They're both tools for modeling an inferred underlying reality. But they themselves are human creations, accurate enough for our human purposes.

Yes, you seem to be asserting this as a premise and then arguing from there. But this is to assume as true the very thing you're setting out to prove, that platonism is false.

What's the argument for mathematics being a sui generis human creation unaffected by the reality of multitude or magnitude? What caused us to create it? If it's useful, why?



To say that these questions are unanswerable suggests nescience, not one answer re platonism being supported over the other.

Neither am I, as far as I am aware

You certainly seem to be. Your claim is that, for something to be properly "real" it must exist wholly outside appearances. How is this not defining reality in terms of the noumenal? For all those following Parmenides, Plato included, there is no reality as totally divorced from appearances and intelligibility. Thought and being are two sides of the same non-composite whole.

If someone were to create a gigantic effigy of a flying spaghetti monster, would that suddenly make the flying spaghetti monster real?

Do you think making a statue of a fictional character makes them real? I don't. Yet is chess fictional? Is world history fiction? Temperature? Dates?

Scientific theories and paradigms are human creations. Yet if these are thereby fictions, then your appeal to "inferring reality from science" would amount to "inferring what is real from fiction."

I don't know if I agree with your diagnosis that the opposition to Platonism arises from 'subject-object metaphysics'. I think it goes back to the decline of Aristotelian realism and the ascendancy of nominalism in late medieval Europe. From which comes the oxymoronic notion of mind-independence of the empirical domain, when whatever we know of the empirical domain is dependent on sensory perception and judgement (per Kant). Hence those objections in that passage I quoted, 'The idea of something existing “outside of space and time” makes empiricists nervous'. Anything real has to be 'out there somewhere' - otherwise it's 'in the mind'. That is the origin of subject-object metaphysics.

:up: :100:

Yes, the philosophy of Plato does not seem to be commensurate with modern subject-object dualism. It seems even less applicable to later Platonists, such as Plotinus, St. Augustine, or St. Bonaventure.

Nominalism seems to me to be the larger issue and I think it has generally been nominalism that has motivated to errection of subject-object dualism, rather than the other way around (although obviously the influence is bi-directional).

I think the equivocity attaches to the term 'good' rather than to the truth value, but even an assertion utilizing analogical equivocity must have a determinate and assertable form. If it doesn't then there is not any unitary thing being asserted.

Peter Redpath makes a pretty convincing argument that it is never our terms that are (properly) analogical for St. Thomas (obviously when we equivocate we do have ambiguous terms). It is rather the predication of the term that is analagous.

Consideration of analogy and univocity vis-à-vis predication should focus on how we relate definitions/predicates to subjects, as opposed to considering concepts and definitions themselves to somehow "be analogous.” That is, for St. Thomas, analogical predication is primarily about judgements and relations, and only secondarily about the terms that are being related.

For example, when we say “good” of God, we are involved in analogical predication, since the manner of God’s being cannot be directly compared to the being of creatures. However, this does not mean we should take the predicate “good” to be “analogical” here, as if the “goodness of God” is somehow a loosely related to what we generally intend by the term “good.” Indeed, if God is “Goodness itself,” (i.e. that by which all things are good— https://www.newadvent.org/summa/1006.htm) it is unclear what it would mean for "our concept of goodness" to be an “analogy” of true goodness. If the “good for man,” the fulfillment of our telos, lies in the contemplation and adoration of God, there is a sense in which God’s goodness must be the paradigmatic example of all goodness, even if we, as finite creatures, can never fully understand goodness as it is univocally predicated of God.

Mistaking the “analogy of predication,” (i.e., how a term applies to a subject) for an “analogy of concepts” (i.e. what a term means) seems to risk opening the door on a pernicious slide towards equivocity, since the predicates we are working become ambiguous themselves. One example of this might be found in Luther’s response to Erasmus’ critiques of his understanding of predestination, to which Luther replied:

”If it is difficult to believe in God’s mercy and goodness when He damns those who do not deserve it, we must recall that if God’s justice could be recognized as just by human comprehension, it would not be divine.”

The issue here is not, of course, the claim that we might be capable of misunderstanding God’s justice. This is true. Rather, it is the claim that God’s goodness is inaccessible to us; that it would not be divine goodness if we recognized it as "goodness". Yet it is easy to see how the move towards such a position might be enabled if we begin to think of the term "good" in "God is good," as being itself analogous. But the good car is "most choiceworthy" of cars, just as God is "most choiceworthy" without qualification.

So, my contention would be that truth doesn't need to become analogical, merely our predication of it. When we modify ambiguous statements, we are making it more obvious how the term relates to the subject, not making it clear which term we are "really" using. Analogy is about how things relate.

The question for the equivocity of truth is this: if the first statement is not meant to be true in a univocal sense, then is it possible for the respondent to disagree with it? To agree? To even understand what is being said?

Sure, we can understand it. We can also have questions about how "great" is related to "the day." Just as "Frodo is tall" can be true if tall relates to him having any height at all (to having an extended 3D body), but false in the sense that "Frodo is taller than average for the humanoid beings of Middle Earth." The question is how the propositions relates to the adequacy of thought (and language) to being, or language to thought.

Again, the reduction of all knowledge to discursive knowledge plays a role here to. Language is often ambiguous for the sake of brevity, but thought can be unclear too. This gets back to Aristotle's distinction:

-Asytheta: truth as the conformity of thought and speech to reality (whose opposite is falsity); and


-Adiareta, truth as the grasping of a whole, apprehension (whose opposite is simply ignorance).

It is worth noting that Aquinas sees truth in a largely discursive manner:

In a certain sense yes, it is in discursive knowledge that we have judgements whose opposite is falsity as opposed to ignorance. However, he often seems to follow the Neoplatonic camp in elevating the primacy of simple apprehension of wholes as wholes.

And this is in Aristotle too, knowledge of principles is what allows us to know the Many through a One. It's what makes science possible, since (in Aristotle's eternal universe) there can be an infinite number of causes but not an infinite number of unifying principles. I see this largely jiving with these sources I mentioned before:

In Ad Thalassium 60, St. Maximus the Confessor argues for the superiority of unified and direct experience, as opposed to discursive reasoning/knowing. Similarly, in Philosophiae Consolationis (4.6), Boethius argues that reason is to the intellect as time is to eternity, and what “circle” is to “center.” This is because it is “proper” for reason to be “diffused” (diffundi, i.e., scattered or spread) about many things, and then to gather from them a single cognition (i.e., unifying the “Many” into a “One”). Pseudo-Dionysius makes a similar point, (De Divinis Nominibus, 7.2) claiming that souls have rationality insofar as they “diffusedly encircle” (diffusiue circueunt) the truth of multiple existent things. Conversely, the intellect considers one simple truth and grasps the cognition of a whole multitude in it.

If science was just logic, and it had to deal with univocal predication, this unifying process would be frustrated.

In proof of which we must consider that when anything is predicated of many things univocally, it is found in each of them according to its proper nature; as animal is found in each species of animal.

Right, yet "health" for a kangaroo is analogically related to "health" for a daffodil. They do not share the same measure. The relation of the term to the predicate is the same though when we want to speak about the health of different organisms in some overarching sense. We do not have an ambiguous term when we say "it is good for all organisms to be healthy."

It is inferred that there exists our world of sense experience, and a reality underlies it. Science has gone a long way in confirming this, showing how our senses mislead us, and only show us the tip of the iceberg.

Ok, but you didn't answer how this "reality" can be inferred "by science," but numbers absolutely cannot be. It seems to me that the empirical sciences only ever deal with phenomena.

Further, can we do physics, cognitive science, or biology without mathematics? More importantly, you haven't given any answer for why or how ratios are useful if they don't *really* apply to or exist in your noumenon. If the noumenal isn't the sort of thing that can be accurately described by number and ratio (we have many things like this in the world of phenomena) then why is it "useful" to describe them that way anyhow? Shouldn't the usefulness of mathematics in science lead us to "infer" that it says something about reality?

It just seems strange to me to appeal to all the ways in which science shows our senses can be misled, when those same sciences often rely on mathematics to point out these illusions, but then to turn around and say that the math you used to discover the illusions (and so to infer their "reality") is itself illusory. And of course any corrections to perception made by "by empirical science" are also discovered through the senses, so if the senses and intellect "mislead us," they're also responsible for correcting this.

It seems that at best you're arguing for nescience: "we can never know if numbers are *really* in the noumena with total certainty." But your positions seems to require actually demonstrating that there is no good reason to infer that ratios/mathematics apply to "things-in-themselves." Having some avenue for skepticism is not enough, people can also doubt that there is any reality that is distinct from appearances (e.g. solipsism, subjective idealism, etc.), but clearly you don't think this is good grounds for accepting that reality is just appearances yourself.

(Note: both noumena [plural] and things-in-themselves imply plurality, number—this is why people who want to go along with Kant's distinction normally speak of simply "a noumenon.")

