Collingwood thinks that understanding someone's metaphysics is a process of asking a question, and then another question, and then another, and that one arrives at a given philosopher's metaphysical presuppositions when you arrive at a bedrock question, i,e. one to which there is no answer in that philosopher's schema.

This appeals to me, although on some days I think that it shows I don't accept any ontology at all. For me there's only epistemology, putting together provisional ontologies that are always subject to revision, a kind of engineer's metaphysics.

This is the appeal of 'structural realism': there is a structure to our ways of thinking that we can recognise across epochs even as we disagree about the details. Then that can come in two flavours 'ontic' and 'epistemic', of which I would of course be the latter.

I think this may be pretty much to say: I agree with Moliere :)

I have a free standing offer to teach anyone how to use a dictionary and search engine — wuliheron

Well, you made the claim, it's not unreasonable to ask you to supply the link to the evidence. You spoke of 'proof' but it's a long way from that. But it's very interesting. Here's a useful discussion about it:

http://www.skeptiko-forum.com/threads/discovery-of-quantum-vibrations-in-microtubules-inside-brain-neurons-supports-controversial-theory.2003/page-2

Wayfarer, I wish you all the best. By necessity rather than choice I downsized in property so I have a little fund plus the State pension and a little pension from the distant days when I used to write soap opera and other scripts that made me some real money! (I gave that up to write novels that alas didn't sell or, after the ones that didn't sell, didn't get published - but you take your chances) Like you I did get some work on the techie side of things, doing websites for people, but now I just do that free for voluntary groups. There's less and less money in it and I can't be arsed to keep up to date.

Now I've gone back to Uni in my late 60's and am really enjoying it, though the discipline is hard. I find my teachers scrupulous and very well-read. I'm doing a thing called a grad diploma, which involves mostly being taught this and that, and then I'm trying to decide whether to register for an MPhil or just write on my own. I love having the Uni library subscriptions, it's marvellous to have the world's journals at your fingertips, and many texts are now electronic. It's also fun to have the company of eager young philosophers, but I think once I go into researching more deeply a particular subject, that aspect will dim.

I don't think 'being reactionary' is a problem as long as you can marshal your arguments well and accept and give out thoughtful criticism. Where I am, there's a surprising (to atheist me) number of people pursuing religion-related topics, for instance; only last night I got chatting to a woman doing a PhD about 'anger in Buddhism'.

Alas it all costs money though. But it has brought me some sort of inner peace for the present.

I suggest all our voices are channelled through a Stephen Hawking machine, to avoid the melancholy end of the forum we would otherwise precipitate when hearing Hanover's voice and immediately recognising that the truth is out there and all our foolish accented ramblings are in vain

What is your experience of?

What is that guides you to the purported need for evidence, which seems to loom large for you?

How did the words you're using come about, and of whom are you asking these questions?

Representative democracies are even bigger than lynch mobs.

A lot of the existentialists were all about radical freedom, and anti-essentialists. Like Sartre said, existence precedes essence. Which I find to be entirely incoherent, since to exist is to have certain properties and qualities outside of your control. — darthbarracuda

Well, it's a long time since I read Sartre and Camus, but this isn't how existentialism lives on in my memory. In one sense all you seem to be saying is that you yourself are some sort of essentialist: you deny responsibility for your acts, you think you have a set of things called 'preferences' that arise in you unbidden. Well, that certainly is anti-existentialist, but it seems odd. Where do these 'preferences' come from? Why are they insensitive to rationality? And how do you know they are? Is there empirical evidence to back up your claim?

My neo-Sartreian existential take would be different. There is the inauthentic life. This is lived when you have thought a reasonable amount about what makes you tick, and understand the well-springs of your choices pretty well, but you go on conforming to conventionality by living a life you have seen through. Or you can live the authentic life by your actions, which may be absurd, lack rational explanation or defy reason, but are actions which you make happen and which then, make you: you are no longer the product of a conformity you have seen through, you are your own person. Onwards, to freedom!

The years take their toll of such a view, and Sartre himself came to sympathise more in later life with the Marxists he originally opposed - there are more deterministic pressures on how to live than one might suppose in one's youth. But I still feel it has some thing going for it. Indeed I went and read some Kierkegaard properly for the first time this summer and found, lo! - the immediate, the life lived and leapt into - this is what defines us by our making it happen. (A strange and tortuous leap in Soren's case, but there you go) We begin where Heidegger begins (and Heidegger is where Sartre begins) with our ordinary sense of ourselves alive, among things ready to hand and present at hand, we don't begin with abstractions about so-called essentials but with existence/Existenz...whence the leap, freedom, the joy of authenticity...

