the idea that wisdom might transcend discursive articulation isn’t foreign to philosophy — it runs through Plato, Plotinus, and arguably into Wittgenstein himself. It’s also central to Eastern philosophy, where sometimes silence becomes the highest form of answer, akin to 'see for yourself!' — Wayfarer
In Kant? Isn't there apprehension prior to judgement? There is intuition/understanding/reason, which is clearly influenced by the three acts. He takes quite a bit from Aristotle. That's sort of Hegel's critique. "Oh look, I started presuppositionlessly and just happened to find Aristotle's categories." (I never found this critique of Hegel's strong, maybe the categories have held up because they are themselves strong).
Kant would deny truth as the adequacy of thought to being in the strong sense, or the idea of form coming through the senses to inform the intellect. I suppose the response here is that he rejects this because he presupposes representationalism and he has no good grounds for doing so (totally different subject). I'm also pretty sure he falls into identifying falsity with negation. So there would be other differences. I just don't know if the differences hold up without also accepting the fundamental axiom of "we experience only ideas/representations/our own experiences, not things," and of "knowledge of things in themselves," (as opposed to things as revealed by acting, actuality) as a sort of epistemic "gold standard" to aspire to. — Count Timothy von Icarus
It depends on from which view we are talking about ethics and aesthetics. Are we talking about them from the "internal" position of distinguishing right and wrong and beauty and plainness, or "externally" with ethics and aesthetics simply being one of the many means humans use complex social behaviors to improve their social fitness?I don't agree with any strong distinction between science and philosophy, but let me ask: can we (ought we) ever ask questions about ethics or aesthetics? Would these fall under the category of "science?" — Count Timothy von Icarus
How about what makes science a good way to know things is that it is the only method that has provided answers and philosophy has provided none. Name one answer philosophy has provided that did not involve some semblance of the scientific method - observing and rationalizing one's observations.At the same time, it seems that there are at least questions about what makes science a good way to know things that must be prior to science, and which tend to fall into the common box of "philosophy." — Count Timothy von Icarus
All philosophy can do is ask questions. Will there be questions that cannot be answered? Sure, but those questions will only seek subjective answers (ethics and aesthetics from an internal view - similar to how Banno is invoking Godel in this thread), or just be silly (language on a holiday).Of course, the line between "philosophy of biology" and biology, or "philosophy of physics," and physics, is always quite blurry. So too the line between philosophy of science and epistemology and foundational questions of evidence and the role of mathematics and logic in scientific discourse and models. That's why I actually think the art/science distinction is more useful than philosophy/science. — Count Timothy von Icarus
Next he looks at an early criticism of Hegel by Krug, who "objected that if he really wished to do justice to Hegel’s philosophy he would have to be able to deduce the quill with which he had been writing." — Jamal
(** philosophically archaic definition, so as not to be confused with the way the term is commonly used on this thread, yet consistent with the immediate subject matter.) — Mww
My point was that charitability it is a two-way street. I can only help make the position clearer if the other participates in answering the questions or explaining why the question is irrelevant.Sure, and that's why a charitable reading can be important. You can help make the position clearer and more compelling! (And maybe start by discarding the assumption that the person "hasn't bothered questioning it themselves." Perhaps they've done so to the best of their ability.) — J
If understanding is the first step, can you say you have successfully completed the first step if your questions that would help you understand are not answered (they get defensive by the simply fact that you are questioning anything they say)? When I show a discrepancy between their current claim and their prior claims is it fair to say that either I don't understand their position or their position is a contradiction BEFORE even reaching step two, and if they don't address the discrepancy by agreeing to either of those two possibilities, then what? At what point are we to say that they are simply insulting our intelligence and wasting our time?Well, showing discrepancies, that's step two, which requires a whole new mindset, I've found. Quite often, if I start by indicating that I do have some understanding of the position, and can see some value or importance, and then describe the discrepancies I also see, it's received more openly. Or not, of course! -- people get defensive. — J
The former.Is the "you" here the "British 'one'" -- that is, "one should be asking oneself . . ." etc. -- or do you mean "you" as in me, specifically the position about understanding another's position that I was sketching? — J
A possible outcome - yes. A useful outcome - no. Computers produce errors even though they are the most logical devices we know of. If the output is aporic then you need to re-evaluate the input or the program for bugs. If you have reached the conclusion that we don't know anything - doesn't that constitute knowledge - that we don't know anything and therefore creates a contradiction?If the conclusion you have reached is aporetic then you've made a wrong turn somewhere in your thinking and would need to reflect.