It is pretty much the central theme of Plato. It's not that reality is cleaved, but that we do not experience reality - only a reflection of it. That's the cave.

Plato makes a distinction between reality and appearances. He does not make a distinction between appearances as "subjectivity," and reality as the "objective/noumenal"—i.e., reality as "things-in-themselves" as set over and against appearances. This Kantian division makes no sense given Plato's philosophy of appearances and images as participation. Kant's view requires the presuppositions of modern representationalism, i.e., that "what we experience" are our own "mental representations of ideas" and that such representations are "what we know" instead of "how we know." The later Platonists allowed that "everything is received in the manner of the receiver," but not that things' appearances are disconnected from what they are (i.e "act follows on being" and "appearing" is an act of the subject of predication).

For instance, Plato's Good is absolute. The absolute is not reality as separated off from appearances. It must encompass all of reality and appearances to be truly absolutely. Thing's appearances are really how they appear. Likewise, the transcendent Good isn't absent from the very finitude it is supposed to transcend. This would make it less than truly transcedent.

It seems like a lot of people, when it comes to philosophy, think "objective" is a synonym for "noumenal." But this is certainly not how the term is employed by many philosophers, and this leads to all sorts of confusions, like the idea that an "objective" goodness or beauty is somehow one that is wholly absent and disconnected from experiences (Sam Harris has this misreading of the Platonic Good in The Moral Landscape for instance). In which case, no wonder such ideas seen farcical. On this misunderstanding they are incoherent, the objective Good must be, by definition, "good for precisely no one." But Platonic eidos (forms), as the term's usual connotations in ancient Greek suggest ("shape," "something seen") are not unrelated to, or absent from, appearances—a reality as set apart from appearance.

I think the word 'reality' is a misnomer here. Chess is something we made up. Would you accept it if people were arguing for the reality of the flying spaghetti monster?

Presumably, the latter is an intentional fiction created to critique religion. It is one thing to claim that Homer's Achilles is a "fictional character." It is another to claim that the Iliad doesn't "really exist" because Homer wrote it. Do airplanes also not exist because they are the invention of man? States? World history? Chess?

I think a view that commits us to claims like: "there are no objective facts about what constitutes a valid move in chess," or "the proposition 'Kasparov is a better chess player than the average preschooler' is one with no truth value because it refers to the "subjective" game of chess," has serious deficits. Does "the Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776" also become subjective because our calendar system is the creation of man? But then temperature would also have to be subjective because it involves both man-made scales and measurement from particular perspectives.

Yeah, why answer a difficult question when we can just engage in question begging? And if everyone just assumes the asserted conclusion is right, this will prevent any skepticism or charges arbitrariness!.

Usually the non-binary response will be an attempt to distinguish different parts of the day instead of collecting it into a single whole.

This works sometimes. I don't think it always does; that is, we cannot reduce thought down to "atomic propositions."

But even if we can, does this mean the higher level statement has no truth value at all?

Of course, there is also the issue of the adequacy of language to thought and experience and the true unity of composites described under one name.

But is this a matter of the univocity of truth or of the ambiguity of language? And is the LEM being rejected if the truth-value is not binary?

Both IMO. Language involve analagous predication because being involves analogy.

I don't see how LEM is directly at stake. LEM is defined in terms of negation and negation and affirmation are contradictories. If we say "it is dark outside" is true, then this entails that it is not "not dark" according to however "dark" is used in the first instance.

"I took a magnifying glass to every part of your vehicle and found a squeaky axle. Therefore I will not drive or trust it."

A fair characterization. But I think the view of truth as related primarily to isolated (often "atomic") propositions has a wide reach even outside of those who go all the way over into deflation. It affects a lot of analytic thought.

Okay, so how would you characterize the view you take exception to?

Here is one based on a class I had on the philosophy of AI:

Truth is something that applies to propositions (and only propositions). All propositions are either true or false. If this causes issues (which it seems it will), this is no problem. All propositions are decomposable into atomic propositions, which are true or false. Knowledge is just affirming more true atomic propositions as respects some subject and fewer false ones. Thus, knowledge can accurately be modeled as a "user" database of atomic propositions as compared to the set of all true atomic propositions.

"Artificial" seems to like the key word to apply here.

Alternatively, there are all the deflationary approaches, which often make some of the same assumptions, particularly that truth is primarily about propositions (or more broadly "how a community uses language.") There is the same issue here of missing the "adequacy of thought to being."

If I understand what you've written, you and I agree that we don't generally know the world as a bunch of propositions.

Exactly, and not all knowledge is discursive knowledge. It's a sad philosophy that has to look at the climax of Dante's Commedia in Canto XXXIII of the Paradisio, his appeals to the inadequacy of language and memory, and say "well he's just sputtering nonsense." And it's just as sad to have to say something like "we can appreciate the words but not its rational content," since the Comedy is one of the very best (IMO the best) instances of philosophy breathed into narrative form.

Plato says something similar in Letter VII. He sort of explains why he uses images, dialogues, and symbolism instead of trying to write something like a dissertation—because what he wants people to understand cannot be communicated that way.

This point of view is very congenial to yours, I would think, since Rödl is doubting whether "p" -- a proposition -- could possibly do the things, all by itself, that formalism says it can. A thinker is required.

Well, according to narrow views of formalism there is very little it can do. It's just the rules, and an AI can do "logic" as well (probably better) than any man. But of course people always end up equivocating on this extremely narrow definition because if that's all logic was it would be completely uninteresting. What we really care about when we read about developments in formal logic is why people think these developments are worthwhile.

Not quite. Think of it in terms of Frege's "force" as equivalent to (one sense of) "assertion". The question is then: How does the "content" (of the force/content distinction) make itself known independently? If "p" is different from "I think p", how exactly does p come to be present to us? This quote from Rödl captures the problem:

I've only read Rödel on Hegel. This is the sort of thing that might get resolved with the distinction between objective and subjective logic, but I don't know how much he runs with the Logics.

The first: Yes.

The second, no. My point is that it is not only or even primarily propositions that are true or false. We have beliefs that can be true or false. Presumably, even people who cannot speak have beliefs. We have theories that get falsified.. We have models that can be more or less true to what they model. Etc.

Propositions cannot be both true and false without qualification. However, we can have propositions that make statements about how true something is to some ideal. "This is a good car." Does this reduce to a binary? I don't think so. Is it simply not truth-apt? I don't think this works either, because a car that won't start is in an important sense not a good car. It isn't true to its purpose.

The same is true for "its dark outside." Darkness is contrary, but the adequacy of thought to being here is contradictory? No doubt it wouldn't make sense to say it is both dark and not-dark out without qualification.

And to say that something is not-black is to say that it is false that it is black. Something cannot be true and false, therefore the true and the false are contradictory:

Something cannot be true and false because nothing can both be and not be anything, in the same way, at the same time, without qualification.

But sentences can be true and false with qualification. Consider: "Ron Artest is good." Well, he was an NBA starter, so if you were talking basketball back in his prime, this is true, he was good. If you're talking other behavior? Well he jumped into the stands to attack a fan who threw a drink at him and attacked some random uninvolved person instead. This seems to qualify as "not good." When it comes to logic, our predicates should be univocal, and this sort of ambiguity should be ruled out.

But even for propositions like: "you had a good day," the truth of this is not reducible to a binary. Sometimes, if asked if we had a good day, we don't really know. Does this mean that there is no truth as to whether or not anyone ever has a good day? That the sentence is not truth-apt? I don't think so.

Okay, that's fair, but ontological truth/falsity as they exist primarily in the intellect. I guess I didn't realize that in the OP you were talking about true/false as states of the intellect. For example, you critique a thesis regarding propositions, and seem to in some way question the LEM:

Well, the problem that I think is most acute is ascribing truth and falsity primarily to propositions. Actually, it seems that in a lot of philosophy they are the only bearers of truth. That's what leads to, IMO, bad conceptualizations of knowledge.

Surely we agree that "p is false" contradicts "p is true."

:up:

Provided the terms are clear. But I suppose my point is that contradiction in this case is used as the lens through which truth as a whole is analyzed. This leads to concepts like "the one true canonical database of all true propositions" and when concepts like this are shown to be flawed, there is a crash into deflation. Truth ends up being either univocal, and contained in "the one true set of propositions," or else entirely relativized (with some appeals to "pragmatism" as a backstop).

I know that sounds absurd, but so much depends on how we construe "assertion," and the long thread on Kimhi a few months back revealed a lot of work to be done on this question.

:rofl: It does. Is the idea here that just thinking something is asserting it? Surely a woman can suspect her husband of cheating, and thereby hold a belief that is either true or false, without having to utter or write down that belief, right?

I have definitely felt stupid and laughed at myself for believing (false) things that I never expressed.

The monist wants to be able to say that there is no disjunction between truth and validity -- that there is something ill-formed or incoherent about "A thinks ~p", as opposed to "A doesn't think p".