For me the theory of evolution is about populations, not individuals, and so all this theorising about the relationship between egoism and evolution is beside the point, although it's a handy mythology if your politics happens to favour the supposed enlightenment of enlightened self-interest.

What about the contents of this forum which is filled with abstract terms like mind, thought, belief, and a thousand others that are not literal because they have no concrete reality to refer to but are not metaphors either? — Barry Etheridge

Trump that, I say :)

Perhaps the Derrida readers could subsequently move on to 'White Mythology', on the wearing away of coinage into metaphor, which, says Derrida, is itself a metaphor...and after all, what is 'literal' but a metaphor itself, if a somewhat worn one?

http://users.clas.ufl.edu/burt/derridawhitemyth.pdf

The freedom referenced by libertarians is rooted in the right to property ownership. — Hanover

This is the very specific form of libertarianism popular now in the USA, not libertarianism as it has been generally understood. Proudhon was an adherent of a version of the labour theory of value, asserting that rightful property is the product of one's own labour.

While he's famous for claiming that property is (otherwise) theft, he also thought that State ownership of capital was illegitimate, and that's why his is a form of libertarian socialism, in which capital is owned by associations of workers - as for instance, much public housing in continental Europe is.

Thanks Andrew. I feel that, given that we never know the consequences of actions before they happen, actually consequentialists are forming judgments based on their forecasting criteria, which may be radically different from the impact of actual consequences. These criteria may even be virtues and vices in rational-sounding cloaks.

Two examples of non-consequentialism. One, sometimes the truth needs to be told. Political friends tell me I should forsake the Greens for a party with a realistic shot at power. But the Greens are right in a fundamental way (for me): that humans have a place in the ecology of the Earth, and that facing up to that - depleting resources, nuclear danger, the use of other animals - is honest. Economic growth is unnecessary: between us we have enough, but we are unprepared to grapple with redistribution. I've reached a point in my life where i think such things need saying.

Two, sometimes compassion matters more than anything else. I can argue this rationally - humans are social animals - but I know i feel it, more as time goes on, whatever the supposed reasons. Sometimes we love - in the Platonic way, the love Socrates finaly advocates in the Symposium (though I'm an atheist and his appeals to the divine) - and the consequences be damned. Save the children. Protect the innocent.

I was surprised that you accused apo of abstraction, since to me one very substantial difficulty is that 'the population Asymmetry' is a giant abstraction. At its heart lies the claim that some bloke living in relative comfort somewhere in the West is in a better position to know whether a couple in Mali or Malaysia or Madagascar should have a child than they are. Claims like this baffle me.

A virtue ethics, such as an Aristotelian view, may well be pragmatic and be equally available to realists or anti-realists. I don't see the need for 'fiction'. (Nor do I think that anti-realists need to believe in a thing called 'mind'.)

What do people praise or blame? What can we generalise from these beginnings about virtues and vices? How can we build from this to make the polis or society work well? How can we then foster the right qualities in individuals, and how do individuals cultivate them in themselves? That's how Aristotle himself builds up his ethics. When we find there are differences between us, we negotiate, looking for common ground. Or we vote, where we can't agree. Or we go to war, if other city-states just refuse to see how wonderfully well-organised the Athenian city-state/the American way of life is.

I CELEBRATE myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass...

Whole thing: http://whitmanarchive.org/published/LG/1891/poems/27

So, there you are. That's why. — Bitter Crank

Thanks, BC. I appreciate that no-one with a royal family to revere like us Brits can really argue that to worship your founding fathers is any more irrational than we are.

The 'us'-ness of history is interesting too, of course. My family roots are in Ireland but when you migrate to a land you bequeath to your children the duty to have a new 'us', unless you're a separatist-leaning community. Once one explores the other histories, the histories of one's ancestors, new angles on things turn up all the time. I was trying to understand the history of the song 'Kelly the boy from Killane' which I have been known to sing lustily at parties when not curbed by sensible people - and found that 'Forth and Bargy', two areas mentioned in the song, is also a collective name for a dialect of English that lasted from the 11th to the 19th centuries in that part of Ireland.

