Of course - but context is everything! What I mean by ‘context’ is that meditative awareness and samadhi are embedded in a cultural milieu which facilitates those practices and insights. That’s one point of Sangha, the association of the wise. But meditation has been a bit oversold in the West as a panacea or magic bullet.

I pursued Buddhist meditation for many years and attended several retreats, including the well-known 10-day Vipassana retreat. I learned a lot from that, and it’s an ongoing endeavour although I haven’t been able to maintain the same routine I did for many years. The ‘hindrances’ that the Buddhists mention are real, and overcoming them difficult. (See this old OP, Most Buddhists Don’t Meditate.)

So those states of spontaneous insight are real but rare. I attended services at a Pure Land sangha for some time just prior to Covid (not having another Buddhist association in the area.) I learned that according to Pure Land, meditation practices are discouraged. They are recognised as effective, but they’re said to belong to the ‘way of sages’ which is difficult (according to them, practically impossible) to bring to fruition. Instead their way is grounded in faith in the saving vows of Amida. I found this caused a kind of conflict for me, as it seemed very like the religion that I had declined to join - the interest I had in Buddhism was that it seemed to offer an alternative to mere belief. Yet, here we are again! (Although that said the core beliefs of Pure Land Buddhism and Christianity are completely different. It’s the psychodynamic of faith that is similar.)

This is all ongoing, I haven’t come to any kind of conclusion about it. There were things I learned from those years of practice and contemplation that will always stay with me.

Chinese dynastic polemics, I would say. Again I have very little fluency in these texts, better to find a Chinese speaker!

No that's definitely in the ball park! 'Axial age', as I say. That's a very useful idea in this context. It's associated with Karl Jaspers but has also been written on by Karen Armstrong. It's about the fact that around 6th-3rd centuries B.C.E. a number of prophets and sages were active, including Pythagoras, Lao Tsu, the Buddha, and others, who set the wheels in motion for what were to become the great cultural formations of India, China and the West.

How would you explain this part, specifically, to an English audience? — Arcane Sandwich

I studied comparative religion, and one of the major authors in that field is Mircea Eliade, a Romanian-American active at the University of Chicago mid-century. It takes some reading. The problem with modern Western culture is that so many of those ideas are stereotyped under the heading of religion, when they're very different from how that term is usually interpreted.

Something mysteriously formed,
Born before heaven and Earth.
In the silence and the void,
Standing alone and unchanging,
Ever present and in motion.
Perhaps it is the mother of ten thousand things.
I do not know its name
Call it Tao.
For lack of a better word, I call it great. — Lao Tzu (Laozi)

I'm always reticent when it comes to this text as it is deeply intertwined with Chinese culture and language and my knowledge of them is cursory. But I can see parallels in other Axial Age texts and concepts. The idea I'd like to call out is an expression 'the uncarved block' which is found in Taoist texts. It refers to the unconditioned, the unmade, which is also the subject of the above. There is no parallel in the English lexicon or culture. It is associated with ancient asceticism and shamanic or yogic practices of trance states, what Indian culture would call samadhi. But these are non-conceptual states, hence 'for the lack of a better word' and 'I do not know its name'. Other like sayings are 'the nameless if the mother of the ten thousand things'. Some parallels can be drawn with Plotinus' One, but with great intepretive care.

Therefore, One should not follow what is Great (Tao), one should instead follow Nature (what is not Tao). — Arcane Sandwich

But this should never be confused with modern naturalism, which has been conscientiously defined to exclude such nefarious and amorphous ideas.

So what about Wayfarer's talk about clinging "to the transitory and ephemeral as if they were lasting and satisfying"? — Astrophel

That's not an idea of my invention, it is simply my paraphrasing of Buddhist lore - it is something any Buddhist would say. I can't say I understand anything of Henry's criticism of Husserl, or indeed much of that post at all.

