. So in your case why not accept the reality of a god? Is your position beyond reason and more about an inability to believe? I am fascinated by forms of atheism which doesn’t rely on conventional arguments — Tom Storm

I begin with the philosophical and psychological
model that makes sense of my world, without at first worrying about how this thinking relates to the question of God. Then I examine the different ways in which ‘god’ can be used. For instance, there is God as a personality , a ‘self’ modeled on human selves. The. there is God as energy, or God as pantheistic totality of all existing things.
Concerning God as a self, if in my psychological
model, the self is a social construct, a continually changing phenomenon with no persisting identity , you can see how this fragments the idea of God as a self.
What about God as energy or pantheistic totality? Here what is at stake is the idea of an ethical grounding for the world. Not a personal self but a grounding of goodness. God is synonymous with the Good. But what if my psychological model puts into question the persisting identity of the meaning of the concept of goodness? If the meaning of goodness when it comes to human relations is relative to content and culture, then God as Goodness becomes just one concept that is relative to its use , which is constantly changing.
In sum , my atheism is not a matter of saying there is no god, but of saying there are as many meanings of that concept as there are selves within my body, or values within and between culture. So God can’t be used as a fundamental explanation or first cause. It is more of an effect of a process that philosophy can describe in other terms, such as Heidegger’s Beyng.

“As the most being-like, God is the first cause and the last goal of all beings. God is represented as the most being-like of beings, and so God essentially occurs out of beyng. Nevertheless, God is not primordially linked to beyng; because beyng occurs essentially not as cause and never as ground.”

how do you suggest, Joshs, such "sacred" claims – usually extensions of the purported predicates of some so-called "god" – be evaluated, especially when they contradict publicly accessible facts and practices? — 180 Proof

Of course , the same ‘sacred scriptures’ , once they were canonically frozen into their eventual form as the 5 books of Moses and the New Testament, immediately became interpreted and reinterpreted over the course of the past 2 millennia in ways that prepared tor way for , and then paralleled, the progress of scientific thought. In the era of Philo and Augustine, Platonic readings were in vogue. By the time of Aquinas and Maimonides, Aristotelian interpretations predominated, which emphasized for the first time human rationality, setting the stage for the Renaissance. In Kierkegaard’s era , a Kantianized , Hegelianized Judeo-Christianity of subjective existentialist faith emerged alongside dialectical materialist science.

The point is, it is not the same sacred scriptures and the same God that each era comes to know , but instead a transformed, reinterpreted text and deity. So how does this evolution of faith square with the ‘publicly accessible facts and practices’. One has to appreciate that facts only exist with a systematic order of practices . One could call this organizing frame an empirical episteme. Furthermore , the reigning episteme of an era undergoes a historical evolution that not only parallels that of Judeo-Christianity, but encompasses religious belief, the sciences, the arts and political thought within a single encompassing frame. This is why there were no atheists among Enlightenment scientists. The publicly accessible facts and practices of the day were subsumed under the order of a divine rationalism.

Science does seem to have to take the position that reality makes sense, is coherent, has laws and responds to human reason. — Andrew4Handel

Yes, this is a good way to characterize the dawn of modern science in the era of Galileo and Newton. But there has to be more to it than this , doesn't there? Because Enlightenment scientists believed in God. I would argue that they had to. Their understanding of the metaphysical underpinnings of scientific rationality implied a divine source. Only when reason and ‘laws of nature’ became relativized after Darwin, Marx and Freud could atheism begin to make sense. In other words , sciences of pure reason( like 18th and 19th century physics) require a God. Sciences ( evolution, ethnology, quantum physics, psychoanalysis) which put reason’s command of itself into question unravel the coherence of God.

↪Joshs Do you believe in god/s? and if so (or not) can you sketch out your thinking? — Tom Storm

I grew up in a religious home but decided I was an atheist in my late teens. It was important for me not to embrace atheism simply as a lack of faith or in any way a rejection of the positive values that are associated with belief in God. My atheism had to be justified as incorporating all that was advantageous about religion while improving on its ability to make for a good society.

No thanks. I have no time for bad fate debaters of any stripe — Vera Mont

I call bullshit. Dont blame others for your inability to grasp their arguments. That’s not bad faith, but it is anti-intellectual as well as insulting to me and I don’t appreciate it.

Atheists beware. Bad-faith debater on the loose! Take cover! — Vera Mont

From atheist Marxist Terry Eagleton:

“Dawkins falsely considers that Christianity offers a rival view of the universe to science. Like the philosopher Daniel C. Dennett in Breaking the Spell, he thinks it is a kind of bogus theory or pseudo-explanation of the world. In this sense, he is rather like someone who thinks that a novel is a botched piece of sociology, and who therefore can’t see the point of it at all. Why bother with Robert Musil when you can read Max Weber? . . .

Dawkins makes an error of genre, or category mistake, about the kind of thing Christian belief is. He imagines that it is either some kind of pseudo-science, or that, if it is not that, then it conveniently dispenses itself from the need for evidence altogether. He also has an old-fashioned scientistic notion of what constitutes evidence.”

Would you like to hear from some more “bad-faith” atheist debaters with similar comments on Dawkins and Dennett? I can give you plenty.

Bivalent logic is a type of two-valued logic, which means that it only allows for two possible truth values: true or false. In other words, something is either true or it is false, and there is no in-between or middle ground. In this sense, bivalent logic does not necessarily require that the world be independent of our concepts. Instead, it simply requires that there be a clear distinction between true and false statements, regardless of how those statements relate to the world or our understanding of it. — Banno

.

