Science is not trying to give an account of what the universe would be like were there no observers. It is trying to give an account of what the universe is like for any observer. — Banno

Yep. :up:

They are not seeking to remove perspective, but to give an account that works from as many perspectives as possible. — Banno

Now how do you say philosophy is different?

@J is convinced that science can give an account that works from as many perspectives as possible, but philosophy can't. Usually what someone of @J's persuasion eventually comes to realize is that either both can or both can't. Scientific knowledge and philosophical knowledge go hand in hand, given that the difference between the two is not as great as has been supposed. The idea that scientific knowledge is possible but philosophical knowledge is not is utterly strange, to say the least. It seems more a consequence of philosophers staring into the mirror of their own reflection than anything of interest.

Sort of, but that would be immune to the strongest part of my argument; which involves the children. We could dispute plausbly either way if, for example, there were any healthy adults which could be held to be an Amalekite proper and I am willing to concede, given the seemingly identity relation between being an Amalekate and a part of the cult, that there weren't any. — Bob Ross

Okay, that's fair. I just wanted to try to impress the idea that the Amalekite culture and the Amalekite religion/cult go hand in hand, and if we want to get into the exegesis we could show that it is specifically the abominations associated with the Amalekites that God is concerned with. The question, "Why the Amalekites?," is something we ought to keep in mind. It would be a significant mistake to assume that this is how God/Israel deals with every people-group. But let's move on to children.

At the end of the day, I emphasize the children, although I understand you are setting that aspect of it aside for a second, because it is really implausible in my mind that there were no Amalekate children and it seems like they would be a part of the ban. — Bob Ross

I think it is reasonable to assume that there were Amalekite children and that they were part of the ban.

1. The God of the OT commanded Saul to put the Amalekites under the ban
2. There were innocent children among the Amalekites
3. Therefore, the God of the OT commanded the killing of the innocent
4. The killing of the innocent is unjust
5. Therefore, the God of the OT is unjust — Leontiskos

In the first place I would want to note that in our Western society which strongly values individualism, the individual is the central agent and the child is often seen to be his own person, so to speak. I saw the new Superman movie (which I did not think was very good) and there is a scene where Clark's father is telling him that parents don't shape their children's lives, but instead give the children tools with which to shape their own lives. That a pretty standard individualistic sentiment, and it would in no way have been the view of ancient peoples.

To oversimplify, the ancient world is going to see the child as strongly shaped by their environment—both "nature" and "nurture"—whereas our own culture tends to see the child as a free agent who largely transcends their environment. I think we have veered too far in the "libertarian" direction, and I think that a factual or statistical analysis would show that children are deeply influenced by environment and culture.

A second consideration is the question of support mechanism. Suppose Israel wipes out the adults. Would they have the resources to absorb all of the children into their own numbers? That seems unlikely, and neither is it clear that the children would be overly cooperative at that point or even when they grow older. So there is the simple logistical problem, where there is a people-group who practices abominations (human sacrifice, cannibalism, rape, demon worship, etc.) and you have to address the problem. How do you address it? Given that the adults are not able to be reformed, they must be imprisoned or killed, and imprisonment of such a large number would have been impractical in that day (if not in ours as well!). So what do you do with the children? How do you view the children? Similarly, what is best for the children? Should they be left to live without parents and support? Should they be left to grow up into evil cannibals (in the case where their parents are not killed)? Should they be abandoned to their fate if they cannot be incorporated and supported? I don't see any obvious answers here. Indeed, the command to kill the children is much like a command to pull out the weed by its root, so that it does not regrow.

Now your argument is apparently thinking in terms of commutative justice, where the child is the agent, the agent has done nothing wrong and is therefore innocent, and therefore the child cannot be harmed and certainly not killed.

So at this stage we have three considerations which cannot be altogether ignored:

• Individual agency vs. group agency
• How to address the problem of abominations which have become embedded in a people-group
• The injustice of killing the individual, including children

The injustice argument has a certain preeminence given that it is trading in exceptionless norms. More explicitly, if the Amalekite children have a right to life, then it is unjust to kill them. So we probably want to ask whether they do in fact have a right to life, even though they are Amalekite children.

Certainly if we think of agency in terms of groups instead of in terms of individuals, then it is no longer clear that the Amalekite children have a right to life. More specifically, it is no longer clear that the Amalekite children are innocent, given that they are inextricably bound up with an abominable group.

