The paradox between sense & reason is the rub, which I think prevails in the poem. — Cavacava

I hadn't thought about the inspiration, thanks for taking me back to Lamia. For myself I think the message of the poem is muddled, perhaps because the characters took over Keats somewhat and defied their allegory, which finally they had to step back into. But you can read it a lot of ways.

But Dawkins is quite hot on misleading analogies that are not to be taken literally, but which he takes literally. The selfish gene for instance. — unenlightened

I too felt that when going back to 'The Selfish gene', which I was more of an enthusiast for when I first read it when it came out - I didn't know much about genetics. It's one reason why I asked this question: I just didn't feel it right to re-locate the forward thrust of life in the encoded gene which blindly (tick tock, see next prevailing metaphor) uses all other things for its own self-perpetuation.

Calling it a "mood" seems like it is being shrugged off or taken too lightly. — 0 thru 9

The talk about 'mood' I was quoting from elsewhere, in work by Matthew Ratcliffe, doesn't take things lightly. It's about 'deep mood' which he distinguishes from everyday talk about mood..

Such a 'deep mood' is our very way of being in the world. In this sense I (think I) completely agree with the outlook of Noble Dust. (Philosophically my phrasing comes from Heidegger, but he thought our deep mood was 'angst', an odd formulation) To the clinician a report of 'depression' may be a 'malady', a 'mood disorder', and perhaps they are bound to look at it that way, given that people come to them saying, This is how I am, what can you do for me? - But to the person concerned it may be the way the world is.

Then, for me, it's up to the person concerned whether they address how they're feeling as a 'malady' -because they wish they could feel better about things - or as a 'way the world is'. (The melancholy exception would be if they seem to stop being able to function as a human being, or express suicidal thoughts that another person.)

The value of a cbt-type approach, if the person decides to try out the 'malady' angle, is that cbt is based on a modern-day version of Stoicism which, as I understand it, tries to enable you to cordon off for yourself zones in which you can still enjoy or at least feel rewarded by life, instead of being consumed by the darkness of your feelings about life and the world. I confess I've tried it without success, and the evidence is only of short-term benefit, but it definitely benefits some people.

You are perpetuating a rational/emotional divide that I disagree with. I'm neither a cognitivist on the one hand nor a Humean on the other. Reason and emotion intertwine in our judgment. That's the sort of creature we are. Reason can't float free of its premisses.

Thanks :)

I don't understand, part of the point of the approach that depression is a pervasive mood is to enable a person to be empowered in relation to it. Moods are not intractable. The philosophy of emotions that I enjoy doesn't make a rational/emotional split in the way youre describing. Rationality is built on premisses that include emotional ones. And emotions are themselves often judgments, and, some would argue, perceptions. If we're to understand the world of our feelings, we need to devote our rationality and our emotional intelligence to the job.

Martha Nussbaum is a bit of a Stoic about anger. She has a recent book on the subject. There's an interview in The Atlantic with a potted version of her views, sorry I'm on my tablet so cant link it. She's too patrician for me but she's a good thinker so the case is well made.

There is a body of work by Matthew Ratcliffe, written very recently, about depression as deep mood. He reaches back to Heidegger, and the notion that mood, in a profound sense, just is how we feel about the world. It can feel all-permeating, insinuating itself into perception, belief and the thinkable. I heartily recommend his work as a starting point. In my studies I've been exploring emotion and mood, I'm interested in how un-emotional the language of analytic philosophy is, and whether emotion reaches into the cognitive.

There's also an important role for the media. When's the last time you read a positive article about a Muslim (or a black person for that matter)? Have you ever taken an Implicit Association Test? https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/Study?tid=-1 — Benkei

I was trying to pick up the sense of what rickyk95 was trying to achieve, not particularly express my own view. I agree with Srap that 'You ain't no Muslim, bruv' was a heartening spontaneous response from someone on the street.

