I find historicism adequate to the task of understanding concepts -- it's the historical method, as applied to texts, which allows us to differentiate between concepts, at least (I'm less certain about "schemes", though -- I'd rather talk about the structure of an argument or a philosophy than a conceptual scheme). And rather than Saturnian and English I'd just note that even German and English have problems of intertranslatability, and that this is commonly known among translators as a kind of irresolvable problem. Against the extensional emphasis I put forward poetry translation as a case where we are able to differentiate meanings such that we can partially translate one language into another language, even if we don't know how it is we do this — Moliere

I'm a historicist too.

Translators of poetry roughly divide, in my mind, between literal translators; partial translators; and those like Robert Lowell who provide 'imitations'. The last of these seem to me to be on the edge of saying that a language is a conceptual scheme.

A case-study outside the history of science would be Brian Friel's play 'Translations'. In the early 19th Century in a village in Ireland, there's a confrontation between the Irish, including the learned Irish, and English surveyors who have come here to 'map' the area. In performance, while the actors mostly use English (with a sprinkling of Latin and greek by the Irish), it is understood by the audience that the Irish and English are speaking separate languages and don't understand each other.

Conceptual problems involve recognition of a language: when the Irish speak in Latin, the bluff English don't recognise that it's a learned, separate-from-Irish language; they don't recognise that the native 'hedge-school' is even a school because it's not official.

The problems also emerge in the naming of places in two interlinked ways. One is that for the mapper, each place can only have one name, so they can't accept the fact that (as in any place, informally) most places have more than one name, plus that the area defined by that name is variable. Two is that the English are imposing an English or Anglicised name on a historically-derived Irish name, and insisting on it. The imposition of the supposed requirements of a technology, and the imposition of simple political power, create a different conceptual set of spaces: I'll be honest, I'm uncertain here whether 'scheme' is a useful or discardable word to express the basis of the supposed concepts involved.

Even in the UK, people remember where they were when the assassination was announced: I was watching an episode of the soap opera 'Coronation Street' and they suddenly stopped playing it and replaced it with classical music. I agree it seemed to symbolise a turning point, just as JFK seemed to symbolise a certain kind of hero (although it turned out he wasn't much of a hero at all).

I echo Tom Storm's comments about those public matters that are popularly believed to count. I visited 'Swinging London' when it was swinging, and I can tell you, it never swung for me.

But I did experience a 60's sense of radical change, linked to music, and to university politics, and to soft drugs, and to clever women. When I came to Berkeley in 1970, though, People's Park was locked up and Nixon was running things! (but there was still music, drugs and clever women)

For the Greeks you had eros, agape, philia, and perhaps storge. — Leontiskos

Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics placed love at the core of his view of the virtuous life: love as philia, intense fellowship between lovers, or friends, or family-members, that was itself one of the foundation stones of the polis.

That's not how the world is for us, however. There is a modern 'philosophy of emotions' which has a vast literature, but which is more of an enquiry into the nature of emotions than the 'What is love?' question that we rather leave to songs and literature. But Martha Nussbaum has written insightfully about the interaction of her feelings of love with her philosophy, ever since her early volume 'Love's knowledge'.

I think the Greeks' different words for what we have subsumed into 'love' made some kind of sense, though. There is storge towards Ma and Pa; philia for the like-minded; eros for individual fierce attachments (though Plato had Diotima make this the fulcrum of everything) and agape for spiritual love. It would be an interesting enquiry as to how we have come to merge these different strands of feeling into the one word, which seems to me to burst at its seams to contain them all.

But there was a sense of unity in the post-war years that certainly seemed to completely crack at on November 22, 1963 — schopenhauer1

To a non-American this seems a very weird idea. There was a schism between many young people of the 60's and their parents, but there were new bonds too: notably young white people supported Civil Rights in the USA, and in the UK young white people began to sing, play and modify black music. Young women were getting equal education in large numbers for the first time. And I remember a strong feeling of international connectedness, when as a young man I first left England to visit Europe in 1969, and the USA in 1970. We read Ginsberg, Kerouac, Saul Bellow, Sartre and Camus.

From across the sea I hated LBJ at the time for his rhetoric, and for carrying on the war till he didn't, but think in retrospect he was brilliant at what he achieved in domestic legislative change, whereas Kennedy seems like all front, looking back.