Pardon me, I'm allowing my mind to drift off.

My point was that BC said and you concurred that 'sometimes' we are uncertain of consequences when acting. I'm interested in your account of the times we aren't uncertain of the consequences. I think of them as nil, which is one reason I'm not a consequentialist.

I'm still a consequentialist, but sometimes we have to guess, estimate, assume--certainly not know-- what the consequences are. — Bitter Crank

I'm not a consequentialist. I'm interested to know what are the circumstances in which anyone knows for certain what the consequences of a certain act will be, before undertaking it. Your remark makes those circumstances sound frequent.

A question from someone not from the USA: why do purported remarks by the founding fathers have a quasi-religious importance to so many Americans? This stuff can have an irrationalist edge, as seen from Abroad.

In my own country the State is taking less of a role in decreeing how people conduct themselves sexually. I think that's all to the good. What has the State to do with it?

Parents should take financial responsibility for their offspring and I the taxpayer should be last resort - but then, generous - helper of the single parent.

All the rest of this moralising...what has other people's adultery to do with me?

I'm not sure anyone has a mind, this issue has been bothering me lately. But I often know what other people are thinking even when they don't speak, or if they just grunt monosyllabically. I'm a student of other people, and so, as far as I can tell, are most of my fellows. If I didn't make a reasonable guess about the state of other people's thinking and feeling, most of the time, I don't see how I would live any kind of an orderly life.

...dreams... — Moliere

I hope I'm not too much of a wet blanket; I agree at heart with what you're saying. I think perhaps I am a little overwhelmed by disappointment at the current state of political discourse, and the plight of the working person. But I did go and sing in a choir at an event celebrating 500 years since Thomas More's Utopia, so maybe there's still hope in my heart :)

Thanks for outlining the thesis, Moliere. My own response to how things are as I age has been to shift to a perspective which I know is a minority view - the Green, ecological view - which I've concluded is where I am most intellectually content. Out here on a limb :) But I think I spent many years slipping into mainstream thinking while kidding myself that I was persuading people out of the mainstream.

On this limb the medium-term looks like that economically most countries will have to adjust from fossil-fuel energy to renewable energy, and that there will be considerable conflict over basic resources, including water, with wars including civil wars a likely continuing consequence. Meanwhile a belief in the rightness of inequality of reward seems embedded in Western thinking, more embedded than it was fifty years ago when I was Hanover's teenage dreamer. In that 50-year period class-based unions have weakened considerably, though gender/race-based organisations have grown much stronger. But coalitions of identity-politics-believers seem flimsy to me.

My worry about the agenda proposed is that it doesn't seem to be taking these very considerable issues into account. Automation is energy- and resource-hungry: is it really inevitable that it will grow and grow? I think it will recede when energy costs become too great, or workers begin to demand the right to work, or the powerful begin to demand that the proleteriat works in return for its basic income. (I am a strong advocate of the universal basic income, and don't think it's necessarily a capitalistic adjustment as swsteph does)

To be frank I think the word 'capitalism' has become too broad a word to be as useful as it was. It disguises tremendous differences in institutional arrangements because they all superficially share certain features.

I realise these are rather stray observations. Broadly the ideas feel to me like an extrapolation from what seem like existing trends which I doubt will continue (nor, sadly, do I agree with swstephe that 'capitalism' or business/finance is weakening). Some of them were 60s dreams too - the reduced working week, cleaner work - and events did not fulfil those dreams.

It's odd how translations of Aristotle and Plato often refer to 'God', and this does the same: 'I have become a god' would be right too, wouldn't it? I was brought up an atheist so I can never grasp this reflex monotheism.

I'm trying to reduce the present-to-hand to the ready-to-hand — Hoo

I do heartily agree with John and Marty that you're misunderstanding the Heidegger enterprise here, and in danger of turning the Dasein set of notions into their opposite. The ready and the present are vitally separate concepts in understanding ourselves and how we understand what's around us. It's the very part of the whole shebang that draws me to it, for it speaks to my everyday experience and makes the non-phenomenological or analytic approach feel inside out.

We can easily imagine propositions like "i did not go for a walk today' being true in a final and definitive sense, because it seems that once the day is passed the fact that I did not go for a walk during it is immutably fixed, and we cannot even begin to imagine what it could mean for it not to be so. — John

This is a bit away from Heidegger, but I just wanted to comment. 'I did not go for a walk today' is one of those self-certainties, I'm not clear any theory of truth relates to such declarations in the first person. 'My wife didn't go for a walk today' might relate to one, though for myself I think that once a supposed (non-)event in time has passed we can never be sure; if we could, then it wouldn't be so hard to reconstruct the simplest of events through evidence.