How about a transcendental method? Kant does not prove morality (or evil), he accepts that both are real. All you have to do is look around to see examples of both. Kant tried to determine the form of the transcendental principles necessary for there to be a moral law. The transcendental in itself is inaccessible to our understanding, forming a limit on what we can know, but which we can still can think. — Cavacava

I accept morality as real in some way. Kant presumed the existence of a God, even though he claimed secular grounds for the moral. Without gods, the realness of morality is present in ethical / moral practice, immanently, but I don't understand where the knowledge of inaccessible truths would come in.

I've been talking about pursuing a degree in Philosophy. I don't think I've ever heard a positive response. Some people (acquaintances, relatives, friends) just blurt out something like, "that's stupid", or "Philosophy is stupid", or "a degree in Philosophy is useless."

How would you respond? — anonymous66

Well, I'm about to do proper graduate studies in Philosophy and quite a lot of my friends (I am 68 so they're mostly retired) ask me what am I doing it for? 'Isn't that just intellectual gymnastics?'

But this is after two years of a grad diploma, and some of the sceptics who looked at me amazed when I said I was going to do that, now say, 'Well done.' Keep going long enough to look them in the eye and say, This is what it's done for me. That's what I say :)

One reason to stay alive: in the hope a new album will ever be issued. He did a one-off single 'Putin' last year.

If it were the case that moral truths existed (I tend to believe they do) — rickyk95

If there were inaccessible moral truths, what would be the mechanism by which one would know there were such truths?

So...All the people who have committed a certain hideous kind of terrorist act in the last 16 years have a professed belief in Islam. And for some reason it's become important to some people that public leaders (referred to in the article as 'the political left' but including UK Conservatives, for instance) should say this out loud, and they don't. How will doing this improve matters?

There was a vigil in Manchester yesterday evening attended by several thousand people, and this was the poem read to the crowd. I'm afraid it doesn't mention Islam at all:

Me too. I was driving into Manchester tonight - no trains cos of the suicide bomber - and a news story on the radio of a man helping out a lost little girl at the Ariana Grande concert - just got me in the tear ducts -

Could you ask him from me how he feels about his life? Does he feel it is a worthwhile project to be stalking a philosopher so persistently, or does he have his own monster of Dark Pointlessness, that he is desperately keeping at bay by busying himself this way? — unenlightened

Actually I rather like the irony when he says he's the other fellow, not Lucifer, as in Randy Newman's 'That's why I love mankind (God's song)':

I burn down your cities
how blind you must be
I take from you your children and you say
how blessed are we
You all must be crazy
to put your faith in me
That's why I love mankind
You really need me
That's why I love mankind

Hi Q, I'm sorry you're troubled by these thoughts, I offer you a little fellow-feeling from a fellow-Wittgenstein lover :)

I am 68 now and have had suicidal thoughts a few times in my life, but have never had the nerve to go through with it - or perhaps, the existential oomf to do it. Perhaps it's only curiosity as to what happens next that has kept me going. Life is still surprising.

When I look back, I did enjoy one series of 'talking cure' appointments, they gave me insight into myself and the expectations of others. Such things are chancey though, the woman was interesting and sympathetic and I don't know how I would have known that beforehand; I've also been through rubbish courses of cbt.

I do think that what has often brought me round is finding a focus on other things. At present I'm pretty highly focused on philosophy actually, I recommend that - There are a lot of Wittgenstein studies still to read!

But looking back, the acquisition of handy skills has stood me in good stead. 20 years ago I was an early adopter of the www - learnt a little html - and today I still do simple websites for people. When the world goes Off-key for me, I still like playing with bits of code, which is a whole other side of me that people who know me as an arty-fart don't expect.

Nine years ago I learnt the rudiments of bridge, and that's been another slow burner: something you can learn the basics of quickly, but which you can constantly enhance by practice and learning.

I hope these ideas don't seem too trivial. Part of the point of emphasising them is that for me the monster of Dark Pointlessness doesn't go away. I see him right across the room from me now. But I've found that if I dwell on his presence, the monstrosity can all too easily suck me in. Absorption in satisfying mental play is what makes me think the ugly fellow is merely amusing. My very best wishes to you.

in language there is no word that means, "I'll stop at the store on the way home tonight and get milk." — Srap Tasmaner

Oddly enough, though, between two people, there often are such words. I go walking with a mate every Tuesday and he gets a text at some point during the day. 'Milk' means, 'Please stop at the store on the way home and get milk.' 'No milk,' means...well, guess :)

I don't get it either, Srap. But we have to rewrite the philosophy of language from pragmatics upwards to get it all straight. I fear I may not have the time or energy.