— Harry Hindu
Say more about this? I'm not understanding yet why aporia wouldn't be a possible outcome for a philosophical inquiry. — J
There is arguably logical convertability as well. To say "a man is standing," is to say "it is true that a man is standing," (assertoric force), which is also to say "one man is standing" (unity) — Count Timothy von Icarus
If understanding is the first step, can you say you have successfully completed the first step if your questions that would help you understand are not answered (they get defensive by the simply fact that you are questioning anything they say)? — Harry Hindu
A possible outcome - yes. A useful outcome - no. — Harry Hindu
If you have reached the conclusion that we don't know anything [about X] - doesn't that constitute knowledge? — Harry Hindu
Exactly. Context helps to establish the meaning (what a word points to) of certain words. Some words are helper words in that they establish the context of the other words in a sentence. When we have agreed that a certain scribble can have multiple meanings, we use helper words to distinguish between the multiple meanings. So we can say that the helper words point to the specific definition of another word in the sentence.as I've said before, it seems to me that for you language is all names, that you think each word stands for something. And I think this is mistaken. I think that what counts is not what the word stands for - if anything - but what we do with our words in context.
And i think this difference prevents us seeing eye to eye. — Banno
Which is the same as saying that the program was written incorrectly and/or is handling input that is was not designed to handle.I dunno, the aporetic dialogues of Plato seem quite useful. But we may be saying the same thing -- that aporia is an invitation to reconsider. My idea is that the reconsidering is a lot more radical than looking for a "bug" in the logic, because I think aporia is often a sign that we've set the whole problem up incorrectly. — J
Your edit of my post isn't what I intended to say.If you have reached the conclusion that we don't know anything [about X] - doesn't that constitute knowledge?
— Harry Hindu
Yes, but not about X. So no contradiction, I'd say. — J
How about what makes science a good way to know things is that it is the only method that has provided answers and philosophy has provided none. Name one answer philosophy has provided that did not involve some semblance of the scientific method - observing and rationalizing one's observations
Are we talking about them from the "internal" position of distinguishing right and wrong and beauty and plainness, or "externally" with ethics and aesthetics simply being one of the many means humans use complex social behaviors to improve their social fitness?
No thanks, C.S. Peirce is my go to American. Pragmaticism, not pragmatism, thank you :grin: — Count Timothy von Icarus
"James’s central thesis is that when an option is live, forced and momentous and cannot be settled by intellectual means, one may and must let one’s non-rational nature make the choice. One may believe what one hopes to be true, or what makes one happiest;" — Hanover
Such faith is rational, but it is also an act of choice. The evidence, because it is about the trustworthiness of the authority and not about the things the authority says, does not convince the mind of the truth of these things, but only of their trustworthiness. To believe their truth, the mind must be moved to do so by an act of trust. But an act of trust is an act of will. We can, if we like, refuse to believe the doctor or the chemist, however convincing the evidence of their trustworthiness may be. We cannot, by contrast, refuse to believe that the angles of a triangle equal two right angles once we have seen the proof, though we can contradict it in words if we like, for speech is an act of will. — Peter L. P. Simpson, Political Illiberalism, 109
If someone is starving and they decide to eat a mushroom, knowing that it might be poisonous, then I can see how the act has value and reason. — Leontiskos
I think such remarks are self refuting and mischaracterise both mathematics and philosophy by falsely implying that they are separate language games. Indeed, formalism fails to explain the evolution of mathematlcs and logic. There's nothing therapeutic about mischaracterising mathematics as being a closed system of meaning. — sime
the act of understanding closes of critique. — Banno
OK, so where does philosophy fit between these two extremes? — J
As Spinoza said, "Omnis determinatio est negatio." — Leontiskos
In today's climate what is needed is philosophy rather than diatribes, ideology, and virtue signaling — Leontiskos
Only when it comes to providing answers. The only way we obtain the answer is by testing all possible answers. An untestable answer is just as valid as all the other untestable answers.But you made a distinction between philosophy and science. — Count Timothy von Icarus
Isn't logic a fundamental branch of philosophy and isn't rationalism vs empiricism a philosophical debate? I think the claim that philosophy deals in observations all the time is suspect.As commonly conceived, philosophy deals in observations all the time. This is true of phenomenology, ethics, metaphysics, etc. Is the claim that whenever these involve observation they are actually "science" and not "philosophy?" — Count Timothy von Icarus
My guess is that the number of assents which involve the will in such a way is very large. It doesn’t seem to be practicable to avoid all such assents, which is probably why people like ↪Russell and Banno so often overreach their own intellectualist criteria. Janus is someone who gives a very idiosyncratic approach to this problem by positing a set of non-rational assents which are justifiable to oneself but not to others. Williams James seems to go too far in collapsing truth into will altogether. Pascal’s Wager represents an especially potent leveraging of the problem. But even after dissecting all of the errors, it is very hard to deny that there must be some rational assents which are not derived entirely from the intellect.
