You're welcome. I'm Sydney born and bred although now live about 90 minutes west in the picturesque Blue Mountains. Anyway, it was a salutary reminder of my probably rose-coloured attitude to Schop, he was an old curmudgeon in some ways. Still, a genius in my book, and worth the effort of reading.

I'm going to comment in this thread because the Trump thread has it's own dedicated MAGA troll.

So, two utterly and profoundly worrying developments.

The first is that Elon Musk and his troupe have now been granted access privileges to the Treasury system that disburses ALL US Government payments to every individual and organisation (NYT Gift Link).

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent gave representatives of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency access to the federal payment system late on Friday, according to five people familiar with the change, handing Elon Musk and the team he is leading a powerful tool to monitor and potentially limit government spending.

The new authority follows a standoff this week with a top Treasury official who had resisted allowing Mr. Musk’s lieutenants into the department’s payment system, which sends out money on behalf of the entire federal government. The official, a career civil servant named David Lebryk, was put on leave and then suddenly retired on Friday after the dispute, according to people familiar with his exit.

The system could give the Trump administration another mechanism to attempt to unilaterally restrict disbursement of money approved for specific purposes by Congress, a push that has faced legal roadblocks.

Mr. Musk, who has been given wide latitude by President Trump to find ways to slash government spending, has recently fixated on Treasury’s payment processes, criticizing the department in a social media post on Saturday for not rejecting more payments as fraudulent or improper.

This is a guy who has never held an elected office. He's putting his lieutenants into Government buildings and scrutinising all the outgoing funds. (Incidentally there's also pretty strong evidence that it was Musk that was behind the bulk email offering severance payments to practically the entire Federal beauracracy.)

The second development is Trump's demands for a list of all the FBI agents that worked on the Jan 6th insurrection and stolen documents cases. It seems many hundreds or even thousands of individuals could be fired or demoted for doing their jobs, following the exoneration pardoning of hundreds of insurrectionist police-bashers.

//update// I now read that the DOGE stooges only have read-only access to the disbursements system, which is not quite as Dr Strangelove as the initial story. But still….//

3.4 Holding a True Thought I spent quite a bit of time on this section, partly because it seems so repetitive and I am becoming a bit exasperrated by the repetive nature of the arguments.

Rödl acknowledges that many resist the idea that we are conscious of our own judgments only through second-order judgments. However, he points out that rejecting second-order judgement while still maintaining the force-content distinction is incoherent. The two positions are intimately linked: if judgment is structured into force (assent) and content (the thought), then self-awareness of judgment must be a separate act— meaning it entails second-order judgement, and that, If we reject second-order, we must also reject the force-content distinction.

If we accept the force-content distinction, then self-awareness of judgment is always a second-order act, which means the first-order judgment itself lacks inherent validity. This renders judgment passive or “dead,” lacking logical traction—it is just an attitude toward a thought rather than an act of understanding. (It means we have 'no dog in the fight' as the saying has it.)

Rödl reconstructs how the force-content distinction conceptualizes judgment: judging means assigning the value true to a thought. This is separate from thinking that it is correct to judge it is true, which is treated as a distinct second-order judgment. However, Rödl notes that recognizing that "it is right to hold p true if and only if p is true" already blurs this distinction because the act of judging and the act of thinking its correctness are intertwined.

Someone who possesses the concept of judgment can expand a judgment by adding, "and so it is right to assent to p." However, Rödl argues that this is only a superficial return to judgment—it does not reintegrate the act of judging with its validity but merely layers a second thought on top of it. The structure remains bifurcated.

Rödl then presents a scenario where someone affirms both p and ¬p, while also knowing that one must be false. This awareness does not necessarily mean they recognize that they themselves are making a contradictory judgment. The logic of the situation is understood, but it is not integrated into self-conscious awareness of one’s own act of judgment.

Where someone holds contradictory judgments:
*She judges that p is true.
*She judges that ¬p (not-p) is true.
*She also holds the meta-level belief that "it is correct to hold a thought true if and only if it is true."

From this, she can logically infer that someone (which might include her!) must be making an error.

At first glance, this seems unproblematic—she recognizes that something must be wrong with holding both p and ¬p as true. However, Rödl points out that if we separate force (the act of judging) from content (the thought being judged), nothing necessitates that she is aware that she herself is the one making the contradictory judgments.