To be liberal is to be contentless – liberalism is defined in terms of lack of content, and permissiveness. You yourself in describing it only defined it in terms of losing facets of a substantive belief that it once had.

You cannot ignore the existence of UU – it's a historical reality. — The Great Whatever

It's hard to claim that UU is a historical reality, and yet claim that liberalism is contentless. Contentful liberalism is a historical reality. The ideas of J S Mill, for instance, argue for a certain form of utilitarianism, and a multiplicity of freedoms of speech, freedom from want and rights to assembly, to be enacted through liberal democracy, with a special emphasis for its time on sexual equality. I'm not that sort of liberal, but I admire and recognise its presence in my world.

I'm surprised apo hasn't popped in. The word 'cow' and the cartoon are recognisably signs. For ontology-addicts signs have an ontology of their own, not necessarily that closely related to the mooing, farting creatures I can see sometimes from my window.

I like 'semi-idealist' I imagine they live in the English suburbs, are not quite philosophical enough to be 'detached' but don't mix with the riff-raff like the rest of the proles.

IF a long, opaque passage, whether pomo or from some other school, is intended to argue that such and such is the case then I reject it because to argue that something is the case is a matter of logic. Logic can always be expressed concisely and clearly if one is prepared to work hard enough at it, and failure to do so is often an indicator of laziness, incompetence or arrogance on the part of the author. — andrewk

I've been reading philosophy, most of it analytic, fairly intensively for a few years now. The supposed difference in readability between analytic and pomo philosophy seems to me mistaken. There are hard-to-read analytics and hard-to-read pomos. At the mo', for example, I am stalled in the midst of 'Sameness and Substance' by David Wiggins, because it defies your ideas andrew and makes logic very hard work. Deleuze was a breeze compared to this. Robert Brandom is another whom I have struggled through heroically! Halfway through I thought, come back Baudrillard, all is forgiven. But I made it through acres of repetition and out into the space of my own reason successfully

Still, it's what people say: that pomo is pointlessly complex whereas Brandom and Wiggins are pointfully (a word that needs ushering into life) complex. Some sort of prejudice is lurking even in this.

One area I've become more interested in is the divide between the natural sciences and the social sciences. It's amazing how little social science analytic philosophers know about, and how often their examples of scientific method are drawn from physics, chemistry and biology. Applied sociology is deeply present in all our cultural and personal lives, from how we are managed at work, through how we are governed, to the Facebook/Google toys we play with. But you wouldn't know from analytic philosophy. I have wondered whether the problem is that the analytic world is individualist - the myth of the lone ethicist, thinker, speaker - and it's only those damn Continentals who deal with the human group, social action. So even someone like Habermas, who seems like a bridge-builder between the analytic and Continental approaches, doesn't get mentioned in the corridors where I hear gossip.

Shouldn't philosophy be based on current science when addressing subjects which have been addressed by science, and serve as a tool of science, asking questions which may, or may not, direct research? — Galuchat

My personal answer to that is no, but if you think there is something in the science which needs addressing, why not say what it is? Part of why I enjoyed Roddy Cowie's approach (lots of his articles are open source, the one I've read with a fine toothcomb is in Goldie's Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of the Emotions) was that he went to the science of emotions expecting he would find a relatively easy model which he could then adapt for the major project he was involved in - enabling computers to understand human emotion in speech and text (HUMAINE). He found the science lacked common definitions and a clear empirical basis. He then went ahead and did some empirical work of his own.

There's a lot of work going on in cross-cultural emotion comparison. Plutchik whom you quote twice was a pioneer in evolution-based explanations but I don't understand his models to be current, although the general idea of 'basic' emotions that roughly occur cross-culturally remains in currency, and there remain more than one model that tries to classify 'the' emotions as basic, secondary and so on. That's part of the trouble, there are lots of systems and a lot of tiny short-term research into countables/measurables, but the big picture is not at all clear.

