The policy is that bans are permanent. There has been only one exception that I can recall. If you’re asking if the platform allows a ban to be reversed, yes it does, because bans do not actually delete the user account.

We introduced temporary suspensions about a year ago. Agent Smith was suspended for a week, then again for two weeks, and lastly for three weeks, the reasons being explained to him at length in private messages. He was told that the third suspension would be the last and that the same posting behaviour thereafter would result in a ban.

You seem to have partially clarified yourself within this discussion so no, I’m not thinking of banning you. And the original comment was at least ambiguous, rather than downright obnoxious, so…well done!

It didn’t sound remotely cold and brutal to me. Frank is up to his old tricks again.

Luxury!

Oh, I should have said: dishwasher? We didn’t even have dishes.

That’s quite agreeable.

Left politics - being mocked by a school friend's family because my family couldn't afford a dish washing machine. — fdrake

I used to tell a similar story, but now I think maybe it’s just a small part of it. Or who knows, maybe it is the deep psychological cause and I just haven’t faced up to it. Anyway…my lower middle-class parents got into money problems and we had our house repossessed and we were struggling for a long time after that. It was about that time that I declared I was a communist.

But there was more to it than that. The contrarian element was strong in me. My Dad had been a kind of socialist. He was on the side of the miners in the eighties and I used to repeat his opinions among my friends, many of whom were the children of pro-Thatcher parents. I was just nine years old and didn’t know what I was talking about, but I was sure I was right.

He also used to talk sympathetically about the Soviet Union, and I was attracted to this, knowing it was a non-standard view. So I began with similar sympathy for the Soviet Union, but luckily ended up going the Trotskyist route. The fact that I became left-wing via wrong opinions isn’t a problem, just the way things go. (Sympathy for the USSR was the wrong opinion, not sympathy for the miners, btw)

I remember the excitement of the weird ideas more than I remember the feelings of injustice or the misery of eating cheap generic supermarket-brand fish-fingers every day.

As I discern it, Wayf, mind is nonmind-dependent insofar as it is embodied, ergo nonmind (aka "world") is not "mind-dependent" and is much more than just "my idea" in the way (e.g.) the territory must exceed in every way (re: dynamics, complexity) mapping of that territory. Kantianism sells that 'the territory is mapmaker-dependent' story (i.e. "world" is mind-dependent) which – like epicycles, etc – I'm still not buying — 180 Proof

(Sorry about losing your formatting)

I tend to agree with you. Of course, the transcendental idealist has a ready answer for this: your notion of the embodied and of the non-mind is yet another example of uncritical transcendental realism that unjustifiably thinks it can get beyond the “correlation” and beyond the field of possible experience created by the subject in the first place. Thus, they would say, you’re begging the question, assuming the nonmind in order to prove it.

So doesn’t it come down to a meta-philosophical choice? Just as we might refuse to play the game of Cartesian scepticism and make a choice to begin in the world rather than in our heads—and in doing so show how the very idea of beginning in the head is historically conditioned, rather than trans-historically self-evident—we can similarly refuse to play the Kantian game and say yes, ok, we can only experience what we can experience, but I am convinced from experience and science that there is something nonmind to be experienced in the first place.

He studied medicine but couldn’t stomach the sight of blood or the suffering of the patients.

Me, I was a lazy student and couldn’t get into Edinburgh.

Darwin was historically later, but his ideas were very much influenced by it — Wayfarer

Yes, and it may have helped that he was at the University of Edinburgh for two years before he dropped out and was sent to Cambridge to take the theological route.

I'll see if I can state succinctly what I believe to be the important point. The difference between Hegel and Marx is the difference between idealism and materialism. The two are actually very similar, but there is an inversion between them in the way that first principles are produced, which results in somewhat opposing ways of looking at the very same thing.

So Hegel described the State as being a manifestation of the Idea. The Idea might be something like "the good", "the right", "the just", and being ideal, it's derived from God. From here, the history of the State is described as a history of the Idea, and how human beings strive to serve the Idea. The Idea comes from God, and there is always a need for the human subjects to be servants to the Idea.