Ah, I think I know a good one for this sort of thing. in Metaphysics, IX 10, Aristotle distinguishes between two kinds of knowledge/truth:


-Asytheta: truth as the conformity of thought and speech to reality (whose opposite is falsity); and


-Adiareta, truth as the grasping of a whole, apprehension (whose opposite is simply ignorance).

It might make sense to think about our knowledge of things as "passing back and forth between these two modes." For instance, because they are very complex topics, it took me a lot of reading and reflection to understand "Plotinus' conception of divine freedom" or "Hegel's dialectic." But now, having studied them, I can also consider them as unified wholes and understand or vet propositions that reference them without having to "unpack" all that I know about them. And it seems to me that the better one understands something the more one is able to consider it as an undivided whole (of course, the thing in question being more of a true unity matters too).

From my notes on similar ideas:

In Ad Thalassium 60, St. Maximus the Confessor argues for the superiority of unified and direct experience, as opposed to discursive reasoning/knowing. Similarly, in Philosophiae Consolationis (4.6), Boethius argues that reason is to the intellect as time is to eternity, and what “circle” is to “center.” This is because it is “proper” for reason to be “diffused” (diffundi, i.e., scattered or spread) about many things, and then to gather from them a single cognition (i.e., unifying the “Many” into a “One”). Pseudo-Dionysius makes a similar point, (De Divinis Nominibus, 7.2) claiming that souls have rationality insofar as they “diffusedly encircle” (diffusiue circueunt) the truth of multiple existent things. Conversely, the intellect considers one simple truth and grasps the cognition of a whole multitude in it.

So, to this question:

This is the problem from Parmenides that Kimhi begin T&B with, you may recall: How can we think that which is not?

Discursive knowledge involves combining, concatenating, estimating, etc. This is a "feebler" sort of knowledge. It is possible to combine things inappropriately, etc.

We can chalk this up to finitude. You can explain it in naturalistic terms too. For perception to occur, signals in the form of various types of energy in the environment must be transformed into electrochemical signals within/between neurons before becoming “present” in phenomenal awareness. This transformation of signals is not lossless. Organism’s sensory systems must be extremely selective about what information they take in from the environment. Taking in even a small fraction of the total entropy an organism is exposed to in the ambient environment would cause it to be overwhelmed by entropy.

To see why, consider the total number of molecules interacting with the surface of an organism at any given moment. Even leaving aside the difficulties in being able to develop sense organs sensitive enough to take in all this information, it is clear that sensitivity to the environment at this level of granularity would require a massive neurological apparatus just to encode the incoming data, let alone sift through it for relevance. Thus, which signals are allowed to pass from the environment into an organism's nervous system must be curated such that most information does not pass into the nervous system. Representationalists are correct that this facet of sensory systems introduces a great deal of bias into perception, just not about some of their other assumptions IMO.

Terrance Deacon has some good stuff on this and the semiotics he (and everyone else in biology) uses is derived from the Scholastic Doctrina Signorum: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/281155120_Steps_to_a_science_of_biosemiotics

Thinking cannot be dependent for its success on anything that is external to it.

Maybe I'm misreading it, but this seems implausible. My success at diagnosing a disease as a doctor depends on the quality of my diagnostic equipment, not just my own thought. My success at correctly reading of the letters on the chart at the optometrists depends on the curvature of my eye's lens, etc. These are all external to thought.

So yes, the distinction you're making between contraries and contradictories is extremely important. The essential unity of the thinker with the thought, the knower with the world, can only be shown by rejecting, as Kimhi does, the idea that a proposition can be true or false in the absence of some context of assertion.

Agreed, although I don't know if "context of assertion" is the right framing. Beliefs can be true or false without being needing to be "asserted."

Are we sure that thought and being exist in the sort of relationship that needs to be "conformed" or "adequated"?

Well, presumably we need to be able to explain false beliefs and false statements. There is adequacy in the sense of "believing the Sun rotates around the Earth" being, in important ways, inadequate.

Can we paint a plausible picture that is at bottom monistic?

Monistic in what sense?

But I don't see Thomas saying that the true and the false are not contradictories, nor do I see Aristotle saying that. Classically, true/false are contradictories:

What about the quote from the OP?

I answer that, True and false are opposed as contraries, and not, as some have said, as affirmation and negation [i.e. contradictory]. In proof of which it must be considered that negation neither asserts anything nor determines any subject, and can therefore be said of being as of not-being, for instance not-seeing or not-sitting. But privation asserts nothing, whereas it determines its subject, for it is "negation in a subject," as stated in Metaph. iv, 4: v. 27; for blindness is not said except of one whose nature it is to see. Contraries, however, both assert something and determine the subject, for blackness is a species of color. Falsity asserts something, for a thing is false, as the Philosopher says (Metaph. iv, 27), inasmuch as something is said or seems to be something that it is not, or not to be what it really is. For as truth implies an adequate apprehension of a thing, so falsity implies the contrary.

https://www.newadvent.org/summa/1017.htm#article4

opposite assertions cannot be true at the same time” (Metaph IV 6 1011b13–20)

Yes, something cannot be black and not-black, just as a sentence cannot be true and not-true. This is because being involves contradictory opposition, as does affirmation and negation. For instance, opposing universal and particular assertions would involve negations of each other (i.e. the square of opposition).

Obviously, the truth of a statement often depends on its context. "Peanuts are healthy" is true as respects most men, and false as respects the person with the peanut allergy. Truth and falsity are mutually exclusive in cases where the truth (or falsity) of a statement would both affirm and deny being without qualification (being and non-being are contradictory).

Thomas also says that univocal predication is proper to the discipline of logicians. If you're building a syllogism, then the truth or falsity of your premises vis-a-vis predication should involve contradiction. It would be problematic if they didn't.

I always assumed Thomas's point here was pointing back to Avicenna and ontological truth. There is also truth as adequacy of being to the divine intellect (truth most perfectly) addressed in the prior question (16).

Perhaps you need to define what you mean by "contrary."

Truth represents a perfect adequacy between the intellect and being. Falsity is the absence of this adequacy. If any inadequacy makes a belief or statement false, that seems to be quite problematic. For one, it would mean that all or almost all of the "laws" of the natural sciences are false, along with our scientific claims.

A theory or hypothesis might not perfectly conform to reality, but this doesn't make it completely inadequate either.

Pretty sure you can relate this to the Square of Opposition as well. For instance, "all elephants have big ears” cannot be true at the same time as “no elephants have big ears," but they can both be false. Whereas with "all elephants have big ears" and "some elephants do not have big ears" one must be true and the other false.

This distinction seems more Kantian than Platonic to me. I think "noumenal" might be a better tern here, i.e. "a thing that exists independently of human senses." At least, Plato himself would reject such a cleavage in reality, as well as existence without any edios (quiddity, intelligibility, form).

Claiming things are real runs into all sorts of prickly problems, though. Have you peeked beyond the veil and seen it was so?

Have you looked on both sides to see if the veil itself is real? I am not sure if you can have a "reality versus appearances" dichotomy if there is only appearances. If there are just appearances, then appearances are reality. But then how do we justify the claim that there is a reality that is completely isolated from appearances?

On the other hand, if we can "infer" the "'reality' behind the veil," then why can't we likewise infer that this reality includes numbers?

This is, BTW, Hegel's critique of Kant. Kant himself is dogmatic. He doesn't justify the assumption that perceptions are of something, that they are in some sense "caused" by noumena (although of course, "cause" itself is phenomenological and so suspect). He just presupposes it and goes from there (and look, he just happens to deduce Aristotle's categories, convenient!). The Logics are pretty much Hegel's attempt to start over without this assumption.

Math is a very useful way of describing relations and ratios between things.

But then wouldn't these objective/noumenal things need to be the sort of things that have ratios? If they don't have ratios, why is it useful to describe them so? If they do, then numbers (multitude and magnitude) seem to apply to the noumena.

Hmm.. I'm inclined to say that there are indeed no objective facts related to chess. Chess tells us nothing about this underlying reality.

But presumably it tells us something about the reality of chess. This is why I don't know about making "objective" and "noumenal" synonyms. For one, it seems likely to me that many people will find a use for the former while rejecting the assumptions that make the latter meaningful. Second, we wouldn't want to have to be committed to the idea that facts about chess, or the game itself, are illusory.

Sort of besides the point though.

I'm actually kind of curious what passages of Plato this refers to.

Platonism in many areas is lower case "p" platonism, which tends to be only ancillary related to Platonism. For instance, :

At least according to the SEP article here, (2) is platonism:

Platonism is the view that there exist such things as abstract objects — where an abstract object is an object that does not exist in space or time and which is therefore entirely non-physical and non-mental.

