What's called an 'illusion' is still real, as the thing it is, it just can also be understood in a different way by shifting context. — csalisbury

Yes! Even im the mundane sense of say, seeing an illusion in the desert (mirages), those illusions are always real: other people can see them, they're an effect of the play of light and angle of incidence and so on. Even illusions must be accounted for, perhaps especially so.

Team flux here. Constancy is just ordered flux, the invariant in variation. I'll only add: both are perfectly real, only that the one furnishes the sufficient reason for the other.

Oh, and regarding time: there's no one time, but multiple times, emerging temporalities, indexed to the relations of rhythms established between locally and globally persistant invariations.

All the more an indictment on the US.

A logical property, roughly. To use your example, one can predicate "prudence" to the subject "Grandma".

I don't live in the States, luckily! Although my own backyard is getting worse and worse by the day, influenced heavily by US policy.

Which reminds me - NYC schools are reluctant to close over COVID concerns because they double as shelter fro 100k+ homeless children. https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/03/09/closing-nyc-schools-amid-coronavirus-outbreak-last-resort-says-official-due-114000

What a shithole of a society.

Student loan debt? No no, first they have to pay off their student lunch debt, because making it through primary and secondary education without starving is a privilege and not a right see.

Man wouldn't it be nice if the poor just stopped being poor that'd be really nice but in the meantime lets cut access to family planning and education and make childcare inaccessible and then tell them that really they shouldn't have kids and if they do well I guess they deserve to be in the position they're in anyway lol fuck poor people right.

I don't know that I necessarily look out for agreement among other so much as shared approaches or shared concerns. The thing I value most with others are questions of the kind: 'what about X?' or 'what impacts would taking Y into account have on this?': forging connections, extending the field of inquiry, bringing something new to the table - this kind of thing is far more invaluable to me than agreement which, at its limit, might lead to nothing more than silence.

Trump and GOP mount coordinated campaign to paint Biden as senile — Michael

Not much painting necessary tbh, the dude's mental decline is there for all to see.

Anyway, here's to another 4 years of Trump. Fuck Americans.

There's actually some interesting overlap with the classic objection to what is traditionally called the 'ontological argument' for existance God here, which argues that because God is the greatest possible being, and that existence is greater than non-existence, God must exist. The objection being that existence is not a predicate (Kant), and that one can't merely define the existence of something into being. With respect to DCT, it's perfectly obvious to anyone with an iota of sense that declaring something to be non-arbitrary is the very height of arbitrariness, so one is tempted to say, along with the objection to the ontological argument, that arbitrariness is not, and cannot be a predicate either.

Have you been on Earth recently?

If gods moral commands are defined as non-arbitrary — DingoJones

:rofl:

I'm ascribing supreme prudence to my grandmother who, being supremely prudent in nature, issues supremely prudent commands (wash one's hands, look both ways before crossing the street, etc.) The question here is: if my grandmother's full nature is that of supreme prudence, as a property, and the property is a presupposition of her commands too, then it seems that her nature is the same thing as the source of her commands. This seems to eliminate any agency on the part of my grandmother; she is just a tool for relaying her own nature. — Aleph Numbers

Ah I see. Interesting - this is actually a very Stoic conception of 'nature'. And the Stoics, believe it or not, connected freedom (or what you call agency) precisely with necessity: only when we act according to our nature are we free, and it is precisely our separation from nature that makes us unfree. In this manner, this is precisely the opposite doctrine from DCT: the problem with DCT is it's arbitrarness. DCT breaks the connection between necessity and action: one acts because the Gods will it; on the Stoic model of agency, one's acts follow necessarily from one's nature, and in that coincidence, which is precisely not arbitrary, one is free.

I may be twisting what you're saying to fit the Stoic model - let me know if I am - but if I'm right, your grandmother is not to be assimilated with the model of DCT. There's no separation of commanding principal and obeying agent, the cleavage between which defines the problem of DCT (recalling, btw, the original understanding of the term 'agent' as one who acts on behalf of another - the principal).