As for Barrett's 'core affect', I know of that through the work of James A Russell - I think Barrett herself thinks of emotion now in terms of 'interoception', which to me is a very useful idea about how we might classify emotional experience, while 'core affect' to me has a clearer relationship to 'mood', the actual focus of my own interest.

An instance of science following the philosophy is the work of Matthew Ratcliffe, where his work on mood and depression has substantially contributed to new research on the psychology.

Emotional labour: to be frank that's not difficult to find, Hochschild's original research was in the 1970's and there's a vast literature about it, I'm not clear why you need me to tell you where to read about it. Nor do I understand why one wouldn't read William James and Martha Nussbaum, who write brilliantly and cogently if you don't agree with them.

I'm a Green. Libertarian though not in the American way. I don't think my politics fit the available choices.

the very real experience of having a self that emotions somehow act upon — darthbarracuda

I've been doing a module at undergrad level on 'philosophy of emotions'. Broadly, theory suggests

- physical response to some object, an idea which derives first in the modern era from William James
- emotions are appraisals of an object (Martha Nussbaum strong on this in a rather austere way)
- emotions motivate (Helm argues)

I'm with apo in that I don't see that we need dualist language. Emotions are a way of describing how we are in the world. They tend to get written out of cognitive-style accounts, or get contrasted to 'reason', but empirically emotions and reasons intertwine. A man called Roddy Cowie did some interesting empirical work (to try to work out how to help computers relate to emotionality). He found that some feeling we call 'emotional' is in place more or less all the time, on people's own first-person accounts, but that the role of 'the emotions' is exaggerated by commentators, in that most emotional moments can't easily be tied to a single emotion. There are quite a lot of essays by people waffling on about 'grief' or 'love' or whatever that, for me, would be best replaced by poetry or song, both of which are highly eloquent about emotion.

There's also some interesting feminist work on 'emotional labour', the work done for instance by smiling air hostesses (as they used to be), an idea which leads here and there to the possibility of thinking about the *distribution* of emotions - that we aren't all capable of the same range of emotionality, nor culturally are 'the same' emotions observed over here and over there.

The way in which we diagnose depression seems to be way less reliable than the way that for example you would find a tumor on someones body, or a life weakening viral infection. The latter seems to have more epistemological validity than the former. What are your thoughts on this? — rickyk95

It seems to me that all diagnosis is based on dialogue. The concept of 'diagnosis' is dialogue-based: it assumes that a medical professional can eventually write something down, generally with the patient's agreement, which they both believe is a satisfactory explanation of why the person called 'the patient' came along in the first place. It's just a ritual we like.

A substantial minority of doctor-patient encounters end without diagnosis, or with a labelling that lacks significant content.

I don't see that there's something separate about mental distress from physical distress. One issue is, how far do we spread the causal web. Many people in the polluted valley where I live have difficulties called respiratory problems, but they aren't diagnosed as having pollution problems. The poor visit the doctor disproportionately for 'mental' problems: they are not diagnosed as having inadequate incomes. It requires coroners with an active view of public health to make sure that individual diagnoses of all sorts of industrially- or behaviourally-caused problems are recognised as not simply the problems of indivduals.

Bad luck. And the very best wishes. Like BC, at some point in my early 60s I gave up the struggle - even though it was financially disadvantageous - to keep my head straight. I couldn't take the Noes any more. But poverty doesn't keep your head straight either. Balancing act.

Take this example: in Europe there is much fear about the so-called "GM maize". The scientists have shown the advantages of that sort of corn: low cost, better crops and pest-resistance. The opponents have one single argument: fear, which is totally irrational lacking any objective basis. Do you see the difference now? — Kai Rodewald

To me the way you have put this demonstrates the very opposite of your claim. It's a piece of rhetoric, in which you place 'science' and rationality on one side of an evaluation, and fear on the other side. As a reader my immediate response is - surely some scientists have spoken for the other argument? And surely there's some emotion on the side of GM maize, otherwise what is the motivation for it in the first place?