Let me compare bivalent logic to what I will call a bipolar sense. A bipolar sense differentiates itself from its contextual background ( the contrast pole) via a unique dimension of similarity and difference. A bipolar sense isn’t just something that happens to be the case. It is something that happens to be the case in a particular way. No bipolar sense ever duplicates its exact content. To apply bivalent logic to a bipolar sense is to always come up short. That is, whenever we ask whether a particular bipolar sense is the case , the answer will be no, simply because the exact sense doesn’t repeat itself.
Bivalent truth and falsity are irrelevant to bipolar senses because the former presupposes the persistent identity of that meaning one is inquiring about.

In other words, bivalent logic must have context-independence. It must apply to truth-apt concepts that are independent of our actual situational sense of what is the case.

So I think one can justifiably argue that a belief in a world that is independent of our concepts or ethical values is a necessary pre-condition for supporting the usefulness of bivalent logic.
— Joshs
Well, then present the argument. What is it? — Banno

Here’s the argument from Putnam’s perspective:

“Without the cognitive values of coherence, simplicity, and instrumental efficacy we have no world and no facts, not even facts about what is so relative to what. And these cognitive values, I claim, are simply a part of our holistic conception of human flourishing. Bereft of the old realist idea of truth as "correspondence" and of the positivist idea of justification as fixed by public "criteria," we are left with the necessity of seeing our search for better conceptions of rationality as an intentional activity which, like every activity that rises above the mere following of inclination or obsession, is guided by our idea of the good.

If coherence and simplicity are values, and if we cannot deny without falling into total self-refuting subjectivism that they are objective (notwithstanding their "softness," the lack of well-defined "criteria," and so forth), then the classic argument against the objectivity of ethical values is totally undercut.”

If your claim is that phenomenology correctly shows us how things are, then there must be some way things actually are, some true propositions opposing false ones. — Isaac

There are so many wonderful ways in which humans beings can talk about what matters to us , what is relevant and how it is relevant. For instance , harmonious, integral, intimate, consistent, similar, compatible, intelligible. Of all of these, ‘true and false’ are
particularly narrow and impoverished.

“It is no more than a moral prejudice that the truth is worth more than appearance; in fact, it is the world's most poorly proven assumption. Let us admit this much: that life could not exist except on the basis of perspectival valuations and appearances; and if, with the virtuous enthusiasm and inanity of many philosophers, someone wanted to completely abolish the “world of appearances,” – well, assuming you could do that, – at least there would not be any of your “truth” left either! Actually, why do we even assume that “true” and “false” are intrinsically opposed? Isn't it enough to assume that there are levels of appearance and, as it were, lighter and darker shades and tones of appearance – different valeurs, to use the language of painters? Why shouldn't the world that is relevant to us – be a fiction? And if someone asks: “But doesn't fiction belong with an author?” – couldn't we shoot back: “Why? Doesn't this ‘belonging' belong, perhaps, to fiction as well? Aren't we allowed to be a bit ironic with the subject, as we are with the predicate and object? Shouldn't philosophers rise above the belief in grammar? With all due respect to governesses, isn't it about time philosophy renounced governess-beliefs?” – The world with which we are concerned is false, i.e., is not fact but fable and approximation on the basis of a meager sum of observations; it is "in flux," as something in a state of becoming, as a falsehood always changing but never getting near the truth: for--there is no "truth" ('Nietzsche, Will to Power.)

All the sirens went off at once; red flags waving like mad. — Vera Mont

And what are those sirens and red flags telling you?

Realism is just supposing that statements are either true or false, that this is the correct grammar to adopt in taking about how things are, that the appropriate logic is bivalent. Talk of "the independent existence of a world outside of our interaction with it" is irrelevant, misleading philosophical twaddle. — Banno

Supposing that statements are either true or false , a logic of bivalence, leads us down the rabbit hole of the meaning or role of ‘truth’ and ‘falsity’, which has been investigated in recent threads here. Davidson and Putnam thought that truth was a concept worth keeping, despite Putnam’s conceptual relativism . Not coincidentallly, both of them rejected value-relativism. I don’t think you’ll find among those philosophers ( Rorty, Rouse, Heidegger, etc) who are both conceptual and ethical relativists, any enthusiasm for the usefulness of propositional truth.
So I think one can justifiably argue that a belief in a world that is independent of our concepts or ethical values is a a necessary pre-condition for supporting the usefulness of bivalent logic.

One cannot 'reveal' something one did not previously think without the concept of one's thoughts having previously been wrong on some matter. If it is possible to be wrong on some matter, there must exist some external state against which one is comparing one's thought to determine it's wrong.

It's not about 'external worlds', it's about external states - information, not matter. It's merely a description of a system. Any defined system must have internal states and states external to it (otherwise it's not defined as we can say nothing about it - it's just 'everything'). Any complex networked system must also have boundary states (otherwise it would either be a single node or linearly connected). This means that internal states have to infer the condition of external states from the condition of boundary states. We've just described a system. There's no need for any commitment to realism, all this could be taking place in a computer or a field of pure information. It's just derived necessarily from the description of a system.