This is the key flaw: if judgment is treated merely as assigning truth values to thoughts, rather than as an inherently self-conscious act (e.g. she knows she is thinking p), then contradictions can be recognized in an abstract way but without self-awareness. She can see that someone is in error, but there’s no necessity that she realizes she herself is the one making the mistake.

In other words, if the force-content distinction were correct, then logical contradiction would not necessarily lead to self-awareness of error, because judgment would not be inherently self-conscious.

Now, Rödl shifts the focus to inference. Suppose someone judges:

*A is true.
*B is true.
*She knows that if A and B are true, then C must be true.

Based on this, she judges that C is true.

So far, everything seems fine: she makes a logical inference. However, Rödl points out a crucial gap: nothing in this description implies that she is aware of having inferred C from A and B:

We cannot say that she knows that she holds a given thought true because judging something is understanding oneself to judge it. For then assigning the value true to a thought would be thinking it valid to assign this value to that thought. The act of holding true a content would be inside that content and the distinction of force and content would collapse. — p47

The problem, again, stems from treating judgment as merely assigning truth values to thoughts. If judgment were just about saying “A is true” and “B is true,” and then mechanically following a rule to conclude “C is true,” then there is no necessary awareness that she has performed an inference. In other words, she might have judged correctly but without knowing why she holds C true.

At this point, I was reminded of John Searle’s ‘Chinese Room’ argument. As is well-known, this thought-experiment is meant to challenge the idea that syntactic processing (mere symbol manipulation) is sufficient for understanding. Rödl’s critique of the force-content distinction exposes a similar issue: if judgment is just assigning truth values (a kind of syntactic operation), then the person making the judgment could go through all the correct logical steps without actually understanding what they mean—just like Searle’s man in the Chinese Room follows rules for manipulating Chinese symbols without understanding Chinese.

In both cases, the key problem is lack of intrinsic self-consciousness:

* The man in the Chinese Room manipulates symbols but does not understand them.
* The thinker who assigns truth values to thoughts (under the force-content distinction) can make inferences or recognize contradictions but does not necessarily recognize themselves as making these judgments.

Rödl’s position could be seen as a deep challenge to the very idea that cognition (or at least judgment) could ever be modeled in purely mechanistic, syntactic terms. Just as Searle insists that syntax is not sufficient for semantics (understanding), Rödl insists that judgment is not just assigning truth values but is an act of self-conscious understanding.

That's all for now.

But unlike animals, we don't just respond to them when our immediate drives make them salient. We actively pick them up for purpose of practical or theoretical reasoning, which is possible thanks to our conceptual skills being rationally articulated. — Pierre-Normand

I recall you mentioned Eric Marcus, 'Rational Causation', who writes extensively on this theme. Could you perhaps say a little about him in this context?

So Rodl is just telling us "what anyone always already knows." — Leontiskos

Perhaps it's matter of recollection ;-)

On some metaphysical postulate about some blind drive the universe follows (as well as us), that's further steps more advanced than experiencing or "willing" (in the common usage of the term). — Manuel

That’s not something I postulate, and something that I question in Schopenhauer; I’m much more drawn to the ‘idea’ aspect of his philosophy, than the ‘world as will’ aspect, which I'm frankly sceptical of. (Actually, coming to think of it, I much prefer the Hegelian geist, but never mind.)

Incidentally I went to an open-air social gathering yesterday, a out-door ‘Philosophical Symposium’, the subject of which was 'The Suffering of the World: Schopenhauer's Christian Buddhism.' I hadn't attended before - it was held in a park near Sydney Harbour, convened by an informal group organised by the main speaker (picture below under the Peroni sign.)



I felt the actual lecture concentrated too much on the familiar 'Schopenhauer as pessimist' meme, and not at all on the idealist side of his philosophy, but never mind, it was enjoyable to sit around a table and talk about philosophy with actual people. :wink:

Says who?

Well, if we don't know what it is, how can we say that it is? — Manuel

On the same grounds as Descartes’ ‘cogito ergo sum’: even if you suffered complete amnesia and forgot your identity, you would be aware of your own being. That’s the point about *any* being: on some level it is aware of its distinction from what is other to it. It knows that it is.

We can't step outside what we see to verify whatever it is we see. — Manuel

Buddhists would say that our grasp of reality is inversely proportional to our degree of attachment. But that belongs to another thread (or forum).

