Comments

  • A Summary of the "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus"
    ↪Sam26


    In the game of chess certain moves are prohibited. The rules are specific to the game. One could make that move in a game that is like chess with the exception of allowing that move. The same holds for language games.

    When Wittgenstein says parenthetically:

    Theology as grammar (PI 373)

    this is not an appeal to logical syntax. It is, instead, about looking at how theological terms are used. What they mean for those who use them. The role they play in the life of those who believe. One might devise or derive rules, but the game is not determined by rules, but rather by what is felt and experienced and believed, by how the words resonate, by how one is moved, by how one is compelled, by how they matter.
  • The Hard Problem of Consciousness & the Fundamental Abstraction
    It should be noted that since antiquity the question has not been whether or not Aristotle held that the heavens are eternal but rather whether what he claimed was true or not.

    I know of no credible scholarly work that supports MU's claims. Are there any?
  • Where do thoughts come from? Are they eternal? Does the Mindscape really exist?
    The claim is all thoughts are pre-existent (just as the trees we encounter when we walk in a forest are pre-existent). — Art48

    Reading this after the Heidegger thread that unfortunately has been relegated to the Lounge, I see the potential for a grave risk. Heidegger attempts to avoid political and ethical responsibility and put in its place "heeding the call of Being". We are not the source of our ideas and so our only responsibility is to heed or fail to heed the call of Being. T
  • A Summary of the "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus"
    if everyone is using different terms for their starting points — schopenhauer1

    More to the point, it is about using the same terms with different demands on the meaning of the terms. It is not about shutting down constructive debate. It is, rather, about trying to get to an agreed starting point or marking the differences in starting points.
  • Donald Trump (All General Trump Conversations Here)
    The establishment’s base is resting their hopes on the word of a porn star, a lawyer who plead guilty for lying, and a political district attorney. — NOS4A2

    And this is how the game of dissimulation is played. Trump and his followers object to legal investigations, but at the same time attempt to discredit statements made, the truth or falsity of which might be established through such investigations.
  • A Summary of the "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus"
    This doesn't take away from my main point, that there is an underlying logic to language, viz., in the use of grammar (syntax) or the expanded grammar that Wittgenstein refers to. — Sam26

    There is a difference between the logic of a language game and an underlying logic of language. Analogously, the rules of chess are not an underlying logic of the game.

    Rather than an appeal to an underlying logic Wittgenstein appeals to what we do. More specifically, to the metaphysical demands philosophers put on words.
  • A Summary of the "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus"
    ↪Sam26


    One can play chess according to the rules and not play logically.

    What one says within a language game is not thereby logical.
  • Donald Trump (All General Trump Conversations Here)
    He was a perfect rendition of the demagogue who leads the fight against the establishment. — frank

    His anti-establishment rhetoric helped to get him elected, but he is no "man of the people". He is every bit the kind of elite he rails against.

    the establishment is neoliberal — frank

    Trump is neoliberal.
  • Heidegger’s Downfall
    It is unfortunate that this has been moved to the lounge. The article speaks for itself. It does not require a thesis or demonstration of commitment in order to justify it as serious or philosophical.

    A quote from Heidegger cited in the article:

    The danger is not [National Socialism] itself, but instead that it will be innocuous via sermons about the True, the Good, and the Beautiful.

    Heidegger's quote is a telling variation of Plato's " the Just, the Beautiful, and the Good".

    Another quote from the article:

    Heidegger’s 1936 praise of Hitler and Mussolini for introducing a “countermovement to nihilism,” intended as praise for their invocation of the Nietzschean will to power.

    In a 1955-56 lecture course published as "The Principle of Reason", Heidegger discussed the leap of thinking, the leap of reason:

    Being and reason: the same. Being: the abyss (SG 93).

    In place of Plato's Good Heidegger puts Reason.

    In 1969 Stanley Rosen published "Nihilism: A Philosophical Essay". It can be described as Plato against Heidegger. Rosen said:

    Nihilism is the concept of reason separated from the concept of the good.
  • Donald Trump (All General Trump Conversations Here)
    It’s typical of his critics — NOS4A2

    It is typical of apologists such as yourself to jump to Trump's defense by making vague accusations that portray him as an innocent treated unfairly by the media, the courts, politicians, and anyone else who, because they dare to question the legality of Trump's actions, are part of a deep state conspiracy.

    the establishment base — NOS4A2
    ?

