Granted, it's also fun to try to eat the whole meal in one bite. :grin: — Leontiskos

I tried that and I nearly choked. not my idea of fun. :wink:

- True. For some reason my nephews are never deterred!

Ahh... to be young and gluttonous!

even in this scenario things are human-mind independent. — Janus

In classical philosophy and scholasticism, particularly within the Thomistic and Neo-Platonic traditions, there is indeed a view that the human intellect (nous) is a reflection or an image of the Divine Intellect. That shows up in the doctrine of the rational soul and also in the role of intellect in hylomorphic dualism. I don't know if they ever entertained the idea of other solar systems (actually wasn't that somerthing that Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake for? Unlike Mahāyāna Buddhism, which acknowledges 'a myriad of life-bearing orbs'.)

Catholics accept the current cosmological paradigm, according to which the cosmos existed for far, far longer without humans than it has with them. — Janus

Indeed. The inventor of big bang cosmology was Georges LeMaitre, a Catholic priest. I've often told that anecdote that Pope Pius wished to use LeMaitre's argument to press the case for 'creation ex nihilo', but that LeMaitre was embarrased by this conflation of the scientific accounts with religious cosmology and asked the Pope's science advisor to intervene, which he did. I loved that story on a couple of grounds - first, LeMaitre's utter commitment to scientific impartiality, while still maintaining his faith, and seeing no conflict between them; second, that he got the Pope to agree not to do something.

Granted, it's also fun to try to eat the whole meal in one bite. :grin: — Leontiskos

I understand your concern. But my philosophical quest started with an eclectic approach - very much in the spirit of the 1960's. I read, for example, quite a few of Alan Watts books, also Thomas Merton, and other eclectics. Heck, I first learned the name 'Jacques Maritain' through a book I bought at Adyar Bookshop (one of many!) God, Zen and the Intuition of Being. All of those kinds of sources quote Aquinas and Plotinus and pseudo-dionysius, and others of that ilk. Later in life, I came to recognise the lack in my own education, never having been schooled in 'the Classics' but some elements of classical philosophy have really come alive for me. Yes, it's syncretist, and definitely unorthodox but there is a thread.

Yes, it's syncretist, and definitely unorthodox but there is a thread. — Wayfarer

That's fair. There are definitely different ways to go about it, and it sounds like you have some good sources to work from.

The point was simply that both Leibniz' and Berkeley's metaphysics fall apart if you remove God. — Janus

Actually that wasn't the point.

Actually that wasn't the point. — plaque flag

That was my point and I was quite explicit about it. Go back and read again...or not...suit yourself...

I won't go any more in this direction in this thread, but it's no small feature of 'mind' that it is profoundly timebinding and historical. The "mighty dead" are gone as flesh but not as spirit. Indeed, the updates they made to the cultural software of the West are more or less alive in us. In thinkers like Hegel, the process began to grasp its own historicity, its own essence.

The bodily forms of those great minds who are the heroes of this history, the temporal existence and outward lives of the philosophers, are, indeed, no more, but their works and thoughts have not followed suit, for they neither conceived nor dreamt of the rational import of their works. Philosophy is not somnambulism, but is developed consciousness; and what these heroes have done is to bring that which is implicitly rational out of the depths of Mind, where it is found at first as substance only, or as inwardly existent, into the light of day, and to advance it into consciousness and knowledge. This forms a continuous awakening. Such work is not only deposited in the temple of Memory as forms of times gone by, but is just as present and as living now as at the time of its production. ... The conquests made by Thought when constituted into Thought form the very Being of Mind. Such knowledge is thus not learning merely, or a knowledge of what is dead, buried and corrupt: the history of Philosophy has not to do with what is gone, but with the living present.
...
Since the progress of development is equivalent to further determination, and this means further immersion in, and a fuller grasp of the Idea itself-that the latest, most modern and newest philosophy is the most developed, richest and deepest. In that philosophy everything which at first seems to be past and gone must be preserved and retained, and it must itself be a mirror of the whole history. The original philosophy is the most abstract, because it is the original and has not as yet made any movement forward; the last, which proceeds from this forward and impelling influence, is the most concrete. This, as may at once be remarked, is no mere pride in the philosophy of our time, because it is in the nature of the whole process that the more developed philosophy of a later time is really the result of the previous operations of the thinking mind; and that it, pressed forwards and onwards from the earlier standpoints, has not grown up on its own account or in a state of isolation. — Hegel

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/hp/hpintroa.htm#A1a

Of course Heidegger has his own, often-gloomier version of this. Key point is that we are thrown into an inheritance, which we eventually pass on, having hopefully made a worthy improvement, correction, or addition. Our cultural world is especially 'mind'-created.