Phenomenology appears to me to be saying that the internal states can infer the condition of other internal states. They could, but there'd be no reason to change any first inference. There's no 'revelation' no 'investigation'. You might one day feel one way, another day, feel another. There's no reason to prefer one over another. One is not 'investigating' anything, one is merely changing one's mind arbitrarily. — Isaac

Phenomenology begins by bracketing notions like ‘state’ and patterns of ‘information’, which are not as much of an improvement over the concept of matter as many think. The problem is that they put identity before difference and try to derive differences from the relations is among identities. The assumption of identity is the idea that there exist states whose identity persists over time (even if only temporarily).

“no need even for a material world to exist, it would be the case inside a computer too.” No need for a material world in order to have a real world. Realism depends not of physicalism or materialism, but on this assumption of at least temporarily persisting self -identity. The real is that which endures as itself. Thus there are all kinds of real objects, including patterns of informationn.

Phenomenology shows how the ‘illusion’ of self-identity is constituted out of the flow of appearances of changing sense, how systems, states, real pattens of ‘information’ and correlations are constituted, founding our mathematics, formal logics and sciences.

Why wee do you think Dennett’s and Dawkin’s doctrinaire atheism comes from?
— Joshs

Why would any of us presume to know where someone else's thinking comes from? M — Vera Mont

I presume to know when it comes to Dennett and Dawkins, and I’m far from the only one who has pointed this out about them, because it is patently obvious from their understanding of the role and nature of science that they view science ‘scientistically’. What does this mean? Any time you hear someone defend atheism on the basis an argument to the effect that there is no empirical evidence in support of God, or that religious believers can’t put their ideas to a scientific test, youre in the vicinity of a scientistic thinking, and a doctrinaire atheism which asserts with authority the ‘truth’ of their position.

Science does not seek a view from nowhere, it seeks explanations that work anywhere.

The claim that science tries to stand outside of nature is no more than rhetoric. — Banno

A view from everywhere , or sideways on, is a relative of the view from nowhere. What justifies this stance is a view of nature grounded in a set of normative presuppositions concerning objectivity. There must be something universal within ‘nature in itself’ that makes it possible for science to ‘work anywhere’.

Care to cite an instance of "religious metaphysics" (1) that quantifies the error of predictions, (2) that experimentally tests its explanations, (3) that is institutionally error-correcting – fallibilistic – by a peer-review community, (4) that is free of "revealed" "X-of-the-gaps" dogmas, etc etc? :chin: — 180 Proof

Your depiction of the methods of science is dependent on normative concepts like error correction and falsification, pointing to the indirect relation between conceptualization and the things themselves of the world. In this move , both our subjectivity and the things in themselves of the world take on the character of the divine in presupposing that which exists in and for itself outside of and before its relation to an outside.

The 'bizarre claim' I was actually referring to was the one implied by an 'investigation' into they way things seem to us without (bracketing out) the question of reality (external states). I just don't believe one approaches the question of how some thing seems to one with a blank slate. I think given almost any question at all one will have preconceptions about it. — Isaac

Husserl’s epoche, otherwise known as the phenomenological reduction or ‘bracketing’ of presuppositions, gets a lot of flack. But the general
principe here is one that is widely applied both in philosophy and in the sciences. Notions of folk psychology, naive perception, the relation between the personal and the sub-personal or your distinction between experience and mental events all involve a ‘bracketing’ of appearance and pre-supposition i. favor of a more fundamental truth. As a realist, you believe in the independent existence of a world outside of our interaction with it. For you this is an indubitable , or founding presupposition, and it is what orients the bracketing by science of naive appearance and preconception.

For Husserl the existence of the world as an independent fact is not a founding presupposition but a preconception which can be bracketed. When one does this one has the opportunity to reveal a more fundamental grounding for science and philosophy in the irreducible interaction between subjective and objective poles of experience. Thus, no independent subject and no independent world.
Just the structural a priori that makes preconception possible.

Perhaps, if religion employed something similar to science’s epistemological method, real progress could be made. — Art48

Science and philosophy run on parallel rails. — Vera Mont

Science’s epistemological method is itself a remnant of religious metaphysics. Why wee do you think Dennett’s and Dawkin’s doctrinaire atheism comes from? What’s needed is an atheism that overcomes epistemological
method. I recommend Nietzsche, Foucault , Kuhn and Rouse.

Here’s Rouse:

“I also think a more basic trace of a theological conception remains in many philosophical accounts of science and nature. A theological conception of God as creator places God outside of nature. God's understanding of nature is also external to the world. Such a God could understand his language and his thoughts about the world, apart from any interaction with the world. Naturalists long ago removed God from scientific conceptions of the world. Yet many naturalists still implicitly understand science as aiming to take God's place. They interpret science as trying to represent nature from a standpoint outside of nature. The language in which science represents the world could then be understood apart from the causal interactions it articulates.”

↪introbert I would honestly like a clearer definition of this ‘political/social schizophrenia’ … I will read around a bit but in the OP there is not a definition I can see that has any real clarity. — I like sushi

I’ll give you a taste of the notions of schizophrenia and ’schizo-analysis’ that Deleuze and Guattari introduced, since it seems to be the main inspiration of introbert’s OP. He says he doesn’t want to link his ideas exclusively to D-G, but I think it would
help if he could lay out in some detail what they wrote and contrast his arguments with theirs.

In his first mentions of schizophrenia, Deleuze distinguishes between a clinical psychopathology and a metaphorical use of the word.