I think generalising about what 'baby boomers' in general subsequently did is a dangerous game. Over the course of a life, different sectors of a generation become important. The quiet people of the 60's became the Thatcherites and Reaganites of the 80's, while the previous radicals lost power - though the continued growth of feminism, gay rights and of advocacy by people of colour carried on in threads that didn't depend on who happened to be in power at the time.

Where are the Palestinian protesters chanting their hatred toward Hamas and love and support for the children of Israel? — Hanover

Oddly enough thousands of Palestinians did demonstrate against Hamas in July/August this year, as reported by the Times of Israel.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/protests-against-hamas-reemerge-in-the-streets-of-gaza-but-will-they-persist/

"Palestinians in Gaza, West Bank strongly support Hamas, October 7 attack
A total of 75% of respondents agreed with the October 7 attack and 74.7% agreed that they support a single Palestinian state “from the river to the sea.”"
https://www.jpost.com/arab-israeli-conflict/article-773791 — RogueAI

And yet only 7.6% of Gaza residents, in answer to the question, What would you like as a preferred government after the war is finished in Gaza Strip?, replied ‘government by Hamas’.

Nigel Warburton is a good populariser of philosophy. He has a couple of introductory books with up-to-date editions, and there is a stash of old podcasts under the name 'philosophy bites' with David Edmunds.

Did you look at the ATP synthase YouTube video?. — Restitutor

I did look at the video. I thought it was fun. It's interesting that the language of the commentary cannot help leaning into a metaphorical vocabulary. One structure was 'designed' in a certain way; 'desires' were imputed to proteins; emotions were ascribed in order to explain the strength of certain forces. Of course it would be a dry commentary without these lively ways of speaking, but they are a nagging reminder of how human organisms are: teleological, purposive, feeling stuff: features we find problematic when applying them to 'machines'.

There's a recent paper by Esposito and Baravalle on the machine-organism relation, which oddly enough seems to me to lend some support to all sides of this debate. They explore the ill-defined definitons of 'machine' and more specifically of the purported analogies between machine and organism. The ATP Synthase can usefully be described by analogy with a machine, but that is not an argument either that (a) it *is* a machine, whatever that might be; nor (b) that the organism of which it is a component part can usefully be described by analogy with a machine.

Here's the paper (I found by fiddling about I could get at the pdf):

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40656-023-00587-2

Western civilization is relevant if we consider that out of the two, Israel is the one that respects the basic human rights and civil liberties of its citizens - uniquely Western values. — Merkwurdichliebe

This wording is very particular. There's an interesting opinion piece in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz about Druze Israelis, who serve in the armed forces, but do not have equal rights. The writer says:

The nation-state law, let us recall, contains no mention of equal rights for all the country’s citizens, Jews and non-Jews. A law that defines the State of Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people but does not in the same breath declare equal rights for all the country’s citizens is a nationalist, anti-democratic law. — Haaretz"

The second issue concerns what respect Israel offers to those who previously inhabited the land on which Israel is founded, who are not its citizens but whose descendants live either in Israel, or in territories conquered and administered by Israel. How is Israel respecting 'the basic human rights and civil liberties' of the inhabitants of Gaza and the West Bank?

I've accepted that I'll never read all of Aristotle's metaphysics, but I've come to appreciate some aspects of him through his modern interpreters. — Wayfarer

Book X of the Nicomachean Ethics is itself something of a metaphysical conundrum that's worth exploring. Aristotle has expended much effort in the rest of the N.E. on exploring phronesis, practical wisdom that pursues eudaimonia. But it has occasionally nagged at him that theoretical nous is in some way a higher form of understanding, involving contemplation, and without necessarily practical outcomes. Book X doesn't resolve this tension, for he both says that (old Gutenberg version)

'...the Working of the Intellect, being apt for contemplation, is thought to excel in earnestness, and to aim at no End beyond itself and to have Pleasure of its own...'

...and yet concludes that active 'Practice' is the key to eudaimonia. My tutor a few years ago, a practical man said, What do the gods talk about all day then? Do they exchange quadratic equations?. Aristotle is not a great explorer of the divine but he acknowledges it is there, and that human speculation and meditation are paths towards it.

