the idea that doing ontology itself might be a limit on freedom in Derrida and Foucault, or Deleuze's attempt to save ontology by making it "creative," presuppose that metaphysics is more something "we create" and less something "discovered." If it is the latter, then not only can some opinions be more correct than others, but it will also be the case that wrong opinions lead to ignorance, and on very many views ignorance itself is a limit on freedom (e.g. the entire idea of "informed consent," or just the basic idea that one cannot successfully do what one doesn't know how to do.) — Count Timothy von Icarus

For these writers, it’s not just “we” who create ontological realities, as human beings or subjects. It is the world itself that continually creates itself, and we are just along for the ride. Right and wrong opinions refer to what is pragmatically workable on the basis of how the world is laid out within a given set of practices. As the world changes and along with it our practices, the criteria of right and wrong, knowledge and ignorance, also change.

For these writers, it’s not just “we” who create ontological realities, as human beings or subjects. It is the world itself that continually creates itself, and we are just along for the ride.

Right, there is overlap on the background suppositions, but also differences that lead to different conclusions. I think the way in which "freedom" in conceptualized, as primarily potential or primarily act, is a big one, but this conceptualization also flows from other disagreements. There is obviously going to be disagreement on: "Philosophy does not consist in knowing and is not inspired by truth. Rather, it is categories like Interesting, Remarkable, or Important that determine success or failure."

I suppose the response to the adventure of rollicking new avenues of thought might be something like the comparison between a trained pianist and someone who has never played a piano before. Yes, the pianist is, in a sense, constrained by long habit, yet at the same time they are free to do things the novice isn't.

Edit: I would think that less focus being placed on the individual is probably less of an area of disagreement here, since this is also an area where the classical tradition varies from early modern and much contemporary thought (we could consider here the influence of Stoicism and particularly Epictetus.) To me, the disagreement lies more in the questions of "what is knowable?" "how is it known?" and "what drives how history and the world unfold?"

Well, there's a lot here, and I won't address remotely all of it.

But I have a simple question. Is this real?

For example, there's this quote from Robert Wallace:

In this way, rational self-governance brings into being an additional kind of reality, which we might describe as more fully real than what was there before, because it integrates those parts in a way that the parts themselves are not integrated. A person who acts “as one,” is more real as himself than a person who merely enacts some part or parts of himself. He is present and functioning as himself, rather than just as a collection of ingredients or inputs.

We all from time to time experience periods of distraction, absence of mind, or depression, in which we aren’t fully present as ourselves. Considering these periods from a vantage point at which we are fully present and functioning as ourselves, we can see what Plato means by saying that some non-illusory things are more real than other non-illusory things. There are times when we ourselves are more real as ourselves than we are at other times.

There's plenty here that sounds plausible, and it's nice to see it put in somewhat practical-sounding terms.

But are the terms used here ― "depression" for instance ― only practical-sounding? There is a unity of psychology and philosophy here that may have much to recommend it, but is it based on the study of human beings? Is it based on therapeutic experience? Is it real, or are terms like "rational self-governance" counters in a game of philosophy?

I really don't mean these questions rhetorically, or as an indirect way to say "What a load of crap."

But I do worry that the "person" here is not a real thing at all, not someone you could meet, or could be, but a fiction. For a direct comparison: I never studied economics in school, and the sort of stuff I would gather from the news was the usual macro-economic guesswork that economists provide journalists. When I first glanced at economic theory, I was genuinely surprised that an enormous amount of economics is not empirical at all, but pure theory. (And it turns out many economists noticed the same thing and decided that maybe they should try doing actual research.) And famously much of that theory revolves around a fictional being called homo economicus. Which is not to say it's useless ― it's a model, an idealization, and interesting and useful in the ways such things are. But it's not descriptive of the behavior of human beings under scarcity, or of human beings making decisions under uncertainty. For that, you have to do actual research.

Look how confidently Wallace uses the indicative: rational self-governance brings into being, it integrates; a unified person is more real, is present, and so on. Are these observations or stipulations?

A great deal of the history of philosophy makes it into your post in one way or another, and I envy your command of the tradition. But is any of what you quote or analyze based on anything at all like research? And if not, what kind of knowledge is this?

