By contrast, the classical/scholastic tradition hadnt yet arrived at a notion of subjective consciousness, and as a result, had nothing like the modern concept of the object — Joshs

It reminds me of the positivists, who responded to Wittgenstein's Tractatus in a way he never intended. — Constance

This actually goes back to Schopenhauer's notion that subject and object are always intertwined. Your thought of a dead, lifeless universe, is still a thought. And even if it is a representation of some "reality", that reality will never be YOUR reality, which is NOT simply "lifeless universe" but a psychologically embodied being THINKING of the lifeless universe, and projecting it, Signifying it, as you might say. — schopenhauer1

He failed to take the Vedanta/Mahayana wisdom far enough. (In that regard, a victim of his age. Bless him for how far he got!) — ENOAH

There is nothing controversial in saying that of the major figures in Western philosophy Schopenhauer is the one who has most in common with Eastern thought. Less adequately pondered is the fact that much of what it is that the two have in common was taken by Schopenhauer from Kant. To suppose that Schopenhauer's philosophy was formed to any decisive degree under the influence of Eastern thought is not only a mistake, but misses the crucial point that in Kant and Schopenhauer the mainstream of Western philosophy threw up conclusions about the nature of reality* which are strikingly similar to some of those propounded by the more mystically oriented religions or philosophies of the East, yet arrived at by an entirely different path.

It would be an error, though one characteristic of Western intellectual provincialism, to suppose that the Oriental doctrines in question were not supported by rational argument: in the case of Buddhist philosophy, in particular, they conspicuously are. But the Kantian-Schopenhauerian conclusions were reached by processes internal to a tradition of thought which is fundamentally rooted in the development of mathematical physics, and this is something with which Buddhist philosophy has been little concerned until the twentieth century. Incidentally, both the Kantian and Schopenhauerian philosophy and the more sophisticated of the mysticisms of the East have received, and continue to receive, extensive corroboration from the revolutionary developments of the twentieth century in the natural sciences. (There is a growing literature on this in the case of Eastern mysticism - a good introduction is The Tao of Physics by Fritjof Capra, which also contains a useful bibliography.) The Eastern religion most congruent with contemporary science is Buddhism. — Bryan Magee, Schopenhauer's Philosophy

My thinking is this: Religion rises out of the radical ethical indeterminacy of our existence. This simply means that we are thrown into a world of ethical issues that, in the most basic analysis, are not resolvable. Yet they insist on resolution with the same apodicticity as logical coercivity. Meaning, just as one cannot but agree with something like modus ponens or the principle of identity in terms of the pure logicality of their intuitive insistence, so one cannot resist the moral insistence of moral redemption. — Constance

The religious person perceives our present life, or our natural life, as radically deficient, deficient from the root (radix) up, as fundamentally unsatisfactory; he feels it to be, not a mere condition, but a predicament; it strikes him as vain or empty if taken as an end in itself; he sees himself as homo viator, as a wayfarer or pilgrim treading a via dolorosa (way of suffering) through a vale that cannot possibly be a final and fitting resting place; he senses or glimpses from time to time the possibility of a Higher Life; he feels himself in danger of missing out on this Higher Life of true happiness. If this doesn't strike a chord in you, then I suggest you do not have a religious disposition. Some people don't, and it cannot be helped. One cannot discuss religion with them, for it cannot be real to them. It is not, for them, what William James in "The Will to Believe" calls a "living option," let alone a "forced" or "momentous" one.

OpenAI released their new GPT-4o model today. — Pierre-Normand

I think disposition has much to do with it. I'm not a fan of owning too many things. I feel better with less. Just sold my car. — Tom Storm

Of all systems of philosophy which start from the object, the most consistent, and that which may be carried furthest, is simple materialism. It regards matter, and with it time and space, as existing absolutely, and ignores the relation to the subject in which alone all this really exists. It then lays hold of the law of causality as a guiding principle or clue, regarding it as a self-existent order (or arrangement) of things,veritas aeterna, and so fails to take account of the understanding, in which and for which alone causality is. It seeks the primary and most simple state of matter, and then tries to develop all the others from it; ascending from mere mechanism, to chemistry, to polarity (i.e. electricity), to the vegetable and to the animal kingdom.

And if we suppose this to have been done, the last link in the chain would be animal sensibility—that is knowledge—which would consequently now appear as a mere modification or state of matter produced by causality. Now if we had followed materialism thus far with clear ideas, when we reached its highest point we would suddenly be seized with a fit of the inextinguishable laughter of the Olympians. As if waking from a dream, we would all at once become aware that its final result—knowledge, which it reached so laboriously, was presupposed as the indispensable condition of its very starting-point, mere matter; and when we imagined that we thought matter, we really thought only the subject that perceives matter; the eye that sees it, the hand that feels it, the understanding that knows it.