My very sketchy grasp of the issue of desire and suffering is more like Schopenhauer's - that will is a primordial kind of thirst, from which the seeker must be de-coupled on pain of being driven into endless rounds of becoming. The 'old wisdom school' of early Buddhism was starkly dualistic, renunciation was severe and irrevocable, and the ordinary human condition poles apart from the enlightened state, never the twain to meet. The development of Mahāyāna radically changed that approach, enlightenment or liberation was seen as implicit within the human state instead of being radically different from it. This is subject of a lot of literature, I couldn't try and summarise it here, except to say that Mahāyāna nondualism dissolved the radical otherness Nirvāṇa found in the earlier schools (this is according to Edward Conze, Buddhism its Essence and Development).

There are many points of convergence between Buddhism and phenomenology. Buddhist culture has been phenomenological from the very outset, with its emphasis on attaining insight into the psycho-physical systems which drive continued attachment (and so rebirth). Their philosophical psychology ('abhidharma') based on the five skandhas (heaps) of Form, Feeling, Perception, Mental Formations and Consciousness, and comprising a stream of momentary experiental states ('dharmas') is utterly different from anything in the Semitic religions and even in ancient Greek culture (although there has always been some back-and-forth influence.) Here is a brief Wikipedia article on Husserl's reading of and reaction to the abhidharma literature.

The influential book The Embodied Mind by Varela, Thompson and Rosch contained many reference to Buddhism and was in many ways moulded by it (notwithstanding Evan Thompson's later re-evaluation of his relationship with Buddhism in his 2020 book Why I am not a Buddhist.) But again it emphasises the confluence between the Buddhist śūnyatā and the phenomenological epochē and the primacy of skilled awareness and attention to the flux of experience.

Re Michel Henri - not sure, I’ve only read some brief articles and excerpts although he certainly seems congenial to my philosophy.

Propositions can never to removed from the existence in which they are discovered in the "first" place. — Astrophel

:100:

I think the question is whether sense of self is direct or indirect. If it were direct, then it would seem that there is nothing I would not know about myself. I would be fully transparent to myself. If it is indirect, then self-consciousness is not always present. — Leontiskos

What I am may be a mystery, but that I am can only be denied on pain of contradiction.

Philosophers chasing after propositional truth (logos) is patently absurd. — Astrophel

Thank you, although whatever brilliance is there is of course the Buddha's. But apropos that particular point, it might be of interest to note that the great sage of Mahāyāna Buddhism, Nāgārjuna, maintained always that he had no thesis of his own, and that his only purpose was to show the contradictions inherent in the theses that were proposed by others.

Rödl seems to think that we have some kind of direct access to the self; that we are transparent to ourselves; and first-person thinking exemplifies this as a qualitatively unique mode of thought. — Leontiskos

Are you familiar with a term I've only recently acquired, 'ipseity'? It means precisely 'a sense of self' or of being a subject. And indeed only living beings, so far as we know, can conceivably have that sense (leaving aside the possibility of angelic intelligences). I know that I am, in quite a different sense than I know that the things around me are - as pointed out by Descartes, of course. I can't really understand how that can be called into question. (I read once an aphorism that I can't find a source for, 'a soul is whatever can say "I am"', which struck me as extremely profound.)

Only the bearer of the hand can know if the hand hurts. — Patterner

Of course. Why this seems puzzling or obtuse to anyone beats me.

I recall you saying you read Perl's "Thinking Being," but I forget exactly what you thought about it — Count Timothy von Icarus

Very impressed with it, particularly the early chapters - the chapter on Plato is indispensable. It corrects the almost universal misconceptions around the nature of the Forms, showing that they are more like what we would today understand as intellectual principles, than the kinds of 'ghostly images' that most people seem to take them for. I'm still assimilating the remainder.