Such an assessment as yours ascribes value, and value involves ethics. You place a high value on the lowness of cost, the unexplained-in-detail betterness of crops and the supposed pest-resistance of the seeds. You place a nil value on any claims to rationality by the opponents of GM-maize. None of these valuations is 'objective' or 'neutral', they are all loaded with social and political concerns with ethical content.

I've never believed in holy authority. So formulating the question of ethics as 'What are we allowed?' doesn't naturally occur to me. Such a question assumes the notion of one who allows, even if they are absent. Why even put it that way?

Then, most things I want involve other people in some way. I want to earn a living, I want food, love, a regular supply of puzzle books and beautiful music, sleep and shelter and freedom of want, and some of these I find I want for other people as well as for me, for some reason. How shall I act vis-a-vis all the others with whom I transact in order to try and satisfy these wants of mine? With each step I ask things of other people, and in turn take responsibility for what I do and have done, however foolish it now looks. I dare say that's one thing I could shirk, being responsible for my own actions, but I wouldn't like it if other people left their shit at my door, so I don't leave my shit at theirs. For a start, I hope they'll carry on growing food for me, making bricks and mending roads, making music and employing me, so unless I'm going to be a dictator - which strikes me as awfully hard work and not something I'm fitted for - there's got to be quite a lot of reciprocity one way or another.

So here we are, negotiating with one another, billions of godless souls. It's amazing it all works so well, don't you think? But it feels like anything is allowed: you just have to take the consequences, and mostly that circumscribes most people's actions in quite drastic ways.

I either have a desire or I don't, and if I'm not aware of a desire how can it be a desire? — Sam26

In my view some people who desire to dominate other people are not aware of this desire, as an example. Indeed they often believe or at least state that they believe that they are being reasonable and egalitarian. But observation of them reveals, for instance, that they interrupt other people often, use certain forms of body language that others interpret as aggressive (e.g. waggling pokers :) ), and brush off criticism. The desire to exert - or indeed to accede to - power often feels to me like it's bubbling along under the surface of talk that's about something else, and actions that seem to be about just those actions.

The way we gesticulate will often show our convictions. — Sam26

If we raise a poker for instance, in a way that another might interpret as threatening. :)

What you seem to be saying is that we never possess knowledge. — Harry Hindu

Sam is seguing from a reading of 'On Certainty' to his own understanding. 'On Certainty' is not a long book, it helps to read the source material to follow the drift.

Someone please tell me how this is not fascistic — Wayfarer

Well, it is anti-populist, anti-Volk, pro-Jewish, pan-European and anti-nationalist. It's still not my cup of tea though:)

So perhaps that's the problem with trying to make language games into a theory of meaning. It only addresses the active language user. Sometimes we're passive... doing nothing except being. — Mongrel

There's a recent-ish paper by PMS Hacker in which he argues that the language-game approach is anthropology, ethnology - it's trying to understand what on earth we're doing in following rules of some kind or other to communicate in some kind of way.

(He argues that any approach based on truth conditions is dead and should be put to sleep, he calls it the 'calculus' approach)

You mentioned Chomsky earlier but surely Chomsky still believes there is, as it were, a Book Of Rules written into us. Witt is much more agnostic than that, in the ways Srap describes.

I'm a convinced atheist. One thing I like to mutter about is the assumption often made that a single 'God' with a capital G is what atheists don't believe in. Me, I think all gods are products of the human imagination.

There is however emotion and feeling, which we tend to separate out as if they were different or lesser ways of apprehension, when the likelihood is they are every bit as profound and perhaps more fundamental to us than intellect. I have religious feelings, for instance when I listened to part of Bach's 'Art of the Fugue' today I had to stop the car and be emotional. Joy, empathy, love and aesthetic pleasure are all experiences where it seems to me I approach something like religious feeling.

