Hamlet is pithy on this point, but I prefer Milton's Satan:

A mind not to be changed by place or time.
The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.
What matter where, if I be still the same,
And what I should be, all but less than he
Whom thunder hath made greater? Here at least
We shall be free; th’ Almighty hath not built
Here for his envy, will not drive us hence:
Here we may reign secure; and, in my choice,
To reign is worth ambition, though in Hell:
Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.

Note, Satan always relates everything to himself. He begins this first epic speech ostensibly talking about another demon, but then it is all "me mine me me" for most of it. He is almost always speaking in similes relating the rest of reality to himself most often. God, very strikingly for Paradise Lost, never uses any similes. I think it's a brilliant, subtle, linguistic point about elements of the "New Science" and mechanistic philosophy of Milton's day, which makes everything a matter of private valuation.

On the question of different laws holding at different times, if this is meant to suggest skepticism, I would just point out that the same holds for all issues of truth. For most of human history, people held disparate beliefs about the shape of the Earth, how infectious diseases spread, etc. What individuals believed on these issues has tended to be a function of the answers they grew up around. If you're culture thought the Earth was flat , you probably did too. But surely this doesn't give us grounds to believe that there is "no fact of the matter," or that the shape of the Earth varies depending on which cultural context you are currently in.




In practice, this seems to be what many "ethics" end up reducing to.

Here you go:

"Arguments from underdetermination are extremely influential in contemporary philosophy.

They have led to many radical, and seemingly skeptical theses.

These theses are perhaps more radical than we today recognize, when seen from the perspective of Enlightenment and pre-modern prevailing opinion.

These types of arguments were not unknown in the [ancient] past, and were indeed often used to produce skeptical arguments.

The tradition most associated with these arguments, ancient Empiricism, sought skepticism on purpose, as a way to attain ataraxia.

Thus, we should not be surprised that borrowing their epistemology leads to skeptical conclusions.

Hence, if we do not like the skeptical conclusions, we should take a look at the epistemic starting points that lead to them.

Indeed, if an epistemology leads to skepticism, that might be a good indication it is inadequate.

The Thomistic response is given as one example of how these arguments used to be put to bed. I use it because I am familiar with it and because the Neoplatonist solution is quite similar. (But the Stoics also had their response, etc.).

I do think that solution is better, but the point isn't to highlight that specific solution, but rather the genealogy of the "problem" and how it arises as a means of elucidating ways it might be resolved or else simply understanding it better."

Now, the term "skeptical" here is a tricky one. I would call many, but certainly not all forms of anti-realism and eliminativism vis-á-vis core subjects such as consciousness, truth, causality, "skeptical" in a broad sense. But skepticism is not epistemic or moral nihilism. There are "skeptical solutions," which is pointed out. So, just as @Ludwig V rightly points out, Hume is a sort of skeptic, but he is hardly a nihilist. Most skeptics aren't nihilists. The ancient skeptics generally weren't, and neither were the Indian skeptics in general.

But I would question whether or not some modern forms of skepticism that appeal to "pragmatism" as a sort of panacea solution actually avoid a sort of nihilism. That's a broader topic.

Added: links and citations are conducive to clarity. It might be helpful if you did not remove them

It would be rather silly to remove them. As I believe I have pointed out before, I have to run an antiquated browser for other purposes and the pop up quote button doesn't work on it. I'll be honest though that I also forget that it's there on other devices out of habit.

That underdetermination stuff is a feature, not a problem. It's about being unhappy with a determinate causal answer such as "God willed it" and looking for more, doing the experiments, using your imagination, seeing what happens when you do this or that..

Again, this lies on the unsupported claim of an essential dichotomy of: "either causes need to be abandoned or else there is only ever one cause, 'God willed it.'"

It should be obvious that this is a straw man. Nonetheless, the history is interesting here because the rise of the "New Science," nominalism, and empiricism was very much an effect of a new theology that positively wanted to make "God wills it" the proximate cause of all things. The idea of self-determining natures was originally rejected on the theological grounds that anything being any thing in a strong sense (i.e., "God cannot make a cat to be a frog while being a cat"), or the notion of final causes, violated absolute divine freedom. Historically, the theological case comes first, and then later arguments are developed explicitly to support it. This view is adopted by the advocates of secularism later. In part, the demand for secularism comes from skepticism about human ends that is generated by the reduction towards a wholly inscrutable divine will. This sort of skepticism was a corner stone of liberal theory for instance.

Even the language of the New Science reflects this. The appeal "natural laws" and the "obedience" of all things to them (rocks as much as men) is motivated by a volanturist theology of sheer divine will. It's from a theology of command and obedience. God makes the law, things must follow. This is why the sort of occasionalism you are referencing, while long popular in Islam (which had already turned to volanturism), only became popular in the West in the early modern period.

The huge gap between Anglo-empiricist and Continental thought is in some ways a continuation of this earlier theological division.

OK. It's just that causal explanation, along with the metaphor of the machine, has been such an icon of what science is about that I find it hard to grasp the alternatives (apart from statistical explanations).

Well, here we run into one of the great difficulties of any genealogical account in this area. What is meant by "cause" varies considerably. I'd argue that it is precisely the empiricist epistemic presuppositions, and the metaphysics that tended to go along with them in the early modern period, that deflate causation into nothing but mechanism (there has been a push in philosophy and physics to restore notions of formal causality on this point, e.g., Max Tegmark's ontic structural realist account or Terrence Deacon's approach to biology). The empiricist reduction of causes to mechanism or mere temporal patterns is not how I intend the term.

I think Hume, as he so often does, provides a devastating diagnostic account of what causation amounts to given these suppositions, which is "not much." But as per the point made above, this shift on causes was not made on the grounds that "otherwise, God is the direct cause of everything and all causation must reduce to 'God wills it.'' Quite the opposite, particularly in the Reformed tradition influential in Scotland.

That's an interesting point. Yet even in modern "building block ontologies" where things "are what they are composed of," I doubt that you would find many advocates for the idea that properties are "inside" things. They normally say the fundamental building blocks just are their properties, plus some individuating principle.

Take “redness” as an example. Under the substantialist view, redness is either an inherent trait of the object or the set of all red things. In processual ontology, redness is an event that unfolds through the interaction of:

The thing (e.g., the apple, whose structure determines how it reflects light);

The light (photons of a particular wavelength);

The observer (a human or other creature interpreting that reflected light through their perceptual apparatus).

Redness, then, is not inside the apple. It is born from the interplay of all three participants. This makes the property contingent: for a different observer (say, someone with color blindness), or under different lighting conditions, redness may not manifest at all.

It's interesting because the original argument for the "primacy" of substance runs something like this:

In the world, we can see red things, red light, but never just "redness." Dogs or trees can be living, tall, fast, but we never have "nothing in particular" that lives or is tall, or a fast motion with nothing moving.

But then substances, originally at least, aren't building blocks. They are the wholes in virtue of which being is many and not only one (although it is also one in another sense). They undergo corruption and generation, and so they are themselves processes in a way. Round substances change. They can cease to be round. What isn't changing would appear to be roundness. But if roundness only exists where there are round things and in the minds that know them, there is a bit of a puzzle here. A process metaphysics still needs unchanging regularities by which to identify processes that are similar, no?

If one considers this from the perspective of a deflationary information theoretic process metaphysics, where all of the universe is something like a changing mathematical "code," it can be helpful. That this is too deflationary is no problem for the example. Within the universal code are subsections of "code" that are more or less intelligible in themselves and self-determining. These are beings/things. There are also accidents, actions preformed by things, properties like color, relations like "being to the left of," etc. The accidents that are not "substance" and so cannot appear except as embedded in or related to some other "thing-unit" of code. They need a substrate to inhere in. The thing-units more fully have essences, in that they do not have a wholly parasitic existence in the way the accidents do. But accidents still have some sort of "essence," in that all instances of roundness, redness, rapidity, etc. will share some sort of morphisms by which they are the same (on pain of equivocation).

