The OP is illformed, of course.

The notion of a philosophical "project" with some statable goal misses what's going on. The moment a goal is stated, someone will formulate a counter-instance, adding a new piece that undermines that very goal. That's what Descartes, Kant, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, and company do.

As with poetry, setting out a definition is setting out a challenge.

But besides that, what's the point of metaphysics if it doesn't make a difference to what you do? Metaphysics is in the end only a tool for doing ethics.

But besides that, what's the point of metaphysics if it doesn't make a difference to what you do? Metaphysics is in the end only a tool for doing ethics. — Banno

Similarly, I feel that my pursuit of abstract ideals resonates with my actual behaviours, and vice versa. — Pantagruel

I'm pretty sure this is exactly what I just said.

I assume by illformed you meant not how you would say it. No need to be ill-mannered. ;)

Not so much.

...the philosophical project as such is, at its heart, metaphysical. — Pantagruel

But besides that, what's the point of metaphysics if it doesn't make a difference to what you do? Metaphysics is in the end only a tool for doing ethics. — Banno

One can just as well say that ethics is a tool
for doing metaphysics. More accurately, each pre-supposes the other. Metaphysics is what puts the ‘ought’ in ethics.

I believe that the rise of the scientific worldview has been, at the same time, the curtailing of the of the metaphysical project. And while I am a respectful student of many sciences, I think we have elevated it too far; that in so doing, something has been lost. Modern physics and cosmology have already run into the wall of dark matter and energy. The paradox of science, that we can learn so much only to discover that we really know so little, suggests to me that the need for a return to the philosophical project is greater than ever. — Pantagruel

Good grief. Keeping up with the galloping advance of science is like trying to hang on to a rocket. You can say physics has run into a wall now that it has encountered the dark sector of "things that are there even if they don't interact". Or you can instead realise this is metaphysics made mathematical. The success of quantum field theory is so sweeping that we are able to generate predictions of particle types that don't even exist with concrete properties, and thus are pretty much unmeasurable except as the most ghostly echoes of those that do.

I would say metaphysics as an inquiry into fundamental being is in rude health. Especially to the degree that we have developed a mathematical holism which can see into what isn't even in principle "visible".

Beyond dark matter and dark energy – which are both rather substantial – physics and cosmology are engaging with the possibilities of a whole hidden sector of particles, or quantum excitations, that have to "exist" even if they could have no effect.

And to be able to think about reality in that fashion surely takes metaphysics to new places.

One can just as well say that ethics is a tool
for doing metaphysics. — Joshs

Not convinced. Tools are for doing, and ethics is about what is to be done. Metaphysics is more what is the case that what to do about it.

That is, the direction of fit is different, and ethics better fits the direction of fit of tools - making stuff the way it ought be.

Systems-centric is another way to characterize it: holism is one of the key characteristics of complex emergent systems. In this guise, it can form the focus of a legitimate paradigm shift, rather than just being a dirty word. — Pantagruel

Yes. That was the premise of physicist Fritjof Capra's 1982 book, The Turning Point. In which he introduced the concepts of Holism and Systems Theory. He applied those ideas to all phases of modern culture. The name of the book suggests a future "paradigm shift" from narrow Reductive methods to broader Holistic thinking. :smile:

PS__Holism does indeed require "going beyond the [reductive] facts" in order to see both sides of reality at once : material parts + metaphysical (mathematical) inter-relationships. Philosophy without imaginative Holism would be factual Physics. Yet. some posters seem to prefer it that way.
PPS__A crucial aspect of Philosophy is skepticism toward your own flights of fancy, to keep your feet on the ground.

Ancient Skepticism :
The Greek word skepsis means investigation. Literally, a “skeptic” is an inquirer. Not all ancient philosophers whom in retrospect we call “skeptics” refer to themselves as such. Nevertheless, they all embrace ways of life that are devoted to inquiry. Ancient skepticism is as much concerned with belief as with knowledge. As long as knowledge has not been attained, the skeptics aim not to affirm anything. This gives rise to their most controversial ambition: a life without belief.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/skepticism-ancient/

I would say metaphysics as an inquiry into fundamental being is in rude health. Especially to the degree that we have developed a mathematical holism which can see into what isn't even in principle "visible". — apokrisis

If this holism is grounded in mathematics , then in order for one to be uncovering its metaphysical basis one would need to ‘ground’ this mathematics in a more originary thinking which is no longer , or not yet, mathematical.

Metaphysics is more what is the case that what to do about it. — Banno

Metaphysics is both about what is and what ought to be. Form projects expectation. This anticipative aspect of the transcendental is the basis of the
‘ought’. Empirical discovery as well as ethical prescription has their condition of possibility in the normative ‘ought’ of an already opened up space of possibility.