This could apply to Plato in some sense, but you'd really need a lot of caveats. Plato's metaphysics works on the idea of "vertical" levels to reality. Forms are "more real" they aren't located in some sort of space out of spacetime. But at the same time, even for Plato and the ancient and medieval Platonists, the Forms aren't absent from the realm of appearances. The reason medieval talk of God can be so sensuous without giving offense is because they thought all good, even the good of what merely appears to be good, is still a participation in/possession of the Good.

So, the world of the senses and spacetime would be deeply related to the Forms, not isolated from them. However, I am not super familiar with platonism in contemporary philosophy of mathematics.

Just as electrons and planets exist independently of us, so do numbers and sets. And just as statements about electrons and planets are made true or false by the objects with which they are concerned and these objects’ perfectly objective properties, so are statements about numbers and sets. Mathematical truths are therefore discovered, not invented.

I know this isn't your definition, but I would suggest a modification to just:

"Platonism about mathematics (or mathematical platonism) is the metaphysical view that there are abstract mathematical objects whose existence is not dependent on us and our language, thought, and practices."

"Independent" might suggest that the two don't interact, but it seems obvious that they must for platonism to be an interesting thesis. The whole second part is problematic in that it seems to assume that "statements" are also independent of us (and true or false independent of us), and I am not sure if all mathematical platonists would like to be committed to those implied premises. It seems to require being a platonist about "statements" in order to be a platonist about any mathematical objects. But, at least for me, "threeness exists without humans around" seems a lot more plausible than "sentences exist without humans around."

I am inclined to argue that maths do not 'exist' in any objective sense.

Math is a product of the human mind, and a very useful for modeling reality for human purposes. It's a way of describing ratios and relations between things. The actual objective nature of such relations seems inaccessible to humans though.

Well, my turn to ask for a definition: what does "objective" mean here? I've noticed it tends to get used in extremely diverse ways. I assume this is not "objective" in the same sense that news is said to be "more or less objective?"

As a follow-up, I would tend to think that the game of chess does not exist independently from the human mind. Chess depends on us; we created it. However, are the rules of chess thus not objective? Are there no objective facts about what constitutes a valid move in chess?

I suppose this gets at the need for a definition.

Isn't it easier then to accept that mathematics does not exist objectively, and is simply a very useful tool conceived by the human mind?

But isn't the follow up question: "why is it useful?" Not all of our inventions end up being useful. In virtue of what is mathematics so useful? Depending on our answer, the platonist might be able to appeal to Occam's razor too. A (relatively) straight-forward explanation for "why is math useful?" is "because mathematical objects are real and instantiated in the world."

This also helps to explain mathematics from a naturalist perspective vis-a-vis its causes. What caused us the create math? Being surrounded by mathematical objects. Why do we have the cognitive skills required to do math? Because math is all around the organism, making the ability to do mathematics adaptive.

1. Human beings exist entirely within spacetime.
2. If there exist any abstract mathematical objects, then they do not exist in spacetime. Therefore, it seems very plausible that:
3. If there exist any abstract mathematical objects, then human beings could not attain knowledge of them. Therefore,
4. If mathematical platonism is correct, then human beings could not attain mathematical knowledge.
5. Human beings have mathematical knowledge. Therefore,
6. Mathematical platonism is not correct.

I think the platonist response would be that premise 2 is false. Mathematical objects exist in spacetime. There is twoness everywhere there are two of something (e.g. in binary solar systems). Premise two seems to imply that any transcendent, Platonic form is absent from what it transcends. Yet this is not how Plato saw things. The Good, for instance, is involved in everything that ever even appears to be good. Plus, my understanding is that many mathematical platonists (lower case p) are immanent realists, along the lines of Aristotle. So, numbers exist precisely where they are instantiated (in space-time). A Hegelian theory would similarly still allow that numbers exist "in history."

I will just note that the path from the elimination of analogy vis-a-vis goodness and beauty to total equivocity (extreme relativism or nihilism) is quite similar. Philosophy first removes the option of analogy. It then discovers that a single univocal measure of goodness, truth, or beauty is seemingly impossible. Faced with this result, it has a "slide into multiplicity" and produces a multitude of isolated truths, goods, and beauties, with each varying by culture, individual, or even context.

"Philosophy as therapy," has always interested me. There is this neat New Yorker article on it. It would be interesting to me if anyone had ever tried to set up a retreat with this in mind.

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-inquiry/when-philosophers-become-therapists

But then I've been reading about Patristic philosophy, particularly from Syria and Egypt, because this is probably one of the key eras where philosophy is practiced as a sort of therapy on a large scale.



The Philokalia is another great example here, although obviously not focused on the laity.

Superdeterminism isn't really an interpretation in quantum foundations, like Pilot-Wave or multiple worlds is. Some interpretations are sometimes said to be superdeterministic (e.g. retro-causality, Many Worlds, etc., depends on how you define things though) but the term more often refers to a "theory without a theory," i.e., explaining different sorts of experiments related to entanglement without positing any overarching interpretation of QM.

The benefit here, if you want to champion "common sense" views is that many theories that might fix your "non-conmmmon sense problems," also say some pretty wild things. And you don't want that if you're a champion of common sense, so you remove the part you want and reject the rest.

The difficulty here is that this is not really an explanation or interpretation, so much as a premise just being asserted because it is "more common sense." Of course, what is often meant by this "closer to the classical picture," and we should also question if a view that took so long to emerge is really common sense or not.

Then Superdeterminists say "yeah but maybe it still works classically, but the reason we're getting the experimental result we're seeing is because *everything in the universe has conspired to trick us into thinking QM is true instead of some type of classical physics*."

:up:, although sometimes the term gets applied to less spurious theories.

One way I've seen it framed is this:

Lots of experiments, particularly modified Wigner's Friend experiments done with photons, seem to suggest that one of:
Locality;
Free Choice; and
The existence of a single set of observations all can agree upon

...must go.

But likely, two of them need to go, or perhaps all three. "Free choice" sounds like the easy one to get rid of. "Ok, but we don't believe in some sort of uncaused free will, easy choice." Except that's not what free choice is. It just refers to the experimenters' choice in making measurements, which can be perfectly "deterministic." To reject this is to say "somehow, through some mysterious mechanism, the universe is set up 'just-so' so that our measurements and observations always correspond to what appears to be non-locality. But really it's because what happens inside an experimenter is somehow causally related (in a directly relevant sense) to whatever their measuring, before they measure anything.

For instance, the spin of a photon you want to measure remotely in a lab 300 miles away, which you didn't even know existed a second ago, is going to determine which property you choose to measure.

Is there a distinction in quantum theory between "nothing" and "nothing-ness?"

The questions: "why existence?" "why the singularity?" or "why cosmic inflation?" is, pace your invocation of "theoretical physicist" (who I am pretty sure does not share your view), and the opinions of most cosmologists, not a "pseudo-question" but something people spend a lot of time theorizing about.

An appeal to physics does not make the answer obvious, certainly not in the way physics can provide solid answers for "why does solid water float in liquid water," or "why are lipids hydrophobic."

Wilzek isn't talking about nothing there, he is talking about the "metric field," space-time.

I have read a bunch of Wilzek's stuff and I have never seen him slip into Davies' unfortunate mistake of trying to explain the existence of existence in terms of quantum fluctuations.

Saying (relatively) empty space-time is unstable is not equivalent with saying nothing, an absence of being, is unstable. The "nothing" in question is most definetly a something. As Wilzek says, "the void weighs."

It would be strange indeed if physics, the science of mobile being, could tell us something about non-being.

You've mentioned you don't really understand this stuff well, and it shows. Might I recommend perhaps letting go of the rigid commitment to what "science says," until you get a lay of the land. Unless this is supposed to be joke?

Well no, not really. We have evidence and studies for this unlike religion. As for what consciousness is, it's an emergent property of the brain. There is no hard problem to solve here.

Stuff like this kinda makes me question the use of philosophy at times, like trying to complicate matters thatare already solved while offering nothing useful to act on. Science may have started off as such but clearly has come far and distinguished itself since then.

Because, of course there is a problem, it's literally called the "Hard Problem of Conciousness," which cognitive scientists bring up all the time. It has not been "solved." Nor has a satisfactory explanation of emergence, or consensus on if it even really exists, been accepted by most scientists and philosophers. You can find entire academic tomes dedicated to emergence, and many (e.g. the Routledge Handbook) will have to spend hundreds of pages on articles dealing with vagaries and contradictory theories precisely because it isn't something that is "solved."

Nor is "x is emergent" particularly explanatory or unproblematic. What does it mean for something to be "emergent?" Weak emergence as mere data compression, or strong emergence? (And does the latter require getting "something from nothing?" Does it make whatever emerges in some way "fundemental?")

These are all questions scientists and philosophers are still exploring. See: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/properties-emergent/

When scientists work on these issues they end up having to do philosophy. There is no hard line between "philosophy of biology," and biology at any rate. "What is life?" or "are plant and animal species 'real?'" are questions biologists try to answer for instance.