An odd feature of explorations of the 'nature' of 'reality' is that they've involved increasingly abstruse experiments, e.g. a tunnel deep under a Swiss mountain where very tiny fragments of the allegedly physical are hurled around at fantastic speeds.

This makes them not dissimilar in structure to 'reality television', which arrived for me 20 years or so ago when a non-representative portion of humanity was confined in an artificial environment and subject to unusual tests while under constant surveillance.

There are manipulators in both scenarios: scientists who observe, and producers who observe. They both edit and judge. We gawp at the outcomes.

Reading Wittgenstein has made me feel, for instance, that 'Reality is not what it seems' is one of those statements that won't stand up to much scrutiny, once unpicked, and that experiments under Swiss mountains or in confined tv studios are going to reveal only a highly stylised version of 'reality'. I like discovering that there's a blindspot in 'reality' that my eyes don't 'see' yet I do, as an example (see the excellent 'Sense and Sensibilia' thread), that under certain conditions physical systems may be particles-not-particles whooshing about in a lot of minuscule empty space, or that social class and nationality at birth probably determine where you'll end up in life. No, really. Maybe Nature does not wear a veil which we can tear away to reveal her true nature.

Leftists want the historically Western nations to abide by Western ideals but then if cultures clash with notions of rights and liberal democracy to give that a pass because of cultural relativism. Therefore human rights to them matter less than respecting cultures. Yet they support the current idea itself of a self-determining NATION STATE. That idea itself, as outlined in the Atlantic Charter is, guess what? WESTERN. — schopenhauer1

Could you give some examples of this tendency of 'leftists'? I don't get it.

If you take female genital mutilation (fgm), for instance, are you claiming that leftists are somehow soft on fgm and other people aren't? I don't know of any evidence for this. I'm inclined to think, feminists leaning to the left have recognised the fact of fgm more clearly and openly than anybody else. But I don't know that that involves believing that perpetrators aren't responsible for their acts, and that the acts aren't wrong in ethics and in law.

If you take the way some women from some Muslim countries are clothed, then there is some sort of left/right divide, e.g. in France, where they have legislated against certain forms of dress. But I don't see the right to tell women what they can and can't wear to be part of a Western ideal, do you?

So, what are examples of this leftist leaning?

However, the "woke" leftist views everything that is the case as a structure of oppression that must be obliterated, hence the woke version of progress is not to build and improve, but to tear down and destroy. Theoretically, it is a Leninist tactic ("the worse it is, the better") because it gives them more opportunity to highlight the failures of the oppressive state and push their illiberal agenda. — Merkwurdichliebe

What's bewildering, though, to a non-woke leftie across the Atlantic is...in practical terms, it looks like in the USA that the right-wing Republicans are trying to tear down and destroy. Surely an alliance of Trump and the Republicans in Congress are like old Trotskyists used to be (the bane of my life as a moderate leftie activist), forever disrupting, continually avoidiing commitment, never wanting to pass any motion because they are so busy signalling to the world how right they are?

Are you saying this isn't the case? Where in the USA are these woke lefties tearing down and destroying anything?

What would be realistic criteria for a state to be considered successful? — Vera Mont

My view is that the opposite of a 'failed' state is a 'successfully functioning' state.

That's a very different beast from a successful state, and 'success' for a state will depend on the criteria one is adopting, which are not going to be universal. Monaco, Saudi Arabia, Norway, Seychelles - different states are successful for different reasons. Surveys of prisoners, or the poor, for example, are going to give you a different league table :)

There is some nervousness in Europe, incidentally, that the USA might become a dysfunctional state, if say Trump were president and right-wing Republicans pursued disruption rather than governance. But for the people who voted such a government in, this might count as success!

Thanks for the clarification, Schop. My puzzlement goes on, however, partly because I don't recognize the leftists I know, here in the north of England, in the 'leftists' who are being generalized over in this thread.

I'm a Green, and the big 'leftist' issue for me is facing up to global warming, and how we transition to a sustainable economy.

Once you're into that as a major area of policy other problems follow, for an anti-authoritarian leftist of my kind: how to rein in financial capital, which monetizes everything and obscures human and environmental value; how income and wealth is distributed, given existing inequalities and the likelihood that worldwide 'growth' is probably near its end (as opposed to 'development', which is always a must); how people are democratically involved in the whole process.

