@Banno is right.

@Metaphysician Undercover @Luke Can you please use PM or email for these discussions instead of hijacking threads. It's basically a private conversation that you're having, spread out over numerous discussion threads. I'm pretty confident that nobody else is interested, and you're spoiling things for everyone else.

Among American intellectuals, baseball seems to be popular. Stephen Jay Gould, who was pretty philosophical, wrote a book called Full House (Life's Grandeur in the UK) that extensively uses baseball in the argument. Something about batting averages and probability, I can't really remember.

And I think there have been several American writers of literary fiction, intellectual types, who've been into baseball.

Maybe when people are young they split into nerds and jocks (to use the American parlance). Those who like computers and books maybe don't play sports much. But later, when the nerds have gotten over their teenage traumas, they feel free to take an interest in sport.

Thanks, I'm glad I'm off the hook.

If one cannot doubt one's existence, then why would one need an argument to prove that one exists?

Descartes decided to doubt as much as he could, without good reason, and found himself stuck at not being able to doubt the doubter. Wittgenstein pointed out that doubting can only occur against a background of certainty. Something must be held firm in order for there to be any doubt.

SO the cogito is not making the same point as Wittgenstein is making. Wittgenstein is saying we don't need the cogito. — Banno

That's fair, but Descartes doesn't argue that he exists; he says he cannot doubt it. This is at least part of what Sam was saying and which I pointed out that Descartes was also saying.

Otherwise, of course you're right that it was Wittgenstein, not Descartes, who showed "that doubting can only occur against a background of certainty".

I'm not sure it's right to say that Descartes tried to doubt everything without good reason, but that's a historical matter.

Well, my criticism was maybe pedantic, and I was going too far in saying that the cogito can't be regarded as an attempted proof. My main point was about the impossibility of doubting one's existence. Of course, if you can't doubt your existence then proof is inappropriate.

It is my point, but Descartes analysis is not the same as Wittgenstein's analysis in OC, which is what I was trying to represent — Sam26

You were responding to a representation of the cogito, and you didn't acknowledge, probably because you didn't know, that the cogito makes the same point you were making. I intervened to correct this. I'm aware that Wittgenstein's analysis is different from Descartes'.

OK, but I wasn't addressing your general opinion of Descartes. Carry on.

What? Descartes was confused about the whole notion of doubting. — Sam26

His point was that you cannot doubt your existence. It's not the kind of thing that can be doubted. I took that to be your own point.

Yes, this was Descartes' point, which GMBA has either misunderstood or just described incorrectly.

Hopefully after you watch all these videos you will have a better idea of what China is trying to do. — dclements

Thanks!

I guess you forgot about the fact that China is threating military action against Taiwan if Taiwan doesn't surrender to China in the near future. Also they are doing everything and anything they can to take over islands in Pacific through either political pressure or money, as well as threating India and other neighboring countries. Also China is trying to gain power in Africa, as well as trying to use computer espionage in any country they can in order to gain some leverage over whatever/whomever they can. — dclements

So...

1. The People's Republic of China wants to get the Republic of China back, and will use bullying and coercion to do it.
2. It wants some islands in its vicinity, for trade and control and regional dominance and all that.
3. The Chinese are exploiting Africans in the context of global capitalism.
4. They're doing espionage.

None of this backs up your statement. I don't approve of what they're doing and how they do it, but their foreign adventures are nothing in comparison with those of some other countries. In any case, none of it shows that they intend to actually invade and "swallow up" the rest of the world, as you claimed. That is just your frenzied fantasy. Taiwan is obviously a special case.

Yes, I thought about mentioning Zizek. He uses jokes to elucidate his concepts, especially the concept of ideology.

Thread still open? — Metaphysician Undercover

Yes, it's quite surprising. I think we, the staff, have a loose convention whereby it's the banner who is responsible for closing the thread. Baden might be leaving it open to catch some more misogynists.