What would you say if I attributed supreme prudence to my grandmother's nature, which is an ontological statement, and then claimed in the same breath that she doesn't embody the word itself, as that would be mere semantics. Could it be argued that she is still defined to be the concept of prudence? — Aleph Numbers

This is somewhat confusing - what does it mean to say that someone is defined to be a concept? I know what 'definition' means for words: a way of fixing or relaying meaning, roughly. But what does it mean to say this of a person? Are you trying to relay or fix the meaning of your grandmother? But what does that mean? I don't really understand how to parse this question.

@fdrake: incidentally, this is the kind of situation where what we were discussing is useful!

Also, if we're going to commit shoddy errors of reasoning perhaps we can at least get the geneaological facts straight - Linnaeus dubbed us homo sapiens not because we have the exclusive capacity of thought - he was not so arrogant as to believe this - but for the far more humbling fact that he could not distinguish for us any defining charcateristics other than the circular fact that humans are those who recognize themselves as such - hence the single, pithy, Socratic line that he scribbed next to Homo Sapiens in the Systema Naturae: nosce te ipsum, know theyself. As he asked elsewhere of a critic: "I ask you and the entire world to show me a generic difference between ape and man which is consistent with the principles of natural history. I most certainly do not know of any".

The fact that our species is named homo sapiens which roughly translates to wise man suggests, in no uncertain terms, that it's thinking that humans excel at; that's relatively speaking of course. — TheMadFool

Huh? Humans are notoriously bloody awful at thinking. If that's our 'purpose' we'd have better trot off into the collective night as we're a miserable failure of a species.

Moreover taking for granted a self-aggrandizing self-appellation as evidence for our 'purpose' is hilariously facile.

Surely some words are concepts, but it's not clear that all of them are. Interrogatives, exclamatives, proper nouns, and imperatives come to mind as examples of classes of words that are not concepts. Moreover, even if one could show that all these kinds of word could be said to have some degree of conceptual content, that content may not exhaust what the word 'is'. I have in mind the idea that all words have a performative dimension (as distinct from their constantive dimension) which would be, by definition, aconceptual.

Lol Reich is an idiot.

oh u talk too much shh

but that a large part of philosophy (but not all) is a matter of showing just how wrong some questions are. — unenlightened

:up:

There's still room for a positive account, and here it looks to require much different tools to build. Linguistic analysis can show us holes in intuition there, a different perspective is required to give anything like a positive account. — fdrake

Yeah I totally agree. Those who think that LA is the be-all-and-end-all of philosophy are infuriating. A major case of seeing everything as a nail while wielding a hammer.

lol dumb thing

I'm not trying to make a point I'm just laughing at you because you said a dumb thing which has been apparently repeated by other people saying dumb things.

Why would I be unhappy I can cure cancer this is great!

Idk as a rule all American political commentators are stupid unless proven otherwise.

I Googled crystal healing and now I can cure cancer gee thanks Google.

Collective idiocy is no excuse for individual idiocy.

lmao OK.

Hillary to the rescue. That's my prediction. DNC will nominate Hillary. — fishfry

Wait you actually think this?

Same, lemme know your thoughts. — Maw

It's a very solid read. The first half of the book is actually more about the history of various peasant resistance movements against feudal power (the Church and the state in particular), while the second half of the book deals with the witch hunts ("Wtich") and colonialism in the Americas ("Caliban'). The stuff on feudal resistance was really interesting to me, alot of the names were new and it was fascinating to read about entire social uprisings that I had never heard of before. Federici's focus on woman in particular makes for really good reading too - she really brings out just how much of women's oppression was and remains political (i.e. intentional responses to socio-economic considerations) and not just some expression of pre-social bias or whathaveyou.

One thing that bothered me slightly was the under-specification of capitalism. She pitches the book as (among other things) a social history of women during the transition to capitalism in Europe, but she doesn't really say much about what constitutes the transition itself: she talks about the enclosure of land and of 'bodies' (i.e. the destruction of community and the atomization of society) as emblematic of capitalism (and she does this really well), but it's not clear why this counts as specifically a capitalist phenomenon (not saying it isn't, only that Federici doesn't make explicit her assumptions).

But otherwise, it really does good work in placing reproduction at the centre of any critique of capitalism, and showing just how implicated it is in any critique of a 'mode of production'. Also gave me a new appreciation - on the basis of class - for the occult in general. As in, the occult and the magical as a site of resistance to the subsumption under capitalist imperatives to universal commercialization. Alot more historical than philosophical, which wasn't what I expected, but enjoyed nonetheless.

