Comments

  • Donald Trump (All General Trump Conversations Here)

    As the matter involves the balance of power between the executive and the legislative branches, even the most hard core trumpsters may not kiss the ring for this.
  • Donald Trump (All General Trump Conversations Here)

    Since the IGs are a crucial element of Congressional oversight, it will be interesting to see if the GOP will let this go forward. At the very least, having to seat this many new officers is not how the legislators were imagining their Spring.
  • p and "I think p"

    Are you saying this in response to actually reading the book or stating an opinion in general about such attempts?
  • p and "I think p"
    But it relates to his later point from Thomas Nagel about 'thoughts we can't get outside of'. Nagel emphasizes that there are perspectives—like the validity of reason or the unity of thought—that we cannot evaluate "from the outside" because they form the very framework within which all thinking and evaluation occur.Wayfarer

    So, what do you make of Rödl's statement that Nagel is making a similar mistake? (as pointed to previously}.
  • p and "I think p"
    What Rodl is claiming, using the synonymy of "thought" and "judgment," is that thinking that things are so is not different from being conscious or aware of so thinking. So the million-dollar question is, When I think about my judgment, which we know is a thought1 (a mental event), is my new thought about that judgment also a thought1? I think much of Rodl's thesis rests on denying this. Self-consciousness has got to be a thought2 item, something "accompanying" any thought1, not an additional simultaneous thought1 (mental event).J

    I think the problem of talking about what is a new 'thought' has to first pass through the issue of the first person being the one making the judgement:

    The Fregean account conceives the first-person pronoun as a variety of reference, which singles out an object in a special way, indicated by the phrase, as the one who is affirming the proposition.This alleged manner of singling out an object explodes the conception of thought that it brings to first-person thought: a thought that is of her who affirms it as affirming it contains the subject’s affirmation of it. It is not a proposition. The first-person pronoun is no variety of reference, but an expression of self-consciousness: it signifies the internality to what is thought of its being thought. The Fregean attempts to represent self-consciousness, which dissolves the force-content distinction, as a special content. If we are to understand the first-person pronoun, we must understand self-consciousness. The first step to this is abandoning the force-content distinction. — ibid. page 25

    The problem of one thought and then another is a product of the view of propositions Rödl is militating against.

    As I think this in the first person, I represent that substance as thinking that she is a human being. That she thinks this is one thing, that she is what she thinks herself to be, another. As we shall see, the semantic framework deriving from Kaplan and Lewis in effect imposes this articulation on first-person thought: she who thinks a first-person thought thinks something of a certain substance, which substance, in a separate thought, she thinks to be herself. — ibid. 27

    The isolation of the "private thinker" on page 23 culminates in this rejection of the "affirming subject":

    In this sense, all propositions will be related to the one who thinks them, and thus in this sense, it may be said that all propositions are first-person propositions. This is a technical ploy; it has no philosophical significance. In the same way, all sentences may be treated as bearing a tense, even if they are tenseless. They will turn out to be true at all times if they are true at one. — ibid. page 28

    The discussion at this point reminds me of a passage in the Theaetetus where true and false opinions are compared:

    Soc Excellent. And do you define thought as I do?

    Theaet. How do you define it?

    Soc: As the talk which the soul has with itself about any subjects which it considers. You must not suppose that I know this that I am declaring to you. But the soul, as the image presents itself to me, when it thinks, is merely conversing with itself, asking itself questions and answering, affirming and denying. When it has arrived at a decision, whether slowly or with a sudden bound, and is at last agreed, and is not in doubt, we call that its opinion; and so I define forming opinion as talking and opinion as talk which has been held, not with someone else, nor yet aloud, but in silence with oneself. How do you define it?
    — Plato, Theaetetus, 189e4, translated by Fowler

    Rödl is speaking more strictly about what Plato also recognizes as a limit to description.
  • Donald Trump (All General Trump Conversations Here)
    The non-discriminating pardon of 1/6 criminals is bad for the rule of law. It specifically empowers those who see themselves as executors of T's will outside of what T can perform as official acts. The recent expansion of executive privilege means T cannot be associated with such behavior when excrement hits whirling objects.