"But on this very account, this I is not intimate with itself through and through, does not shine through so to speak, but is opaque, and therefore remains a riddle to itself." ~ Schopenhauer — Manuel

Agree, but the awareness of will is not an appearance. We may not know what it is, but that it is, we can have no doubt.

But we do reach better approximations. And that's what we continue to do. — Manuel

But the uncertainty principle shows that there’s a limit to how exact we can be.

Crikey pointes out that Dutton now has two ministers responsible for reducing government waste... — Banno

that'd be right. Some other imaginary bogeyman for him to winge about. Everyone knows that whenever the Tories cut the public service, they then open the purse to thousands of overpaid consultants from the big end of town, who report to their shareholders, not to the electorate.

Yes, science is metaphysics - in large part, not entirely - because they try to tell us what that nature is. — Manuel

Not necessarily what it is but how it appears - and it's an important distinction.

Neils Bohr: “Physics is not about how the world is, it is about what we can say about the world”.

Werner Heisenberg: “What we observe is not nature herself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.”

In any case, we do not - and cannot - go beyond appearance. — Manuel

I'd be careful there, it's a big statement!

:pray:

I’ve been thinking about a way to express Berkeley’s esse est percipi without the theological commitment to an all-seeing God or even the (Brahman-like) cosmic intelligence of Kastrup’s Mind at Large. A philosophically neutral alternative is simply to say that what is real, is real for a mind—or even just for 'the observer'. For those who are able to hold to a theistic interpretation, then the Divine Intellect will fulfill that role, but that isn’t strictly necessary for the paradigm to make sense.

If we then ask how to define this mind, the answer is that it cannot be defined in objective terms—because it is not an object. Mind does not appear to us as a phenomenon, but appears as the observer. It is the first-person to whom all experience occurs, meaning that it is never something we can stand outside of and conceptualize as we do with other objects (on any scale). As the old Hindu saying has it, to do so is like the hand trying to grasp itself, or the eye trying to see itself. This is why materialists like Dennett, recognizing that mind cannot be an objective entity, attempt to eliminate it altogether rather than acknowledge its unique status, which undermines their core tenet of the supremacy of objectivity.

This brings us back to Berkeley’s critique of materialism, the assumption that only observed phenomena—the measurable and quantifiable—is real. Because mind itself is never an observed phenomenon, the materialist concludes that mind must be either an illusion or an emergent property of physical processes. This, however, is an assumption, not a conclusion¹. If anything, the inverse is true: the very concept of an objective, external reality depends on the presence of an observer for whom reality appears in the first place.

This position doesn’t entail a theistic framework—it’s simply the recognition that experience always occurs for a mind, hence the indispensability of the subject. Whether one frames this in terms of Berkeley’s God, Kastrup’s ‘Mind at Large,’ or Husserl’s transcendental subject, or even contemporary enactivist approaches to cognition, the underlying point remains the same: the world appears only as structured within awareness or consciousness, within which which the subject of experience is an ineliminable pole.

----

1. 'The world is not conclusion/a species stands beyond/invisible as music/but positive as sound' ~ Emily Dickinson.

existence simpliciter — Count Timothy von Icarus

An oxymoron.

One of the outlinks in the Post story:

A Milwaukee TV weather forecaster has been dropped by her station one day after she criticized Elon Musk on social media for his straight-arm gesture that many have likened to a Nazi salute.

Staffers at WDJT-TV (Channel 58) were alerted by email on Wednesday that meteorologist Sam Kuffel had left the station. Her biography and picture had been removed from Channel 58 website by Wednesday afternoon.

"Meteorologist Sam Kuffel is no longer employed at CBS58," said the staff memo from news director Jessie Garcia that was obtained by the Journal Sentinel. "A search for a replacement is underway." — Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Don’t forget the Supreme Court ruling giving Presidents absolute immunity for official acts. And that he’s had two major felony charges tossed by getting elected. That he thinks Justice is out to get him. You think that’s the profile of someone afraid of the law? (There's a venerable American colloquialism, 'scofflaw', which describes Trump perfectly.)

Meanwhile, must-read WaPo article on MAGA censorship of free expression under the banner of 'protecting free speech' (perfect Orwellian doublespeak).

On Day 1, President Donald Trump signed an executive order titled “Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship.” This might have sounded like banal lip service, reaffirming commitment to the First Amendment. In reality, it was the start of an Orwellian effort to root out wrongthink from government ranks and the private sector.

The first kind of speech to be shushed was scientific speech.