Out of body experiences hey? Hmh.

there is enough evidence from the medical literature that the mind can still act and perceive in states without any brain activity — Agathob

Cite?

The American constitution should be torn up and burned in whichever trash heap is nearest at hand.

Ah, I was going to mention the Euthyphro dilemma, but I see it's already been brought up. I don't have much to add here because I'm not convinced that the terms of the argument - morality as 'subjective' or 'objective', or even as 'facts' - are particularly intelligible. On the other hand the question of arbitrariness is interesting, and does seem to me to be a fairly staunch objection to any kind of DCT. The objection, raised above by someone, that 'because God said it, it makes it non-arbitrary', is, of course, no less arbitrary.

So relying upon such a connection by virtue of seeing it as relevant alone construes language and world as something which is given and self interpreting; it is some way or the other, and if this is not seen in the case being analysed, that is a problem of someone's understanding rather than a problem of the methodology. In broad terms, the applicability of connections like Wittgenstein's knowledge-doubt one rests upon a privileged domain in which terms are imbued their meaning, and a connection to this domain is only ensured if you follow the pattern of argument in the knowledge-doubt (or like) analysis. It stops being a methodology using language, and reifies a particular interpretation of language as language, without the mechanisms of contextualisation that it espouses. Linguistic analysis comes (or can come) to police sense rather than clarify it. — fdrake

I don't think this is quite right, but I think this partly down to how to phrased things with the dichotomy language/world. I need to modify what I said above: it is in fact the case that language and world can 'come apart', but the key thing is to recognise instances when they do. 'Linguistic analysis' ('LA'), as I understand it, is the attempt to track when language and world depart from one another, despite the impression that they have not (what Witty calls 'being held captive by a picture' or somesuch). There's a passage from Cavell that I really like that brings out the critical import of LA here, where he uses a really interesting turn of phrase, on making words 'nothing but their meaning':

"Wittgenstein's notion of "speaking outside language games"... suggests that what happens to the philosopher's concepts is that they are deprived of their ordinary criteria of employment (which does not mean that his words are deprived of meaning - one could say that such words have nothing but their meanings) and, collecting no new ones, leave his concepts without relation to the world (which does not mean that what he says is false), or in terms I used earlier, remove them from their position among our system of concepts".

I like Cavell's way of putting things because he does not say that such uses of words are meaning-less per se, but that they are nothing 'but' their meanings: that their significance does not reach, as it were, where we would want it to reach. The words have meaning, but this meaning does not have the significance one takes it to have. I think the Wittgensteinian treatment of knowledge and doubt is exemplary in this regard: against those who ask: 'but how do you really know the Thing with Certainty?', the Wittgensteinian counter-question is simply: 'do you understand what you're asking? Are you aware of how singular your question is, and the equivocations one risks in construing your question as though simply one more in a long line of questions about knowledge?'.

To be 'mislead by grammar' is here to think that this use of language still 'has its position among our system of concepts': to not recognize that world and language have come apart. That all said, against Wittgenstein, I'm all too happy to maintain that philosophers have long known that this is exactly what what happens in their discourse, and that Witty was simply making explicit what every competent philosopher has known implicitly since time immemorial (Wittgenstein projected, as it were, his own naivety onto the philosophers whom he never read).

i feel like thousand plateaus is a boss in an rpg you fight too early and only confront prepared later on. — csalisbury

I know! I feel that way too. I would have liked to have spent more time on preparatory reading (Hjelmslev and Jakobson in particular), but I'm reading it concurrently with a course that a local philosophy school is running, so... Ah well. Force of the encounter and all that.

Pierre Clastres - Society Against the State: Essays in Political Anthropology
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari - A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Vol. 2
Eugene Holland - Deleuze and Guattari's 'A Thousand Plateaus': A Reader's Guide
Brent Adkins - Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus : A Critical Introduction and Guide

Should keep me occupied for the next month or so.

Sam's analysis of *anything is pretty embarrassing.

Fixed.

whether such understanding is sufficient to allow one to infer, based also upon the associated environment of usage, the object of reference — Vessuvius

This model of meaning is explicitly rejected by Wittgenstein, so I'll only say that whatever its merits, it is not what is in question when discussing linguistic analysis as per the OP.