Comments

  • Wittgenstein's solipsist from Tractatus.
    The way I read Wittgenstein is that both "solipsism" and "realism" are not about the world but both are evasions of the tortuous life of saying what the "case" is.
    Wittgenstein doesn't like people who cut in line.
  • Reading Group, Preface to Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Walter Kaufman.

    Is that remark purely about the link?
    Or do you object to using Miller's translation?
  • Platonic Realism and Its Relation to Physical Objects
    I think it's more that such a distinction was not part of Aristotle's lexicon. No philosophers of his day expressed their ideas in terms of "objective" and "subjective", it's much more characteristic of the modern period, although the significance is more than just lexical.Wayfarer

    I take your point regarding distinctions made then and now. In the context of the Platonic discussion of how beings "participate" in the forms, Aristotle is giving weight toward the cosmos shaping the conditions of knowledge over seeing the intellect as something that is primarily about the centrality of any individual thinker. Both views are pertinent and discussed. It comes down to what is the ground of what that tips Aristotle's hand.
    In the discussion on this thread and looking generally at the "history of philosophy" point of view, it seems how time is framed as an experience ends up being a big change between then and now.

    I saw this when I found the other passage. I wonder how far he intends for us to push the analogy. The tool requires the hand to manipulate it. If the intellect is analogous that suggests that the reception of forms by the intellect and senses is not passive.Fooloso4

    Aristotle agreed with that. That is an element in him saying that the influence of the sensed/known thing is not like setting another thing into motion. The receptivity of the ensouled being to become other things than itself at the same time it was being itself is not explained but presented as a phenomenon. And that element relates to the problem of presenting "forms" shaping "passive" matter. If the imagination is like this passive stuff, why is it so darn busy? The begged question was about figuring what is dead.
  • An epistemological proof of the external world.

    That does make sense.
    I will have to mull upon it.
  • An epistemological proof of the external world.

    That works for me.
    But i have to confess that I never got the solipsism thing. In any of its iterations.
    I am probably the wrong person to ask. I simply do not understand the idea.
  • An epistemological proof of the external world.
    I did not read that text that way.
    The "deceiver" does not cause the doubt but takes advantage of it. Doubt is the natural element of Reason. The idea that one is being mislead by appearances on purpose is not a promotion of the isolation of solipsism but points to the difficulty of thinking for oneself.
    From that point of view, Descartes' answer may be too easy.
  • Platonic Realism and Its Relation to Physical Objects

    but as I read it Aristotle is not claiming, as Wayfarer is, that world and mind arise together as objective and subjective poles.Fooloso4

    In the matter of Aristotle saying " Actual knowledge is identical with its object" (431a1), the "potential" knowing is the absence of the object until it is present. In the comparing of perception and knowledge, Aristotle focuses on our capacity for the actuality of the object to be the cause of perception in time:

    "It is clear that the object of perception makes that which can perceive actively so instead of potentially so; for it is not affected or altered." (431a4)

    If this wasn't the case, perception would not help the ensouled being survive. The universe would just be fake news.

    Building on the element of being actualized, Aristotle says:

    "To the thinking soul images serve as sense-perceptions (aisthemeta). And when it asserts or denies good or bad, it avoids or pursues it. Hence the soul never thinks without an image. " (431a8)

    To complete the comparison, Aristotle says:

    "Knowledge and perception are divided to correspond to their objects, the potential to the potential, the actual to the actual. In the soul that which can perceive and that which can know are potentially these things, the one the object of knowledge, the other the object of perception. These must either be the things themselves or their forms. Not the things themselves; for it is not the stone which is in the soul but its form. Hence the soul is as the hand is; for the hand is a tool of tools, and the intellect is a form of forms and sense a form objects of perception. (431b24) All above translated by D.W. Hamlyn.

