Seems so, to me.

The idea that I must act for the other's sake and not for my own is a largely Kantian idea, and it is problematic. It is not impossible to do this, but it is difficult and rare, and such an idea should not form the basis of realistic ethics. I think that, more than anything, it has confused us. — Leontiskos

That's pretty close to how I think.

Though I'd extend the range to include all forms of Christianity.

It's a nice thought, but for the wrong species.

:D

I put more trust in him than any of the usuals, that's for sure -- a better constant than anyone else! :D

Here in the USA, I know they teach Nietzsche at Fordham only, cause Fordham Theologians should know what an atheist said about them. Maybe there are a few, but most of the philosophy programs I have searched do not teach Nietzsche (I don't blame them). — Eros1982

The USian universities are usually more analytic focused in philosophy departments.

But I know I have heard people say that grumpiness due to hunger is a part of their personality, and other such things, when I know that I am able to consciously change these aspects of myself. So, I think I can fairly say that I have a better working model for myself (what I imagine consciousness to be) than most other people. — Brendan Golledge

Maybe you're just better at changing your attitude towards hunger than the people who told you that, among the things that others have told you.

Or maybe you're just as grumpy as everyone else, but you don't feel grumpy. In this scenario you'd actually have a worse model than the other person because you're incorrect about your grumpiness.

Or maybe you're only looking for people who aren't as good at you as changing their attitude towards hunger -- the people who are good at it don't have a need to announce to you their ability.

Or maybe they're incorrect about being able to change themselves and they're really just telling you that they're not interested in changing.

:D

It's frustrating, but I find it fascinating too. The influence cannot be denied, so there's the part of me that likes the history of philosophy and charting the lineages of ideas.

But then the strangeness of it all is part of its fascination, and trying to wrap my head around the strange is something I find rewarding in philosophy. It shows me another way of looking at the world.

I think the article sides with Freud a bit :D -- I don't think there are gaps for Hegel. I'd reconcile them by saying that Philosophy is a higher kind of knowledge than Psychology, and so the very explication of the unconscious makes us conscious of the unconscious, but that this is already a stepping-across a barrier such that we can engage with the unconscious by making it explicit, and finding its rational core. In a way Freud could be read as completing Hegel instead of in conflict, if we prioritized Hegel instead. (which is kind of the omni-move of Hegel -- every philosophy has a time and a place...)

******
https://www.coppelia.io/graphing-the-history-of-philosophy

And to see the whole graph at once, though it can be hard to read:

https://dailynous.com/2014/04/21/graphing-the-history-of-philosophical-influences/

Interesting to note that the graphing technique separated out Freud from Hegel, though unfortunately for what that article highlights it looks like he gets lumped in with philosophy by it.

I'm considering following his instructions because I'd like to play with the graph.

EDIT: Oh, and the significance is that it's an analogy for Hegelian "time" -- if we let the philosophers' names stand in for their ideas, then we have a kind of "mapping" between concepts which can serve as a visual picture of how Hegel's concepts might relate -- and perhaps "Geist" is a kind of movement along these relationships (or, better -- they even change relationships over time and move about)

A thought --

In comparing the Block Universe to Hegel, and using McTaggart:

The Block Universe as ontology posits that the A-series is an illusion.

I think Hegelian time does the opposite -- the B-series is an abstraction built from the A-series (which is not composed as McTaggart describes time for the A-series, though I think the analogy works to get a sense across)

I gave it a relisten, and I think you're right to say he's confused: I think he presents something of a rationalization for Hegel, but one I wouldn't be tempted to make.The Phenomenology of Spirit was published in 1807, and The Origin of the Species in 1859, and the theories of the universe he's reconciling with Hegel come even after that.

But I also can understand the desire to provide this reconciliation on a podcast -- it's not just introducing basic concepts of Hegel, but is pointing out how Hegel can relate to our day (and so be worth studying, in spite of the difficulty).

I just have a different motivation than him so it's OK that I disagree with the rationalization.

