Comments

  • 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.
  • Question for Aristotelians

    From what I have garnered so far from his references to Aristotle, Rödl’s book is not trying to frame "idealism" against a "materialism". In the footnote reference I quoted above, the key moment is:

    That part of the soul, then, which we call mind (by mind I mean that part by which the soul thinks and forms judgements) has no actual existence until it thinks. — De Anima, 429a 16, translated by W.S Hett

    Rödl also references:

    But we must also distinguish certain senses of potentiality and actuality; for so far we have been using these terms quite generally. One sense of “instructed” is that in which we might call a man instructed because he is one of a class of instructed persons who have knowledge; but there is another sense in which we call instructed a person who knows (say) grammar. Each of these two has capacity, but in a different sense: the former, because the class (genos) to which he belongs, i.e., his matter (hyle), is of a certain kind, the latter, because he is capable of exercising his knowledge whenever he likes, provided that external causes do not prevent him. But there is a third kind of instructed person—the man who is already exercising his knowledge; he is in actuality instructed and in the strict sense knows (e.g.) this particular A. — ibid. 417a 22

    The actual existence of thinking in both passages is a confluence of circumstances. A living person must come from a particular kind of matter and become capable of actually knowing and thinking. I agree with Wang that the "activity" is not outside of the creature but think he is looking at it from the wrong end of the telescope. All coming-to-be is from agency beyond the particular organism. That particular kinds of material are required is a rebuke to the Pythagorean view that Forms shape purely undetermined goo.

    Maybe I will get Rödl’s book and find out what he makes of these texts.
  • Question for Aristotelians

    I read the SEP and it makes distinctions between concepts that are conflated by your saying:

    Well, that's what I'm often trying to do, apparently without much success, even though it seems quite clear to me. 'Metaphysical realism' is really just philosophy-speak for direct or naive realism, which phenomenology criticizes as 'the natural attitude' - the world just is as it seems, and if we can learn more about it, it can only be through science. By idealism I'm referring to the usual advocates - Berkeley, Kant, German idealism, and nowadays Bernardo Kastrup. I think there's a reasonably clear core of tenets, isn't there?Wayfarer

    The article says:

    Metaphysical realism is not the same as scientific realism. That the world’s constituents exist mind-independently does not entail that its constituents are as science portrays them. One could adopt an instrumentalist attitude toward the theoretical entities posited by science, continuing to believe that whatever entities the world actually does contain exist independently of our conceptions and perceptions of them. For the same reason, metaphysical realists need not accept that the entities and structures ontologists posit exist mind-independently.SEP 1

    Your comments about phenomenology are inverse to the articles references to behaviorism as a challenge to 'metaphysical realism" on the basis of it being merely a product of language:

    In psychology one may or may not be a behaviourist, but in linguistics one has no choice … There is nothing in linguistic meaning beyond what is to be gleaned from overt behaviour in observable circumstances. - Quine — ibid. 3.2

    In the context of your theme of a reality lost in history, the conditions for it are closer to the claims of this realism than to any method of behaviorism. I understand your dissatisfaction with the isolation of the thinker from what is thought but find this formulation of realism does not conform to your history of philosophy.
  • Donald Trump (All General Trump Conversations Here)
    The latest Trump statements on overriding the sovereignty of adjacent nations shows him hoping to ditch the "sphere of influence' thing and go for straight colonialism.

    Putin knows where he is coming from.
  • p and "I think p"
    More precisely, he [Kant] says that the I think must be able to accompany all my representations, for all my representations must be capable of being thought.J

    That "must be able" component played a big part in Sartre's Transcendence of the Ego. His arguments are interesting even if one is not sold on swapping "existence" for "essence."
  • Donald Trump (All General Trump Conversations Here)

    Since the minions will all be connected to the man as a minimum requirement for participation, it will not be like the Team of Rivals ascribed by some to the Lincoln administration.

    Far from opposing the evils of government, the system of patronage will blossom during the impending administration.
  • What are you listening to right now?
    The graphic part is annoying, but the music is good. The Daydream track is ensemble playing like it ought to be.

  • Question for Aristotelians

    That reference to De Anima in the footnote does point to a particular expression of "self-consciousness":

    It is necessary then that mind, since it thinks all things, should be uncontaminated, as Anaxagoras says, in order that it may be in control, that is, that it may know; for the intrusion of anything foreign hinders and obstructs it. Hence the mind, too, can have no characteristic except its capacity to receive. That part of the soul, then, which we call mind (by mind I mean that part by which the soul thinks and forms judgements) has no actual existence until it thinks. So it is unreasonable to suppose that it is mixed with the body; for in that case it would become somehow qualitative, e.g., hot or cold, or would even have some organ, as the sensitive faculty has; but in fact it has none. It has been well said that the soul is the place of forms, except that this does not apply to the soul as a whole, but only in its thinking capacity, and the forms occupy it not actually but only potentially. But that the perceptive and thinking faculties are not alike in their impassivity is obvious if we consider the sense organs and sensation. For the sense loses sensation under the stimulus of a too violent sensible object; e.g., of sound immediately after loud sounds, and neither seeing nor smelling is possible just after strong colours and scents; but when mind thinks the highly intelligible, it is not less able to think of slighter things, but even more able; for the faculty of sense is not apart from the body, whereas the mind is separable. But when the mind has become the several groups of its objects, as the learned man when active is said to do (and this happens, when he can exercise his function by himself), even then the mind is in a sense potential, though not quite in the same way as before it learned and discovered; moreover the mind is then capable of thinking itself. — De Anima, 429a 16, translated by W.S Hett