Note that when thinking in terms of group agency rather than individual agency, children of the Edomites, for example, are innocent in virtue of their people-group and therefore do have a right to life. Or more simply, the commandment against murder applies straightforwardly to them. So the criterion of innocence has not been abandoned, but is rather being interpreted and applied differently.

Anyway, those are three of the basic data points I think we would need to consider when thinking about the Amalekite children.

If so, then how do you explain the fact that God punished Saul for sparing some animals? Doesn't that suggest that God was including everything that lived in the City itself? — Bob Ross

At the very end of that clip I suggested this is addressed quite well (beginning at 1:11:45). If you didn't get a chance to watch those 18 minutes I would recommend it.


P.S. The reason you aren't getting a lot of direct answers to your argument in this thread is simply because it is a very difficult argument to address. For that reason I'm not sure whether I will succeed in giving you a satisfactory answer either, but I think these considerations complicate the initial picture quite a bit.

Talmud helps us apply Torah, but Torah is the holier, more primary text. — BitconnectCarlos

Thanks for confirming.

- How many philosophy forum rules do you break each time you refuse to do philosophy? Almost 28,000 posts. :roll:

You and Tim pretending that the concluding remark is the whole argument is pathetic. — Banno

Why don't you try making an argument for once? Do you realize this is a philosophy forum?

More simple questions that you refuse to answer. They just keep piling up:

What's the reasoning here:

P1: Any phrase could be used as a password.
P2: ????
C: Therefore there are no language to learn and linguistic conventions don't determine what words mean. — Count Timothy von Icarus

But what if we actually spoke about assertions rather than circumlocutions that may or may not indicate assertion? What about:

"The cat is on the mat."
"I assert the cat is on the mat."

Yes. No work can be done or progress made if one believes “equal rationality” applies to both sides of any dispute.

Rationality may exist on both sides, but how “equal”? The inequality of the rationality is what constitutes any dispute, whether one side (or both) are making invalid arguments and/or using unfounded facts. — Fire Ologist

That's right, and this is precisely why one of @J's heroes contradict themselves:

The moral of the story is that if someone takes up Chakravartty's stance voluntarism, then they must give up their ability to "encourage others... to see things our way." By definition, the stance voluntarist has no reasons for why someone should "see things his way." — Leontiskos

Relativistic "stances" undermine dialogue and knowledge altogether. If no one view is more rational than any other, then there is no reason to search for what is better.

This is @J's underlying approach in the vast majority of his posts. It is a "search" for the stone of infallibility:

1. Either the stone of infallibility exists, or else it doesn't
2. If it exists, then there is an end to relativistic pluralism
3. If it does not exist, then there is no end to relativistic pluralism
4. The stone of infallibility does not exist
5. Therefore, there is no end to relativistic pluralism

For my money @J wants (5), and this is post hoc rationalization, even though he styles it as a "search." But even if that is wrong, the whole framing around the horizon of infallibility is entirely confused. That is the fundamental error of both Williams and @J: this obsession with infallibility, which has become the gravitational center of their thought whether they like it or not. The correct response to this bizarrely redundant argument is, "Why do you care so much about infallibility?"

- :up:

-

The problem is that while "we all" can indeed make intelligible and rational claims in support of a given framework, another group of "us all" can dispute them, with equal rationality. — J

Why is that a problem?

Or rather, how do you determine that every claim is made "with equal rationality"?

What you always end up saying is, "Oh, well not every claim is made with equal rationality. But every claim from the set of [serious/professional/rational people] is made with equal rationality, and I have no way to tell you how to identify that set." These threads of yours always involve this same petitio principii, which amounts to a sort of question-begging assertion in favor of relativistic pluralism.

I suspect what's at bottom is the same old TPF schtick of, "You have the burden of proof." "I don't know why any one claim could be said to be more rational than any other claim, and you have the burden of proof in showing such a thing." I don't see that sound methodology is being used in trying to support such theses in these sorts of threads. This is one place where Wittgenstein's "therapeutic" diagnosis seems especially apt.

- So would you still work out if in return you received nothing more than the pain? Even if it did not help you "achieve a better body"?

- Yes, that is a good parallel in the UK context. :up:

Kimhi may be correct that Frege's assumption that the unasserted proposition and the assertion are "on a par," so to speak, is the source of many problems.* It is certainly occurring in this thread. Taxonomical thinking is occluding linguistic realities. — Leontiskos

This is related to Srap's observation:

(It is even plausible to claim that the division itself is not a posit of theory, but is itself found in nature -- right up until you hit the exception at quantum scale.) — Srap Tasmaner

These two moves are very similar:

• Scientist: "My observing the electron could not possibly have an effect on the experiment!"
• Philosopher: "My taxonomical dissection of assertions could not possibly have a per se effect on the outcome of these arguments!"