Thus the tremendous petitio principii (begged question) reveals itself unexpectedly; for suddenly the last link is seen to be the starting-point, the chain a circle, and the materialist is like Baron Münchausen who, when swimming in water on horseback, drew the horse into the air with his legs, and himself also by his cue. The fundamental absurdity of materialism is that it starts from the objective, and takes as the ultimate ground of explanation something objective, whether it be matter in the abstract, simply as it is thought, or, after it has taken form, as empirically given—that is to say, as substance, the chemical elements with their primary relations. Some such thing it takes as existing absolutely and in itself, in order that it may evolve organic nature and finally the knowing subject from it, and explain them adequately by means of it; whereas in truth all that is objective is already determined as such in manifold ways by the knowing subject through its forms of knowing, and presupposes them; and consequently it entirely disappears if we think the subject away.

Thus materialism is the attempt to explain what is immediately given us by what is given us indirectly. 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 (i.e. physics)).

But we have shown that 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 ever 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. Yet the aim and ideal of all natural science is at bottom a consistent materialism. — WWR page 35

God could not be understood by human reason but only through Biblical revelation or mystical experience — Religious Modernity

6.5.2.1 The solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of this problem.

(Is not this the reason why men to whom after long doubting the sense of life became clear, could not then say wherein this sense consisted?)


6.522 There is indeed the inexpressible. This shows itself; it is the mystical. — TLP

Logic gives us a variety of ways in which we might talk about how things are. It does not commit us to this or that ontology. — Banno

For Gillespie, the epochal question that gave birth to modernity arose out of a metaphysical and theological crisis within late medieval Christianity and became manifested in the nominalist revolution. Prior to nominalism, Christianity was defined by scholastic philosophy, which posited the real existence of universals: reality was ultimately not composed of particulars but of universal categories of divine reason. The experience of the world as universal categories became articulated in syllogistic logic that corresponded to divine reason, and man was believed to be created as a rational animal in the image of God and guided by a natural goal and divinely revealed supernatural one.

Contrary to the scholastics, the nominalists believed reality was composed not of universal categories but of particulars. Language did not point to universal categories but was merely signs useful for human understanding; creation was particular and therefore not teleological; and God could not be understood by human reason but only through Biblical revelation or mystical experience. Nominalism challenged and eventually destroyed the great synthesis that started with the Church Fathers that combined the reason of Greek philosophy with the Christian revelation. — Religious Modernity

Will we say that the world consists of objects, and we just give them names? Or will we say that the names are arbitrary, we just invent them? — Banno

I don't think an emotion or rather passion, which was once called apathia, which is nowadays called 'apathy', really could have changed all that much. The only thing that changed was our perception of such a passion... In my opinion, reification happened to the term in the context of socioeconomic systems and tidbits of rationalizations about psychologizing the term away. — Shawn

Generally speaking, the classical/scholastic view would be that God is both "inside" and "outside" the system — Count Timothy von Icarus

This is why Calvin would go on to have such a problem digesting Augustine. How can a person have any sort of freedom without constraining divine sovereignty if God sits over here and man over there? Here, Augustine's "God is closer to me than my most inmost self," degenerates into a mere metaphor, rather than being a sort of metaphysical statement. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Niels Bohr would soon argue that until an observation or measurement is made, a microphysical object like an electron does not exist anywhere. Between one measurement and the next it has no existence outside the abstract possibilities of the wave function. It is only when an observation or measurement is made that the ‘wave function collapses’ as one of the ‘possible’ states of the electron becomes the ‘actual’ state and the probability of all the other possibilities becomes zero. — Kumar, Manjit. Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality (pp. 219-220). Icon Books. Kindle Edition.

Does this mean that ideal entangled electrons wait patiently for a physicist to poke his nose into their business before they reveal themselves as real independent particles? — Gnomon

When it comes to reasoning, explaining, elaborating, understanding, etc., especially when the topic has any level of complexity, GPT-4 is almost immeasurably better than GPT 3.5! — Pierre-Normand

“The world is my idea:”—this is a truth which holds good for everything that lives and knows, though man alone can bring it into reflective and abstract consciousness. If he really does this, he has attained to philosophical wisdom. It then becomes clear and certain to him that what he knows is not a sun and an earth, but only an eye that sees a sun, a hand that feels an earth; that the world which surrounds him is there only as idea, i.e., only in relation to something else, the consciousness, which is himself. If any truth can be asserted a priori, it is this...