Hence, man is, of the sensible things we know, the most able to become unified, precisely because man has access to transcendent aims — Count Timothy von Icarus

If you reach such conclusions by reason alone, do you not worry that it all just hangs in the air, that it's like an economics theorem circa 1950, true within the game being played, but without any empirical grounding and without the genuine possibility of any practical application?

Go ahead and explain that. Some of us are uneducated. — Srap Tasmaner

Do you see how the motion of the last train car has more dependencies than that of the first (engine) car?

(There's a thread over there about non-existent objects, but I haven't looked at it. ― No, there's two of them.) — Srap Tasmaner

:D

Well, that takes down my theory. Is it really less real if we already have two threads discussing the curiosity?

Sometimes workbooks for children have a kind of puzzle in them, where you're given a little group of pictures and are told to put them in order to make a story. They often rely on thermodynamics ― you're supposed to know that broken pieces of a vase don't rise from the ground (defying gravity as well) and assemble themselves into a vase on the table.

Let's call the world where that sort of thing doesn't happen "the real world." If you tend to tell yourself and others stories where that sort of thing does happen, then I'd be tempted to say your world is "less real" than mine. And insofar as people's beliefs are real, or at least a useful way of categorizing their behavior, and insofar as their behavior has consequences in the real world, I'd be tempted to say that people are capable of increasing or decreasing the reality of situations they are involved in. (It's like the response to "facts are theory-laden": let's make sure our theories are fact-laden.) — Srap Tasmaner

But this is a better rendition.

I'm thinking now that it's not beliefs relative to states of affairs, as categories, that admits of degrees of reality.

But rather beliefs, relative to one another with respect to reality that admits of degrees of reality. Which makes some sense to me -- I have true and false beliefs, and beliefs which implicate sets of beliefs, and the beliefs which implicate sets of beliefs which have more true statements are the beliefs with "more reality".

Almost literally.

I also have in mind the sort of thing you can see in Peter Jackson's film Heavenly Creatures, where the characters begin to slip back and forth between the real world and their own fantasy world. We all do a bit of this, and it seems quite natural to put how much we do it on a scale. Mistaking a windmill on the horizon for a grain elevator is one thing; mistaking it for a dragon is another. At least grain elevators are real, and windmills and grain elevators are both members of "rural towers". But dragons ... — Srap Tasmaner

And I agree with you that this phenomena is related but different. I wanted to wait until I watched the movie before responding, hence my tardiness.

The slip between fantasy and reality seems to make sense of reality as degrees -- are we playing a part in our imaginative game together right now, or are we talking about the bills?

Aristotle doesn't think rocks are proper beings — Count Timothy von Icarus

So now you have real, existing and being. A proper muddle.

Aristotle identifies proper beings as those things that are the source of their own production... For example, a red blood cell is not the source of its own production, nor is it a self-governing whole.

Of course it is. An animal is just a way for red blood cells to make more red blood cells. The telos of red blood cells is to keep the other cells of the body going so that they can reproduce and make more red blood cells...

Telos is a rather slippery notion. That's why it dropped out of use.

What's with the unattributed quotes and references?

So now you have real, existing and being. A proper muddle.

Nonsense, the central argument of the Metaphysics is quite simple: "being qua being is being per se in accordance with the categories, which in turn is primary ousia, but primary ousia is form/edios, while form/eidos is quiddity and quiddity is actuality." QED. :grin:

But in all seriousness, it isn't that much of a muddle, Aristotle uses lots of concrete examples and spends a lot of time on definitions.

Telos is a rather slippery notion. That's why it dropped out of use.

Has it? It's used all over economics, pol sci, and other social sciences, e.g. the notion of "utility." It's all over organizational psychology, or other areas of psychology. It's used in biology in the form of "teleonomy" and "function." It's used everywhere in medicine and public health. It even shows up in the pedagogy of physics in the way that the properties of end states make them more likely (sometimes to the point of being, for all intents and purposes, determined) to occur. Even more reductionist biologists like Dawkins feel the need to rely on the idea (e.g. "archeo vs. neo purpose).