The Medieval answer to this philosophical problem is found in both a robust understanding of the relation between the intellect and the will, and also in the doctrine of the convertibility of the good and the true.
I think such remarks are self refuting and mischaracterise both mathematics and philosophy by falsely implying that they are separate language games. Indeed, formalism fails to explain the evolution of mathematlcs and logic. There's nothing therapeutic about mischaracterising mathematics as being a closed system of meaning.
One of the first and most decisive forms of this self-restriction of reason is no doubt Kant’s determination to set limits to reason “in order to make room for faith." Such a determination seems eminently reasonable: the remedy for presumption is modesty, and modesty would seem to be best ensured by restricting reason’s scope, which would cause it to respect what lies beyond it as genuinely “beyond.” But our argument is that setting limits to reason in this way in fact makes modesty impossible, and that the only way to avoid a closed system is vigilantly to insist on “totality.” The problem with Hegel, for example, who is typically presented as the very peak of Western rational presumption, is not that he claimed too much for reason, but too little: his system closed in on itself the moment he allowed reason to lose sight of the whole.
Ethics is not necessarily the study of ends, but the ends in relation with some intent because we see people that accidentally caused harm different than people that intentionally caused harm.I'm not really sure why these should be different. Ethics is the study of ends. Politics, as a sort of archetectonic study of ends in the broadest sphere possible, is both a study of what people do and what they would benefit from doing, and this is recognized in the contemporary social sciences. — Count Timothy von Icarus
Define "useful". — Harry Hindu
Your edit of my post isn't what I intended to say.
anything = everything about every X — Harry Hindu
Ethics is not necessarily the study of ends, but the ends in relation with some intent because we see people that accidentally caused harm different than people that intentionally caused harm.
What people do and what is best for them is different than what an individual does and what is best for the individual, which could conflict with what is best for the group.
I would define useful as being applicable in real-world situations and produces the expected results.In this context, I meant philosophically helpful or provocative -- something worth our time to understand. Is there a way you prefer to think of it? -- I'm certainly not married to this one. — J
Seems like you're just defining "intent" here.Right, become the former are seeking different ends from the latter. — Count Timothy von Icarus
Not when the "common good" is bad for the individual. The good of the individual vs the good of the group is a well-known ethical dilemma and has not been settled as far as I know.Potentially. That's a question ethics and politics studies, the role of the "common good" being key here. — Count Timothy von Icarus
If you're having difficulty answering the questions then how can you say whether there is a strong line or not? The point of asking the questions was to try to get at whether there is a strong line between the two or not, and if the distinction is useful or not. The conclusions reached in any field of knowledge must not contradict the conclusions reached in another field. All knowledge must be integrated. The field of genetics integrates well with the field of biology. The field of quantum mechanics does not integrate well with classical physics. The interpretations of what the science of QM is showing would be in the domain of philosophy as none of them are testable at the moment.Good questions. The difficulty in answering these are precisely why I don't see a particularly strong line between the two. — Count Timothy von Icarus
I was thinking about it a bit more and can see philosophy, with the application of logic, tests the theories for soundness, while science tests them by experimentation - a process involving both logic and observation. So, philosophy and science done well would be where the conclusion reached passed all, or at least most, of the tests each one performs.If science only becomes science when it is testable, then a great deal of what scientists do, especially theoretical work, is philosophy and not science. So, like I said, the line is not very clear by this criteria, or at least it fails to corresponds to common usages. — Count Timothy von Icarus
Williams James seems to go too far in collapsing truth into will altogether. — Leontiskos
For these reasons I find Hanover’s approach too strong (although at this point he is only quoting James' more mild ideas). — Leontiskos
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