The final authority that was, Paul was also pretty darn sophisticated in the art of philosophy, so he had some idea on how to gear the forum towards higher standards. Timothy was a moderator, as were some other grad students or undergrad students. — Posty McPostface

Sorry to come around to this a little late, but was Timothy the Pitt grad student? I know a lot of people at Pitt and I've always wanted to find out who it was I learned a lot from but it's a weird question to go around asking people.

Also, I'm really disappointed to discover that Paul is not Bitter Crank, which I thought for whatever reason was the case. I'm actually a bit fuzzy on the transition to this site. What happened to Paul? Why the change?

We also had a debate forum that encouraged higher quality posts on the old site. We even invited some professional philosophers, like Chalmers or Searle, to put in their thoughts to organized questions of the sort. So, there was certainly an incentive to post higher quality posts also. — Posty McPostface

I remember those posts well. I suspect that nowadays it would be a lot harder to get philosophers to do an AMA on a place like this since they'd rather go to something large like "Partially Examined Life" or Reddit. That's IMO part of the corrosive, changing dynamics of the internet.

Maybe one thing you guys might think about is asking younger Tenure-Track or even Grad Students on the job market to consider coming on here to present their work. I think they might like the exposure and interest, which is always hard to come by. They're also less prone to be divas and more likely to engage than, well, certain prominent philosophers.

I think you have both zeroed in on perhaps the biggest problem and are right to try and bring the issue wider awareness. My guess is that the current set-up is cleaner, nicer and more accessible but also corrosive of discourse.

Just as, for example, the previous system of upvotes/downvotes was fun but also cheapened discourse.

But certainly there is no greater tolerance for low quality posts here than there was on the old site, and there is no sudden drop in the philosophical skills of internet denizens. — Baden

Certainly, I did not mean to imply either that this site tolerates more low quality posts or that the folks on the new site are less interesting, sophisticated, intelligent, etc. than before. I think that my feeling - subjective, idiosyncratic, anecdotal - is that the way each of us communicates on internet forums like this has become less sophisticated over time. There's something different about how a site like this functions as a quasi-public space in 2018 as opposed to 2010 and I'm as "guilty" of this as anyone else.

Of course, this may be my falling into a tired reactionary trope, but it feels as though the rise of a certain modality of the internet in the 2010s - related to the colonizing of spaces and practices we find in Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, etc. -- has made us all slightly more glib and contentious than we were before.

It sticks closer to older issues and major figures, you'll find many discussions of solipsism, scientific realism and horrifically bad interpretations of quantum mechanics much more than people discussing current scholarship on the issues. [...] This makes moderating the site contentious at times, because it is actually pretty popular for an academic interest discussion forum and what makes it so is higher quality requirements and the mods' resisting the medium's natural tendency toward shitposting and meme-to-meme combat. So moderating policy also has to contain an element of attention economy management, this keeps things on topic and stops the forum being co-opted by special interest groups. Somewhat ironically, this is what makes it an island of free and reasoned expression amidst the sea of piss which is internet debate. — fdrake

I wonder to what extent you think this reflects changes in the internet itself. Perhaps I have an excessively nostalgic memory of the past, but the old version of this site struck me as far more interested in sophisticated and complex discussions. Very vaguely (since I always lurked but never posted), I remember learning a lot from a Pitt grad student with a Bertrand Russell avatar and a Thai (?) Marxist at Ohio State who made a lot of insightful comments about politics. We have some of those here (Streetlight!), but it seems to me the quality of discussion is not what it was on the old site (e.g. politics discussions between members like Maw and Augustino are vaguely interesting but not hugely illuminating) and there is little to no interest in academic philosophy. (No one discussing even major contemporary figures like Brandom, Ranciere, Noe, let alone serious current scholarship in semantics or QT.)

I am still massively enjoying this site, but it strikes me that this shift says more about the changing dynamics of the internet than the members or organization of this site. Petty political squabbling, shitposting, memes, emojis, etc. just seem to have been integrating into the practices of online communication in a way that's profoundly cheapened the conversation over the last decade.

Perhaps I am wrong on this?

He did believe that even truth is allways a falsification to some extend. I'd recomment to read "on truth and lies in an extra-moral sense" to understand where he's coming from, it's not that long... — ChatteringMonkey

Thanks for the recommendation. I have actually read almost everything published/unpublished he has written and of course all the major works several times. Personally, I want to resist the temptation to read too much into an early essay ("On Truth and Lies...") which Nietzsche chose not to publish. My own feeling is that the Theory folks make too much of that essay. If you have any recommendations on secondary literature I'd be happy to take a look.

But then he clearly also believes in some sense of truth, as is evident in numerous passages — ChatteringMonkey

I think I want to say senses of truth; it's a fools errand to get stuck in the antimony that Nietzsche either has a view of truth or rejects truth.

We begin with the most crude falsifications of the world, which then can eventially be refined into something that is progressively more accurate or less wrong. — ChatteringMonkey

My problem with this is that it's just a variation on the determinatio est negatio of Spinoza and Hegel. It just seems off to suggest that his views were that simple and he failed to credit Spinoza and Hegel (quite the contrary!).

Also note that truth and untruth, is not to be confounded with 'the will to truth' and 'the will to decieve' which is what he is talking about in the quote in the opening post. — ChatteringMonkey

It's an important distinction, to be sure, but re-read the opening quotation. He says nihilism and pessimism "is taken [by Nietzsche in the book] to be the truth" so we have to be careful dissecting what he means here. Again, if he meant "the will to truth" then I'm certain he would have said so.