No, but you can be Pilate...as long as you wash the blood off your hands — Leghorn

:rofl:

I missed some entertaining stuff while I was asleep.

Now, would one of you tiny-booted muttonheads pass the mustard?

Indeed :grin:

I've shared my view previously, that people's bad ideas should be addressed and refuted rather than banning or hating on the person infected with such bad ideas. — Yohan

Up to a point I agree, but see the guidelines:

Racists, homophobes, sexists, Nazi sympathisers, etc.: We don't consider your views worthy of debate, and you'll be banned for espousing them.

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/480/site-guidelines

This won't change.

A while back China had better political relations with neighboring countries such as Austria — dclements

:chin:

Otherwise, your reply does not make anything close to a case for the claim that the Chinese intend to "swallow up one country after another", as you put it.

One good thing that's come out of this discussion is that I've learned, partly thanks to Banno, that espouse does not mean advocate. The meanings are significantly further apart than I thought.

:up:

In a nutshell if China manages to become the biggest super power in the world and nobody can or will stop them, they will just keep swallowing one country after another until either most or all of the world is under the authoritarian rule of China itself. — dclements

I haven't seen anyone else seriously claim that the Chinese authorities have any such plan, or that it's a remotely probable scenario. Where do you get the idea from?

Welcome to the forum :smile:

They may take our lives...

Finnish heavy rock plus English folk singer, in a song about the cutting down of an ancient bristlecone pine. :cool:

Congrats! So far I've listened to Pre-Relapse and Levels of Compression and really enjoyed them. That bit in LoC at 02:57 when the bass drone comes in is epic.

Well, as promised, I read Dune. A remarkable creation, and rightly famous I think, but not my cup of tea. By half way through I was rooting for the Harkonnens. I can only take so much humourless solemnity rendered in lacklustre prose.

Now, probably on to some more fiction. Something from: Gene Wolfe, Cervantes, Dostoevsky's Demons, Huysmans' Against Nature, Calvino's Invisible Cities, short stories by Gogol and Lem.

I've been reading some stories by Donald Barthelme: "The Balloon", "The School", and "On the Deck". Great stuff. I'd never read anything like them before.

Nice

Current favourite Scottish band.

I apologise for the facetious comment above. In humans alone, the mind reaches the point of being able to consider such issues. That marks humans off from other sentient creatures. And I still think it's remarkable that this has to even be spelled out, let alone that it be a cause of such hostility. — Wayfarer

Still hanging in there with the being thing I see.

The point I would make here is that this is irrelevant to how the word being is used in philosophy. You have a pet usage scheme, perhaps deriving from pop culture--"the being from another world"--and you think this supports the distinction you want to make.

But you can make this distinction without distorting "being" and "existence". Some beings are inanimate, some are sentient, and some are alone in having X.

They are two separate issues.

The difference between the two is the difference between the different grounds of being in each. The ground of being in the Tao Te Ching is the Tao, the undifferentiated unity which is the natural state of existence before humans get involved. For science, it is objective reality, which represents the multiplicity of concrete phenomena that would make up the universe even if there was no consciousness.

Although they seem contradictory ... — T Clark

But from the point of view of a kind of Kantianism--particularly Schopenhauer's--these two are consistent. At least, they're consistent if science's objective reality is not taken as the ground of being. My guess is that this is quite a common stance even among scientific people. It was something like Kant's view, and Kant himself was an astronomer and cosmologist who claimed never to be denying the reality of empirical reality (science's objective reality).

You know the story: we perceive and model the world in the way we do owing to the way that we must do according to our perceptual and conceptual faculties. We never get beyond that to see the world in itself, the ground of being. What we have then, and what we study scientifically, is empirical reality, i.e., real and objective but bound reciprocally with human beings. (Whether this is coherent or not is another story).

It was Schopenhauer who took it a step further and asserted positively that the thing in itself, that which is beyond human perception and concepts, is an undifferentiated unity. He might have been encouraged in this by his reading of Eastern philosophy.