As the biologist J. B. S. Haldane observed: "Teleology is like a mistress to a biologist: he cannot live without her but he's unwilling to be seen with her in public."

I think Etienne Gilson has the right of it when he says that "teleology" is to "astrology" as "teleonomy" and related terms are to "astronomy." In both cases both sets of terms develop out of the same history, and come with a lot of baggage (particularly because of the way the literary tradition used to be blended with the philosophical/scientific tradition). The new terms (astronomy and teleonomy) serve to try to separate that baggage (with disagreement over what counts as useless baggage in the latter case).

What's with the unattributed quotes and references?

Like I said, those are my notes.



There are a lot of related ideas in psychology, e.g. "self-actualization," or "individuation." "We might consider the psychiatrist Viktor Frankl's "logotherapy" as well, humanistic psychology, and a whole range of similar movements. These have been subject to empirical study, in a variety of formats, although "therapy for mental illness" would probably be the most common lens. And the connection to the philosophical tradition is often explicit. For instance, when Martin Seligman was head of the APA he pushed "positive psychology" (also quite popular) in a context that drew heavily on the Aristotelian tradition to define the program.

"Is there empirical support for Plato's thesis here?" is probably a question that is way too broad for useful analysis. A lot of traditions/movements in psychology (both therapeutic and research based) have drawn on the wider philosophical tradition, but you're not going to be able to generate a metanalysis that cuts across all of them that will be worth its salt because the way the question has been instrumentalized and investigated are too disparate.

You could break the question up though. For instance, we could ask about Aristotle's thesis that the virtues (and vices) can be trained and are properly thought of as habits (habits we nonetheless are born with or without talents for). I think the empirical case for this is quite strong, and indeed empirically informed "self-help" literature by psychologists in this area often name drops old Aristotle.

You might find this New Yorker article on philosophers doing therapy interesting. A key difference would be the consideration of how "what one ought to do is addressed." I don't know of empirical work on this sort of therapy. The article mentions success stories, and also the opinion of some psychologists that this work wouldn't work for people with severe mental illnesses. That sort of goes along with a lot of the philosophy though; there is a certain level of stability and unity that is a prerequisite for fruitful inquiry.

On the metaphysical side, there is an entire interdisciplinary field dedicated to self-organizing systems, and a great deal of crossover between homeostasis and "staying-at-work-being-itself," or other frameworks from the literature of dissipative systems. This literature also references Aristotle a lot. For instance, in Terrance Deacon's Incomplete Nature, an attempt to derive teleonomy from statistical mechanics, gets framed in Aristotelian terms.

But I also think it's important to keep in mind what empirical research can and can't do vis-a-vis these sorts of questions, particularly empirical research housed in a scientific apparatus that generally tends to either discourage metaphysics, or at least tries to keep it separated from your day-to-day scientific work. We can point to empirical studies to support metaphysical claims, just as Plato, St. Thomas, etc. often use everyday examples or examples drawn from technical professions, but it's going to often be impossible to run experiments on such suppositions.

If metaphysics is rightly above mathematics as the most abstract and most general science (the claim of Aristotle, Boethius, St. Thomas, etc.), then asking for experimental results is more akin to asking for an experiment to prove mathematical propositions. To be sure, we can demonstrate that some numbers are prime, or the rules of arithmetic, by using rocks and apples. We can use examples from the senses. And if our mathematics is diverging wildly from our observations, we might think we have something wrong on that side of the house. Yet I do not think we can justify metaphysics on empirical grounds, in the same way you wouldn't justify Lagrange's four-square theorem or the Pythagorean theorem by showing that it works in enough randomly selected examples to hit some p value threshold. At best you can falsify metaphysical claims.

...Aristotle... — Count Timothy von Icarus

I'm not really interested in what Aristotle said, so much as what he argued. That is, that Aristotle said this or that doesn't carry much weight for me.

Like I said, those are my notes. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Hand waving at Hofstadter doesn't help much, either.

Seems to me that hierarchies of being are based on essentialism, a notion that we are better off without. But my point here is that saying something is more complex is different to saying it is of greater worth.