I think a key difficulty here that led to a sort of corruption of notions of substance that brings the difficulties you mention, as well as others, is that the term tended to be used in two related but diverse ways. From the perspective of metaphysics, organisms are most properly beings, being organic wholes. Break a dog or tree in half and you get a corpse; break a rock in half and you just get two rocks. Unity and multiplicity are contrary, not contradictory opposites, akin to light and darkness or heat and cold, so we can have greater or lesser unity in metaphysics. But for logic you need univocal terms. With the rise of nominalism and the demand for univocity, you cannot have any play in the terms of substance, leading towards the reductionism that attaches properties to some sort of unchanging building block.

Anyhow, on your point re the relationally of redness; it is worth pointing out that this holds for all properties, not just those involving minds. We can say that 'salt is water soluble," but it only dissolves in water when interacting with water, etc. While modern thought began to center on the epistemic consequences of something akin to the old Scholastic dictum that: "Everything is received in the manner of the receiver," this focus tended to make "the receiver" only a mind, when originally it was anything (likewise the "subject" was originally the "subject of predication" not exclusively the "experiencing subject."

Properties like charge, mass, etc. reveal themselves in interaction. Hence, "properties in themselves" would be epistemically inaccessible but also irrelevant to the world. "Act follows on being."

Of course, terminology evolves, but I call these corruptions because they introduce many of the problems process metaphysicians are often trying to address. But process metaphysicians still need a way, it would seem, to separate substance and accidents, or else there would just be one monoprocess, and a black cat would become a different thing when it fell into brown mud and became brown, etc.

Still, a hammer has a modus (potential, opportunity) to be a hammer, as does a stone, especially when attached to a stick, as does a microscope when used to drive nails. But this property is not in the object or the subject, but in the encounter. In the involvement. After this encounter, as I said, the hammerness remains in our consciousness. Hammerness can be lost in modus (the hammer just rotted and became unusable), hammerness can be lost in act (for example, people started using screwdrivers and stopped hammering nails), and hammerness can be lost in consciousness (we have raised a generation that doesn't know what a hammer is or what to do with it).

That makes sense. Artifacts seem like a particularly hard place to start. It is debatable if anything used to hammer is a hammer, or if it is just being used for hammering. However, it is simply not the case that everything that is used as a sheep is a sheep. If you try to breed a male pig to your female sheep, you will starve. If you try to get cats to pull your dog sled you will get scratched and go nowhere. But more to the point, not only will the "tool" not work, but the living organism is itself its own goal-directed whole and this is not altered by our use of it.

I suppose though that this could be considered a matter of degree. A volume of water or air never makes for a good hammer. When Rorty debated Eco, he said that what a screwdriver is doesn't necessitate (or even "suggest") how we use it, since we could just as well use it to scratch our ear as turn a screw, and yet in an obvious sense this isn't so. A razor sharp hunting knife is not a good toy to throw into a baby's crib (at the very least, for the baby) because of what both are, and this is true across all cultural boundaries and seems that it must be true. You can use a PC tower as a door stop, but you cannot run Widows or check your email on any other sort of doorstop.

Ah, I see now, you meant:

The only proper metaphysical way to pin down terms is dichotomously. We have to have to be able to say what wisdom is sensibly “other” to in a measurable fashion.

...as a criticism. I took it as a recommendation; as in, we need to find dichotomies.

I don't think the bolded is true though. Dominant theories of goodness from Aristotle on (and one might even include Plato here) primarily think of bad/evil (and falsity) in terms of privation. The two are contrary opposites. But prima facie, this no more makes goodness (or beauty, truth, and unity) impossible understand than it is impossible to understand light because darkness is merely its absence, or heat because cold is its absence. Light and heat have a positive content, and so does goodness and truth. If one dispenses with these, then I'm not sure what inquiry would consist in; our goal could no longer be truth (knowledge/understanding), and such a goal could no longer be good to pursue.

So what is the proper “other” that grounds adaptive? Well the Darwinian story is that variety is what evolution requires. It is exceptions to the rule that feed the existence of that rule. Every individual must take the risk of being a mistake so that statistically the collective success emerges.

What is "success" here? A difficulty is that natural selection and related theories have been philosophically interpreted in extremely disparate ways. You get articles to the effect that "reality is evil" or Tennyson's famous:

Man, her last work, who seem’d so fair,
Such splendid purpose in his eyes,
Who roll’d the psalm to wintry skies,
Who built him fanes of fruitless prayer,

Who trusted God was love indeed
And love Creation’s final law —
Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and claw
With ravine, shriek’d against his creed —

...right alongside the Lion King's "circle of life" (and more sophisticated versions). I've also seen thermodynamics used to justify a sort of Hegelian providential progress towards "being knowing itself as self, as the Absolute/God," a sort of twist on de Chardin's Omega Point. I don't think "empirical evidence" dictates that one be preferred over the other (although wisdom might).

Success is often interpreted simply as reproduction. In which case, chickens, pigs, sheep, and cattle have been the beneficiaries of a tremendous adaptational boon. And yet, one could hardly look at your standard poultry "factory farm" and not come away questioning if this is "success."

I have a romantic notion of philosophy as potentially being able to provide this kind of psychological or experiential transformation, not just the lifeless pursuit of analysis and cold reasoning, but a new way of seeing that enlarges our experience in some way. Yet such a description feels rather tendentious, soft and poetic. — Tom Storm

Well, one interesting thing is that back when the primary goal of philosophical education was existential transformation instead of intellectual specialization (i.e., for most of pre-modern though, and for much Eastern philosophy) it was also taught very differently. In order to achieve that sort of transformation, it was very much a sort of "lifestyle" education, with a heavy focus on asceticism, "spiritual exercises," and generally time for silence/contemplation (although not as much for the Cynics).

Whether this actually worked, or how exactly it worked is another question. The ancient sources are often idealized, and we might suspect that some of them are fictionalized (a few are satirical or slanderous). Obviously, it worked in a certain sense, in that life in the community was radically different as long as people stayed in it. From what I know, in-depth guides to practice don't really exist until the Middle Ages, when different monastic communities wanted to compare notes on methods. But by that point their role had already expanded significantly and so they were often dealing with populations that were less zealously committed to the project, or were putting other sorts of concerns first (charity, more general education, good old fashioned corruption, etc.).

I can imagine some contexts in which it wouldn't. But my version of "repute" doesn't have to mean "acclaimed by colleagues." I'm struggling to find a term that describes people who "know the subject," as I said earlier. Perhaps there isn't a single term for that. Or is it "expert"? But then I know quite a few subjects while not considering myself an expert. Maybe it's more like, "If you can read an article in a contemporary phil journal, understand the discussion, have read many or most of the references, and are familiar with the issues that have arisen about the position being espoused, then you deserve a respectful hearing in reply." But even that admits of exceptions, of course.

That makes sense to me, but it seems like a criteria for "who gets a hearing" not which positions are accepted. So, in the confines of the original example: determining which acts belong to the set of just ones, we cannot simply rely on who deserves a hearing, since—unless we are very restrictive about who gets a hearing—they will likely present us with mutually exclusive positions. Likewise, if we find none of the options sufficient, and we wish to develop our own, there must be some sort of way for us to determine which new paths are worth pursuing.

Basically: "who deserves a hearing?" and "who is closer to the truth?" are two different questions.

A radical critique need not be accepted in order to gain a hearing. The acceptance involved is "a seat at the table," as described above, not agreement with the critique.

Sure, that seems fair. But as noted above, this moves away from a standard for assent, to merely a standard of what is worth considering.