Although they seem contradictory, I didn't feel any conflict in using both ways of understanding. I could hold them both in my mind at the same time. That's when I started to think about the fact that they weren't true or false. Sometimes it made sense for me to think in one way and at other times the other. That's what made it clear that neither was true or false. — T Clark

So it seems to me that it doesn't necessarily follow from one's ability to hold both positions at the same time that they are neither true nor false. They might be doing different things, and are true in their own ways, meaning at their own levels of description or within their own scope. In a similar way, you can think of a painting as a certain configuration of pigments, and you can describe it that way in great detail, but you can also think of it as a moving portrait or beautiful scene or whatever. Different levels or modes of description, both having true or false statements. (I suspect you're an emotivist who doesn't believe artistic judgments have truth value, but I don't think that's relevant here; maybe I should have thought of a better example).

Ambient doom jazz?

The motivating thought behind the formation of this band: "The audience ... must have the feeling of being in a grave."

I don't know, I find it great for calming background music during work.

I said "postmodern" in relation to Pynchon and Wallace which you were thinking about reading eventually. Good point about Don Quixote. Maybe challenging book might be a better term.

I can't say you'll enjoy it, it might turn out to be very boring for you, but given that you were talking about GR and IJ, difficult books or unique books in general. Now you know about it. — Manuel

:up:

Yep, and I enjoyed looking into it for a few minutes. Who knows if I'll go further with it. Maybe in two decades.

Ducks Newburyport — Manuel

I read the first few pages on Amazon's "look inside" and thought it was a fun read. The form looks interesting, less so the themes and subject matter. It might be a matter of taste.

And there's the blurb:

"A scorching indictment of America's barbarity, past and present, and a lament for the way we are sleepwalking into environmental disaster"

Yawn! But I guess I shouldn't judge the book by the blurb.

And then there's ... "the fact that". Would I be a middlebrow philistine fool to point out how ugly this phrase is? Maybe it takes on a pleasing hypnotic quality as you get into the book, I don't know. Think how much paper and readers' time could have been saved if every instance of "the fact that" had been removed. Now, I expect the sentence wraps up at the end brilliantly or movingly or shockingly or whatever, when "the fact that" finally pays off, but still, I wonder if it justifies making the reader put up with it for almosty the whole reading experience.

Of course, these are just initial reactions combined with my tastes and prejudices.

It might not be "postmodern" — Manuel

I suppose it's kinda modernist in that it has a superficial resemblance to parts of Ulysses, though maybe without the poetry. Whether it's postmodern, I don't know. I don't even know what "postmodern(ist)" means when it comes to fiction. It can't be about the cool stuff like self-reference, metafiction, nested stories and so on, because that was going on at the beginning of the novel in Don Quixote, and hasn't stopped since then.

This discussion was merged into Anti-vaccination: Is it right?

I do have some sympathy for digging into the language of a poem looking for deeper meanings. I remember an interpretation of Frost's "Wild Grapes" that identified and explained some of Frost's allusions to Greek myths. It added depth and perspective without changing my basic understanding of the poem. — T Clark

Yeah I'm all for digging into the language for deeper meanings in the way you describe. But the habit of identifying allegory and symbolic schemes in works of art that I see so much of seems much more primitive and lazy than that.

I'm not familiar with Robert Frost. Basically I know some Ted Hughes poems and this one by Ezra Pound:

In a Station of the Metro

The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough.

----------------

I always seem to go for the nature imagery.

I find it hard to get along with anything that rhymes. It's hard for me to grasp. I can't do the rhythms and absorb the meaning at the same time. It never feels right.

No one has anything but a preliminary understanding of how memory and consciousness work. Trying to do the philosophy without adequate understanding of the mechanics won't work. — T Clark

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Search_of_Lost_Time

I'd say Proust is more than preliminary, but some may disagree.