I claim that this evolving ontology articulates the world, manifesting an ideal perspective. A little personification will probably be alright, especially given that our implicit goal (those of us who are serious, anyway) is to achieve this ideal perspective (move toward it at least.)

now you seem to be flirting with full-fledged Idealism — Leontiskos

It was intended as a defense of idealism from the outset.


Splendid Hegel quote. Just the kind of thing that Marx inverted.

@Wayfarer, I think you would enjoy section 1.4 of Joseph Ratzinger's Introduction to Christianity, entitled, "The boundary of the modern understanding of reality and the place of belief." It represents a somewhat different approach to these questions of Scientism than the ones we have been considering.

Towards the end of his argument, he says:

So the conviction was bound to spread more and more that in the final analysis all that man could really know was what was repeatable, what he could put before his eyes at any time in an experiment. Everything that he can see only at secondhand remains the past and, whatever proofs may be adduced, is not completely knowable. Thus the scientific method, which consists of a combination of mathematics (Descartes!) and devotion to the facts in the form of the repeatable experiment, appears to be the one real vehicle of reliable certainty. The combination of mathematical thinking and factual thinking has produced the science-orientated intellectual standpoint of modern man, which signifies devotion to reality insofar as it is capable of being shaped. The fact has set free the faciendum, the “made” has set free the “makable”, the repeatable, the provable, and only exists for the sake of the latter. It comes to the primacy of the “makable” over the “made”. . . — Joseph Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity, Section 1.4

Who is "us"? Mankind as a whole, any particular person, or a particular person (but not some other person)?
— baker

I would have thought it should be obvious that I was referring to the way things generally appear to humans; you know, things like 'trees have leaves', 'water flows downhill,', 'clear skies are blue' and countless other well-established commonalities of appearances. — Janus

It all goes back to disagreement, and what to do about it, how to think about it.

The differences in locutions are not superficial.
— baker

I think what you say here has no relevance to what it aims to respond to.

Given that people often say "This isn't real, it's all in your mind", there's clearly more to it.

I've been following this theme of disagreement throughout this thread, but with little success, apparently.

It's precisely disagreement, on various levels, that points in the direction that the mental is all we have to work with. Not that the mental is all there is. But that it is all we have to work with.

And traditionally, and in general, the way many people try to overcome disagreement (and to win verbal disputes) is to posit the existence of an external world of which they claim or imply to have special knowledge, and that anyone who doesn't think the way they do is wrong, bad, evil, or in some other way defective.

In any case, the person who told you're wrong to like Portrait of a Lady was speaking idiotically; it's uncontroversial that there is no accounting for taste, no possibility of establishing objective aesthetic criteria.

Traditional literary theory disagrees with you.

Splendid Hegel quote. Just the kind of thing that Marx inverted. — Wayfarer

:up:

Since that went over well, I'll add some of Heidegger's updating of the software (of the software's self-articulation.)

Coming into the world, one grows into a determinate tradition of speaking, seeing, interpreting. Being-in-the-world is an already-having-the-world-thus-and-so.
...
Dasein, whiling away its own time in each case, is at the same time always [also, even primarily ] a generation. So a specific interpretedness precedes every Dasein in the shape of the generation itself. What is preserved in the generation is itself the outcome of earlier views and disputes, earlier interpretations and past concerns.
...
Such a forgotten past is inherent in the prevailing interpretedness of being-together-with-one-another. To the extent that Dasein lives from ... this past, it is this past itself.
...
The world with which we are concerned and being-in itself are both interpreted within the parameters of a particular framework of intelligibility.
...
... the 'fore'-character in the structure of interpretedness shows us that it is none other than what has already been that jumps ahead, as it were, of a present time pervaded by interpretedness. Guided by its interpretedness, expectant concern lives its own past.
...
Dasein 'is' history.

I got this nice quote from @Joshs:

The past is not an earlier position but the now implicitly functioning past....the past functions to "interpret" the present,...the past is changed by so functioning. — Gendlin

For what it's worth, William James quotes psychologists that were aware of this already in his time. We meet the present as our entire past. Since I am mostly the 'generic human soul' of my generation (the 'who of everyday dasein' or 'the anyone'), much of this past is not personal but cultural. This includes inferential norms, which we experience as binding, as the condition for the possibility of a genuine psychology, and so never reducible to psychological contingency.
...
For you and anyone else, I commend Julian Young's Heidegger's Later Philosophy for its beautiful clarity. All killer, no filler. It agrees with Braver's take in A Thing of This World. It's a spiritual take but not a mystical take. It's all conceptually tight (to me a plus).

derivative on the thing that exists in itself

Can you unfold this ? My bias is that you won't find more than what Mill described, but perhaps you'll surprise me. — plaque flag

I think Mill's whole construal of "possibilities of sensation" is a non-starter:

These various possibilities are the important thing to me in the world. My present sensations are generally of little importance, and are moreover fugitive: the possibilities, on the contrary, are permanent, which is the character that mainly distinguishes our idea of Substance or Matter from our notion of sensation.

