Children who often experience good tours in the mountains probably develop different brains too.

The claim that music, or certain structures in music, has beneficial effects on the mind seems self-fulfilling if it is assumed that the music is good (and simply false when the music is bad). — jkop

I daresay structuredness of one kind or another is usually helpful in an education. I was referring to very specific evidence that children with a concentrated musical education grow up with brains different from a control group. There is then a secondary debate to be had about whether this brain difference is 'beneficial'; there's certainly evidence that it has some other cognitive benefits. These include fine-motor skills, linguistic skills and the ability to integrate sensory information, not just the vague purported 'good' effects of popular wisdom about Mozart.

I think that's quite different from such occasional and relatively trivial events as 'good tours in the mountains'.

When I was a child I found early on that both my parents had a thing about Jews. They seemed oddly unaware that I had friends at school who were Jewish. My Mum was middle-class diffident about it: 'Very nice people,' she'd say of a couple down the street, and then with a certain emphasis, 'Jews, you know.' My Dad was more straightforward and said 'their' cooking smelled unpleasant; I still have in my memory a rude song about 'Crikey Moses, king of the Jews' which he taught me before I was old enough to grasp its meaning.

I was pretty nervous when I brought Jewish friends home, but actually my parents were nice as pie to them, which seriously puzzled me. Nevertheless my dad refused to speak to the Jewish next-door neighbours for over a decade because they built an extension against his objection. He grew our privet hedge about a mile high, making it terribly ugly, in an attempt to block out their light.

In my early teens I read James Baldwin who I thought was electrifying, and I thought more seriously about race. It seemed to me right to think of my Dad as a racist, and my Mum as a fence-sitter. Later of course I would read some sociology and grasp the slipperiness of classification by so-called race, but by then the notion of racism, and the fact that it helped to describe something my father was, and I was not, was thoroughly lodged in me.

Now I'm an oldish git with Jewish friends (ranging from Zionist to practising to appalled Palestinian sympathisers) and to be honest, I'm a supporter of the Palestinian cause but don't agree with anti-Israeli boycotts. I suspect the worm of what I find it useful to call 'anti-Semitism' is entwined in there, not that boycotters are anti-Semitic, but that some anti-Israelis aren't confronting their own anti-jewish prejudices, prejudices which aren't going to have dissipated in a generation of earnest people like me. I've been to central Asian countries, for instance, with much worse human rights records than Israel who aren't boycotted, and I think there should be consistency about such a thing. It's a melancholy fact that some right-wing Zionists (for it did after all used to be a socialist cause as well) have begun to conflate criticism of Israel's actions with prejudice against Jews, but in my heart I know some of my fellow lefties are prejudiced in ways they don't want to confront.

Well, this is very personal, but just to say...let's not be glib about race and racism and Jews and Israel.

How muddled? I thought he was aiming to say that when we identify what a thing is, we end up talking about a form. Its like he's talking to an audience who has no comprehension of the word "form", so he's giving an example of it: when we talk about a language, we're talking about a form (as opposed to any particular instance of it.) — Mongrel

Well, I think he referenced Darwin in an odd way, because Darwin traces a different analogy. Plus I'm thinking a lot about the philosophy of language at the moment for my own work, and I reacted adversely to his examples of what a linguist does from the get-go:

We classify individual organisms as bearers of particular life forms; and so also we classify people as speakers of particular languages (type A)... — Thompson

I immediately find myself burrowing into that notion of classifying 'people as speakers of particular languages' and finding it wanting. It muddles me and diverts me from Thompson's path. So for me to accept his five-fold system I had to try and forget the language analogy!

Music interacts with the body and causes an experience in the mind. The experience connects the music with the mind. Anything becomes connected with the mind by experience, and any experience may shape the mind. — jkop

On a neuroscientific level, there's a lot of evidence now about brain plasticity and the effects of music. Children with a musical education develop with startlingly different brains to the rest of us. I'm not disagreeing with the general point, just reinforcing it. I can imagine a Twin Earth where the twinlings regard speech and writing as merely a small subset of 'music', and wonder why we set so much store by a narrow range of sounds and marks on paper.

Like Sapientia, ideas about gods don't form any part of what interests me about philosophy, although I have found myself arguing strongly - as an atheist - for an appreciation of religious experience. It's clear that what many religious people sometimes experience through religion is profound. If one is to try and understand the nature of understanding and insight, then 'The cloud of unknowing' or 'Pilgrim's progress' or Spinoza or 'Honest to God' or the poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins are all big contributors to my insights, even if I lack their authors' underlying supernatural beliefs.