There is a sense in which Plato, Plotinus, St. Augustine, Eriugena, St. Maximus and Hegel are all "idealists," or even Aristotle, St. Thomas, and Dante, but I think they offer a path around some of the questionable conclusions of a lot of modern idealism — Count Timothy von Icarus

I said to @Leontiskos recently that it's said that Aquinas was a realist, not an idealist, but his realism is very different from today's. Why? Because the contemporary criterion of objectivity that underlies modern realism —the mind-independent object —would have been foreign to him. Aquinas' epistemology was based on assimilation, where the knower and known are united in an intellectual act:

The Aristotelian-Thomistic account... sidesteps indirect realism/phenomenalism that has plagued philosophy since Descartes. It claims that we directly know reality because we are formally one with it. Our cognitive powers are enformed by the very same forms as their objects [which are] the means by which we know extra-mental objects. We know things by receiving the forms of them in an immaterial way, and this reception is the fulfillment, not the destruction, of the knowing powers — Cognition in Aquinas

But by the time Kant arrives on the scene, the idea of the "mind-independent object of sense perception"—the modern criterion of objectivity—had taken hold, courtesy of the empiricists. Which is what Kant (and before him Bishop Berkeley, in a different way) was reacting against. I see that as the main motivation for what we now call idealism, and why we can retrospectively call Plato an idealist, even though it’s plainly an anachronism as the term itself was not devised until the early modern period.

Whereas for Aquinas', the notion of "mind-independence" in that modern sense would have seemed alien. And that's where "idealism" as the opposite of materialism originates - with the modern era and the "Cartesian divide". That phrase in the quoted passage "we directly know reality because we are formally one with it" is crucial. Notice the resonance with Hindu nondualism, although in many other respects they diverge (although nevertheless I noticed recently that one of Raimundo Pannikar's three doctorates was on a comparitive study of Aquinas and Adi Sankara.) It represents what Vervaeke calls "participatory knowing", which is very different to propositional knowledge.

They're very deep theological questions. Better to ask a theologian. I still say the idea of kenosis is key.

For Husserl, purpose is bound up with the anticipatory nature of intentional acts. — Joshs

Not what I had in mind. More a sense of purpose, not anticipatory processing. I'm not talking of scientific accuracy, either, but existential angst, which is presumably what both religion and existential philosophies seek to ameliorate.

How is "blind faith" not an adequate response to the Problem of Induction? — Arcane Sandwich

Because philosophers are concerned with 'how can we know?' And, as causal relations seem utterly fundamental to scientific principles, then the suggestion that they ought to be simply accepted on blind faith is not an acceptable response. It was the substance of Kant's famous 'answer to Hume' but that is far afield of this OP.

Right. And Rödl uses that to make a larger point in support of his overall thesis (although his analogy was not 'my hand hurts'.)

Is the problem with first and third person, or is it with putting pain into a proposition? — Banno

Both. I believe it was you who first first introduced 'my hand hurts' (here). I've provided a précis of the some of the discussuion in this post.

But it is "adequately conveyed" in the first person? — Banno

I can tell you 'my hand hurts' but I can't convey the actual feeling - which is the point! You will only know what I mean because you too know what it means to have a sore hand. ChatGPT will know what the words mean, but it will never know what it is like to have a sore hand.

Will you, ChatGPT?

No, I will never know what it is like to have a sore hand. I can analyze and convey the meaning of "my hand hurts" based on linguistic and logical structures, but I lack subjective experience and the capacity for first-person awareness, which are necessary to truly feel or know pain. This distinction underscores the unique nature of first-person experience, as discussed in your thread. — ChatGPT

The real subject of the proposition, which is pain. Pain is never experienced in the third person. :roll:

Subject of Chapter 2: Propositions>2.2 Fregean Propositions - an argument to the effect that the idea of a 'first-person proposition' is incoherent.

On the Fregean account, we cannot approach the thought we quote any closer than we do in referring to its sign. There is no such thing as disquoting this quote. And we must not say: yes there is, for she who thinks the first-person thought can disquote. For we apprehend her disquoting only in quotes. And our question is what we can make of these quotes. The Neo-Fregean “I”, or SELF, or :flower: , is the undisquotable quote, the uninterpretable sign, the enigma itself.

(It's very difficult to cherry-pick Rödl's arguments so as to convey the overall gist. The section I quoted is at the end of 2.2.)

