Thing is, I agree that science is super important if you want to practice philosophy; but the kind of platitudinous posturing that you're engaged with here is worse than the worst kind of philosophy; it's vacuous pseudo-intellectual signaling empty of any content.

Best to have let them go. They've clearly never had any feel for philosophy to begin with.

Darth is right that its only those who suffer from insecurity or inability concern themselves so much with trying to distinguish between 'actual' and 'non-actual philsophy'. Unable to do philosophy, they go around like little insufferable bureaucrats, preaching about truth and doxa, and contributing nothing to philosophy itself. Impotence masquerading as importance.

Fair enough, and I'll say no more about here.

Just to be clear, there is a good discussion to be had about the relationship between science and philosophy. There is no good discussion to be had about a rant regarding 'intelligent' and 'inept' people and their 'suitability' for philosophy. One of these is philosophy. The other is pompous trash peddled by dickheads.

I understand what Hume is saying. — Ron Cram

Hume is denying that they are observable or ascertainable in any way. — Ron Cram

:rofl:

Said every raving conspiracy theorist ever.

Mm, it's a simple concept, seemingly hard to grasp.

I'm saying that you are adding meaning to the bolded words that Hume himself never intended. — Ron Cram

Hume's text stands on its own. That your two stated purposes are (1) affirming and pandering to your own preconceived view of Hume ('he was wrong'), along with (2) adressing an issue he barely raised - his relationship with Newton - speaks more to your own projections than it does to Hume's project. When your argument hinges upon the lunatic sophistry of 'necessary is not really necessary', then I can only leave you to your own devices. I wish you luck.

One alternative is that the existence - or not - of God is a non-issue, and that the question itself it not worth contemplating because it is a badly posed question. That is, what ought to be rejected is not God's existence or non-existence, but the very question itself, which asks a question about a non-sense, not unlike - perhaps exactly like - the question of weather or not square circles exist: a question not worth answering on account of the nonsensicality of its very subject. God is like that. A mistake of grammar.

It seems obvious that the solution is to drop the Platonism and with it the ridiculous extravagances of MWI, and so dissolve the 'problem' as sensical to begin with.

I think you are reading into the text that which is not there. — Ron Cram

I literally quoted Hume's exact words with some bolding. Like, the opposite of reading things into the text which are not there. On the other hand, Hume nowhere speaks of 'kinetic force', which is something that you've quite literally conjured out of thin air to put into Hume's mouth.

And yes, there are plenty of people who disagree with Hume, but appeals to authority are meaningless and about as straightforward a case of fallacious reasoning as can be.

I was going to straight up delete this thread - because it is totally vacuous - but I figured locking it and leaving it up for the irony was too irresistible.

Alternatively, you can simply read, with more attention than you have so far given, your own citation: “When we look about us towards external objects, and consider the operations of causes, we are never able, in a single instance, to discover any power or necessary connextion; [that is] any quality which binds the effect to the cause and renders the one an infallible consequence of the other. We only find that the one does actually, in fact, follow the other. The impulse of one billiard ball is attended with motion in the second. This is the whole that attends to the outward senses."

I said nothing about modal logic. People have been talking about modality for centuries before the invention of modal logic. In any case, I refer you to my initial post in this thread, which went over the question. Alternatively, you can pay closer attention to your own Hume citation, in which the question of necessity stands front and centre.

Notice that Hume is not talking about a purely mental exercise. He is relying on his sense of vision. Further, he is denying the possibility to understand cause and effect such as is easily seen in one billiard ball striking another. This is clearly observed by anyone, even a child can understand that this is a transfer of kinetic energy. — Ron Cram

As I said previously, if you are unable to address the question of modality, then you are unable to address Hume. That is just the case with your reading. To the flames it goes.

Also, I'm confused by your comment that one cannot wring existence from logic. You may have heard about Descartes doing exactly that... cogito ergo sum. — Ron Cram

I have heard about Descartes' famously fallacious argument, yes.