Suppose we start with a many worlds, non-collapsing universe that evolves physically but remains probabilistic. Now intuitively, my suggestion would be that Schrödinger's cat has enough geist to collapse its own wave function, and will obviously collapse it to the state in which it is alive (because it can't see itself dead). So the form of geist's freedom is in the first instance the necessary choice of freedom itself, that is, the choice of life. Thus natural selection selects for freedom to select.

How say ye? — unenlightened

I think that works. Just supposing that consciousness emerged in some kind of event that likely is the birth of religion then, supposing natural selection to be true and reconcilable with Hegel, that would be a good guess for reconciliation -- in the beginning there was no consciousness, only the atoms and void which somehow formed creatures which, in these many-worlds, we happen to be in the branches in which we're alive because while there are branches in which we're not, we obviously wouldn't be a part of those branches. We only get to experience the branches where we do come out alive, so even if it's a fluke that happens only once in a universe we just happen to live in that universe where it happened.


A problem for many-worlds though: it exacerbates the binding problem in that there's no cause or reason for why I continue to inhabit the branch that I do if my choices make a branch in the universe. Do consciousnessness multiply with every choice that we make, and along with that universes? Why on earth am I in this branch, and not the one where something else happened?

It would seem to me that that's where the coin-toss has to come in: you had a 50/50 chance, or whatever the odds were, to go along for the ride in this branch. Maybe someone else went along for a ride in the other branch. But if that's the case then we're back to a random universe we experience, stochastic and not freely chosen.

I think of The Phenomenology of Spirit as a story about the birth of Humanity. There's a rational beginning to this story, but the conceptual structures don't necessarily fit in with the historical timeline allusions throughout the text. It skips forwards and backwards, at least by my memory, to make connections. It's as if Geist has always been moving and the Phenomenologist can step out of the phenomena and describe them, as a scientist would, but then coming to realize that this is itself an act of Geist, or experiencing Geist and that all the worlds philosophies are expressions of this structure. So even if the historical timeline as we'd normally construct it is linear, I'd say Hegel's time is not linear because he's still talking about conceptual structures that are the basis of reality. So at the Birth of Humanity, or the beginning of consciousness, we'd have access to all the structures which are described through the history of philosophy, they just wouldn't necessarily be articulated yet, or would need development from the concepts that were expressable at the time -- while Geist lays the foundation.

For Hegel he just lives in a moment where enough has been accumulated by philosophers that he can begin to build a body of knowledge with it, contra the Kantian impulse to limit knowledge to the natural world.


Or, well, that's how I'd put it right now. Though I'm rusty.

I have for several years been in the habit of consciously and deliberately changing my emotional state by this method. This is a large part of what convinces me that I have a higher level of consciousness than most people. Most people do not realize that their emotions are under conscious control. But I don't just choose what I do; I chose what I want to do. — Brendan Golledge

So I take it that this is the core of your reasoning: you've been in the habit of consciously changing yourself for the better, and so you are persuaded that your consciousness is higher than others.

But how do you know others aren't doing the same? What is it that makes this change a higher change such that one's consciousness is increased? How do we numerate or compare consciousnesses to one another?

014

I agree with the title. Freedom is the core of Hegel, same as Marx. This would be the center if we could connect them together.

I wasn't jiving with the QM interps, tho I suppose that's predictable.

There's some Epicurean handwaving with the swerve.

But I prefer the existential approach where we obviously must choose things every day. So it's worth noting that these descriptions won't tell us what to do.

If anyone has questions about how to make that work I can field them. PM or otherwise.

But if someone that voted yes has a preference for something else I'm fine with going with that and learning. (meaning Discord, as a talking app that's easy to organize around)

013

Good intro to a classic. I encourage others thinking along to read it

011

Glad to see the podcast highlighting the thesis-antithesis-synthesis being an oversimplification that doesn't exactly correspond to what Hegel wrote. And I like his quotes of Bohm in relation to Hegel. The Bohm quote about the in-itself and the for-itself and the in-and-for-itself is a better rendition. I didn't realize Bohm was a victim of McCarthyism. And I agree that the most important part of the dialectic is that it is a movement.