Philosophers sometimes err by straying into areas that they don't understand, but this is equally true for people who work in the natural sciences. E.g., Sapolsky put out an entire book on the "science" of free will, which flops back and forth between bigism and smallism as it suits his argument, and he seems to think that action must be "uncaused" to be free or that any self-determining process must break down into self-determining "parts." There are lots of scientific citations in the book (including lots of unreplicatable, highly questionable stuff, such as the "Lady Macbeth effect,") and he's a scientist, but it isn't good scientific/philosophical reasoning, more an ad hoc mashup of datapoints said to fit an unclear thesis.

This is incredibly common in more theoretical scientific works because you often don't get taught about good argument in undergrad or grad programs in the sciences (at least I didn't). So a lot of popular science seems to mistake lining up an avalanche of citations and referring to how they could fit/be explained by theoretical these, for good argument. This is how you end up with multiple different people who claim to have "solved the Hard Problem" pushing incommensurate theories that nonetheless use all the same landmark studies as their datapoints.

My quote had mentioned the language of "laws of nature." There is also a great deal of debate in the empirical sciences about how to think about these or how to think of causation more generally. There is not consensus here, nor any sort of "common sense," unproblematic definition of what the "laws of nature" are and how they work. And, like I said, it's a language inherited from a theological context and a certain vision of God; the early modern scientists who created our model didn't separate religion and science in the same way.

It's an interesting question for sure. But against the "information requires consciousness," view we might consider the ways in which information theory informs the biology of algae, viruses, and protists, who I am not sure we want to count as "conscious," even if their behavior is certainly "goal-directed," or "teleonomic."

Plus, if one buys into something like computational theory of mind (long the dominant paradigm in cognitive science) or integrated information theory, then it would seem that information has to come prior to consciousness (else we have a circular explanation).

Of course, pancomputationalism is also very popular with physicists, and this would seem to cut the legs out of CTM, in that literally everything is a computer in some sense, making the brain's "being a computer" not much of an explanation of consciousness.

There is another circularity here. Turing comes up with the Turing Machine model with human computers in mind. Back in his day a "computer" was a person you paid to do calculations. The model is based on what that person needs to do to calculate. The "states" of the Turing Machine are "states of mind" originally. So, we end up explaining consciousness (or all of physics) in terms of a concept whose most popular explanation has a sort of Cartesian homunculus right in the middle of its paradigmatic explanation.

The Shannon-Weaver model of communications also (often) has an implicit Cartesian homunculus in the "destination" that understands any signal in many contexts as well.

IDK, it's a tricky area. I think that the solution is likely to involve seeing that life, consciousness, and goal directedness are not binaries, but exist on a sliding scale (contrary opposition, not contradictory) and that semiotic relations need not involved an "interpreter" just an "interpretant" (e.g. a ribosome doesn't "read.")

Which reminds me of a good quote on this sort of issue:

If we could ask the medieval scientist 'Why, then, do
you talk as if [inanimate objects like rocks had desires]?' he might (for he was always a dialectician) retort with the counter-question, 'But do you intend your language about laws and obedience any more literally than I intend mine about kindly enclyning? Do you really believe that a falling stone is aware of a directive issued to it by some legislator and feels either a moral or a prudential obligation to conform?' We should then have to admit that both ways of expressing are metaphorical. The odd thing is that ours is the more anthropomorphic of the two. To talk as if inanimate bodies had a homing instinct is to bring them no nearer to us than the pigeons; to talk as if they could ' obey laws' is to treat them like men and even like citizens.

But though neither statement can be taken literally, it
does not follow that it makes no difference which is used. On the imaginative and emotional level it makes a great difference whether, with the medievals, we project upon the universe our strivings and desires, or with the moderns, our police-system and our traffic regulations. The old language continually suggests a sort of continuity between merely physical events and our most spiritual aspirations.


C.S. Lewis - The Discarded Image

Of course, theology has had a lasting impact on scientism here, because the move from the universe as an organic whole to one defined by "laws" that are inscrutable, and some initial efficient cause, is not what you get when you simply "strip away superstition," but is rather Reformation theology, whose influence remains potent even in the hands of avowed atheists centuries later.

What's always funny to me is how the classical Newtonian view is held up as the paradigm of "common sense intuitions."

Is it? It's sometimes claimed that classical mechanics "works perfectly" for medium sized objects, and that problems only show up at very large or very small scales.

Except it doesn't. Right from the beginning gravity was an occult force acting at a distance, which in turn had to make "natural laws" active casual agents in the world "shoving the planets into their places like schoolboys" as Hegel puts it. The deficiencies of such a model of causation are well highlighted by Hume. Then electromagnetism added another occult force that didn't fit into the "everything is little billiard balls model."

Nor could/has the mechanistic model, where the billiard ball is the paradigmatic example of all physical interactions, been able to explain life or consciousness, nor was it able to offer up theories of self-organization, except via a deficient view of organisms as simply intricate "clockwork." Nor, in it's classical forms, can it incorporate information and the successes of information theory. We have suggested a long hangover of "Cartesian anxiety," because the classical model required early modern thinkers to excise consciousness, ideas, and freedom from the "physical realm."

I think the "anti-metaphysical movement's" greatest success has been to keep us stuck, frozen with a defunct 19th century metaphysics as the default, such that it becomes "common sense," to most through our education system. But surely it is cannot be "common sense" in any overarching sense, since it differs dramatically from the more organic-focused physics that dominated for two millennia prior to the creation of the classical model.

From what I see it can’t, especially in this case where the interpretations of quantum physics aren’t even close to the math that is taking place. They’re watered down guesses to explain the math, which is the most solid one ever. But since philosophers commenting on this can’t do the math behind it their works about what it means are effectively useless.

I think this is an unwarranted assumption. Most philosophers of physics are physicists by education and work experience. The ones with philosophy PhDs often also hold undergraduate, or often advanced degrees in physics as well. The top programs for philosophy of biology, physics, etc. often allow candidates to get a masters in the field they are studying now, and of course one can learn the mathematics involved without going through a degree program.

Plus, knowledge of mathematics is not often a limit on contributions to the field. Einstein, largely regarded as the greatest philosopher of physics in the 20th century, had trouble with the math used in SR/GR. He sought help and got it, but he was obviously still crucial to the development of the theory (and obviously so were folks like Robb, the "Euclid of relativity" working more on the math).

Most of the work in quantum foundations—the various interpretations—has been done by physicists at any rate. Philosophers have some important things to contribute though. For instance, the arguments to eternalism from various interpretations of the Andromeda Paradox and Twin Paradoxes, simply involve convoluted reasoning and conflations.

By studying particulars as particulars you get to the unifying stuff.

Right, that's exactly what I said.

Because it is. It’s also funny that you cited two of the weirdos who back it. Wheeler thinks we manifest the universe with consciousness, which we don’t and as a quantum physicist he should know better. Penrose also has wooed theories about consciousness despite what we know about the brain today.

This is an inaccurate description of the participatory universe. At any rate, was the problem with Consciousness Causes Collapse that von Neumann and Wigner didn't know math?

The theory is hard to believe, but it's not prima facie implausible when compared to Many Worlds and the idea that everything happens, nor does MWI seem particularly implausible compared to the premises involved in the superdeterminist view invoked as "saving common sense intuitions."

In a certain sense, the math isn't accurate. The promoters of MWI often stress that their interpretation has the benefit of remaining true to the Schrodinger Equation instead of having to work in "post hoc" collapse. But one has to have a very particular view of mathematics and its relationship to the sciences to claim that having to introduce something that is observed in every case is a knock against a theory.

Likewise, claims of eternalism by physicists, which are incredibly popular in the popular physics literature, often presented as "what science says is true," are going to draw in philosophers because these aren't empirically testable claims and are largely supported by assumptions about how mathematics relates to nature. And if these go a step further into making claims about "free will," that's another place where good philosophical reasoning will be wanted.

I feel like every new discovery in the field gets muddled by thousands of people who try to run away with it and draw conclusions that it's not saying.

There are quacks and charlatans who use quantum weirdness to push all sorts of nonsense. There are also lots of people who try to label the work of serious scholars as falling into this former category as a way to discredit them and push their own agenda.

For instance, Sabine Hossenfelder portrays retro-causality (and so models like the crystalizing block) as a sort of garble created by uniformed hucksters. It isn't. Hucksters might promote it, but the key work in this area was by John Wheeler and Rodger Penrose, two of the biggest names in the field, and people take it seriously.

It's also a bit strange because Hossenfelder wants "common sense" interpretations of QM, and retro-causality actually achieves this by making the world both local and deterministic.

The confusion is not the result of people doing "bad science." The fact is that there are at least 10 major interpretations of QM and none have majority support. Further, prior consensus was largely enforced by a sort of dogmatic doctrine against work in quantum foundations, including attacks on it as "unscientific." Adam Becker's "What is Real?" has a good introduction on Bell's work on locality and the general climate of intimidation that existed in this period, with people being told explicitly that it was "career suicide" to engage in certain sorts of speculation, or having their jobs threatened, despite this work later becoming extremely influential. Tegmark relates a similar story of intimidation in his "Our Mathematical Universe."