Last week, the administration ordered a blackout on public communications from government health agencies — in the middle of flu season and a global zoonotic outbreak. For the first time since 1952, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention withheld its weekly report on morbidity and mortality data updates.

The blocked issue was slated to contain two important new studies about bird flu transmission, KFF reports. The move echoed Trump’s data-suppression approach to covid-19. (“If we stopped testing right now,” he said in June 2020, “we’d have very few cases, if any.”)

Other federal departments, such as the Energy Department, were also ordered to cease public communications unless they had explicit approval of the acting secretary, according to memos shared with the Post. Some agencies have been blocked from sharing data even within the government. Others have canceled previously approved data access or other exchanges with outside researchers.

In one case, a University of North Carolina legal scholar was told his scheduled talk at a U.S. attorney’s office was canceled. The topic of the event: complicity of German lawyers in the creation of the Nazi state. You can’t make these things up. — A new era of government censorship has dawned

No need to make it up. You can watch it happening.

Don't scientists subscribe to a massive metaphysical commitment, that reality can be understood? — Tom Storm

The scientific method relies heavily on limiting the kinds of questions it tackles to those that can be meaningfully addressed within a defined scope. Consider for example the laws of motion and Galileo's definitions of physics in terms of the measurable attributes of bodies. Galileo made revolutionary discoveries in the understanding of motion, including the concept of inertia (that objects in motion tend to stay in motion unless acted upon by a force).  Galileo emphasized observation and experimentation, laying the groundwork for the scientific method. Newton took these ideas further and formalized them into his three laws of motion, which are fundamental to classical mechanics, meticulously following Galileo's method in collecting data and formulating theories based on evidence. This is why they are considered two foundational figures in modern science. But note that this already relies on some fundamental assumptions and axioms, notably idealisation and abstraction. The practice of physics assume ideal forms, frictionless planes, dimensionless points, and bodies with precisely measurable attributes and behaviours. On the one hand, this proves incredibly powerful in control and prediction within its domain, which is universal in principle, but on the other, it is limited in practice by the fact that the real world does not actually comprise ideal forms and measurable forces, although this method also enables fantastically high levels of approximation. And of course there's no question of its power - you're literally looking at its results!

But notice that among what this excludes is - the subject! There is no conceptual space in all of this for the actual scientist. Which in some sense is what Bishop Berkeley is attempting to restore. He's saying something like, look, unless this is real for someone, then what kind of reality does it have? Phenomenology was to bring all of this out and make it explicit, but the germ of the idea is there in Berkeley (and Descartes for that matter, who is often credited as the forefather of phenomenology.)

The desire to know the answers to ultimate metaphysical questions like “Who am I?”, “What is reality?”, and “What is the mind?” has been haunting me throughout my life. To me, it surpasses other common aspects of a utility function. I cannot say much about the reason for that, as the curiosity seems natural and inherent to me, and precise attribution does not seem possible. I do feel bored and even disgusted by the fact that many human behaviors, including mine, are often driven by flawed/trivial motives, such as selfishness, the sense of superiority, and so on, from a very early age.

From my understanding, current philosophy and science cannot adequately explain these questions. — LaymanThinker

Might that be because of the materialist underpinnings of current philosophy and science? After all, according to its populist advocates, h.sapiens is simply another species, albeit a very clever one, but driven by the same basic instincts as everything else in the natural world, to survive and reproduce. The origin of life is a kind of biochemical fluke, maybe even a one-off, happening in a vast, indifferent universe which neither knows nor cares about humanity. Any conception of reason is a human invention and //apart from its instrumental value// a mere vanity.

If one’s life goal is to understand these ultimate questions and their solutions, should they first focus on longevity in order to wait for humanity to develop the necessary technology, philosophy, or language? — LaymanThinker

Like waiting for Godot. If we don't understand the question, then how what kind of answer can we expect? How can artificial intelligence be expected to answer a question which real intelligence can only dimly pose?

This also means that the most dire fears about Trump aren't realistic. — ssu

Hope you're right. But he could do a lot less than the most dire, and still be dire. Consider what is within his power, a misjudgement in an international economic or military crisis could be *extremely* dire.