'Undisquotable' stopped me, I had to look it up, but essentially, we can only ever refer to first-person statements, e.g. 'my hand hurts', as if in quotes - quoting what John is saying. In the Fregean framework, first-person thoughts are problematical because they involve a self-referential aspect that cannot be ‘disquoted’ or fully expressed from a third-person perspective. This means that while we can refer to, or quote, a first-person statement like “my hand hurts,” we cannot adequately convey the subjective experience it conveys in a third-person proposition. The term ‘undisquotable’ highlights the idea that first-person thoughts maintain an intrinsic self-reference that eludes complete external articulation or understanding. ('Facing up to the problem of consciousness' comes to mind!)

The more I work with this, the more I'm realizing that the idea of "accompanying" a thought can be given so many interpretations that I wonder if it's even helpful. — J

Perhaps you're over-thinking it. Rödl's point is that the truth of propositions can't be 'mind-independent' in the way that Frege's objectivism insists it must be. (I can't help but think that book you once mentioned, Bernstein's 'Beyond Objectivism and Relativism', might also be relevant to this argument.)

Is pain a suitable subject for the analysis of propositional content?
— Wayfarer

Why not?

A propositional attitude is a mental state towards a proposition (Wikipedia - Propositional attitude). I know is a mental state towards the proposition "my hand hurts". — RussellA

Because pain is intrinsically first-person in nature. John can report that 'my hand hurts' but absent any visible injury or determinable cause, this can only ever be something known to a third party such as Bob, in a different way to the subject (or not at all, in the event of no visible condition). Pp 23-24, the text discusses first-person propositions which are specific to a subject, which by nature are private and inaccessible to others. These propositions are objective in that their validity depends solely on their truth - John really does have a pain in his hand - not simply on the subject making the claim. However, their objectivity lacks the usual feature of being affirmable by other subjects. The text suggests that while only the referent of a first-person thought can affirm its content, others can only affirm correlated contents. For example, if John thinks “my hand hurts,” only he can affirm this, but Bob can affirm a related proposition like “John has cut his hand,” understanding the correlation. This framework allows private facts to be apprehended as common truths through correlated propositions. Rödl then goes on to argue against the possibility of first-person propositions as such, suggesting instead that the first-person pronoun is not a form of reference but an expression of self-consciousness. He criticizes Frege's account, which views the pronoun as a way of singling out an object (i.e. a specific person), and instead proposes that understanding the first-person pronoun requires understanding the implications of self-consciousness, which undermines the force-content distinction. Remember, that distinction suggests that thought can be objective only if it is detached from the subject who thinks it. However, first-person thought (I have pain) challenges this by showing that the act of judgment is self-conscious and cannot be isolated from what is judged.

Not necessarily - it can also lead to hermeneutics, the art of interpretation of texts, often ancient texts, including Biblical texts. Much more characteristic of European philosophy, and not something I'm knowledgable in, though always keen to learn more.

(Incidentally, I learned something interesting about Wittgenstein in this essay Wittgenstein,Tolstoy and the Folly of Logical Positivism.)

He said on the Cross: "My God, My God, Why Have You Forsaken Me?". How could He be abandoned if He and God are one? — MoK

The interpretation that makes the most sense to me, is that this is where Jesus was utterly and entirely human. He was one of us, or indeed, all of us, at that point. No faith, no hope, no consolation, utterly bereft and desolate. This is why this agonised exclamation is described in terms of kenosis, self-emptying. Remember, 'he who saves his life will lose it, and he who looses his life for My sake will be saved.' To learn more about kenosis, google it.

My favourite quote of his, "Of course it didn't happen.' — Tom Storm

'There are myths that are truer than history'.

I want to point out is that this is not a mere copy. The brain takes input spread out spatially and temporary and condenses it into a simultaneity. Features which originally belonged to different times and different places in the world are perceived at the same time and in the same space. But this isn’t all the brain does. In tying disparate events together temporally and spatially, it can also construe patterns. It can perceive these events as related to each other, meaningfully similar on some basis or other and on the basis of which both events differ from a third. — Joshs

I'm considerably more sympathetic towards your argument than is the Count. I will just make some additional observations.