Just to be clear about what exactly Hume acheived: the argument against induction shows that causality is not conceptual. You cannot wring causality out of concepts, nor existence from logic. Its ultimate import is that it stands as a bulwark against conceptual idealism. This is why the idea that Hume is somehow anti-science is laughable: on the contrary, Hume secures the emprical basis of science by expelling idealism from our understanding of causality, once and for all. To argue for the logical necessity of causal connection is to argue for idealism through and through. There are few positions more contemptuous of science than that.

Again, Newton was right. Hume was philosophically motivated and wrong. — Ron Cram

But Hume was not wrong. You've all but admitted that short of begging the question, you can't even address Hume's problem. And Newton's picture of the world is anything but 'right' in any nuanced sense of the term. His linear conception of cause and effect is incredibly artificial, and is scientifically useful within only very narrow parameters. Like I said, it takes a poor grasp of both science and Hume to make the conclusions you do.

I'm not willing to debate the validity of induction. — Ron Cram

Then you're not willing to debate Hume. Which is fine, so long as this is acknowledged.

I'm working developing a livable epistemology. Virtue epistemology attempts to answer the Gettier problem but it isn't apt (meaning it's unwleldy and difficult to use on a daily basis). I'm sensitive to the charge that all human thinking should not be based on presuppositions because that makes all human thinking circular. My new epistemology is built on the concept of the testable hypothesis. The proposition "My senses are basically reliable" is a testable hypothesis and a good starting point for a livable epistemology. My sense of vision can be tested by my sense of touch, etc. The answer is yes, my senses are basically reliable. The idea that induction is basically reliable is also a testable hypothesis. Are all inductions going to be correct? No. But inductions can be used to test other inductions until we come to a satisfactory level of certainty or probability about truth. If one wishes to challenge a particular induction, they must do so using induction. Trying to use deduction to challenge induction is a category error. — Ron Cram

You have more in common with Hume than you might think, then. Like him, you seem to want to hew to a more anti-foundationalist way of thinking about the world. Hume often invokes incredulity (and a bizarre kind of anger) on account of his seeming radicality; which is unfortunate because Hume is a far more pragmatic, cautious philosopher than people give him credit for.

But the status of inference is just what is in question. Begging the question does not solve it.

It's also worth mentioning that causality in nature is supremely differential: one can modulate the effects of causes by all sorts of means - score one for empiricism. Were cause and effect to have the force of logical necessity, both science and nature would be much poorer for it. Those who think Hume stands against science know neither much of science nor Hume.

Rather, a transfer of kinetic energy will always have an effect in our world as surely as the fact a valid conclusion follows from the premises. — Ron Cram

And presumably you can present an argument for this assertion?

Cause and effect has a logical necessity because it has a physical necessity. — Ron Cram

At best this is a confused statement, at worst a meaningless one. It is clear what logical necessity is. It is supremely unclear what 'physical necessity' is, or how it relates to either logic or cause and effect.

Hume's significance is missed entirely if it is not recognized that the argument against induction ultimately resolves into in question of modality - that is, necessity and contingency. What Hume questioned was not 'cause and effect' (whatever that would even mean), but the modality of the connection between both: he denied - and rightly so - that the connection between cause and effect has the status of logical necessity. This is why Hume is rightly regarded as an empiricist: any connection between cause and effect must be 'extra-logical', it cannot rely on (formal) logic alone, but must be grounded in something 'wordly'. Hume articulated the unbridgeable gap between logic and existence in a way that no one serious about philosophy can pass over.

Any discussion - including the ones here - that do not take the question of modality into account when discussing Hume's challenge to induction ought to be committed to the flames.

Incidentally, Kant is where you go after Hume; if you're looking for a first step in response to Hume, Kant - and the entirety of transcendental philosophy - is the best place to go.

Nah, but he's been on my radar since Against the Grain came out last year(?). The bloke you liked to a while back (on Gri Gri magic) wrote a bit about him too, and I read alot of his stuff. Definitely someone I want to look into when I can.