From this it does not follow that animals are not rational. — Janus

you appeal to Plato as someone who thought as you do. But there is no argument to support that way of thinking — Janus

I should say that while debates about universals—mathematical or otherwise—are interesting, I don’t want to enter that fray given my time constraints. — Leontiskos

Thomists and other critics of Ockham have tended to present traditional realism, with its forms or natures, as the solution to the modern problem of knowledge. It seems to me that it does not quite get to the heart of the matter. A genuine realist should see “forms” not merely as a solution to a distinctly modern problem of knowledge, but as part of an alternative conception of knowledge, a conception that is not so much desired and awaiting defense, as forgotten and so no longer desired. Characterized by forms, reality had an intrinsic intelligibility, not just in each of its parts but as a whole. With forms as causes, there are interconnections between different parts of an intelligible world, indeed there are overlapping matrices of intelligibility in the world, making possible an ascent from the more particular, posterior, and mundane to the more universal, primary, and noble.

In short, the appeal to forms or natures does not just help account for the possibility of trustworthy access to facts, it makes possible a notion of wisdom, traditionally conceived as an ordering grasp of reality. Preoccupied with overcoming Cartesian skepticism, it often seems as if philosophy’s highest aspiration is merely to secure some veridical cognitive events. Rarely sought is a more robust goal: an authoritative and life-altering wisdom.

If you don't want to try, then I'll conclude that you don't have such an argument. — Janus

By 'existent' I refer to manifest or phenomenal existence. Broadly speaking, this refers to sensable objects (I prefer that spelling as it avoids the equivocation with the other meaning of 'sensible') - tables and chairs, stars and planets, oceans and continents. They're phenomenal in the sense of appearing to subjects as sensable objects or conglomerates.

I am differentiating this from what used to be called 'intelligible objects' - logical principles, numbers, conventions, qualifiers and so on. For example, if I were to say to you, 'show me the law of the excluded middle', you would have to explain it to me. It's not really an 'object' at all in the same sense as the proverbial chair or apple. You might point to a glossary entry, but that too comprises the explanation of a concept. The same with all kinds of arithmetical proofs and principles. Even natural laws - the laws of motion, for example. All of these can only be grasped by a rational intelligence. I could not demonstrate or explain them to a cow or a dog. They are what could be described as 'noumenal' in the general (not Kantian) sense, being 'objects of intellect' (nous) - only graspable by a rational mind.

As I said at the outset, in regular speech it is quite clear to say 'the number 7 exists'. But when you ask what it is, then you are not pointing to a sensable object - that is the symbol - but a rational act. (That's the sense in which I mean that 'counting is an act', but it doesn't mean that the demonstrations of rudimentary reasoning in higher animals amounts to reason per se.)

In Plato these levels or kinds of knowledge were distinguished per the Analogy of the Divided Line . Those distinctions are what have been forgotten, abandoned or lost in the intervening millenia due to the dominance of nominalism and empiricism. But In reality, thought itself, the rational mind, operates through a process of synthesis which blends and binds the phenomenal and noumenal into synthetic judgements (per Kant). — Wayfarer

What is it precisely you think I don't understand about your position? — Janus

I've noticed that if anyone disagrees with you or questions your ideas you fall back on the claim that they don't understand. — Janus

That we strive in the first place, is where I like to start. The hope of redemption is the part that is speculation. — schopenhauer1

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. — Schopenhauer's Compass,Urs App

When the ascetic transcends human nature, the ascetic resolves the problem of evil: by removing the individuated and individuating human consciousness from the scene, the entire spatio-temporal situation within which daily violence occurs is removed.

In a way, then, the ascetic consciousness can be said symbolically to return Adam and Eve to Paradise, for it is the very quest for knowledge (i.e., the will to apply the principle of individuation to experience) that the ascetic overcomes. This amounts to a self-overcoming at the universal level, where not only physical desires are overcome, but where humanly-inherent epistemological dispositions are overcome as well.

Likewise for the perfect form of the turd or the pile of vomit — Janus

Wayfarer is talking about some supposed ontological role, the E, not quantification — Banno

Kant's phenomenal/ noumenal distinction as I understand it is not between sense objects and abstracta, but between what we can know and what we cannot. — Janus

The Greek word νοούμενoν, nooúmenon (plural νοούμενα, nooúmena) is the neuter middle-passive present participle of νοεῖν, noeîn, 'to think, to mean', which in turn originates from the word νοῦς, noûs, an Attic contracted form of νόος, nóos, 'perception, understanding, mind'. A rough equivalent in English would be "that which is thought", or "the object of an act of thought".