Europe is largely composed of social democracies, which are moving 'right'wards in some respects at the moment, but from a strong consensual basis, with welfare states, socialised medicine and relatively high taxes, owing little to Marx, especially the Leninist flavour. There are issues on which there is obviously a gulf between 'us' and the USA, the most obvious of which is abortion: apart from Poland and Hungary (and pockets of countries like Northern Ireland in the UK), abortion rights are widely accepted in Europe, and the USA's insistence for many decades on tying international aid to reproductive rights has been a source of disagreement about what 'Western civilization' means.

So these are the leftie issues for me, which no-one in this thread has mentioned.

This word 'woke' has caught on only in quite rightwing circles over here, though maybe that'll change. It seems a rather vague insult, like 'reactionary' used to be among liberal lefties (or indeed 'Fascist', which in my youth was a horrible slur). In the UK for instance the rightwing government have trumpeted freedom of speech, but in the last few weeks have been retreatiing to obvious things like 'Freedom of speech has its limits'; alas the first university free speech tsar, Arif Ahmed, appointed by the Tories, is known for believing that free speech includes being able to speak up for Palestinians. (Also trans rights has been less of a left/right issue here, and so for example I'm a supporter of Kathleen Stock, a philosopher who has been no-platformed for her critique of transgender rights)

My last point: is 'race' a mostly unspoken part of this debate? Bill Maher in the opening monologue said 'White' startlingly often to my ear. Brits don't do that so much any more. In the UK of course the staunchest defenders of Empire, and opponents of immigration by black and brown people, have in the last decade been Conservative black and brown ministers of state, so our debate over here has a different feel, but we too have some sort of reckoning to make with slavery and Empire. But perhaps that is an example of how woke I am, that I think such a reckoning is needed!

Is it because I'm not north American that I find it hard to understand this thread? Bill Maher is one of those comedians who doesn't travel well, I think it's one of those things about being divided by a common language.

So I'm a leftist; I'm a strong supporter of universal human rights; and philosophically I am a sort of moral relativist. David Vellemann outlines the kind of view I go with: that different social groups can, indeed will, have incompatible moralities, but their moral concerns are thematically linked. Rational-based negotiation then remains the best way of trying to resolve moral differences.

The argument here seems much more political than philosophical. Who are the 'leftists' who under attack here? Why hasn't anyone quoted any of them? What is the corrective moral view: Maher is a comedian so he has every right not to have an answer, but are people in general arguing for moral objectivism, or what?

Do you think that there is an anti-Jewish bias in Europe stemming from pre-Holocaust ideas of Jewry that is not present in newer Western nation like the US? There are certainly hate groups everywhere but I am wondering if geography influences these trends — schopenhauer1

I'm inclined to think, as a subsequent poster says, that people carry their prejudices with them when they migrate. One reason I responded with a personal story here is that there does tend to be a lot of sometimes quite arcane debate about how other people's prejudices arose over the centuries, but not a lot of confrontation of one's own prejudices.

In Europe the picture is patchy. Germany may seem nowadays upfront in its acknowledgement of Holocaust responsibility, but it took nearly 20 years before such acknowledgement began in a serious way. Some figures of the central European right, e.g. in Poland, tend to mitigate their own countries' role in antisemitic murders 1933-45.

It doesn't look like there was ever that many Jewish people in that region until Britain gave them Israel. — TiredThinker

There was a moderate increase in the Jewish population of 'Palestine' in the late 19th century, some call it 'the first Aliyah'. Then many thousands came from the Russian Empire in the 1900's; and after the First World War many more arrived. The British did not 'give' Israel to Jewish settlers. Rather, the British helped create the tragedy of Palestine/Israel in 1914-20: they first promised support for a single Arab state; they reneged on that with the Sykes-Picot deal of 1916 which carved up Arabia among the Imperial powers, should the allies defeat the Ottomans; they then in 1917 supported the Balfour declaration of a Jewish 'homeland', on condition that the rights of Palestinian Arabs were respected. Mutual contradictions abound in these stances. Once the Ottomans were defeated, the League of nations, formed after the war, granted the 'mandate' over Palestine to Britain, lasting until 1948 (and also the 'mandate' over Transjordan, which became independent in 1946).