What's the reasoning here:

P1: Any phrase could be used as a password.
P2: ????
C: Therefore there are no language to learn and linguistic conventions don't determine what words mean.

Prima facie, that's a ridiculous claim unless one runs back from the motte to the bailey in order to massively caveat it so as to make it an entirely different claim. — Count Timothy von Icarus

:up: :fire:

Oh, I see what you're saying. Yeah fair enough - didn't quite grok the subtext, sorry. I do now. — AmadeusD

:up:

Two of Aristotle's basic criteria in identifying the kind of regime in question are: "Who votes/decides on the rulers?" and "Who is eligible to be voted for?"

Election is always of some people by some people, but everything depends on who chooses whom and how. The fundamental options (to follow Aristotle) are that all may choose from all or from some or from both; or some may choose from all or from some or from both; or all and some may choose from all or from some or from both. When all choose from all, the election may be called democratic; when some from some, oligarchic; when mixed, aristocratic or political. — Peter L. P. Simpson, Political Illiberalism, p. 30

and:

...One might conclude from this analysis that the system of elections in the United States would, by this classification, count as aristocratic or political. With respect to form, it may be so. With respect to practice, it is not. For an element of political sophistry here intervenes, since there are at least two ways of understanding what is meant by election. We mean by elections choosing between candidates whose names are on the ballot and who have, before the election, been going about soliciting people for their votes. Others, by contrast, have meant choosing from among candidates who are not named on any ballot and who have not been going about soliciting votes. — Peter L. P. Simpson, Political Illiberalism, p. 31

So the idea is that you identify the set of people who choose or cast votes, and then you identify the set of people who are chosen from, and at that point you have the first criterion for determining regime (at least in the common case of electoral regimes).

For Aristotle this is practical, not theoretical. Even if everyone can vote in a theoretical sense, and everyone can be voted for in a theoretical sense, in a practical sense not everyone votes and not everyone can be voted for. A big part of politics is controlling who votes and who can be voted for.

the act and the performing of it as distinct things. — bongo fury

Whatever narrower psychological sense of "perform" or "assert" makes us disqualify an otherwise appropriate sound event from being a performance or an assertion string from being an assertion. (Is what I feared was being reified.) — bongo fury

To distinguish an act from a performing of [that act] is to attach oneself to a very strange doctrine of human action, where acts are somehow reified and can even be "unperformed." "Performance" is a metaphor, and it will get us into trouble with its unclarity.

Assertion (and performance) require a necessary condition of intention. Whether something was asserted or performed cannot be decided without consulting the agent's intentions.

Additional criteria would be completeness (encompassing all variables and outcomes); infallibility or predictability; being right without being responsible; ensuring agreement, being only either true or false, etc. It seems we are taking abstraction from context or an individual (or human fallibility, limitation) as the criteria for “certainty”. I’m trying to point out how forced this is by differentiating topics and claiming that their individual criteria and their appropriate contexts are necessary and sufficient for being accepted (that we can all assert intelligible and rational claims about their “framework”). That this does not ensure agreement is philosophy’s (and morality’s) lack of power (which Fire Ologistpoints out correctly) which science claims (though as easily ignored it appears). But this a categorical difference (it works differently) not a relegation to individual persuasion, opinion, belief, rhetoric (“locality”). — Antony Nickles

:up:

They mean different things whether asserted or not. — Michael

• Teacher: "What do you think, Michael?"
• Michael: "The cat is on the mat."

Is that different than, "I think the cat is on the mat"?

The notion that material strings have strict meanings without taking context and intention into account is not going to get us anywhere.

My point is, there you almost go... reifying the act and the performing of it as distinct things. — bongo fury

Yes, and this is Kimhi through and through, as well as Rombout's paper on Frege.

The point that Kimhi makes successfully is that it is more unnatural for an assertion to be unasserted-and-reified than for it to be asserted. When we put the assertion into limbo in order to scrutinize it absent any assertion on our part, we are doing something that is weird and which is not usually done. Further, even the reified assertion has a kind of latent assertativeness or at least assertability.