How do we learn to discriminate? By engaging in the practice with others and watching how they do it, and why.

Well, I don't want to repeat myself, but I suppose my objection here is a variation on what I said earlier. I do agree. I think it is true, in that intellectual virtue is learned/trained in a way analogous to a skill. If one practices, has good teachers, etc., progress can be made. However, I don't think all practice and observation will lead in this direction. It seems equally possible to learn, or be habituated in intellectual vices. I think some theological/philosophical schools have exemplified this problem throughout history. They become dogmatic and parochial, or overly hierarchical, etc., and so they end up tending to habituate their membership with these same vices.

To pick an easy target that a lot of academics (philosophers included) have criticized: elements of "publish or perish" promote bad research habits and have a negative impact on discourse, but moreover they teach certain sorts of intellectual vice. But obviously far more severe examples abound.

So, then to my mind what is important isn't necessarily the persistence in practice, but rather persistence in practices that foster certain skills and, for lack of a better term, virtues (habits). Expertise alone isn't enough either. Astrologers have expertise in astrology, but we might think they are more deluded about how the stars affect our lives than the average person (alternatively, we might say that "expertise" is only truly expertise if it actually involves knowledge of what it claims expertise in. The astrologer is an expert in something, but not what they think they are an expert in).

Perhaps I wasn't clear. The distinction I'm focusing on is the one that he himself adopts - between what he calls pyrrhonism, but which is probably actually closer to Cartesianism. (Given the history of philosophy taught in Philosophy 101, it seems very odd that he doesn't mention Descartes.) I think that he is really quite close to the old tradition, without the Stoicism (so far as I can discern). (I owe that understanding to you.)

Ah, gotcha. That makes sense.

That reading is a misunderstanding of Wittgenstein. I do not think you include Wittgenstein among the incautious sceptics.

Sorry, that got shifted out of place. That was a reply to @Banno who thought I had Wittgenstein with the "skeptics." I do not think this is so. But some positions that appeal to Wittgenstein, such as the cognitive relativism thesis, lead to a sort of broad skepticism about our ability to understand others (outside our own time and culture, or even tout court). This is a misreading of Wittgenstein to the extent it is attributed to him I think, but I think most advocates don't say this; rather they claim that if you follow out Wittgenstein's insights, with their own additions, you get cognitive relativism.

Everyone is me.
Everywhere is here.
Every when is now. :smile:

When Svetaketu was twelve years old he was sent to a teacher, with whom he studied until he was twenty-four. After learning all the Vedas, he returned home full of conceit in the belief that he was consummately well educated, and very censorious.

His father said to him,

"Svetaketu, my child, you who are so full of your learning and so censorious, have you asked for that knowledge by which we hear the unhearable, by which we perceive what cannot be perceived and know what cannot be known?"

'What is that knowledge, sir?' asked Svetaketu.

His father replied, 'As by knowing one lump of clay
all thatthat is made of clay is known, the difference being only in name, but the truth being that all is clay so, my child,is that knowledge, knowing which we know all.'

'But surely these venerable teachers of mine are ignorant of this knowledge; for if they possessed it they would have imparted it to me. Do you, sir, therefore give me that knowledge.'

' So be it,' said the father. . . . And he said,

"Bring me a fruit of the nyagrodha tree.'

'Here is one, sir.'
'Break it.'

'It is broken, sir.'

'What do you see there?'

Some seeds, sir, exceedingly small.'

' Break one of these.'

'It is broken, sir.'

'What do you see there?'

'Nothing at all.'

The father said, 'My son, that subtle essence which you do not perceive there in that very essence stands the being of the huge nyagrodha tree. In that which is the subtle essence all that exists has its self. That is the True, that is the Self, and thou, Svetaketu, art That.'

'Pray, sir said the son, 'tell me more.'

'Be it so, my child,' the father replied; and he said, 'Place
this salt in water, and come to me tomorrow morning.'

The son did as he was told.

Next morning the father said, 'Bring me the salt which you put in the water.'

The son looked for it, but could not find it; for the salt, of
course, had dissolved.

The father said, 'Taste some of the water from the surface of the vessel. How is it?'

'Salty.'

'Taste some from the middle. How is it ?'

'Salty.'

'Taste some from the bottom. How is it?'

'Salty.'

The father said, 'Throw the water away and then come back to me again.

The son did so ; but the salt was not lost, for salt exists forever.

Then the father said, 'Here likewise in this body of yours,
my son, you do not perceive the True; but there in fact it is. In that which is the subtle essence, all that exists has its self. That is the True, that is the Self, and thou, Svetaketu, art That.

From the Chandogya Upanishad

Your main argument is that underdetermination only seems feasible because of the rejection of your two metaphysical principles. From this you deduce that "...the skepticism resulting from underdetermination has been seen as a serious threat and challenge". But what you call "underdetermination" here is very different to the use of that term in Duhem and Quine. Where they showed us specific cases in which we could not decide between competing theories, you suppose that we can never decide between any cases, unless we accept your two premises. Doing so lumps together quite disparate approaches, flattening the philosophical landscape, reduces complex positions to caricatures. Your "argument" consists in labelling.

This is a misreading. See the summary I provided above for Moliere. That particular response is offered as merelyone example of why the form of the argument, though known from antiquity, was not considered to be widely applicable in the past.

From this you deduce that "...the skepticism resulting from underdetermination has been seen as a serious threat and challenge".

No I don't; that would be a bizarre "deduction." The comments on the difficulties with some of these positions are all in the first half of the paper, before those premises are presented.

A relevant section would instead be:

Again, the difficulty here is that the “solutions” often seem quite skeptical, e.g., “words never refer to things,” “there is never a fact about exactly what rules we are following,” etc. Here, it is worth considering what it is one ought to do if one sees an argument with an absurd conclusion. The first things to do are to check that the argument is valid, and crucially, that the premises are true. I would argue that contemporary thought, particularly analytic thought, has far too often only done the first. Because it holds many empiricist presuppositions beyond repute (indeed, “dogmatically” might not be too strong a word) it has not generally questioned them.

Yet if an epistemology results in our having to affirm conclusions that seem prima facie absurd, and if further, it seems to lead towards radical skepticism and epistemological nihilism, or an ever branching fragmentation of disparate “skeptical solutions” and new “anti-realisms,” that might be a good indication that it is simply a bad epistemology. Indeed, an ability to at least secure our most bedrock beliefs might be considered a sort of minimal benchmark for a set of epistemic premises. Yet, due to the conflation of “empiricism” with “the scientific method,” as well as modern culture’s preference for iconoclasm, novelty, and “creativity,” the starting assumptions that lead to these conclusions are rarely questioned. With that in mind, let us turn to the realist responses that, in prior epochs, made these arguments seem relatively insubstantial.10

(Note: Kripke himself allows that the claim seems absurd.)

I write that the wider application of this form of argument, and that fact that it is thought to be extremely strong, has often led to theses that would have seemed radical for most of history. I also point out that thinkers have thought that these do pose a serious challenge (e.g., Russell's quote on Hume). I do point out that others have been enthusiastic about the ability to support a variety of radical theses, seeing this as liberating, or supporting a move to "pragmatism."

Some of the redefinitions of truth do strike me as dressed up epistemic nihilism with a hand wave to "pragmatism" as a modern panacea. I do think this particular trend is quite problematic. What this generally reduces to in practice is: "those with power decide what is true." Or at least, this is eventuality is not kept out.

Where they showed us specific cases in which we could not decide between competing theories, you suppose that we can never decide between any cases, unless we accept your two premises.

No I don't, I say those are the two core premises related to the example. It's a relevant example because the Neoplatonist response is similar. The Stoics, however, had a different response, etc.