I'm pretty sure physics doesn't really have anything to say about realism, anti-realism, or idealism, but that hasn't stopped folks from trying.

There are many different types of realism. Local realism involves the claim that things indefinitely far away from each other cannot instantaneously affect one another (influence moving faster than the speed of light). People have learned to parrot "but information cannot be transmitted superluminally!" as if this obviously makes entanglement straightforwardly unproblematic. Needless to say, the pioneers of relativity theory, Einstein chief among them, did not think this was in any way obvious.

Coverage of these debates tends towards the consensus that, while Bohr was right and Einstein wrong about "spooky action at a distance," Einstein was right about this being somewhat of a "problem" requiring more attention. Bohr's commitment to a certain sort of philosophy led him to paper over the problem, which in turn discouraged work like Bell's on his famous inequalities.

I don't know how physics couldn't inform philosophical debates or vice versa. It cannot solve them, but empirical examples often play a major role in metaphysics. Physics seems to tell us something about part-whole relations, information transfer, etc.

Physics itself was long a part of philosophy. It's the study of "mobile being," natural philosophy. Plenty of scientists argue there is no clear line between science and philosophy, and I'd tend to agree with them. The idea that the two are totally discrete is just one very particular form of philosophy that was dominant in the mid-20th century, one with thankfully seems to be dying.

The desire to build a firewall between philosophy and science isn't lacking in some good motivation. The logical positivists grew up in the shadow of "Aryan physics" in Germany and "socialist genetics" in Stalin's USSR. But I'd argue that what they really needed was a better philosophy of science that could show them why these fields were not proper scientific subjects.

This problem hasn't gone away. Today we have people positing sui generis "feminist epistemologies" or "African epistemologies," etc. Different sciences for different sorts of people or locations.

The sad thing is, there was already a fine answer to this problem that had been popular for millennia. Aristotle lays it out in the Posterior Analytics and other places. Science deals with per se predications, what is essential to things, not per accidens. This rules out organizing the sciences based on relation (or time/space) because these can involve and infinite number of predications and we cannot consider and infinite number of predicates in a finite time for the same reason that one cannot cross an infinite distance in a finite time at a finite speed. So there can be no science of "biology as studied by men named John" and no "chemistry inside the bodies of cats on the island of Iceland."

Further, there are very many particulars. For example, 200 million insects for each man on Earth. This means science cannot progress by studying particulars as particulars. Rather, it must identify the unifying principles at work in things. For instance, we learn about flight through the principle of lift (and others) not by studying each individual instance of flight or cells in the wings of flying animals.

I think self-preservation is a drive of nature.

No doubt, but other ends often loom larger. Stinging often kills bees, and yet they sting for the good of the hive. Male spiders, male praying mantis, etc. mate even though this generally means being eaten. Parts of organisms, with their own degree of form and drive to homeostasis, often self-terminate for the good of the whole, and this shows up in individuals in some superorganisms or in holobionts composed of multiple species.

Reproduction and the protection of young is another area where it is common to see even extreme levels of risk taken in pursuit of a goal that lies external to the organism.

Whitehead, in "The Function of Reason" speaks of the three drives:
To live
To live well
To live better

The modern evolutionary synthesis has tended to only focus on reproduction, in part because it is easier to study gene frequencies and model them. Part of what makes extended evolutionary synthesis so fascinating is that it attempts to avoid this reductionism (which is in part only justified by the methodological limits of its time, and then a dogmatic commitment to a particular mechanistic view of nature).

Isn't is sui generis in the sense that it forces us to conceive of "our benefit" in a non-egoistic manner? After all, egoists don't balk at dieting to lose weight in the way they balk at martyrdom.

I don't think so. Any involvement in a common good or deep identification with institutions (e.g. the family, the church, the state, one's workplace, etc.) involves transcending egoism to some degree. One of the reasons the egoist "misses out" on things that are to his benefit is because he cannot fully participate in these common goods.

The good of a "good marriage" or of a deep commitment to the church or one's vocation, can be a key element of human flourishing. The egoist cannot fully participate in these goods. They might get married, but their marriage has to be based around power struggles, manipulation, and quid pro quo arrangements.

Actual participation in the common good, as opposed to merely receiving individual benefits from participation, is not a binary status. People can identify with (even love) and participate in institutions more or less fully. Likewise, Aristotle'sfriendship of the good doesn't require that we don't get the benefits of the friendship of pleasure or the friendship of utility (Ethics Book VIII), but rather than we get the extra benefits of the higher level, which transcends the lower (up to the "giving birth in beauty" of the Symposium—and such "giving birth in beauty" is part of "being like God.")

I agree that we are mistaken in thinking that egoism is the default or natural position, but it does have a basis in human experience.

No doubt. So too does drunkenness, wrathfulness, sullenness, gluttony, licentiousness, adultery, murder, etc.

Egoism is atomization; yet goodness always relates to the whole, pointing to the One as against the slide into the Many.

That's Plato's whole point, that it is the pursuit of what is truly good, not what simply appears to be good or is said to be good, which allows us to transcend current beliefs and desire—to not be ruled over by instinct, appetites, passions, and circumstance (or to be relatively less so).

Egoism is a sort of default that must be transcended. It is the sickness that prevails when good health is not fostered and nurtured. And this jives very well with the Orthodox notion of sin as disease and the Fall as a sort of cosmic corruption, a web of interconnecting, self-reinforcing lines of pathology.

Yes, but the univocity is determined by egoism and the attendant interpretation of "our benefit."

Perhaps. I think there is a sort of positive feedback loop here. Univocity cuts off the option of understanding goodness analogically, which in turn makes it harder to see a coherent way out of egoism, while at the same time egoism makes one blind to the possibility of analogy. A negative side effect of the intense drive towards specialization in philosophy is that there isn't much focus on the ways ideas from different areas of philosophy interact.

This is part of what makes modern ethical treatments of the classical tradition often deficient. They are deflating them out the gate because the moral philosopher doesn't want to mess around with metaphysics and philosophy of nature, and yet for Aristotle notions of virtue ultimately tie back to metaphysics, the "queen of the sciences."

So, I see the two coming from different angles and reinforcing one another. Whereas this is a very different view from the idea that the One is also the Good itself (e.g., https://www.newadvent.org/summa/1006.htm)

There will be more of us once we unveil the new Thanksgaining mascot, Pizza the Hutt. People will drop their dry turkey in no time.

Truly, we should forget the prayers and thanks and just fully embrace our secular bourgeoisie culture. Rename the damn thing "Thanksgaining." The sales start on Thursday now anyhow, and retail workers have to show up before they've had time to eat any turkey either way.

What should we be thankful for? Getting to gain!

I figure we give people until 2 or 3 in the afternoon to finish gorging themselves on the cornucopia provided by Monsanto and co. and then it's time for shopping! Remember to bring the pepper spray in case someone tries to take the last TV or Xbox you want. :rofl:

Sure, I just think the extreme cases are useful to demonstrate how it is implausible, from the perspective of almost any ethics, that we always benefit most from extending our own lives. For another thing, dramatic calorie restriction is pretty much the best way to ensure life extension in organisms, and yet very few would want to say we benefit from starving ourselves to get a few extra years of old age, even if we are "gaining years" at the cost of fleeting satiety.

But if we can have proper goals that trump life extension, then it is to our benefit to pursue them, and this can hold for greater sacrifices as well. This can mean self-sacrifice involving death, just as the bee prefers to sting and die rather than to flee the hive. The drive of beings to maintain their own form is absolute nowhere in nature.

We might say that it benefits us to have things we care about so much that we are willing to make such sacrifices. The egoist is, in a certain sense, "missing out" in their inability to so fully identify with things that transcend them.

Nor is the case of dying in this way really sui generis. We often take on all sorts of risk and suffering to accomplish goals. The duties that come with being a parent, learning to ride a bike, learning to read, starting an exercise regime or diet, etc. can all be unpleasant and risky, and yet it seems hard to claim that this entails that they cannot be to our benefit. The daily self-reported "happiness" of parents of young children is significantly lower on average, for years out, but I don't think this makes having children necessarily not to one's benefit.

It's the demand for a univocal measure of the good that leads towards such rigid pronouncements as "it is never to our benefit to do something that kills us."

I think it particularly makes sense from the perspective of virtue ethics, but I think it will make sense in almost any ethics.

Our lives are finite, so we are not talking death versus immortality, but "dying now" versus "dying somewhat later." To highlight the absurdity that it is "always better to die later," we need only consider the limit situation where everyone and everything we cherish is destroyed, subject to great suffering, etc. and we get just 5 more seconds of life, versus our simply dying, with none of these consequences, 5 second earlier. I don't think anyone wants to be committed to the idea that we should let our children be tortured so that we can take a couple more breaths, or even that those extra few breaths would benefit us.