As to philosophy in general, I find the exercise very calming. I am approaching old age and want to understand more about the nature of processes and things. I am a pluralist, I am out of sympathy with all the arguments that eventually arrive at 'Everything is...', even various forms of holism. We have multiple ways of understanding ourselves - art, music, science, religion, political commentary, philosophy - and so while I'm taking a largely analytic approach to philosophising, I doubt that such analysis is in the end going to make me feel any closer to the heart of things than Shostakovich, Sam Beckett, Barbara Hepworth or Adrienne Rich. The disinterest of philosophy in the arts is a disappointment to me, and the analytic approach via 'aesthetics' is unappealing, so I find I am most interested in epistemology, and in the philosophy of language, which is refreshingly muddled and plural.

One difficulty I'd like to clear out of the way is the analogy Thompson draws between his approach to 'life forms' and a linguist's approach to language:

These three sorts of judgment about the umbrella jelly and umbrella jellies might be compared to three parallel forms of judgment about human speech - an analogy Darwin himself
draws. As we distinguish various species, or natural forms of life, so also we distinguish various
languages, or customary forms of discursive interaction... — Thompson

To me this analogy fails from the outset. The Darwin analogy I know traces an account based on history/genealogy of both species and language, which isn't what Thompson seems to be saying at all: this paper presents a static, 'equilibrium' account which only gets itself into a muddle by comparing itself with language.

Well, that's how it seems to me. Other comments welcome of course :)

With that analogy cleared out of the way, I like the basic Thompson justification for virtue ethics, which is how I read the thing, even if at times he's infuriatingly oblique.

Plato did much analysis of pleasure and pain, I'll see if I can recall some of the principles put forward by him. To begin with, pleasure is not to be opposed to pain, because despite the fact that release from pain does bring a type of pleasure, there are other pleasures such as the pleasures of virtue, and the intellectual pleasures, which are not derived from a release from pain. — Metaphysician Undercover

I agree with this. The Plato/Aristotle picture does not have a pleasure/pain spectrum. Nor does our ordinary language.

Pleasure, for instance, can be opposed to 'displeasure' on a spectrum including indifference: our aesthetic pleasures, for instance, fall into this category.

And pain, for instance, can be opposed to 'painlessness', which is altogether different from pleasure.

There are other zones in the pleasure/pain nexus. Aristotle, for instance, discusses the 'pleasure' in the 'good' of recovering from illness, and points out that this is hardly a good or a pleasure we would in general seek or regard as good.

It's interesting to me that modern commentators don't know what to with the emphasis on philia in Aristotle's ethics, also central to Epicurus. I liked the Internet from the start for the fellowship of it. I found others with interests like mine and indeed kinks like mine. I'm someone who gets involved in voluntary groups and who tries to maintain friendships - some of my friendships have lasted 40+ years now. It's good for me to reflect on how people and relations shift. So in a sense my regular personality finds similar expression on the Net. I don't mean comradeship is for everyone - I'm just a philiac I suppose. And I'm still in love with the access to knowledge the Internet provides. The saddest things about the Web for me are embodied in Facebook - a Stalinist one-size interface designed to make money by being mendacious to me, making me its consumer and product.

I ask this because A-T philosophy is "apparently" having a bit of a revival in analytic circles. — darthbarracuda

I heard that too. I'm a lowly grad student but at levels far above me in academe there's a lot of talk of powers, capacities and dispositions.

Nancy Cartwright is one who's moved more to an Aristotelian position (insofar as I even understand these labels). Personally I like her philosophy of science work.

I'm up for a read, 'How moral agents became ghosts' could be the Macintyre option.

Studies in animal behavior (including emotions, cognition, memory, perceptions, etc.) will either validate your intuition or they won't. — Bitter Crank

Of course studies in animal behaviour have turned out to vary a lot in their conclusions depending on the presuppositions of the human enquirers. Studies of animals in their natural habitats often give quite different findings to those of captivity studies.

More generally, if we become ecologists rather than economists we will look at how everything relates to everything else, Gibsonian 'affordances' and all, instead of seeing how everything relates to human costs and benefits.