I'm not sure Nietzsche really holds to any unequivocal notion of truth - — StreetlightX

My feeling is that he does. On my reading at least, it's a mistake to think that he equivocates about truth simply because he lacks a univocal conception of truth.

(cf. the famous: "What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions — they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins.) — StreetlightX

In short, I doubt that for Nietzsche the "What is Truth?" question allows for a singular answer, pragmatic or postmodern. This paragraph is certainly indicative of Nietzsche's views about how particular truths, particular manifestations of the will to truth, etc. function under certain (sickly) conditions. But I don't think he's making a strong claim about truth beyond (like Wittgenstein) attempting to diagnose how truths function in particular circumstances. Now, this may lead to reading him as a sort of pragmatist...

- and that he holds to a more or less pragmatic understanding of truth where truth simply is a variable plank in a larger assemblage of elements that allow one to live in some way or another (truth is as truth does, as it were). Raymond Geuss has a wonderful article (in his recent Changing the Subject) where he tries to disentangle some of the different ways in which Nietzsche talks about truth, depending on the context in which those discussions take place. — StreetlightX

...but I have concerns with that label. As your quote from Geuss indicates, Nietzsche seems to be aiming for a complex understanding of the multivocality of truth (and the ethics of truth) that nevertheless does not equivocate or reject truth. This is a way of thinking about truth which I think the whole global academic establishment seems not to have caught up with yet. (Whereas they've already successfully mined and catalogued similarly complex positions held by other great philosophers like Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, etc.)

Any attempt to treat Nietzsche on truth would need, I think, to attend to the multiplicity of these differing approaches. — StreetlightX

Truth as multiplicity. Leading me to feel that the original quote -- "One can see that in this book pessimism, or, to put it more clearly, nihilism, is taken to be the truth." -- remains puzzling.

[M]aybe people can [too] easily succomb to pessimism if they knew the terrible truth — Aleksander Kvam

It's an interesting question in this sense: How do @Streetlight's thoughts about the unity of embracing life-affirmation through the fire of nihilism relate to the movement of Western culture towards an increasing sense of resentment, decadence, and "willing-nothing rather than not willing"?

I'm not sure.

could he mean that truth is false? — Aleksander Kvam

I think it's more that the notion of transcendent truth is an illusion, so we have to embrace a notion of truth that is not blind to the role it plays in life. Here, I want to read Nietzsche as having a more Wittgensteinian conception of truth as real and worldly, as opposed to the much more popular post-modern notion that truth is just interpretation, construction and projection.

My understanding is that the 'democratic' reading of Nietzsche would go something like: the death of God requires a much wider cultural shift over the 200 years after the writing of Ecce Homo towards a culture capable of recognizing truth as neither projection/construction on a meaningless world nor grounded in something transcendent.

one of Nietzsche's recurring motifs is that nihilism, taken to the limit, effectively undermines itself [...] and that the real problem with nihilism is that it draws the wrong conclusions about its own procedures: not pessimsim, but unburdened affirmation is what you get once you leap through the fire of nihilism to get to the other side (hence also Nietzsche's self-declaration in the WTP of himself as a 'perfect nihilist'). — StreetlightX

I think this is right, and very informative, but I'm still trying to make sense of how to understand what constitutes "truth" in this formulation. It has taken me years to de-Heidegger my reading of Nietzsche, and I think I've always understood Nietzsche to be sharing Heidegger's basic conception of passionate involvement in the world wherein Schopenhauer et. al are simply in error about the ontological truth of what it means to be a human being who belongs to a world.

And this jibes with some of Nietzsche's other comments on truth, in which - far from simply devaluing it, he treats it as a measure of spirit: ""Something might be true, even if it were also harmful and dangerous in the highest degree; indeed, it might be part of the essential nature of existence that to understand it completely would lead to our own destruction. The strength of a person’s spirit would then be measured by how much “truth” he could tolerate, or more precisely, to what extent he needs to have it diluted, disguised, sweetened, muted"; — StreetlightX

There's a question here, at least to my mind, about where conceptual truth comes into the picture. Certainly we could reproach the Homeric and Sophoclean Greeks for their lack of conceptual understanding. So perhaps truth as the measure of a spirit comes when we incorporate the well-ordered instincts of the Homeric Greeks with the conceptual knowledge afforded us by the post-Socrates/post-Christian West? This may be me projecting too much of a Bildungsgeschichte onto Nietzsche.

These are all phenomenal posts and I have learned a lot from each of you.

[Nietzsche] considers that a person "addicted" to truth is ugly and weak. They can't "rise up" and affirm life. They can't "rise up" and affirm life. There is no art, there is no journey, there is no ambition or passion or any of that. This is why Nietzsche criticizes Christianity, Platonism, Socrates, Buddhism, etc for being "nihilistic" and death-worshipping. — darthbarracuda

I think that this is right but that the psychology is reversed -- weakness encourages an addiction to truth, rather than the other way around. The initial healthy, biological value of our intellectual capacities, wherein truth is responsible to life; truth is a means of improving the circumstances in which one finds oneself, is perverted into its own ascetic ideal. Perhaps it's because we lack the strength to give up on truth? That is, to admit its illusory character? This jumps out at me:

"The will to appearance, illusion, deception, becoming and change (to objective deception) is here taken to be more profound, more primordial, more metaphysical than the will to truth, reality and being - the latter is merely a form of the will to illusion."

So, reality, truth and being are "a form of the will to illusion" - this is bad! - but then his alternative is "the will to...illusion". Nietzsche seems to think that truth is illusion, and that illusion is not bad but needs to be embraced in a way that cannot be done from within the will to truth.