At best you can falsify metaphysical claims — Count Timothy von Icarus

You can? How on earth does that work without presupposing the very thing which makes falsification intelligible?

But my point here is that saying something is more complex is different to saying it is of greater worth.

Ok. I don't know of anyone who has advocated such a position.



We might be differing on what is considered a metaphysical claim. I am thinking of things like Empedocles' claim that everything is made of different arrangements of earth, water, air, and fire, mixing according to the principles of love and strife. Or Thales claim that water is the principle of all things.

"Water is an undividable primitive" is the sort of supposition that is open to empirical investigation. No doubt, we could easily reformulate these models (or something like them) using new, ever smaller primitive elements, as materialists did. In some sense, they are unfalsifiable in that we can always posit ever smaller building blocks at work in a "building block ontology," but we might have other empirically informed grounds to reject such a view.

Granted, people could also reject the grounds for thinking that water is a composite substance, but I am thinking in terms of what most people are generally going to accept.

When people hold up the surfeit of apparently purposeless suffering in the world as a counter argument to metaphysical optimism they are making a similar sort of argument, and I don't think these arguments are implausible.

Has it? It's used all over economics, pol sci, and other social sciences, e.g. the notion of "utility." It's all over organizational psychology, or other areas of psychology. It's used in biology in the form of "teleonomy" and "function." It's used everywhere in medicine and public health. It even shows up in the pedagogy of physics in the way that the properties of end states make them more likely (sometimes to the point of being, for all intents and purposes, determined) to occur. Even more reductionist biologists like Dawkins feel the need to rely on the idea (e.g. "archeo vs. neo purpose).

As the biologist J. B. S. Haldane observed: "Teleology is like a mistress to a biologist: he cannot live without her but he's unwilling to be seen with her in public." — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yep. :up: Also logic, for those who don't think it is mere symbol manipulation.

That's a lot to chew on, thank you.

saying something is more complex is different to saying it is of greater worth. — Banno

Curious then that murder charges apply only to the killing of humans. Although that may be an inadvertent illustration of the consequences of a flattened ontology.

The reductionist wanted there to be reality or not-reality, a binary choice. But to me the difference between ordinary visual perception and visual perception through instruments involve different angles on 'reality', which one might distinguish by talk of 'degrees'. — mcdoodle

I hadn't thought of it that way, although now you mention it, it is quite an effective analogy. Have you noticed the Aeon essay I posted a good while back on 'the blind spot of science'? It can be found here and has since been published as a book.)

The Form of the Good is the embodiment of what’s really good. So pursuing knowledge of the Form of the Good is what enables the rational part of the soul to govern us, and thus makes us fully present, fully real, as ourselves. In this way, the Form of the Good is a precondition of our being fully real, as ourselves.

I was hoping you'd introduce Wallace to the conversation. Overall, agree with your analysis.

saying something is more complex is different to saying it is of greater worth.
— Banno

Curious then that murder charges apply only to the killing of humans. — Wayfarer

Yas, saying some thing is human is different to saying humans are worth not killing. Can you set out why you think this problematic?

Ok. I don't know of anyone who has advocated such a position. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Folk only advocate it until it is pointed out. Then they drop it.

I find this thread dizzying. I don't understand what anyone is saying or why anyone thinks their implicit inferences are valid. We are moving from 17th century theories of substance, to Platonic "degrees of reality," to Liberalism, to metaethics, to philosophical anthropology... If I asked Chat-GPT to write a post on a random topic and then posted it in this thread, I don't see how it could be off-topic. :halo:

Really no idea, at this point, why this OP got started. — Wayfarer

It feels like the Wild West. Or that movie, Everything Everywhere All at Once.

Do they? Who? It's a bizarre claim. The Wermacht and bubonic plague were both complex for instance.

My avatar agrees. — Pantagruel

I didn't know it was Descartes. I used to think it was some bloke on a bank note of some country. It seems then, images alone cannot become knowledge. Image needs the corresponding ideas or concepts to be qualified as knowledge.

When ideas and concepts alone are perceived, it is also not clear knowledge. The supplementary images for the idea or concept would help for forming more realistic knowledge.