    The withdrawal from WHO is a strategic mistake apart from the idiocy of not engaging with public health problems as they emerge.
  • Donald Trump (All General Trump Conversations Here)


    I get that you do not desire retribution. But there are others who do.

    What to do with them? Will they have power in the coming days?

    You seem confident that this question has nothing to do with your circumstances.
  • Donald Trump (All General Trump Conversations Here)

    Is your condition bereft of any differences that choices made will affect outcomes? Your laughter is like that of the gods.
  • Donald Trump (All General Trump Conversations Here)

    Why comment when so satisfied with your superior position?
  • Donald Trump (All General Trump Conversations Here)

    There is an ambiguity in your delight. You are above the fray.
  • Donald Trump (All General Trump Conversations Here)

    The latest T proposals speak of sending U.S. military down to the border before figuring out how that fits in with the other federal, state, and county jurisdictions.

    As a citizen here, that promotes the expansion of federal power above that of local communities. It hurts the brain to have self-identified Libertarians support such measures.

    More important than that is the proposed abandonment of regulation in all its forms. The efficacy of the anti-regulation movement will produce the most immediate outcomes for life in our nation. The environment, levels of education, standards of police behavior, acceptance of chosen forms of identity, equal rights under the law, national responses to health threats, etcetera.

    Whatever bad and good we may have done for others, the dissolution of our infrastructure is what will consume the next decade.
  • p and "I think p"
    So is the idea that he follows Hegel in disagreeing with Kant about noumena but he does not disagree with respect to his interpretation that, "The I think accompanies all my thoughts"?Leontiskos

    I need to read and think more about it but perhaps Rödl may not want to accept all of Hegel either. Mww's account of the 'thinking substance' underscores some of the problems with distinguishing first person thought and objective judgement. The way Rödl separates them is that first person thoughts do not raise the problem of validation that objective judgements do. That preserves some of the isolation expressed in Kant's version of given objects. I think Rödl is inept in getting rid of Kant's "can accompany each thought". The region of "self-consciousness" is neither expanded nor reduced by the formulation.

    Another element that makes me wonder about Rödl's relationship with Hegel is the impending chapters that incorporate Aristotle's' view of the thinker coming into being. I haven't gotten that far.
  • p and "I think p"
    Or perhaps you are claiming that Rodl mildly disagrees with the idea that he attributes to Kant?Leontiskos

    I think Rödl is greatly influenced by Hegel's criticism of Kant. The expression of common ground can be found here:

    This bears repeating: there is no meaning in saying that, in an act of thinking, two things are thought, pu and I think p. Kant said: the I think accompanies all my thoughts.3 Hegel calls this way of putting it “inept”. However, in defense of Kant, we note that he hastened to add that the I think cannot in turn be accompanied by any representation. Thus he sought to make it plain that the I think is not something thought alongside the thought that it accompanies, but internal to what is thought as such. When I say, the I think is contained in what is thought, this may with equal justice be called inept. It suggests that there are two things, one containing the other. Perhaps we should say, what is thought is suffused with the I think. But here, too, if we undertake to think through the metaphor, we come to grief before long. — ibid. page 6

    Where Rödl diverges from Kant relates to Hegel's objections to the role of 'intuition' giving us objects to understand or not:

    S]ince an object can appear to us only by means of … pure forms of sensibility, i.e., be an object of empirical intuition, space and time are thus pure intuitions that contain a priori the conditions of the possibility of appearances, and the synthesis in them has objective validity. The categories of the understanding, on the contrary, do not represent to us the conditions under which objects are given in intuition at all, hence objects can indeed appear to us without necessarily having to be related to functions of the understanding, and therefore without the understanding containing their a priori conditions. Thus a difficulty is revealed here that we did not encounter in the field of sensibility, namely how subjective conditions of thinking should have objective validity, i.e., yield conditions of the possibility of objects; for appearances can certainly be given in intuition without functions of the understanding. … [T]hat objects of sensible intuition must accord with the formal conditions of sensibility that lie in the mind a priori is clear from the fact that otherwise they would not be objects for us; but that they must also accord with the conditions that the understanding requires for the synthetic unity of thinking is a conclusion that is not so easily seen. For appearances could after all be so constituted that the understanding would not find them in accord with the conditions of its unity, and everything would then lie in such confusion that, e.g., in the succession of appearances nothing would offer itself that would furnish a rule of synthesis and thus correspond to the concept of cause and effect, so that this concept would be entirely empty, nugatory, and without significance. Appearances would nonetheless offer objects to our intuition, for intuition by no means requires the functions of thinking. — Kant, CPR A89-91/B122-123

    I read Rödl's rejection of the mind/world opposition to include the unknowable "things in themselves". That is more than a mild disagreement.
  • Donald Trump (All General Trump Conversations Here)
    On the eve of the new executive, it is impossible to know which part of the rhetoric was bluster and what was not.

    Will there be trade wars, the removal of the Department of Education funding, the weaponization of the DOJ and the FBI, camps of stateless people, and a new colonial ambition to signal our withdrawal from the alliances built over decades of shared adversity?
  • p and "I think p"
    The matter of duality is not dissolved but framed in way outside of contending dependenciesPaine

    Could you explain that a little further? A passage that I highlighted, adjacent to the one you quoted, is:

    The aim of this essay, as an introduction to absolute idealism, is to make plain that it is impossible to think judgment through this opposition: mind here, world there, two things in relation or not. To dismantle this opposition is not to propose that the world is mind dependent. Nor is it to propose that the mind is world-dependent. These ways of speaking solidify the opposition; they are an impediment to comprehension.
    Wayfarer

    This says to me that the problem is not an unnecessary division. Rödl objects to Nagel and Moore in this way:

    They hold fast to the notion that the objectivity of judgment resides in its being of something other, something that is as it is independently of being thought to be so. In consequence, their result is an ultimate incomprehensibility of our thought of ourselves as judging and knowing. — ibid. page 14

    The proposed solution is not to find a register where the two terms are one but to preserve the dynamic of 'first person thinking' over against 'objectivity' that does not have them jockeying against one another as possible grounds of experience. Rödl is saying we have valid reasons for thinking the former differences exist that we have projected into the idea of the latter.
  • p and "I think p"

    What puzzles me in your charge of dishonesty is that it dissolves Rödl's efforts to separate first person thinking from objective judgment. Whatever unity the two modes may have in a larger notion of consciousness such as Hegel presented, Rödl maintains they have two distinct, even mutually exclusive "characters" in our experience.

    That distinction disappears if: "every hamburger has ketchup on it."
  • p and "I think p"
    Perhaps the problem is I'm not sure what you mean "last exit from the highway of absolute idealism".Janus

    Rödl proposes "absolute idealism" as the way forward from where Nagel and Moore stopped:

    As the concept of knowledge is contained in the self-consciousness of judgment, there can be no account of knowledge that does not represent the subject who knows as understanding herself to do so. An account of knowledge seeks to bring to explicit consciousness the self-knowledge of her who knows; it articulates what is contained in her knowing herself to know. If we are to express in language the self-consciousness of judgment, we need to articulate the idea of a judgment in which and through which she who judges comprehends that judgment to be knowledge, comprehends it to be true to, agree with, reality. This task is rarely confronted in epistemology today. Thomas Nagel and Adrian Moore confront it. We will discuss their thoughts in Chapter 5. While both are oriented by the understanding we have of judgment in judging, they fail to appreciate the significance of this; they fail to appreciate the significance of the self-consciousness of judgment. They hold fast to the notion that the objectivity of judgment resides in its being of something other, something that is as it is independently of being thought to be so. In consequence, their result is an ultimate incomprehensibility of our thought of ourselves as judging and knowing. — SC&O, page 14