I guess that is called self-loathing then. — ssu

He hates Government for many reasons, but one is definitely because of the prosecutions that were launched against him between his terms. He just sacked a whole bunch of prosecutors from DoJ because of their association with those cases, plus he's just offered redundancies to practically the entire Federal workforce. His loathing of the deep state is well-documented, but it turns out that the deep state turns out to be much of the federal beauracracy. He wants to turn the Government into a subsidiary of Trump Inc, and at the moment, he's not getting a lot of pushback. Congress is completely supine. They're terrified of crossing him.

:rofl: :up:

I think Schop was a major influence wasn’t he? (Although I generally shy away from discussion of Neitszche.)

Very interesting question!

Again I'm impressed with Schopenhauer's attitude (although recognizing the thread is about Berkeley).

Schopenhauer sees the body as the one phenomenon we know from both the first-person (inside) and third-person (external) perspectives. Unlike other objects, which are only known to us as representations, our body is directly felt as Will. Accordingly, bodily actions are not caused by will in a mechanistic sense; rather, they manifest the will. When I move my arm, it is not that my will causes the movement—it is the movement. In this respect the body provides an analogy for understanding the nature of a larger reality: things appear as representations, but in their essence, they are Will.

That is similar to how analytical idealist Bernardo Kastrup puts it:

If you are sad – very sad inside, to the point of despair – and you look at yourself in the mirror, you may be crying. So you will see tears flowing down your face and contorted muscles, but not for a moment would you think that those tears and contorted muscles are the whole story. You know that behind those tears, there is the thing in itself – the real thing – which is your sadness. So the tears and the muscles are the extrinsic appearance, the representation of an inner reality. — Mind over Matter

(A general point to note: within the premodern metaphysical vision, particularly in Neoplatonism and Christian theology, being was understood as a form of plenitude—what the ancients called the Pleroma, the 'fullness of being'. From this perspective, being is not a neutral or arbitrary descriptor, but an expression of fullness, goodness, and actuality, compared to which non-existence or non-being is a privation or deficiency. The ontological argument, then, is not simply about correct use of language but is grounded in this intuition of the inherent meaning of Being.

Also worth noting that for the medievals, arguments for God’s existence were devotional as much as polemical —they were edifying ideas intended to elevate the mind toward the Divine. The ontological argument, in this context, is not merely a logical proof but an intellectual prayer, grounded in the awareness of the fullness of being (Pleroma) as identical with the absolute Good.)

The first of the Trump Internment Camps for undesireables is on the drawing board.

President Trump said he is signing an executive order on Wednesday to prepare a massive facility at Guantánamo Bay to be used to house deported migrants. The order will direct the Department of Defense and Department of Homeland Security to prepare a 30,000-person migrant facility at Guantánamo Bay, a facility in Cuba that has been used to house military prisoners, including several involved in the 9/11 attacks.

Meanwhile, the 'funding freeze fiasco' is an example of the always spectacular Trumpian ham-fistedness. After practically paralyzing the entire Federal Government, Trump says, ooops, better not do that. But no doubt he'll keep trying. He hates Government, and he's in an ideal place to disable it.

I’m sorry, but “opening of the first eye” is absurd, if such is meant even remotely literal. To reconcile the absurdity, we are forced to admit the metaphor merely represents some arbitrary initial impact on a fully developed rational intelligence. — Mww

It is common knowledge that in the cosmic scheme, h.sapiens has only existed for the merest sliver of time, and mammals and higher animals generally relatively recent arrivals. That is a matter of temporal sequence, but again the observing mind provides the framework within which that is intelligible. And as I've brought Schopenhauer in, I'll double down:

Since all imaginable characteristics of objects depend on the modes in which they are apprehended by perceiving subjects, then without at least tacitly assumed presuppositions relating to the former (subject) no sense can be given to terms purporting to denote the latter (object). In short, it is impossible to talk about material objects at all, and therefore even so much as to assert their existence, without the use of words the conditions of whose intelligibility derive from the experience of perceiving subjects. — Bryan Magee, Schopenhauer's Philosophy

So, while it is an empirical fact that universe pre-existed conscious beings, the way in which it exists outside of, or before, conscious beings is unknowable as a matter of principle, as the knowledge we have of it, which is considerable, is still held within that intellectual framework. That is why the great Kant could say that one could be both an empirical realist AND transcendental idealist and see no contradiction between them.

Isn't this where the colloquial "go kick rocks" comes from? — DifferentiatingEgg

No, it comes from the Samuel Johnson anecdote, which is described in the OP.

