Was the world more religious or mystical for the early Wittgenstein or more so for the latter man? That is, was the the thing-in-itself more a mystery for him in his younger days or when he got older?

Space and truth are nothing, but I can conceptualize them still. I can abstract from their non-existence something to ponder on. Wittgenstein is too Zen for me in general because I think if you can think about something, why not try to see how far you can run with the idea? Instead of closing off the road before the race..

Time however.. what is it? I can't abstract any idea of it out of nothing or something. So the idea must be empty

An understanding of this reality, for starters. Read Carlo Rovelli’s ‘The Order of Time’. He effectively dismantles and then restructures our notion of time, and I think goes some way towards supporting your position. — Possibility

Thanks! I've been wondering, in a very Wittgensteinian way, what time adds to the concept of motion

Heidegger would say location IS the fourth dimension

This is a good topic. Questions like "how many souls do you have" and "what is the relationship between your objective mind and your subjective mind" would thwart his scheme however. Religious questions like that many of us feel are not meaningless

Modern theory of time itself says there is no difference between eternity and time, the spiritual and the material as well. Very much like Yoruba religions

What right had Einstein to put time into his equations? What do they even stand for if his B theory is correct?

I want to add, this alluring, spontaneous self-generation of all (divinity) that Hinduism speaks of is similar to Descartes position (held against the scholastics in Descartes's "Replies to Objections") that God creates himself. I have over the years seen more and more how Descartes started modern philosophy and rationalism, but did so in such a subtle way. Nevertheless we get our information about the philosophy from the world. Is this a mistake? Must a cause always precede the effect at least in some way? Lots of questions. The quantum eraser experiments comes to mind.

Tapas in Hindu religion is thought of as a physical manifestation of Brahma/Atman within the body (especially the stomach). It is called "sexual warm" or "the warm of birth" sometimes. This is a radically different idea than western theism. For many Indians, the universe generates itself through a auto-sexual birthing act.

Descartes idea of God was different: you could never become God because the chasm between the finite and the perfectly infinite can never be bridged. Now Descartes was not a theologian. For believing Christians, they follow St Peter in the Bible in saying we "partake of divine nature" in heaven. The Church Fathers called it deification. There is still a numerical difference between creator and creature though, and the relation of cause and effect remains.

However Hindus (whom I have been reading about the past couple days) say what Hegel (and Protagoras) said: our souls are all reality. Hegel got his notion of soul from Aristotle, but exploded it into the infinite through his own reasoning and comes up close to Hinduism on this.

Descartes (back to him) thought we don't get a vague idea of God from thinking, but we have naturally a very specific idea, "clear and distinct", within our souls about this infinite Being. Maybe material objects
didn't exist, he said, but this being that has all greatness must exist because this idea within him of God can't stand alone. It can only come from God and it can only point, in it's internal nature, to God. This idea of his that this idea of perfect being cannot be an idea that has nothing objective to correspond to is very modern. (This is one of the reasons he is the first modern philosopher) Most people don't consider this argument, and turn to his ontological argument instead (which was just him atomizing the former argument). The idea is a mere contingent substance isolated by itself.

There is something about ideas that must ultimately make us realize they correspond to a reality outside.

I sometimes entertain the idea that wherever the infinite and finite intersect, there you will find a human being immersed in the existence medium. — Merkwurdichliebe

I like that. We seem to be born into the middle of a story and wonder "who did I get in the middle without understanding the beginning and end?". A phenomenologist would say "where else is there to be!"

Christians are stuck in the "I sin seven times a day and just always do penance" mentality. Maybe they literally sin all the time. Idn. They think everyone else does. My counter Pascal wager is "if you can't prove the supernatural is real, why choose faith and make life harder on yourself."