    According to absolute idealism the world just is the world as experienced by humans—"the rational is the real", so it doesn't seem clear that Rödl is moving beyond absolute idealism.Janus

    As your reference to the Hegel formula suggests, the goal is not to move beyond but to learn how to accept absolute idealism. The matter of duality is not dissolved but framed in way outside of contending dependencies:

    There is a major obstacle to the reception of absolute idealism, the history of it and, more importantly, the thought of it: this is the notion that absolute idealism is a species of—idealism. In an appropriately vague and vulgar way, idealism can be represented as the idea that the world, nature, the object of experience, depends on the mind. Reality is mind-dependent. Absolute idealism is the most radical, the most thorough, and the only sound rejection of that. — ibid. page 16

    The tension between the first person and objective judgement is maintained but approached through understanding knowledge as a power. To that end, Rödl introduces Aristotle, who figures largely in Chapter 4:

    The recent reintroduction of the idea of the power of knowledge into epistemology is a huge step. Yet the idea is confounding. It is confounding on account of the objectivity of judgment. Since judgment is objective, the power of knowledge is not a power to this or that; it is the power, the power überhaupt. And this makes it hard to understand how it can provide for the recognition of the validity of a particular judgment. We make progress as we see that the power of knowledge is not a given power. It is not a power that is as it is anyway, independently of being understood in acts of this very power. (As Aristotle notes, this distinguishes the power of knowledge from powers of sensory consciousness.) As the power of knowledge is nothing given, it is what it is only in its own exercise: it determines itself. The power of knowledge is what is known; it is what we know, or the knowledge (Chapter 8). — ibid. page 17
  • p and "I think p"

    Pardon me, that was a lame response. I will try giving a better one soon. I need to work for a bit.
  • p and "I think p"
    Perhaps the problem is I'm not sure what you mean "last exit from the highway of absolute idealism".Janus

    If the problem is not like Nagel put it, then it is another problem. Röd proposes an alternative response after honoring Nagel for making it a problem.
  • Behavior and being
    Is not the Harmann quote appealing to those who have nothing to gain from the outcome?
  • Behavior and being
    I suppose that's understandable.Arcane Sandwich
  • Behavior and being

    Said like an entry in a text that does not concern you.
  • Behavior and being

    I have a problem with the encyclopedic approach to expression of ideas. Half of me roots for Harman's language while the other half objects to another victim of an accepted practice.
  • Behavior and being
    I don't agree with youArcane Sandwich

    About the remark about schools of thought?
  • Behavior and being

    I don't accept the pertinence of schools as presented here but do credit Harman for giving an excellent rant.
  • p and "I think p"

    Thanks to you and to Wayfarer. Whatever else comes from the book, it is a different way to approach what has often been discussed on the forum before.
  • p and "I think p"
    Paine I'll only note that the passage quoted is suggestive of the non-duality of mind and world.Wayfarer

    Rödl is more specific about where Nagel and Moore miss the mark:

    Thomas Nagel and Adrian Moore confront it. We will discuss their thoughts in Chapter 5. While both are oriented by the understanding we have of judgment in judging, they fail to appreciate the significance of this; they fail to appreciate the significance of the self-consciousness of judgment. They hold fast to the notion that the objectivity of judgment resides in its being of something other, something that is as it is independently of being thought to be so. In consequence, their result is an ultimate incomprehensibility of our thought of ourselves as judging and knowing. — ibid. page 14

    Put that way, "non-duality" sounds like a bridge between the terms as opposites where I read the text to say that objectivity, as such, is accepted as a dynamic that distinguishes the first person and her thought as a first person from objective judgement.
  • p and "I think p"
    I think this very close to the thrust of Rödl's arguments, which I presume explains Rödl's focus on Nagel.Wayfarer