I'm looking for evidence in other aspects of the text that this is a consistent and strong feature rather than a bug or simple side-effect, and I'm not really finding much. In other words, what I'm seeing seems indistinguishable (apart from being a bit tighter) from a university creative-level writing attempt by a competent but undeveloped writer whose teacher for some reason has yet to hit her with the rule "No kitsch". And that's more or less the crux of my criticism, not that there's nothing at all to talk about here in terms of the plot, but that the story doesn't offer much, if anything, artistically. — Baden

Yeah, I think this is entirely fair on it's own terms, but I suppose I just can't not see the piece from a critical-sociological angle which is the 'level' at which is resonates for me. As I mentioned earlier, I first came across it in the context of the Aziz Ansari 'awful date' story, which I always saw as a kind of 'test case' for the MeToo movement, and gauging the kind(s) of response that occurred in relation to it. And what Cat Person helped me to do (along with the Ansari story and alot of what's been in the air since, of which Cat Person was one piece in an assemblage) was put into narrative form how a certain kind of situation can develop, and the kind of 'ingredients' that go into making it.

I mean, to delve back in a bit - and to follow some of @Moliere's comments in his last post - one reading of the story is as a critique of desire, where both characters are alienated from their own desires - in different ways. Margot literally narrates her own situation (via imaginary boyfriend/narcissistic projective fantasy) as if she were other than exactly what she is. Robert, for his part, doesn't question his desires, but it doesn't take much to see them as thoroughly socially scripted, especially the way he reacts to Margot's tears outside the club, where he clearly finds comfort in playing the 'comforting, strong man' while projecting an image of feminine vulnerability upon Margot. Robert is so alienated from his desire he doesn't even realize it. Which brings be back to @Timeline's question:

Was his reaction at the end merely evidence of feeling emasculated from the experience - like when she laughed or when he received the text message from Tamara - or was it because he is one-sided in the experience and could not understand at all how his behaviour was wrong. — TimeLine

If what I said above is valid, then it's not just the case that Robert was emasculated (although he was) and that he couldn't see things from a non-ego perspective, but more that he can't see his own alienation from himself, doesn't realize just how thoroughly mediated his own desires are, and the effects they have. And the point of all this being that this kind of alienation cannot be thought in isolation from the social (the masculine script Robert sticks by), and the thoroughly confused relation to her own desires that Margot has (she asks him back home!, when by all accounts the night is going awfully, or at least very, very blandly). And if you read the Ansari story (written from Her first-person perspective as well!), you get a very similar feeling that She was uncomfortable for alot of what happened and it progressed to a point far beyond what it should have been (n.b. not blaming her, it's fucking terrifying and bewildering to be put in that position, and we are not educated and socially prepared for how to deal with it for the most part).

And it's these kinds of resonances, where I just can't see Cat Person outside of all of that, where I find it's value. On the other hand - yes, I totally agree that there could have been a far more effective vehicle to carry that fourth, and that yeah, alot of what I've said above is clearly not reading the story from a compositional perceptive. But yeah, that's just where my head's at when I read it.

I recommend anyone try this exercise. Read "Cat Person". Then read "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been" by Joyce Carol Oates.

https://www.cusd200.org/cms/lib/IL01001538/Centricity/Domain/361/oates_going.pdf — Baden

*long, slow breath out*; man, that was brutal - and a useful foil for talking about Cat Person, I think. One of the things you can't do with the Oates piece is necessarily relate it to a common, occasional experience (not a criticism). There's something 'everyday' about Cat Person, it means - I think - to capture a particular experience that (can be) resonant and I think did resonate with alot of people: that strange nexus of feelings/ambiguities that happen around bad dates and/or bad sex. Oates obviously isn't aiming for that even though her characters are obviously far more realized and starkly drawn, which is why the story resonates on a different level. So with respect to the following:

She's confused; we're confused; and though we might more or less resonate with her experiences (depending on who we are), we're not deeply engaged with her desires (or fears) because they're not well-drawn. We don't know who she is any more than she does and we don't care all that much. Or I didn't anyway.