Kimhi may be correct that Frege's assumption that the unasserted proposition and the assertion are "on a par," so to speak, is the source of many problems.* It is certainly occurring in this thread. Taxonomical thinking is occluding linguistic realities.


* More precisely, this is not an assumption so much as a necessity of the sort of logical work to which Frege applied himself, which is why Geach was right to defend it at least on that score.

I believe if God voluntarily creates a world, then He will always have to (1) create the best possible world and (2) freely will to incarnate Himself through hypostatic union as a representative member of the species of any that are persons to save them. I think, and Leontiskos can correct me on this, this would be a heresy for Christianity of God being forced to always pick the best. — Bob Ross

Quickly, I would not say that the doctrine which holds that God always creates the best is a heresy, although it isn't characteristically Christian and I don't think it comes onto the scene until Leibniz. Aquinas doesn't think the word "best" makes sense in that context, given the infinite possibilities. Regarding (2), it looks like you are claiming that, "He will always have to freely will..." Here necessity runs up against freedom, and beyond that, Christians do not tend to hold that the hypostatic union was logically necessary. They will say that it was conditionally necessary either upon the condition of creation, or else upon the condition of sin.

I haven't been following the thread too closely, but I realize some are imputing (1) to the OP and then arguing against (1). I don't think the OP requires (1)—or (2), for that matter. The OP looks to me like an argument from injustice, and it is much easier to get a theist to agree that God is not unjust than to get them to agree to these other points.

This is how the concept is used in law. It's a bit more complicated than this, but essentially its the "if but for..." rule. — AmadeusD

Yes, exactly. :up:

I was thinking about the way that the legal context tries to avoid over-committing to metaphysical or causal doctrines by using "but-for" reasoning.

The one who controls the pre-selection of the candidates would lose enormous amounts of power and control if they were to yield up that prerogative. — Leontiskos

and who is that? — AmadeusD

Were you responding to that?

It is usually not a single person. I don't know if you follow American politics, but supporters of Bernie Sanders know the ballot gatekeeping well, particularly after the 2016 and 2020 Democratic presidential primaries.* In that sense the political parties control the ballot, and in particular they exert a great deal of influence over their own candidate. In fact you could read American politics since 2016 as the incursion of populism into the presidential scene, where on the one hand the Democrats were able to exclude Sanders from the nomination and on the other hand the Republics were unable to exclude Trump from the nomination. It's likely true that if the DNC were set up like the RNC then Sanders would have won the Democratic primary, and that if the RNC were set up like the DNC then Trump would have lost the Republican primary.

All of that is indicative of the way that partisan interests control the ballot, and in fact this isn't altogether unintentional in our system.


* In 2024 the Democrats held no primary at all in order to nominate Harris.

Chiming in on the topic, using a point of departure from a different thread...

The question boggles me, too. Thoughts and verbal or written expressions are perhaps the least consequential and harmless actions a person can make in his life time. So it is a conundrum why people get so worked up about beliefs and words and often respond with some very consequential and harmful actions, like censorship, ostracization, or even violence.

Can such an inconsequential act, like the imperceptible movements of the brain and making articulated sounds from the mouth, be evil? I don’t think so. I believe the reactions to acts of speech, though, undoubtedly are, and represent some sort of superstition of language, though I no argument for it yet. — NOS4A2

Sorry, I forgot about this reply.

For my part, I am not convinced that speech is an inconsequential act. This is why free speech always becomes a difficult issue. If speech were inconsequential then no one would worry about free speech and we would need no civil right to free speech.

To give a very blasé example, suppose the captain orders his troops to kill the women and children. That is a consequential speech act, albeit a command. Its causal power is manifest. Other acts of speech, such as persuasive speech, can also be consequential. If someone traveled back in time to kill Hitler, they may very well aim to off him before he starts giving his big speeches, given what a powerful orator he was. — Leontiskos

Further, we could also try to avoid all doctrines of causality and just think about counterfactual reasoning, namely by holding that an event is impactful if it has a counterfactual effect.

For example, was Hitler's speech impactful? On the counterfactual approach we look at what would have happened had Hitler been born mute, unable to speak (and presumably also unable to write). If this would have had an impact on the historical events, then apparently Hitler's speech played a role in shaping events, regardless of any particular causal doctrine.

I think that if we accept the counterfactual approach to assessing impact, then speech must have an impact.

It's the literalism that is unworkable. — Hanover

One of the reasons I think the Stephen De Young is because it addresses your approach as well, specifically at 1:00:17, where De Young considers using Game of Thrones as a religious text.

