Is the mind in what is understood, or in the way in which it understands? — Pantagruel

I figure the answer points to the importance of a dialogue that develops different models and assumptions over time. Framing answers to problems create new ones. The importance of Aristotle is that he marked out the limits of his horizon. He accepted the depths of our ignorance as described by Socrates but did not say the quality was acceptable as any kind of last word.

When Aristotle limits what can be a science to what can be identified as what changes, it can be read as an attempt at a complete explanation. But all of those accounts keep running into the limits of what has been explained. He is modelling how to use language during the work of inquiry.

What is politically expedient is to satisfy the insatiable demand for transgressive performance. There is a market demand for that and suppliers are working to meet it. The carnival of mutual disgust consumes all surrounding resources. The credit line of opportunity costs accrued indulging in the catharsis keeps getting bigger but there is no income coming in to balance it against. It is the condition of people who have nothing to do with what keeps them alive. And if they cannot survive they will have at least taken down their enemies with them.

What makes Roark so attractive to some young males is that the theme of rugged individualism and the virtues of a pure meritocracy provide cover for the desire to be accepted by a particular group on the basis of what Veblen referred to as the display of conspicuous consumption. The dominance of Roark over women reflects how participation in the group translates the role of beauty. For example:

She is useless and expensive, and she is consequentially valuable as evidence of pecuniary strength. It results that at this cultural stage women take thought to alter their persons , so as to conform more nearly the requirements of the instructed taste of the time; and under the guidance of of the canon of pecuniary decency, the men find the resulting artificiality induced pathological features attractive. So, for instance, the constricted waist which has had so wide and persistent a vogue in the communities of the Western culture, and so also the deformed foot of the Chinese. Both of these are mutilations of unquestioned repulsiveness to the untrained sense. — Theory of the Leisure Class, Thorsten Veblen

The futility of the 'kept' woman finding purpose through work is not a bug but a feature for Roark, it makes the forced sex hotter as a kind of degradation of worth. Rand makes the fantasy even hotter by suggesting that such a result is secretly what is wanted.

Time for me to hit the shower....

I see the distinction you are making but balk at the true versus false designation. It is not a field to win or lose honor except in the eyes of the living. All of the dead are equal through their death.

My concept is that, where there is no purpose, there can be no will, but rather exists only the aimless longing indicated (and misnamed??) by Schopenhauer. In this conception, will is closely associated with Viktor Frankl's "search for meaning" which he hypothesized as being universal in man. — Michael Zwingli

Nietzsche throws down several stumbling blocks to Mill's kind of utilitarianism and Frankl's 'search for meaning' Book One of The Gay Science puts the differences between instincts and reasoning in a different context than how an individual operates. Section 11 questions the agency of the actors themselves, at least as something treated as self explanatory causes for outcomes:

Consciousness.- Consciousness is the last and latest development of the organic and hence also what is most unfinished
and unstrong. Consciousness gives rise to countless errors that
lead an animal or man to perish sooner than necessary, "exceeding destiny." as Homer puts it. If the conserving association of
the instincts were not so very much more powerful, and if it
did not serve on the whole as a regulator, humanity would
have to perish of its misjudgments and its fantasies with open
eyes, of its Jack of thoroughness and its credulity-in short, of
its consciousness; rather, without the former, humanity would
long have disappeared.
Before a function is fully developed and mature it constitutes a danger for the organism, and it is good if during the
interval it is subjected to some tyranny. Thus consciousness is
tyrannized-not least by our pride in it. One thinks that it constitutes the kernel of man; what is abiding, eternal, ultimate,
and most original in him. One takes consciousness for a determinate magnitude. One denies its growth arid its intermittences.
One takes it for the "unity of the organism.''
This ridiculous overestimation and misunderstanding of consciousness has the very useful consequence that it prevents an
all too fast- development of consciousness. Believing that they
possess consciousness, men have not exerted themselves very
much to acquire it; and things haven't changed much in this
respect. To this day the task of incorporating knowledge and
making it instinctive is only beginning to dawn on the human
eye and is not yet clearly discernible; it is a task -that is seen
only by those who have comprehended that so far we have
incorporated only our errors and that all our consciousness
relates to errors. — Fredrich Nietzsche, translated by Walter Kaufman

The ontological argument is a sham unless seen as mysticism — Gregory

One of the appeals to reason in the argument is that we could not have had a notion of the divine unless we were infected by the notion at some point. That strikes me as a very unmysitcal thing to say. We try to take inventory of our ideas and this very strange one shows up.

Rightly or wrongly, the idea is presented as an interloper, something that is not self evident.

Anselm brought in the idea of what can be imagined and what were the conditions of such an activity. It was not a work of mysticism like others of that sort.

What do you make of St. Anselm? He was not interested in replacing faith with reason. Nor vice versa.

I don't understand the human side of these speculations. If there is a god who is interested in what I do and think, then that is an important part of my experience. And if that is the case, I do not care about what could be said or not by this and that criteria outside of my relationship.

The entire notion is based upon whether something is going on or not for some people. It is meaningless outside of that context.

Why didn't Aristotle, the father of metaphysics, not make a Kantian-like distinction between noumena and phenomena? After all it seems to be baked into metaphysics. — TheMadFool

Perhaps it has something to do with the division Descartes made between the I and the world it perceives. The singularity presumed is not concordant with Aristotle seeing humans as inhabiting a place between gods and animals.

Yes.

Do you take this dialogue as a warning against complete, self-contained systems of thought? — frank

That is unlikely given this writing is one of the first of its kind. I was referring to the willingness to have every proposition be challenged as such. The permission to hear new ideas. Why would one extend such an invitation?