Nietzsche wasn't exactly the most impressive person all things considered. His philosophy of the Ubermensch looks more like a fantasy day-dream than something that can be seriously put into practice and lived. — darthbarracuda

Wasn't he, though? I'm not sure what could be more impressive than being one of the 100 most intellectually sophisticated people in the history of this planet, opening up entirely new ways of thinking and leading scores of readers navigate life's journeys. In this respect, I'll suggest that the idea of the Ubermensch is - to put it simply - embracing the strive and struggle of becoming as a means of continual self-perfection. And it seems to me he accomplished that in his own life.

Of course, it's a question of the goods we seek in life. But I wouldn't be quick to denigrate the goods achieved in the course of Nietzsche's life.

Nietzsche should be integrated into a broader pessimistic worldview that includes things like antinatalism, in my opinion. — darthbarracuda

I would of course be very excited to read anything you might have to say in terms of gesturing towards how such a broader pessimistic worldview might look like.

My suggestion is you just go ahead and start reading those texts on their own and see what you make of them. Allow yourself to grow with the texts. This isn't mathematics or physics where you need to go from A to B to C. In philosophy you can spend a lifetime reading any great book over and over again.

I don't think that's likely. — Ciceronianus the White

Makes sense. Why even bother with academic philosophy when reading Being & Time makes you a thousand times more profound than any of the poor souls toiling away in academia?

It may be necessary to use the words "essence" and "Being" and "existence" quite often — Ciceronianus the White

Obviously, because if you had to translate those words into basic English then you wouldn't be doing philosophy but engaging in some perverse brand of Cartesianism.

Would hyphens count as words? — Ciceronianus the White

If you even have to ask then obviously you haven't read Volume 58 of the gesammelte Werke you god damn philistine.

And it would be challenging, but I think I could manage. — Ciceronianus the White

Well, it would certainly make a fun thread. :up:

[a] And the idea that all that makes sex moral is "consent", is related to capitalism, because it makes sex out to be a service or exchange between two parties- [c] the buyer and the seller. Invariably the buyer is the man, the seller is the woman. The woman is the object, the man is the subject. — darthbarracuda

Okay...so where exactly does this massive inference from [a] to [c] about human relations and sexual practices come from?

The woman is the object, the man is the subject. — darthbarracuda

Well, sure, if you deny women agency by inferring that women aren't just as capable of facilitating and enjoying their own sexual encounters as men are.

The man orgasms in ~5 minutes, the woman never does. — darthbarracuda

*ahem* Perhaps what's needed is more experience in healthy, hetrosexual practices, rather than repudiating them? This would also give a fuller sense of partnership and equality between the sexes.

In fact, the notion of sexual consent itself brings with it certain revealing assumptions. We do not typically ask for consent for other activities - I do not ask for consent to sit across from you, for example. I do not ask for consent when I approach a cashier to check out from the grocery store. — darthbarracuda

So...some things require consent and others do not? How exactly is this revealing beyond our collective interest in basic respect for human dignity and bodily autonomy?

So then what is it about sex that makes consent so important? — darthbarracuda

Basic respect for human dignity and bodily autonomy.

sex is inherently violating, objectifying, manipulating. Consider: it is usually the man who asks for consent of the woman — darthbarracuda

This is a really sad, slightly impoverished view of sex and female autonomy that I urge you to reconsider. Consent is about preventing the potential of violation, objectification and manipulation. You're essentiallizing the corruption of a potentially beautiful relationship between willing adults. It's the quintessential pessimist's move, to suggest that the potential for corruption makes the whole activity "inherently" bad or meaningless.

Yet this is clearly contradictory, you cannot ask a person to suspend their dignity and still claim to respect them as a person. — darthbarracuda

Okay, here's a question. Is an autonomous sexual partner who enjoys sexual liasons with men, feels empowered and sees absolutely nothing wrong with her choices "suspend[ing her] dignity"? Certainly, it seems to me that, if anything, you're suspending her dignity by projecting your negative remarks onto her.

I enjoy thinking about The Nothing, which can't be discussed but which I encounter only by the dread I feel when thinking of Heil--wait, I mean HEIL--wait I mean that back-stabbing, anti-Semitic, Hitler-worshipping acolyte of the "inner truth and greatness of National Socialism"; Joseph Goebbels' Mini-Me, that... — Ciceronianus the White

Nothing would make me happier than to read 1,000 words of this in the form of a dissertation proposal or grad school application. :lol:

I view Dimitri as the "most successful" of the 3 brothers — Agustino

Well, that's one of the sources of the beauty of the novel, it's purposefully set-up so that each of us will identify with different characters in different ways depending upon our own personality, inclinations, motivations, desires, etc. But still, Dostoyevsky never hid his intent that Alyosha was to be the protagonist and spiritual heart of the novel. I doubt he would have explicitly stated that in the preface if it weren't at least intended to signal something important to everyone who reads the novel, even those who (for example) identify more with Dimitri.

I disagree with your interpretation of Dimitri. I view Dimitri as the "most successful" of the 3 brothers, the one who ultimately rights his wrongs and emerges on top, despite the fact that he ends up sentenced for a crime he did not commit. — Agustino

This reconciliation of his personality and its flaws only comes after his arrest, through the act of expiation, when he embraces his fate with the help of Alyosha. His initial motivations (to do away with the 'base', 'sensual', 'Karamazov' side, as he puts it in his first talk with Alyosha early in the novel) are untenable and lead him to ruin in the form of nearly killing either his father and/or Grigory Vasilievich. Only an existential 'miracle', in the form of brute luck and contingency, saves him, and opens him up to salvation through expiation and forgiveness. Alyosha plays a key role in this.