Isn't what you're referring to here the subjective unity of perception? This is how the mind 'creates' or 'constructs' (both words have problematical connotations) the unified experience of the world which is our lived world ('lebenswelt'). Something I often mention is that neuroscience has no account of which particular neural system or systems actually perform the magic of generating a unified world-picture from the disparate sensory and somatic sources inputs - and that's a quote from a paper on it:

What we do know is that there is no place in the brain where there could be a direct neural encoding of the illusory detailed scene (Kaas and Collins 2003). That is, enough is known about the structure and function of the visual system to rule out any detailed neural representation that embodies the subjective experience.

This is, of course, the basis on which I argue that cognitive science lends support to idealism - that experienced reality is mind dependent (not mind-independent as realist philosophies would have it.)

This kind of insight is native to Buddhist philosophical psychology, abhidharma, and also to the Mind Only (Yogācāra) school. It's far too complicated a model to try and summarise in a forum post (ref), but suffice to say, there's a very good reason that Varela and Maturana draw extensively on abhidharma in their writings on embodied cognition.

The concept of accuracy limits us to thinking about knowledge of nature ( and morals) in terms of conformity to arbitrary properties and laws. But is this the way nature is in itself, or just a model that we have imposed on it? — Joshs

But then, I think what your musings lack, is an overall sense of purpose. Isn't this the factor which Heidegger addresses through his writings on 'care'? The point being, consideration of what matters to us, why it is important. And on not kidding ourselves (something I myself am prone to, regrettably.) 'Seeing things as they truly are' is not necessarily a matter for scientific analysis, because we're involved in life, we're part of what we are seeking to understand. And that's what religions seek to provide - a kind of moral polestar, an over-arching purpose or meaning, towards which these questions, or quests, are oriented. (But then, I am mindful of the postmodernist skepticism towards meta-narrative, which is also a factor here.)

So duality is not an illusion – 'samsara is nirvana' is ignorance? — 180 Proof

The non-difference of saṃsāra and Nirvāṇa has never been accepted by Theravada but is taught in Mahāyāna cultures. Once again something I read on Dharmawheel when I used to post there: ‘Saṃsāra is Nirvāṇa grasped, Nirvāṇa is Saṃsāra released.’ The aphorism expresses the Mahāyāna understanding that Saṃsāra and Nirvāṇan are not separate realms but rather two modes of perceiving the same reality: one clouded by ignorance, the other illuminated by prajna.

Another way of putting it is that, for ignorance, Nirvāṇa is always somewhere else - ‘somewhere over the rainbow’ - whereas for enlightenment it is right here.

I'll only note that the passage quoted is suggestive of the non-duality of mind and world.

I'm realising that I have to take Rödl's book in a few sections at a time. Today I've read 2.1-2.3 and made some notes on those sections. I might have skipped ahead to p37, but I'm not up to it yet.

Some further notes:

Chapter 2>2.1 Force and Content Distinction

In Frege’s terminology, the “act of assent” refers to the force of a judgment, which is the act of agreeing or accepting a proposition. This act is distinct from the content of the judgment, which is the proposition itself, or what is being assented to. The distinction between force and content is meant to underline the objectivity of thought, locating objectivity in the content rather than in the act of judgment. In other words, the content is understood to be just so, irrespective of the act of assent on anyone's part. The force, on the other hand, refers to the act of assenting to or affirming the content.

Implicitly, this distinction is used to 'prize apart' the act of thinking and the subject of thought so as to defend the objectivity of the content. The force-content distinction is used to separate the act of thinking (force) from the subject of thought (content) in order to defend the objectivity of the content. This distinction aims to ensure that the validity and objectivity of thought depend on the content itself, rather than on the subjective act of assenting to it. By doing so, the objectivity and universality of thought are located in the content, independent of any individual’s act of judgment.

The discussion then distinguishes between first-person thought and examining first-person thought from an external perspective. First-person thought inherently involves self-consciousness, where the act of thinking is internal to what is thought. When viewed from an external perspective, the focus shifts to understanding the objectivity of thought, which is seen as independent of the subject’s characteristics. This distinction highlights the tension between the subjective nature of first-person thought and the objective validity sought in philosophical inquiry.