Marx liked Hegel's historical approach, but figured he got the first principle wrong. In order to produce a true historicity he had to replace the Idea with matter, as the first principle. This was to place the living human being, and its material body as the first principle, rather than some pie in the sky "good", "right", or "God". So from Marx's perspective there is real substance grounding these ideas like "good", "right", "just", and this is the material needs of the material human being. From this perspective we can have a real history of the State, judging by its practises of providing for the material needs of material human bodies.

You can see the inversion. From the Hegelian perspective, the people must be judged in their capacity to serve the ideals of the State. From the Marxian perspective, the State must be judged in its capacity to serve the material needs of human beings. — Metaphysician Undercover

I think you succeeded. Nicely put.

If I had to quibble or add something, I’d want to emphasize that “material needs” for Marx included social, creative, spiritual and intellectual needs.

“I see the tree as it really is” is either normally true but sometimes not*, or else it’s incoherent, along with its contrary statement. These are two ways of using the words.

With the second sense, it’s incoherent because it’s like saying “I see the tree as it appears without my intervening process of perception”. But obviously, a tree that is not perceived does not appear.

Despite appearances, this is an argument against indirect, not direct, realism.

* “Sometimes not”: I was at the top of a mountain once, looking down upon a pine forest. Within this forest, surrounded by pines, was a group of golden birch trees, which was strange considering it was the South of France in spring. A short while later the correct perception snapped into place: they were not birch trees at all but just a patch of pine trees lit up by evening sunlight through a gap in the clouds.

Non-sceptical realism.

The danger of this poll is that it feeds the layperson’s impression that the existence of the external world is the central issue in philosophy.

I banned @Agent Smith for refusing moderation. Having deleted several of his low quality posts yesterday, I gave up and told him publicly to stop. He replied with a snickering emoji and, when I deleted that, with “Stop stalking me! :snicker:”.

Knowing that he is generally good-natured, I would not have banned him just for that had it not come after years of warnings and suspensions, and several private conversations. I had to delete many of his low quality comments every day. The staff discussed his case several times and we were generally in agreement.

We went out of our way to keep him here, but he just couldn’t do what we asked him to. I even created temporary suspensions primarily so that we didn’t have to ban him.

The forum is not a chat room. Outside of the Shoutbox and the Lounge, posts should be substantial and relevant.

but without the good time.

Maybe a tumour was the wrong analogy. Fungal infection?

Yeah, like a tumour.

:yawn:

think this is the theme you highlighted in your recent post on Dialectic of Enlightenment — fdrake

Possibly. I do recognize that my post in the Shoutbox describing the disappointment I experienced yesterday when eating a plum pie was a good example of the divergence of use value and exchange value.

By the way, when it comes to Marx’s political economy, I read Capital volume 1 many years ago but haven’t revisited it much since then and haven’t read the Grundrisse. I’m interested—I only wish I could get over my antipathy to anything in the vicinity of economics. Sublimated anxiety over money, probably.

Keep up the great work :up:

I believe that Marx provided a very unique and informative approach (in the form of basic assumptions) toward the interactions between things, both animate and inanimate. He has very insightful principles which ought not be ignored by anyone interested in the interactions between beings, things, and both. — Metaphysician Undercover

Without knowing exactly what you mean, I tend to agree. However, it’s probably essential in understanding Marx to see that he was attempting a philosophy of praxis, a realization of philosophy in history:

The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.

This isn’t an anti-intellectual dismissal of philosophy but rather an imperative: philosophy ought to be more than simply speculative metaphysics (and certainly should not be less than speculative metaphysics, which would describe empiricism and positivism).

The question is moot, it looks like, from an antirealist standpoint. — Agent Smith

Enough with these comments Smith.

I agree, the "purely negative effort to clear up some deep confusions" is precisely what I understand to be philosophy's "transformative process of liberation". I can speculate that Wittgenstein may have meant that philosophy leaves the world just as it is, in the sense of not adopting any metaphysical view about the nature of reality, and I would agree with that.

