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Philosophy, Politics and Values: Could there be a New Renaissance or has it gone too far?
:up: :up:... it is likely that the mythical idea of the 'end times' has an influence on the shaping of history and how people live. — Jack Cummins -
Philosophy, Politics and Values: Could there be a New Renaissance or has it gone too far?Pardon. It was your 'reasoning' that I didn't find relevant.
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Philosophy, Politics and Values: Could there be a New Renaissance or has it gone too far?I don't see the relevance of your post to either the OP topic or my posts.
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Philosophy, Politics and Values: Could there be a New Renaissance or has it gone too far?
Nothing new in this sort of "end times" anxiety except for the historical circumstances and particulars.I am just concerned that what is happening now may be the point of no return. — Jack Cummins -
Philosophy, Politics and Values: Could there be a New Renaissance or has it gone too far?:up: :up:
If you haven't already, consider this article on the impersonal forces which tend to collapse civilizations (or empires) ...
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/nov/30/the-deep-historical-forces-that-explain-trumps-win
My previous post makes a similiar point: the cycles of "rise and fall" are envitable. -
Donald Trump (All General Trump Conversations Here)
:mask:Well, a chunk of Americans cared more about voting against a black woman. — RogueAI -
Cosmology & evolution: theism vs deism vs accidentalism
:up: :up:As described, the first cause is uncaused - but it's not an "accident", in the traditional sense as being synonymous with "contingent". — Relativist -
Philosophy, Politics and Values: Could there be a New Renaissance or has it gone too far?
My reading of "great histories" informs me that civilization is always on the brink of collapse. Periods of long, gradual decline culminate in sudden unforeseeable crashes (à la chaotic systems (e.g. avalanches, cancers)). Besides increasing entropy (i.e. environmental degradation & destruction, runaway dominance of accumulated disinformation), endemic political and cultural corruption seems the recurring culprit.Use your head, can't you, use your head, you're on earth, there's no cure for that! — Samuel Beckett, Endgame
Recently in the late great XXth Century: both World Wars brought civilization conspicuously closer to the brink; both global pandemics (1918-20, 2020-21); "The Great Depression" (1929-1940); "The Cold War" nuclear brinksmanship – punctuated by The Cuban Missile Crisis (1962) – kept the (settler-colonizer "first") world on the brink (1949-1989); and, last but not least, rapidly accelerating industrialization-caused Global Warming primarily by former Imperial Powers across the Northern Hemisphere (1820s - present) ... to name a few rationally undeniable 'processes' which have been stress-testing modern global civilization (many roots of which are vestiges of premodern revolutions-schisms, imperial wars, "Dark Ages", migrations-diseases, etc).
According to recorded history (ca 5,000 BCE), Jack, all civilizations have been built bricolage-like from and amid the ruins of previous civilizations. We are just "cursed", as the Chinese say, to be "living in interesting times" where the hazards – black swans – of collapse are observable and even measureable. -
Cosmology & evolution: theism vs deism vs accidentalism
:roll: Incorrigible & lazy ...Spinoza hedged his bets by labeling hispantheisticdeity as Deus sive Natura. — Gnomon
'Natura deus est' is pantheistic; however, (sub specie aeternitatis) Spinoza's concept is acosmist¹.
(2023, 2020, 2021)
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/825698 [1] -
Cosmology & evolution: theism vs deism vs accidentalismIn other words, the improbability that 'an uncreated, transcendent creator of universes' exists (e.g. Plato, Aquinas) is, at best, equal to the improbability that 'an uncreated, autopoietic universe' exists (e.g. Epicurus, Spinoza); however, the latter is more parsimonious (i.e. has fewer inexplicable terms/assumptions) than the former.