Furthermore, we constantly shift between third- and first-person perspectives without being consciously aware of so doing. This transition is significant in understanding how objective validity and self-consciousness interplay in judgment. The first-person perspective involves self-conscious thought, where the act of thinking is internal to what is thought. In contrast, the third-person perspective treats judgment as an observable act, external to the self-awareness of the thinker. Rödl suggests that while judgment can be analyzed from both perspectives, the self-consciousness inherent in first-person thought is not a separate viewpoint but is integral to the act of judgment itself. It's very important to notice this perspectival shift, it is very much what Rödl means when he says that he's not advancing a novel argument, so much as calling attention to ingrained habits of thought.

"I know my hand hurts" — Banno

Is pain a suitable subject for the analysis of propositional content? I searched Rödl's book for an instance of 'pain' and the only return was from p37:

For, holding on to the force-content distinction, we arrest ourselves in incomprehension. It is painful to be at sea. But it is infinitely better than to be under the illusion of understanding something one does not understand.

where it's obvious that pain is being used metaphorically. The apodictic nature of first-person knowledge or feeling of sensation is not, so far as I can tell, discussed elsewhere in this text.

Why would consciousness be limited to physical spacetime? — EnPassant

I don't believe it is, and the hard problem of consciousness suggests it is not, but naturalism assumes that it is. There was a lot of discussion earlier in this thread about that conflict.

Astonishingly, Trump still insists that the exporting countries are the ones who pay the tarrifs he's set to impose. He's setting up a 'department of external revenue' to collect the revenue. To this day, he can't or won't understand that buyers in the importing country pay the tarrifs, not the exporters. One of innummerable examples of his immunity to facts.

And besides

"The president-elect appears ignorant of the fact that there’s been an 'external revenue service' since July 31, 1789," posted Andrew Feinberg, White House correspondent for The Independent. "That’s when George Washington signed legislation creating the US Customs Service, the forerunner of what is now [the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Agency]."

Although being ignorant of facts is part of the MO.

The bottom line is, America has elected a President who hates Government. As far as Trump is concerned, the separation of powers and the checks and balances designed by the Constitution are all impediments to his will, and as such, part of the problem that he wants to dissolve. He wants a government of underlings and enablers, and so far the craven Republican Party is bending over backwards to give him exactly that.

So the Jack Smith report has been published.

One of the Buddhist sayings I read on Dharmawheel was that ‘saṃsāra has no beginning but it has an end. Nirvāṇa has a beginning but it has no end.’

In order to always have a secure compass in hand so as to find one's way in life, and to see life always in the correct light without going astray, nothing is more suitable than getting used to seeing the world as something like a penal colony. This view finds its...justification not only in my philosophy, but also in the wisdom of all times, namely, in Brahmanism, Buddhism, Empedocles, Pythagoras [...] Even in genuine and correctly understood Christianity, our existence is regarded as the result of a liability or a misstep. ... We will thus always keep our position in mind and regard every human, first and foremost, as a being that exists only on account of sinfulness, and who is life is an expiation of the offence committed through birth. Exactly this constitutes what Christianity calls the sinful nature of man. — Arthur Schopenhauer, quoted in Schopenhauer's Compass, Urs App

Buddhism, it is said, does not accept the idea of original sin, however, it is understood that beings are bound by a state of beginningless ignorance, which bears some resemblance. I understand that this is incomprehensible from the perspective of secular philosophy, for which this life and the amelioration of political, economic and physical conditions is the only meaningful aim. But it is relevant to the OP.

Husserl argued that philosophy needed to ask the basic questions about what lies in the presuppositions of science and the "naturalistic attitude". To look this deeply into the essential givenness of the world, one had to suspend of "bracket" knowledge claims that otherwise dominate ideas. — Astrophel

:clap:

consider the standard truth tables taught in logic classes, and see how abstract they, referring to propositional values only. What happened to actual world?? It simply does not matter, which is why ango american philosophy collapsed in on itself. — Astrophel

:clap:

Reason cannot, keep in mind, understand what it is, cannot "get behind" itself (Wittgenstein). for this would take a pov outside outside of logic itself and this cannot be "conceived". — Astrophel

'The eye cannot see itself, nor the hand grasp itself', says the Upaniṣad.