    The distinction between objective and subjective is treated here as the illusion. The range from living with only the capacity to feel touch to knowing other beings as they really exist points to our capacity in a different way than reflecting upon limits we cannot be on both sides of.
  • Platonic Realism and Its Relation to Physical Objects

    It doesn't mean that 'the world is in the mind'. It's more like, world and mind arise together as objective and subjective poles, we have a shared world of meanings and common facts within which we all dwell.Wayfarer

    This reminds me of De Anima where Aristotle says: "In a way, the soul is all things."
  • Is Revenge Hopeless?

    The social contract forbidding one to act alone in retribution for grievous harm has always been the most difficult thing to accept. It is not a "modern" problem. It is the one we have had since people could say there is a problem.
  • Work should be based on quantity of boredom involved

    Maybe I am a bad example. I do several kinds of work in the same time period. I have to manage stuff while also making things. That is very different from playing a specific role in a warehouse or factory.

    On the other hand, management is drudgery too.

    Yeah, I am dodging your formula. I will think about it.
  • Work should be based on quantity of boredom involved
    Drudgery is often in the eye of the beholder. As a tradesman, I have put up my share of drywall. I hate putting up drywall. But I have worked alongside many who did not.

    I am patient with other construction acts. Some colleagues shake their heads at my willingness to make sure each preparation is done. My form of life is intolerable in their view. It gets complicated in the world of actual production.
  • The common man has always been there and endured it all.
    In reference to Kafka, I don't get how that is post modern. Or even "modern" as the expression goes.
    Sorry. Carry on.
  • The emotional meaning of ritual and icon
    Still not sure what you're talking about. Anyway, I really didn't think a conflict would arise here. It just interested me to think about how Homer relates to the OP.frank

    I am not trying to pick a fight.
    The Finley view is interesting and I will try to check it out. My comments were not an argument against them but trying to look at the challenge of the OP as something that put explanations of all kinds in a dim light.
  • Platonic Realism and Its Relation to Physical Objects
    Can a metaphor be a platonic form? Are platonic forms leaky metaphors, hiding the messy physical details, while sometimes letting them through? Didn't Plato have difficulty deciding whether some things had forms, like mud?Marchesk

    Well, there is that part of Plato's Parmenides where the question was asked if "participation" of a particular being in a form was more like being covered by a sail or happening in the same day. That is quite a range of speculation.
    The status of mud is that it is not in danger of not being itself. The "participation" element seems to be related to beings that are in danger of losing themselves.
  • The emotional meaning of ritual and icon

    I am not sure how to respond to the absence of individuality idea. It doesn't square with the depiction of all these different agendas of both mortals and immortals to advance their fortunes.

    The not being able to separate between the human and the environment idea is put to rest by the brutal way terrible acts of violence are constantly being compared to events in the natural world. From that point of view, the Iliad is an anti-war message.

    What I mean by looking around nervously is wondering how much energy is expended to create a safe zone for the individual. Nothing would make someone feel safer than the depiction of other times where people did not have our advantages.
  • The emotional meaning of ritual and icon
    If the influence is not "just poetic", then the poetry is not just internal.
    Maybe one cannot truly mark where the "external" begins.

    So, in the matter of action films, the appearance of a potential we dismiss in other places as possible is a feature, not a bug. But I don't think that analogy is a good fit for the Homer narrative. The analogy projects a way to perceive phenomena instead of looking around nervously at our surroundings.
  • The emotional meaning of ritual and icon

    I don't read the story as saying Athene is the source of the lust. Earlier in the tale, she gets Achilles to chill out. She is a manipulator who uses different ways to attain different ends and they change as the situation unfolds. Her favorite mortal is Odysseus.

    In regards to the OP, I was thinking of the effect of the aegis in the midst of the Achaians being persuaded through words to stay and fight. The flutter of the tassels directly influencing each person.