“…when Kant puts ratio­nal theology into question, in the same stroke he introduces a kind of disequilibrium, a fissure or crack in the pure Self of the 'I think', an alienation in principle, insurmountable in principle: the subject can henceforth represent its own spontaneity only as that of an Other, and in so doing in­voke a mysterious coherence in the last instance which excludes its own - namely, that of the world and God. A Cogito for a dissolved Self: the Self of 'I think' includes in its essence a receptivity of intuition in relation to which I is already an other. It matters little that synthetic identity - and, following that, the morality of practical reason - restore the integrity of the self, of the world and of God, thereby preparing the way for post-Kantian syntheses: for a brief moment we enter into that schizophrenia in principle which characterizes the highest power of thought, and opens Being directly onto difference, despite all the mediations, all the reconciliations, of the concept.”

Deleuze argues that philosophy has been under the burden of a dogmatic image of thought that swallows differences within formal logic and propositional rationality.

“It is not a question of opposing to the dogmatic image of thought another image borrowed, for example, from schizophrenia, but rather of remembe­ring that schizophrenia is not only a human fact but also a possibility for thought - one, moreover, which can only be revealed as such through the abolition of that image. It is noteworthy that the dogmatic image, for its part, recognizes only error as a possible misadventure of thought, and reduces everything to the form of error.”

Deleuze is using his peculiar notion of schizophrenia in service of a radical concept of becoming influenced by Nietzsche.

Julie Van der Wielen writes:

“In Anti‐Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari describe what they call the schizophrenic process. Their aim is actually ethical‐philosophical and socio‐political; it transcends a merely clinical point of view on schizophrenia.1 Nevertheless, one can also distinguish here a description of schizophrenia as a mental condition, in a positive manner: according to them, if the schizophrenic individual seems confused and unable to operate within meaningful structures, this must not be explained negatively, as a failure to interiorize such structures. Instead, one must explore the way in which the schizophrenic functions and try to understand his “logic” without preconceptions.”

the "small print" of causal determinism makes it seem impossible, whereas the large print of personal experience makes freedom of the will seem certainly (if not always) so.

Which dictum you gonna believe? Is it even up to you? — Janus

One way out of this is to dump linear causal
determinism for a dynamical reciprocal determinism. This is the route Dennett and embodied psychology take. Natural systems are non-linear and self-referential, creatively redefining the role and meaning of their constituents via the temporal evolution of the whole.

'

There's no one-to-one relationship between the two, such that a small and variable number of 'chemical and physiological reactions of my brain in the presence of coffee' might be described by us as "I smell coffee".

We 'assign' narratives to the various neural happenings according to some rules-of-assignment, and those rules almost exclusively come from our culture. — Isaac

Is there a one-to-one relationship between a small and variable number of chemical and physiological reactions of my brain and cultural rules of assignment?

But such an argument seems lost here, among the phenomenologist's bizarre claims — Isaac

Does this sound like a bizarre claim to you?

From phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty:
” My friend Paul and I point out to each other certain details of the landscape; and Paul's finger, which is pointing out the church tower, is not a finger-for-me that I think of as orientated towards a church-tower-for-me, it is Paul's finger which itself shows me the tower that Paul sees, just as, conversely, when I make a movement towards some point in the landscape that I can see, I do not imagine that I am producing in Paul, in virtue of some pre-established harmony, inner visions merely analogous to mine: I believe, on the contrary, that my gestures invade Paul's world and guide his gaze. When I think of Paul, I do not think of a flow of private sensations indirectly related to mine through the medium of interposed signs, but of someone who has a living experience of the same world as mine, as well as the same history, and with whom I am in communication through that world and that history.”(Phenomenology of Perception, p.471)

“ In the experience of dialogue, there is constituted between the other person and myself a common ground; my thought and his are inter-woven into a single fabric, my words and those of my interlocutor are called forth by the state of the discussion, and they are inserted into a shared operation of which neither of us is the creator. We have here a dual being, where the other is for me no longer a mere bit of behavior in my transcendental field, nor I in his; we are collaborators for each other in consummate reciprocity.

Our perspectives merge into each other, and we co-exist through a common world. In the present dialogue, I am freed from myself, for the other person's thoughts are certainly his; they are not of my making, though I do grasp them the moment they come into being, or even anticipate them. And indeed, the objection which my interlocutor raises to what I say draws from me thoughts which I had no idea I possessed, so that at the same time that I lend him thoughts, he reciprocates by making me think too. It is only retrospectively, when I have withdrawn from the dialogue and am recalling it that I am able to reintegrate it into my life and make of it an episode in my private history”. (Phenomenology of Perception, p.413))

But Mcdowell would have us think there is a gap between these two.

Is that what you are suggesting, Josh? I'm not seeing it.

(Davidson would have us think that the physiology causes the belief. I'm not in complete agreement with that.) — Banno

When Davidson says the physiology is a cause, he seems to mean something other than a direct relation between it and a belief. McDowell is trying to get him to make sensory cause into something more ‘visible’ without quite turning it into a proposition.
Davidson and Mcdowell discuss this very issue here

Let me know how you interpret the discussion. Start at 22:20

The understanding that our decisions are influenced by many things, and furthermore that the development of our character is influenced by many things, is already built into ordinary interpersonal relationships, as well as modern justice systems — SophistiCat

Martha Nussbaum has put a lot of work into spelling out specific implications for the dispensing of legal justice of her forward-looking approach to blame. What she advocates does not seem to be “already built into modern justice systems”. On the contrary, it has had a lot of influence in those circles.