But what you call "underdetermination" here is very different to the use of that term in Duhem and Quine

I define what I mean in the first paragraph. The arguments listed follow that general pattern. The term is associated with the "underdetermination of scientific theory," but that does not mean there are no other arguments from underdetermination. I mention the ancient Empiricist version and (briefly) the even broader Academic ones for instance.

The issue here is not that there are uncaused events,

Good, so you agree with it.

so much as that a method that supposes explanation in terms only of ultimate cause is no explanation at all.

It doesn't mention anything about "ultimate causes." For the purposes of the arguments in question, the relevant causes are the causes of our perceptions, the act of understanding, etc.

"God wills it" satisfies your rejection of "underdetermination", but at the cost of providing no explanation at all.

A dichotomy of:

A. Contingent events just happen; and
B. A sort of occasionalism where God (or a necessary cause) is necessarily the only cause.

For instance, in the example cited, "God wills it," is not the only cause. What is the positive argument that:

" 1. Things do not happen “for no reason at all.” Things/events have causes. If something is contingent, if it has only potential existence, then some prior actuality must bring it into being. It will not simply snap into being of itself. Our experiences are contingent, thus they must be caused by something that is prior to them."

Entails that "God wills it," is the cause of everything?

He seems to think that since evidence can't determine which of the competing theories is true, we cannot chose one theory to go on with - as if the only basis for choosing were deductive.

I suggest nothing of the sort. Obviously, we can have a sort of volanturist approach to theories, or invoke principles such as parsimony, etc. However, the appeal to parsimony is a particularly pernicious principle in the hands of empiricsts precisely because the main data of experience are excluded from consideration, and then phenomena such as consciousness or causes are recommended for elimination on the grounds of parsimony.

For some reason, a little while ago, I re-read Hume's Enquiry, and realized that he is not at all the sceptic that he is painted to be. His rejection of what he calls pyrrhonism is emphatic. (He does not believe that it can be refuted but argues that it is inconsequential, and recommends a stiff dose of everyday life as a remedy.) He distinguishes between pyrrhonism and "judicious" or "mitigated" scepticism, which he thinks is an essential part of dealing with life. See Enquiry XII, esp. part 3.

Funny, this is generally precisely how I've seen his approach to skepticism described. Others have just generally found his conclusions, particularly in ethics, more problematic than he does.

I don't think "skepticism" has historically been used only to describe extreme positions such as: "I can know nothing at all; the sky is falling!" For instance, this hardly describes the paradigmatic ancient skeptics. I would think Hume's approach actually isn't that different from the ancient skeptics however. Their skepticism is also largely pragmatic. What do you think makes them radically different?

In any case, what difference would it make if it were true that the first state was full of memories and people?

Presumably, it would remove some of our warrant for thinking things will continue on as they have in the past, seeing as how there is no past.

Well, yes and no. If we think that we have to dismiss this anti-realism by means of argumentation in the traditional fashion, we have a problem

I am not sure about that. The arguments I have seen for it seem me to use questionable premises. If the premises are (likely) false, there is no good reason to believe the argument is true.


If you think I am calling Wittgenstein himself a skeptic then this is incautious reading. The general pattern of the rule-following argument has been expanded in that direction by later, less cautious thinkers.

But that's just it -- I don't think it's nonsense. It's a position that needs refutation, unlike the position that justice is a fish.

If nonsense is limited to statements on a level of "justice is a fish," then it seems to keep out very little though, right? But "nonsense" was originally the criteria for what deserves to be taken seriously, no?

But, to anticipate your objection, that doesn't mean that anything goes, that some nonsense from Tom deserves to be taken as seriously as "justice(Rawls)."

By "we," I meant philosophers of repute, those who know the history, the questions, and the difficulties.

So then the standard would really be "what philosophers of repute" take seriously. But I wonder if this really works well for all contexts. In the context of Stalinism or Hitlerism, was it the "philosophers of repute" who had a monopoly on serious claims about justice? Salafi scholars have repute amongst Salafis and are often denigrated in the West. Dugin has great standing in Russia. Nick Land was a professor at one of the most prestigious English language programs in Continental philosophy. He only fell out of repute when he began to espouse far-right views. But then, this seems to leave open the possibility that "what deserves to be taken seriously " is just whatever those who exert control over reputations (i.e., academia) allow. This seems particularly problematic for a field that is routinely criticized by its own membership for being parochial and operating in a siloed echo chamber.

I am certainly not against the idea that wisdom might best be measured by the wise. My point is rather that there seems to me be some significant daylight (sometimes a great deal) between "who is currently said to be wise (in our preferred context presumably)" and who might actually be wise. It does not seem to me that the two must coincide, or even that they must inexorably progress towards coinciding.

Plus, a standard based on the opinions of those with current repute seems to rule out, by definition, any radical critique until that radical critique has already been accepted by those of repute. But if those of repute hold to this standard of only taking the views of those who already have repute seriously, they will never countenance a radical critique.

It depends how literally one means "nonsense," I think -- whether it's shorthand for "views I don't find defensible."

Well, if it was the latter, that seems preferable. "Views that are defensible" are kept out, not merely "views that are wholly ridiculous," or "views espoused by people lacking proper repute within our preferred context." And what "makes a view defensible," is presumably not just that it fails to be absurd, or is put forth by someone of repute. That then, is what I would suggest for a standard.

I truly believed you were focused on definitions rather than knowledge, and claiming that without a definition of, say, the good, we wouldn't know how to recognize good things.

I can see the confusion in context. If we are beholden to the idea that properties are sets of whatever exemplifies a property, then yes, it does seem that something like a definition is required to know what the members of that set ought to be.

Initially though, I was just responding to the possibility that there might be sui generis properties for each person's opinion about each property. Aside from a lack of parsimony, it's hard to see how knowledge would be constituted in this case. I cannot really ever be wrong about what belongs to justice(Tim) or living(Tim). By definition these properties just would be what I think belongs to them. For us to ever be wrong, it must be at least possible for us to be wrong about which common terms apply to which particulars.

The only proper metaphysical way to pin down terms is dichotomously. We have to have to be able to say what wisdom is sensibly “other” to in a measurable fashion.

I'm confused, how is "good and bad" (or "beautiful and ugly," "true or false," or "one and many" for that matter) not "dichotomous?"

Is it impossible to "measure" what is better or worse? I'm quite ready to offer an explanation of why Nazism was bad and unwise. It seems that it is precisely the move towards a reduction to "adaptation" (without any clear idea of what is being adapted towards) that renders such an explanation impossible, from what I can see at least.

A reduction of goodness, beauty, truth, metaphysics, etc. to talk about brains and natural selection seems, dare I say, unwise.

Yes. Contrast that with the way Tim sticks to stipulated definitions

Where have I done that? The only mention of definitions was @J's usual straw man to the effect that if one mentions knowledge of the relevant subject (i.e., justice, health) as the measure of expertise or wisdom, one must necessarily be appealing to a "Great Philosophical Definition in the Sky."

I don't think anything about my past thoughts would suggest that I think things are "whatever we stipulate them to be."

I asked @J in virtue of what are some opinions nonsense" and he brought up a (IMO false) dichotomy between (great sky) definitions and "practice." One might suppose though that, from an epistemic standpoint, one needs something like a "definition" to determine the members of these sets, so I suppose something like a definition might enter into things there.

But either all practices a justificatory or they aren't. We agree that some aren't. So this isn't an answer. In virtue of what are some practices to be discounted? I'm not sure. Practice seems to have been an incomplete intermediary; the search goes. Athough now it seems to be suggested that some sort of innate knowledge allows us to recognize "nonsense?" But then why do traditions that put forth nonsense not recognize this then? How did Protagoras miss this for instance?

PI §201 yet again: there's a way of understanding justice that is not found in stipulating a definition but is exhibited in what we call "being just" and "being unjust" in actual cases.