It's something of a forgotten war, in 1916-18: British, French and Italians, in alliance with local Arab forces, fought for Arabia against the Ottomans. 50,000 Brits (including Empire forces) died and 500,000 were injured. Those who remember this war already know the name of Gaza: it was the site of two Ottoman victories in 1917. One of my great uncles came home from there permanently mad; another later became a British Palestine policeman, which family lore says he found an impossible job because Britain tried to face in several directions at once.

We should be clear that antisemitism is a 19th century concoction, that grew in an environment where 'race' was a hot topic, hence, in part, Nietzsche's preoccupation with it. Few people note that Arabs, among others, are 'semites' on a race-based division of the world's peoples; the term has become synonymous with Jewry.

I was brought up by anti-Jewish parents. My Dad taught me unpleasant rhymes about greedy Jews; my Mum said the people who'd moved in down the street were 'Very nice people. Jews, you know.'

I do feel some personal grounding is needed in debating 'antisemitism'. A lot of the debate here has been very theoretical. As it happened, for me, loads of my schoolmates, including the arty ones I got on with, were Jewish and I emerged into adulthood without prejudice, indeed a bit pro-Jewish, and anti-racist in general, as far as I can tell. But those rhymes and comments of my parents live forever in me. I can't wipe my memory. There is something atavistic about prejudice, to find emotional and intellectual explanations for life's difficulties in the Other, and Jews are Other everywhere they have gone - yet have resolutely survived.

Now Zionists among Jewry have established a state where every non-Jew is Other. To me this is both a remarkable triumph over adversity, and once a two-state solution became impossible, a never-ending tragedy. Leaders squirm over the difficulties this gives rise to: in my native UK the opposition party leader can't bring himself to condemn what I think of as vile Israeli actions (in response to vile Hamas actions); it seems like only the Irish government in the EU dissents from an EU pro-Israeli stance; but the ordinary human sympathies of Brits, Irish and Europeans are, as far as I can see, more with the helpless Palestinians. Awfully, under these sympathies the atavism of anti-Jewishness bubbles up. I just try to stay reasonable. What more can be done?

Do you suppose there are a lot of children hanging out at armament factories during the night? — Leontiskos

The OP says 'debris from the [factory] explosion kills 100 civilians'. Are you saying these civilians were 'hanging out at armament factories' rather than, say, going about their normal business, maybe living a few streets away? I don't follow.

It's interesting how, in describing the two events, the actions of Group A are described more emotively, with butcher and smashed. One's own ethical code shows in one's descriptions.

In practice Group B are also butchering, and their actions smash children against walls too. They don't do it with their bare hands, though.

When I was a teenager it took me ages to recover from reading Vonnegut's 'Slaughterhouse Five' about the Allied bombing of Dresden, which had then caused me to discover in the library how Bomber Harris and the heroes of the RAF had killed thousands of Germans - in what is mostly thought of as a failed effort to sap German civilian morale.

Aristotle has a powerful examination of courage and its relationship to fearlessness in the Nicomachean Ethics, Book III. As is his way, it boils down to fearing the right kind of thing in the right kind of way. You can find a rather quaint translation online here: https://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/nicomachaen.3.iii.html

I think it's the absence of subjectivity that's the killer blow to the idea of sentient AI: a computer system is not a being. — Wayfarer

I've been trying to write a little fiction, that just won't come out right at the moment, about whether some humans' belief in the subjectivity of a computing machine might persuade a lot of other humans there is sentient AI. 'Definitions' can slip away from rationality in the hands of human sociality.

This seems to me already lurking in the popular speculation about future AI as a sort of supermensch. I mean, if enough Americans can believe that the best person in their midst to run the place is Donald Trump, then widespread beliefs can be ill-founded yet become entrenched.

One mistake that I discuss with Google Bard (my version of your chats to gpt) is that large language systems have been 'trained' to use the first person singular. Bard is sympathetic to my case, while still calling itself 'I' of course. In our fictions - think of all the animal stories we love - the use of 'I' seems to me to involve an ascribed sentience.

