew time was relative, before Einstein showed it empirically.
  • Jackson
    1.8k
    Kant was a Newtonian. He thought there was absolute time and space.
  • Janus
    16.5k
    What is time?Jackson

    Duration. All experiences must persist for a time. I wasn't thinking of sequence; but that raises a different question: can we understand events without sequentiality?

    Kant was a Newtonian. He thought there was absolute time and space.Jackson

    And...?
  • Jackson
    1.8k
    uration. All experiences must persist for a time. I wasn't thinking of sequence; but that raises a different question: can we understand events without sequentiality?

    Kant was a Newtonian. He thought there was absolute time and space.
    — Jackson

    And...?
    seconds ago
    Janus

    And I don't accept Kant's concept of space and time. So, his conditions of experience are contrary to science.
  • schopenhauer1
    11k
    Rejecting Newton’s doctrine, Whitehead takes precisely the opposite stance; Of the ‘Receptacle’— which in Adventures of Ideas is his concept referring to “the general notion of extension” (AI 258; see also AI 192)—he says: “It is part of the essential nature of each physical
    actuality that it is itself an element qualifying the Receptacle, and that the qualifications of the
    Receptacle enter into its own nature.” (AI 171) In other words, the fact that “the relata modify the nature of the relations” (AI 201) entails that extension as the “primary relationship” (PR 288) between actual occasions, is modified by these occasions.
    Joshs

    Don't know what this really means, honestly. I know that Whitehead talks about being and becoming and how an entity can change while be persistent, but that's about all I can say on this unless you really give more than neologisms, even Whiteheadian ones.
  • schopenhauer1
    11k
    “Will” can naturally have effects only on “will” – and not on “matter” (not on “nerves” for instance –). Enough: we must venture the hypothesis that everywhere “effects” are recognized, will is effecting will – and that every mechanistic event in which a force is active is really a force and effect of the will. – Assuming, finally, that we succeeded in explaining our entire life of drives as the organization and outgrowth of one basic form of will (namely, of the will to power, which is my claim); assuming we could trace all organic functions back to this will to power and find that it even solved the problem of procreation and nutrition (which is a single problem); then we will have earned the right to clearly designate all efficacious force as: will to power. The world seen from inside, the world determined and described with respect to its “intelligible character” – would be just this “will to power” and nothing else. –“Joshs

    Nietzsche has to lay of the cocaine.
  • schopenhauer1
    11k
    So, from the empirical perspective it is of course true that the Universe precedes our existence, but from the perspective of transcendental idealism, ‘before’ is also a part of the way in which the observing mind constructs the world.

    My tentative, meta-philosophical claim is that this implies that in some sense, the appearance of conscious sentient beings literally brings the universe into existence. Not that ‘before’ we came along that it didn’t exist, but that the manner of its existence is unintelligible apart from the perspective brought to it by the observer. We can’t get ‘outside’ that perspective, even if we try and see the world as if there’s no observer. (Sorry for the length of this post.)
    Wayfarer

    Well, of course you are going to win favors quoting literature about Schopenhauer (and his conception of Kant's Transcendental Idealism). From the man himself:

    On the other hand, the law of causality and the treatment and investigation of nature which is based upon it, lead us necessarily to the conclusion that, in time, each more highly organised state of matter has succeeded a cruder state: so that the lower animals existed before men, fishes before land animals, plants before fishes, and the unorganised before all that is organised; that, consequently, the original mass had to pass through a long series of changes before the first eye could be opened. And yet, the existence of this whole world remains ever dependent upon the first eye that opened, even if it were that of an insect. For such an eye is a necessary condition of the possibility of knowledge, and the whole world exists only in and for knowledge, and without it is not even thinkable. The world is entirely idea, and as such demands the knowing subject as the supporter of its existence. This long course of time itself, filled with innumerable changes, through which matter rose from form to form till at last the first percipient creature appeared,—this whole time itself is only thinkable in the identity of a consciousness whose succession of ideas, whose form of knowing it is, and apart from which, it loses all meaning and is nothing at all.

    Thus we see, on the one hand, the existence of the whole world necessarily dependent upon the first conscious being, however undeveloped it may be; on the other hand, this conscious being just as necessarily entirely dependent upon a long chain of causes and effects which have preceded it, and in which it itself appears as a small link. These two contradictory points of view, to each of which we are led with the same necessity, we might again call an antinomy in our faculty of knowledge... The necessary contradiction which at last presents itself to us here, finds its solution in the fact that, to use Kant's phraseology, time, space, and causality do not belong to the thing-in-itself, but only to its phenomena, of which they are the form; which in my language means this: The objective world, the world as idea, is not the only side of the world, but merely its outward side; and it has an entirely different side—the side of its inmost nature—its kernel—the thing-in-itself... But the world as idea... only appears with the opening of the first eye. Without this medium of knowledge it cannot be, and therefore it was not before it. But without that eye, that is to say, outside of knowledge, there was also no before, no time. Thus time has no beginning, but all beginning is in time.

    Since, however, it is the most universal form of the knowable, in which all phenomena are united together through causality, time, with its infinity of past and future, is present in the beginning of knowledge. The phenomenon which fills the first present must at once be known as causally bound up with and dependent upon a sequence of phenomena which stretches infinitely into the past, and this past itself is just as truly conditioned by this first present, as conversely the present is by the past. Accordingly the past out of which the first present arises, is, like it, dependent upon the knowing subject, without which it is nothing. It necessarily happens, however, that this first present does not manifest itself as the first, that is, as having no past for its parent, but as being the beginning of time. It manifests itself rather as the consequence of the past, according to the principle of existence in time. In the same way, the phenomena which fill this first present appear as the effects of earlier phenomena which filled the past, in accordance with the law of causality. Those who like mythological interpretations may take the birth of Kronos, the youngest of the Titans, as a symbol of the moment here referred to at which time appears, though, indeed it has no beginning; for with him, since he ate his father, the crude productions of heaven and earth cease, and the races of gods and men appear upon the scene.
    — Schopenhauer
  • Janus
    16.5k
    And I don't accept Kant's concept of space and time. So, his conditions of experience are contrary to science.Jackson

    Kant is talking, not about any purported objective characteristics of space and time ( for him they are not objective, but subjective), but about how they are experienced by us. You may have read a lot of Kant, but it doesn't look like you've understood him.
  • Jackson
    1.8k
    Kant is talking, not about any purported objective characteristics of space and time ( for him they are not objective, but subjective), but about how they are experienced by us. You may have read a lot of Kant, but it doesn't look like you've understood him.Janus

    A shame you need to make a personal attack. We're done.
  • schopenhauer1
    11k
    A world creates and recreates itself , but in a way that is not accessible to a neutral
    overview, because the nature of its fecundity is inherently perspectival. This is why matter is already value-laden
    Joshs

    Besides the fact that it puts the burden of proof from sentience to the universe itself, how else is this substantiated?
bold
italic
underline
strike
code
quote
ulist
image
url
mention
reveal
youtube
tweet
Add a Comment

Welcome to The Philosophy Forum!

Get involved in philosophical discussions about knowledge, truth, language, consciousness, science, politics, religion, logic and mathematics, art, history, and lots more. No ads, no clutter, and very little agreement — just fascinating conversations.