    Empty rhetoric. Trump, his Republican supporters, Fox News, the Federalist society, big money supporters are all entrenched part of "the establishment".
  • Donald Trump (All General Trump Conversations Here)
    ↪Michael


    What form does he want and expect these protests to take? Given what has happened in the past, it does not seem likely that they would be peaceful.

    But this is typical of Trump. It is clear that he does not want his day in court. Above all else is the court of public opinion. But in a selective rather than general sense, that is, limited to the opinion of his followers.
  • The Hard Problem of Consciousness & the Fundamental Abstraction
    theories put forward by the Pythagoreans — Metaphysician Undercover

    He does not present them as theories put forward by the Pythagoreans. The premises are his own. In the beginning of 1.2 he repeatedly says "we" not the Pythagoreans.

    those quotes come from a small part of the beginning of Bk 1, ch2 — Metaphysician Undercover

    Except for the first two all of these quotes come from chapter 3, not from "a small part of the beginning of Bk 1, ch2.". And the first two do not come from the beginning of the chapter.

    You look at Bk1 Ch2, then completely ignore all the logical arguments made throughout ch 3,,4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12. — Metaphysician Undercover

    Aristotle makes the distinction cited above between primary and compound bodies. What is true of compound bodies is not true of primary bodies. The arguments you are referring to are not refutations for the simple and obvious reason that they are about compound bodies not primary bodies.
  • The Unsolved Mystery of Evil: A Necessary Paradox?
    ↪boagie


    It is one thing to say that the irrational religious meanings of the term needs to be negated. It is quite another to say:


    Evil is irrational religious baggage, much of which is about offending an imaginary friend. — boagie

    and:

    It is an unhealthy concept that needs to be abandoned. — boagie

    There is nothing irrational about the Hebrew Bible term ra', Many scholars prefer to translate it as the tree of good and bad. There is nothing there about an imaginary friend. It is about what men do.

    You perpetuate the very thing you are trying to eliminate by carrying the baggage you want to leave behind.
  • The Unsolved Mystery of Evil: A Necessary Paradox?
    Evil is irrational religious baggage — boagie

    The irrational religious baggage is something you and others are carrying.

    You are conflating a particular reified belief with the much older and more basic meaning which is that evil is what is bad, what causes suffering, hardship, and adversity.
  • The Hard Problem of Consciousness & the Fundamental Abstraction
    the vehicle of intelligibility is the phantasm or neural state encoding sensory content -- and it is identically the action of the sensible on our nervous system. — Dfpolis

    Melodie Stenger, with the support of Aristotle, suggests that the reason why something appears to one person to be one thing appears to another to be another is that the action of phantasia moves in both directions. To put it differently, things do not appear to be as they are simply because of how they are but because of how the particular person is. It is not simply the work of the imagination but of the imagination of a particular person, of their character, of their beliefs and experiences.

    From Nicomachean Ethics:

    But suppose someone were to say that all people aim at the apparent good, but they are not in control of how things appear [phantasias], but rather whatever sort of person each one is, of that sort too does the end appear to anyone. So if each one were in some way responsible for one’s own active condition, then each would be in some way responsible oneself for how things appear [phantasias]…(1114a30-114b20)
  • Opinions on Francis Macdonald Cornford's translation of The Republic.
    I don't recommend either Jowett or Cornford, except if nothing else is available.

    I recommend Allan Bloom(pdf) It is what I used when I was teaching.


    I have not read this translation but in general his translations are very good Sachs
  • The Unsolved Mystery of Evil: A Necessary Paradox?
    ↪Wayfarer


    Genesis has the concept of the ways of things but not of their nature. The movement of the snake, moving one way in order to go in another, reflects its duplicity. Only part of what it tells Eve is true. Part of what it says is equivocal - on the day you eat you will not die, and part is a matter of what it does not say.
  • Goodness and God
    People's observance of the influence of their gods on the world is on a par with the fact that our mutually agreed belief in the value of a paper note influence the functionality of economies and financial systems. — Benj96

    An agreed upon practice and something about which there is no agreement about anything is not on a par.
  • The Hard Problem of Consciousness & the Fundamental Abstraction
    The failure to distinguish between two different kinds of bodies, terrestrial and heavenly or primary body, leads to false assertions and conclusions.