It depends on how reason is conceived. Reason for the ancients and medievals is ecstatic and transcendent, "the Logos is without beginning and end." Often today it is not much more than computation. How it is conceived will determine its limits. Is reason something we do inside "language games?" Is it just "rule following?" Or is it a more expansive ground for both? Does reason have desires and ends? — Count Timothy von Icarus

:clap: In the ancient world, reason qua logos was that which animated the Cosmos. But then this becomes subsumed by theology as the literal 'word of God', which is what 'logos' came to mean. And this is what was said to be 'foolishness to the Greeks'. This tension, between reason and faith, has existed in Christianity ever since. We're still suffering from it, although there are those who say it can be reconciled. (Aquinas would be one, but notice that Luther was scornful of Aquinas' regard for Aristotle, and the mystical elements of Christianity, infused with Platonism, often flirts with or is accused of heresy by fideist Christians.)

Something should be said about the Buddhist approach to the question posed in the OP. It is often said in modern Buddhist circles, that the Buddha only teaches the cause of suffering and its end. While this has been questioned (ref) it is still true that Buddhism is almost uniquely focussed on the question of the nature of suffering and its cause. The 'Four Noble Truths' of Buddhism begin with the observation that embodied existence is dukkha, a word that is usually translated as 'suffering' or 'stressful'. But, the Four Truths go on to say, there is a cause to this suffering, and a way to the end of suffering (often overlooked by those critical of Buddhism's purported 'pessimism'.)

The philosophical point that should be made, is that the question 'what is the cause of dukkha' generates quite a different problematic to 'what is the origin of everything' which is implied by the Biblical belief that God created the world. Buddhism basically says that the cause of suffering is not some evil Gnostic demiurge that wants to torture mankind, or an indifferent God who lets the innocent suffer for no reason. No, the cause of suffering can be found within oneself, in the form of the constant desire (trishna, thirst, clinging) - to be or to become, to possess and to retain, to cling to the transitory and ephemeral as if they were lasting and satisfying, when by their very nature, they are not. That of course is a very deep and difficult thing to penetrate, as the desire to be and to become is engrained in us by the entire history of biological existence. It nevertheless is the 'cause of sorrow' as the Buddha teaches it, radical though that might be (and it is radical).

It is of course true that Buddhism situates the 'problem of suffering' against a background of the endless caravan of birth and death ('saṃsāra'), which is quite alien to Western cultural traditions (at least since the early Christian era.) Regardless, the Buddha's teaching is now part of global culture, and the perspectives it provides can be brought to bear on the question of 'religion and suffering'.

Aha! Still seems overall positively disposed toward Rödl. I've seen McDowell's MInd and World mentioned here numerous times but it's just a book too far....(perhaps Robert Brandom is of a vaguely similar ilk?)

It would be fun to see the Iliad or Beowulf rendered in logical form. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I asked our digital friend to oblige. They came back with:

Sing, O goddess, the anger of Achilles son of Peleus,
that brought countless ills upon the Achaeans.
Many a brave soul did it send hurrying down to Hades,
and many a hero did it yield a prey to dogs and vultures,
for so were the counsels of Jove fulfilled
from the day on which the son of Atreus, king of men,
and great Achilles, first fell out with one another.

I've posted their rendering in symbolic logic in image format as it is difficult to render it in plain text:



(Incidentally, they also said 'That's a delightful challenge'.)

///

I listened to a talk by John McDowell on Rödl's book. I — Leontiskos

Very good, but I note that he says it's a wonderful book and 'almost' perfect. I will try and find time to listen.

Yes. Gillard's was exemplary, all things considered.

:lol: Fair dinkum…..

Agree. Dutton's only real policy, apart from appealing to fear, uncertainty and doubt, is the nuclear one we started with. I'm hopeful he doesn't win. But I'm also pretty unimpressed with Antony Albanese. He spends too much time trying to be Mr Nice Guy, every voter's friend. He appeared on Spicks and Specks for goodness sake. I can just hear him intoning on talkback radio, 'A huge thankyou to the South Doobyville Fire Brigade for rescuing Mrs Jones' cat from the tree in her backyard. And shame on all the naysayers who are laughing over the fact they ran the cat over when leaving the property. That's Un-Australian!'