You might be implicitly presenting a science-philosophy duality in your post, which is really a modern artifact. Adam Smith was a social philosopher, for instance.

The effect of this duality is that in the present, scientists are untrained in philosophy, and philosophers too are largely untrained in the sciences. This makes certain problems in both philosophy & science difficult to deal with, namely because in the past the sciences and philosophy were one and the same, and their practitioners had just the same training, so cross-assistance was very common. Avicenna reached metaphysical conclusions in virtue of his physical investigations, and Leibniz reached the correct conclusion that spacetime is relative through a priori metaphysical investigation, which was at the time "empirically false" (according to the Newtonians), but was later found to be the correct theory through the works of Mach and Einstein.

On the other hand, it seems that the lack of cross-training is a natural evolution of the fact that our fields of inquiry are getting increasingly complex and advanced, and no one can really be a true polymath anymore. But this doesn't mean philosophers shouldn't learn the basic sciences, or that scientists shouldn't learn basic philosophy. Certainly the basics can still be learned and be part of any inquirer's essential training, just as both philosophers and scientists learn algebra and calculus while not needing to know the most avant garde mathematics.

Ain’t logic the foundation of maths? Along with counting?

So yes. I’m never one to police academic boundaries in a reductionist fashion. I see only their developmental continuity.

It must be the case - in my epistemology - that knowledge grows in a dialectical and developmental fashion. The pragmatic dichotomy is that of reason and observation. Or more abstractly, logic and counting.

Metaphysics began with this dialectical approach - the holism of the unity of opposites. Tao and Buddhism made the same start too.

The reaction to this overarching holism was then reductionism. We had the atomistic metaphysics that paved the way for the mechanical sciences.

The next logical step after that is the unity of these new opposites. Which is what we are finding across the sciences. Physics is being forced to take holism seriously through the maths of quantum fields, topological order, gauge theory, holography, and all the rest.

So if you go back to the roots of holistic thought to check if there is any mathematics to it, then you can find that in the dialectical reasoning that prefigures the physics of symmetry breaking, phase transitions, spontaneous “order out of chaos”, and all that.

Maths is the logic of relations tied to counting - a general theory about causal theories and a general theory about quantifying variables. It is the holism of the local and global, suitably broken down into a working method.

This anticipative aspect of the transcendental is the basis of the
‘ought’. — Joshs

That looks to be pointing to the overlap between ethics and metaphysics. A rule of thumb: metaphysics is about what is the case, ethics, about what ought be the case.

But I ought be doing other things...

:cool: :up:

Metaphysics is in the end only a tool for doing ethics. — Banno

:chin:

What is the philosophical project? — Pantagruel

To paraphrase Leonard Cohen:

There are cracks in things which is how insight gets in.

It has always seemed to me that philosophy is an attempt to make sense of human existence by reflective reasoning deliberately in contrast to non-rational practices (e.g. myth, superstition, intuition, magic, etc). In this Socratic light, my "philosophical project" is to unlearn self-immiserating (i.e. maladaptive) habits of thinking and conduct by striving daily to understand – to reduce "intuitive" (folk, common sense) misunderstandings of – what we do not know about what we think we know (e.g. sciences, histories, technics, arts).

So far, in order to make sense of human existence as a whole, classical (cataphatic) metaphysics has down the millennia proposed various, speculative absolutes/categories ("X is real")-of-the-gaps which illuminate as well as occlude those gaps in our knowledge, however, without closing or eliminating them. Prodigious developments in modern natural sciences in the last few centuries have eclipsed the indispensible speculations of metaphysics to the point where several schools of "anti-metaphysical thought" became fashionable which are as vacuous as they are themselves also self-refuting forms of metaphysics (e.g. positivism, nihilism, existentialism, deconstructionism / radical relativism, scientism, etc). It seems to me, the more productive way forward (thanks again @Tobias!), rather than these "anti-metaphysics" cul de sacs is to seek, so to speak, a 'Non-Euclidean' formulation of classical metaphysics (i.e. "what is real?"). For me, as I've mentioned quite a few times elsewhere, this alternative approach begins with: What must reason exclude from conceiving reality as such – what is necessarily not real?

Much of what is self-immiserating (à la dukkha), or maladaptive, consists in failing to align our expectations – what we think we know – with reality due to, I suspect, acquired habits of fixating on – attachments to – 'things which are not real and false beliefs about unreal things' aka "illusions of knowledge" (i.e. believing we know what and when, actually, we do not or cannot know). Perhaps speculating on what cannot possibly be real – a Non-Euclidean (e.g. apophatic) metaphysics – is the step forward after, so to speak, throwing away Witty's ladder. :smirk:

That looks to be pointing to the overlap between ethics and metaphysics. A rule of thumb: metaphysics is about what is the case, ethics, about what ought be the case. — Banno

This is a reductionist manoeuvre aimed to put the self at the centre of the world. The mechanical view of nature arose by kicking final cause out of the picture. Teleology became the dirty word.