I see philosophy as a propaedeutic to spiritual transformation, to learning to see non-dually. Still, I would say that although philosophy cannot effect a far-reaching spiritual transformation, it can help to liberate us from being concerned with "views", just as Nagarjuna's dialectic is intended to do, and that that counts as a "transformative process of liberation"; albeit merely an intellectual one. — Janus

Sounds lovely. But I’ve run out of things to say about this, because I haven’t worked out what I think about it.

I guess it's a matter of interpretation: to me an "understanding of how things can come to be as they are" suggests some kind of causal account of the genesis of the world, and i don't think Heidegger was concerned with that. Of course I might be mistaken, and I could be persuaded to change my mind by being presented with anything he wrote which would suggest otherwise. — Janus

No I don’t disagree. It does look too ontic.

I see. Yeah, I don’t entirely agree with him. At the same time, I don’t think I’d want to promote philosophy as some sort of personal comfort. I think it is fundamentally important to humanity and society as a whole.

I don't understand Heidegger as ever being concerned with the "understanding of how things can come to be as they are". — Janus

As I understand it, his deep project was about the meaning of being, so wouldn’t that entail an “understanding of how things can come to be as they are”?

What if debating philosophy gives us social and spiritual fulfillment? Some philosophers like the perplexing madness of it. Certainly "going about your day" can be very mundane so not sure why he couldn't circle back to that idea at least pragmatically speaking, being that he was kind of a linguistic pragmatist. — schopenhauer1

I don’t understand what you’re saying here schop.

This discussion has gone off-topic. I have a feeling it was my fault.

Wittgenstein cannot have really believed that "philosophy leaves everything as it is" since he saw it as a therapeutic, transformative process of liberation from reificatory thinking, of "bewitchment by means of language" — Janus

I don’t think it’s a contradiction but I’m unwilling to work out exactly why it isn’t. The main point is that what you call a transformative process of liberation, others would call a purely negative effort to clear up some deep confusions. Getting our house in order so we can all get on with whatever it is that we already, with no input or comment from philosophy, regard as important in our social and spiritual lives. It is in this sense that some critics have labelled him as basically conservative.

I think they’re pretty much right but I also think Wittgenstein is great.

Fair enough. For my part I could apply the first few sentences of the Searle article to myself. — Banno

Even the best of us have a fatal flaw.

It’s clearly related to his work elsewhere on the ‘instrumentalisation of reason’ — Wayfarer

Exactly. He wrote it around the same time he was writing DofE with Adorno. But it’s much clearer.

I think it can be coherently argued that the principle problem of philosophy is precisely learning to perceive truly. This does not only apply to the hypothetical tree, apple, or coffee cup which is the perennial stand-in for ‘the world’. If you go back to the beginning of philosophy (with Parmenides and the Eleatics) the understanding of how things can come to be as they are is the fundamental question. I *think* this is what Heidegger was attempting to revive with his question of ‘the meaning of being’.

Anglo philosophy is now as Banno pointed out overwhelmingly realist (and I would add naturalistic) in orientation. It starts with the assumption of ‘the reality of the tree/apple/coffee cup’ and then tries to work backward from that assumption without ever really calling it into question. Whereas what is generally categorised as idealist philosophy and also phenomenology, does call the ‘normal attitude’ into question. — Wayfarer

I have two modes that I haven’t quite been able to reconcile. One is my Anglo mode, in which I’m a plain-speaking direct realist, and the other is my sort of phenomenological, sort of Marxian, quite traditional, wannabe Hegelian mode, in which philosophy has ambitions as grand as you’ve set out here. From the latter point of view, Wittgenstein’s statement that philosophy “leaves everything as it is” is an abomination.

That “the principle problem of philosophy is precisely learning to perceive truly”, in a wider sense than is meant in this here discussion, sounds good to me. I think you’d really appreciate Horkheimer’s Eclipse of Reason, which I’m reading now. He has a notion of “objective reason”, which aims at universal truths and might line up with your own conception of philosophy.