The problem with Alyosha is that he never put his hand in the fire so to speak. He was always a spectator, whatsoever was happening, was not happening to him. — Agustino

I hope you won't be offended if I ask how long it's been since you've actually read the book. Perhaps it's been a while? In any case, this goes so completely against everything Dostoyevsky intended for the novel and every academic interpretation I am familiar with that it would be interesting for you to try and reasonably defend this position. I suspect if you take another look at the text with a fresh set of eyes you might be surprised by how passionately involved Alyosha is with the development and fate of all the major characters in the book.

Each apple is so much different from the other that it is hard to imagine how we can talk about (number) two apples. And that is a miracle we do almost every moment of our life – without noticing what we are doing. — Damir Ibrisimovic

It seems that we need to reinvent our theories to enable unique phenomena occurring in our picture of the universe. — Damir Ibrisimovic

I hope you won't be offended if I offer my retort, in good natured jest, in the form of a small dialogue.

Person A: I have observed two apples. I was quite shocked! They were so different! And I must admit to you that I have thus concluded that we must rethink anew all of our scientific and philosophical theories hitherto!
Person B: Wouldn't it make a lot more sense to first lay some doubt upon your observation?
Person A: Nonsense! I must post this to the internet at once!
Person B: Good, well then perhaps you should set to work reinventing the whole theoretical apparatus which enables internet, wifi, computing, satellites and microchips first.
***
Descartes (waking up from night sweats): Surely I must quit leaving the oven on while I fall asleep. It leads to the most awful hallucinations.

Could anyone please explain to me why Dimitry has to look for 3,000 roubles when he apparently has them tied to his neck the whole time? Also, why does he have to look for the full amount when he apparently split it in two and only spent 1,500? — Daniel Miller

I suppose the simple answer is this: Dimitri spends the whole book in a state of anxiety about the relationship between his 'lofty' side (inherited from his mother) and his 'base', sensual side (inherited from his father) and what this means for his character, identity, existence and future. Spending 1,500 rubles impulsively in frivolous sensuality while keeping 1,500 close to his breast and always on his mind is illustrative of this 'split' which drives his character. This then motivates his manic anxiety throughout the events of the novel and causes Dimitri to feel implicitly that if he can get his father to pay the full 3,000 so that Dimitri can "go away for ever" then his father will have enabled the symbolic release by means of which Dimitri could let go of the base Karamazov side and embrace his 'lofty' side.

Thematically, it's shown to be a fools errand because (a) an attempt to deny one side of your complex motivations leads to ruin (as illustrated by Dimitri's fate); (b) a personality which lacks this tension is bound to turn out either evil or brutish (as illustrated by Ivan's and Fydor's fate); (c) Joy is found in embracing both sides in a well-ordered set of instincts rather than pitting them against each other (as illustrated by Alyosha's fate and Zosima's shortcomings).

It's even worse than that. People have been making the circumstantial case for a little while that Trump attended the meeting via speakerphone. Giuliani essentially confirmed this hunch today when he emphatically denied that Trump physically attended the meeting but refused to say point blank that he did not attend the meeting.

Run out and buy yourself a copy of The Brothers Karamazov, like, right now. Don't ask why, don't read a bunch of stuff that's going to contextualize it for you, just go experience it as soon as you can.

I'm getting first hand information as to what is meant by "Trump Derangement Syndrome" on this thread. — raza

:lol: Trump has you deranged, buddy. All I'm doing is demonstrating your own bad judgment by posting a couple times in this thread and living my life, you're posting dozens of times a day about your obsession with Trump, so it's not surprising you project your derangement onto others. Also, way to skip straight to ad hominem in order to skip any meaningful reflection on how thoroughly whipped your logic is. :lol:

I think that the aim is to nurture a particular kind of posturing. Hence ‘trolling’ and ‘owning the libs’. It’s signalling to supporters a certain sort of ironic cynicism that refuses to believe in anything, no matter how well proven, demonstrated or established. The purpose of lying en masse is not to negate this or that truth but to re-order the sense in which people cope with the real world. It’s an assault on our capacity to meaningfully discuss the distinction between truth and reality, not an attempt to convince an audience that any particular falsehood is true.

(FN: This is me pretty much paraphrasing Arendt.)

It's not for me. It's for the impeachment process. It will falter or it will not, based on evidence presented to that particular forum and how it may be defended. — raza

I was pretty disgusted when I was told that you partake in cannibalistic orgies with actual family members. Doubly so when it came to light that some think you have been snatching local babies for that purpose. To my mind, it's starting to paint a picture of why you oppose abortion. Of course, it's not for me to judge. I'm not endorsing any of these claims. But given their serious nature I think it's crucial that Philosophy Forum open up a process that will falter or not based on the evidence presented. Don't worry, you'll have plenty of time to defend yourself against these heinous accusations in front of your friends, family and the media. Surely, you shouldn't be bothered by the fact that those acting as judges and prosecutors and offering political spin will be your political enemies. If you're innocent, like you say, the facts will surely clear you.

A stage of "the process" has begun, has it not? Introduction of the resolution? — raza

Look, I'm just saying that we leftists here at PF have decided to withhold judgment on whether you're a child-snatching incest-crazed cannibal until everyone gets their say and all the evidence comes out over the course of a rigorous process. Incidentally, we'll be running the process. Of course, you shouldn't be bothered that we have a huge incentive to find you guilty. If you're innocent, like you say, the facts will surely clear you.

Now, I didn't say he wasn't carrying out his duties. I merely paraphrased as to why the impeachment. — raza

Now, I've never said that you're a child-snatching incest-crazed cannibal. I am merely paraphrasing why the banning.