    De Caelo On the Heavens:

    These premises clearly give the conclusion that there is in nature some bodily substance other than the formations we know, prior to them all and more divine than they. (269a30)

    On all these grounds, therefore, we may infer with confidence that there is something beyond the bodies that are about us on this earth, different and separate from them ; and that the superior glory of its nature is proportionate to its distance from this world of ours. (269b14)

    It is equally reasonable to assume that this body will be ungenerated and indestructible and exempt from increase and alteration (270a13)

    If then this body can have no contrary, because there can be no contrary motion to the circular, nature seems justly to have exempted from contraries the body which was to be ungenerated and indestructible. (270a17)

    The reasons why the primary body is eternal and not subject to increase or diminution, but unaging and unalterable and unmodified, will be clear from what has been said to any one who believes in our assumptions. Our theory seems to confirm experience and to be confirmed by it. (270b1)

    If then there is, as there certainly is, anything divine, what we have just said about the primary bodily substance was well said. (270b10)

    And so, implying that the primary body is something else beyond earth, fire, air, and water, they gave the highest place a name of its own, aether, derived from the fact that it ‘runs always for an eternity of time. (270b21)
  • A Summary of the "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus"
    If white turns into black some people say “Essentially it is still the same”. And others, if the colour becomes one degree darker, say “It has changed completely".
    (Wittgenstein, Culture and Value 42)
  • Goodness and God
    ...if God is all existants. — Benj96

    To go from "if" to "is" is a conjuring act.
  • The Unsolved Mystery of Evil: A Necessary Paradox?
    The snake is the hero in this story. — Tom Storm

    In my story too it often is.
  • Goodness and God
    If one starts from the belief that God exists and that God is good, then it follows that good exists. But the same holds for any number of things. If one starts from the belief that God exists and that God is X, then it follows that X exists. Play the old Mad Libs game, replace X with any adjective, and it is clear just how pointless this is.
  • The Hard Problem of Consciousness & the Fundamental Abstraction
    You do not recognize my efforts as efforts. — Paine

    But others do recognize them as a valuable contribution here and elsewhere. You have shown more patience over the years with certain people, and are far more polite than I am, but we all have our limits.
  • The Unsolved Mystery of Evil: A Necessary Paradox?
    ↪invicta


    What should not be overlooked is how much of what the snake said is the truth:

    For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil. (3.5)

    God confirms this:

    And the Lord God said, “The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. (3.22)

    Being like a god is a main source of our suffering. Knowledge is productive. Adam knew Eve and she conceived and gave birth to Cain. (4.1) Knowing good and evil means doing and producing good and evil. Both are fruits of the same tree.
  • A Summary of the "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus"
    ... what can be said in his later philosophy is still limited to the world — Sam26

    In the Tractatus he makes the distinction between "the world" and "my world". That distinction does not carry over to the later writings. What can be said is no longer limited to the facts delimited in the Tractatus. It is no longer a question of what can be said but of the shared language of a form of life.

    The limits of language in the Tractatus were drawn in order to show the limits of thought or its expression. In the preface to PI the limits of thought are no longer determined by facts:

    The thoughts that I publish in what follows are the precipitate of philosophical investigations which have occupied me for the last sixteen years. They concern many subjects: the concepts of meaning, of understanding, of a proposition and sentence, of logic, the foundations of mathematics, states of consciousness, and other things.

    Rather than narrow things down his investigations opens up our view of thought and language.

    122. A main source of our failure to understand is that we don’t have an overview of the use of our words. - Our grammar is deficient in surveyability. A surveyable representation [ an übersichtlichen Darstellung] produces precisely that kind of understanding which consists in ‘seeing connections’. Hence the importance of finding and inventing intermediate links.

    The concept of a surveyable representation is of fundamental significance for us. It characterizes the way we represent things, how we look at matters. (Is this a ‘Weltanschauung’?)