    Aristotle's point in the quote from Parts of Animals is not an opposition to "materialism" as depicted by Gerson but a basis upon which to study material beings. While arguing for first principles and causality, Aristotle said this in regards to Empedocles:

    For instance, when he is explaining what Bone is, he says not that it is any one of the Elements, or any two, or three, or even all of them, but that it is “the logos of the mixture” of the Elements. And it is clear that he would explain in the same way what Flesh and each of such parts is. 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.” The first to touch upon it was Democritus; and he did so, not because he thought it necessary for the study of Nature, but because he was carried away by the subject in hand and could not avoid it. In Socrates’ time an advance was made so far as the method was concerned; but at that time philosophers gave up the study of Nature. — Parts of Animals, 242a 20, translated by Peck and Forster

    I am curious what Rödl will make of Aristotle's enthusiasm for empirical study while formulating his concept of "Idealism".
  • Question for Aristotelians

    The question of causality on the cosmological scale of Metaphysics book Lambda is itself a product of trying to distinguish "active" and "passive" elements of individual things.

    Your question about scholars making that connection is less important to me than looking for how nous is something we can learn about through our experiences and thinking about it. I am not arguing for a "subtlety" as much as for a difficulty.

    Edit to add: The point I was making about the connection of DA Book 2' references to nous in the other works concerning life is what will make the discussion in Book 3 seem less of a one-off as you described it to be.
  • Question for Aristotelians

    I am proposing that he is talking about it many times but with the humility of being a mortal creature who only can remotely glimpse the divine. Note how often he uses "perhaps" in Book 3. He does not state as a matter of fact that nous is separable. In Book 2, Aristotle is more comfortable with locating the "act of knowing in the context of the individual as receiving (some of) the power from the kind (genos) they come from. The same immediacy of the actual is being sought for without the naming of the agent in Book 3.
  • Question for Aristotelians

    Your link points to another important reference:

    Another passage which is traditionally read together with the De Anima passage is in Metaphysics, Book XII, Ch. 7–10.[2] Aristotle again distinguishes between the active and passive intellects, but this time he equates the active intellect with the "unmoved mover" and God. He explains that when people have real knowledge, their thinking is, for a time receiving, or partaking of, this energeia of the nous (active intellect). — ibid.

    More important for the use of "active agent" in De Anima is the inquiry in Metaphysics of how potential and actual "energeia" relate to each other. These investigations are contiguous to the fact that Book 2 of De Anima echoes many elements of Parts of Animals, Coming to be and Passing away, and History of Animals.

    As those titles suggest, Aristotle did not say that personal (or individual) lives survived death. The Neoplatonists who were popular when the "Medieval' period began did promote various versions of such personal immortality. That is the batter Augustine used to cook his pancakes.
  • Question for Aristotelians

    I have looked at a preview of Rödl’s book. It is an interesting challenge to the mind/object dichotomy of Descartes and Kant (and many others).

    I see your quote came from page 55 and that a footnote accompanies the reference to Part of Animals. Does that note give the Bekker line number for the reference?

    The preview also let me see from 118 to 123. His account of De Anima 417a 21ff is solid as well as the references to Metaphysics Gamma. The distinction between different kinds of potentiality (powers) is a helpful touchstone to the rest of De Anima.
  • Identity fragmentation in an insecure world

    That example is not comparable to the situation in the U.S.A.

    But the citation does show you think the problem was manufactured.
  • Identity fragmentation in an insecure world

    Your proposed response would have led to much more of that.
  • Identity fragmentation in an insecure world
    Hardly a response to my challenge. I take it you are not equal to it.
  • Identity fragmentation in an insecure world

    So, you were onboard with much more death than happened.

    Unless you are one of the people who believe the attempts to control the disease were causes of the event.

    Please advise.
  • The Tao and Non-dualism

    That note is a reasonable generality of the different views.

    There is comparison of different jobs in the literature. It is easier to understand the work of the butcher than that of a leader. The difference being asked for is not easy.
  • The Tao and Non-dualism
    The customary explanation is that Confucius (Kung Futzu) represents social propriety and custom while the ‘true man of the Way’ is basically unbound by such niceties.Wayfarer

    The literature includes many examples of previous social orders that were deemed superior to a present state of affairs. The Daoist writings include such narratives.
  • The Tao and Non-dualism

    That account does not include the talk about a natural world where the evils of the present world are not necessary.
  • The Tao and Non-dualism

    There was that opposition. And it carried on over a number of centuries in the form of different narratives. I will try to round up examples that you are asking for. It is an old data set. It won't happen tomorrow.

    One interesting aspect of Chuang Tzu's depiction of Confucius is that it represents him learning stuff.
  • The Tao and Non-dualism

    It helps to compare these statements with the words from Confucius and the role of Mohists as sources of legislation. The statements were made in a particular context.

    That is not to say that an appeal to a universal truth is to be disregarded.