I believe the shift away from Aristotelianism, in the way that "matter" is conceived, is derived from the physicists. — Metaphysician Undercover

Plainly, the death knell for Aristotelianism was the advent of Galilean science and the collapse of the 'medieval synthesis.' And Descartes and all the early moderns took great pains to differentiate themselves from 'the schoolmen', on the not unreasonable grounds that it had become stultifyingly dogmatic. (Actually I still remember an anecdote from the very first lecture in philosophy I attended, by Alan Chalmers, author of What is this Thing called Science? He related the story of group of monks who fell into an argument about how many teeth horses had. They all scurried off to the library, but alas, when they reconvened, they reported that as this fact wasn't in Aristotle, then it couldn't be known. When one fellow suggested going and actually looking in a horses mouth, he was ridiculed.)

Announcing it publicly served no public interest, — Relativist

:rofl: Since when are Trump’s activities ever in response to ‘the public interest’? He’s driven wholly and solely by what Buddhists call ‘the three poisons’: hatred, greed and delusion.

physicists have not been deterred from subtitling their books things like: "the quest for the ultimate nature of reality," or "what is real?" etc. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I have a number of such books, although they're by science writers rather than physicists (Manjit Kumar, David Lindley, Adam Becker.) But the fact that it's still a question is rather in Berkeley's favour, don't you think?

The quote you provided seems to agree with me. Berkeley was criticizing the 'new' conception of matter. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yes, I'll concede that, but there's nothing in Berkeley's philosophy that corresponds with the 'morphe' of Aristotle's hylomorphism. But you're correct in saying that he is targetting the conception of matter held by the other early modern philosophers.

While it's true that for Aristotle "matter is what stays the same," when there is change, the "matter" and "substance" of Berkeley's era had changed dramatically from their ancient or medieval usages.
— Count Timothy von Icarus

I do not agree. Berkeley takes "matter" in very much the way of Aristotle. That's how he manages to conceive of substance without matter. — Metaphysician Undercover

I agree with @Count Timothy von Icarus. As I put it in an earlier post:

In essence, Berkeley’s rejection of material substance is a critique of the early modern philosophers (specifically Descartes and Locke) who inherited and transformed Aristotelian metaphysics into the notion of a "material substratum." For Locke, material substance was posited as the "unknown support" underlying sensible qualities, but something inherently beyond perception, and of which we only receive impressions (the basis of Locke's representative realism). For Descartes, matter was res extensa, entirely lacking in intelligence and possessing only spatial extension, all of the functions of intelligence residing in res cogitans, the so-called 'thinking substance'. — Wayfarer

Note the 'and transformed'. Berkeley was very much at odds with Aristotelian universals, which he rejected as 'abstract ideas'.

What I'm trying to say here is that the "appearance of solidity", and the sensation of weight, and the visual image of a rock, are all mental functions. If you see a gray mass, and you believe it to be solid & massive, you will refrain from kicking it. Unless, of course, you are trying to demonstrate that something is there "that is not solely mental". You know from personal experience that your mind/body requires a door in order to "pass through a wall". — Gnomon

Eddington's Two Tables

3.3 Second Order Judgements.

Rödl starts this section by examining the idea that when we judge "things are so," additional reflection on the judgment’s validity (e.g., "it is right to judge that things are so") is a second-order act—a separate judgment added to the first-order judgment. But this again relies on the force-content distinction: that the act of affirming a judgment (its "force") is separable from the content of the judgment.

If accept that the thought of validity is a separate, second-order judgment, then the first-order judgment ("things are so") becomes unmoored from any inherent awareness of its own validity. In this case, nothing within the act of first-order judgment prevents it from being conjoined with its contrary (e.g., simultaneously judging "things are so" and "things are not so").

Suppose we add a second-order judgment, such as "it is wrong to judge that things are not so." Rödl argues that this second-order judgment itself would require its own validity judgment (a third-order judgment) to avoid contradiction.

The problem cascades: each judgment would require a higher-order judgment to affirm its validity, creating an infinite regress or an endless chain of 'second guessing'.

Rödl shows that treating the validity of a judgement as a separate, reflective act is basically incoherent. If the recognition of validity isn’t assumed in the original judgment, there’s no way to prevent judgments from contradicting each other. ('I thought I thought that, but did I'?)

….on the one hand, the existence of the whole world necessarily dependent upon the first conscious being….