There's a sense in which I think confusion is - or should be - the point. 'We' don't know, as a society, how to play amorous games very well; we're confused, right at the level of desire itself, whether our desires are themselves what we want. This is what accounts for the ambivalence of affect that seems to be exhibited by both Margot and Robert - they're both profoundly unsure about what they do/should be doing, even as they do it. So I guess I'm taking the sketchiness of the characters at face value: they're thinly drawn because they really are 'thin people', at least with respect to their romantic lives.

Anne Sauvagnargues - Deleuze and Art
Anne Sauvagnargues - Artmachines: Deleuze, Guattari, Simondon

Nooo, I think it's so, so, so important not to reduce this to sociopathy or at least personal pathology - thats what I meant when I said it's impossible to give a purely psychological reading of the story. Or even, if it is sociopathy at work, it needs to be read literally as a pathology of the socius, of whom Robert is an accretion. What I want to emphasise is that we all have the capacity to be Robert, we (men, women, and everything in between) can all see ourselves doing the Right Thing, playing the Correct Role ('she asked me to come home with her!'), without still knowing what it is we are doing. Pathologizing keeps the danger too far; it Others too quickly, absolves us too easily. It needs to be near to be real.

Perhaps I can put it this way: Csal has been talking about games and meta-games recently: I think both Robert and Margot know the game, but are both utterly clueless about the meta-game: the motions are right, and there are real consequences of those motions, but the meta-game is incredibly fuzzy for both of them ('Do I want what it is I'm supposed to want? Do they?' - Margot to her credit, asks this question, even though she doesn't quite act on it; Robert remains oblivious). At the story level, one thing that's striking is the lack of any real, motivated 'decisional' action, I think. The whole relationship - with maybe the exception of the initial asking out - is built off reactions. Both are consistently unsure about what the other is thinking, and you consistently have this weird retroactive confirmation of motivation where each acts decisively only ever based on some expression of vulnerability in the other (with the vulnerability evoked by the other to begin with).

(Like, why the dolphin emoji? Because that's What One Does. It's 'Cute'. Actually alienating and objectively bizarre, but The Cute Thing To Do).

Maybe this is why there's something a little off about the story. There are no real narrative gestures, no elements of surprise and unexpected joys (the kind that make your heart flutter wildly when one begins a relationship). They're both constantly on the back foot with each other. There's an almost complete absence of romance (again with the exception of the texting at the beginning), which is a genre marked, I think, precisely by grand Gesture. Instead, the one real decision comes from an external influence, the friend who writes the message. The element that seems strongest here is tragedy - had the friend not intervened, would Margot have gone on at least one more incredibly awkard date with bad sex? I think entirely possible.

Anyway, just loosely strung together thoughts. I feel like the piece could also be called something like - pace Arendt - the banality of amorous evil - although evil is too strong a word. Something between evil and idiocy.

If you think that philosophy ought not to have any use apart from standing as some independent 'entity' of some sorts... — Posty McPostface

Ugh, no. Philosophy is a discipline and a practice like any other - metallurgy say. You learn some techniques, hone your craft, create some good pieces, if you're lucky, and if you practice and study hard enough. But ultimately you contribute to a body of practice that far exceeds you. But when you ask the metallurgist: what's the use of what you do? Well - who cares? This is just some external question that has nothing to do the fact of the practice of metallurgy. It's gossip, window-dressing for the celebrity rag.

I read the story around the same time as the Aziz Ansari 'story' broke (I think because of it, the piece having been published about a month before), so I can't divorce my reading of it from that general atmospherics of 'bad sex as a societal phenomenon'. I think you're right to highlight the strange game of power going on, and one of the things I thought a bit about in the wake of both the Ansari story and Cat Person is that we're just really bad at playing games with sexual power.

Or rather, we play games that we don't even know that we're playing; Or, we have these hazy outlines, absorbed through a mishmash of observation, gossip, some mixed experiences, and we do - or think we do - what we're 'supposed to', and you commit yourself to this network of expectations you (or your partner) didn't even quite know you've bought into. And normally this is fine (life is like that) except no one wants to talk about this stuff because sex is still treated as this weird and dirty thing that you can only whisper about, even as we're meant to be this sexually liberated society - which ends up confusing things even more.