The post WWII generations grew up with the firm belief that economic growth would proceed into the far future (like, 22nd century, at least). Economists predicted steady growth.
...I'm not proposing a catastrophe, but I am wondering two things:

Are economic predictions worth the paper they are printed on? and
Are we living in a period of extended slow-to-no growth? — Bitter Crank

Being green and Green I think we should aim for steady state economics now, i.e. stability over the business cycle, without growth. Anything more is non-sustainable. Even a steady state economy would require innovation and productivity improvement if the economy as a whole were to improve its performance. There is a not-very-active movement (http://steadystate.org/ - always sad when 'Upcoming events' are blank).

Of course, if you aim for that, redistribution has to be seriously addressed. The growth narrative goes with a notion that a rising tide lifts all ships. In the last 20 years it transparently hasn't. Real incomes of working people have fallen.

Economic predictions are indeed terrible, they always have been, they're best taken as an indicator of confidence or pessimism. I began life wanting to be an economist, but gave it up at University: there is brilliant work in some small areas, but much of it is ideology with a high dose of fairly meaningless statistics. I remember a terrible notion propounded by Walt Rostow that growth could be achieved by 'third world' countries if they followed a certain number of maxims, a doctrine that lived on far too long into the late 20th century.

Oddly enough 'economic growth' as an assumed policy target is quite a recent phenomenon. Much of it here in the UK has turned into a rhetorical game, with the need for 'austerity' a cover for deliberately redistributing resources and 'the living wage' being redefined in government-speak so that it's below the level actually required to live..

If you are interested in Epicurean psychological pain you may want to try and find:

Some Aspects of Epicurean Psychology., David Konstan — Moliere

Thanks. Konstan is the author of the current Stanford entry on Epicurus but doesn't touch on pain much there. I'll look out the book next time I'm back on the trek to the uni library.

My discussion group didn't dwell so much on the attitude to death but the attitude to dying.

The other aspect of Epicurus where he seems to follow Aristotle is in the pro-attitude to philia, usually translated as 'friendship'. That interests me in a socio-political way. As against 'liberalism' in the European sense, the liberalism of Rawls and Mill, I've always believed in 'socialism' broadly constructed. We are mutual animals, there is no individualised 'state of nature' for Rousseau or Rawls to go to, even as an ideal type, for humans always band together in social groups. The strand of non-marxist socialism that runs from the early 19th century, often involving experiments in living together like New Lanark, strongly appeals to me (I remember Barbara Taylor's 'Eve and the New Jerusalem' as a seminal book that made me see history in a different pro-feminist way). Greek philia seems to me to relate to this sense of mutuality, comradeship, which analytic and liberal commentators don't quite know what to do with, so they gloss over it, whereas for Aristotle and Epicurus, I'm interested to find, it was central.

Two other factors that it took me a while to grasp are (a) neutral alleles - there are many elements that are simply neutral for fitness, and (b) genetic drift - the ordinary accidental variation in a population that then has effect down the reproductive line.

How keen we are to find purpose on the nature of things!

I'm afraid this thread passed me by a couple of months ago, but my old gits' philosophy group has just been talking first about the Stoics and then about Epicurus. Perhaps because we're all older people we focused for a while on Epicurus' apparent belief that dying itself is not to be feared because, in the ordinary course of death, our soul-atoms begin to lose their potency (I'm probably putting this wrongly but this is how we put it). A woman-member gave a remarkable and moving account of her 4-year-old child dying in just such a way - refusing medication even when her mother tried to smuggle it into her, and dying in some sort of peace and accommodation with what was happening to her.

I find the debate about pain earlier in the thread a bit strange. I've had a lifetime of cluster headaches, 40 years of them now, and talked to other people about the experience of pain. I think in an odd way one can enter into the experience of pain. You don't thereby mitigate it but you do develop an attitude towards it, a non-contentious mode which makes a difference. I see that to my mind I'm anti-Stoic and pro-Epicurean, as it were, in feeling this.

I do think 'pleasure' for Epicurus is a descendant of Aristotle's, who's only a generation away, and Aristotle is clear that there is intellectual pleasure, and (if they are different) there is pleasure as a state which is different from appetitive pleasure.