Right, hence, the Good is not on the Divided Line. It must be outside of it because it relates to the whole, the apparent and the real, and so it cannot be merely one point upon the line. To be properly absolute, the absolute must include reality and appearances. Likewise, in the cave image, Socrates must break into his own story from without as the sign of the Good. And then the text itself refers outside itself to the historical Socrates at this point, to a life lived.

Plato is (reasonably IMO) quite skeptical of the power of language in this area (e.g., the Seventh Letter).

You don't seem to be addressing the critique. IS there a way for syllogistic logic to recover here?

I pointed out that the rejection of properties (or individuals) is absurd and your response was "yep." What more is there to say? It is possible to explain what a circle is without recourse so "it is the property of being a circle." Even if the case is different for red (as G.E. Moore argued) I don't see the issue. One can know what red is without having a bunch of words formed into an explanation of it, and that red is a predicable. You're the one asking for a definition of red for it to be considered a property, which seems absurd to me.

But red is not a primitive that stands on its own. As Hegel would point out, its intelligibility relies on the broader notion of color, etc. So I would tend to disagree with Moore here; yet even if he is right, I don't really see the issue.

Really? In those words? I'd say that was comparatively rare. Good philosophers tend to be much more interested in understanding and, sometimes, refutation, than in name-calling. Is there some publication or passage you have in mind?

Have you read the New Athiests? This isn't anything new. Consider Nietzsche's invective or that Russell writes that the reason Nietzsche made his more misogynistic claims about whipping women is because "he knew that in reality the woman would get the whip away from him and end up beating him."

No one in the Republic suggests that "Justice is really a fish." Why not, if they don't know what justice is? Why doesn't their ignorance open the door to nonsense?

You think "might makes right" is nonsense but not Thrasymachus' claim that justice is "whatever is to the advantage of the stronger?" What about Cleitophon's claim that "justice is just whatever the stronger thinks (appears) is to their advantage?" Or, in other dialogues, Protagoras' claim that whatever one thinks is true is true for that person (a position I am pretty sure you have called nonsense before) and Gorgias' claim that rhetoric is the master art because it can convince powerful people and assemblies to agree with you over experts?

Thrasymachus' silence is generally taken as being a shamed silence after being called out on his nonsense, and he cannot accept Cleitophon's suggestion to save his argument because it would imply that sophists are useless because one is always already right about what one thinks.

Yes, and look what happened: We no longer consider such a position viable.

Who is "we?" That particular take has had a great resurgence on far-right circles that have a good deal of sway these days. I imagine that Bronze Age Pervert has sold a good deal more copies than any academic philosopher in the past decade.

That's how intellectual investigations operate, over time. Less plausible, less defensible positions are weeded out, and newer, stronger possibilities are broached. And the discussion goes on.

Is this something like a "law of history," inexorable in the long term? Something like natural selection, but for truth? Would this imply that more recent philosophy will tend to always be better in the long run?

I would think that history shows that only certain sorts of processes produce such progress, and that it is sometimes reversible, and also uneven. The good is often sewn alongside the bad when it comes to ideas. It does not seem to me that truth is equivalent with something like "fitness" vis-á-vis the reproduction and dispersion of memes, information, theories, or opinions. This is why salacious gossip and implausible urban myths often "replicate" better than true statements.

In technology, where there are a strong, widely applicable incentives in play, there might tend to be a stronger pull towards progress, but this relationship seems more fraught when it comes to ethics and politics. It seems more likely that, in general, vice will tend to beget vice and error to beget error, and vice versa—not in any irreversible process mind you, but on average.

Indeed, agreeing that the proffered definitions of justice are inadequate presupposes agreement concerning what is just and what isn't.

We already had what Socrates was looking for...

To an extent, yes. The reader is supposed to recognize absurdities, although they have to be fully untangled first.

In the dialogues themselves, agreement is rarely reached however. Socrates often switches interlocutors because the original one is intransigent. I think there is a salient dramatic point in that. Normally the sophists just lapse into sullen silence. With Protagoras' this move is quite straightforward. If no one is ever wrong, then no one needs Protagoras as a teacher (his profession). But this often isn't so much agreement about the topic at hand (initially) as it is exposing how these positions refute themselves.

A main theme in the Republic is that reason is itself defenseless. Socrates is forced to go down in Book I because "we are many and you are one."

Part of the problem here is that properties are taken as fundamental, when they are better understood as one-place predications, set amongst a hierarchy starting with zero placed predicates and working on up - or a hierarchy of individuals, groups of individuals, groups of groups of individuals, and so on

In older writings properties are often called "predicables." How are there "predictions" without anything to predicate? This is what I mean by: "we will invariably just end up reinventing properties."

There are reasons why snake oil isn't taken seriously as a nostrum -- reasons that have little to do with knowing how todefine health

This is red herring, like the "definition of justice in the Great Dictionary of Philosophical Terms." I said "knowledge of health" (or "knowledge of justice") not "the definition." Do advances in medicine and the development of medical skill not involve knowledge of health and disease?

For me, "snake oil" is another way of talking about "nonsense" or "anything goes," so my response is the same.

Sure, I perhaps made the example too obvious. There are, however, professional philosophers or scientists who publish in philosophy who make claims and counter claims about how each other's traditions are nonsense and sophistry (e.g., the targets of the New Atheists and those who have responded to them). They're both part of broader established traditions.

More to the point, what could have gone wrong in the Salafi tradition? They had discourse and practices. So did German academia in the 1930s, yet many of their ethicist, jurists, and theologians, etc. were enthusiastic or at least stayed about the countries new course. So, it does not seem that "practices" in general lead to what we would probably agree is justice, but only certain sorts of practices.

Why not? Why doesn't "anything go"? Why doesn't aporia lead to intellectual anarchy? See the Republic.

Which part exactly?

Can you think of a discipline in which that actually occurs?

Sure, philosophy. Although its becoming academicized has tempered it (although this is partly from exclusion, and arguably flows more from power dynamics than anything else). From the birth of the printing press to the early 20th century it was full of quite radical positions. Positions like "might makes right" were popular enough to warrant in depth responses from figures like Hegel (when he was already famous).

I keep wondering if there are transformational understandings about time and self and being and truth and reality that would open up and utterly change one.

That's one of the key points of Saint Augustine's autobiography. In his thirties, after a very different sort of life, Augustine became a celibate, gave up his very promising career in the imperial circle, and gave away all his (not inconsiderable) wealth. Only then did he start producing all his influential philosophical texts; although obviously the ideas had been developed over time. It's not an uncommon motif, particularly in earlier philosophical biographies. It seems significantly less common in modern philosophy, although there are examples such as Pascal. It's a sort of "trope" in Eastern thought too, the life of the Buddha being a paradigmatic example. But, just because these are tropes and find their way into hagiography, doesn't mean they aren't real; we do have first hand biographical accounts as well.

There is a similar, but much more limited phenomenon within Marxism, the "Marxist conversion." Yet that tends to be a more limited awakening to a particular political outlook.

So it always has the same aim

Sure, in a broad sense. Practical wisdom aims at making the choices that are best, and at properly valuing ends and means to those ends.

There is nothing particularly "transcendent" about that, and at any rate I find the term "transcendent" to generally be unhelpful because it is often a source of equivocation. I guess the problem I see is that anything can be said to be "adaptive" if we are given free aim to choose the ends that we are supposedly adapting towards, but not all adaptations/actions appear to be wise.

In the Function of Reason, Alfred North Whitehead charts out the goals of life as: to live, to life well, and to live better (which is remarkably similar to St. Maximus' "being, well-being, eternal being"). Now, adaptation can be ordered to any of these. Whether or not something is "adaptive" as opposed to "maladaptive" depends on ends (i.e., what it means to "live better"), and that's exactly what practical wisdom is supposed to help with.