This is subtly off. A substance is not a possibility of sensation. That is an accidental characteristic of a substance, not its definition. That characteristic is crucial to human epistemology, but that doesn't make it the definition. Further, no one actually thinks about objects in such a way. Objects are things that we encounter through our senses, not possibilities of sensation. This is the same reversal of metaphysics and epistemology that occurs so often in modern philosophy.

The object itself and not some representation of it is known. — plaque flag

Mill is close to talking about a representation (sensation) rather than the object itself. He is defining the object in terms of sensation-representation.

In fact this sort of move is what strikes me as odd about so much of modern and contemporary philosophy. Again and again, a proper accident is mistaken for an essential property, and the error is always grounded in a shift towards the epistemic subject. The forlorn formal cause sneaks in through the back door, unnoticed and not critically attended to. In this case Mill has an epistemological problem before him, and as a consequence he ends up defining objects in terms of epistemology. ...So I suppose I am beginning to understand Kit Fine's modus operandi (link).

And traditionally, and in general, the way many people try to overcome disagreement (and to win verbal disputes) is to posit the existence of an external world of which they claim or imply to have special knowledge, and that anyone who doesn't think the way they do is wrong, bad, evil, or in some other way defective. — baker

:up:

I'm thinking of using Rashomon and As I Lay Dying as explications of the nondual perspectivist position. Both narratives give us the-world-for-characters. We never get the External Aperspectival World, and I've been claiming that such a thing is a round square, a seductive empty phrase, for we all get the world only as such characters. The world we know is the-world-for-characters. But we dream of stuff that floats without a nose in the picture, because it's a useful dream, however incorrect in some other important sense.

Related issue. We only have belief, never truth. Or rather 'true' is a compliment we pay to claims we believe. It's no magic sauce. Young Wittgenstein was (impressively) already clear on this, somehow seeing right through the usual superstition, perhaps because he was perspectivist. { He didn't call himself that, but I'll defend a nondual perspectivist interpretation of key passages from the TLP. }

Further, no one actually thinks about objects in such a way. . — Leontiskos

:up:

Of course. But most people aren't philosophers.

Of course. But most people aren't philosophers. — plaque flag

I see it in the way you see Kant, albeit much more subtle and less pronounced:

It may be hard to see because radical indirect realism is so sexy. I watched a Donald Hoffman Ted talk, and it was gripping. I knew it was fallacious and confused, but I still enjoyed it. I felt the pull of the sci-fi. I could be one of the those in on the Secret, while others were lost in the shadow play on the cave wall. — plaque flag

The non-sequitur is that, just because we know objects through sensation, it does not follow that objects just are possibilities of sensation.

Mill is close to talking about a representation (sensation) rather than the object itself. He is defining the object in terms of sensation-representation. — Leontiskos

I'd say you'd have to look into his 'deconstruction' of the self too. To be clear, I don't take Mill or anyone really as an authority. But Mill gets something right. It's what I was getting at with what I quoted above.

The essential partiality of our view of things, he argued, their being given only in a certain perspective and at a certain moment in time, does not diminish their reality, but on the contrary establishes it, as there is no other way for things to be co-present with us and with other things than through such "Abschattungen" (profiles, adumbrations).

The thing transcends our view, but is manifest precisely by presenting itself to a range of possible views. The object of perception is immanently tied to its background—to the nexus of meaningful relations among objects within the world.

In case it helps, I intensely agree with early Heidegger (famous KNS1919 lecture) that we get a meaningful world directly. We get tables and wigs and cats, not planes of color, etc. And this lifeworld is also profoundly cultural and historical, so I see a picture of Shakespeare and grasp the cultural significance immediately (though of course I can always look more closely, and so on ---for all is horizonal).

So I utterly reject crude sense-data understandings of the given. The lifeworld is the given. So the point for me is not sensation (though sense organs are involved) but perspective. The object is always situated in a field of vision, and we understand it in the first place as something that could be looked at.

The non-sequitur is that, just because we know objects through sensation, it does not follow that objects just are possibilities of sensation. — Leontiskos

As I've said, the issue is semantic. People sometimes worry about whether P is warranted. But they forget to check whether P is meaningful. Respectfully, you still haven't met my challenge, unless I haven't got to that part yet.

How do you understand the existence of physical objects ?