But science just hides finality from view. It is still there in the principle of least action and the second law of thermodynamics. Something has to give the Cosmos its definite direction.

In terms of an ontic “ought”, the purpose of the Universe is rather permissive. Within its optimising constraints, all kinds of local freedoms are dialectically defined as the differences that don’t make a difference to the overarching cosmic intent.

But anyway, the is/ought thing is what humans find useful to hold true so as to make explicit the freedoms that are available because the Universe has no reason to care. But at the metaphysical level, or at least the natural philosophy branch of metaphysics, we engage with the finality that the Universe actually does embody.

This is a reductionist manoeuvre aimed to put the self at the centre of the world. — apokrisis

How?

If anything, ethics is "centred" on the other; it is social, political.

Sure. The self is a social construction. It is the collective view. It is centred on individuals in interaction until they arrive at some functional habit that is their shared constraining purpose.

Excellent post. :up:

Most interesting. — Ms. Marple

What precisely is the problem with cataphatic metaphysics (x is real)?

Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth. — Sherlock Holmes

:up:

But science just hides finality from view. It is still there in the principle of least action and the second law of thermodynamics. Something has to give the Cosmos its definite direction. — apokrisis

"Direction" =/= destination (i.e. "finality"). That this sentence ends, for instance, is not the purpose, goal, or meaning of this sentence. Likewise, "the cosmos", my friend, is not an intentional agent with an intrinsic telos (category mistake, no?) but a dissipative mega-structure with a sell-by date.

Ain’t logic the foundation of maths? Along with counting? Maths is the logic of relations tied to counting - a general theory about causal theories and a general theory about quantifying variables. It is the holism of the local and global, suitably broken down into a working method — apokrisis

Not just any kind of logic , but a certain formal logic connected with certain assumptions about the nature of the object justifying such notions as the fundamental distinction between kind and degree , quantity and quality.

What precisely is the problem with cataphatic metaphysics (x is real)? — Agent Smith

To start, the dialectics inherent in any thesis "X is real": not-X is real ad infinitum.

To start, the dialectics inherent in any thesis "X is real": not-X is real ad infinitum. — 180 Proof

Apologies, I don't follow.

but a dissipative mega-structure with a sell-by date. — 180 Proof

:grin:

Exactly. The most reduced notion of a global telos that we could arrive at which would produce an entropically closed system.

So it is teleological minimalism. Yet still, a tellic ontology. Best of both worlds!

justifying such notions as the fundamental distinction between kind and degree , quantity and quality. — Joshs

What was I saying other than that dichotomous distinctions are fundamental? For vagueness, the possibility of dialectical logic already spells the beginning of its end.

teleological minimalism — apokrisis

:roll:

"BothAnd", no? :smirk:

Well what is your ontology when it comes to the global constraints on a system?

Did you have some other story on how constraints can be causal?

:cool:

I do not conceive of "global constraints" as "causal", perhaps because I'm not convinced that a systems science paradigm provides an adequate framework, or model, of the universe (i.e. whole of nature). Your thoughts on this topic are very insightful and deeply provocative – I'm still processing the briefs on biosemiotics, etc you've shared, apo – but "my ontology", simplistic though it may be, consists of this mereological constraint: local dynamics (e.g. biosemiotics) cannot, without performative self-contradiction, encompass the global structure (e.g. the cosmos) that also encompasses those local dynamics.

"BothAnd", no? — 180 Proof

X and not-X, both can be real e.g. Putin is real and so is Zelensky (not-Putin).

I do not conceive of "global constraints" as "causal" — 180 Proof

A context limits what is possible. So it is an apophatic cause. It causes by suppressing what might otherwise be the case.

Global constraints embody both formal and final cause and combine to be the downwards acting regulation in a holistic or hierarchical metaphysics.

Finality in a physical system is not a purpose but a tendency. It is what tends to happen in the context of some constraint. Rough grains of rock tend to become smooth and graded into fine sand if they are swilled in the surf for long enough. A simple expression of the second law and the tendency towards averageness with random mixing.

So natural philosophers like Stan Sathe find it normal to include telos in their cosmology. But they make the obvious distinction between the physical realm and the biosemiotic one.

Salthe's hierarchy theory claims three grades of telos, ranging from the brutely physical to the complexly mindful.

So there is a subsumption hierarchy of the form - {teleomaty {teleonomy {teleology}}}.

Or in ordinary language, the three levels of {physical propensity {biological function {cognitive purpose}}}.

See for instance: http://www.cosmosandhistory.org/index.php/journal/article/view/189/284

And to be able to think about reality in that fashion surely takes metaphysics to new places. — apokrisis

And if you are able to think about physics in that fashion then I surely agree.