My citation of Douglas Adams was meant to add a veneer of wryness to my remarks. Still, I think some animals are more cultural than you imagine, and even quite small-brained animals pass skills and knowledge on to their young and their fellows. I've had an abiding interest in the great tit, partly of course because of the provocative name, and partly because of the famous period in the 1920's when the tit population of Britain seemed to learn how to open the bottle tops of milk left on the doorstep at remarkable speed. Here's a Nature piece from a couple of years ago about cultural transmission among great tits, which have been observed over many generations now:

http://www.nature.com/articles/nature13998.epdf?referrer_access_token=kibGvfYBJkARgv7jeJUtAdRgN0jAjWel9jnR3ZoTv0NGQeKg-mcpc9swFq3F1OX6zFTLKn5GSEU6xheT3JBKEUQovhF4J6bvd7exfmBF7Hi3a7riiEeoLWkgGTGlP-Ps

I'm inclined to imagine that orca, and some others among the whales /dolphins, do have oral histories, as it seems some primates than us do, in a limited way. Knowledge of skills and localities passes between generations of all sorts of creatures, but is not greatly studied.

I wander what's actually at stake here, suppose we confirm that they have an extensive language, does that impact any of your philosophical (or non-philosophical) views? — shmik

It doesn't greatly impact my own views, in that I think of our animal-ness as a continuum with the rest of the animal kingdom. But many people hold the uniqueness of human language as a pivotal axiom, that's why I mentioned it. Indeed, I've seen many posters on the old forum inadvertently contrast 'human' to 'animal', it is quite an ingrained way of thinking.

It is a good thing, even when one is a naturalist, that one's philosophy of mind not conflict with one's metaphysics or with one's ontological understanding of living beings. One's desire to avoid such conflicts need not be a covert attempt to save supernatural belief. — Pierre-Normand

There is a converse, though: that people's claims about philosophy of mind maybe be covert claims about metaphysical naturalism. I am an ardent advocate of science as a method and a body of work but against metaphysical naturalism, and I think the two things are confused in determinism/freewill debates.

The alternative surely, is a very brief present though, with any sense of a moment of a longer duration, being some kind of simulation performed by our minds, or brain. — Punshhh

I don't see this. A symphony: that can be present to us as a whole. A drama. A novel. The ways of remembering and anticipating presented to us in novels, from Flaubert to Toni Morrison. I suppose I disagree with the distinction you make in the op:

...a consequence of the constitution of our incarnate bodies and the world they are evolved to dwell in, rather than some more fundamental part of our being — Punshhh

Biology is history, it seems rich enough to me to be the foundation of 'fundamental parts of our being', although I don't mean we can explain culture from biology. From biological beginnings we can imagine time as Proust or Hawking or Shostakovich imagines time: once we do this imagining, it's available to us at any given, ahm, moment, isn't it?

When I first visited the old forum determinism/freewill was the topic that fascinated me most. The greater clarity that the habit of philosophical debate brings gradually cured me of this fascination.

I have a very minority position on the issue in general. First, I think determinism is a mystery and pointless to debate: empirically there is no model imaginable that can demonstrate determinism to be present or absent, it is a prejudice we bring to the table with our thinking, often citing supposed 'laws' of this and that or 'principles' of sufficient whatever.

Second, I think 'free will' is an idea unrelated to determinism. Its history is theological and in contemporary debates it remains akin to theology, a way of relating a person's view of psychology to their view of ontology.

I'm not much of a one for the moment. At any given time (sic) I feel short-term memory and near-future-models in play, as well as longer-term hopes and memories. It's as if I am always in the middle of a song, and I remember most of the beginning, and I have a feeling about how it's going to end. Certainly there is a key we're in and some recent motifs keep playing.