    125. This entanglement in our rules is what we want to understand: that is, to survey.
    It throws light on our concept of meaning something. For in those cases, things turn out otherwise than we had meant, foreseen. That is just what we say when, for example, a contradiction appears: “That’s not the way I meant it.”
    The civic status of a contradiction, or its status in civic life - that is the philosophical problem.
  • A Summary of the "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus"
    The world is all that is the case — Sam26

    It may have no bearing on your project, but Wittgenstein's focus on seeing aspects, ways of looking, and ways of seeing run counter to the claim that the world is what is the case. Although he does not develop this, even in the Tractatus he is thinking about these things. This is why the ethical and the aesthetic, in its original sense of what is perceived or seen, are regarded as the same. That they are not in the world does not mean that they are not of the utmost importance. Ethics too is said to be transcendental. (T 6.421)

    Logic is what is transcendental from inside the world. Ethics and aesthetics from outside, that is, "my world".

    With regard to ethics he says:

    The world of the happy man is a different one from that of the unhappy man. (T6.43)

    With regard to the way of seeing things:

    ... the figure can be seen in two ways as a cube; and all similar phenomena. For we really see two different facts. (T 5.5423)
  • The Hard Problem of Consciousness & the Fundamental Abstraction
    I gave up at ‘there’s a unique form for every particular’. — Wayfarer

    This is so twisted I did not even bother to attempt to straighten in out. Once again, typically, it is not clear whether he thinks this is what Aristotle was claiming or if he thinks he is correcting him.

    I don't think Aristotle would have let him within 100 yards of the Lyceum.

    [Correction. I did make the attempt. Repeatedly, through various iterations. For a moment I forgot while trying to straighten out the most recent tangles.]
  • The Hard Problem of Consciousness & the Fundamental Abstraction
    You didn't address the post. — Metaphysician Undercover

    No, I didn't. To what end? You have shown yourself to be incapable of separating and distinguishing between what Aristotle said and whatever it is you think he should have said or want him to have said. You end up with something you call his "true position". A position that is at odds with and irreconcilable with what he actually said.

    I think I was wrong to say that you are faithful to Aquinas. On second thought it seems likely that you would reinvent him as well in your own image of his "true position".
  • The Hard Problem of Consciousness & the Fundamental Abstraction
    In the text, the matter is immediately cast into the language of actuality and potentiality. Something causes change. Something else is changed. — Paine

    But does this speak to his claim about a certain kind of unnamed object?

    2.7 opens:

    The object of sight is the visible, and what is visible is color and a certain kind of object which
    can be described in words but which has no single name

    He goes on to say that color is not visible without light, and there are objects that are not visible by color or light.

    Some objects of sight which in light are invisible, in darkness stimulate the sense; that is, things that appear fiery or shining. This class of objects has no simple common name, but instances of it are fungi, flesh, heads, scales, and eyes of fish. (419a 1-6)

    Although he does not include the stars in the short list of the class of objects that are invisible in light, they are objects that are visible in darkness. Is there something in common between the things he lists and the stars? Something other than color? He continues:

    In none of these is what is seen their own proper' color. Why we see these at all is another question.

    And drops it.
  • Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover: a better understanding
    A good example of eternal unmoved movement:

    In Plato's Republic Glaucon says astronomy compels the soul to see what's above. Socrates responds that as it is taken up now it causes the soul to look downward. (429a)

    The cause in these examples is not physical. More importantly, for both Plato and Aristotle it is not a one way street. Both the mover and what is moved are interconnected. Together they form a whole. It is not simply the stars that cause the movement up or down. It is Glaucon who moves his head and Socrates who moves from what is visible to what is intelligible. This is an indication of why in Aristotle's Physics he talks about the soul.
  • The Unsolved Mystery of Evil: A Necessary Paradox?
    Premise 2: If a universally accepted explanation for the existence of evil were found, it would enable humans to reconcile with the presence of evil and suffering in the world. — gevgala

    The real problem of evil, the misfortunes we suffer, would remain. A theological reconciliation does nothing to change that.

    Put differently, the real problem of evil is not theological. To the extent theologians treat it as if it is, they are part of the problem not the solution.
  • The Hard Problem of Consciousness & the Fundamental Abstraction
    ↪Metaphysician Undercover


    You use the exoteric/esoteric distinction as a blunt instrument to twist and distort the text so that it will mean whatever it is you want it to mean.