Why the need for a bang or for a whimper? Why not voyage on without knowing? Not well, but forward none the less? — Noble Dust

Or, in the darker spirit:

Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better. — Beckett

I think the consensus of the folks I've talked to in this thread is that the concept of language games is not as distinct from propositional meaning as I had thought it was. In fact, I can't really tell the difference. — Mongrel

I do think the Investigations is worth a read. If you're finding 'language games' not that distinct from 'propositional meaning' then something is getting lost. At one point Witt wanted the P I and the Tractatus published together so the relationship between the two would be plainer. I think part of that is that 'The world is everything that is the case' leads to what he saw as the farthest reaches of propositional meaning, and that two to three decades later 'language games', 'form of life' and the looser ideas he later had were understandings that the exchange of propositional meanings is just one 'form of life', appropriate to those doing the exchange in their mutual ambit.

The approach you're taking is one many analytics have held on to, but I confess I find it difficult to understand why they do after Wittgenstein. It seems to say that a certain sort of talk, what Robert Brandom calls (at great length and density) the giving and receiving of reasons, is what all talk is about. It's not how they talk on my local bus, for instance. A philosophy of language has to cope with the talk on my local bus if I'm going to ride with it, as it were.

The stuff Streetlight is mentioning revolves around para 241:

"So you are saying that human agreement decides what is false and what is true?" -- It is what human beings say that is false and true; and they agree in the language they use. That is not agreement in opinions but in form of life. — Witt, P I"

However, when applying the concept of language games to "language games," one of the first things we're going to do is deny that "language games" expresses any concept. — Mongrel

I don't see why we're going to do that. I believe I understand 'language games' as a concept, and I understand it so partly because of other remarks by Wittgenstein about how some concepts can't be defined precisely, but are understood because their uses - the exemplary case is 'game' - have family resemblances.

But Witt's 'Philosophical Investigations' is also indeed a pawn, or possibly a knight or bishop, in the language game of philosophy. There's a certain social and intellectual milieu where such games are mostly played.

In passing, it's interesting that your imagined example is of written language, whereas the Witt notion applies to all forms of language-exchange, and is rooted in talk about 'utterances'.

When using meta-linguistic terminology... — sime

Here, though, there are only words, ordinary words in ordinary language, even to explain to use how we ought to use meta-language. I don't see how that can mitigate any difficulties. I think philosophers on the whole do indeed try to explain the formal meaning they intend their terms to have, but there is a neo-Derrida in my head sometimes who can always find a connotation lurking in the most precise of definitions. Squiggles of various kinds do often clarify: for instance, I'm reading David Wiggins at the moment and his ideas about 'sameness and substance' are greatly clarified by a recourse to formal symbolism. There remains a difficulty in then relating such a formal symbolic language back to the world of ordinary language and human interaction. As soon as one paraphrases, or refers to a slab of ordinary language by some letter or other symbol as if it were a mathematical variable, something is lost of the original, lost in translation.

This is the way the world ends: — Bitter Crank

'The end is where we start from', Eliot says in 'Little Gidding', the last of the Four Quartets, where the despondency of the hollow men has given way to a calmer, more philosophical and structured melancholy.

One sense in which this feels to me to be so, that the end is where we start from, is that forecasts for 'time future' are usually commentaries on the mood of the present, with some right-sounding evidence attached. The future focuses our present mood. Me I think there'll be both bangs and whimpers, and that homo sapiens is a species that lacks the insight to control our dazzling intelligence and curiosity. We slash and burn, sure there'll be new places to plunder over the horizon. But there comes a moment where there aren't: hence the chimeras of life on Mars or half-man-half-a.i.biscuit.

I'm just back from the funeral of an old friend though, so may be more melancholy than usual, and I'm just re-reading Eliot because the late friend was an enthusiast and so was the celebrant at his funeral. Still I'm heartened to read a line I don't remember noticing before, 'Old men ought to be explorers' Eliot writes, and:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time. — T S Eliot

I think market forces are both marvellous things and thoroughly immoral, but I don't understand your argument to this end at all.

Maybe 'desire' is a good place to start. In a market certain decisions are taken based on price. For the buyer, this is some sort of preference, within existing conditions. How does that relate to desire? How can I express my desire for universal love and peace, for instance? Or my acute desire for trinkets I sadly can't afford?