Society is always adapting, but it appears that societies can grow more or less wise or more or less virtuous. For instance, Nazism was an adaptation to the pressures of post-war economic and political circumstances in Germany, but in general we'd want to call it "maladaptive." Another example might be the tendency for people to fill spiritual needs, or the need for recognition, with radical manichean politics. As a "coping mechanism" this is in a sense adaptive, but we might think it is also deeply flawed (unwise). Wisdom would be prudent adaptation.

The Disembodied Criminal:

This is the last section of background before we get to the media analysis.

Landa argues that Nietzsche and Stirner exclude most ordinary, property-related offenses from their "glorification" of crime. I think "glorification" might be a bit too strong a term here though. The notion is more that there is something laudable in a certain sort of crime. Landa identifies the "proper" motivations as "non-material." By this he simply means that the crimes are not motivated by a petty desire for wealth, goods, etc., nor for out of desperate biological need. Stirner puts it this way: the covetous criminal is a failure, since they are grasping after what is not truly their own.

So, what is valorized is strictly a sort of “Dionysian crime," that is an expression of the will to power. This frames the "right sort" of crime as an aesthetic and symbolic revolt against mediocrity and mass society. This stands in contrast to socialist-humanist (and often Victorian Christian) views that linked crime to poverty or inequality.

For Nietzsche, the criminal largely served a metaphorical purpose. They are a figure embodying rebellion and strength, not a literal model for social reform. Landa argues that this selective glorification of crime was ultimately coopted by bourgeois ideology. Property crimes could be seen as "petty" while the reimagining noble criminal served as a sort of cultural rebel archetype to use against egalitarianism. Hence, the trend inadvertently reinforces the sanctity of private property and serves to justify the social hierarchy, in that the successful capitalist, if accused of crime/immorality, can adopt a similar sort of archetype.

I will skip the next section and the one on M because it is probably less well known. Moving on:

Thrill Versus Self-Preservation

Landa uses the Leopold and Loeb trial of 1924 to illustrate how Nietzschean ideas about crime infiltrated public discourse. For those unfamiliar with the case, it involved two wealthy youths who murdered a younger boy, after allegedly being inspired by Nietzsche’s rejection of herd morality and call to revalue all values. During the trial, the motive for the crime became a major area of focus.

The defense focused heavily on arguing that the murder was not committed for personal gain, but rather for the thrill of the crime itself. That is, it was a Dionysian act; perhaps evil, but more "purely" motivated. The defense worked to portray Leopold’s reading of Nietzsche as evidence of stifled intellectual brilliance in order to suggest that the crime stemmed from lofty rumination, not base greed. Indeed, the defense even tried an anti-egalitarian tactic, arguing that the defendant's wealth had made them an unfair target of ire.

By contrast, the prosecution, in hoping to secure a heavier penalty, insisted that money was the true motive, portraying the killing as an afterthought to protect the robbery. That is, as a practical act of self-preservation, not passion. At one remarkable point, the prosecutor actually criticizes the boys for not killing for passion or pleasure, but only out of calculated greed.

An interesting point here is that, in classical Western ethics, it would be "killing for pleasure" and particularly "killing because of lofty ruminations" that would be considered the worse sort of sin. For instance, Dante puts crimes of incontinence and uncontrolled desire in the upper level of Hell, where punishments are less severe. Below that lies the realm of violent crimes, and in the deepest pits of Hell we see sins that corrupt the intellect. The idea here is that a person is more culpable for willed, intellectual vice than for mere incontinence, but also that sins of the intellect are more dire precisely because they represent the corruption of the very faculty that would allow us to know and pursue the good (i.e., the intellect and will) instead of evil. On this view, the worst sorts of sins involve the will becoming its own object (as opposed to the Good, the proper target of the will). This is the maximal form of the Augustinian curvatas in se, where the soul curves inward on itself like a black hole. But Dante's architecture is essentially copied over from Aristotle and St. Thomas; and parallels an area of wide consensus.

Personally, I think this shift would seem to stem from a larger shift towards volanturism in modern thought, and the tendency to define freedom in terms of potency/power.

At any rate, Landa argues that this implies that both sides implicitly accepted a "Nietzschean" hierarchy of motives. Passionate, “Dionysian” crime appears to have seemed more excusable than material, utilitarian crime. The court transcripts reveal a convergence between Nietzsche’s valuation of “beautiful crime” and bourgeois legal norms, where profit-driven crime (the corruption of the market) is considered to be the gravest variety. For Landa, the case shows how society views insanity and uncontrollable passion (including intellectual passion) as less dangerous to social order than sane, utilitarian crime—since a rational criminal exposes the arbitrariness of property and social safeguards.

I don't think Landa has this quite right. He highlights an interesting case. However, I am not sure if this doesn't say more about more general aesthetic and moral attitudes. Certainly, such attitudes might have helped promote capitalism, but I think that is probably an ancillary effect.

So the answer to the question, "Who decides what is nonsense?" is not "The person who looks up the definition of justice in the Great Dictionary of Philosophical Terms," but instead, "The group of people who are competent, by virtue of study and practice, to interpret the question of what justice is, and understand how it connects with other key philosophical issues."

Wouldn't it be "by virtue of what is known through study and practice?" If study and practice are justificatory of themselves, I'd observe that the leaders of ISIS were educated and part of a particular study and practice of justice and ethics (IIRC, al Baghdadi held a doctorate). But then the leaders of ISIS have a very different view of justice from that of Anglo liberals. So either study and practice alone are not enough, or else there is a different justice for each practice (which is closer to @litewave's solution to differing sets of just acts).

Think about it this way: if someone studies snake oil medicine for a long time, and are part of a well-established, does that make them as much of an authority of health as a medical doctor? What if their methods do not promote health, but actually tend to produce disease? The difference between the two would seem to lie in what they know about health and disease, and this affects what they are able to achieve in terms of treatment. Now, in the former case, what is it the legitimate authorities know?

If Tom, Rawls, et al. each make a claim about what justice is, and we don't think any of them can be supported, what is the situation? Do we say, "Each of these people has a different justice. So for them, justice just is what they consider just." No, we say, "None of these people has been able to tell us what justice is. I don't know either, but I don't have to know in order to understand why the proposed definitions are unsatisfactory." This is Socrates' position, more or less. This, I think, rules out the "positive metaphysical claim"; the question is whether @litewave's thesis can also rule it out.

That makes more sense to me. @litewave's response was that, when we have different sets, we have different properties (i.e., different justices, plural); however I think one could retain the notion of a property as a set without necessarily having to be committed to this clarification.

'within' is an interesting concept in this context. It's a spatial metaphor in which brain/body is a container and the mind is something inside it. But from another perspective, the body exists 'within awareness'.

It's also interesting because, while the body is a locus of activity, it is not sufficient to generate a mind. Place a healthy human body in most of the environments that prevail in the universe—the bottom of the sea, the surface of a star, within the Earth's core, in the void of space, etc.—and you don't get consciousness but virtually instant death. You can abstract the context away, but only by holding the environment within narrow parameters. Even a normal room, if filled with CO2 or NO2, will make consciousness impossible.

You say that with great certainty, as if it were an explanation of what a property is.

I am just explaining how the term is used in metaphysics. Properties are not unique to realism or theories of "abstract objects." Depending on how one views sets, I would think that the original suggestion could also be construed in constructivist or fictionalist terms, or whatever one likes.

"Predicatables" are an older term for instance. But, presumably "getting rid of properties" isn't getting rid of predication or common terms. Which means that what are normally referred to as "properties" will remain.

The closest parallel I can think of would be individuals/particulars. No doubt, it has been difficult to define these and exactly how they are individuated. However, there would be a similar difficulty in eliminating individuals.