Well, it seems to me that if we talk about something, then that something is not ineffable....

Hence if we talk about sensations - the aroma of coffee being the case in point - then the sensation is not ineffable — Banno

I’m trying to recall how Davidson thinks about this, since you relate to his work. I believe he posits perceptual experience , such as the aroma of coffee, as non-conceptually causal. Wouldn’t he argue that not only my attempt to communicate the smell of coffee to someone involves language, but my thinking about the experience in my own head requires a propositional articulation of the causal event? This of course, makes the causal sensation , or whatever it is, not only inaccessible to others but also to me in a certain sense. At the very least, there is a gap between the causal event and my thinking to myself, and to talking to others, about it.

I would just say at this point that this gap seems to be a product of Davidson’s insistence that perception is non-conceptual while language is conceptual This led Mcdowell to comment that Davidson makes language into a “frictionless spinning in a void”.

Which is why I find the Strawson et al stance patronising and undermining the remarkable powers of self reflection humans possess and autonomy — Andrew4Handel

‘Patronizing’ is a common accusation leveled against the postmodern and ‘woke’ left. But I’d hardly put Strawson in that category. We’re talking about a pretty mild version of social constructionism here, if we can call it that. If you’re that taken aback by his tame argument , I can’t imagine what you must think of the social justice crowd, influenced by folks like Foucault , Butler and Fanon.

There are degrees of mitigating circumstances from severe mental illness to having some adversity like everyone but not enough to act to causally determine ones criminal activity — Andrew4Handel

Are you familiar with Martha Nussbaum’s positions relating to issues of blame, anger and justice? They seem reasonable to me, striking a balance between mitigating circumstances and assigning responsibility.

I think the no free will brigade commit themselves to denying blame where it is due in an inappropriate way that has a negative effects on the victims of someone else. It is the culture of making bullies equal victims to their victims and further victimising victims. — Andrew4Handel

Sounds like you are an adherent of conservative social politics. No bleeding heart nonsense for you.

People who have believed in predestination have also supported punishment. People that don't believe in free will can believe in punishment as a deterrent to others — Andrew4Handel

as a consequence of man's fall, every person born into the world is enslaved to the service of sin as a result of their fallen nature and, apart from the efficacious (irresistible) or prevenient (enabling) grace of God, is completely unable to choose by themselves to follow God, refrain from evil, or accept the gift of salvation as it is offered. — Andrew4Handel

Deterrents are a form of forward-looking , or consequentialist, blame, which Strawson and other blame skeptics endorse. Predestination and total depravity are linked to free will in the following way. In an earlier post I wrote:

“The very autonomy of the free willing subject presupposes a profound arbitrariness to free will. We say that the subject who has free will wills of their own accord, chooses what they want to choose , and as such has autonomy with respect to ‘foreign' social and internal bodily influences. The machinations of the free will amount to a self-enclosed system.

This solipsist self functions via an internal logic of values that, while rational within the internal bounds of its own subjectivity, is walled off from the wider community of selves and therefore can choose value in a profoundly irrational or immoral manner with respect to social consensus.

Therefore, the very autonomy of the Cartesian subject presupposes a profound potential laxity and arbitrariness to individual free will in relation to the moral norms of a wider social community. Modernist deterministic moral arguments of those like Pereboom, Strawson and Nussbaum surrender the absolute solipsist rationalism of free will-based models of the self in favor of a view of the self as belonging to and determined by a wider causal empirical social and natural order. If we ask why the agent endowed with free will chose to perform a certain action , the only explanation we can give is that it made sense to them given their own desires and whims. If we instead inquire why the individual ensconced within a modernist deterministic or postmodern relativist world performed the same action, we would be able to make use of the wider explanatory framework of the natural or discursive order in situating the causes of behavior.”

This solipsist autonomy, cut off from a wider social ecology and cultural community, also characterizes the conditions of predestination and total depravity. Blame can reasonably be distributed within a community as well as within the isolated individual for free will skeptics, but this doesnt makes sense for perspectives which see individual motivation and values as walled off from the influence of the community, whether of their own choosing or because God made them this way.

I think Galen was not convince of this argument
, but was caused by his rebellion to his father, P.F Strawson, who defended free will. I think he would have to agree to stay consistent with his argument. — Richard B

Nothing about Strawson’s general philosophical outlook leads me to think he would share his father’s view on free will, especially his belief that the self is continually changing.

I find that every time I talk about something I don't really understand on this forum I get corrected. Maybe I should stop talking about things I don't understand — ToothyMaw

Just because a majority of philosophers believes a certain thing doesn’t mean they’re right. Just gives you an opportunity to investigate what they’re saying and decide for yourself. Afterwards, you may decide they’re full of crap.

I don't see how culture would get in the way of good science. Scientists, if they are good scientists, largely shouldn't pay attention to culture. That's not to say we shouldn't have ethicists directing how we use our science, but culture doesn't matter that much, I think. The same goes for mathematics. — ToothyMaw

I dont think you’ll find many contemporary philosophers of science who would agree with you here. Your view is more consistent with a 19th century perspective on the relation between science and culture. Today it is widely accepted that, far from ignoring culture, the science of an era is inseparably intertwined with all other areas of culture in terms of mural shaping and influence.