There are two distinct crises, occurring centuries after Origen is dead. The first takes place around 400, during sort of the Patristic golden age and involves a lot of famous characters. The second a century later IIRC. Saint Jerome for instance starts off endorsing Origen and universalism, but ends up attacking some Origenist positions. St. John Chrysostom gets removed from being Archbishop of Constantinople and exiled to Anatolia, in part because he was protecting Origenist monks (although really more because of his clashed with the Empress and her camp). St. Augustine is largely absent from this one because Origenism is mainly popular in the Levant and Egypt, not so much out in Latin western Africa where he is.

The problem with Origen centers around his more Platonist speculations. It would be inaccurate to call them Neoplatonic, because Origen is an older contemporary and potential inspiration for Plotinus, but rather "late middle Platonism." But Neoplatonism might rightly be thought of as in a sense repaganizing Jewish and Christian (including Gnostic) advances in Platonism.

It's worth pointing out that Origen was a critic of the Gnostics, as was Clement, although there is also a lot of overlap because much of Gnosticism became orthodoxy. Pagels argues that John is a "gnostic gospel," which might be a bit much, but there is something to the idea.

A literal 'sky father', then. Origen's writings are voluminous and take some background to understand, but it seems to me he was on the right side of the argument.

I think this probably a gross oversimplification given the characters involved. The main objection I've seen brough up is to the preexistence of human souls and the idea of the Fall as a "fall into corporeality" chiefly. So, the issues at play are the goodness of creation (no doubt corrupted and ruled over by the corrupt archons and demons), and the idea that humans, having achieved the beatific vision and beholding the perfection of God, can decide that something else looks more appealing. I am most familiar with St. Maximus' rebuttal's of these arguments, but the Cappadocians take them up too. The problem is that, if man can achieve theosis and beatification and then fall once, what stops him from doing it again? This also seems to introduce an element of arbitrariness into perfected freedom that is at odds with much classical philosophy.

The other thing is that the views on creation and the fall also tend to make the body a "prison" of sorts, whereas the resurrection of Revelations (less accepted in Origen's time) involves the resurrection of the body. Then, in some places, Origen seems to play around with reincarnation, another "no-go" for otherwise sympathetic voices.

But the issue wasn't so much Origen's speculations, as much later partisans pushing them further and trying to transform them into doctrine and dogma.

Okay, but why? How is it to her benefit? J is obviously going to respond by pointing out that one who ceases to exist can no longer positively benefit.

Because it's generally bad to have one's grandchildren die. The one act, saving the kids, might entail dying. Which is to be preferred? The claim that it is simply impossible to rightly prize any goals more than temporarily extending one's (necessarily finite) mortal life seems like one that it will be very hard to justify.

"A society grows great when men plant trees in whose shade they know they will never sit," is not meant to be a proverb on the benefits of old men falling into delusions about what is truly to their benefit for instance.

"They conquered him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony; love for life did not deter them from death" (Revelation 12:11).

Exactly. As St. Maximus says:

“Food is not evil – but gluttony is.
Childbearing is not evil – but fornication is.
Money is not evil – but avarice is.
Glory is not evil – but vainglory is.
Indeed, there is no evil in existing things – but only in their misuse."

Knowing what’s best for me, on a much stricter sense, is an internal necessary truth, carries the implication of an internal authority alone, the escape from which is, of course, quite impossible. Being human, and given a specific theoretical exposition, yes, individuals always know what is best for himself, and he certainly knows what is true, because he alone is the cause of what he knows as best for him.

So what do you think of Plato's response to Protagoras' similar position in the Theaetetus, that philosophers and teachers are worthless if we can never be mistaken about what is best for us?

And how might we explain the ubiquitous human experience of regret, where we think that what we thought was best for us, has turned out (by our own admission) not to be? Is it best for us to drink all those whiskeys when we think it's a great idea at night, and then the same act that was good for us transforms into being bad for us when we wake up with a hangover?

When we throw our life's savings into a crypto scheme and promptly lose it in a rug pull, was the person who told us not invest not more right about what was good for us than we were?

I don't think that follows --

if it were arbitrary people could agree insofar that they feel the same.

Yes, and they would feel the same at random, according to arbitrary desires, so we should expect overlap to be roughly random.

So, supposing human desire is "arbitrary," why then have I never seen people slamming their hands in their car door for fun or having competitions to see how much paint they can drink? People tend to do a very narrow range of the things they could possibly do. Why do hot tubs sell so well when digging a hole so you can sit in a pool of muddy, fetid, cold water is so much easier and cheaper? Why is murder and rape illegal everywhere, but nowhere has decided to make pears or bronze illegal? What's with people going through such lengths to inject heroin but no one ever inject barbecue sauce, lemon juice, or motor oil?

Sure seems like a lot of similarity for something arbitrary.

The economy -- these are useful for war, agriculture, production, etc.

So then they aren't desired arbitrarily. Science is pursued because it shows us how to do things, indeed, in a certain sense it makes us free to do things that we otherwise could not. At the same time, you also mention wonder. Science is sought for its own sake.

But I'd argue that the desire for truth and understanding is not properly a passion nor an appetite.

But it seems a popular image, at least -- the Rational Being Controlling Emotion. The Charioteer Guiding. There's a part of the image that I like -- that one is along for the ride -- but the part that I do not like is the idea of a charioteer choosing. Taken literally it's a homuncular fallacy -- we explain the mind by assuming a minded person within the mechanism of the mind.

In his A Secular Age Charles Taylor does a pretty great job tracing this to the Reformation period and the rise of "neo-stoicism" and the idea of the "buffered self." So, the overlap with homuncular or "Cartesian theater" theories is no accident. Yet this is decidedly not how Plato was received when Platonism was particularly dominant. Aside from Taylor, C.S. Lewis's The Discarded Image does a good job capturing the old model of the porous self:

The daemons are 'between' us and the gods not only locally and materially but qualitatively as well. Like the impassible gods, they are immortal: like mortal men, they are passible (xiii). Some of them, before they became daemons, lived in terrestrial bodies; were in fact men. That is why Pompey saw Semidei Manes, demigod-ghosts, in the airy region. But this is not true of all daemons. Some, such as Sleep and Love, were never human. From this class an individual daemon (or genius, the standard Latin translation of daemon) is allotted to each human being as his ' witness and guardian' through life (xvi).It would detain us too long here to trace the steps whereby a man's genius, from being an invisible, personal, and external attendant, became his true self, and then his cast of mind, and finally (among the Romantics) his literary or artistic gifts. To understand this process fully would be to grasp that great movement of internalisation, and that consequent aggrandisement of man and desiccation of the outer universe, in which the psychological history of the West has so largely consisted.

Okay, but how so? What is a counterexample?

People ask not to receive medical treatment all the time. My grandfather, for instance, was told he should undergo open heart surgery at 86, after having lost his wife and being ready for the end of life. It is hardly clear that it would have been to his benefit to spend his last days undergoing grueling, painful treatments to extend his life. And this sort of thing happens all the time.

If a grandmother attempts to save her grandchildren, and will die in the process of successfully rescuing them, it hardly seems clear that this cannot be to her benefit either.

Likewise, if a genie shows up and offers us 100 years of the life of our choice in perfect health, or an indeterminant amount of time (but at least 1,000 years) living in a concentration camp, it's hardly obvious that it's to our benefit to take the latter because it extends our lives.

Now you can say, "but people would like to live longer lives, just not sick or imprisoned, etc." And this might well be true, but it shows that life is not ultimately sought for its own sake, but rather as a prerequisite for other goods.

Gmak Isn't it the case that good cannot be defined in morality? Only the human actions are good, neutral or evil. But good itself is a word for property of the actions

Not for most ethics. It is things, not acts that are primarily good. One can have a "good car," a "good doctor," a "good government," or a "good person" living a "good life."

An ethics where "moral good" is some sort of distinct property unrelated to these other uses of good and which primarily applies only to human acts seems doomed to failure IMHO, because it cannot explain what this "good" has to do with anything else that is desirable and choice-worthy.

On the prevailing view that dominated in the West for over a millennia, all good things or things that appear good are good in virtue of their possession/participation of the goodness of God, who is goodness itself for example.


For example, St. Augustine' De Doctrina Christiana (Chapter 22):

Among all these things, then, those only are the true objects of enjoyment which we have spoken of as eternal and unchangeable. The rest are for use, that we may be able to arrive at the full enjoyment of the former. We, however, who enjoy and use other things are things ourselves...