A deflationary account of individuals and properties is still a particular account. I am not sure if the presence of disagreement of difficulty suggests any particular account though. It would be a bit like suggesting that, because "life" is difficult to define, and because there is great disagreement surrounding it, we should default to not explaining life, but rather simply looking at what we call "living." This methodological move might be supported in some contexts, but I don't see how any further positive metaphysical claim like "there is no life, or living versus dead versus non-living, but only ways of speaking" could be supported over any others using an appeal to ignorance or difficulty.

Society would judge them as having being immature, or just unlucky perhaps, and now wise after the event. These miserable folk clearly developed their habits, but unwise ones. And society might even deserve the blame as its own "wisdom" might have set out the game of life in a fashion where being miserable was rather an inevitable outcome

Right, so wisdom isn't equivalent with what appears to be wise or is said to be wise by others. In this case, the individuals, and perhaps the society, are unwise. So then wisdom isn't just any intellectual habit, but rather a certain type of intellectual habit.

Leaving out sophia and looking only at practical wisdom, Plato's notion seems pretty appropriate here:

Plato describes being educated as primarily "desiring what is truly worthy/good and despising what is truly unworthy/bad."

Cleverness may turn into wisdom. It may also turn into adaptive habits aimed at unworthy ends.

Wisdom always sounds like a good thing to have. But really, it is just some set of habits that have evolved within a society's own game of life

Certainly not all habits are wise though. And yet all habits might be considered to be "pragmatic" as achieving some ends. The question is if those ends are truly (rather than merely apparently) desirable though. If one does not distinguish between good and bad ends (wise and unwise ends) then it would seem that wisdom is just "whatever habits just so happen to emerge," or "whatever is currently said to be wise."

Prima facie, while people or societies might not tend towards maximal vice, neither do they appear to naturally tend towards perfect virtue.

However, in general the data is that trans people are much, much more likely to be victims of crime than perpetrators,

Nothing in your source seems to indicate what you are saying. It is silent on the rates at which trans individuals are perpetrators of violent crime. In general, groups that are more likely to be the victims of violent crime are also more likely to be perpetrators. "X is more likely to be a victim," does not entail "X is less likely to be a perpetrator." In general, it's quite the opposite. For instance, men commit most violent crimes and are also more likely to be victims.

Mashing Hume, Wittgenstein, Kripke, Duhem, Quine, Kuhn, Mill, Feyerabend, and Goodman together and calling them "sceptics" ought ring alarm bells with anyone.

Yes, but you are conflating arguments from underdetermination and skepticism. The examples you listed are given as examples of the former, not the latter. These arguments are not necessarily skeptical. Wittgenstein, for example, is often read as offering a purely descriptive account, not a skeptical or metaphysical account. However, historically these arguments have often been extended towards anti-realism and skepticism, or positions that would have been considered skeptical and/or radical up until the 20th century. I do, in fact, point out that there is disagreement as to whether redefinitions of truth itself are mere modifications, or an equivocation that essentially denies truth and knowledge and offers up an alternative "pragmatic equivalent" such as "'true' is just an endorsement of beliefs we feel it is good to hold."

Kripke's skeptical solutions, for instance, are not straightforward skepticism and I do not present them as identical. They are also not strong refutations of skeptical claims however. Arguments to anti-realism from underdetermination are often but not always skeptical (e.g., "there is no fact of the matter we can empirically verify..."). They try to reduce the burden of proof they face, arguing merely for undecidability or skepticism instead of making positive metaphysical claims, but this is not always so, sometimes they make stronger metaphysical claims (often on the assumption the empirically verifiable differences are necessarily equivalent with ontological differences).

Second, just because a philosopher says: "I am not a skeptic," doesn't make it so. Hume accepted the label gladly. Contemporary philosophers tend to run away from it. But by prior norms and standards, many of these claims, or their extensions would be considered skeptical (and are still often considered so by some contemporary thinkers).You are missing this nuance.

And those two supposed foundations - That things do not happen “for no reason at all" and that everything has an explanation - at least some discussion might be worthwhile, rather than mere assertion.

The second one is not "everything has an explanation." It's:

1. Things do not happen “for no reason at all.” Things/events have causes. If something is contingent, if it has only potential existence, then some prior actuality must bring it into being. It will not simply snap into being of itself. Our experiences are contingent, thus they must be caused by something that is prior to them.

2. Being is intelligible, and to be is to be intelligible. Every being is something in particular. That is, it has a form, an actuality, that is determinant of what it is (as well as the potential to change, explained by matter). This actuality determines how a thing interacts with everything else, including our sense organs and our intellects. If this was not the case, interactions would be essentially uncaused, and then there would be no reason for them to be one way and not any other (i.e. random).

...Indeed, if they did not hold, if being were unintelligible and things did happen “for no reason at all,” we might suppose that philosophy and science are a lost cause.

If you want to argue that things/interactions/events are (and are one way and not any other) "for no reason at all," without causes, feel free. Likewise, if you want to object that something can be "nothing in particular (nothing determinant) of "nothing at all."

All a property, in the broadest sense, is just an attribute or quality possessed by something. So, Socrates is a man, a rose is red, etc. The rose is red, but the rose is not identical with the color red. And there is the idea that multiple things can instantiate the same properties.

For instance, a common simple version of Leibniz' Law is: "Necessarily, no two objects share all their properties." One need not assume redness is a "thing" to make use of this.

There are nominalist accounts of properties. One does not need to be a "Platonist" to make use of properties. It's a quite useful concept because:

If there are no properties, in virtue of what would some things be members of "the set of red things" but not others?

Or in virtue of what would different individual things he discernible?

What's your answer? That red things are exactly those that have the property "red"?

I think it's pretty easy to identify red things. Color can be explained in various ways. Likewise, triangular things are those things with three sides, etc.

But even if we were left with properties as some sort of inexplicable metaphysical primitive, that still seems better than "nothing has the property of being triangular" which would seem to imply that nothing is triangular. Or more broadly, "nothing has any properties," which seems absurd. One will just end up reinventing the basic idea of a property under another name in order to say that anything is anything.

If there are no properties, in virtue of what would some things be members of "the set of red things" but not others?

Or in virtue of what would different individual things he discernible?

In virtue of what would:

-resisting absorption into dominant systems
-resisting commodification and turning into marketable lifestyles
-being able to avoid recoding by systems of recognition that make them legible, or manageable.
-opposing reincorporation into cycles of reproduction of normative social structures.

be desirable? Prima facie, I am not sure why these are necessarily valuable or laudable. Being legible and manageable does not seem like a necessarily negative trait. It's often a positive one.

To be honest, these standards, particularly the last, sort of do seem to be "the celebration of the novel and transgressive for their own sake."

That's all up to the individual.

Sure, but how could their choice be non-arbitrary? The individual chooses, but if it isn't for some sort of understood reason, it would seem to be an inchoate choice, or something more akin to a muscle spasm or careless act than self-determining, reflexive freedom.

The more obvious objection, to my mind, ties into the modal caveat in the OP:

This problem can be fixed by clarifying that a property is the set of not only its presently existing instances but also of its past and future instances and of all its possible instances (existing in possible worlds)

Isn't it possible that people might consider properties all sorts of ridiculous ways? I don't see a mechanism here for dismissing Tom's opinion on the grounds that it is "nonsense" when we have already opened things up to every possible set configuration. Yet this would seem to make "everything to be everything else."

I don't think the "opinion based flexibility" works with the modal expansion. And something like "all possible opinions that aren't 'nonsense,'" seems to ignore that there are many possible opinions about what constitutes "nonsense." This is made more acute by the modal expansion, but I would say it applies just as well for what you've said, since there is the question: "who decides what is nonsense?"