Still reckon we're heading for a coalition government with Labour and others.

Yes, in many ways Rödl is anachronistic. — Banno

I think there's a larger issue. I'm not alone in seeing at least some elements of German idealism to be essential to larger questions of philosophy, and its rejection by the 'plain language' analytical philosophers (famously initiated by Moore and Russell) as basically sidestepping or deprecating many of those important questions. Everything is reduced to interminable arguments about terminology or valid propositions or what can be validly stated. The same can't be said of Continental philosophy
- Nagel starts another of his essays 'Analytic philosophy as a historical movement has not done much to provide an alternative to the consolations of religion. This is sometimes made a cause for reproach, and it has led to unfavorable comparisons with the continental tradition of the twentieth century, which did not shirk that task. I believe this is one of the reasons why continental philosophy has been better received by the general public: it is at least trying to provide nourishment for the soul, the job by which philosophy is supposed to earn its keep.' (Secular Philosophy and the Religious Temperament.)

But then, I do understand that any mention of 'nourishment for the soul' will be tarred with the same brush as disdain for anything deemed religious. There's a kind of subterranean barrier which declares what is and is not deemed 'acceptable philosophical discourse' according to that criterion. (I notice John Vervaeke, the philosophically-informed cognitive scientist that I'm listening to, manages to navigate these issues without being so constrained. Anyway, another digression. I'll try and get back to the actual text.....)

So the present topic is Hegel catching up with the logic of the turn of the last century. Fine. — Banno

Yes I know that anything that existed before 10 minutes ago is now obsolete.

So I asked what a "Fregian proposition" is and received in reply explanations about what a thought is. — Banno

Neither coincidental nor misplaced. The seminal article of Frege's is called 'The Thought: A Logical Investigation' which explicitly identifies propositions and thoughts.

We are it seems to return to the obtuse philosophical style that was rejected by Frege, Russell, Moore and a few others. A retrograde step — Banno

But that begs a question. As Rödl is claiming to represent absolute idealism, and a re-statement of Hegelian logic, that is not surprising, but whether it is 'retrograde' depends on whether we agree that the 'linguistic turn' against idealism was an improvement in the first place. Which is one of the major points at issue.

Whether the tree out the window is to be placed with the oaks or the elms is not just an arbitrary judgement to be made by Pat, but a step in a broader activity in which others participate. — Banno

Whereas Kant seems to imply that an individual’s mind controls thought, Hegel argues that a collective component to knowledge also exists. In fact, according to Hegel, tension always exists between an individual’s unique knowledge of things and the need for universal concepts—two movements that represent the first and second of the three so-called modes of consciousness. The first mode of consciousness—meaning, or "sense certainty"—is the mind’s initial attempt to grasp the nature of a thing. This primary impulse runs up against the requirement that concepts have a "universal" quality, which means that different people must also be able to comprehend these concepts. This requirement leads to the second mode of consciousness, perception. With perception, consciousness, in its search for certainty, appeals to categories of thought worked out between individuals through some kind of communicative process at the level of common language. Expressed more simply, the ideas we have of the world around us are shaped by the language we speak, so that the names and meanings that other people have worked out before us (throughout the history of language) shape our perceptions. — Lecture Notes, Hegel

'Evolutionary Naturalism' is actually a chapter in The Last Word. I've read that particular chapter a number of times but I need to re-visit the rest of the book.

Talk at this level of abstraction can plunge us into huge terminological problems, as you know. — J

It's all to do with universals. There's another good discussion of them in Russell's Problems of Philosophy: The World of Universals. For the pre-scientific revolution worldview, the problem didn't present itself, because of the correspondence between ideas, universals, and the Divine intelligence. But, back to Rödl - I'm working towards Chapter 4, The Science without Contrary. Let's stick to Rödl for now (my digression, I know.)