EDIT:

Decided to skip 012.

Here is a paper on Marxist dialectic as the result of his "inversion" of Hegel.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/21598282.2022.2054000

Looks like a total misunderstanding to me from my ignorance. — unenlightened

Read the paper over the day. I think it's a fair interpretation of Marx, but I'd also separate out Marxist from Hegelian dialectics. The one thing I'd disagree with the author of the paper on is that Hegel's argument is fallacious, because the accusation of fallacy requires a logic and Hegel is working at that level of generality where since he's building a logic there's a choice to be had -- you can choose Hegel's logic, or the one that paper chooses (which is far more popular, and gets along with Marx, so fairs fair)

I'm only pointing to a warning sign on the path: make sure you're enjoying the activity, rather than ruminating in a circle, since we can get stuck in that pattern. I think when it's a pleasure is when we're not feeling despair and we're trying to make sense of the experience. Camus' contemplation of suicide is attempting to rationally pursue the question of the absurd and whether or not we should commit suicide on philosophical grounds.

But if what we need is healing then it's important to note we usually need help with that, and thinking about it isn't the same as talking about it with a therapist or a trusted friend, and philosophizing about it -- well, only do that when healed. You have more important things to do than philosophize about it when you're hurting.

Found this to listen along to an interpretation of Hegel at the part cited in episode 010 quoting paragraph 53 of The Phenomenology of Spirit.

Depends heavily on the reason why you're interested in the idea. Usually my interest in such stuff is spurred on by feeling despair, and usually thinking is the last thing that helps with the feeling of despair. In that case the best philosophical treatment of despair is to put down philosophy because rumination will only make it worse.

But as a person with clinical depression I've found Camus' writings soothing. Not many people like to think through suicide, and usually it's an irrational affair so it's a refreshing essay to me: it took what I've felt seriously unlike anyone else did, and that was therapeutic. So in that case there was a sense in which it was nice to feel a connection to at least something else that let me know that I'm not alone.

Finding that balance between ruminating too much but simultaneously bringing some sense to these feelings so that people don't feel alone is hard to do, but rewarding to me.

So -- if you're in a place where you're not ruminating, and able to bring light to those feelings for others I think it's a good thing, but it's worth noting the danger of rumination since the emotion can lead to a kind of reinforcing circle of despair.

Half facetiousness aside, why? — Outlander

Funzies. That's about it.

Which, to be fair, is a good reason to do things among us creatures.

In fact it's starting to look like the Laws of Form is pretty much a Hegelian calculus:
Make a distinction between being and nothing. Call it the first distinction... — unenlightened

But if I think about this as verbal mathematics constructing an abstract system, the arguments are only important to avoid contradiction, and what is more significant is definition and construction. Looked it in this light, there is as much woo here as there is in set theory. — unenlightened

Yup. That's how I read him. And there's definitely echoes of Hegel in the Laws of Form, which is interesting... but I'd stay on guard too because Hegel has a way of seeming to relate to everything.

But, yeah, no magical thinking at all. Odd or incorrect or of the times or whatever thinking, but not magical. At least as I understand him.

I'm not following your final paragraph very well, but it's OK because I agree that the emphasis on others is an important part of Hegel's philosophy, and so is time. I view Hegel's logic as an attempt to connect the classic philosophical categories to the process of science's development in history, where science is understood in the wider sense as "a systematic body of knowledge" rather than the modern sense of "these topics".

The differences between Kant/Hegel... are huge. One might be tempted to say incommensurable, except we can read them and compare. I only mean to point out that I believe Hegel's target is the influence of Kant -- I believe he is targeting Kant's philosophical arguments on the limitations of knowledge because they were influential, and certainly conflicts with his project of establishing knowledge in philosophy, including metaphysical knowledge.

Well that doesn't bode well for physicalism! :D

But then the land of metaphor can express literal truths, too. And what is the relationship between these predicates?