The secret of sophia is to keep a 50/50 proportion of objectivity and subjectivity in one's life, those terms understood philosophically

Nice! Good stuff. "[T]he understanding self-projection of Being upon a potentiality-for-being toward a possibility to be... for the sake of which Being is, has the mode of being OF being-in-the-world. Accordingly, the relation to innerworldly beings lies in it ontologically." Heidegger

Again, balance between subjectivism and objectivism

Balance between subjectivity and the objective

https://www.amazon.com/German-Idealism-Struggle-Subjectivism-1781-1801-ebook/dp/B002OSXS28/ref=pd_sim_351_1/140-5759656-3941344?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=B002OSXS28&pd_rd_r=33682732-d01e-48b4-a64b-391f9b942aa1&pd_rd_w=8R2Vb&pd_rd_wg=oNKaZ&pf_rd_p=bab57536-7c8f-4781-a8ed-3e270b9cd303&pf_rd_r=47K4MSCDT7WX7MMG0ARG&psc=1&refRID=47K4MSCDT7WX7MMG0ARG

I want to get this! Hinduism is lopsided because it emphasizes "Brahma" as a substance. With Hegel at least, it seems to me his language dictates that we take his "Absolute" to be primarily an experience, since it is like the ultimate thought for him

That was great, but I think there is something else. Reality is like one of those sparklers on the 4th of July. The colors are Perfect Forms. But there is a continuum down the wand down to nothingness. Buddhism recognizes that Egos are all along the continuum at different places. The German idealists each had there own way of finding the "absolute experience". Only Schopenhauer was a full Buddhist

Protagoras is my favorite Greek. One of his works was read by Porphyry in the third century CE, but none survive to this day. People wanted Christian faith instead and so destroyed his legacy.

"He seems to have held that a tangent touches a circle not only at one point, but at more than one, clearly arguing from visual experience of drawn lines."

There, it's working :)



I don't know what relates to this thread. God can render all human reasoning open to doubt. You sound like Cicero. Is you're way better than epoche and ataraxia? Kant divided his mind into practical reason, judgment, reason general, understanding, intuitions. The combinations he used with them were fascinating. There are many writers on this forum that have very interesting angles. But you think this thread has made much work, so In a paragraph, what have you discovered?

You haven't made a case for a single idea of this whole thread. You aren't versatile

how does ANY of this relate to phusis or anything anyone on here is talking about? — Xtrix

You are just bringing up a cryptic word and thinking it's going to get somewhere in a conversation. Concepts are what count. We have no sure knowledge of what ancient texts mean.

Great stuff man! It seems to me we need a "remoteness from being" in order to appreciate it, if only latter. I am one of those people who are always asking questions. I just get worried there won't be enough questions to ask. My stats say it's infinite, at least relative to a human, but ye I am a "doubting Thomas". Thomas is actually my middle name. After Aquinas. He had strong religious faith since a very young age. I went to Thomas Aquinas College for three quarters in 2004-2005. Now I find philosophy like a puzzle, and I don't like the cut and try scholastic method were they demand you accept premises that seem obvious to them

When thinking about Kant and the world with it's mathematics, it is common sense that 2 plus 2 equals 4 appplies to the world. But there are many strange geometries: https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=pbs+edge+of+an+infnite+universe&docid=608049205598619846&mid=028119E3662230F5BD84028119E3662230F5BD84&view=detail&FORM=VIRE

There are also many spiritualities. Look at the Car's Jr. star and try to imagine it NOT having a smiling face. This is what Kant did for the world, and he enjoyed it. He went back to the world with his new found faculty of Judgment and experienced a bittersweet world

Shots in the dark, since I fell out of the discussion.

) Kant was a doubting Platonist who had a love for nature Plato did not

2) to feel is as noble as to think. If thinking nothing makes you feel best, you must ask what purpose of life is

3) Science doesn't need purpose however. All it needs is trial and risk taking.

I believe Zenos paradox applies to a block of stone. Your imagination can draw perfect triangles on marble to. The modern error strayed to far from Plato. They forgot there were perfect shapes in all of nature. Today we call that geometrical symmetry

The isolated reason can adopt three positions.

1) 2+2 equals everything but four, so there are no numbers

2) there is only one number

3) regular mathematics

Which of the 3 apply to the world is a question too

I once found an article on Einstein's response to Zeno. When I went back to it the url was down. Just know it was out there once and you tech savvy guys might be able to locate i :)

Parmenides said we went from being back to being. Heraclitis implies we come from nothing and go to nothing. Eternal becoming is nothingness. I want to read Heideggers book on the metaphysical foundations of logic. He thought Parmenides and Heraclitus were in agreement. That's mind blowing

Fitche said idealism is the first reality, than the dogmatism of the world. I get the sense that for him we go from a pure set of nothing to infinite reality. Heidegger seems to say we go from being to infinite nothingness. They were politically similar though

I realize now. For Schopenhauer,

If consciousness is to your body as the world is to the Forms, then he is saying the same thing as Hegel. Phenomenology! (And the same thing as Kant) All five of the great German idealist were Buddhist par excellence. You come from nothing. Then you posit yourself. Then you posit the world. Then you come to realize through contemplation that you and everything are the Forms. Those thinkers fought between
themselves because they got to that state from different places (practical reason, judgment, reason general, understanding, intuitions, imagination [romanticism], and combinations of them).