As I wrote before, this has been a really helpful, interesting, and eye-opening discussion for me. — T Clark

:up:

The Critique of Pure Reason reading group starts tomorrow. See you there!

I don't think I'm anti-intellectual at all. I live in my intellect. Everything good I've ever written on the forum comes from my intellect, reason, resting on a foundation of experience and awareness. — T Clark

Fair enough. Maybe I'm still reacting to the tone of the OP.

I think there's a good case to be made that western philosophy is founded on distrust of experience and awareness. — T Clark

There's some truth in that. Particularly a distrust of earthly, bodily experience. But here we are engaging with the tradition, and some philosophers within the tradition have addressed it.

My former professor in art failed to perceive the beauty of the Mona Lisa painting when she saw it in person. She wasn't impressed. — Caldwell

Yes, there is clearly something wrong with her. — Bartricks

@T Clark

Here's another angle. I think you've said a couple of times that you're seeking the insights of people here who you respect. So why not seek the insights of the people who have dedicated their lives to thinking things through?

I think Cornel West makes a good distinction between "philosophy as a profession" and "philosophy as a way of life". We can add to that philosophy as a hobby or amateur philosophy, which needn't mean bad. — Manuel

Talking of Cornel West, he wrote a piece in April that's even more pertinent, and an interesting angle on this topic:

Howard University’s removal of classics is a spiritual catastrophe

Upon learning to read while enslaved, Frederick Douglass began his great journey of emancipation, as such journeys always begin, in the mind. Defying unjust laws, he read in secret, empowered by the wisdom of contemporaries and classics alike to think as a free man. Douglass risked mockery, abuse, beating and even death to study the likes of Socrates, Cato and Cicero.

Long after Douglass’s encounters with these ancient thinkers, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. would be similarly galvanized by his reading in the classics as a young seminarian — he mentions Socrates three times in his 1963 “Letter From Birmingham Jail.” — Cornel West

Of course I am influenced by the culture I live in. How much does that make my search for an unprejudiced vision of reality quixotic? I can't be sure, I can only do the best I can. Purity of vision is probably not necessary. If my current understanding is irreparably intermixed with western philosophy, it hardly seems likely that further study will make things better. — T Clark

The sentence that I've bolded here: maybe you can see that it's mistaken, if you think about the difference between, on one hand, being unknowingly influenced, and on the other hand, reading the influential thinkers to understand how you and others are being influenced (and what those thinkers were reacting against, and so on). I suggest you read the short opinion piece by West that I quoted above, to get an idea of the value of the philosophical canon.

Here are some more quotes from it:

Students must be challenged: Can they face texts from the greatest thinkers that force them to radically call into question their presuppositions? — Cornel West

As German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer emphasized in the past century, traditions are inescapable and unavoidable. It is a question not of whether you are going to work in a tradition, but which one. Even the choice of no tradition leaves people ignorantly beholden within a language they didn’t create and frameworks they don’t understand.

Engaging with the classics and with our civilizational heritage is the means to finding our true voice. It is how we become our full selves, spiritually free and morally great. — Cornel West

It's interesting how West's focus on the black experience brings these things into focus. He implies that what might appear as the "decolonizing" of education has more to do with a utilitarian anti-intellectualism in the wider society. I think it's fair to say that there is more than a hint of this in your OP.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/04/19/cornel-west-howard-classics/

Just pay attention. To the world and to yourself. — T Clark

I think it's fair to accuse some academic philosophy of concentrating on texts at the expense of paying attention to yourself and what's around you.

But, and this is a big but, I think the best philosophers do both. More than that, you can learn how to better pay attention by studying great philosophers. My own experience is that I learned how to pay attention more deeply and more productively from reading Wittgenstein, Merleau-Ponty, Plato, and others. And Proust, very philosophical as novelists go, though maybe he's more in the realm of psychology.

This is just a quick response. I'm not sure I'm up for describing exactly how those writers worked their magic on my perceptual skills, even though that might be interesting.