    That is not to throw cold water on your question. I think it needs to be framed differently.
  • The emotional meaning of ritual and icon
    He spoke, nor did the lord of men Agamemnon neglect him,
    but straightway commanded the clear-voiced heralds to summon
    by proclamation to battle the flowing-haired Achaians;
    and the heralds made their cry and the men were assembled swiftly.
    And they, the god-supported kings, about Agamemnon
    ran marshalling the men, and among them grey-eyed Athene
    holding the dear treasured aegis, ageless, immortal,
    from whose edges float a hundred golden tassels,
    each one carefully woven, and each worth a hundred oxen.
    With this fluttering she swept through the host of the Achaians
    urging them to go forward. She kindled the strength in each man's
    heart to take the battle without respite and keep on fighting.
    And now battle became sweeter to them than to go back
    in their hollow ships to the beloved land of their fathers.

    Iliad, book 2, line 440
    translated by Richmond Lattimore
  • Nussbaum

    I am on board with cooperation not being outside of the "state of nature."
    As Rawls presents it, the "original" contract is not so much about that question but who gets a say in the space of equal agents.
    Rawls recognizes that the equality has to be supposed to some extent. There is also this emphasis that deals get made, we live with them for a while, the need to renegotiate appears.
    So, in one way, Nussbaum seems to be saying Rawls was too successful. The original deals let a lot of things happen and they have their own inertia.
  • Anyone studying Aristotle?
    The fact we do not compute the divisions mentally does not mean they are not happening in reality. The fact the divisions took place in the past I suppose could be argued that actual infinity is not realised in the present, but it is realised in the past which is as bad to my mind - the past happened and was real.Devans99

    I don't think Aristotle is saying that what is potential is not "happening." In De Anima, knowledge is described this way:

    Actual knowledge is identical with its object. But potential knowledge is prior in the individual. but not prior even in time in general; for all things that come to be are derived from that which is so actually.
    Chapter 7 translated by D.W. Hamlyn

    This suggests there is a disconnect between what the one who "knows" needs to presume to make sense of time and the actuality of knowledge when this identity occurs. The past is just one set of potentialities. Otherwise, all that is possible will have occurred.
  • Pain and Pleasure, the only real things?
    Aristotle noted that matched pairs of qualities collapse into single things like unhappy couples at a wedding.
    Keats noted that truth is beauty.
    I think they were at the same event.
  • On Anger
    I read the Stoics to be saying that anger diminishes autonomy. That is not the same as training oneself to not feel it. The problem with anger is that it wants to take over all executive functions. Aurelius and Epictetus developed strategies to countervail against that principle of totality can exhibit and how fast the expression happens. The "apathy" being promoted is not deadening a sensation but repeating others to countervail its influence.

    What Seneca noted as a psychological observation is in harmony with the first word of the Iliad being Wrath. The destructive power of a single person's anger has a life of its own. Especially when that single person happens to be really good at destruction. I think the Stoics were hoping more for a detente than a complete victory over the agency.

    As a matter of psychology, as we "moderns" have come to use the word, autonomy is still a central concept but is expressed in various models of development. There is continuity to the Stoics in the idea that healthy characters come from the influence of healthy characters but the contemporary conversation is much more focused on how a person comes to be in contrast to competing models of development.

    This is all a long winded way to say that caution should be taken when comparing the Stoics "agenda" with the way we now speak of drives, emotion (repressed or not) and efficacy of expressing such emotion.
  • Why do we need free will
    The idea is qualified. There is no way to see it otherwise.thewonder

    Well, what if one disagreed? Saying there is the line in the sand as you describe a "necessity" is presented as a limit to what is possible. There is a bit of determination in every expression of free will.

    One way to look at it is that "free will" is not a self evident thing but a topic brought up in specific situations.
  • Nussbaum

    I am okay with hanging with the five year olds.
    From that point of view, it is difficult to tell if your comment is directed to Nussbaum or myself.
  • Why do we need free will

    It does not clarify the picture to corral the idea of determinism to be merely the epiphenomenon of those interested in validating the cancellation of direct experience.
    What will you make of the argument between Luther and Erasmus in that context? How does that explain the distance between Spinoza and Descartes?