Each conscious being indeed maintains the form, the condition, of its world in accordance with its effects, but each conscious being isn’t his own world’s existential causality. — Mww

Isn't it interesting, though, that with David Hume and the advent of modern philosophy, the whole concept of natural causation is thrown into question. I recall Bertrand Russell saying in the History of Western Philosophy that Hume's scepticism would even cast science itself into doubt, had not Kant 'slipped a plank' under it. He was referring to Kant's 'answer to Hume', whereby Kant resurrected causal relations by showing that they are among the necessary conditions of reason.

I recall an exchange some years ago between Richard Dawkins and the now deceased Bishop George Pell about evolution and creation, the transcript of which was kept online by the Australian Broadcasting Commission:

GEORGE PELL: Well, what is the reason that science gives why we're here? Science tells us how things happen, science tells us nothing about why there was the big bang. Why there is a transition from inanimate matter to living matter. Science is silent on we could solve most of the questions in science and it would leave all the problems of life almost completely untouched. Why be good?

RICHARD DAWKINS: Why be good is a separate question, which I also came to. Why we exist, you're playing with the word "why" there. Science is working on the problem of the antecedent factors that lead to our existence. Now, "why" in any further sense than that, why in the sense of purpose is, in my opinion, not a meaningful question. You cannot ask a question like "Why down mountains exist?" as though mountains have some kind of purpose. What you can say is what are the causal factors that lead to the existence of mountains and the same with life and the same with the universe. Now, science, over the centuries, has gradually pieced together answers to those questions: "why" in that sense.

Dawkins unwittingly expresses the way in which his type of scientific materialism is irrational, as it has no concept of causation beyond the material. There is no reason for anything existing, only a kind of forensic reconstruction of prior temporal events.

In that passage Schopenhauer makes explicit what is implicit in Kant: causation is not an inherent property of the objective domain, but a necessary condition of how the mind structures experience. The logical relations and causal connections we discern in the world are only possible because the world is idea—a representation shaped by the mind. For the empiricists, this connection between causation and logic is severed, leaving causation as little more than a psychological habit without grounding. Schopenhauer restores this connection by showing that causation exists because the world exists as idea.

Modern thought generally assumes that temporal priority subsumes causal or explanatory priority, but this is far from self-evident. As Schopenhauer argues, time and causality are structures in consciousness, not independent realities. To conflate what comes first in time with what is most fundamental in being is to mistake the descriptive for the ontological. For instance, while the Big Bang may precede the universe temporally, it does not answer the ontological question of why there is something rather than nothing. Similarly, while neural activity may precede consciousness in time, it does not explain the existence of consciousness, which is the very framework through which we understand causation.

This is exactly what Schopenhauer is saying: 'The objective world, the world as idea, is not the only side of the world, but merely its outward side; and it has an entirely different side—the side of its inmost nature—its kernel—the thing-in-itself… But the world as idea… only appears with the opening of the first eye.'

The ever-astonishing guitar artistry of Kent Nishimura

So it seems to me this paper missed it's target by fifty years or so — Banno

The relentless grind of progress, eh. Philosophical ideas certainly have short use-by dates in our day and age.

So am I right in thinking that for you idealism consists more of our cognitive apparatus making order our of a type of chaos (but there is some sort of "noumena" to begin with)? — Tom Storm

I think I'll defer again to Schopenhauer. While he came along much later than Berkeley, his insight ‘no object without a subject’ encapsulates a key idealist critique of materialism. Schopenhauer’s analysis deepens Berkeley’s argument by revealing how materialism presupposes the subject’s forms of knowledge—time, space, and causality—without acknowledging their dependence on the subject. This convergence between their critiques underscores the enduring relevance of idealism in challenging naive realism and materialism, which is, as Schopenhauer often insists, 'the philosophy of the subject who forgets herself'.

"I answer, if by Nature is meant only the visible series of effects or sensations imprinted on our minds, according to certain fixed and general laws, then it is plain that Nature, taken in this sense, cannot produce anything at all" ~ Berkeley — Mww

I can't help be reminded of:

At the basis of the whole modern view of the world lies the illusion that the so-called laws of nature are the explanations of natural phenomena. — TLP 6.371

Science let it be known humans could have things, could do things, entirely on their own, or at least enough on their own to call into question isolated external causality of the Berkeley-ian “un-constructed” spirit type. — Mww

Of course. But I'm of the view that it was this emerging modern view of the universe that the good Bishop wished to oppose. That the reason idealism as school of thought begins to appear in this time, is because of the rejection of scholastic realism, which held that particulars did not posses their own inherent or intrinsic reality, as scholastic realism held that the being of particulars was grounded in their intelligible form. Whereas the emerging forms of nominalism held that particulars are real 'in their own right', so to speak. This has had many consequences, most of which we're not aware of, as they are formative in modern culture.