"in the same way", Frege says "that a pencil exists independently of grasping it. Thought contents (e.g. numerical value) are true and bear their relations to one another (and presumably to what they are about) independently of anyone's thinking these thought contents - "just as a planet, even before anyone saw it, was in interaction with other planets." — Frege on Knowing the Third Realm, Tyler Burge

Vedānta (specifically Advaita)... talks of the ātman (self) in similar terms as the noumenon.

and

Regarding the equivalent concepts in Plato, Ted Honderich writes: "Platonic Ideas and Forms are noumena, and phenomena are things displaying themselves to the senses... This dichotomy is the most characteristic feature of Plato's dualism; that noumena and the noumenal world are objects of the highest knowledge, truths, and values is Plato's principal legacy to philosophy."

Kant -- damn his eyes -- was right: we only understand of the world what we put into it.

We distinguish one bit from another, sort those bits and classify them, even paint them different colors to make it easier to keep track of them.

Mathematics is, first of all, our analysis of what we're doing when we do all that. More than that, it's a simplification and idealization of the process, to make it faster and more efficient.

It's all signal processing. The brain is not fundamentally interested in the world, but in the maintenance of the body it's responsible for, and the signals the brain deals with are about that body: they have an origin and and a type and a strength, and so on. Some of this is instrumented, so there's a reflective capacity to see how all these signals come together, and that's the beginning of mathematics. — Srap Tasmaner

In ...Engagement and Metaphysical dissatisfaction, Barry Stroud argues that the project (of metaphysics) cannot be carried out, because we are too immersed in the system of concepts that we hope to subject to metaphysical assessment. This "prevents us from finding enought distance between our conception of the world and the world it is meant to be a conception of to allow for an appropriately impartial metaphysical verdict on the relation between the two."

Stroud believes that we cannot succeed in reaching either a positive (often called realist), or a negative (anti-realist) metaphysical verdict about a number of basic conceptions – that we cannot show either that they succeed in describing the way the world is independent of our responses, or that they fail to do so. He argues for this claim in detail with respect to three of the most fundamental and philosophically contested concepts: causality, essentially, and value. The argument has a general and powerful form. Stroud contends that the use of the very concepts being assessed, and judgements of the very kind being questioned play an indispensable part in the metaphysical reasoning that is supposed to lead to our conclusions about these concepts and beliefs. — Analytical Philosophy and Human Life, Thomas Nagel, p 218

That science can indeed give us an objective account of the world - an account of the world `as it is in itself’ -is possible only because, and not in spite, of our being already `given over’ to the world in our ordinary practice. — Joshs

What do you think of the claim that discrete entities only exist as a product of minds? That is, "physics shows us a world that is just a single continuous process, with no truly isolated systems, where everything interacts with everything else, and so discrete things like apples, cars, etc. would exist solely as 'products of the mind/social practices.'" — Count Timothy von Icarus

Are you not arguing for two kinds of reality—the reality of the body and the different reality of the mind? — Janus

There are simple algorithms for determining whether a number is prime; it's a mechanical process that doesn't require what you call "rational insight — Srap Tasmaner

Frege accepted the traditional rationalist account of knowledge of the relevant primitive truths, truths of logic. This account, which he associated with the Euclidean tradition, maintained that basic truths of geometry and logic are self-evident. Frege says on several occasions that such primitive truths - as well as basic rules of inference and certain relevant definitions- are self-evident. He did not develop these remarks because he thought they admitted little development. The interesting problems for him were finding and understanding the primitive truths, and showing how they, together with infer- ence rules and definitions, could be used to derive the truths of arithmetic.

that you are saying there are two realities—the physical ("sensable") and the mental (abstract) which is basically dualism. — Janus

fortunately Theodore Sider is trying to help us out . . . see his Writing the Book of the World. — J

I have asked him to explain what could be meant by saying that numbers are real — Janus

Scientists tend to be empiricists; they imagine the universe to be made up of things we can touch and taste and so on; things we can learn about through observation and experiment. The idea of something (i.e. number) existing “outside of space and time” makes empiricists nervous: It sounds embarrassingly like the way religious believers talk about God, and God was banished from respectable scientific discourse a long time ago.

Platonism, as mathematician Brian Davies has put it, “has more in common with mystical religions than it does with modern science.” The fear is that if mathematicians give Plato an inch, he’ll take a mile. If the truth of mathematical statements can be confirmed just by thinking about them, then why not ethical problems, or even religious questions? Why bother with empiricism at all?