Neither ought any one to have joy in himself, if you look at the matter clearly, because no one ought to love even himself for his own sake, but for the sake of Him who is the true object of enjoyment. For a man is never in so good a state as when his whole life is a journey towards the unchangeable life, and his affections are entirely fixed upon that. If, however, he loves himself for his own sake, he does not look at himself in relation to God, but turns his mind in upon himself, and so is not occupied with anything that is unchangeable. And thus he does not enjoy himself at his best, because he is better when his mind is fully fixed upon, and his affections wrapped up in, the unchangeable good, than when he turns from that to enjoy even himself. Wherefore if you ought not to love even yourself for your own sake, but for His in whom your love finds its most worthy object, no other man has a right to be angry if you love him too for God's sake.

I couldn't quite parse what you were trying to say. Is the contention that individuals always know what is best for them and what is true for them vis-á-vis ethics?

You mean like one of these “possible worlds” the postmodern analytical mindset deems so relevant? Dunno about all that pathological nonsense

No, I mean it just in the common sense that we have the potential to be/do things we currently aren't/can't. I can play the guitar and bass. At one point I couldn't, but I obviously had the potential to learn in some sense. I can't play the violin, but potentially I could learn to do so. Likewise, someone who regularly drives drunk could potentially stop doing this, etc.

You are welcome to your philosophical inclinations, as anyone is, but obviously they are very far from mine. Not that that’s a problem for either of us, only that there’s little chance of meeting in the middle.

The ubiquitous "bourgeoisie metaphysics" rears it's head again!

But Mww, if someone like St. Augustine, Boethius, or Plato are right, then it is your problem. It is your problem because you are depriving yourself of what is truly best and settling for inferior, counterfeit goods instead of the real deal.

And, we might presume that in your example, it is also the problem of the person whose car you stole :rofl: . But even on a more benign example, a person's friends and family, their employers, employees, and clients, their potentia friends and clients, students, mentees, etc., the state and the organizations of which they are or might be a member—these all suffer when we fail to live up to our potential and do what is truly best because they miss out on what we could be to them. So it's everyone's problem in some sense.

Imagine a world where everyone is their best, most virtuous, strongest, courageous, generous, wisest, enlightened, and self-actualized selves.

It is always to your benefit to be courageous. (Supposition)
It is never to your benefit to die.
Some courageous acts get you killed.
Therefore, (1) is false. (Via reductio)

Two is a false premise, yet it's easy to imagine an example where something like this might be successful. For example, the courageous fire fighter might die in a scenario where a coward lives, potentially without doing anyone any good through their sacrifice (and indeed hurting their wife and children).

However it would be foolish to think that individual virtue would somehow insulate someone from all bad fortune or all the consequences of living in an unvirtuous world and society. Virtue insulates us from bad fortune and make us relatively more self-determining. It doesn't make us invulnerable and absolutely self-determining. The virtues help us to live better lives, not perfect ones.

In general, it is better to be courageous than reckless or cowardly. In a case where we misjudge the risk as lower than it is, the rash person would seem to always fall victim when the courageous person does, and the converse is true vis-á-vis the coward if the risk is deemed higher than it really is.

But this doesn't mean that we, as people, shouldn't want to be courageous, prudent, wise, etc.—to possess thess qualities in general.

Plus, I feel like courage is the easiest one to make this sort of example for because it involves our response to danger. It's harder to think of common examples where it would be better to be profligate or avaricious, as opposed to generous, or either gluttonous/lustful or anhedonic/sterile as opposed to temperate.

The difficulty of looking at isolated scenarios is the ubiquitous influence of fortune and the unknown. For consequentialists, there is the rape that leads to the conception of the person who invents technologies that remove our reliance on fossil fuels, saving millions from global warming related deaths and preventing several wars. Or the child who is murdered who would otherwise become the next Hitler or Stalin. Or the "life saving" technology developed with the best intentions that ends up harming millions. The same sorts of issues hold true for rules. You either have preverse counter-examples or else create rules so broad and immune to the viccistiudes of fortune and our own ignorance that they are completely unhelpful (e.g. "always choose the better over the worse.")

Fortune and misfortune—error and ignorance, these always play a large role in our lives. Yet the virtuous person is best able to weather them, just as the virtuous state is best able to, be it through better fostering technological advancement, being able to better defend itself, or being more immune to political turmoil and economic disruptions (e.g., people do not tend to revolt against states they love and enjoy and systems they have "bought into"). And of course it's better for individuals, organizations, and states to live in a more virtuous world.

So this only covers part of ethics then?

Those are just examples. When I think of people who feel genuinely bad about what they have done I am thinking more about documentaries I've seen on prisoners and people I know who went to prison. I don't think BTK or the Gilgo Beach Killer are particularly remorseful. In some sense, they seem incapable of it.

The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution by Francis Fukuyama

This is a really great work, both volumes, not so much because of Fukuyama's individual contributions, but because it's fairly encyclopedic and is good at synthesizing views on state development.

every wicked person has to be miserable as a result.

But that isn't what is required at all; that would be a straw man relying on extremes (Plato's point, for instance, requires significant nuance). Fortune, the acts of others, the social context, etc. are all relevant to one's happiness. Aristotle makes this point explicitly at the outset of the ethics.

The point is rather that it's always better to possess the virtues than to lack them. "Jeffery Epstein if he never got caught and exposed" being relatively happy (in the common English use of the term), is not a counterexample for two reasons:

First, considering that Epstein was able to build a massive fortune, a great deal of influence, and to be successful in elite social and intellectual circles, it would seem that Epstein did possess many of the virtues to varying degrees. Perhaps luck played an outsized role in his success, but it does seem that he was intelligent, charming, not brash or reckless, prudent in some respects (or we might say cunning), etc.

Second, the proper counterexample would be a case where Epstein lives a better life (or to deflate the notion, is "more happy") and would benefit from being more cowardly or rash, more gluttonous, more irascible or lacking in spirit, or conversely less modest, less temperate, less honest, etc.

The other key point is that the state of virtue involves enjoying right action. Would Epstein's life have been worse if he had enjoyed deeper romantic partnerships based around a common good more than coercing adolescents into sex for his or gratification less? I think the answer is obvious.

The good always relates to the whole. Of course we can imagine a situation where someone who is born into modern Denmark and with great wealth, can, in many ways, live a life that is happier than someone born in Liberia, despite the latter being relatively more virtuous. The virtues, at the individual level, make the individual life better; they don't make context irrelevant.

If the virtues are attained to a high level of perfection (something far more difficult to accomplish in an unvirtuous society), then they do insulate one from future misery (e.g. Laozi and St. Francis happy in the wilderness with nothing, St. Paul sublime in prison).

This is no way entails that "being sent to prison is to one's benefit." It would have been better for Boethius to live in a more virtuous society, one that wouldn't execute him for fighting corruption. It would not have been to his benefit to be less virtuous.

I think it is a better thing for Socrates et al. to do right, but I don't equate this "better" with being beneficial for them; you do.

Ok, but then it seems to me that you're committed to the idea that people can be profoundly wrong about what is truly to their own benefit, because in these examples (Boethius, St. Polycarp, St. Maximus, St. Paul, etc.) all think that would they do is to their benefit. But then if people, and indeed an entire epoch of ethics, can be profoundly wrong about what is actually to their own benefit, then I am not sure what your appeal to "common notions of benefit" is supposed to show exactly.

Which way is the "right" way to use the word?

On the view that things can be truly better or worse for people, the one that is (more) accurate.

It isn't good for people like Epstein to be the type of people they are. It would be better for them to change. Is it good for them to go to prison? Not necessarily, but that's precisely because prison doesn't change the type of person you are. Indeed, it often makes people worse. Prison is often "an education in vice." This has to do with the way prisons work, particularly in the US. It would be better for prisoners if they lived in a more virtuous society that structured corrections better.

No, it says nothing about motivation, and there are many things besides pleasure that are beneficial. It says that a benefit improves a person's lot in life, or something equally general. Again, I appeal to ordinary usage: If one's daughter is raped and murdered, she may have refused to give up a wanted man and been punished accordingly, and so acted virtuously, but what father would claim she had anything beneficial happen to her?

This example is confused, because the daughter is dead, but then doesn't want to give up her murderer? At any rate, you seem to be falling back on "virtues ethics requires you to benefit from being tortured, murdered, etc." again. It doesn't. It requires that you benefit from being virtuous, as in "possessing the virtues" not as in "completing isolated acts deemed good by some deontological framework."

You keep slipping into an entirely alien frame, which is MacIntyre's exact point. You hear "it's to your benefit to be virtuous," and it seems the only meaning you can take from that it "it is to your benefit (personal good) to complete acts deemed morally good according to some set of proper rules by which virtuous behavior is defined."

However, it means: "it is to your benefit to be courageous, temperate, prudent, generous, patient, honest, friendly, modest, loving, witty, etc." and "it is better for you to live with people who have these virtues," and "it is better to live in societies that embody and instill these virtues."

Edit:

I don't think "the best option available" has to be beneficial for anyone; you do.

In virtue of what is an option that benefits no one "best?"