    If you are to take this interpretive approach you must start with what he actually said as your starting point. You do not do this. You ignore what he said in some cases and deny that he said it in others. Often you mistake the part for the whole or deny there is a whole, so you can treat the part as the whole.

    More precisely, you are faithful to Aquinas. If Aristotle says "X" and Aquinas "Y" then Y is the truth. But you blur the distinction: If Aristotle says "X" and Aquinas "Y" then Aristotle really meant Y.
  • Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover: a better understanding
    I hope it’s not some semantic or linguistic trick being used here in the definition of the word change. — invicta

    Something unchanging always remains what it is as it is.

    Some quick comments:

    There is little or no agreement as to what Aristotle means by 'God'. This much is clear. Whatever it might be it is not the creator of the universe. It does not interfere in the affairs of men. It does not hear our prayers. In brief, in order to understand what he is talking about, start by forgetting whatever assumptions, beliefs, and concepts you might have about God.

    It is worth noting that Aristotle does not start with gods or prime movers (plural), but does use the term theology and does talk about things divine. There is a great deal of road work that must be done first.
  • The Hard Problem of Consciousness & the Fundamental Abstraction
    This is completely consistent with what I've been arguing. — Metaphysician Undercover

    It is not. Have you forgotten what you have claimed?

    There are no unnatural, or divine bodies, nothing in the universe is moving in an eternal circular motion, because all has been generated and will be destroyed, consisting of natural bodies. — Metaphysician Undercover

    The only thing you got half right is that they are natural, albeit bodies.
  • The Hard Problem of Consciousness & the Fundamental Abstraction
    ↪Paine


    Looking into it, the "certain nature", might be the transparent, Gendlin
    but it might be what makes something transparent. Reeve

    As to the kind of object, some commentators identify it as "phosphorescents".Gendlin A compound word from Greek and Latin.

    Not everything is visible in light, but only the color proper to each thing; for some things are not seen in the light but bring about perception in the dark, e.g., those things . . . such as . . . scales, and eyes of fish ... (419a 1-6)
  • The Hard Problem of Consciousness & the Fundamental Abstraction
    ↪Paine


    What is that "certain nature"?

    What is:

    ...a certain kind of object which can be described in words but which has no single name (418a26–28)
  • The Hard Problem of Consciousness & the Fundamental Abstraction
    ↪Metaphysician Undercover


    So, on the basis of an unexplained omission in one compilation you attempt to dismiss parts of the text that appear in fuller translations of the same text by the same translator as well as other translations and in the commentaries.

    Does the compilation include Book 1.2 269a 30?

    But there is nothing out of which this body can have been generated. And if it is exempt from increase and diminution, the same reasoning leads us to suppose that it is also unalterable.

    And, as quoted before:

    On all these grounds, therefore, we may infer with confidence that there is something beyond the bodies that are about us on this earth, different and separate from them ; and that the superior glory of its nature is proportionate to its distance from this world of ours. (269b 14)

    There is general agreement that at least some of works of Aristotle are based on lecture notes, but that is no reason to disregard those parts of the text that run counter to your preferred beliefs. If these are student notes then they are students who knew and understood Aristotle far better than we do. In addition, the works often quickly get blamed for our lack of understanding. With a thinker as important as Aristotle it seems more likely that whoever compiled these notes, whether Aristotle or students did so with care. The burden is on us to tie things together and resolve seeming contradictions. In addition, it may be that Aristotle thought that certain problems are irresolvable. Rather than discard parts of the text, the point may be to bring out and allow the problem to stand.

    Aristotle does not want simply to inform us or give us our opinion, he wants us to grapple with problems, to think.
  • The Hard Problem of Consciousness & the Fundamental Abstraction
    ↪Metaphysician Undercover


    I don't know which translation you are using but both Stocks, whose translation appears in several places on the internet with those lines intact, and Guthrie's Loeb Classical Library translation, say the same thing.
  • The Hard Problem of Consciousness & the Fundamental Abstraction
    Therefore the movement of that which is divine must be eternal. But such is the heaven, viz. a divine body, and for that reason to it is given the circular body whose nature it is to move always in a circle. (286a10)

    That there is one heaven, then, only, and that it is ungenerated and eternal, and further that its movement is regular, has now been sufficiently explained. (289a8)
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