I think that philosophers, scientists, and mathematicians, at least, would pay attention to what we might be able to learn from such advanced aliens. — ToothyMaw

It’s not a question of paying attention but of comprehending what one is paying attention to. We have philosophers , scientists and mathematicians today who represent widely differing levels of cultural understanding. The more traditional among them are living in the midst of ‘aliens’ they cannot comprehend.

An example: Derrida is a controversial figure. Some think he is a charlatan and others beleive he is one of the most important thinkers of the past 200 years. I happen to side with the latter camp. Let’s assume for the sake of argument I’m right. Did you know that in the 1990’s a group of scholars signed a petition protesting against Cambridge University awarding Derrida an honorary degree. Among them was one of the leading philosophers of our era, W.O. Quine. How is it that one of the most brilliant and well respected scholars can so utterly fail to see the brilliance of a contemporary thinker?
In the case of Quine and Derrida I suggest it was not just a matter of difference in style and approach, but the content of the work. Quine was not ready to grasp what Derrida was trying to tell us. For Quine , Derrida was a space alien.

Not to mention, the advances we might make would be largely self-discovered if the surprise box exists — ToothyMaw

You mean like the robot hand in Terminator 2?
I think our most talented philosophers, mathematicians and scientists will become Quines when presented with the ideas of an advanced civilization, just as the ideas of Freud, Darwin and Einstein would have been gibberish to the scientists of ancient Babylonia or Azteca. Science doesnt emerge in a vacuum, it is a product of larger cultural worldviews.

Some people are born bad. End of story — jgill

Yes, but if you agree with the following, then you are actually in Strawson’s camp:

“what we do and the way we are is ultimately the result of factors beyond our control, whether that be determinism, chance, or luck, and because of this agents are never morally responsible in the sense needed to justify certain kinds of desert-based judgments, attitudes, or treatments—such as resentment, indignation, moral anger, backward-looking blame, and retributive punishment.” “In the basic form of desert, someone who has done wrong for bad reasons deserves to be blamed and perhaps punished just because he has done wrong for those reasons, and someone who has performed a morally exemplary action for good reasons deserves credit, praise, and perhaps reward just because she has performed that action for those reasons (Feinberg 1970; Pereboom 2001, 2014; Scanlon 2013). This backward-looking sense is closely linked with the reactive attitudes of indignation, moral resentment, and guilt, and on the positive side, with gratitude (Strawson 1962); arguably because these attitudes presuppose that their targets are morally responsible in the basic desert sense.” (Caruso 2018)

“The more you believe in a person's free will, the more you will hold them morally responsible for their actions. ...and the amount that you hold a person responsible is related to how much they deserve to be praised or blamed, rewarded or punished, which, of course, affects the entire justice system.”

In sum, Strawson et al are not arguing against blame , punishment and justice but against revenge, retribution and backward-looking blame, which they see as the outcome of a traditional belief in free-will. They are advocating instead for a forward-looking constructive form of justice and blame no longer tied to revenge and anger. You dont have to go back too far in history to find
rampant examples of systems of justice based on retribution and an eye for a eye ( or a hand for a theft).

. In teaching someone to add, they become able to participate in a group of language games such as sharing, bookkeeping, calculating change. It's the action that counts, after all. — Banno

I would just add that ‘action’ should be specified even more finely in terms of sense of meaning rather than via general terms like bookkeeping and calculating. The action counts not as a token of a general conceptual category, and not in Quine’s understanding of behavior in objectively causal terms, but as belonging to a partially shared situational inter-action.

For instance, in PI Wittgenstein analyzes the word ‘calculating’’ in terms of actual use( rather than ‘in the head’’), showing that there is no such general meaning , only a family of context-specific senses. How do we know that someone is calculating? By way of actions within a contextual language game that determine always freshly what calculating performs , how it is used.

↪Janus, ↪Moliere, it would be wrong to treat teaching as moving something from one mind to another. It is better thought of as bringing about certain behaviours in one's students. Hence it is a public exercise.

Improving is a public enterprise. It can be seen, or it amounts to nothing. — Banno

What is it that is seen when we publicly observe a behavior? Is the public appearance of the behavior the moving of something from the behavior to each of the minds who are witnessing it, unmediated by individual interpretation?

I don't know what he means by "ultimate" responsibility. — ChrisH

I think I have an idea. As a blame skeptic, like Pereboom, Nussbaum and others, Strawson rejects the kind of radical free will that makes the subject responsible in an ultimate way. I take this to mean the deliberately willed actions of an autonomous, morally responsible Cartesian subject. Those who believe in such an ultimately responsible subject are necessarily harsher and more ‘blameful' in their views of justice than deterministic , non-desert based modernist approaches, which rest on shaping influences (bodily-affective and social) outside of an agent's control.

The very autonomy of the Cartesian subject presupposes a profound arbitrariness to free will. We say that the subject who has free will wills of their own accord, chooses what they want to choose , and as such has autonomy with respect to ‘foreign' social and internal bodily influences. The machinations of the free will amount to a self-enclosed system.

This solipsist self functions via an internal logic of values that, while rational within the internal bounds of its own subjectivity, is walled off from the wider community of selves and therefore can choose value in a profoundly irrational or immoral manner with respect to social consensus.