Also - this kind of thing, where one is persuaded not at the level of belief, but at the level of 'topic of interest' is one place where I think persuasion has a role on forums like these. Some of my most consequential shifts in thought haven't been from changing an already held position, but having an interest aroused where it would not have done otherwise.

To put it in terms I like to use: I've been persuaded about questions, not answers. The most interesting interactions on the forum are not - are never - 'oh you're right', but 'oh I didn't think about that'. — StreetlightX

Gosh, I never know if it's a good idea to interrupt the conversation and backtrack after I've been too busy to get on here for several days but in this case I will just for the dumb comment: I agree!

I think that one problem with the conception of persuasion implicitly offered in the OP is that it seems to set us to work on a static conception of truth and reason. You can't persuade someone to change their long-held philosophical views because a person's philosophy doesn't boil down to the possession of a position which is inferred from the given of 'facts', 'truth', 'modes of reasoning', whatever. It's a lot more organic than that, it involves the development of your whole person. The best you can hope for is the honor of influencing another person's organic development (unless of course you're a tin-pot dictator who has other means of persuasion.).

I finally got around to reading Capital Vol. 1 for the first time late last year and was impressed by a lot of misconceptions which I think surround it. Beyond the opening few chapters, it's far more focused on description and analysis than theory, and a lot of the concerns he's raising deal with irrefutably awful stuff, unless one's pro de facto child slavery. It's certainly not a 1000+ page theoretical edifice a la Kant, which is what I think scares people off.

There may be other laws which apply. I don't know, and am not inclined to research that right now, having quite enough legal work for which I'm being paid (though not enough). — Ciceronianus the White

The crime they seem to pursuing in this regard -- in addition to the possibility of various financial crimes, wire-fraud, conspiracy to commit cyber crimes. etc. -- is: Conspiracy to Defraud the United States and Conspiracy to Commit an Offense Against the United States. This would certainly qualify as "treason" in any reasonable colloquial, moral or political discourse, though of course not in the legal sense.

I am pretty surprised that no one has seriously discussed the role of mentorship and friendship yet. My friends have persuaded me on lots of subjects, while good teachers have exposed me to entirely new ways of thinking about the world, and indeed over time persuaded me to approach my life very differently (I wonder: where would I be without teachers who made existentialism and phenomenology come alive?). In both cases this persuasion is reciprocal, and I would like to think that I influence and persuade my friends in equal measure, and that I might someday (with luck) pay back my debt to my teachers by helping to persuade students to embrace new ways of thinking about the world by exposing them to whatever ways of thinking will help them develop and flourish in their own lives.

I am also a little surprised that veteran members on this site don't develop the sort of friendship where they might persuade each other on some crucial subjects (I'll just say that some posts from Streetlight have recently got me reading some figures like Connolly differently), but still I honestly don't know why anyone would expect to persuade a fully-developed, non-friend to significantly change their minds on anything. Philosophy lives in friendship and mentorship.

Frankly, say what you will, but I'm glad that we have Republicans in power to protect the Constitution, and the original intention of the Founding Fathers, which of course was a system of checks and balances in which the judiciary branch surreptitiously coordinates with the executive branch then lies about it to the American people with a mass-media-politial-spectacle in order to enrich one other by installing a judge who aims to give the president king-like powers.

Please address the actual argument and tell me what premise(s) you disagree with. — Relativist

They are addressing your argument. If you provide no epistemological justification in favor of adopting your form of argument -- in this case, you jump straight into an attempt to prove a variety of truths about the nature of evil, free will, God, suffering and the world in under ten propositions -- then your interlocutors are under no obligation to adopt your preferred form of argument in order to dispute your reasoning and conclusions.

I think what you've written here is a decent try at rebutting one particular form of one particular argument that some theologians have made historically. But you seem to think that this would extend to (a) defeating all possible theological arguments on the point (rather than attempting to show that one particular theological argument is self-defeating on its own terms); (b) your argument having actually made definitive statements on its own merits (about God, free will, etc.), rather than merely showing some possible contradictions in a felonious theological argument.

It's written in the Guidelines, which I hope everyone wandering in off the street or off anything else would read: :) — Baden

As with all guidelines, I'm guessing the rules are a tad malleable if @frank has some of that $100 million dollar super pac money to throw your way, or if he happens to be cousins with the owner of the site. :lol:

I have the feeling that if I hadn't encountered many of the (kantian and post-kantian) ideas in them already, his essays would have seemed so scintillatingly insightful that I would have been inclined to go along with the rest of what he says. But, having encountered those ideas before, the additional concepts he constructs from them seem like severely unjustified leaps. — csalisbury

Not to stray too far off topic, but what you say about your reading of Latour here is something I've noticed more and more in my own experience reading a lot of philosophers over the past year and a half or so. I'm much less impressed by a lot of folks than I was at age, like, 20-25, because their sources and conjuring tricks are more transparent to me now. So I'm really glad to see someone echo this sentiment -- the first time I've seen/heard it -- since the few times I've ventured to articulate the idea with friends and colleagues it seems to come across as an arrogant dismissal, though I don't think it is.

It's got me thinking that a true understanding of many of these philosophers is like love, involving a sort of willful ignoring of their faults, and the age at which you encounter a philosopher is really key, because (e.g.) Latour is going to be better at convincing younger readers to become engrossed in his work. I take this to be a pervasive phenomenon in French philosophy in particular, with people like Cioran, Rancière, Badiou, even Onfray trying to win over Bac aged youngins to their style of thought probably more than their actual colleagues, consequently borrowing liberally from a lot of historical thinkers and subjects (e.g. math) without a huge amount of worry over rigour.