It concerns me too that OpenAI (a fine misnomer in view of their secrecy about their 'training material') is built on the shoulders of millions of human giants, whose contribution is neither acknowledged nor financially rewarded. (Some authors and artists are of course trying to sue for royalties but it seems doubtful they've got the clout against techie behemoths). Every reply one receives from so-called AI is constructed from a model built on ordinary human interactions; each 'reply' is not an expression of 'intelligence', but a refined forecast of what happens next, as programmed. The machines are stochastic parrots, as the Google women's paper of three years ago put it. But subsequent human discourse about them, and our subsequent discourse 'with' them, including our acceptance of their self-identification using the word 'I', as well as our public discourse about their potential sentience, may well be leading us up the garden path.

Again, I don't think the human v animal demonstration/comparison of the notions of horror and terror, have much more to offer, than the contributions already made. — universeness

I'm just commenting that 'human v animal' is an odd way of putting things, when humans are animals.

I also find it interesting that the animal kingdom don't seem to have the revenge pressure that we have. — universeness

On a side issue, humanity is part of the animal kingdom. Animals are not 'other' to 'us'. We are animals.

I find pleasure/pain as a primary nexus for desire, some sort of norm, quite a difficulty. Kant's attempt at defining aesthetic judgment is built, like Epicurus' system, on the pleasure/pain axis, and it's terribly inadequate. There are two examples that for me don't fit this picture:

1. A woman's desire to bear and raise a child. I don't know of a male philosopher who looks at this seriously: yet it's how the species continues, the heart of the matter. Pleasure/pain cannot account for these desires, or so it seems to me. There is something marvellous involved: the embrace of pain and confinement to enable something else; the desire to create another, to recognise and love that other and to find fulfilment in both the caring for that other, and the eventual letting go of control.

2. Sado-masochism. In s/m behaviour a high degree of pain may be the greatest pleasure. And the ethical approaches to such behaviour involve, as the Count outlines in another context, the second order desire: How shall we enact our desires, that will involve being hurt or hurting, in a way that acknowledges and indeed privileges the other? After all, the enactment of such desires on a first order basis would be no more than narcissism, and cruelty.

I don't have a systematic reply to offer, just ask about these things. I start off taking an analytic approach to these questions, but it seems to me Levinas' explorations of our encounters with the other offer great insights into how we can resolve the analytic problems that arise.

(Long time no see and sorry I'm late to this, I've just followed an impulse to rejoin the forum)

I would be a strong supporter of something like this theory if it were about a process. 'Minding', perhaps.

I know academe studies 'philosophy of mind' but 'mind' is a very English-language concept. Even our neighbours' French and German struggle to translate 'mind'. It's a thing that isn't a thing, an all-encompassing entity that yet has no 'stuff' in it. To me it feels to be in the way, like a homunculus.

Maybe 'minding' isn't right either but (a) it's a process, and I feel that much of what you write about is about process; (b) it relates to 'thinking' without imprisoning that thinking in a particular pseudo-place, allowing the body as well as the brain to get a look-in, indeed perhaps allowing the process to be free-floating in a Hegelian way as plaque flag references; (c) it's got an element of attention or caring in it, 'Yes I do mind', a touch of Heidegger's 'sorge' if we're prepared to mention the old Nazi - and for me that helps, we're talking about creatures who go about the world and aren't necessarily sitting back in their armchairs, puffing on their pipes, reflecting on great Matters, they are rather coping in the here and now with what matters to them, inventing ideas to explain what happens as they move around, improvising, improving, bouncing ideas off each other.

On this account of course there is no 'real' to penetrate to or to accept is forever out of reach, because there need be no ontology, like Collingwood's metaphysics. Epistemology might be all there is :)

One other thing that lingers, now I'm remembering the impact of 'Crash' on me...The developed world really does fetishize the car in a most peculiar way, and this is very rarely remarked upon. People rationally agree that we've got to cut back on oil use, and yet buy bigger energy-guzzling cars, can only imagine a net zero future with loads of cars, vote for policies that allow cars more rights than pedestrian people. The person with the flag walking in front of a car to keep its speed down in 1900 would have saved thousands of lives: why do we laugh at such an image? The victory of car-drivers over pedestrians for rights over the city streets that gave rise to the term 'jaywalkers' 100 years ago wasn't an inevitable historical victory. The advertisements I see whenever I go to a cinema seem to be a sensual and sometimes quasi-erotic hymn to the car, and few other than Ballard have ever taken up this notion and run with it. I think future eras will look back on this phase of humanity's relationship with cars and wonder at how perverse we were. to so over-value the car, an asset the salaryman/working woman can enjoy and love and work dutifully for and become addicted to.

