My vote goes to Kant. He's generally credited for innovations that aren't his, and he was fundamentally a reactionary force against the subtler and more exciting British empiricsts. I also think many things he's celebrated for, like the Refutation of Idealism, are fundamentally confused.

I'm just being a bit histrionic for rhetorical purposes, because I think people are histrionic in the opposite direction when it comes to OLP. I don't think it was quite as innovative as you give it credit for: commonsense philosophy that tries to draw metaphysical or deflationary conclusions always rears its head. What was unique about OLP was its bizarre fixation on the English language itself. I think it's mostly a case of, if you spend your whole life reading books, you start to think everything's a word. If it had gotten more out of hand, perhaps we'd have people saying the only real discipline is lexicography.

Wittgenstein's intellectual life was utterly dominated by England. Russell was his only real influence, the rest was personal dream & mysticism (that happened to overlap with Schopenhauer). The banality of OLP, etc. is an English phenomenon through and through and found a congenial environment at Oxford.

Wittgenstein is sort of like the Last Man for me - he represents the end of an era in philosophy collapsing under its own decadence, impotence, incuriosity, complacency etc. Unfortunately emblematic of England, a country I otherwise love. I think we're still recovering from him and need to refresh our curiosity and appetite for genuine inquiry beyond facile games with the English language. I've never really accommodated him except insofar as I've reacted to him in this way: he's the hallmark of a certain banality that needs to be overcome to start thinking again.

I have a glint of optimism. Perhaps there are enough reasonably clever folk who actually see what is going on. — Banno

Are you one of them?! :O

Unfortunately not, but maybe you'll learn someday!

Then I guess you're too dumb to have this conversation.

I don't really want to play this game.

No it's quite serious actually, because I don't understand what you're seeking to say. I don't see instances of thoughts kicking stones. I only see instances of feet interacting with stones and footballs and whatever other physical object. I see thoughts on the other hand interacting only with other thoughts. Where the hell do I see thought interacting with matter? — Agustino

I'm not responding until you stop pretending to be stupid. If you actually are that stupid, then there's also no point in responding, right?

I'm still waiting for you to show me a thought kicking a physical stone. — Agustino

Please don't be dense.

Why not do it in audio?

Are a foot and a rock distinct?

What is the bridge?

Isn't this a problem for physicalists?

That's not the impression I got from reading Descartes: he emphasizes how extension and thought are distinct essences. Yet distinct things can interact. I don't find that notion incomprehensible at all, but maybe my imagination is just good or something.

Further, it's not like "I have a left hand and a right hand, they are distinct yet they interact". The mental and physical are completely distinct, while hands have much in common. — Banno

Not at all - for example, the mental and physical are both temporal. Descartes says the mind and body are far more closely intertwined than ship and captain.

Tell me TGW, can you conceive of two objects occupying the same position in space at one and the same time? No. — Agustino

Yes.

No, things which have a different nature cannot interact. — Agustino

Well, that's obviously false. Feet and stones have different natures, yet a foot can kick a stone.

Well, it is clear how two material things can interact, in fact just as clear as how two ideal things can interact — Agustino

It is not any more clear than how a material and 'ideal' thing can interact (although 'ideal' is a poor descriptor for the mental in Descartes' view).

If a basketball is made of atoms, and a a football is also made of atoms, then they can interact, if they collide, by virtue of the simple fact that they cannot share the same position in space — Agustino

OK, why can't they, and how do you know that? If you know it by experience, then we also know about physical-mental correlations and their effects on one another from experience. If you made it up as a postulate, then we can equally make up postulates about physical-mental interaction.

Dualism is fucked up precisely because it cannot account for correlation - it creates two separate realms, which aren't even correlated to begin with! — Agustino

But this is just false. Obviously the dualist thinks the two realms interact in systematic ways – hence interactionist dualism.

Just because two things are distinct doesn't mean they can't interact: if that were true, distinct physical things couldn't interact either.

I remember learning about this paradox and thinking it was kind of cool. My first response was: is there a problem? It might be that seeing a green apple does indeed provide a miniscule amount of evidence for the hypothesis that all ravens are black, but also that this miniscule evidence is provided to each raven color-hypothesis other than the green one, not allowing one to favor one over the other based on the evidence, and so making it of little help.

Who actually believes in causation, anyone? Fucking plebs.

I'm struggling to see what relevance this post has to the question.

Consider: the question of how something material and something non-material can possibly interact seems to presuppose that it is clear how two material things interact. But why can we not equally ask, how is it that two separate things in space, apart from one another, come into interaction?

If you say, because we define causality that way, then this is not good enough, for then we can just defined causality so as to include interaction between the mental and physical, seeing as we seem to have so many obvious instances of it, and you beg the question.

If you say, we don't know how, but we can observe this happening and write down generalizations as to how it does, then this is not good enough, because then we can do the same with physical and mental activity, the correlations between which are even pre-theoretically obvious and abundant.

So what is the argument? In what way is the interaction between the mental and physical mysterious, that interaction between physical objects already is not? What provision can you make for one that will not carry over to the other?

Nothing that Hume said on the issue has ever been addressed seriously, as far as I'm aware.

For that matter, neither has anything Descartes said. For all the sentiment against interactionist dualism, I've never heard a solid argument against it, and if you scan this thread, you will also not find (even the beginning of) one.

When I was little, I thought of it as 'the gray.' Kind of an understanding I guess, but disillusionment. Unlike other experiences, it only goes in one direction, and there's always more left to lose.

I mostly read modern AP of language nowadays, and whatever those philosophers' virtues, they aren't 'great.' But then the 'great' philosophers I used to read just seem sort of stupid now, I don't know. It may be getting older is making me incurious, or that only very young people can be impressed by 'big' thoughts.

Man, Pence is loving the ride.

There is no 'interaction problem.' As Hume noted, even the problem of motion of bodies in different points of space is rationally inexplicable. There is a 'motion problem' just as much as there is an 'interaction problem.'

I don't see any reason to believe (2). Also, the mind is temporal.

'Nothing' is a generalized quantifier, a function from properties to truth values, true just in case said property is true of no individual.

How sad do you have to be to think duckrabbit is insightful?

It's going to be difficult to avoid these sorts of issues given the sloppy manner in which Sellars writes. — Terrapin Station

Given that you're now literally reinterpreting what Sellars writes on the assumption he is making typos...

If the philosophers in question believe that it doesn't make sense to speak of unveridical sensations, then when we can't say that their view includes that "some of the members of 'seeing that x if F' are non-veridical." — Terrapin Station

Because as he says, there he's talking about ostensible seeings, not sensations.

Also his "It is the fact" is grammatically ambiguous to me contextually, especially re what the pronoun "it" is standing for, if anything but that's maybe not a big deal. — Terrapin Station

That's a pleonastic 'it,' it doesn't refer. It's like saying 'It was the rain that worried me,' which is the same as 'the rain worried me.' 'It' isn't referring to anything.

he makes the claim that for it to strike someone as if it makes sense to speak — Terrapin Station

...for it to strike someone (i.e., impress them) that it does not make sense...

Since this is an English lesson now, I guess the philosophical discussion is over.

Woah cowboy, that first quote isn't mine (is it?) — StreetlightX

Yeah, my bad, I misread.

And Apo isn't exactly some innocent wide eyed lamb whom I've been eviscerating; he's an arrogant nong whose basically trailed me around every other post I've made in this forum to register some antagonism or another. So I'm not exactly predisposed to show him any love. — StreetlightX

Fine, but I'm just pointing out he's your mirror image. The issues in the OP don't really matter to me, I just thought the debate about the debating style was interesting.

I think it's wrong generally to disavow traditions you're ignorant of, which you did before I brought up the topic. I'm not saying you have to study it or even pay any attention to it if you have the feeling it won't be useful to you, but spontaneously discrediting it is dishonest. I was making the point in reference to the larger point about your goals and method of debate.

I think we must be prepared to completely dismiss all terms of logic and mathematics — SX

the entire edifice of formal logic is more or less inadequate to the task — SX

(And how 'dramatic' is this language!) These are things, I claim, that you don't know and can't pronounce on. And then the larger point was about the hermeticism and dismissal you are criticizing others of, and my attempt to show you that this was common in your own posts.

If I understand correctly, the first formula expresses a contradiction, since F will always satisfy the existential. I get that you're trying to rule out F's existence by saying it doesn't satisfy the tautologous (∀x)(Fx → Fx), but as far as I can tell the result is just a sentence that can't ever be true.

Same holds for the second.

It's tricky what you mean by a property not existing: you can of course say that no individual bears the property, but that can be done in first-order. The fact that you are using the symbol F at all already commits your ontology to the property denoted by F to 'existing' in the minimal sense that it's in the domain of quantification of property-variables. If you wanted to say it didn't exist while quantifying over it, you'd have to have some alternate notion of existence, maybe expressed by an existence predicate on properties (that might return true just in case the property holds of no individual, or cannot hold of any individual).

It's the same puzzle about how to express that a certain individual doesn't exist in first-order logic. Suppose you write something like:

~(∃x)(x = a)

But that requires the individual denoted by 'a' to be in your domain, and so in the domain of quantification of individual variables. Even to say that whatever 'a' denotes doesn't exist, then, is to commit yourself to its 'existence' in this minimal (Meinongian) sense.

Surely you see the irony in dismissing someone for disregarding something that doesn't agree with a pre-fabricated POV, and then doing the same to formal logic? What does this amount to other than saying 'yes I'm ignorant, but I don't need to know, because I know enough, i.e. that it's wrong?' It sounds like someone refusing to read the Qu'ran because after all it's Satanic. There's a weird pride in ignorance seeping in here, almost as if knowing less justifies you all the more in a sweeping rejection.

And in case it wasn't clear from the above post, I think a lot of criticisms made of continentals by analytic philosophers, even leading ones, are appalling in their ignorance, and I realize that in many other ways continentals are more sophisticated than analytics: for example, the analytic tradition has never really 'gotten' the hermeneutic circle.

I am not demanding that anyone study any tradition in particular, and it's impossible to give equal time to them all. What I am demanding is that these traditions not be insulted in ignorance, and that given that one is interested in a certain narrow scope of philosophy, that others not be insulted for exercising the same prerogative and not reading Deleuze.

As for formal logic, I do regret not being more acquainted with it, if only because one ought to know one's enemy to all the better to engage it. — StreetlightX

How can you know it's your enemy if you don't know it?

I'm not really a fan of Sider or Lewis as metaphysicians myself, but Lewis' contributions to logic with his logic of counterfactuals, counterpart theory, centered worlds, etc. are not only brilliant technical innovations, but provide tools for formalizing tricky concepts in fresh ways. It may be that I'm biased toward formalism because linguistics needs formalism to survive, far more than philosophy, but to dismiss the really interesting things these guys have done with their logics on grounds of some vaguely felt dissatisfaction with what you think (without really knowing) represents a fundamental metaphysical misconception is naive.

I mean, whether you like it or not, counterfactuals, for example, have a certain logic to them, in the way they license inferences, and in struggling with that Lewis is doing something concrete with interesting formal consequences that, for all their protests, continental philosophers are not doing. This is not to say he's the continental's superior, but just that it needs admission that your 'foe' has resources you don't, and to admit that in many ways he is more sophisticated than you. The reverse might also be true, but then I think the incumbency runs both ways.

I also think drawing indiscriminately from scientific sources has a danger of tourism to it, but maybe that's a separate issue.

If his points were good, or had thought put into them, wouldn't they show some distinctive mark of his having thought about them? But literally everything he says has been said often in many other places in public, in the form of talking points of a broad political cluster.

It stands to reason that he said these things because he heard them and regurgitated them, and for no other reason.

No?

I don't think SX's fare is of little consequence per se, it's just highly hermetic and theory-/tradition-internal.

And while I can understand your desire to reject the criticism, the sentiment has little import from within the tradition, where you're least positioned to examine its validity.

Of course, we shouldn't expect specialized disciplines always to be accessible to everyone at all times. It's just a matter of how inward-looking you want your inquiry to be. I think there is a broad tension in your posts, SX, in that you object to people who deny the relevance of your highly specific tradition-internal approaches to problems to general concerns, but at the same time base a lot of your philosophical identity on a snobbery towards anyone not versed in that specific tradition. There is a lot of venom toward people who come at things from a different tradition (e.g. apokrisis) on grounds that they can't think broadly enough, but you evince that same unwillingness or inability.

And this results in your doing the same thing you despise. For example, I think your comment dismissing formal logic was embarrassing and parochial. Maybe you don't want to hear that, but that's how I read it, and I think you should study formal logic before dismissing it out of hand.

Because I make accurate observations about people like A.C. Grayling who make public fools of themselves. You should induce something about the high quality of my general opinions.

It's not possible that any critical thought went into what Grayling said, because you can hear what he said on any radio station.

Because then you would be right about things, if you listened to me and believed whatever I said.