Lastly, I'm interested in 'mental pain' as part of the Epicurean model, again, in contrast to the Stoic-inspired cognitive behavioural model that's all the rage. For the Stoics it seems a question of technique. For Epicureans it's reflection and an accommodation with nature, as Dryden's version of Lucretius (which is great fun in itself, a late revelation to me!) puts it:

For life is all in wandring errours led;
And just as Children are surpriz’d with dread,
And tremble in the dark, so riper years
Ev’n in broad daylight are possest with fears;
And shake at shadows fanciful and vain,
As those which in the breasts of Children reign.
These bugbears of the mind, this inward Hell,
No rayes of outward sunshine can dispel;
But nature and right reason must display
Their beames abroad, and bring the darksome soul to day. — Dryden/Lucretius"

Thanks for your explanation mcdoodle, it seems then that we mostly agree, but use different terminology; what you call "metaphysical naturalism" I would call 'scientism'.

Would you go as far as to say, though, that science has nothing interesting to tell us about ourselves? — John

Perhaps we will talk of this in another thread. I do think science has a lot of interesting things to tell us about ourselves. I don't know why anyone would say anything different. But some things called 'science' are decidedly dodgy, from psychology to economics to very theoretical physics :)

And there you go. You tell me you don't intend to ad hom me and then repeat the ad hom.

Again, if you dispute aspects of my interpretation, and can back it up, then that would make for an interesting discussion. Instead you just make lazy dismissals with no substance. And get annoyed because I tell you that you are being lazy. — apokrisis

Well, I will give up coming back to this thread now, I don't engage in this kind of exchange.

I'm reading a little book of essays by Nicholas Bachtin, lesser-known brother of Mikhail. Nicholas was a keen classicist and a friend of Wittgenstein, who read portions of the Philosophical Investigations to him during the writing. In his essay on 'Realism in the drama' he has this to say:

Certainly the universe in which the Greek lived was not only different from ours but even, in several respects, incommensurable with it. And yet we have a right to claim that we belong to a different stage of the same civilization. For certain essential fictions created by the Greeks still ordain our vision of the real....[but] as soon as we leave the domain of our own civilization, the differences [in views of reality] become striking....and may concern even the most fundamental categories... — Bachtin

People "hide" from reality, so to speak. Hence culture, art, religion, self-improvement television shows, fictional literature, etc. — darthbarracuda

I don't understand the word 'Hence' here. All these genres or ways of acting seem to me attempts to come to terms with human experience, not to hide from it.

Not that I'm necessarily disagreeing with the overarching thesis. Maybe humans are creatures dissatisfied with their ecological niche but incapable of the wisdom required to moderate our behaviour now we're clothed and sheltered in inhospitable climes. 'The over-reacher' is a classic modern cultural notion from the plays and poetry of Marlowe onwards: we recognise this tendency in ourselves but seem powerless to negotiate with it.

Can you tell me exactly what "metaphysical naturalism" consists in — John

Well I think of it as applying the category 'naturalism' to all, I mean all sorts of philosophical discussions, including those where it either is inapposite, or reductionist. One example: I remember sociobiology getting going in the 1970's, and feeling my blood boil at the attempt to explain things like gender differences or ethical arguments by supposed derivation from 'evolution' when feminism or ethics needs, to me, to be approached on different terms altogether. Landru talks about these things as different forms of 'discourse' and that's what the sociological and Continental approaches call them: the disciplines have their own histories and conventions. To try and derive ideas about them from a 'naturalism' that in turn derives from scientific realism is to try and play Go with chess pieces: it can be done but it's foolish because they are different games.

I'm doing a grad course in mostly analytic philosophy at the moment, and another area where this 'metaphysical naturalism' has struck me forcibly is something I'm interested in: what music is about. There is a strand of thinking, for instance, in talking about 'the ontology of music' that a score or a recorded musical performance is the basis of 'ontology', and that seems to me a dreary and belittling way of approaching one of the arts (and indeed the arts in other cultures where 'music' has a different importance and relevance) as if they were a branch of the natural world, as if the same sorts of issues apply in the same sorts of ways as they do with science - whereas to me they are a whole different sphere – 'discourse' when we talk about it – to which quite different concepts apply.

Sorry this is a distance from universals but you asked so I answered!

And you judge my understanding of Anaximander, the result of many years of study, having just done a hasty google search?