I was very taken with 'Crash', which I read about thirty years ago. In a way I felt prepared for how inexorable it is. From earlier novels I remembered 'The wind from nowhere', which I'd read before 'Crash', when a cyclonic wind springs up, and blows, and blows, and when any other writer would maybe have it ease up, the wind and the terrors it unleashes are relentless. Perhaps it was that familiarity with how Ballard's mind seemed to work that makes me feel I wasn't as affected as you were by 'Crash': I knew he would take one giant premise, and be inexorable, relentless. 'High rise' is a later, to me failed, version of the same obsessive approach. Maybe I was ready to keep my distance.

In longer retrospect, 'Empire of the sun' was later an eye-opener to Ballard's imagination, a semi-autobiographical novel of a boy lost in the horrors of the Second World War in 'the far East', forced to confront terrible things before he was old enough to have developed a moral compass. It was also, speaking as someone who was trying to write fiction at the time, a remarkably bold thing for Ballard to do: to try and write a literary heartfelt realist novel, after a lifetime's reputation for doing something quite different.

Last thought: I felt as you did about 'Crash', about the Pinturas Negras, the 'Black Paintings' of Goya when I saw them in Madrid. They are images that still sometimes haunt me. I can see 'Saturn devouring his son' or 'Two old men eating soup' clearly now, without having to look them up, and my gorge rises. They are ghastly, and I'm deeply glad I saw them.

The fantasy of humans as possible brains in a vat belongs to the period when AI was believed to be achievable by analysing how the brain (which was an analogy for a computer) expressed its intelligence.

It seems to me that period is gone. Now AI, for example, is focussed on 'What happens next'. And our model of the human is at present just such a creature: body and mind are integrated, and they behave in constant expectation of what happens next.

A brain in a vat seems to me like a ghastly horror movie opinion, thought up by people who think a lot, and live little.

All I know is that it was the novel in which there was a metal dildo called Steely Dan which then provided the name for the well-known musical ensemble (and my personal all-time favourite band). — Wayfarer

Me too

I'm mostly interested in what a realist theory of language might be. — Tom Storm

I found it hard to grasp how you would approach that question if you couldn't answer Banno as to what 'realism' might be.

Much languaging (as some describe the process of expression through language), especially spoken language, is about emotion, fellowship, cooperation, problem-solving. 'Reality' seems to me just a passing notion here. I've been struck by reports about the conversations between Lukashenko of Belarus and Prighozin the Wagner leader that seem to have forestalled an internal Russian conflict. They are old comrades, who apparently swore at each other in their first conversation during the crisis for 20 minutes, and eventually arrived at a way of resolving the situation. Such a debate is very like the debates we all have at work, or, to zoom in, with a loved one: the purported 'facts' matter, but it is not through reference to 'the real' or by coming to any agreement about 'facts' that we resolve the exchange, the issues that matter. Language flows through us, especially familiar language with familiars, and we find ways to move forwards.

the underlying material of language - information — Jabberwock

This notion of 'underlying material' seems to imply 'reality' lurking under there. To me language is amazingly rich, in and of itself. It can't be reduced, and there isn't something underlying it. Here I agree with apo, though I don't personally go for any kind of universalising theory. Hilary Lawson claims to have found a universalising theory, somehow, in going beyond Wittgenstein and Derrida to notions of openness and closure. That to me seems like just another shtick to build an institute on (and he founded an Institute on that basis). I'm OK with the prior situation: that Wittgenstein talked mostly a great deal of sense, including about the limits of sense, and that Derrida's analysis vanished into a spiral of clever-clever nonsense (though his homage to Levinas and thereby the relation of the I to the Other, I've personally found rewarding).

Witt's Tractatus is analysable on this basis. It begins of course 'The world is everything that is the case.' It seems that everything flows from this simplicity.