Even then, after knowing the bloke in the avatar is Descartes, I don't know much about the real Descartes. It will be a gradual process to have more degree of real knowledge about him, if I keep reading on Descartes through time.

I find this thread dizzying. I don't understand what anyone is saying or why anyone thinks their implicit inferences are valid. We are moving from 17th century theories of substance, to Platonic "degrees of reality," to Liberalism, to metaethics, to philosophical anthropology.. — Leontiskos

I quite agree. But I think the fact that this happens, in relation to this topic, speaks to the topic.

Recall that in After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre introduces an imaginative analogy to help frame his critique of modern moral philosophy. He asks us to imagine a scenario where civilization collapses and, as a result, all scientific knowledge is largely destroyed. In this hypothetical world, fragments of scientific knowledge remain—bits of scientific vocabulary, isolated experimental results, and pieces of theories—but these fragments are disconnected from the larger framework of scientific principles and practices that once gave them meaning.

The survivors, lacking the overarching context, attempt to reconstruct science using these remnants. However, without understanding the systematic methodology or philosophical underpinnings that unified these fragments into a coherent whole in the first place, their efforts result in a distorted and fragmented picture. MacIntyre uses this scenario as an analogy for the current state of moral philosophy: he argues that modern moral discourse is similarly fragmented because it has lost its connection to the broader, historically embedded frameworks (like Aristotelian virtue ethics) that once provided coherence.

Along similar lines, in Edwin Abbott's 'Flatland', a two-dimensional surface (like a plane) is trying to comprehend a three-dimensional object—a cone—as it passes through it. Since the surface only comprehends two dimensions, it would perceive the cone not as a unified three-dimensional shape but as a series of two-dimensional cross-sections. If the cone's point passes through the plane first, it would begin as a single point; as more of the cone moves through, the plane would perceive this as a gradually expanding circle; and eventually, as the cone narrows again, the circle would shrink until it disappears. From the perspective of the two-dimensional plane, these changing shapes (points, circles, ellipses) seem unrelated and fragmented, because the surface cannot grasp the unifying structure of the cone as a whole.

The very fact that the discussion has tended to lurch chaotically between substance theories, Platonic hierarchies, metaethics, and anthropology suggests a lack of shared principles to anchor the conversation - which is evidence of the problem, that we are like the two-dimensional inhabitants of Flatland, trying to comprehend concepts (like degrees of being) that inhere in a higher-dimensional metaphysical framework. There's no common reference within which the idea of degrees of reality can even be discussed.

Maybe it's related to Hegel's idea of partial truths, or Rumi's "magnificent lie.". This implies a higher truth, or something more real, but that's just poetry for it.

The survivors, lacking the overarching context, attempt to reconstruct science using these remnants. — Wayfarer

I read that book a million years ago and forgot he does this. Does he mention that this whole scenario is borrowed from A Canticle for Leibowitz?

Well, likewise with me, but I don't remember that point, but looking at the précis, it seems an obvious source for McIntyre. Actually looks like a classic in its own right.


But, so what?

But, so what? — Wayfarer

Just wondered. Canticle is brilliant, yes.

Really no idea, at this point, why this OP got started. — Wayfarer

Btw, it was started to give you a platform for explicitly discussing and defending an idea you often mention in passing, an idea you feel is often rejected out of hand.

The further purpose was to specifically not reject the idea out of hand and encourage others not to, and to set an example by trying to make sense of an idea I don't naturally have much affinity for, in my own clumsy way, of course.

I find this thread dizzying. — Leontiskos

Don't tempt me. I'll start a thread in your honor next.

Oh, and I very much appreciate that and thank you for it. (Incidentally made that rather frustrated comment on it before it started attracting any attention. I think we did get it out in the open after that.)

MacIntyre discusses Canticle at length in the opening, and I always thought Canticle itself was supposed to be a metaphor for the collapse of the Roman Empire and the preservation of knowledge by monastics (based on what I know about it, I haven't made it around to that one yet). Also, it had been fairly common to see the work of Dark Age scholars as "corruptions" of the original thought (which had been helpfully "recovered" in the Enlightenment move to "reboot" philosophy).