    As a matter of the "history" of philosophy, any and everyone's explanation is a tale of what had to be or not. I don't see the advantages of qualifying ideas in advance of their presentation.
  • E.M. Cioran Aphorism Analysis
    I don't know.
    All these aphorisms assume i own my life.
    If I was that uncertain about what it is for, I would not also assume I knew what was going on.
    It all seems to be a language game set up where the speaker loses in the end.
    Like the dreams we all have.
  • What is the Purpose of Your Existence?
    I am good at some things. Handy, if you will.
    As I get older, there is developing an odd inverse reciprocal relationship between what is easy for me and what is interesting. I still like to do what is easy. But as the shadows lengthen, I cannot help but be more interested in what has always kicked my ass.
    So, the above is a way to suggest we hand out assignments to ourselves and it is very difficult to carry them out.
    We are too full, not too empty.
  • Confucianism And Communism
    Taoist expressions of the limits of Confucian principles do not negate them as a matter of being wrong on the basis of what they claim be the case but because it is so easy for them to say what is important.
  • Nussbaum

    As I continue to read the book, I think she is arguing for a third thing.
    Maybe a different way to conceive of the state of nature as a starting place.
  • Was Pascal right about this?

    To be precise, he did not say being alone meant doing nothing.
    Pascal promoted a severe form of personal discipline. In that key, the message would seem to be that you should too.
    But the statement also suggests we can provide something for ourselves that we tend to consider to be only available through others.
    A neglected resource.
  • Nussbaum

    Well, at the very least, do you accept that "people" are not accepting the role you describe because it sickens them?
    If there is nothing in the package but what you describe, I would kill myself.
  • Nussbaum
    I am not sure you are saying that either. Your position is interesting in that your statements are consistent to themselves and the environment you describe matches what each generation must deal with.
    But no generation is interested in giving the one before them the last word.
    Let's say, for the sake of argument, you are correct. The next generation could not care less about that judgement.
    That is why the problem is like Job's.
  • Nussbaum

    I don't know.
    You seem to be saying that all attempts to limit authority as a means to predetermine conditions for subsequent generations is a loser's game.
    If you are correct, you run into the problem of Job. He complains while also dismissing his interlocutors on the basis of not accepting his righteousness.
    In that way, Job is wrong or right. he is either getting a raw deal or his "friends" are correct.
  • Nussbaum

    I agree that there is an incredible quantity of inertia in regards to what binds our lives to the means of continuing to live in the way we do.
    On the other hand, it is interesting how dependent those forces are upon our simple compliance with particular requirements.
    Having children is not only replicating the conditions that will cause them to suffer. It is not all just about receiving or not receiving an inheritance. If you want your kids to be smarter than you are, that can be arranged. If you want them to be stupid, that can be done.
    Generations of choice.
  • Nussbaum

    I don't read Nussbaum's description of Rawls' starting point of "equal" parties to the deal to be a sham. The end of the State of Nature comes about either through something idealized as the rule of one person (as Hobbes conceived it) or a system of reciprocal exchange. The latter is not possible without leveling the participants to be equal in so far as they invest in a system instead of shooting whatever gets too close to their compound.
    So, that element of reciprocity is important to keep alive and well fed but is not sufficient as an arbiter in matters where participation is limited by either capability or status under law. When referring to "representation" in my previous comment, I was thinking there is a continual criticism of the "original" deal because that articulation concealed those who were being spoken for without their participation.
  • Nussbaum

    After the opening section on the State of Nature and halfway through the section: Three Unsolved Problems.
  • Nussbaum
    Frontiers of Justice, page 18 and thereabouts.
  • Nussbaum

    As Nussbaum presents it, the difference between the designers of the deal versus who the deal is made for is critical.
    So there is an element of representation in the scene where agents are supposed to be acting directly for themselves.