    Rödl treats Nagel as the last exit from the highway of absolute idealism:

    The aim of this essay, as an introduction to absolute idealism, is to make plain that it is impossible to think judgment through this opposition: mind here, world there, two things in relation or not. To dismantle this opposition is not to propose that the world is mind-dependent. Nor is it to propose that the mind is world-dependent. These ways of speaking solidify the opposition; they are an impediment to comprehension. — SC&O, Rödl, page 16

    This seems to be where Rödl also moves beyond Kant (as referred to here). The need to oppose solipsism in the Critique of Pure Reason has been dissolved.
  • p and "I think p"
    I did add page references in those notes.Wayfarer

    I was just reading the post as it appeared. Did not realize that you were drawing from your notes.

    It must be an error to suppose that thought, in order to be objective, must be of something other than itself — Sebastian Rödl

    Taken at face value, that is a description of things-in-themselves per Kant. Schopenhauer seems to repeat the same idea of thought and representation being displaced from what is objective. Perhaps Rödl is proposing an alternative.
  • p and "I think p"

    Now that I am reading Self-Consciousness and Objectivity, it would help if you cited where you are quoting from.

    I read the Schopenhauer passage as not confirming the Rödl statement. Was that your understanding as well?
  • Why Philosophy?

    Wow. I had a much different experience. The emphasis upon thinking for oneself was difficult to endure as it involved lots of criticism of what one said.
  • Donald Trump (All General Trump Conversations Here)

    Ending in The Last Picture Show.

    Imitation meets its maker.
  • Question for Aristotelians
    Except Hegel was never such a heart-throb. Gotta say, though, that for me the toughest sell so far in S-C&O is the connection to something genuinely Hegelian.J

    Now that I have decided to read the book, I will not be reading reviews of it. I will be looking for what I gleaned from Hegel.

    Chief amongst them will be the connection to Self-Consciousness as a process of development as depicted in the Phenomenology of Geist. The movement from initial states of mind and the actions they motivated to the emergence of greater awareness. Hegel is making a statement about establishing a new method equal in spirit to Aristotle claiming that:

    Now the reason why earlier thinkers did not arrive at this method of procedure was that in their time there was no notion of “essence” and no way of defining “being.” — Parts of Animals, 242a 20, translated by Peck and Forster
  • What are the top 5 heavy metal albums of all time?
    Belongs in Lounge with others of the same ilk.
  • How do you know the Earth is round?

    I read the quote marks to refer to the problem of barely perceptible changes of grade. Salt flats are even enough to permit driving over at very high speeds. But that is not as reliable a measure of continuity as a fluid that seeks its own level.

    It is true that waves involve local variations but average out in the limits of the visible. These observations are best made while not experiencing a tsunami.
  • How do you know the Earth is round?
    On a large body of water or the ocean located next to a tall treeless hill, embark perpendicular to the shoreline after placing large brightly colored flags every 10 feet up the hill. As you get further from shore, the flags will sink out of sight. The first will disappear at around 3 to 4 miles.
  • Question for Aristotelians

    The idea of a mean between extremes is interesting. I need to sit with that for a bit in order to avoid saying something off the cuff.
  • Question for Aristotelians

    I am curious if you meant to link to Gerson's article rather than Wang's with the same title. If so, there is a comment I would like to make about past conversations between us on the topic.

    I do not want to mount up for a new Anabasis against Gerson. But I will read Rödl to see how his view of Aristotle matches up with Gerson's concept of self-reflexivity and his Plotinus point of view of Aristotle that I have highlighted in the past.
  • Question for Aristotelians
    I appreciate everyone's effort to save me some bucks. I am frugal by nature and habit.

    But I will go through the front door and buy the book. I have read enough primary text of both Aristotle and Hegel to make swimming through a bunch of conflicting opinions before trying the book itself more work than I was afraid of taking on in the first place.