Therefore, the very autonomy of the Cartesian subject presupposes a profound potential laxity and arbitrariness to individual free will in relation to the moral norms of a wider social community. Modernist deterministic moral arguments of those like Pereboom, Strawson and Nussbaum surrender the absolute solipsist rationalism of free will-based models of the self in favor of a view of the self as belonging to and determined by a wider causal empirical social and natural order. If we ask why the agent endowed with free will chose to perform a certain action , the only explanation we can give is that it made sense to them given their own desires and whims. If we instead inquire why the individual ensconced within a modernist deterministic or postmodern relativist world performed the same action, we would be able to make use of the wider explanatory framework of the natural or discursive order in situating the causes of behavior.

This is my fun theory on what we might discover as we travel the galaxy in terms of new information given to us by advanced alien civilizations. — ToothyMaw

We already live amongst intelllectually advanced aliens, interacting with them in myriad ways. And yet this direct and unrestricted access does not make possible the transfer of one mode of thinking from one individual or group to another. Why not? Because we can only assimilate complex ideas that are consistent with our own worldview. As a result, we share a world in which ancient, traditional, modern and postmodern ways of thinking co-exist. If the immediacy of social media cannot bridge these gaps in outlook, our exposure to other-worldly cultures will fare no better.

t trying to come to terms with one's circumstances in life along with not wanting to become something one isn't, is a healthy and therapeutic practice. What's not to love about self-acceptance? — Shawn

That we have to make an effort to accept ourselves demonstrates the fact that the person we find ourselves to be is at odds with the person we had thought ourselves to be. How often does our behavior surprise or disappoint or puzzle us ? How many nights do we lay awake wracked with guilt, not recognizing who we have become? And how many relationships dissolve because because one or both of the parties are no longer who they used to be? It seems to me , then, that self-acceptance arrives after the fact. Of course we don’t want changes in ourselves that we dont choose, that other people and circumstance in general seem to force on us. That’s implied by will or desire. But how many times have we resisted tooth and nail changes in our thinking or ways of doing things that we later considered to be profound improvements in ourselves? Isn’t it the case that often changes in ourselves that we resist most strongly turn out in retrospect to be the most beneficial?

Therapists are familiar with the scenario where just as a client is getting close to achieving a breakthrough in insight about some aspect of their life, they are overwhelmed with a feeling of threat, even when they perceive the changes to be potentially positive. They feel threatened because they anticipate the insights will bring wrenching, confusing readjustments in their way of relating to themselves and others. Threat acts as a protective valve against the initial disruption that personal transformation brings. It prompts us to retreat back into the old and familiar habits of self, even when those habits have become confining.

The fact is the self is changing all the time. Self-acceptance is not about desiring a self frozen in place (which describes the mood of despair) , but striking a balance between who we are becoming and who we have been. We must not move too quickly into unexplored frontiers, so that we can preserve enough integrity and coherence in our identity to be able to accept our changing self.

To my (very limited) understanding phenomenology aspires to what the title suggests, an account of the "phenomenon of perception", of what it is like to perceive, in the abstract. Perhaps you can illustrate your point with a quote? I can't see how an abstract accounting like this can bridge the gap I described. — hypericin

In phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty’s hands, language is not the product of a meeting between private perceptions inside individual minds but of a primary intersubjectivity.

” My friend Paul and I point out to each other certain details of the landscape; and Paul's finger, which is pointing out the church tower, is not a finger-for-me that I think of as orientated towards a church-tower-for-me, it is Paul's finger which itself shows me the tower that Paul sees, just as, conversely, when I make a movement towards some point in the landscape that I can see, I do not imagine that I am producing in Paul, in virtue of some pre-established harmony, inner visions merely analogous to mine: I believe, on the contrary, that my gestures invade Paul's world and guide his gaze. When I think of Paul, I do not think of a flow of private sensations indirectly related to mine through the medium of interposed signs, but of someone who has a living experience of the same world as mine, as well as the same history, and with whom I am in communication through that world and that history.”(Phenomenology of Perception, p.471)

“ In the experience of dialogue, there is constituted between the other person and myself a common ground; my thought and his are inter-woven into a single fabric, my words and those of my interlocutor are called forth by the state of the discussion, and they are inserted into a shared operation of which neither of us is the creator. We have here a dual being, where the other is for me no longer a mere bit of behavior in my transcendental field, nor I in his; we are collaborators for each other in consummate reciprocity. Our perspectives merge into each other, and we co-exist through a common world. In the present dialogue, I am freed from myself, for the other person's thoughts are certainly his; they are not of my making, though I do grasp them the moment they come into being, or even anticipate them. And indeed, the objection which my interlocutor raises to what I say draws from me thoughts which I had no idea I possessed, so that at the same time that I lend him thoughts, he reciprocates by making me think too. It is only retrospectively, when I have withdrawn from the dialogue and am recalling it that I am able to reintegrate it into my life and make of it an episode in my private history”. (Phenomenology of Perception, p.413)

Deleuze’s concept of intensive magnitude implies that only difference returns and is never the same. Anything identified as the same, as something that can be the same, can never return. The differentiating return transforms the return circuit into a departure from the self so that a sense of self only emerges in this gup — Number2018

Referring to singularity, to the event of becoming, is ultimately incompatible with the phenomenological approach — Number2018

There are many interpreters of Deleuze these days, so each of us have to choose our preferred interpreter. It might be helpful to my understanding of your interest in Deleuze if you could mention which current writers you think get him right. With regard to the relation between singualeites and ordinary points, between the quantitative and the qualitative , difference in degree and difference in kind, there is divergence between two prominent readers of Deleuze, James Williams and Dan Smith. Are you familiar with their disagreement? I agree with Williams over Smith.