@Gnomon @Wayfarer @RogueAI -
Cosmology & evolution: theism vs deism vs accidentalism
:clap: :100:So we must start out by asking the question 'is this world more likely a product of intelligent design or chance'? Well, we are not allowed to start out by assuming a designer with a particular character. So, [to do] the calculation we must consider how many different plans and intentiosn a designer may have. And there's the problem: there are going to be a potential infinite number. Certainly the odds of there being a designer who wished to create a world such as this are going to be everybit as long as the odds that a world such as this arose by chance. And given that the latter is a simpler thesis than the former - it doesn't assume a designer - then the chance thesis is the more reasonable one, other things being equal. — Clearbury
IME, woo-woo warriors like @Gnomon can't grok parsimony in either science or philosophy. -
Is the truth still owed even if it erodes free will?Deontologically:
If the truth shall kill them, let them die. — Immanuel Kant -
A Transcendental Argument for the Existence of Transcendent Laws
:100: :up:The ground of a transcendental argument presupposes a given. Depending on the choice of definitions, to construct an a priori judgement in the form of a transcendental argument, but with transcendent conceptions, is always invalid, insofar as no transcendent conceptions are given, re: that, the negation of which, is impossible. — Mww -
A Transcendental Argument for the Existence of Transcendent Laws
Not unless there is a metaphysical necessity – (transcendental) reason – 'why there is anything at all'. Only "X is ultimately necessary" (i e. absolute) precipates an infinite regrees of "whys" (or "laws").If I were to grant your point here, then, it seems like reality would have to have, assuming there are laws, an infinite regress of them—no? — Bob Ross
I think fundamental physics overwhelmingly suggests, though does/can not prove, that Order is (only) a phase-transition of Disorder such that the more cogent, self-consistent conception of this universe (of atomic event-patterns, or fields-excitations) is that it is a random 'non-zero' (CCC ~Penrose?) fluctuation of vacua. Perhaps this is an Everettian (per)version of Spinozist substance and/or Epicurean void ... Q. Meillassoux's metaphysical term for this sort of concept is 'hyper-chaos' (aka ... sunyata ... dao ... Heraclitus' logos ... ) :fire:If it’s contingent ‘all the way down’, then how is it not chaos? — Wayfarer -
A Transcendental Argument for the Existence of Transcendent LawsIf the nonexistence of nature, like the nonexistence of a sunny day, is a non-contradiction, then nature, like a sunny day, is contingent (i.e. non-necessary; can change, become otherwise; possibly 'comes to be, continues to be or ceases to be'). Therefore, if nature as a whole, as well as each of its constituents, is contingent (NB: nature could be otherwise =/= "anything" within nature could happen), then its "laws", or inherent regularities-relations, are 'necessarily contingent', no?
Also, contra Kantianism, isn't 'the human brain-body adaptively interacting with its environment' (i.e. embodied agency) – an emergent constituent of nature – the necessary precognition for 'the human mind' (i.e. grammar, experience, judgment)? -
Cosmology & evolution: theism vs deism vs accidentalism:up: :up:
(2022) re: @Gnomon's occult teleology (aka "seeing faces in the clouds")
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/770004 -
Kohlberg's Theory of Moral Development & Christian Ethics
:up: :up:Christianity is pretty irrelevant to ethics.
The view on sex and marriage expressed in the OP is pretty patriarchal. — Banno -
Cosmology & evolution: theism vs deism vs accidentalism
:100:Some other methodological Naturalists are so dogmaticthat I don't waste my time dialoging with them.
— Gnomon
Funny how those same naturalists see through your bullshit and don't hesitate to call you on it.
It's not dogmatism, it's just that there is so much evidence which proves that you spew bullshit, and I happen to know somewhat about such evidence. — wonderer1
@Gnomon spews that as if 'methodological Supernaturalists' like him are not "dogmatic" and do not spectacularly fail in every instance to produce testable, explanatory models of natural phenomena.