Which, while I can see that it felt off-topic, is why I started in with the economic form of physicalism: say what you will about the formal relationships between classes of objects, as long as you have a job. In a way it brings home what matters to us -- if economic physicalism is correct then work-life is what ends up defining these concepts that we're using. So it's not so much that our work-life "generates" reality, but that the concepts we are using come from a physical work-life that's hard to deny because we all have economic needs, and surely that influences how we think.

Right. It's the rigorous argument part that makes physicalism difficult, and I erased many paragraphs which had all the caveats expressed because I wanted to hone the thought down to something that was actually in support and not hedged. That seems to be the reason I'm tempted, but it's the part where you try to be rigorous that makes me begin to doubt physicalism.

A thought in support of physicalism with respect to the mind-body problem: there are physical processes which relate with mind, at least with respect to an individual. Sugar is an ever-present need for a functioning brain, and it has to be in the right amounts or a person begins to lose awareness in various ways whether it's too much or too little. Our individual capacity to engage in minded activities seems to have so many bodily fragilities that the connection between them is hard to deny. I think it's for this reason that we are tempted to believe in physicalism of the mind: just what else would the mind be other than physical if we already know of all these other processes which we'd call physical which have causal relationships to what we'd call mind?

:monkey: ;)

While I agree with I wouldn't go that far.

The perspective I think of Hegel from is Kant -- I think he's attempting to respond to Kantian arguments, or at least the influence of Kantian arguments, in favor of a different kind of absolute. Where Kant claimed his system, if true, is complete, Hegel claims that if it's true then this implies important things about knowledge in philosophy. He's attempting to build a philosophy that overcomes Kant's antinomies and deduction of the categories because he's proposing a different sort of logic -- which is why the stuff about philosophy counting as a kind of knowledge resonates with me, at least. It makes sense.
 

005

Super interesting interpretation of the Christian story through Hegel: the notion that Jesus was real, and his death is the second coming that brings his spirit upon all the people -- so we don't have to wait, it's already here, but in a "picture-thinking" rather than "hard-thinking" way.

I think this too clean.

I'm uncertain about essential rocks, properties of universal -isms, and processes by which we come to think of universals.

Scientism, at least in a useful expression, should be understood as a mistake. Not many would say they are scientistic, though they exist. What it really means isn't clear, and so we can't reduce it to a notion of empiricism vs. philosophical knowledge. It's not that easy. Where it is easy is in saying things like science makes philosophy or religion or art or whatever no longer relevant -- scientism is more of a chauvinism than it is a proper philosophic position.

So I suppose I mean to say that it's worth noting as a bad way to go about arguing for physicalism.

Ahhhh, my people! May the nerds forever be seen.

I'm interested.

My habits are https://discord.com/ based, and I think it might be easier to facilitate with that than Teams. Teams is good for organized schedules, such as one has for work, but not so good for less-organized schedules -- such as organizing conversations across the world among some interested creatures who know this isn't their first priority (or maybe wish it werent?)

Discord, though, is good for pop-ins: we could set the conference from one time to another, some odd weekend or week-long period, and while we all have other things to take care of we could pop in and out as we are able.

The true philosopher-kings: the editors of wikipedia!

More seriously I'm not surprised. Philosophy attempts to tie concepts together pretty frequently, and I'd say that a lot of topics of knowledge which are prone to encyclopedic treatment arose out of a philosophical impulse. Such as encyclopedia>American English>Variety (linguistics)>Sociolinguistics>Society>Individual>Entity>Existence :D

It is mentioned here that time is not in the logic as such, but as it is the 'science' of logic it immediately plunges into being and seems to imply time even though time is not a dimension of logic as such.

Hopefully that will become clearer as we go on, or someone here will clarify it for me? — unenlightened

It's cool that he's starting with The Science of Logic because that's where I dropped off last time I seriously pursued reading Hegel. It was just a smidge too dry for me at the time to want to keep going.