I don't know if you read different threads to me, but I think that's overly magnanimous. I'd rather your generous optimism than my bitter misanthropy but I'm struggling to see how you're interpreting the sort of statements we regularly get here as quirks of the format and not the narcissistic excesses anonymity encourages. — Pseudonym

I think it's not so much that I am more optimistic than you about the camaraderie on this forum than it is that I am far more pessimistic than you about the shockingly bad behavior of academic philosophers and theorists. This forum is far more cordial than the websites which cater to academics and graduate students.

the rejection of a priori knowledge (which, as I mentioned to Wayfarer) is what this is really about, — Pseudonym

This strikes me as precisely the type of narrow position I agree with darth is wrong-headed. I have no problem with rejecting the notion of a priori knowledge. But this doesn't banish philosophy to mere knowledge of our own 'mental states' as you said, perhaps with an intentionally polemic tone.

If the only method of communicating some insight is so open to interpretation that virtually any conclusion could be drawn from reading it, then nothing had really been achieved by studying it. — Pseudonym

But it's not so much that these works are merely "open to interpretation" as it is that they are inevitably "open to misinterpretation", so to speak. The same holds for art. Returning to an earlier analogy, someone might not understand or appreciate a Tarkovsky film because they lack any sense of film as art, and this says nothing about the film so much as the viewer. Or perhaps they have a sense of film but not for certain types of films. Roger Ebert, for example, criticizes a lot of films that became genuine classics because he failed to understand and appreciate them. But it would seem weird to say that it reflects negatively on these films because they were open to the sort of misinterpretation that gets articulated in Ebert's reviews. (Blue Velvet is not a misogynistic film about sexual fantasy, for example, but a very interesting and profound film which touches on many important themes. Yet it is simply not possible for a great work of art that touches on its themes to save itself from this sort of misinterpretation.)

but what justification do we have for thinking ourselves more likely to find it by determining what Heidegger really meant than by simply following through whatever we think he means? — Pseudonym

I am likely misinterpreting this, but I think it raises a very interesting and valuable point not touched on in the OP. I have often wondered why we take it for granted that we can so much as understand what the great geniuses of human history think. It's very strange that there are hundreds of universities in the US alone giving 18 year old students paper topics asking them to critique the thought of geniuses. Surely this must represent our epoch's egalitarian mindset in some sense. And this is not to denigrate 18 year olds. Perhaps all of us -- including academic philosophers -- are not so smart. I've been wondering a lot recently "Why do we talk so much about Nietzscche, Hegel, Heidegger, etc. like we actually understand? Perhaps we don't. Perhaps it's actually the case that they are much much smarter than me and those I talk with." Anyway, perhaps a useless aside here.

But the overwhelming evidence from decades of investigation is that it cannot be established whether an interpretation is "closer to his actual position". — Pseudonym

I guess that I just flat out disagree with this statement. We can't understand a great philosophical work for the same reason that we can't understand our best friend. It doesn't mean that our friendship is useless. It just means that a human being -- or a work of great philosophy -- is too enormously complex to be understood. And not complex through sheer "genius" in a sense of knowledge of truths, but complex in the sense as motivated in contradictory ways; presenting different faces to different people; providing an interesting or funny way of looking at things in different contexts. The mistake isn't to question the person or the work, the mistake is to think that you can devour the person or work like a geometrical proof.

In my profession I have cause to discuss matters with professional philosophers and almost exhaustively I've found them to be humble about their beliefs and accepting of their limited nature. Most published papers will use terminology like "it seems to me...", "I find X more persuasive because...", or "my feeling is that...". It's only places like this, where people are desperate to prove themselves that you will encounter the more dogmatic "so and so proves that...", "you've misunderstood what X means", "you don't know what you're talking about until you've read X..." etc. As I say, no academic philosopher I've ever met actually speak like that, but it seems entirely de rigueur here, and that's a disappointment. — Pseudonym

These are valid and interesting points, but I’m not sure that they are cause for disappointment. I think that most of your concerns reflect the limitations of an internet forum. Faceless people quickly constructing written posts back-and-forth can come across as much ruder or more arrogant than they are in reality. I recently joined, and I am still fairly shocked at how obnoxious many of my posts read, but I don’t belive that this reveals anything significant about my character. (I hope not!) People come across strange in email too.

I am curious about your profession and who you are dealing with, but if you are dealing with tenured professors I'll suggest that a lot of this might be age rather than career success. Over time, I think, philosophy humbles you. A lot of graduate students tend to think they're going to be the next canonical genius. Getting older often means coming to grips with the limits of philosophy and of one's own intelligence. It's why we can all use a good dose of the OP in our youth. :smile:

Nietzsche is just as valid a target of your argument as Kant, or Lewis. It doesn't matter what the target of his philosophical propositions were, nor the result of an 'understanding' of them, it is still your understanding of them, It is still monumentally narcissistic of Nietzsche to write (especially in such a obscure manner), with the intention that his understanding of the world (even Nihilistically), actually means anything other than as an insight into his own mental state. — Pseudonym

I guess that my concern is that you’re here presenting a very relativistic version of what @darthbarracuda has said, making it a far less effective criticism (to my mind) of rationalism et al. If a philosopher is narcissistic because they claim to have insight into anything whatsoever other than their own mental state then there is a lot of ground we will have to cover, but I suspect that such an extreme position will not hold up to extended scrutiny. It at least makes the OP less interesting to me, since I thought it was a beautiful and subtle critique of a certain style of thought, laying forward the sort of questions and concerns which led me to philosophy in the first place.