I don't think you can support that mental constructs of pure philosophy are useful in any way to a person. — magritte

As far as I know, 'persons' are the only ones who might be possibly interested in these 'constructs.'

My response was directed to what might be wanted beyond acceptance to any particular account of our limitations, however those things may be described. To notice that quality is not a claim upon what should be counted as possible or not. It is not leverage to object to your idea that the universe is a product of perception.

Nonetheless, I am pretty sure the universe is something with me and without me.

Forms are only used to build Plato's abstract metaphysical models, and have no psychologically useful correlates. — magritte

Doesn't our experience with recognizing kinds, types, and universals in the realm of particulars count as 'psychologically useful' correlates?

Your description seems to suggest that the problems of Parmenides have all been surpassed by means of some complete explanation. Some of the effort in the dialogue is troubled by the consequences of complete explanations. Are 'we' beyond that now?

Lack of desire for what? — T Clark

To understand the universe as it is, both with us and without us.

I never said I agreed with Protagoras, you did. — T Clark

Yes, it is only my description.

So, you agree with Protagoras: 'Man is the measure of all things.'
That view captures a certain kind of immediacy in our experience but exemplifies the lack of desire I was referring to. According to Protagoras, any further efforts to understand beyond those parameters is make-work or wankery.

The goal is not be be correct, it's to provide answers that will work in the real world. — T Clark

I propose the goal is to understand the world and ourselves in it. Being correct (or not) is an attribute of a proposition or a set of them. Understanding is finding out what is 'real' and wanting to understand more because of that experience. Being satisfied that a relativity separates absolute assumptions is a kind of cessation of desire. It is to say there is no ultimate coherence in this 'real' world and it is foolish to seek it out.

It is in that sense of the love in the word philosophy that I meant to have no problems. The eunuch does not sport pesky erections.

Rejecting the need for a "meta-framework" is intellectually liberating. — T Clark

Is that not making the struggle to understand risk free?

The Collingwood method of not framing assumptions as true or false is helpful toward a taxonomic orientation of various concepts and points of view but it doesn't give itself problems it cannot solve.

Is that not an 'absolute' assumption of some kind? Is that saying all problems are only results of some set of ideas being adopted and are not verifiable beyond the expression of them?

The topic prompted me to check out examples of assessing "EQ" and it seems peculiar to me that so many are based upon reporting on oneself through series of questions. A lot of those questions are of the 'when did you stop beating your wife' variety. If emotional intelligence is about perceiving emotions other people are having, it should me more like an archery contest where many arrows miss the mark.

As for the ones who make the best decisions because of the ability, the problem of comparison is like the kind discussed in the Art of War by Sun Tzu. The true masters of conflict are able to perceive and respond to what is happening so that fighting becomes unnecessary. The visible arts of strategy and persuasion are attempts to compensate for failures of insight and response. The highest skill is not visible.

It should be noted that the lines you quote from Kafka are half of aphorism #104, the last of the series titled Reflections On Sin, Pain, Hope, And The True Way. The first half of #104 reads:

"No one can say we are wanting in faith. The mere fact of our living is itself inexhaustible in its proof of faith."
"You call that a proof of faith? But one simply cannot not live."
"In that very 'simply cannot' lies the insane power of faith; in that denial it embodies itself." — translated by Willa and Edna Muir

Each of the aphorisms (as noted by the translators) "were carefully written and numbered by Kafka himself on separate pieces of paper." In the context of what one needs to read or not regarding a subject of philosophy, Kafka, in this case, was intent upon tying the aphorisms together and read with the others kept in view.

So the confidence that the world will "give itself to us" in #104 has to be seen with the ease and depths of our capacity for illusion and harm. Consider, for example, aphorisms #25 and #26:

25: Once we have granted accommodation to the Evil One he no longer demands we should believe him.

26: The afterthoughts with which you justify your accommodation of the Evil One are not yours but those of the Evil One.
The animal snatches the whip from its master and whips itself so as to become master, and does not know all this is only a fantasy caused by a new knot in the master's whiplash.

Whatever "doing philosophy" may be, texts that strive to be more than a list of self-sufficient explanations need to live together in a certain way to become what they are talking about. I suppose one could look at that element in a purely instrumental fashion but there is more to it than that.

I wonder how much stands up to philosophical scrutiny, especially the idea of the collective unconscious. — Jack Cummins

This is a great question but also makes me wonder if you want to have your cake and eat it too. The collective unconsciousness is presented as both a phenomena and an idea. Jung is not interested in tricking people about it. It is either one or another.

Jung is interesting. The architectural side is at odds with the willingness to hear about individual suffering. He did both. Something about the experience led him to something very different from others.
But that to me seems like a retreat from explanation. There is no bon mot. You should be unhappy.

I don't have a clear idea about what constitutes the "psychological." It seems like it is not only a set of explanations but a method for putting other problems in a context. So, the comparison of philosophical with religious experience seems to assume an underlying something to which both relate. There are a number of disciplines that attempt to understand things in that way. I am asserting you are taking some kind of stance like that to view philosophy and religion from a distance far enough away to see them apart. My experience of these activities has not been something where the different qualities announced themselves as what they are by simply appearing.

Your question of how one might do the work of another led me to think there is viewpoint prior to either by which to compare them. Is that a psychological point of view? Asking that means I have not gotten as far as asking what the differences are. There must be many. But what is the background of comparison?

In your asking about the difference between philosophy and religion, I have difficulty with taking either as a given circumscribed set of activities that may or may not overlap. Is there a way to separate them that is not already a choice?
When you say: "I am wondering about the way in which philosophy provides an alternative way of finding explanations and meanings", it sounds like religion had this job we can distinguish beyond the confines of choosing it or not over philosophy.
I would like to hear more about this job. It sounds more important than deciding who should get it.