Flipping open the Table of Contents the first mention of "time" comes from page 234 in my Miller translation. Miller in the translator's preface:

...above all, [the student] must 'mark, learn, and inwardly digest' what Hegel himself has to say in his Prefaces and Introduction and, last but not least, in the chapter entitled "With What Must the Science Begin?'. This chapter is of great importance for understanding of the beginning of the Science of Logic, for in it Hegel has made it quite clear why he begins with pure being

My thought is that time is derivative rather than comes along with becoming. I can't remember how time, as a concept, gets introduced, but that's how I'd put it from memory and listening -- so time is implied by the passage of sentence-to-sentence and by the notion of becoming, but it's not a proper concept or moment at this point.

Got through episode 4 tonight, on true infinity. This is great. He has a clear passion for Hegel and an admirable humility.

Hegel remains (a) German. and (b) difficult. — unenlightened

These are my usual criteria for selecting philosophers to read ;)

But he keeps popping up all over the place, and he seems to be an influence on various people that are an influence on me, so by way of passively absorbing something of him with minimum effort, I have started listening to the podcast, The Cunning of Geist, by Gregory Novak. available wherever you source your podcasts. — unenlightened

I've now listened to episode 1. This should be good to listen to when I'm feeling the itch.

I didn't study Hegel in my undergraduate days, because he was too woo for school. — unenlightened

I read The Phenomenology of Spirit, but my mentor came from the continental cut of cloth so it was encouraged rather than frowned upon. So not woo, but philosophy -- stuff that's interesting and worth exploring with the rational methods of philosophy.

Now I want immediately to deal with something that has become problematic here, because of the reification of individuality as the only manifestation of mind. The idea that mind is brain, and therefore there is my mind, your mind, and everyman's mind - and nothing else minded, has to be put in question to grasp even the title of the podcast. — unenlightened

I'm on board, naturally.

And I'll just include a reference for McTaggart, on time. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mctaggart/
and that's my introduction to the introduction. — unenlightened

I re-read that entry recently due to the physicalism thread. cause and time are linked, and physicalism typically gets support from causation, so I think it natural.


This is probably a better way for myself to ease my way back to Hegel. I believe he's important for me and in general, though I find him terribly frustrating.

. Unfortunately, some posters on this forum hold the materialistic worldview of Scientism, which dismisses Metaphysical reasoning as groundless — Gnomon

If the worldview of Scientism dismisses metaphysical reasoning as groundless then I'd say that physicalism is groundless, since physicalism is a belief arrived at by metaphysical reasoning.

As such it would be a poor argument for physicalism.

:D

Was I physical yesterday?

I'm not a committed physicalist, though it's in the territory of my thinking, but I believe if I am physical today then I was physical yesterday. In terms of physicalism, at least, this is a problem for presentism: how or why does physicality not apply to the computer I was typing on yesterday?

:love:

:D I had the same thought at first

The one unequivocally beautiful thing in the plains is the sky. I've enjoyed reading the imagery here because I've seen it many times over.

And here too -- another image I can connect to.

Yes, that's the correct grammar.

We both are. No worries. You can say it -- but I disagree on the basis that yesterday the mountains are as physical as today. So if they are physical today I feel that they must have been yesterday.

But, also, I'll note we're getting into some of the topics outside the topic :D -- I'm not sure where to go, though I'm still interested in arguments for physicalism. Time, causation, meta-metaphysics, metaphysics of physicalism?

The one thing I want to avoid in making another thread is the mind-body problem because that's what this thread is :D

Two things are at play, the mental and the physical. — Mark Nyquist

I agree here. So we're at least equally confused.

I disagree that physical matter is its physical presence. But I also agree with:

We can imaging time lines in our brains but we can't physically get out of the present — Mark Nyquist

I hope nothing I've said suggests that we can, physically or otherwise, get out of the present.

We have direct access to the present. In the present I pick up a history book which tells me something about the past. Was JFK physically assassinated, or was he only assassinated in my brain? JFK's assassination took place in my brain just now, but I believe it took place in past material reality.

Today I can look at a history book. What is its relation to the past?