In terms of critiquing Philosophy, the effects are what is relevant, not the intentions. If the effect of the presentation of certain existential texts is that they are wielded as evidence in a pseudo-analytical project, then they are as guilty of misleading as the analyst. — Pseudonym

This strikes me as very broad as well. Do philosophers have to be so precise as to eliminate all possible misinterpretations?

Again, this is more the case outside of academia where you here nonsense like "that's not Heidegger's point..." (which I read recently), like any of us actually have a clue what Heidegger's point actually is. I guarantee you that if you name any conceivable interpretation of Heidegger I will find you a published author who has proposed it. — Pseudonym

Is that nonsense, though? I suppose you might be alluding to something I wrote, since I have been sticking my nose in several Heidegger threads. Anyhow, you seem to suggest that we can’t meaningfully discuss Heidegger — in the same manner you suggest earlier that we can’t discuss anything beyond our mental states — because no one knows anything for sure and all we have are a jumble of possible interpretations.

Again, this strikes me as committed to a sort of relativism I can’t stomach and I hope was not the meaning of the OP. I suppose I just think that it’s fair game, if someone is critiquing Heidegger, to retort that they are criticizing a position they seem to be incorrectly ascribing to Heidegger, and to offer what one takes to be something closer to his actual position. It would be rather uncharitable to suggest that everyone who writes this way reveals a narcissistic drive to prove themselves.

There is something noble and, as Descartes and Husserl (et al) noticed, an ethical dimension to the philosophical endeavor. But yes, I am less concerned with other forms of philosophy here than I am with others, you are correct about this. When speaking of philosophy I have in mind a certain kind of philosophy rather than "philosophy" in the abstract. Anti-philosophy is still philosophy, etc etc. I have in mind philosophers who evidently see philosophy as some kind of grand narrative that almost ought to be worshiped, its traditional problems as of utmost importance. Philosophy is used to banish evil ideas, solipsism, relativism, skepticism, "nihilism", etc. — darthbarracuda

But it's not a trivial point. It strikes me as a particularly narrow viewpoint to reserve the title of capital-p Philosophy for the practice of attempting to give grand narratives of the ultimate truth of reality, then to denigrate the rest of philosophy as only counting in an "abstract" sense. It reads like someone who would perhaps have had a significant critique in 1805, but is now merely rejecting a certain sort of philosophy; namely, highly rational/logical/cognitivistic approaches. The concerns are a good contribution to philosophy (!) but surely misguided as a critique external to philosophy. Philosophy is practiced within our human forms of life and there's nothing skeptical about admitting this. It's not either capital-p Philosophy or naked skepticism. It's a false choice.

It's significant to me that we have no clear foundation for knowledge and that at the end of the day we really just have to hope that certain things are true. — darthbarracuda

Yup, I agree with the first clause. But surely I don't quit doing philosophy in any meaningful or valuable sense the moment I reject foundationalism, nor does this entail that I merely "hope" certain things are true. Meaningfully philosophizing about the world and truth(s) does not require an apodictic story about the ultimate ground of truth.

I think the general skepticism of this thread has not ever been refuted but simply passed by because there are "more important" things to do. — darthbarracuda

I think -- although I shouldn't speak for others -- it's because a lot of us agree with you that rationalism, grand narratives, foundationalism, etc. are wrong approaches to philosophy and life! But that doesn't condemn philosophy anymore than hating Hollywood filmmaking condemns film as art.

:sad: — Wayfarer

:smile:

(Edit: Cleaned up the text a bit.)

Philosophy is an anthropocentric narcissism of the highest magnitude that entails an exceptional view of the power of reason. To hold any theoretical belief is to assert that one has a special place in nature, a privileged position concocted by the illusions called "knowledge" and "understanding". — darthbarracuda

I have been debating whether to try and dispute this post point by point. But I think that all of my concerns lead to this: Why do you take philosophy to be merely an exercise in rational knowledge, truth, and theoretical belief? This strikes me as a very sad and limited vision of the role and value of philosophy in the practice of our lives. Hence when you make assertions such as --

Yet it has not been shown that "understanding" has any relation to truth. — darthbarracuda

-- surely philosophy is characterized over and against other disciplines or modes of thought precisely in its being the pursuit of understanding, not knowledge. Just to extend this out a bit, this makes me think that your complaints, for example --

Reality is forcibly coerced into reason, subjugated by the ambitions of a finite being whose narcissism tells him that reality can be "understood", and that the limits of his faculties forms the limits of the world itself. — darthbarracuda

-- are reasonable objections to a certain sort of philosophy that I too hate (e.g. Continental Rationalism and huge swaths of analytic philosophy), but not, as you assert, philosophy as a whole; that is, not philosophy as a practice or as the whole history of a tradition.

But neither he, nor they, have had any inkling of Sophia in my book. Cast your mind back to the Greeks - the things they were able to conceive of and develop, due to the power of reason, ought to astound you. — Wayfarer

What exactly, on your view, did they accomplish? Many of the pre-Socratics articulated beautiful and thought-provoking visions of the world and reality in spite of these visions being rationally and scientifically unsound. Socrates seems to me to have accomplished little beyond his kamikaze mission to destroy his own bodily existence while hastening the collapse of Athenian society. Aristotle is great insofar as he either simply articulated or categorized the biological, social, political, etc. forms of life he experienced from within the Greek normative framework he took for granted, but everything he did beyond this (e.g. the Physics) was an absolute disaster when taken up for rational articulation by the Medieval Christians.