:up:I think there is another, quite independent, way of undermining the argument from fine-tuning. — Clearbury
Also, given that only a vanishingly insignificant fraction of the volumn of the observable universe is hospitable to any form of life that we can recognize as such, "the fine-tuning argument"^ is not sound. Like "the cosmological argument"^ which is unsound as well insofar as the universe (i.e. spacetime) had developed from a planck radius of (eternal) a-causal, or random, activity. Such medieval dogmas^, in fact, amount to nothing but 'god-of-the-gaps' appeals to ignorance, of which the OP is a pseudo-scientific, "creationist" specimen. :sparkle: :eyes: :pray:
To wit:
:roll: And 'mysterian¹ apologetics' gets us where?Thomas Nagel had this to say ... — Wayfarer
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_closure_(philosophy) [1]
(vide CS Peirce re: abductive reasoning²)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abductive_reasoning [2] -
Cosmology & evolution: theism vs deism vs accidentalism:up:
:up: :up:
for fact-free, non-corroborative stories (rationalized with pseudo-philosophizing) rather than fact-based, corroborative stories (interpreted via critical philosophizing)belief in gods—or in any supernatural guiding principle—is more like a preference — Tom Storm -
Cosmology & evolution: theism vs deism vs accidentalism
No doubt.There is no atheist worldview. — Tom Storm
However, do you agree 'there is a naturalist (or anti/non-supernaruralist) worldview of the few' in contrast to 'the supernaturalist (or anti/non-naturalist) worldview of the many'? (i.e. like 'Jacob and the angel' (or 'Sisyphus and his stone'), Logos-seeking self always struggling with Mythos-pretending ego, respectively?) -
Cosmology & evolution: theism vs deism vs accidentalism
Perhaps some emotionally need certitude, or an illusion of knowledge (i.e. severe allergy to admitting what (that) they don't know (e.g. woo-of-the-gaps)), whereas others do not have such an acute anxiety and even thrive from exploring intractable unknowns, indicative by their willingness to say "I/we don't know". The latter seems to me (I don't mean to stereotype / caricature) an artistic-philosophical-scientific disposition and the former more magical-mythic/cultic-mystical than not.It seems to me that some people need answers to certain quesions, others don't. I often wonder why that is. — Tom Storm
:up: e.g. Thales and the other Milesian as well as Ionian & atomist Pre-Socratics ...an alternative physicalist cosmology to the ones provided by mythologies -
US Election 2024 (All general discussion)
:fire: :death:The only thing we have to fear is fear itself. — FDR, as Adolf Hitler becomes Chancellor of Germany, 1933
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Should I get with my teacher?:smirk: Well ...
... a student's pov:
https://youtu.be/7grUgixqH8I?si=7SxW3vFpDEV2X9Rg
or a teacher's pov:
https://youtu.be/ITnL7-2RwUQ?si=RaALyxM10i0c95Hs -
Cosmology & evolution: theism vs deism vs accidentalism@Gnomon – An interesting summary of Stephen Meyer's polemical thesis; however, dress-up "Intelligent Design" any way – with any jargon – you wish, it is always both fallacious (re: argument from ignorance (i.e. god-of-the-gaps)) and scientistic pseudo-science (re: non-explanatory (i.e. "god did it" ), ergo experimentally untestable (i.e. does not make any unique predictions). Thus, he has not made a compelling case, or sound argument, against contemporary cosmological or evolutionary theories and/or in favor of (a) more testably explanatory model(s).
Fwiw by contrast, here is the link to a short summery of particle physicist and philosopher Victor J. Stenger's God: The Failed Hypothesis: How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist (2007) ...
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/God:_The_Failed_Hypothesis -
The Cogito
No. Yes. Re: the last sentence of my post that you left out of the quote:Do you think anything can be inferred from the cogito, whatsoever? Or is it entirely different from the philosophical subject, or are they one and the same and yet meaningless tautology? — Moliere
In other words, the latter [pathology] cannot be said and the former [tautology] need not be said: neither expresses a distinction that makes a[n ontological] difference. — 180 Proof -
Things that aren't "Real" aren't Meaningfully Different than Things that are Real.
Circular reasoning & compositional fallacy.If we live in a simulation, it would also be the real world, because the simulation exists in the real world. — Hyper
So how do you designate the distinction between a copy / counterfeit and the original? or distinguish a fictional account from a nonfictional account?The term "fake" is misleading because everything exists in a sense.
Anyway, consider "Meinong's Jungle" ...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meinong%27s_jungle
:lol:Try living in a picture of a house for a week, and get back to us.
— unenlightened
Yo mamma was so fat, her picture weighed 10 pounds. — T Clark -
The CogitoCaveat: dubito, dubitans accidit. :smirk:
Yes, "the subject" is what an object does and, as Spinoza suggests, a complementary way of attributing-describing an object's predicates. In other words, "for itself" is only a kind – phase transition – of "in itself" (pace Sartre).Descartes’ mistake: the subject isn’t as much a different substance than the object, as it is differently conditioned than an object.
(2020)
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/539399 -
US Election 2024 (All general discussion)Maybe that explains why non-MAGA cultists voted for The Clown but does not explain why about 7 million Democratic voters who had voted for Biden in 2020 did not vote for Harris (or The Clown) this year.
Maybe. :smirk:Or... maybe I'm full of shit and we are all fucked. — Fooloso4
180 Proof
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