But the book gets complicated, with lots of paras and sub-paras, to describe an entire system built on such a basis.

And then, darn it, it ends a systematic account with what is almost a dismissal of, certainly a proposal to overwhelm, the whole complicated system:

'My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands
me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out
through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw
away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.)
He must surmount these propositions; then he sees the world
rightly.'

So, at the last, 'Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.' You can't get simpler than that.

There's an old critique of A C Grayling which seems to agree with Un's view of this, its emphasis being that 'militant atheism' in a sense needs religious texts to be rendered literally, to make its literalist critique possible:

Grayling sees himself as a champion of the Enlightenment, but in the old battle over the interpretation of religious texts he is on the side of conservative literalist fundamentalists rather than progressive critical liberals. He believes that the scriptures must be taken at their word, rather than being allowed to flourish as many-layered parables, teeming with quarrels, follies, jokes, reversals and paradoxes.

This is from an old Grauniad review.

A complicating issue is how 'we' distribute medical help. In practice there is already rationing by society and cost of types of treatment, and the technological advances enabling gene-based treatment are likely to be very costly per person. So at the one-to-one level 'we' may take each case on its merits, but in broader terms 'we' don't.

It seems a bit perverse to claim that groups of people which each call themselves a 'party' are nevertheless simply of the same party. The label of the party represents something profound, even if the core 'interests' they each pursue are, say, business 'interests'. So in my view it's a silly claim, even though as a lefty I agree with the emotion underlying the view - that business interests largely overwhelm the interests of others, even among parties that claim to be social democrats.

A secondary issue may be dwarfed in the USA by the Trumpian changes, but here in the UK there has grown a clear division between the interests of financial capital and of business capital. In this sense even the 'Business Party' would not be as monolithic as claimed.

Well, 1+1 = 10 in a binary system, to take the simplest example where the signs to the left of the '=' might imply a different sign to the right. I never grasp why 1+1=2 is taken as some sort of truism in all contexts, that's all I mean.

'1+1=2' is only true within a certain system of signs, so is conditional in its own way, isn't it?

For me a memory, for example, is something a person experiences. It's an odd thing for instance to come to a place you believe you've never been before, and realise you were wrong. It's as if the memory of that place resides partly in that place: the experience is an interaction between person, place and time. In a sense then the philosophical question feels more like, Why do I want to specify a location for my memory? Must a memory be allocated to a body-part, or even to a location within that particular person? One of my long-time favourite poems is Henry Reed's 'The naming of parts', a wartime poem which riffs on the purported provision of part-naming, amid the natural experiences of Spring. Here's the poem.

Then there is the mother, or indeed any close carer, of a baby: she recognises a something in the baby that is very particularly that new human being, a unique identity in the movements and eyes and responses and 'personality' that soon merges: if this were true, the self would be no myth, at least, not to others. 'Why is he acting that way?' 'He's just being himself.'

Can those immersed in the philosophical tradition tell me if aesthetic reasoning is used to justify positions on morality and meaning?

Personally I think the 'aesthetic' is too easily relegated to the sidelines of philosophical chat. Kant himself attempts in the least studied of the critiques to relate the 'aesthetic' to the 'teleological'. That is the area of opinion that you are ascribing to 'religion': that there is some wholeness, in this supposedly religious view, that integrates talk about 'meaning' and talk about 'aesthetics'. (Morality is another step on)

There is a division between the 'artistic' and the 'scientific' well-known in modern culture that is present in, for instance, ugly scientific (and indeed philosophical) writing. Sometimes there is a strange sort of pride in how nearly unreadable scientific work is, and how pointlessly elegant are artistic works which do not have 'truth conditions'.

Hannah Ginsborg has written about this (including a Stanford entry on the topic) but it is under-explored. One reason I love Wittgenstein, for instance, is that I think his works are beautifully written. Essays in the style of the PI would however be ill-rewarded in contemporary academe (and unreproducible by AI). This is an area that nags at me personally, although I do not have answers to offer. When I went back to study Philosophy at University in later life I went with a lifetime of experience of how to write, and I was shocked at how little good writing, as I understand it, was valued, compared to bullet-point essays that Google Bard can now reproduce (actually, more elegantly than most such essays are in the raw).