So you have Nice Guys who do the Right Thing and still can't get laid, or end up being rejected like Robert, and they didn't do anything Bad, which is just jet-fuel for resentment - incipt 'incels'. So one thing I don't think than can be done is to give a purely psychological reading of the story: I don't think there's alot more 'going on' with either Margot or Robert than what's described in the story; or at least, what's going on is that neither has any idea of why they do what they do beyond the fact that they 'know what they feel'. I think anything they'd say, if you were to ask them 'now', would just be back-projection.

Fine.

Would it be uncharitable to say that philosophy has already served its purpose? All the unrealized potential that people had, driven by wonder, curiosity, and the like, have been realized throughout the span of more than two millennia in the form of all the various fields that have sprung up from philosophy.

In other words, what more does philosophy have to offer, or am I being uncharitable now? — Posty McPostface

It's not at all clear what you're asking. 'What more does philosopher have to offer'..? To who? For what? In comparison to...? I don't understand how someone who can profess such affinity for Wittgenstein can so consistently ask questions which are so confused. 'Unrealized potential driven by wonder realized thoughout the span of millennia in the form of various fields....': this is not a sensical sentence.

We are all philosophers. — Monitor

Yeah, we definitely disagree. I can't imagine a deeper trivialisation of philosophy than this.

Eugh, you can do better than just sprouting off a desiccated saying like it has any relevance to what we're talking about.

Ought to? Says who? I think you 'ought to' put your own question into question - why is 'use' so important to you? I don't demand that you ought to have a 'use' - which would be a vulgar effacement of your autonomy - and I don't see why philosophy 'ought' to have a 'use', which has the brass tang of an ugly utilitarian approach to a subject which I think ought to exceed all such considerations.

I don't think it's clear that there is 'a' purpose of philosophy although it certainly has been put to uses. And moreover I think there's an autonomy of philosophy that ought to be upheld, one that affirms it's absolute indifference to any 'use'. I see it not unlike a giant, thundering river which you can only really dip into every now and then, and, if you study hard enough, be lucky enough to map some of its many banks. So I think there's something deeply impersonal about philosophy, and while it's entirely possible to use it as a psychological crutch or whathave you, there's nothing about it that necessitates that use.

That said, there's nothing quite like wonder at that which exhibits indifference, and some of the strongest feelings are aroused precisely by incomprehension. Flaubert, on writing, once wrote: "What a heavy oar the pen is, and what a hard current is the idea, when one digs into it!"; and I think this is as true of philosophy as it is of literature: we dig our oars, steer our little boats, and the indifference of the currents always threaten to overwhelm us. There's a joy in that, even if a Sisyphean joy. Which is not to say that philosophy exists 'for' your joy, or sadness, or any affect. It does it's own thing regardless of you (or anyone).

"For it is written, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and will bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent." (1 Corinthians 1:19-20)

Which would be nice if it doesn't then go on to juxtapose this with the Wisdom of God.

Wisdom is anti-philosophy; thought reduced to platitudes and ready-made issuances.

Yes but you're talking about the bloke who said that to be is to be reckoned with as a value of a variable. It's hard to get more propositiony than that! Or else you have something like Ted Sider's metaphysics which tries to capture the world be means of a "complete sentence in a fundamental language", which is just the apogee of analytic proposition-madness carried to the nth degree.

Ah, I see what you mean but I don't think that's it. It's not enough to look at words/sentences in that 'present-at-hand' manner to 'see' propositions. Unlike broken hammers, the idea of propositions don't simply slip into awareness at the point of puzzlement or semantic breakdown - I think this is to underestimate just how artificial propositions are, the fact that they more or less don't exist outside a highly contrived, technical literature where their properties have to be stipulated in a specific manner ('bearers of reference which are truth-apt', to give a minimal characterization). It's artifice through and through.

The phenomenology you describe is perhaps the first step towards treating language in terms of propositions, but it remains too general to capture them in their specificity. The moral of all this being something like: fuck Frege.

Merleau-Ponty is more my jam, but I'm not entirely sure what you mean by 'propositions as phenomneology'- your cite doesn't really expand upon it.