If you dispute my interpretation, of course tell me your specific concern. But please drop the superior attitude.
....
So all you are doing is waving the banner of social constructionism and hoping it counts as a position. Lazy. — apokrisis

I can't say I enjoy these debates when this tone arrives in them. I certainly didn't mean to be rude, so I'm sorry if I was, but please don't be rude in return for a perceived slight. I still think your account of Anaximander is very sweeping, and reads to me like someone enthusiastic for an idea seeking confirmation in history, rather than a historian's account of how Greek metaphysics developed. I come late to all this philosophical stuff, but I try to be scrupulous in my judgment, and rely on a little more than Google searches. I've worked outwards from Aristotle and Plato to the Stoics and Epicureans then backwards to the pre-Socratics in the last year, but I don't claim to be well-read in this stuff, just trying to understand it.

I certainly don't accept laziness as one of my faults, nor that I'm a social constructionist. I can't say I exactly know what my 'position' is, I'm on something of a journey, and rather a Wittgensteinian in temper. Really, I think this 'universals' debate ends in stalemate: one finds oneself of one inclination rather than another for reasons grounded in something about one's character, rather than in rational argument.

For me the point is that nature contributes to our categorial perceptions and judgements; more than contributes: categorial perception and judgement is itself an expression of nature, just as we are. The further point is that we are, by no means, all there is to nature.

Methodological naturalism is just the tendency to discount supernatural interventions that contravene natural law. But then I think it's also necessary, when trying to understanding the more indeterministic spiritual side of things, in relation to both the animal and the human, not to abandon naturalism, and devolve to supernaturalism, but rather to greatly expand our conceptions of what is both natural and possible. — John

You imply that beyond methodological naturalism lies only 'the more indeterministic spiritual side of things'. But what about the arts, politics, ethics and the social sciences? 'Naturalism' is an irrelevant category in the arts, for instance, or refers to something quite different in artistic creation and judgment than it does when the scientific method is involved.

In ethics, how shall we make judgments? By finding something appealing in evolutionary biology? Not for me.

In short: I'm not a believer in metaphysical naturalism. But if we circumscribe science to the realm of methodological naturalism, then we can do science together and apply it all over the shop and have a whale of a time.

When we do, we find categories there, and sub-categories of categories, and so on. Is that categorical forking resident in what we find, or in how we undertake and understand the finding, or a mixture of both? I'm arguing for a mixture of both.

The "rules" of physics are not a constraint on the world. They are an expression of what it happens to be doing at a moment. — TheWillowOfDarkness

I don't think I disagree with anything you wrote in your post, although I would say 'what it appears to be doing to thinkers of a certain place and era'.

You misrepresent the point I was making. What I said was that metaphysics - as rational inquiry into the nature of existence - got started by understanding that a hierarchy of constraints was what was naturally logical. And that is the vision that has been consistently fruitful, presumably because it is right. — apokrisis

I don't think you did say that. But if that's what you meant, then fair enough, that's what you meant. But I think you show a non-historian's excess confidence, especially in your response to Wayfarer, in believing you know what Anaximander said (we only have a fragment and others' commentaries), and then what others in the Greek world thought or didn't think.

If you can make a rational argument for why hierarchical organisation is somehow against nature, or that there is empirical evidence that natural philosophy has strayed from it in the past, and so may do so again in the future, then please provide that. — apokrisis

I don't see why I would need or wish to make either of these arguments. My argument is that hierarchical categorisation is how human thinking works, however 'nature' works, and that human thinking in any given place and era is historically situated.

Metaphysics began with Anaximander taking just such a hierarchical view of nature and has relentlentlessly followed the same path ever since. So from a historical point of view, there has only been the one story.

To shrug your shoulders and say "lucky accident, hey", is supremely optimistic as an argument here. — apokrisis

(a) I don't see how my view says 'lucky accident, hey'. My view, to which you were replying, refers to a dialectic between how human understanding works and how the world seems to present itself to us.
(b) The idea that metaphysics began with Anaximander and goes in a straight line, however relentlentlentlessly, to here would not be supported by most historians of ideas. History is much more interesting and hard to fathom than that. The modern era in the West re-started, as I'd see it, in the 16th/17th centuries, and from then on laid claim to a Greco-Latin origin to modern ideas that has to leap across previous chasms of centuries when entirely other metaphysics (it seems reaosonable to presume) held sway.
(c) I'm sticking with my view that physicists and who-knows-who in 400 years' time won't have the same sort of categorisations of the world we move through as we do. Of course, it's a tricky proposition to test empirically. There you go: this is a metaphysical debate.

But if our categories and hierarchies are not merely arbitrary then they do "reflect the way the world that we move through is ordered." Of course, I am not claiming that the reflection must be perfect, just that there must some reflection if our categories and hierarchies are not to be completely arbitrary. — John

I think 'refraction' would be my preferred metaphor.