It's a semantic quibble over what obtains in reality (Sachverhalt) and what not necessarily so or is otherwise possible (Sachlage). — Posty McPostface

Sorry, I don't think that I understand what is meant by "semantic quibble" here.

Yeah, that's not how I understand Sachlage. More like a possible configuration of atomic facts giving rise to it having a 'sense'. — Posty McPostface

I'm not sure if you're objecting to my way of posing things ("how stuff lies together") or the dictionary-definition I provided of "objective situation", or both. But like I said my object was not to present a 'best' way of reading these passages, only to show how different ways of translating the words might provoke different notions of what's going on in those passages.

Sachverhalt is what is and Sachlage is what could be. — Posty McPostface

As to your suggestion here, let's look at the larger scaffolding for a second:

1. The World is all that is the case.

1.1 The world is the totality of facts, not things.

1.2 The world divides into facts.

2. What is the case—a fact—is the existence of a state of affairs. [Was der Fall ist, die Tatsache, ist das Bestehen von Sachverhalten.] — L.W.

The world is all that is the case and what is the case is the Bestehen of a Sachverhalten. One way of thinking about this is that the world is "how stuff hangs together". And it is holding together particular ways the facts might lie together--Sachlage.

So I am tempted to think that it is not semantic quibbling to worry about the best translation of these terms, different ways of rendering them, etc. I am willing to accept your goal of a simplified way of rendering things but I would be wary of doing so at the expense of other avenues.

Edit: Wow, I am tired and made all kinds of little errors in e.g. singular/plural, and it's amazing how such small mistakes present ideas in a totally different (wrong) light as a result of the acerbic beauty of this book.

So, I hope I'm not going too off topic here. I'm just trying to understand if there is any apparent difference between 'Sachlage' (state of affairs) and 'Sachverhalt' (atomic facts). — Posty McPostface

I think that it might sometimes help to break these words apart and refit variations on each word into Wittgenstein's sentences just to see what comes out.

For Sach-lage, I like to think of "how stuff lies together". It might also mean an "objective situation" or "state of affairs", or even (in limited cases) "cause".

For Sach-verhalt, I like to think of "how stuff holds together". The dictionary definition is literally "Tatsachen und ihre Zusammenhänge", so it might also mean "facts and their relationships".

Now, re-reading the sections you quoted, let me re-translate them a bit. Not to improve them, but just to show how monkeying around with the translation can help provide different thoughts about interpretation:

2.0121
It would, so to speak, appear as an accident, when to a thing that could exist alone on its own account, subsequently an [objective situation] could be made to fit.
If things can occur in [facts and relationships], this possibility must already lie in them.

(A logical entity cannot be merely possible. Logic treats of every possibility, and all possibilities are its facts.)

Just as we cannot think of spatial objects at all apart from space, or temporal objects apart from time, so we cannot think of any object apart from the possibility of its connexion with other things.

If I can think of an object in the context of [how stuff hangs together], I cannot think of it apart from the possibility of this context. — L.W.

Objects contain the possibility of all [objective situations].

(Alternatively:) Objects contain all possible ways stuff might lie together. — L.W.

The possibility of its occurrence in [how stuff holds together] is the form of the object. — L.W.

What do you think? Is this useful or misleading and overly complicated?

Maybe, but not in this essay. Pay attention to his references to Hegel. This essay is not complete gibberish. It seems like you're suggesting that it is. — frank

Could you reproduce what you consider to be the relevant/important passages? It feels like having a bit of text to work from might help give some direction to a conversation that's now sort of spinning in a void.

Also :up: :lol:

I answered your question and your response didn't make any sense. As far as I'm concerned I'm arguing about treating people with basic human dignity. — Baden

I don't want to be a nuisance, stepping into a very serious thread with an overly academic remark, but have you read Anscombe's "Modern Moral Philosophy"? The famous remark I have in mind:

But if someone really thinks, in advance, that it is open to question whether such an action as procuring the judicial execution of the innocent should be quite excluded from consideration — I do not want to argue with him; he shows a corrupt mind.” — G.E.M. Anscombe

That's my unshakable feeling about arguing with anyone pro-child concentration camp. There's no meaningful moral conversation to be had; the conversation itself is a form of corruption.

I need an answer to this question so I use the only tools at my disposal. I know these tools are not entirely satisfactory: science gives provisional answers, probability even more so but the pure logic tool failed to give an answer for 1000s of years and there are no other tools to use. — Devans99

Well, I wish you the best of luck. :smile: I hope you might consider the alternative of embracing the idea that it is not a question which admits of an answer; that the question itself is the first step in a movement towards faith in God's pervasive love (Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky) and/or the joyful immanence of discovery and creation in a world one can share with friends, family, and community (Nietzsche). That is, the question is embraced and answered in how you live a life rather than a solution you give in words.

In either case, I suggest you consider engaging a bit with this wonderful thread.

I fail to appreciate your objections. We can have absolute knowledge of abstract concepts only (eg logic and maths); we can never have absolute knowledge of the physical world.

So we can discuss the physical world as much as we like but we will never reach any conclusions without employing probability. — Devans99

I'm not posing an objection as much as a skeptical worry that you're a flesh and blood animal employing concepts which you acquired in the course of participating in an earth-bound human form of life and it seems bad philosophical practice to investigate the nature and origin of both all that is and the existence of entities as such without first giving some consideration as to why you feel entitled to hold that these abstract concepts are capable of doing that sort of work. This needs some initial justification before you get going with probabilities and all that.

I should add that I am putting this concern out there only as a good faith effort to suggest additional philosophical problems you might want to consider as part of your reflections. :smile: