Ha! Yes, this and people like Ike Turner. — Tom Storm

legend has it that a DJ (name escapes me) starting using 'rocking and rolling' (predictably sailor's slang) in place of Rythm and Blues, which is was associated with (ahem) colored folk. (Well, it was the fifties.)

Where should I start? — Quk

Probably in the 1950's, with American radio.

Why took it thousands of years until Rock music became popular? — Quk

Had to invent the Fender amp first, and they didn't have electronics. Nor, for that matter, Levi's jeans.

(I think Beethoven was one the first famous Rock'n'Rollers.) — Quk

Roll Over Beethoven

Or even.....

Having watched Christians in palliative care (an aspect of my work) it is not unusual to find people having no confidence in God at the end, often to the surprise of relatives and friends. — Tom Storm

Ever read about A J Ayer's near death experience?

My recent experiences have slightly weakened my conviction that my genuine death, which is due fairly soon, will be the end of me, though I continue to hope that it will be. They have not weakened my conviction that there is no God.

You might prefer Heidegger's interpretation — Metaphysician Undercover

I don't prefer it, I cited it because he makes a similar point to that made in the OP, in respect of the geneology of the idea of 'substance' in the modern philosophical sense.

I've read the relevant excerpts and understand what he's saying. And don't overlook that Heidegger originally trained for the Catholic priesthood before taking up philosophy, I'm sure he was thoroughly conversant with scholastic philosophy.

When you have something useful to add, perhaps you might come back.

I do fear divine judgement. Not so much the others.

The evidence for what? For your assertion not applying to me? — Srap Tasmaner

Evidence that Thomas Nagel is 'making it up'. So I will flesh it out a bit. Now might be the place to bust out the often-quoted passage from Thomas Nagel in his essay, Evolutionary Naturalism and the Fear of Religion. The essay starts with a passage from C S Peirce, a deep meditation on science, belief, and truth, which ends:

The only end of science, as such, is to learn the lesson that the universe has to teach it. In Induction it simply surrenders itself to the force of facts. But it finds . . . that this is not enough. It is driven in desperation to call upon its inward sympathy with nature, its instinct for aid, just as we find Galileo at the dawn of modern science making his appeal to il lume naturale. . . . The value of Facts to it, lies only in this, that they belong to Nature; and nature is something great, and beautiful, and sacred, and eternal, and real,--the object of its worship and its aspiration.

The soul's deeper parts can only be reached through its surface. In this way the eternal forms, that mathematics and philosophy and the other sciences make us acquainted with will by slow percolation gradually reach the very core of one's being, and will come to influence our lives; and this they will do, not because they involve truths of merely vital importance, but because they [are] ideal and eternal verities. — C S Peirce

Nagel calls these views 'alarmingly Platonist' in that they 'maintain that the project of pure inquiry is sustained by our “inward sympathy” with nature, on which we draw in forming hypotheses that can then be tested against the facts.' He says it is alarming, because 'it is hard to know what world picture to associate it with, and difficult to avoid the suspicion that the picture will be religious, or quasi-religious. Rationalism has always had a more religious flavor than empiricism. Even without God, the idea of a natural sympathy between the deepest truths of nature and the deepest layers of the human mind, which can be exploited to allow gradual development of a truer and truer conception of reality, makes us more at home in the universe than is secularly comfortable. The thought that the relation between mind and the world is something fundamental makes many people in this day and age nervous. I believe this is one manifestation of a fear of religion which has large and often pernicious consequences for modern intellectual life.' This is the prelude to the passage in question:

In speaking of the fear of religion, I don't mean to refer to the entirely reasonable hostility toward certain established religions and religious institutions, in virtue of their objectionable moral doctrines, social policies, and political influence. Nor am I referring to the association of many religious beliefs with superstition and the acceptance of evident empirical falsehoods. I am talking about something much deeper--namely, the fear of religion itself. I speak from experience, being strongly subject to this fear myself. I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn't just that I don't believe in God and, naturally, hope that I'm right in my belief. It's that I hope there is no God! I don't want there to be a God; I don't want the universe to be like that.

My guess is that this cosmic authority problem is not a rare condition and that it is responsible for much of the scientism and reductionism of our time. One of the tendencies it supports is the ludicrous overuse of evolutionary biology to explain everything about life, including everything about the human mind. Darwin enabled modern secular culture to heave a great collective sigh of relief, by apparently providing a way to eliminate purpose, meaning, and design as fundamental features of the world. Instead they become epiphenomena, generated incidentally by a process that can be entirely explained by the operation of the non-teleological laws of physics on the material of which we and our environments are all composed. — Evolutionary Naturalism and the Fear of Religion, Thomas Nagel

That pretty well describes my overall attitude towards naturalism in philosophy as a whole. And it's important to note that Thomas Nagel professes atheism - he's by no means a religious apologist.

And the evidence for that would be.....?

i don't presume to comment on what I have not studied in depth. — Janus

Yet you presume to tell others that you know what they have or haven't read.

for Spinoza God was not an experiencing subject, not transcendent but immanent, and was the nature of nature itself, — Janus

I’d put it like this: In the Ethics (which I did study as an undergraduate) Spinoza finds lasting happiness in the intellectual love of God, which is the vision of the one infinite Substance (which could equally well be understood as Being) underlying everything and everyone. This is not the love of a subject in the personal sense, but the joyous recognition that all finite things, including our own minds, are expressions of the one infinite reality that is.

This site seems to contain a lot of strong voices advocating theism or views related to higher consciousness or transcendence — Tom Storm

I've noticed that also. It's a far cry from the milieu I encountered when I first started posting on forums (mind you the first one I joined was the now-defunct Richard Dawkins forum which as you can imagine was hysterically atheistic.) But it might also be a sign of the times - I think the new atheism is nowadays considered passé and culture is increasingly pluralistic and open to varying perspectives.

I just realized my frustration with many atheists over subjects relating God and faith: It’s either bad philosophy or bad theology that we struggle with when trying to bridge the gap between the theist and the atheist. And theology has no real place here on TPF anyway. — Fire Ologist

I mentioned in the Hotel Manager thread, that I was attempting to maintain a philosophical rather than confessional perspective (not always succesfully). Also that philosophy of religion is not quite the same as theology. I think philosophical theology has a place in philosophy provided it is not overtly evangalistic.

I concentrate on a specific issue, namely, that of the necessity of an heirarchical ontology or degrees of reality. Which is a fancy way of saying that there is a real dimension of value - in Platonist terms, that there is a true good, one which is neither subjective, objective or social, but transcendent of these distinctions, and that classical philosophy was grounded in the understanding that these 'levels of being' have corresponding 'levels of knowing'. Whereas the naturalist assumption is of a 'flat' ontology within which moral judgement is justified on subjective, social or pragmatic grounds.

But then, anything said about transcendent values runs into the overall antagonism towards a religious metaphysic as it is associated with religious philosophy. The deeper dynamic of that is that secular philosophy is antagostic to the possibility of the transcendent because it is fearful that it might be real after all (compare Thomas Nagel's 'fear of religion'). Better to leave the whole question sealed.

Perhaps the 'scientific revolution' has merely added footnotes to Aristotle : Atomic Number. :nerd: — Gnomon

I watched an exceedingly interesting documentary on the way that the basic outline of the Table of Elements was constructed in a single weekend by Dmitri Mendeleev.

Using this, an essence can be seen as the properties a thing must have in every possible world in which it is found. — Banno

I think all of this David Lewis 'possible worlds' and a considerable amount of modern modal metaphysics are purely verbal exercises with no traction in reality. Empty words. At least in classical metaphysics, there was something real at stake, even if we no longer believe in it.

YOU aren't talking about science, and it's account of the natural world, but I am. — Relativist

Yes, but this is a philosophy forum and that is my area of interest. Science - or natural philosophy - has a more limited scope than philosophy proper as philosophy is also concerned with ethics, epistemology and the meaning of existence. There are philosophical questions that will always remain open and learning to be open to them is part of the endeavour. Believing that the methods of science can be applied to the questions of philosophy is what is described as ‘scientism’.

You focus on the deficiencies of physicalism at accounting for the mind, and it seems you therefore dismiss physicalist metaphysics because it inadequately accounts for your area of focus. — Relativist

My area of focus is philosophy, as I’ve outlined above. The problem with physicalism is that it begins with exclusions and abstractions. Classical physics, for example, began by focusing on the movement of bodies, later expanding with the discovery of electromagnetism to include the broader domain of matter-energy.

But physics, as a method, brackets out questions of meaning. Its power lies in its ability to isolate variables and describe systems independently of context, which is why classical (pre-quantum) physics could achieve such precision. Yet among the factors it deliberately excludes is the nature of the observer—the mind that frames, measures, and interprets what is observed. That bifurcation of mind and world is central to this entire debate, and I suggest you're not grasping its implications. Physicalism can't find any mind in the world it studies, because it begins by excluding it, and then tries to patch it back in as a 'result' or 'consequence' of the mindless interactions which are its subject matter and from which it seeks to explain everything about life and mind.

This exclusion could not be sustained in quantum physics, where the so-called observer problem brought the role of measurement and observation back into focus. Since then, physics has no longer provided the idealized model of mind-independent reality that reigned from Newton to Einstein. Yet that outdated model still holds considerable sway over culture.

As to whether I advocate a metaphysics, it’s a notoriously difficult subject. The term properly belongs to the Aristotelian tradition in which it originated, which has its own lexicon and scope and in which I am not highly educated (while suspecting that there is considerably more of value in it than we nowadays allow). I say that because the word is often used dismissively, along the lines of positivism, regarding any ideas which can’t be validated scientifically ('oh, that's just metaphysics'). So it need to be used carefully. The Kantian insight into the way the mind constructs the world also fundamentally changed metaphysics. I've also been influenced by the study of Buddhism, which eschews speculative metaphysics and emphasises direct awareness of the world-constructing activities of mind ('vikalpa'). In general terms, I'm inclined to the view that the cosmos goes through periods of creation and destruction over vast aeons of time and that this is the background against which these questions are explored. I don't see anything 'anti-scientific' in that (it is similar to Penrose cyclic cosmology.)

As to whether the mind-created world 'reflects' reality, notice the implication - the mind here, internal, and the world, there, external (the 'mirror of the world' paradigm of Richard Rorty.) Obviously scientific powers have vastly expanded our grasp of the natural world - there's no contest regarding that point. But questions of meaning still elude us, all the same. One could be a world-conquering scientific technologist and entreprenuer, and yet still casually destroy programs that provide aid and sustenance to millions of the world's poor, while saying that empathy is a fundamental weakness. If philosophy is indeed the love of wisdom, then such actions certainly denote its lack.

Trump is criticizing Walmart, one of the largest (if not the largest) US retailer, for saying that tarriffs will cause prices to increase. He says they should 'eat the tarriffs', presumably meaning that they should take the percentage hit out of their gross margin, instead of raising prices.

Pardon me, but isn't 'The Republican Party' the party of business, of free enterprise, of free-wheeling capitalism? So how anti-business is it to demand that a business reduce its margins, lest it embarass the President? I mean, Trump already refuses to admit what tarriffs are - namely, a tax on imports - but demanding that businesses bleed profit so as to meet his political aims, is about as anti-business as it gets.

We can predict the Republican congress will say nothing, as usual.

Agree that Peirce's prose can be very obscure.

I do think modern science has come close to functionally defining the essences of material things in the Periodic Table of the Elements. — Gnomon

It is no coincidence that Greek science and philosophy laid the earliest foundations for the 'scientific revolution', so-called.

Look at it from the perspective of cognitive science: cognitive sciences knows that what we instintively understand as the external world is generated by the h.sapiens brain.
— Wayfarer

Agreed.

Materialism as a philosophy, fails to take this into account, or ignores it - Wayfarer

I disagree. Rather, physicalism's account of mental activity is deficient. Even it if justifies rejecting physicalism, it doesn't justify rejecting our innate basic beliefs that there is an external world that we perceive, and interact with. We naturally belief our perceptions of the world are true. What defeats these beliefs? — Relativist

You say that even if physicalism’s account of mental activity is deficient, that doesn’t defeat our basic belief in an external world that we perceive and interact with. But I think that warrants closer scrutiny, as the question at hand is the sense in which that world is 'mind-independent'.

Cognitive science shows that what we experience as 'the world' is not the world as such - as it is in itself, you might say - but a world-model generated by our perceptual and cognitive processes. So what we take to be "the external world" is already shaped through our cognitive apparatus. This suggests that our belief in the world’s externality is determined by how we are conditioned, biologically, culturally and socially, to model and interpret experience, rather than by direct perception of a mind-independent domain.

I say that part of this world-model is 'the self in the world'. We see ourselves as individual subjects in a domain of other subjects, as well as impersonal objects and forces. But that too is a model, indeed the dominant model in scientific-secular culture. But philosophy demands us to look deeper, to understand the way that even such an obvious and common-sense view is itself a construct.

One does not need to deny the empirical facts of science (indeed, the originator of this kind of philosophy, Immanuel Kant, did not) . But the philosophical question is about the nature of existence, of reality as lived - not the composition and activities of those impersonal objects and forces which science takes as the ground of its analysis. We ourselves are more than objects in it - we are subjects, agents, whose actions and decisions are of fundamental importance. And through critical self-awareness, we can come to understand that world we experience is already a mediated construction, not an unfiltered or unvarnished encounter with reality in itself. Which is what physicialism doesn’t see. Scientism is the belief that the human being can be understood solely through the perspective of the physical and chemical sciences, which is inherently 'objectifiying':

What does modern science have to say about the nature of man? There are, of course, all sorts of disagreements and divergencies in the views of individual scientists. But I think it is true to say that one view is steadily gaining ground, so that it bids fair to become established scientific doctrine. This is the view that we can give a complete account of man in purely physico-chemical terms. — D M Armstrong, The Nature of Mind

That is, as an object.

This doesn’t amount to denying the reality of a domain beyond that 'constructed' experience, but it does challenge the pre-critical realism with which it is being understood. Of course we can and do study objects and forces impersonally, and we can and do study human beings objectively, through medicine, anatomy, physiology etc, but being aware of the limitations of objectivity is part of what philosophy brings to the table.

Materialism is an account of the world that is consistent with our perceptions and with science. What is his account of the world? How does its usefulness compare? Criticizing the deficiencies of materialism is not a justification for an alternative. — Relativist

But we’re not talking about science. We’re discussing philosophy, which is crucially concerned with the human condition, with questions of meaning. Schopenhauer, as it happens, was well informed about the science of his day (as was Kant). But there’s no conflict between idealism and science: the conflict is between idealism and scientific materialism, which mistakes the empirical and contingent for a kind of philosophical absolute.

Materialism needs to to learn to look at its spectacles, not just through them.

Big CNN analysis of Musk and DOGE now that Musk has stepped back. It points out that absent Musk, DOGE has well and truly embedded itself all across Government agencies, where it acts with almost zero consultation, and often without any explanation or apology. Many tens of thousands of employees have been terminated abruptly, frozen out of their systems and escorted out of buildings with little or no explanation. 'Cutting waste and fraud' is a pretext, or a cudgel. DOGE also has over-ridden many checks and balances on data secrecy and personal privacy and aggregated vast amounts of data. (You can bet, for instance, it would be a cinch for them to trawl social media for remarks and posts hostile to Trump/Musk and use that in profiling and targetting.)

The problem is, so much of what DOGE is doing is blatantly ideological and blatantly in service of Trump and Musk's political views, hatreds and perceptions. If DOGE really was committed to equity or efficiency or improvement it might not be so utterly egregrious. As it is, it is doing irreversible damage to many programs and agencies.

He seems to be criticizing physicalism's inadequate account of thoughts and ideas Is that it? — Relativist

No. He's saying - and he says it very clearly - that the world, objects, and things, ARE ideas. Look at it from the perspective of cognitive science: cognitive sciences knows that what we instintively understand as the external world is generated by the h.sapiens brain. Materialism as a philosophy, fails to take this into account, or ignores it. Whatever presents itself to our senses 'has passed through the machinery and manufactory of the brain, and has thus come under the forms of space, time and causality, by means of which it is first presented to us as extended in space and...active in time.' Space and time likewise are foundational neurological senses which allow us to orient ourselves and move around. They are real, but they also are built on an ineliminably (can't be eliminated) subjective basis. Physicalism attributes to the objects of perception an inherent reality which they don't possess. Hence, Schopenhauer's saying 'materialism is the philosophy of the subject who forgets herself.'

Does idealism explain ANYTHING? — Relativist

it explains why physicalism is based on false premisses.

As for my stance on the first question, absent a me to observe the apple, it wouldn't exist relative to me, but it would still exist relative to the basket in which it sits. — noAxioms

So you believe!

The definition is a sort of relational version of the Eleatic principle. — noAxioms

Hey, thanks for clearing that up. :chin:

What IS ontologically fundamental? Isn't it a brute fact? Even if it is mathematical, it's a brute fact that it's mathematical, and a brute fact as to the specific mathematical system that happens to exist. — Relativist

The appeal to 'brute fact' seems convenient but is ultimately uninformative. Calling something a brute fact doesn’t explain it—it just brings inquiry to a halt. It’s a way of saying "that’s just how it is", which might end a conversation but leaves the real philosophical analysis undone.

Likewise, reducing mathematics to abstraction and logic to "nothing more than semantics" risks psychologizing both, as if they are just artifacts of human mental or linguistic activity. But this is self-defeating, since the very theories that physicalism relies on—especially in physics—are themselves mathematically formulated. If mathematics is nothing more than a human abstraction, then so are the mathematical models that physicalism depends on to describe reality. That undermines (or rather subjectivises) the very objectivity that physicalism claims.

I think the mistake that physicalism makes, is to regard objects as mind-independent. That's the whole problem in a nutshell. But atomic physics itself has seriously questioned whether such a mind-independent object will ever be found. After all, the 'standard model' is just that: a model! And where does that model exist, if not in the abstract domain that only mathematical physics can explore? The mathematical structures that describe particles and fields aren’t themselves particles or fields; they exist in an ideal or formal realm that that we can only access through symbolic reasoning.

This has long been recognized as a serious question, famously raised by Eugene Wigner as "the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences." Why should abstract mathematical structures map so well onto physical reality, if they are just inventions of human thought? The fact that they do suggests discovery, not mere invention or mental construction. There have been innummerable such discoveries in the recent history of science. ('Einstein Proved Right Again'.)

So the question isn’t just whether there is a "brute fact" about the nature of reality, but whether mathematical and logical structures themselves are ontologically prior —the sense in which they are real in a sense beyond the descriptive. That’s a much deeper and more interesting question.

to the strict epistemic idealist, I would ask: how do you explain the 'arising' of the 'empirical/experienced world' without positing an intelligible mind-independent reality (let's consider the minds here as those of sentient beings not some 'higher' Mind, which would in fact be, in a certain sense, a mind-indepedent reality, at least from the epistemic idealist point of view)? — boundless

My answer would be that the in-itself—the world as it is entirely apart from any relation to an observer—cannot be said to be non-existent. Of course something is, independently of our perception of it. But precisely insofar as it is independent of any possible relation to perception or thought, it is beyond all predication - hence, also, not really 'something'! Nothing can truthfully be said of it—not that it is, nor that it is not, for even non-existence is itself a conceptual construction.

In this sense, and somewhat in line with certain strands of Buddhist philosophy, the in-itself is neither existent nor non-existent. Any claim otherwise would overstep what can be justifiably said, since even the concept of "existing" or "not existing" already presupposes a frame of conceptual reference that cannot be meaningfully applied to what is, by definition, outside such reference. (The proper attitude is something like 'shuddup already' ;-) )

Feeling, thought, and volition (any groups under which we class psychical phenomena) are all the material of existence, and there is no other material, actual or even possible...
— Berkeley

This seems to entail abandoning our innate sense of a world external to ourselves. If one really believed this, why wouldn't one stop interacting with the world we're allegedly imagining? Why eat? Why work? ....Our perceptions entail only a reflection of reality, not reality itself. It is a perspective, but a perspective on what is actually there. — Relativist

The passage that @Boundless quoted was from F H Bradley, not George Berkeley, although as he said, they converge on a similar form of idealism. And as the thread is about the possibility of a mind-independent reality, Bradley is quite relevant. He was highly influential in his lifetime, and had considerable impact on a young Bertrand Russell. However, Russell later abandoned Bradley's 'absolute idealism' for reasons very like your own.

Bradley and Berkeley aside, I will take issue with what you say is 'actually there'. In line with what I've said above, your 'actually there' remains a conceptual construction or a sign. But physicalist philosophy overlooks this by regarding the 'testimony of sense' as indubitable. As another well-known idealist puts it:

All that is objective, extended, active — that is to say, all that is material — is regarded by materialism as affording so solid a basis for its explanation, that a reduction of everything to this can leave nothing to be desired (especially if in ultimate analysis this reduction should resolve itself into action and reaction). But ...all this is given indirectly and in the highest degree determined, and is therefore merely a relatively present object, for it has passed through the machinery and manufactory of the brain, and has thus come under the forms of space, time and causality, by means of which it is first presented to us as extended in space and...active in time. From such an indirectly given object, materialism seeks to explain what is immediately given, the idea (in which alone the object that materialism starts with exists), and finally even the will from which all those fundamental forces, that manifest themselves, under the guidance of causes, and therefore according to law, are in truth to be explained. To the assertion that thought is a modification of matter we may always, with equal right, oppose the contrary assertion that all matter is merely the modification of the knowing subject, as its idea. — Arthur Schopenhauer, World as Will and Representation

You might protest that the object is not an idea, but an actuality. But this overlooks, or rather, takes for granted, the fact that any object you refer to is identified as such, named and thereby brought into the domain of name and form, otherwise it would not constitute an object. You and I both know what it is - look, it's a hammer. It's a chair. It's a qasar. It's a neuron - but the point stands.

(By the way, the natural reaction to the claim that objects are 'ideas', is to say, 'the object is external to us, but the idea is within the mind'. However, this 'thought-construction' takes place in a context already provided by the mind - that of self-and-world, internal and external. To understand that requires a kind of meta-cognitive insight into the sense in which this too is a form of what Schopenhauer calls 'vorstellung' - a mental construct.)

Martin Heidegger says that the initial interpretation of the word <ousia> was lost in its translation to the Latin. As a consequence it was also lost in its translations to modern languages. He says that <ousia> precisely means ‘being’ - not ‘substance’, that is not some ‘thing’ or some ‘being’ that “stands” (-stance) “under” (sub-).”

In Being and Time, Heidegger says that the term “substance,” derived from the Latin translation, is already an interpretation (as much as a translation) of the Greek ousia. He emphasizes that ousia designates “presence” and that translating it merely as “substance” imposes a static and material connotation that obfuscates the dynamic and existential nuances present in the original Greek.

Furthermore, in his Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger elaborates on this point by asserting that the historical translation of ousia as “substance” has constrained philosophical inquiry. He argues that this translation has led to a conception of beings as static entities or things, thereby obscuring the more profound question of the reality of Being. Heidegger suggests that a more faithful translation of ousia would be “presence,” capturing the dynamic nature of Being rather than depicting it as a static entity.

we can't make any claim about how 'the world is' without any kind of reference to experience — boundless

That’s it. This is what I believe Kant means by the ‘in itself’, as distinct from ‘the phenomenal’. The issue is, empiricism tends to take what exists in the absence of any observer as the hallmark of what is real, but that entails an inherent contradiction.

Under idealism, perceived time is more fundamental than the time from any theory. — noAxioms

It's more the case that any theory ultimately depends on perception/measurement of time. And that shouldn't be taken as a 'falsifiable hypothesis', as it is not. The pre-theoretical experience of temporal succession and measurement is logically prior to any theoretical model of time. We could not arrive at any theory of time without already presupposing the ability to observe, record, and compare events in time.

So it's not a 'falsifiable hypothesis', because falsifiable hypotheses are propositions within a theoretical framework that make empirical predictions that could turn out to be incorrect. Rather, this is a meta-theoretical observation —a philosophical reflection on what must already be the case for any theory to arise or be tested. It is not as if one could simply 'swap out' this analysis for some alternative: it reflects the conditions of possibility for any empirical theorizing at all.

That dependency is what the 'blind spot of science' (Frank, Gleiser and Thompson) fails to recognise.

How do you map souls and spirits with what we understand scientifically? — Harry Hindu

‘Soul’ was one term used to translate the Greek ‘psuche’ which lives on as ‘psyche’. ‘Spirit’ originally comes from ‘pneuma’, meaning ‘breath’, or ‘animating principle’. Those terms belong to an earlier world of discourse, but the realities they denote are still real enough. Again, the point of the original post is that through Descartes ‘res cogitans’, ‘mind’ comes to be represented as ‘thinking thing’ or ‘thinking substance’ which I say is an incoherent concept.

Aristotle’s Fourfold Distinction
Aristotle already identifies a hierarchy of souls in De Anima:

• Inanimate (minerals, elements): no soul, mere material extension
• Nutritive Soul (plants): growth, nutrition, reproduction.
• Sensitive Soul (animals): sensation, appetite, locomotion.
• Rational Soul (humans): reason, self-reflection, intellect.

Neo-Platonism and the Great Chain of Being

Plotinus and later Christian Platonists (e.g., Pseudo-Dionysius) described the "ladder of being", with:

• Matter (lowest, formless substratum)
• Life (plants, animals)
• Soul (animals, humans)
• Intellect or Spirit (humans, divine beings)
• The One or God (absolute unity)

More from the Sachs entry on Aristotle Metaphysics:

A table, a chair, a rock, a painting– each is a this, but a living thing is a this in a special way. It is the author of its own this-ness. It appropriates from its surroundings, by eating and drinking and breathing, what it organizes into and holds together as itself. This work of self-separation from its environment is never finished but must go on without break if the living thing is to be at all.

it is clear from this that Aristotle differentiates living beings from other kinds of objects.

In fact, I believe that it is you who is applying a lens of a modern world-view perspective. In his Physics and Metaphysics, Aristotle did not provide a clear distinction between living beings and inanimate things, as you are proposing, so "being" could refer to both — Metaphysician Undercover

It’s true that Aristotle uses being (to on) in a broad sense to include many kinds of things. But in Physics and Metaphysics, he also clearly distinguishes between natural beings—which have internal principles of movement and life—and artifacts or inert things, which do not.

In Physics II.1-2, he distinguishes between things that move or change by themselves (nature) and those that depend on external causes (artifacts). Likewise, in Metaphysics Zeta, he emphasizes that form and actuality, not mere particularity, make something a substance in the fullest sense—and his best examples are living beings, not static objects.

So while Aristotle speaks of many things as “beings,” (things that are) he clearly differentiates their modes of being, giving special significance to those beings that have their own internal principles of life and motion. To deny that there are different kinds being is, in effect, to collapse ontology into mere enumeration. But if ontology means the study of being as being, then it must also account for differences in kinds of beings —for example, the difference between what merely exists as a consequence of external causes and those beings that live, move, and self-organize. That is a fundamental distinction in Aristotle.

You better mind the details. The devil's in them, or so it is said.

That would be in accordance with Aristotle's understanding of a substance as an individual entity. Spinoza understood substance more in line with the modern way as "what is fundamental". So, for Spinoza God or Nature (which he considered to be synonymous) is fundamental and individual entities are modes of that fundamental reality. If you think about the etymology 'substance' suggests 'what stands under', which interestingly is related to the etymology of 'understanding'. — Janus

As the OP suggests, the term we translate as 'substance' originally comes from the Greek ousia, a form of the Greek verb 'to be'. There was no direct Latin equivalent, so 'substantia'—literally, "what stands under"—was chosen as a translation. But this shift has led to an unfortunate equivocation: on the one hand, substance as “a material or stuff with uniform properties” which is what we usually mean by it, and on the other, substance as “a category of being”. These are very different notions, but they’ve been conflated in translation.

Imagine if substance in Spinoza had instead been translated as subject—so that the whole of nature comprises a single subject, not a single substance. While not entirely accurate, this alternative captures something important that is often lost in translation. We would then say: "God or Nature is the only true subject, and all individual subjects are but modes of this one subject." (As it happens, this kind of expression is then quite compatible with many other forms of philosophical idealism.)

By contrast, the word 'substance' tends to suggest a kind of metaphysical materialism—the idea that the world consists of one universal "stuff" that shows up in many forms. But that isn’t quite what thinkers like Spinoza or Aristotle seem to have meant. Their concern was not with material stuff, but with what it means to be—whether as one ultimate being or as multiple beings participating in, or as expressions of, a higher unity. And that is a significant difference.

Degrees of Reality

In contrast to contemporary philosophers, most 17th century philosophers held that reality comes in degrees—that some things that exist are more or less real than other things that exist. At least part of what dictates a being’s reality, according to these philosophers, is the extent to which its existence is dependent on other things: the less dependent a thing is on other things for its existence, the more real it is. Given that there are only substances and modes, and that modes depend on substances for their existence, it follows that substances are the most real constituents of reality. — 17th Century Theories of Substance, IEP

this constant tension between trying to give descriptions of what is the case and the fact that this can effectively be deflated in terms of word-use and enactive cognition, which itself is a description of what is the case, which brings us back to the beginning (in the sense that describing or giving a story about what is the case regarding how cognition works is itself word-use and enactive cognition). — Apustimelogist

It’s a zen koan!

https://aeon.co/essays/charles-sanders-peirce-was-americas-greatest-thinker

I don't think the Australian Greens are going to exercise much influence in this Parliament. I notice that Larrisa Waters said she intends to work constructively with Government, which is probably a better choice than the blatant obstructonism and grandstanding of the Greens in the previous Parliament. (I also think Hanson Young was quite happy to remain manager of business rather than leader, which is a far more taxing job.)

But unity and multiplicity are contrary, not contradictory opposites, and substance (in the sense of being—verb—"a being") sort of exists on a sliding scale, with different things being more or less truly one and discrete (self-determing), just as man can be more or less unified and directed towards the Good. Aristotle, in a very clever way, is extending Plato's psychology into a metaphysical principle here. — Count Timothy von Icarus

:100:

It's definitely idealistic leaning, but seems legit, no? Do you agree with it all? — noAxioms

Yes, I completely agree with it. It highlights the role of the mind in stitching together - synthesising - a set of otherwise disconnected facts into the unitary perception of space-time. You said you haven't read up on Kant, but he says something like this: space and time are not derived from experience (a posteriori), nor are they concepts, but rather they are the necessary, a priori conditions of experience. In other words, we cannot perceive or imagine anything without situating it in space and time. And they are not things or properties in themselves but are the conditions under which appearances are possible. Kant calls them "pure" because they are independent of any particular empirical content, and "intuitions" because they represent a singular, immediate framework for perception, not a general concept or category. Yet, also important to note that Kant is an empirical realist, i.e. he accepts that the objects of analysis are real as phenomena.

Proper time is still the same (invariant) in any interpretation, and is something meaningful to us. — noAxioms

In any interpretation, yes. But again, what it is outside any interpretation can only be inferred.

You asked a rhetorical question in the thread title - 'Does anybody support a mind-independent reailty' - from what I'm seeing, the answer would be that you do. Would that be right?

I think it's fairly confusing. — Count Timothy von Icarus

That was the point of the original post. I’m attempting to describe how the oxymoronic conception of ‘mental substance’ was arrived at.

I don't know if I would wholeheartedly endorse (C S Peirce). He is very concerned to make his thought consistent with science, which is indeed important, but 19th century science tended pretty hard towards reductionism and smallism, and sometimes his moves seem to be in line with this perhaps because of the quite dominant idea that to be "scientific" is to be reductive. He has a reductive account of essence and substantial form, or of natural kinds, but I don't think one actually needs to be reductive here and loses much if one is. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I don't think that's correct. He's an exceedingly complex writer with a vast corpus of work which is still being sorted and edited. But he (along with his contemporaries or near-contemporaries William James, Joshia Royce, Bordern Parker Bowne, et al) were all idealist in some sense - this was before the great rejection of idealism by Moore and Russell. In their day, idealism was mainstream.

I haven't yet really grasped Peirce's ideas of firstness-secondness-thirdness, nor his tripartite relation of sign, signified etc - but I think it's fair to describe it as an attempt at a fully-fledged metaphysic and one which is not at all friendly to materialism in any way shape or form. But he also spent decades as a working scientist and surveyor and was scrupulously empirical in such matters. So I don't think it's all fair to describe Peirce as reductionist.

(In many discussiones with Apokrisis, where I really first encountered Peirce, I would emphasise his idealist side, while Apo would deprecate it as due it being a 'man of his times', and lacking our more-sophisticated grasp of systems science. I never quite bought that, as I think that Peirce was a thoroughgoing idealist in his philosophical views. To this day, if you google the term 'objective idealism' C S Peirce is one of the top names on the returned list - 'matter is effette mind'.)

This is precisely why Aristotle can be plausibly claimed as an "idealist" while he might also plausibly be claimed as the father of empiricism and "objective science." It's really both and neither because the distinction makes no sense for him. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I've tried to make the point before, that for Aristotle, and also for the Scholastics, 'idealism' wasn't necessary, because they had a completely different orientation or way-of-being in the world. Theirs was a 'participatory ontology', exemplified in Aristotle's maxim 'the soul is in a way all things'. So our sense of separateness, and the idea of the universe as a vast impersonal aggregation of material objects, wasn't real for them. The world was an expression of a higher intelligence, with which the individual had an 'I-Thou' relationship (per Martin Buber) rather than the 'me-it' relationship that characterises modernity. When that started to be called into question, about the time of the Renaissance, was when idealism began to make its appearance, as a kind of corrective to the emerging modern materialism.

(That incidentally is what makes the 'analytical thomists' so interesting, in their attempts are reconciling or comparing Aquinas and Kant, although it's a pretty recondite subject.)

What I'm asking is how does either notion of substance compliment what we currently know scientifically and vice versa. — Harry Hindu

'Complement' is a good way of putting it. There are some aspects of Aristotelian philosophy that have made a comeback in current science. Not his Physics, which is completely superseded. But there are other elements of Aristotle which retain relevance, especially in philosophy of biology (ref). His intuitive understanding of the way that organisms are self-organizing and governed by an internal telos, in particular.

And also the Platonic tradition, of which Aristotle is a part, is baked into the grammar of our culture in very deep ways. This OP is about the geneology of the idea of substance, which starts off being something completely different to how it's now understood.

In the scientific context, the term substance refers to pure matter alone, consisting of only one type of atom or one type of molecule. — Harry Hindu

That's the point of the OP - that using the term 'substance' mistakenly equates 'being' with 'stuff'. And in the current scientific context, there is no real material ultimate in the sense of a material atom. Atoms are nowadays understood as excitations in fields, the primitive idea of the atom as 'indivisible particle' (that's what the word means, 'not divisible') is long dead, in the age of wave-particle duality.

Do you really call other persons and animals objects? That’s precisely my point—the term object is misleading in this context. (And as a historical note, the first instances of the term 'objective' only begin to appear in the early 17th century, well after Aristotle.)

You also mention bronze statues. But Aristotle clearly distinguishes artifacts from organisms, noting that artifacts have external causes—they are shaped by something other than themselves—whereas living beings have internal principles of form and change. That’s why Aristotle’s paradigm cases of ousia are living beings, not mere products or constructions (or objects, as such).

You say I’m applying unwarranted restrictions to Aristotle’s hylomorphism. Fair enough. But I’d suggest that you may be reading Aristotle through a modern, objectively-oriented lens, one that did not obtain in his milieu, and does not do justice to the ontological depth conveyed by his original terminology.

What an individual object actually is, is a unique peculiar form, which is proper only to itself, (the law of identity). — Metaphysician Undercover

I appreciate the clarification about particularity, but I think this risks reading Aristotle through the modern, objective point of view to which we are encultured. In the Categories and Metaphysics, Aristotle’s paradigm examples of 'substance' are not objects like stones or marbles, but beings—plants, animals, and humans. They are beings that possess their own internal principles of organization, growth, and change—what Aristotle calls form and actuality. Hence again the fact that the original term was 'ouisia'. He's asking about what beings are - not what objects are.

This suggests that Aristotle’s notion of primary substance is not bare particularity or mere “thisness” in the sense of counting objects in space-time, but the actuality of a being as the kind that it is. In that sense living beings, not material objects, are Aristotle’s typical examples of 'subjects' (rather than 'substances'!)

Thank you. I'm continuing to learn how much philosophy feeds into politics and vice versa.

Yes, I have little exposure to Adorno, save some readings from his Dialectics of the Enlightenment, which overall I found congenial. So, one question that remark brings up for me is, is this 'emancipation' to be understood primarily in political terms?

This is where Wittgenstein agrees and says it's about our practices (language games and our form of life), but Adorno says it's sociohistorical, though not reducible to sociohistorical facts. — Jamal

Isn’t a lot of this just a tacit prohibition on anything that could be considered outside the scope of natural sciences, evolutionary biology, and so on? Don’t mention anything remotely platonic. Has to be something comfortably domesticated.