Here is an earlier manifesto by the two of them: http://criticallegalthinking.com/2013/05/14/accelerate-manifesto-for-an-accelerationist-politics/

I'm afraid I haven't read the book. Moliere, maybe you could tell us a bit about what you enjoyed in it. I see Srncek is something of a philosopher: I found an interview with him discussing Simondon, Meillassoux and all that. :)

I saw the full moon this morning. It was in the external world above the holly tree. Did you see it? — Mongrel

Well - as they say when they're fretting about an excluded middle - I did, and I didn't. :)

So, thinking along that line I would say abstractions, if they are worn out anythings, are worn out analogies, not metaphors — John

I like the provocations of Derrida. Limited Inc is great fun at the expense of Austin/Searle that goes, I was going to say 'too far' but I don't mean that...I just feel Derrida always takes an idea to an extreme where few others would go. I like 'White Mythology' but that's partly because I find the idea of 'literal' meaning mostly baffling, and the coin imagery is very evocative. Even 'literal' in 'literal meaning' is a near-dead metaphor after all :)

As for Heidegger and B & T, I was guided to the other translation, McQuarrie and Thingy. First time around I found it impenetrable, second time - alongside a lecture course by Tom Baldwin - I found it almost lucid. Sometimes I just need a teacher to get me on track. I also came to accept, on second reading, that conventional language wouldn't cut it for what Heidegger had to say, that he had to break away from it to refurnish the whole house of philosophy, as it were. Mind you Hannah Arendt suggested that this portentous style of his became atrophied, a way of sounding important even when having nothing to say. (I think novelists who get outsize reputations end up like that, all style and no content)

My initial naïve conception of what is going on is that people feel like their views would be impotent without this foundation. But, their views are impotent anyway — shmik

I usually avoid ethical chats because for me, people often feel that expressing an opinion to other people is some sort of ethical act - when mostly it's just sounding off. Ethics are about how one lives and what one expects of others.

I love Aristotle's optimism about the truth even though I don't share it.

For the true and the approximately true are apprehended by the same faculty; it may also be noted that men have a sufficient natural instinct for what is true, and usually do arrive at the truth. Hence the man who makes a good guess at truth is likely to make a good guess at what is reputable.

...Rhetoric is useful because things that are true and things that are just have a natural tendency to prevail over their opposites, so that if the decisions of judges are not what they ought to be, the defeat must be due to the speakers themselves, and they must be blamed accordingly. — Aristotle's Rhetoric

I wish I felt this way. But I read Vance Packard's 'The hidden persuaders' at a formative age and I've never been the same since.

I don't like the phrase 'fine art', it belongs to a way of enjoying art that strikes me as snobby.

There are many forms of art that make the world more intelligible for me, in profounder ways than philosophy can. I particularly love Euripides; I've sought out all sorts of performances all my life and there's always something new and interesting in the dialectic between modern interpretation and the way he put things. Now that I find I'm enjoying Aristotle late in life (just reading the Rhetoric), I enjoy the contrast between them: that Euripides journeys beyond where rational inquiry can take us, into richer and darker places. Aristotle is however constantly quoting the poets and dramatists, suffused with their work himself.

My obsession: what's the relation between all our talking, and the way events happen in, to and around us?

I'm doing some work in philosophy of language so the implications for semantics of what we think about 'truth' have been bothering me. I've been reading some linguistics text-books to get the hang of what practical students of linguistics think. Many of the books are startlingly wedded to 'truth-conditional semantics', i.e. the notion that knowing the meaning of a sentence amounts to knowing its truth-conditions.

It's important to distinguish this from truth-values. We only need to know, on the truth-conditional theory, the conditions under which it would be 'true'.

Nevertheless, to a man (like me) who's spent most of a lifetime writing dialogue and fictional and factual prose, it seems profoundly mistaken. Its examples always stem from some attempted exchange of information, as if this were typical use of language, and whenever difficulties arise they are sloughed off from semantics to (linguistic) pragmatics. It exaggerates written as against spoken language. It lacks a coherent relation to the philosophy of action. It seems as if Wittgenstein and 'use as meaning' had never happened.

(The substantial other options for semantics as I read them are proof-theoretic semantics, i.e. inference as the basis of meaning, championed by Dummett...or to abandon the analytic approach and accept a form of Bakhtinian dialogism, i.e. all is dialogue and 'true' would be just one of many markers that interlocutors would have some sort of agreement or score-keeping about)

Be glad of comments.

It would be odd to insist that a person is alive and dead at the same time. — fdrake

I was interested in the recent case of a woman getting married. Her father was dead, so she asked, to act as the man who 'gives her away', the man who had received her late father's transplanted heart, so that there would be something of her living father in the person doing the job. After all, at heart the man was her father, wasn't he?