I do think this whole discussion has a tendency to confuse the philosophy of science with philosophy. These purported universals are not just words used in scientific method, so they neither stand nor fall by how useful they are to methodological naturalists (I know, the spirit of Landru has entered me, what can I do?). The debate is about whether such entities, or whatever they might be, exist, and if not, what sort of beast they are. This applies to all the language we use, from sparrows (which I confess I still confuse with dunnocks) to the nature of music to love, sweet love and whether Economics is any kind of a science.

Point of order - Plato was indeed a mystic. The dictionary definition of the term is 'initiate into the mystery religions', and Plato, an Orphic, was that. — Wayfarer

:) Got to agree there

I think it goes against all the evidence and against reason to claim that our categories and hierarchies are merely arbitrary — John

I don't believe I proposed that at all. I'm just opposed to the opposite naturalistic thesis: that our present-day categories reflect the way the world that we move through is ordered.

I'm just a historicist. Our categories and hierarchies change and develop in a dialectical relationship between our ways of understanding, on the one hand, and the way the world seems to present itself to us, on the other. These things change radically over time. Apo's example of 'gravity' is a case in point. Pre-17th century physics had all sorts of (what now seem weird) explanations for why stuff tends to fall to earth. (I've just been to my old gits' philosophy group where we were discussing the amazing physics of the Epicureans, for instance, and how they rather remarkably accepted the notion of atoms but believed they had to 'swerve' to justify animal action in the world) The word 'gravity' originally meant 'seriousness', which nowadays seems like a secondary use. Its very naming, and our view of the phenomenon named as a universal, are part of how our modern era makes sense of who we are and where we are. I don't see why we should expect that a physicist in say 400 years' time will see universals as the same as we do now. It certainly hasn't worked out that way so far.

Other than Aristotle what are some good resources on four cause causation, in particular its relationship to science? — darthbarracuda

It's worth noting that 'cause' is a translation of 'aition', plural 'aitia'. Some argue that this is closer in meaning to 'explanation', so Aristotle is giving answers to the question Why?

So why is science hierarchically organised in to physics, chemistry, biology, psychology? Did humans just invent a crazy set of divisions for no reason or does that reflect the ontic fact that existence is found to have levels of constraint that range from the very general to the highly specific? — apokrisis

Humans arrived at a form of hierarchy for excellent reasons. Hierarchical organisation of understanding makes sense. The particular present-day hierarchy of sciences is however a historically-situated way of organising, that happened for contingent reasons. In other eras or in other possible worlds understanding might be organised quite differently. That's where my metaphysics leads. That's why I'm nominalist about universals.

Nominalism is right on that score. We humans freely name abstractions without really being systematic about the formal and final causality that the names mean to refer to.

But reality is organised hierarchically. So teacups are ideals that have their formal and final cause very locally within the sphere of human culture. And sparrows likewise are the product of very local biological and ecological constraints - the symmetry breaking information to be found in a genetic and ecological developmental history. — apokrisis

These are metaphysical debates. I don't think that 'reality is organised hierarchically' nor that there are ideal teacups or sparrows. Here your language, to my surprise, sounds much more like Wayfarer's, for you sound like you claim a great chain of being, but one derived, as Landru would remind us if he were here, from methodological naturalism. What you are arguing here here is not something you can demonstrate with scientific references, although, granted, you can make a powerful argument from scientific knowledge to the realm beyond science.

I just argue the metaphysics from the argument in your first para - as an anti-ontology: there is no over-arching system to the worlds we move through and that's why our language is non-systematic.

Doesn't Aristotle conceive of matter as potency and form as act, though? — Thorongil

As I understand it, it's rather like (no coincidence) Heidegger's distinction between 'present-at-hand' and 'ready-to-hand'. Matter has potential, dynamis; form is actuality, energeia or entelechia.

This last year reading Davidson's essay 'mental events' about inter alia his 'anomalous monism' has made me think about these questions differently. I don't mean that I agree with Davidson but at least he addresses the barrier: there is something about 'mental' and 'physical' explanations that we sometimes rather casually intermingle, but they don't fit together, and it may be there are parallel (but not item-for-item parallel) explanations under different descriptions, the mental and the physical.

For me Dennett's stuff about multiple drafts etc. is a bold try at redescribing what goes on in our heads, but I hate talk of 'illusion' in the way he does.