The response to your claim that the story is unworkable when taken in a literal sense would be, "Actually the story is unworkable even when taken in a mythological sense." For example, when Plato critiques the Greek myths, he is critiquing them qua mythology. Such a critique is equally open to @Bob Ross or anyone else who takes issue with the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament). I think De Young is correct when he says that the mythological pivot doesn't solve the problem.

I think if you begin with an immovable preconceived notion of what God is (love, etc.) and you encounter a tradition inconsistent with that, you are left with either judgmentally or non-judgmentally responding to it. Non-judgmentally, you'd recognize it academically and consider yourself educated. Judgmentally, you'd tell the other side they were worshipping a false god. — Hanover

And again I ask, is this what @Bob Ross is doing? Are you representing him fairly? Is his argument a "declaration"? Is he merely "considering himself educated" or "judgmentally telling the other side they are worshipping a false god"? Isn't he doing something altogether different when he offers you an argument?

It seems clear to me that you think it is impossible to give an argument for a religious position, and yet this is precisely what Bob Ross is doing. So apparently you are forced to construe Ross' argument as something other than an argument. That doesn't make any sense to me.

Both at extremes are not virtuous [...]

The problem is in taking these stories too literally. — Hanover

Would you say that taking these stories too non-literally is also an extreme?

The point is this is a mythological story about responding to evil and the consequences of misplaced sympathy. I don't think a Christian should find that notion objectionable. It's the literalism that is unworkable. — Hanover

That's possible, but the arguments are where the rubber hits the road, and those will necessarily be religious arguments. If the story is mythological then the religion which takes it to be mythological will be better than the religion that does not, ceteris paribus. Thus in order to support your own religion you would want to show that the story is in fact mythological. The point is that religious argument is inevitable. We can't make progress in any of this without it.

- But this is little more than a quibble. Neoplatonism is heavily indebted to Aristotle, and therefore ' counterpoint was perfectly valid. Clearly Ross is claiming that his conception of God is philosophical and is based on classical theism, particularly thinkers like Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, etc.

A.k.a "Direct Democracy." An old idea.

I was not aware of that, and that’s fine as long as we agree then that:

1. Not all people who lived in the culture of the Amalekites were Amalekites, since an Amalekite is a religious affiliation and those who lack the capacity or choose not to engage in it were not be properly affiliated. — Bob Ross

I find it implausible that no one in an entire city [...] [was] a person that disagrees with the cult but lacks the means to escape... — Bob Ross

Well that is precisely what I am disputing, although I want to leave children to the side for the moment.

It seems like part of your argument is <The OT God told Saul to kill all of the adult Amalekites, even though only some of them were evil>.

My point is that religion/cult in the ancient world is not an optional add-on. There is no such thing as an Amalekite who is not an Amalekite in a cultic sense. The difficulty is that modern preconceptions color the way one reads these stories, and the notion that religion/cult is optional or accidental is one of those. Again, we will get to the question of children soon.

Else, Stephen De Young explains that there are precedents and examples where defectors are not under the ban. So if someone defects from the Amalekites and abandons their cultural abominations, then they need not be killed.

Compare especially the story of Genesis 18, where we find that God will not destroy Sodom if there can be found righteous within the city.

No. It’s just regular old everyday knowledge. — T Clark

Okay, so it looks like on your view there is "scientific knowledge" and there is "everyday knowledge," but there is no such thing as "philosophical knowledge."

Okay, well these are clearly two different claims:

1. The cat is on the mat
2. I think that the cat is on the mat

(2) can be true even if (1) is false. — Michael

I think there is a lot of ambiguity in such formulations. For example:

1. The cat is on the mat
2. I think that the cat is on the mat
3. "The cat is on the mat"
4. I think, "The cat is on the mat."
5. "I think the cat is on the mat."
6. "I think the cat is on the mat."

And then add the fact that "think" is itself rather ambiguous. Note especially that (1) is not clearly a claim or an assertion at all, given that people will often write it that way and intend it to represent a truth or else a proposition that is not being asserted by anyone.

I think this is an argument I could probably make. Not so much that philosophers don’t have knowledge, but that philosophy does not involve knowledge. Certainly metaphysics doesn’t. Neither do aesthetics or morals. — T Clark

Okay, and do you say that science involves knowledge? And if you know that scientists have knowledge, then is your knowledge of this philosophical? Can "philosophy" know that science involves knowledge?