Of course. But most people aren't philosophers. — plaque flag

Also, I have always thought this would be an interesting study in itself. What does it mean for a philosopher to redefine a commonly used term? For instance, what does it mean when Mill comes along and redefines objects as possibilities of sensation? Is this not equivocation?

Presumably what he is trying to do is convince the world that an object is not what they suppose it to be, but this is too seldom explicit. My favorite philosophers are very careful to avoid this sort of redefinition.

Also, I have always thought this would be an interesting study in itself. What does it mean for a philosopher to redefine a commonly used term? For instance, what does it mean when Mill comes along and redefines objects as possibilities of sensation? Is this not equivocation? — Leontiskos

Explication (unfolding) is not redefinition.

Explication (unfolding) is not redefinition. — plaque flag

An "unfolding" which contradicts the previous notion is redefinition.

Presumably what he is trying to do is convince the world that an object is not what they suppose it to be, but this is too seldom explicit. My favorite philosophers are very careful to avoid this sort of redefinition. — Leontiskos

Come on though, that's presumption, as you say. Uncharitable. And Mill is dead. So please just try to understand me, and then defeat my position.

An "unfolding" which contradicts the previous notion is redefinition. — Leontiskos

What previous definition ? People mostly use words like tools with pre-theoretical skill. We are concept-mongering practical primates. It's the worldly foolishness of philosophy and all that. Making it explicit is hard work. And most people just don't need such clarity.

Here's a classic passage that nails the spirit of phenomenology.

What is “familiarly known” is not properly known, just for the reason that it is “familiar”. When engaged in the process of knowing, it is the commonest form of self-deception, and a deception of other people as well, to assume something to be familiar, and give assent to it on that very account. Knowledge of that sort, with all its talk, never gets from the spot, but has no idea that this is the case. Subject and object, and so on, God, nature, understanding, sensibility, etc., are uncritically presupposed as familiar and something valid, and become fixed points from which to start and to which to return. The process of knowing flits between these secure points, and in consequence goes on merely along the surface. Apprehending and proving consist similarly in seeing whether every one finds what is said corresponding to his idea too, whether it is familiar and seems to him so and so or not.
...
Analysis of an idea, as it used to be carried out, did in fact consist in nothing else than doing away with its character of familiarity.

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/ph/phprefac.htm

My own philosophical work is largely motivated by a sense that people don't know very well what they are talking about in the first place. And I don't think such ambiguity is ever completely reducible. Obviously inferences are important, but meaningless or insufficiently determinate conclusions are worthless.

Come on though, that's presumption, as you say. Uncharitable. And Mill is dead. So please just try to understand me, and then defeat my position. — plaque flag

I am explaining why I disagree with Mill. I don't know how closely you follow him.

Respectfully, you still haven't met my challenge, unless I haven't got to that part yet.

How do you understand the existence of physical objects ? — plaque flag

The challenge of how to understand the existence of physical objects in a way that differs from Mill?

...So the point for me is not sensation (though sense organs are involved) but perspective. The object is always situated in a field of vision, and we understand it in the first place as something that could be looked at. — plaque flag

This seems pretty close to Mill. I think what we understand in the first place is a thing, and secondarily that the thing has perceptible properties, and then later that the thing likely has non-perceptible properties.

What previous definition ? People most use words like tools with pre-theoretical skill. Concept-mongering practical primates. Making it explicit is hard work. — plaque flag

I think someone like Mill is saying, "Objects are this and not that. Your pre-theoretical view was mistaken." I don't think he is saying that "this" unfolds from "that", such that both are secure.

.

Objects are things that we encounter through our senses, not possibilities of sensation. — Leontiskos

That's just a rephrasing, it seems to me.

I think what we understand in the first place is a thing, and secondarily that the thing has perceptible properties, and then later that the thing likely has non-perceptible properties. — Leontiskos

Sure, we start in the world of things, not as philosophers. Then we learn to analyze, account for the subjects and objects. But I object to 'non-perceptible properties.' What's that supposed to mean ? Science finds patterns in perceptions. Or so I claim.

That's just a rephrasing, it seems to me. — plaque flag

Right, and that's why I said it is subtle. I don't think anyone on the forum has grasped the point Kit Fine is making in that thread, largely because it is foreign to contemporary philosophy.

I would have to think about how to make it more apparent.

I think someone like Mill is saying, "Objects are this and not that. Your pre-theoretical view was mistaken." I don't think he is saying that "this" unfolds from "that", such that both are secure. — Leontiskos

The point is an explication of the pre-theoretical view.

Note that most of the objects in the world are not currently perceived (by this or that single person). And I've never seen the Eiffel Tower, but I think I could see it, given certain conditions.