One small point from the op, I wasn't clear why it holds that 'if panpsychism there would be no way to know where my consciousness starts and another begins'. The pan-ness doesn't require us to be part of a universal consciousness. (I'm not a pan psychist but...)

Anyone read 'How forests talk'? That's an interesting zone that I don't finally buy into, but seems an interesting ecological way of looking at these things, but I've only read reviews of the book so far.

Interesting. On the one hand, it seems that revenge comes from a desire for justice. The state's justice... is it a stand-in for divine justice? — Mongrel

Well, I realise as you raise this question that I'm strongly influenced by having studied Aristotle just lately, with a side-order of Plato. Aristotle tries to found social justice on something like the virtue of justice, but he's more interested in the institutions of justice than Plato. For Ari there's redistributive justice - of the goods of living - and rectificatory justice - the righting of wrongs - and in both of them a question of the right proportion comes into play. Institutional justice isn't a 'stand-in' for the divine, since for Ari the divine is to be concerned with altogether loftier matters. It seems to me his view is improved by a dose of Epicurus, that social justice aids in bringing harmony. Certainly Ari's is an immanent, polis-based justice. At the heart of it is a famous and brilliant passage on 'equity' (V 10 of the Nicomachean Ethics) which I gather modern lawyers still use as a basis for consideration of complex cases, which says that there will always be a justice beyond mere rules.

Now, straight away I think this is incorrect. How could 'a universal' be 'an entity'? All throughout this essay, universals are posited as 'entities' - as if Plato's 'ideal form' is 'an entity' — Wayfarer

Many people do interpret Plato's forms, as explained by Plato, as entities. But I agree that the encyclopaedia entry is surprisingly wrong: modern philosophers however neo-Platonic wouldn't regard universals as entities.

I am a simple nominalist about universals. We are universalising creatures, and such universalising is indeed the only way we could make sense of events and objects. To differentiate is to deny identity; and then to quantify over properties is to universalise, from redness to sparrows.

How for instance do words change their meaning over time, and how do our names for the 'same' sort of thing change over time? They change as our understanding shifts, as the worlds we move in shift.

Cycles of revenge aren't fueled by religion. They're driven by the bloody mindedness that follows the funeral of the murdered, right? Does the state help with this? Does it make it worse? Does it have any effect at all? — Mongrel

Well, I was thinking of those vengeful Greek deities as role-models for the undivine. I think they did egg Medea and Orestes on, for instance.

I don't think there is justice, and therefore there is no end to revenge-cycles, without a State. So we shouldn't kill all the lawyers after all :)

I suppose this means you aren't very interested in, say, analytic philosophy? Analyticism does not use phenomenology very much, it's more intuitions and logic. — darthbarracuda

Well I'm actually back in Academe doing an analytic-based course. It's an interesting exercise trying to squeeze what I think into an analytic-shaped box :)

Let's hear it also for the ancient Greek dramatists. How shall we ever end cycles of revenge fuelled by beliefs in angry vengeful gods?

Ah: impartial justice. But this can only be achieved in the polis, with talk and competitive games and Plato's well-trained Guardians to intervene when there's mayhem.

Like you I've taken to philosophy. I find it absorbing. People have thought hard about things, and it's all about thought.

I'm not interested in truth which seems overrated: an important-sounding value you put into a system if you want. I like clarification and insight. I doubt there is truth, I suppose: philosophy seems to me non-progressive, and I like it for that.

Personal Construct theory was never very popular, in large part, I think, because the statistical analysis of repertory grids is fairly horrendous for us soft-scientists. But its mere existence as the formalisation of metapsychology is interesting in this context. — unenlightened

Thanks for this, I'm afraid I was previously ignorant of the whole theory. I like the whole concept that each person's psychology might be built up from how they regard the identity of others - if I've grasped it aright (and I've looked it up on Wikipedia, so now I'm an Internet expert). Running with the idea, it strikes me that big P Psychology might be a whole matrix of everyone's theories about other people.

Or some other strange artform like the movie Synecdoche, New York. Anybody see that? — Mongrel

I saw that. If I close my eyes I still see the real world of that movie crumbling, revealing itself to be a set. I assume this may happen at the moment of death: suddenly strips appear in what you thought was the endless sky, and the cars turn into papier mache.

Most recently by the same Charlie Kaufman creature, 'Anomalisa' was somewhat about identity too, the subtlest puppet work since I don't know when :)