You said it's heresy. — Hanover

A Christian heresy is only a problem for a Christian. To accuse a non-Christian of heresy would be a form of begging the question.

But, assuming we don't care about that, I'd say it's perfectly fine to say the OT and NT are incompatible and you've got to choose one, the other, or neither. — Hanover

Okay, good. But I want to highlight that @Bob Ross is not a Marcionite, given that he does not embrace the NT. He is rejecting the OT on other grounds.

But to declare which must be chosen because it's the correct one is simply to declare your God the true God and all other believers wrong — Hanover

"It's correct because it's correct," would be a tautological declaration. I don't see @Bob Ross doing that. His central premise is <It is unjust to kill the innocent>. He is neither declaring a tautology nor begging the question. Here is the argument he accepted as a representation of the second point in his OP:

1. The God of the OT commanded Saul to put the Amalekites under the ban
2. There were innocent children among the Amalekites
3. Therefore, the God of the OT commanded the killing of the innocent
4. The killing of the innocent is unjust
5. Therefore, the God of the OT is unjust — Leontiskos

Do you think that argument is "to simply declare your God the true God and all other believers wrong"?

I can’t help think it must be something like gnosis or one of its cognates - subject of that rather arcane term 'gnoseology' which is comparable to 'epistemology' but with rather more gnostic overtones. In any case, it is knowledge of the kind which conveys a kind of apodictic sense, although that is a good deal easier to write about than to actually attain. — Wayfarer

Yes, good. And the presupposition is that the certitude in question must be justifiable, and therefore disagreements must be adjudicable. Science is thought to be adjudicable because it is thought to have clear objects and criteria.

-

That is philosophy’s claim*, but it neither claims it “absolutely”, nor “locally”, as these are predetermined, created standards. — Antony Nickles

(* the claim is: "as long as I don't claim knowledge about what the [absolute] conception is, my talk about it can remain "local.")

I was with you all the way, until this. Maybe I'm not understanding you. Let's grant that both "absolute" and "local" are predetermined, created standards. How does this exempt philosophy from nonetheless speaking from one or the other? What would be the third alternative? — J

I see that point of @Antony Nickles as crucial. A truth-claim is neither "absolute" nor "local." These are contrived categories which tend to break down as soon as an explication is requested.

I do think Bob has clarified. He did say he didn't think the OT God was consistent with what he knew God was. And I do see why a Christian would need to sort out what is pretty clearly a change from OT to NT if there is a commitment they are the same. — Hanover

Well what is "pretty clear" to you is not at all evident to Christians. Here is the heresy I spoke of:

Marcion preached that the benevolent God of the Gospel who sent Jesus into the world as the savior was the true Supreme Being, different and opposed to the malevolent deity, the Demiurge or creator deity, identified with Yahweh in the Hebrew Bible. — Marcionism | Wikipedia

So when you claim that Christians would say "Amen" to the heresy of Marcionism, you are making factual errors that misrepresent the religion. Throughout the thread @Bob Ross has emphasized that his argument is opposed to Christianity, beginning with to Tzeentch. So it's really weird that you would claim that Ross is taking a position to which Christians would say, "Amen." Every Christian in the thread is arguing against the OP.

If your hermeneutic leads to inconsistency, you either (1) live with the inconsistency as not overly relevant, (2) declare humility and lack of grasp of the mystery, or (3) change your hermeneutic. — Hanover

I basically agree. :up:

God didn't write the Bible, so inconsistency should be expected and I choose a very non-literalist interpretation. — Hanover

Good, that's what I was trying to get at.

My objection was to the suggestion of an a priori knowledge of God as being consistent with the NT and a declaration of invalidity to all other beliefs in God.

That is, an option 4 was being chosen. The OT was being rejected as invalid. That's the equivalent of me saying the simple solution is to reject the NT. That would work too. — Hanover

Is there something you believe to be wrong with "option 4"?

I think @Bob Ross is saying little more than, "I believe in God, and according to my beliefs the OT god is not God. Here are some arguments for why." He is of course offering his arguments tentatively, in the sense that he is looking to understand and address objections to his view.

Honestly, you're coming across as kind of clueless. — frank

You are the one coming across as clueless, Frank. You make weird, contentious claims about neo-Platonism and then fail to substantiate them, gesturing towards "somewhere" in an hour-long video.

@Bob Ross - The reason these threads are tricky on TPF is because asking TPFers religious questions is like going into a bar and asking the patrons about quantum physics. They will have a lot to say, and none of it will be remotely accurate. Toss in the large number of anti-religious cynics like Frank and the quality dips even further.