I think scholarship increasingly tends to reject this "corruption" thesis, recognizing that works in this era, e.g. Eriugena's Periphyseaon, represent significant, novel shifts in philosophy, rather then the old "reason enthralled to backwards Christianity," meme (which also makes no sense because wider advances in the Orthodox and Muslim East overlap the Latin Dark Age slump.)

This is sort of relevant to MacIntyre's thesis though because, not only did the Enlightenment jettison prior ethical theory, but it also ripped up the metaphysics it grew out of, essentially "starting over" (explicitly in Descartes' theory for instance). At the same time, philosophy was radically democratized and moved away from being largely the domain of highly trained specialists, with most living ascetic and contemplative lives, to becoming more the arena of anyone with the means to write. Then, the printing press and pamphlet sales becoming a measure/means of success further democratized things. And you can see this in some pretty famous Enlightenment texts, for instance when Hume dives into philosophy of religion while being seemingly ignorant of why assuming the univocity of being might be problematic, or at the very least question begging.

Point being, I think you could expand MacIntyre's thesis outside of ethics, and this would explain why so much contemporary philosophy has involved the recovery or rediscovery of old ideas from the "lost period" (e.g. semiotics, phenomenology, group minds, etc.).

Charles Taylor's "A Secular Age," is an interesting supplement to MacIntyre's because it shows how much of these changes were also theologically motivated, even though these changes then work themselves into major atheist thinkers (e.g. Nietzsche's German Protestant background comes through strong). For example, you cannot have an ethics of virtue (excellences) if man is totally depraved and is only ever good through miraculous grace. Nor can you have much of a philosophy of ethics if true Goodness, God's Goodness, is cut off from our own notions of goodness by total equivocity, hence you focus on rules instead, first drawn from the Bible, and only later for "all rational agents."

But my point here is that saying something is more complex is different to saying it is of greater worth.

Ok. I don't know of anyone who has advocated such a position. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Oh, I do. I was trained in classical music theory, and the assumption that complexity equates to quality was nearly unquestioned. Why is Bach better than Telemann? More complex. Why is the Western classical tradition better than pop? More complex. Etc. The heck of it is, there's something to this. Complexity is a virtue, it's just not the only virtue. And whether it is important to a particular piece of music depends on the aesthetic purposes of the piece. But when someone says, "I just can't find anything of worth in Beyonce, it's too simple, I listen once and there's nothing more to hear," they're not saying something silly. IMO, anyway.

he argues that modern moral discourse is similarly fragmented because it has lost its connection to the broader, historically embedded frameworks (like Aristotelian virtue ethics) that once provided coherence. — Wayfarer

I think After Virtue is essential reading, but here again we see that one person's "history of philosophy" is another's "tendentious sour-cherry-picking." Here's a rephrasing and expansion of your (accurate) summary of one of MacIntyre's main points:

"There is no such thing as a single "modern moral discourse"; rather, ethics and moral philosophy have branched out in several interesting and important directions, each with their own problems for discussion both internally and with other branches. This branching-out no longer reveals a single direct connection to broader, historically embedded frameworks (like Aristotelian virtue ethics) that once provided a systematic view of ethics, along with the meta-ethical claim that the view could not be challenged without challenging an entire philosophical system. A number of branches of modern moral philosophy call this into question."

Is this version any more accurate than MacIntyre's? I think it is, but I wouldn't completely endorse either one. My point is that we shouldn't be beguiled by the idea that a loss of connection with a particular older tradition renders the entire discipline incoherent. Make Philosophy Great Again? I don't think so.

There are a two main strands to the thread, and this isn't one of them. Which is fine, I was just spitballing.

I still find it interesting that ordinary people routinely think truth can land on a spectrum, that there can be more or less truth in what you say.

And in a similar way people describe ideas, accounts, views, as more realistic or less, on a spectrum like accuracy (which @fdrake brought up).

I find that sort of thing awfully interesting, but this thread is about what sort of existence properties have, whether things that have more property-types have more existence, and whether there's a truer realm beyond this one.

Make Philosophy Great Again — J

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