Williams writes:

“Dan Smith gives no prominence to Deleuze's work on time for the determination of the new in Deleuze. This presents two difficulties through the critical question of whether Deleuze's work on calculus should be taken as a starting point for his work on time, as opposed to my focus on synthetic processes, and through the related question of whether the role of singularities in the philosophy of time should be understood through a mathematical understanding of the term:

‘The singularities of complex curves are far more complex. They constitute those points in the neighborhood of which the differential relation changes sign, and the curve bifurcates, and either increases or decreases' (Smith, 2007: 12).

My reservation about the mathematical model is its dependence on an opposition between ordinary and singular points. In terms of Deleuze's philosophy of time, there are no ordinary points in ordinary time, since the processes of time are all dependent on multiple singularities and their relations (in the living present, in the pure past, in eternal return and in the caesura that come with the new). In that sense, then, at least for the philosophy of time, my view is that the new is better defined in a more formal metaphysical manner. So I would rephrase the following sentence from Smith's work, avoiding the terms ‘ordinary', ‘constant' and ‘perpetual': ‘Every determinate thing is a combination of the singular and the ordinary, a multiplicity that is constantly changing, in perpetual flux' .The version closer to Deleuze's account of time would be: Every determinate thing is a combination of singularities, forming a multiplicity that is changing in multiple ways according to the syntheses of time and led by the work of dark precursors and the eternal return of difference, the eternal return of the new.”(Gilles Deleuze's Philosophy of Time)

Another noted reader of Deleuze is John Protevi. Are you familiar with his work? He says that in contrast to certain forms of phenomenology, “Deleuze lets us go “above” and “below” the subject; “above” to politics, and “below” to biology. We live at the crossroads: singular subjects arise from a “crystallization” or “resolution” of a distributed network of natural processes and social practices.”

This sounds like your claim that

Our self (our subjectivity) is one of the lines of our current assemblage. — Number2018

But is Protevi’s reading doing justice to Deleuze? He argues that “a sophisticated approach to phenomenology does not see it as reducing experience to what appears to a subject but rather as proceeding from that appearance to an understanding of what must underlie it.
Taken that way, Deleuze's transcendental empiricism, which seeks the conditions of real rather than possible experience, lies at not nearly as far a remove from say, Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of the lived body, as many have thought.”

When we look at the way that Protevi wants to rethink enactivist, embodied cognition, however , we find his brand of Deleuzianism to be merely a more reductionist form of embodied cognition. For instance , his understanding of Deleuzian affect incorporates cognitive and neuroscientific approaches like Lisa Barrett, Griffiths, Panksepp and LeDoux, and he associates the anthropological work of James Scott with Deleuzian thought. I see these approaches as not particularly compatible with Deleuze.

Peotevi and Massumi are the only Deleuzian writers I know of who engage with phenomenologically informed enactivist approaches to cognition, motivation, intersubjectivity and affect. In their hands, Deleuze is less useful than the models offered by Varela, Thompson, Gallagher and others. How, specifically, does your Deleuzian reading improve on an enactivist psychology?

Therefore, to say, "should I become what I am not" is to state that we want to become something, be it richer or poorer or happier or more joyful. My point here is that if we have wants, and they are realized by our conception of truth or lies, then why would anyone want to live (to be) in terms of what they are not? What would be the point of living with ourselves in contradiction of who or what we are? Yet, we do this every day. — Shawn

To quote psychologist George Kelly:

“…it is not so much what man is that counts as it is what he ventures to make of himself. To make the leap he must do more than disclose himself; he must risk a certain amount of confusion. Then, as soon as he does catch a glimpse of a different kind of life, he needs to find some way of overcoming the paralyzing moment of threat, for this is the instant when he wonders what he really is – whether he is what he just was or is what he is about to be. It may be helpful at this point to ask ourselves a question about children at Halloween. Is the little youngster who comes to your door on the night of October 30th, all dressed up in his costume and behind a mask, piping "trick or treat, trick or treat" – is that youngster disguising himself or is he revealing himself? Is he failing to be spontaneous? Is he not being himself?

Which is the real child – the child behind the mask or the barefaced child who must stand up in front of adults and say "please" and "thank you?" I suspect costumes and masks worn at Halloween time, as well as uniforms worn by officers on duty, doctoral degrees, and the other devices we employ to avoid being seen as we are, are all ways we have of extricating ourselves from predicaments into which we have been cast by the language of objectivity. They represent devices for coping with the world in the language of hypothesis.

But masks have a way of sticking to our faces when worn too long. Verbs cease to express the invitational mood after the invitation has been accepted and experience has left its mark. To suggest to a person that he be what he has already become is not much of an invitation.
Thus it is that the man who has worn a uniform long enough to explore all its possibilities begins to think that he really is an officer. Once this happens he may have to go through a lot of chaos before he can make anything more of himself. A student who is awarded a Ph.D. degree can find a lot of adventure in being called "doctor" and the academic mask may enable him to experiment with his life in ways that would have seemed much too preposterous before his dissertation was accepted.

But trouble sets in when he begins to think that he really is a doctor, or a professor, or a scholar. When that happens he will have to spend most of his time making noises like doctors, professors, or scholars, with the resultant failure from that time on to undertake anything interesting. He becomes trapped by verbs that have lapsed into the indicative mood when he wasn't looking.”