Great philosophical systems, such as those of Plato and Aristotle, scholasticism, and German idealism were founded on an objective theory of reason. It aimed at evolving a comprehensive system, or hierarchy, of all beings, including man and his aims. The degree of reasonableness of a man’s life could be determined according to its harmony with this totality. Its objective structure, and not just man and his purposes, was to be the measuring rod for individual thoughts and actions. This concept of reason never precluded subjective reason, but regarded the latter as only a partial, limited expression of a universal rationality from which criteria for all things and beings were derived. — Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason

It’s not just me who thinks so by the way. The view is set out nicely in Possible Experience: Understanding Kant's Critique of Pure Reason by Arthur Collins.

That is what is most objectionable — hypericin

I’ll tell you what I think is most objectionable. It’s when people are explicitly and politely told that what they are attacking is a position that nobody holds, and they ignore the information completely. Or when someone helpfully cites the philosophical literature and sets out the state of philosophical debate on the issue, and likewise is ignored.

Direct/indirect realism is like grammar controversies: it attracts those who are sure of themselves but at the same time unwilling to do the most basic research.

Do we not, by our very thinking nature have "immediate" background structures of his categories? — schopenhauer1

I suppose you could say that. I felt it confused the issue to use “immediate” in that way, because Kant is using it specifically with regard to the perception of things in the world.

The idea that we perceive things "as they are' seems incoherent to me. But that is indeed the naive assumption; that our eyes are like windows through which we look out onto a world of real objects. Naive realists like Banno don't seem to be able to let go of this primal picture. — Janus

I think it’s more that he is reacting to the equally incoherent claim that we don’t perceive things “as they (really) are”.

And thus, I would say, not quite a direct realist — schopenhauer1

Ok, I confess: to describe Kant as a direct realist tout court is an exaggeration. But as Horkheimer said, sometimes only exaggeration is true.

By the way, it’s not immediate access to the categories that we have, but immediate access to things in the world around us.

Yes, he was a transcendental idealist; that’s implicit in what I’ve said already. I’m emphasizing his system in a particular way to bring out what I see is the thrust of his thinking on these matters.

I admit that for Kant, objects of experience are real insofar as they are conditioned by the transcendental conditions of experience. In other words, we experience things that we are able to experience, as we are able to experience them.

It would be wrong to interpret him as saying that we just see things in our heads.

Even Kant supposed a thing in itself — schopenhauer1

An appeal to the supposed authority of Kant will not carry much weight here — Banno

Kant was a direct realist. The external world is the “empirically real” and the tree is an empirical object that we experience “immediately”. See the “Refutation of Idealism”.

here it is proved that outer experience is really immediate — B276

Not that it’s remotely relevant.

It is immaterial in the sense it is not correlated with anything physical and in the sense it is not objectively visible or in a one to one relationship with any particular brain state. — Andrew4Handel

Yes, although I’d put it a little differently just by saying that it is not reducible to physical explanations. But crucially, I wouldn’t say that this irreducibility entails immateriality. In other words, I’m going with some kind of non-reductive materialism.

Individuals do not recognize themselves. They learn to be themselves in interaction with other selves. There is no process of recognizing others as selves, or rather that skill is an integral part of learning to be a self. — Ludwig V

If recognizing others as selves is an integral part of learning to be a self, then isn’t it going too far to say that individuals do not recognize themselves?

Basically though, I don’t think I disagree with anything you’re saying, and my attempted definition could certainly do with some refinement. Note that if I seemed to imply a process, this was more in the way of a kind of mythical history to make the definition clearer, rather than an account of individual self-formation.

my narrative is not constructed. It is lived. Afterwards, narratives may be constructed. — Ludwig V

I’m not sure I understand this. Stories are not lived, they are told. Life is what is lived, and this life becomes a narrative (but again, I’m not implying temporal stages here) in the representation an individual has of itself, i.e., the self.

Once again, I doubt we differ much here.

I can't even imagine wanting to try. — Vera Mont

I'm not sure why you think anyone is interested in the fact that you are not interested in Hegel, in a discussion specifically about Hegel. There are other discussions that you might find more edifying.