I suspect the survey results differ over time. — Fooloso4
Is idealism here the love that dare not speak its name? Are the idealists in their cupboard, hiding their true feelings behind excuses and lack of commitment? Or do these forums disproportionately attract contrarians? — Banno
No disrespect but I'm going to argue against the source. Magee is absentmindedly stupid in some important ways.I have repeated a passage in Bryan Magee's 'Schopenhauer's Philosophy' many times here: — Wayfarer
The claim that it is impossible that we know that the earth has existed for a long time even before the perceiving subjects is itself a claim about thing-in-itself, about what actually is. But Kant cannot make this claim because he doesn't know what actually is.'Everyone knows that the earth, and a fortiori the universe, existed for a long time before there were any living beings, and therefore any perceiving subjects. But according to Kant ... that is impossible.'
If Magee endorses Kant's argument, then Magee cannot make this claim that it is what actually is in the world. The whole of the empirical world in space and time is the creation of our understanding?. Okay. Fine. But Magee is making this statement under the assumption of idealism. So he doesn't know either.The point is, the whole of the empirical world in space and time is the creation of our understanding, which apprehends all the objects of empirical knowledge within it as being in some part of that space and at some part of that time:
No it isn't if you're making an important comparison with the PhilPapers results.Twenty four responses. That might be enough to make some observations. — Banno
:100:I appreciate the citations and your reflections on (transcendental) idealism. Still, there's that confusion, or conflation, of ontology with epistemology, which plagues even Kant-Schopenhauer-Magee, that yields conceptual incoherences such as (e.g.) — 180 Proof
Ok, but I'm not sure what we might conclude from that. — Banno
Again, this thread was simply to reinforce the point that the forums are not representative of present philosophical thought. — Banno
No it isn't if you're making an important comparison with the PhilPapers results. — L'éléphant
And at 24 votes, one would have expected one or two folk to have chosen idealism. None did, despite their rejection of realism. — Banno
Magee is absentmindedly stupid in some important ways. — L'éléphant
Is mind ontologically separate from / independent of (the) world?
Does mind correspond to Being and ideas to Beings (well isn't Being / mind also an "idea" – the one we're discussing)? — 180 Proof
There. Happy now? — Metaphysician Undercover
As someone who has 16.9K posts, you can do better than this to respond to my response to Magee's claim.I'll favour his account over yours in this case. — Wayfarer
The problem of including the observer in our description of physical reality arises most insistently when it comes to the subject of quantum cosmology - the application of quantum mechanics to the universe as a whole - because, by definition, 'the universe' must include any observers. Andrei Linde has given a deep reason for why observers enter into quantum cosmology in a fundamental way. It has to do with the nature of time. The passage of time is not absolute; it always involves a change of one physical system relative to another, for example, how many times the hands of the clock go around relative to the rotation of the Earth. When it comes to the Universe as a whole, time loses its meaning, for there is nothing else relative to which the universe may be said to change. This 'vanishing' of time for the entire universe becomes very explicit in quantum cosmology, where the time variable simply drops out of the quantum description. It may readily be restored by considering the Universe to be separated into two subsystems: an observer with a clock, and the rest of the Universe. So the observer plays an absolutely crucial role in this respect. Linde expresses it graphically: 'thus we see that without introducing an observer, we have a dead universe, which does not evolve in time', and, 'we are together, the Universe and us. The moment you say the Universe exists without any observers, I cannot make any sense out of that. I cannot imagine a consistent theory of everything that ignores consciousness...in the absence of observers, our universe is dead'. — Paul Davies, The Goldilocks Enigma: Why is the Universe Just Right for Life, p 271
Thus, in his mature masterpiece, the Ethics, Spinoza finds lasting happiness only in the “intellectual love of God”, which is the mystical, non-dual vision of the single “Substance” (I would prefer "subject") underlying everything and everyone. The non-dual nature of this vision is clearly announced by Spinoza when he says that “[t]he mind’s intellectual love of God is the very love of God by which God loves himself” (Ethics, Part 5, Prop. 36). Since, for Spinoza, God is the Whole that includes everything, it also includes your love for God, and thus God can be said to love Itself through you. — Peter Sas
The realist sees the existence of constraints as the most significant element, the idealist sees the degree of freedom within those constraints as the most important bit. — Isaac
If even our eyes and the fine-tuned measuring devices of the scientist are irrecoverably flawed by subjectivity, then merely 'thinking about it' can't very well be held up as being an improvement.... If even our eyes and the fine-tuned measuring devices of the scientist are irrecoverably flawed by subjectivity, then merely 'thinking about it' can't very well be held up as being an improvement. — Isaac
I think that the really deep aspects of the various world philosophical traditions do far, far more than just 'think about it'. They have their methodologies, strict, rigorous, and highly disciplined. — Wayfarer
But they are all thought-based, they all rely on some 'data-harvesting' method, be it meditation, revelation, or enlightenment... — Isaac
That is alarming — Nickolasgaspar
The Kantian question, for example, what can I know, places the human being as an abstraction, as it were as a pure spirit that, like a machine, can think about God and the world in a pure form. This idealized, individualized fictional human does not exist. — Wolfgang
Again, thanks for the clarifying response. The question remains though: is "reality itself" ideal? Anyway, your conception of idealism, Wayf, seems fairly idiosyncratic to me as nonduality (e.g. Advaita) contrasts profoundly with the transcendental schools of idealism which are dualist. I find nonduality quite congenial with my own conception of naturalism (which has strong affinities with Spinoza as well as Nietzsche, neither of whom I consider 'idealists').One way I have put it is that whilst we may be distinct and separate - an inevitable consequence of existence! - we are not, as it were, outside of, or apart from, reality itself. That, I think, is the key insight of non-dualism. — Wayfarer
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