This isn't my position. It's Bob Ross's. He said the OT description of God wasn't God, and I said if it's not, the he saying those who do accept it as God don't believe in God. — Hanover

Do you think Christians would say "Amen" to the claim that "God in the OT is not really God"? Because that's what you said above.

I never did. I've been consistenly open to other interpretations. I've only pointed out that if one claims to know what the true God is and then you claim others don't adhere to it, then you're just telling me your religion is right and mine wrong. — Hanover

The OP is surely presenting arguments against a particular religious tenet, namely the divinity of the OT God. So yes, it involves the claim that such a religious tenet is wrong, along with any religion which upholds it.

It seems like God in the OT is not really God. — Bob Ross

is where you present Christianity as The truth. If one is Christian, they'll say Amen, if not, then not. — Hanover

But like so much of your posts, this is simply not true at all. Christians accept that the OT God is not God? What silliness is this? Marcionism is a very old Christian heresy.

The issue here is Biblical interpretation, and as a Reformed Jew you have a very loose way of interpreting the Bible.

The key to your position is found here:

not everyone who relies on the Bible relies solely on the Bible for all direction — Hanover

You would say, "I don't think God commanded the killing of the Amalekites," and the question is simply whether this view of yours is consistent with the Biblical testimony. There are a very large number of historical Christians and Jews who do not believe that such a view is consistent with the Biblical testimony. We can't just sideline these central questions and pretend that Reformed Judaism is the only possible approach.

Does this help with the puzzles of how and why and whether they ought? — bongo fury

It's worth seeing how there is a way in which Frege and Kimhi are correct in seeing judgment as syncategorematic or unembeddable, and this can be seen by looking at one metaphysical aspect of judgment, namely its temporality.

First, Rombout points out that Frege's judgment-stroke is "performative language" (38). She says:

The vertical part of the symbol is not just signifying some act of judgment it seems, rather “the judgment stroke contains the act of assertion”(I3). This raises the question whether the judgment stroke is a sign signifying an act or whether writing it actually effects the assertion. — Frege, Russell and Wittgenstein on the Judgment Stroke, by Floor Rombout, 11

This underscores the fact that human judgment is an act. Similarly, the stroke that indicates this act is not therefore a mere semantic construction. Further, acts are temporal, and the act of judgment is no exception. This is why the act of judgment is by its very nature syncategorematic or unembeddable. To judge is to act in the present. Hence:

The issue here is that we reason discursively, and we do not (strictly speaking) ever simultaneously engage in more than one judgment. So when <I judge that I judge that a is F> there is at least a temporal distinction between the two instances of judgment, and in this case there is also a logical priority issue, i.e. one of the two judgments must be logically prior to the other.

So if Rodl wants to read that proposition as a non-temporal angelic intellection, it won't make any sense. That is, if we try to make both instances of 'judge' temporally and logically identical, it won't make any sense.

One way for Rodl to dispute true recursivity would be to say that the only way to interpret <I judge that I judge that a is F> in a non-vacuous way is to interpret it as <I judge that I have judged that a is F>. — Leontiskos

So we have 1 vs 2. Here is 1:

• I judge that a is F
• I judge that I judge that a is F
• I judge that I judge that I judge that a is F
• ...

And here is 2:

• I judge that a is F
• I judge that I have judged that a is F
• I judge that I have judged that I have judged that a is F
• ...

The equivocation of the judgment-terms in (1) can be more clearly seen once we realize that only one judgment is ever a judgment in the primary sense, namely a judgment in the present. This equivocation is remedied in (2) by explicitly allowing only the first judgment-term to be in the present tense. The others are in the past tense.

I think this sheds light on the recursivity of judgment, insofar as we can see that there is a judgment-hierarchy in any judgment about judgments. That hierarchy is most obvious when we think about tense, but we could also divert from tense and think about other forms of primary-ness and secondary-ness of judgments. For example, we might hold that (1) is acceptable, while each judgment-term is still not univocal in that primary sense.

There are two related issues. The first asks about the relation between a present-tense judgment and a past-tense judgment. There is a curious sense in which a past-tense judgment is not yet past, and is still "in effect"—at least insofar as we have not rescinded our assent in the meanwhile. (This entails that "I have judged" could mean at least two different things.) Still, this does not make a past-tense judgment active or present or primary in the same way that a present-tense judgment is active and present and primary. The second issue regards the question of whether and how a single judgment can encompass many judgments, i.e. how judgment can be mereologically complex. Philosophers are primarily concerned with this second question as it pertains to primary or present-tense judgments (e.g. "Dave, Sue, John, and Marie are all in attendance at the party"), but the question could also be extended to the various sentences of (1) or (2).