Did Berkeley in the 18th century have any empirical evidence upon which to base his foresight of the "modern subatomic physics" view of Matter? Or was his Idealism a> just intuition or b> expansion on Plato's metaphysics? — Gnomon

It's important to get what Berkeley is saying. Many people, even many philosophers, take him to be saying that solid objects are all 'in the mind', which is why Samuel Johnson believed that kicking a rock refuted his arguments. As I've been saying, that is based on a misunderstanding of Berkeley's contention, which was that there is no material substance apart from all of the perceived attributes of objects (size, shape, weight, solidity among them.) So he's not saying the rock doesn't exist, or is a 'mere' idea, but that what we know of it, is the sensible impressions it causes in us. As per the paragraph above on the meaning of 'substance' in Berkeley - the meaning of substance is crucial in this context. It doesn't mean 'a material with uniform properties' (a sticky substance, a waxy substance, a very hard substance.) It means something like 'a particular of of which attributes can be predicated, or in which attributes inhere'.

(The point I'm interested in, is that 'substance' was derived from the Latin translations of Aristotle's 'ousia' in his Metaphysics, and that is a form of the verb 'to be'. So it is at least arguable that what philosophers often refer to a substances, might be better rendered as 'beings' or 'subjects'. It's not entirely correct, but it conveys something important. For instance, in translations of Spinoza, we read 'God is the infinite, necessarily existing, unique substance.' What if that was given as 'subject' or 'being'? Again, not quite right, but conveying something that has been lost in translation, and which leads to the idea, mistaken in my view, that 'substance' is objectively existent as a kind of thing, no matter how ethereal. But at any rate, it is the philosophical notion of 'substance' and in particular 'corporeal substance' which is at issue.

Of course it is true that Berkeley had no conception of modern physics, although he might well have known of ancient atomism. But it is arguable that modern physics has also undermined the conception of 'corporeal substances'. It has certainly cast doubt on the conception of the mind-independence of fundamental particles, at issue in the 'Bohr-Einstein debates'.)

Berkeley held to Platonism in some ways, with the emphasis on ideas, but contra in others, as he opposed universals. Many say that is the real shortcoming of his philosophy.

The textbook account of Kant on Berkeley is that, after the first edition of Critique of Pure Reason, Kant was angry that many critics took him to be affirming Berkeley's basic thesis. Accordingly in the B edition, he included a section on the Refutation of Idealism, directed at Descartes and Berkeley. You can find an account here.

Like 'substance', I think 'idea' in philosophy means something other than the parade of thoughts, words and images that pass the mind's eye. Objects are recognised by us as kinds and types - this is where Kant comes in - and without that recognition, which is part of the process of apperception, then they would be nothing to us. Experience presents itself to us in the form of ideas. It is much more clearly enunciated by Schopenhauer, in the opening paragraph of WWI, where he recognised Berkeley's 'permanent service to philosophy', although then immediately saying 'even though the rest of his teaching should not endure'. (Talk about a back-handed compliment.)

+1 :100:

Similar territory traversed by Nagel's What is it Like to be a Bat, isn't it? Although I think I can imagine that bats, being warm-blooded mammals, have a rudimentary form of self-awareness, which I can't help but think completely absent in arachnids. But even bats aren't going to wonder about what it would be like to be .... That is an idea that to our knowledge only humans can entertain.

Davidson would say that by the time I've verified that spiders actually have experiences different from my own, I will have destroyed scheme-content duality. — frank

Ever seen The Fly?

IMO, the more appropriate criticism of Berkeley is that his philosophy is shallow — Count Timothy von Icarus

Agree. That's why I described him as a naive idealist, although a bit tongue-in-cheek. But his commitment to nominalism and rejection of universals undermines many other aspects of his philosophy. (I read somewhere that C S Peirce wrote a review of Berkeley which agreed with him in some respects but criticized his nominalism.)

Now granted, the critique of subsistent "matter" taken alone is stronger, but I feel like there are a lot of people who do this better. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Specifically, those who came along later!

reasonable. I'll try and find the time for it.