Buddhism is a very fluid state of beliefs. There will always be debates among them within the movement of thought

" … the total disappearance of being would not be the advent of the reign of non-being, but on the contrary the concomitant disappearance of nothingness." Sartre

I wouldn't say that the arrow paradox is something philosophers are making a mountain out of a molehill of. If Zeno is right, motion would be impossible and all that we see around us would be an illusion. Isn't that something to worry about?

As for infinitesimal calculus, I think it's a clever way around the problem of instantaneous velocity. — TheMadFool

The problem is not specifically motion, although that is how Zeno phrased it. The difficulty is space with having no final term while having a spatial limit. In other words, being infinite and finite. There can be motion because there is a limit and no motion because there is no final term. If it can be figured out how space can exist in this state in the first place, motion can be explained

I want to read Kants's critique of judgment from front to cover. He thinks judgement is between understanding (our caring for the world) and reason ( our caring for logic). Our highest ability is to judge. Schopenhauer attacked Kant for living in reason instead of understanding. Maybe Kant found pure judgment. I love that aesthetic. To judge is to act subjectively

Imagine an ant moving along infinitesimals on the surface of a ball. To him the moments are discrete, but to the ball they are continuous geodesical paths. To us objects are finite, to math they are uncountable infinities. Let us not put these ideas together as contradictions, but look for ways towards which Banach-Tarski paradox will seem like most common sense

You might like these quotes. — jjAmEs

Nice! But what about Marxism then? They say they can predict human nature and the process of history through sociology, psychology, and mathematics

0 multiplied by an uncountable infinity (maybe a specific one) equals generic "length." That is the conclusion of Zeno's paradox. TIme maybe not have parts, but space does. It can be divided endlessly. Those who say space is discrete or that the continuous doesn't apply to the real world are morons and I refuse to debate them anymore. Banach-Tarski's paradox helps us reason from "generic length" to specific finite lengths

The same old warmonkey. — jjAmEs

Hegel was wrong about deciphering history. It really has no rythm or reason

Sorry. The long Hegel quote is from Phenomenology of Spirit, at the very end the section on phrenology. He was addressing a modern question basically: "what part of the head is you?"

"[Fitche] gave sophisms and even crazy sham demonstrations whose absurdity was concealed under the mask of profundity and of the incomprehensibility ostensibly arising therefrom." Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena, Vol. I, §13

That's the only quote I have right now from Arthur boy. He's only making Fitche more attractive to me though

Schelling, Fitche, Hegel, and Kant only believed in God subjectively

I read once that for Schopenhauer to see the relation of the will to the body as the relation between th e phenomena and noumnena was to see the forms. I love that because it is convoluted and backwards. Just as truth is

I actually don't like how Fitche grounded all judgment on reality upon morality alone. Hegel expounded on beauty, Forms of the individual and social history. Much more versatile

Thank you much

Here is the full quote of Hegel's swipe at Kant:

"Reason, as essentially the logos (notion), is immediately parted asunder into itself and it's opposite (the world), an opposition which just for that reason is immediately again superseded [into living in the Forms]. But if it presents itself in this way as both itself and it's opposite, and if it is held fast in the entirely isolated moment of this disintegration, reason is apprehended in an irrational form (Kantian intuition);and the purer the moments of this opposition are, the more glaring is the appearance of this content, which is either alone for consciousness, or alone expressed ingenuously by consciousness. The 'depth' which mind brings out from within, but carries with no further than to make a presentation, and let it remain at this level- and the 'ignorance' on the part of this consciousness as to what it really says, are the same kind of connection of higher and lower which, in the case of the living being, nature naively expresses when it combines of it's highest fulfillment, the organ of generation, with the organ of urination. The infinite judgement as infinite would be the fulfillment of life that comprehends itself, while the consciousness of the infinite judgment that remains at the level of presentation corresponds to urination."