NB: I gave a number of relevant sources in the post <here>.

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Added: Just to be clear the Kimhi quote is against writing ⊢(⊢p → ⊢q), not ⊢⊢(p→q). — Banno

No, when Kimhi says, "[The judgment-stroke] cannot be repeated in different logical contexts, but can only stand by itself," he is obviously excluding your strange embeddings. ⊢(⊢(p→q)) is obviously repeating the judgment-stroke within a logical context. Indeed, once one understands Frege's notation they realize that it is not even notationally possible to do this. Here is Rombout in the post where this was already explained to you:

Instead of writing the whole inference, consisting of the three assertions “ ⊢ p”, “ ⊢ (p ⊃ q)” and “ ⊢ q” , Russell and Whitehead propose an abbreviation containing the assertions of the two atomic propositions connected by an implication: “ ⊢ p ⊃⊢ q”. Frege would consider this a category mistake; in the Begriffsschrift it is not possible to have a judgment stroke within the scope of a conditional.

...

A reason why Russell and Whitehead consider this abbreviation acceptable can be found in their explanation of syllogisms... — Rombout, 44-5

(Rombout's whole paper examines why Wittgenstenians characteristically fail to understand this aspect of Frege, just as Wittgenstein did.)

But I don’t get it. I can’t even figure out what the question on the table is. — T Clark

It's confusing because if you just say it plainly it is seen to be silly, so it has to be dressed up in a lot of cryptic language that one must then refuse to clarify.

@J's professor, Bernard Williams, is allergic to the idea that philosophers have knowledge (and so is @J). So this is what happens:

• Williams: "Philosophers definitely don't have knowledge, but I am happy to grant that scientists have knowledge."
• Interlocutor: "If philosophers such as yourself know that scientists have knowledge, then don't you have that knowledge?"
• Williams: "Hmm... [Insert indecipherable paragraph from OP here]."
• Williams: "In short, I can be right about this, but not assert it as a piece of knowledge. As long as I don't say I know that I've got it right, I've avoided the trap."

So the idea is that philosophers can't have knowledge, even though they know that scientists have knowledge, and this is okay as long as philosophers say, "I am right about my claim that scientists have knowledge, but I am not saying I know that scientists have knowledge." *

If you like you can replace "knowledge" with "absolute knowledge" and then ask @J what the heck "absolute knowledge" is supposed to be (and you can do the same thing for any other such substitution).

Normal philosophers without an allergy to knowledge just say that they know that scientists have knowledge, and that this knowing is of course itself knowledge. So the philosopher at the very least has some knowledge, namely the knowledge that scientists have knowledge, and since the normal philosopher is not allergic to knowledge the world will not collapse upon admitting that he knows something.


* Note how intimately connected this is to @J's continual claims that there can be non-assertive assertions. The non-knowledge-claim about being right is for @J an example of his non-assertive assertion. Or in other words, the knowledge claim that isn't a knowledge claim is just one of those assertions that isn't an assertion, so it's not ad hoc at all! lol

I agree with that assessment so far. It's the killing of innocents that my OP is objecting to: I recognize that the Canaanites were doing horrible things and a war against them is justified. However, that doesn't justify purposely attempting to genocide the people in their entirety. — Bob Ross

Okay, fair.

First let's clarify that the ban on the Amalekites was a religious or cultural form of genocide, given that their cultic rites required the abominable practices in question. "Amalekite" is a cultic referent, and it is precisely the cultic practices which are abominable. It is precisely the religion that is to be wiped out (although there was no distinction between the culture and the religion, because they were the same thing). Among other things, what this means is that if all of the Amalekites abandoned their Amalekite religion, they would no longer be Amalekites, and they would not have to be killed. For example, the Israelite leader Caleb was born into the Kenizzites, who were very similar to the Amalekites on the points in question. Yet he became an Israelite.

So it is not a matter of "genociding the people in their entirety" because some of them were doing horrible things. It is actually a matter of "cutting off the abominations" per se. If the Amalekites were not engaging in abominations, they would not have been put under the ban.

Are we still on the same page? (I realize I still haven't gotten to children yet. :razz:)