Look at the Republic. Justice never gets a satisfactory definition, but it would be hard to read the book carefully and not believe you've learned something about the subject.

Sure, but lacking a definition seems to me to be much different issue. On this account, we don't have many different claims about what justice is, but many different justices. It's a positive metaphysical claim to say that justice just is the set of things each individual considers to be just. So, we'd be justifying a positive metaphysical claim using our own profession of ignorance.

What's new about it?

It's been used in some novel ways. For example:

• David Hume’s argument against causal inferences and explanations, as well as his hugely influential “Problem of Induction;”

• Ludwig Wittgenstein’s rule-following argument, as well as Saul Kripke’s influential reformulation of it;

• W.V.O Quine’s argument for the inscrutability of reference;

• Quine’s holist arguments for the underdetermination of theories by evidence, as well similar arguments for forms of theoretical underdetermination made by J.S. Mill and expounded upon by Pierre Duhem;

• Thomas Kuhn’s arguments about underdetermination at the level of scientific paradigms;

• As well as many others, including Feyerabend’s “epistemological anarchism,” Goodman’s “new riddle of induction,” etc.

Yes. But I don't see that anti-realism is a necessary consequence of the applicability of these criteria.

Sure, arguably it is "underdetermined."

One difference is that there is not the slightest reason to take any of those possibilities seriously.

Maybe, but it's a not unpopular opinion that the existence of the universe and its contents are an inscrutable "brute fact." Now, if inscrutable brute facts can "just happen" without causes, then there is no reason why they should be one way and not any other. So why would it be any more or less likely that a universe just "happens to be" with a first state something that looks something like cosmic inflation rather than a first state full of memories and people?

I will grant that this is only a problem for those asserting the "brute fact" view. But if we assert, to the contrary, that the cosmos had a determining cause, then presumably this is a realist claim. In which case, maybe an inability to dismiss anti-realism will bother us.

I mean that the property is the set.

Gotcha. I was thinking of "identifying" (verb), which made me think of the epistemological questions.

There may not be a universally agreed specification of justice, so different people may identify justice with different sets of acts. It's easier with redness, which can be specified with reference to a certain range of wavelengths of light, although the exact boundaries of this range may not be universally agreed either.

But doesn't this mean that there would be many different versions of the same property? So there would really be "justice(Tom), justice(Greg), justice(Sandra), etc. Given properties' roles in metaphysics, that seems problematic, particularly since the stipulation re modality would seem to indicate that we should be considering "everything that might possibly be considered x." A pretty popular idea in contemporary analytic metaphysics is the "bundle/pin cushion" view where things just are their properties (plus or less a sort of "bare particular substratum" or haecceity). Yet we seem to have opened the door on there potentially being as many properties as there are (potential) opinions. Wouldn't this risk making everything into everything else? This is why I personally prefer an intensional explanation of properties.

Even on deflationary accounts, this still seems like it could present problems because it would mean we are guilty of equivocation any time a different set is specified (and how, in practice, could we even determine that different sets had been specified?).

A similar sort of issue occurs with due to modality. If we're consequentialists, presumably any act might be "just" or "good" as well as "unjust" or "evil" given the right context. Does that mean good and evil represent the same set and thus the same thing? Likewise, wouldn't the set of contingent falsehoods end up being the same as contingent truths? But then are truth and falsehood the same thing unless they are necessary?

Also, what about the property of "being a property?"

Instead, values are affirmed through their capacity to open new possibilities for subjectivity.

Yes, but it seems debatable if this is itself good, no? Or, in virtue of what are new possibilities good? It does not seem to be true prima facie at least. Not all possibilities seem worthy of actualization. Indeed, to elevate potency over actuality is arguably to confuse self-determining, reflexive freedom with arbitrariness. I am aware that Deleuze has responses here; I am not sure if they are adequate though.

Dante's use of Ulysses is a great example of just this concern. Ulysses says:

[Not even my family and responsibilities]

Could quench deep in myself the burning wish
to know the world and have experience
of all man's vices, of all human worth.

Inferno - Canto XXVI - 97-99

Now even if we allow Aristotle's “all men by nature desire to know” and “it is owing to their wonder that men... first began to philosophize" (i.e., to love wisdom), is it wise or choiceworthy to desire experience of “all man’s vices?”

Then, in the next circle down, we see the most brutal punishment in the poem, the schismatics being repeatedly dismembered (as they dismembered institutions during their lifetimes). At this point one of the damned offers to explain their woes to Dante, that he might "have full experience." This is clearly not the sort of potential for new forms of subjectivity we want though. (Not to go on a tangent, it's just a nice, graphic illustration.)

The point being: not all experiences are good. Potentiality does not appear, to me at least, to be self-justifying. Second, I do not seem how "being a collective process" necessarily excludes arbitrariness.

On the first point, we could ask: "shouldn't we be equally open to new capacities to pursue cruelty, disintegration, addiction, etc.?" Being able to infect others with an STD is in some sense a "power" after all; so is sadism. So too for getting to experience withdrawals or blindness.

No doubt, Deleuze would deny any appeal to novelty for novelty’s sake and pivot to what increases the power of life, or to Spinoza re the "power to act." However, my rejoinder here is that what is being identified here just are the virtues. Vices cripple these powers; they are precisely what is diminishing and mutilating. Virtue is what allows for self-determining actualization and self-governance. This is really an area of convergence as far as I can tell.

Yet there is not a convergence on justification. It seems to me that, at the very least, "power to act" must itself be presupposed a standard. And yet it doesn't seem like that will be enough to rule out vice. There might be a "joy" in being a violent neo-Nazi. Nor is it clear why active power should be necessarily preferred to a sort of "passive power" like being addicted to a drug. There is, of course, the intrinsic negative valance of suffering, yet many vices are pleasurable. Hence, it seems to me like a telos is still required to give any sort of positive structure here.

Now, if we adopt a "privation theory of evil" here, it is perhaps easier to justify virtue without equally justifying vice, but that requires a different ontology. A "privation" only makes sense in terms of a telos (we don't call rocks "blind" after all).

It's not about better or worse, it's just simply how one becomes who they are, by following what drives them.

But then it isn't any better or worse (more or less choiceworthy) to simply refuse to be what one is either, no? The same for sublimation. If that were the case though, wouldn't it be problematic? It seems to me that a choice made vis-a-vis something that cannot be "better or worse" (something indifferent to desirability) would be arbitrary.

I'd say the two only seem similar because the ends pursued in chess are obvious and fixed. Indeed, I'd say being good at chess is a skill/techne, not wisdom. But consider people who are quite "clever" at navigating their life such that they can satisfy their appetites, amass wealth, win over romantic partners, etc., and find themselves at mid-life completely miserable. Surely, they have been "clever" and intelligent in some sense, but have they been wise?

For instance, was Jeffery Epstein wise? He certainly seems to have been clever. Had his fortunes not taken a turn and he remained out of prison and the public eye, would he then be wise because he was able to achieve the satisfaction of his appetites and to flourish according to most contemporary standards for "success?" Would he have been wise if he had simply been more inconspicuous about his crimes or kept strictly to the local age of consent?

that depends on the person. Those who thrive under the compulsions of external values ought to live under a system of external values.

Those with their own strong organizing drive would find living under an external value system to be stifling.

They might find it stifling, but it does not seem to follow from this alone that it is necessarily better for those who do find it stifling to act contrary to systems of "external values" in virtue of this fact. It seems that, in at least some cases, it is better to for those who feel stifled to learn to appreciate and enjoy what at first seems stifling. For example, the music student or person learning the art of painting might find their instruction initially stifling, and yet it may help to make them more excellent, and they may learn to love what they have initialy learned under some duress.

I would imagine this is probably the main question vis-á-vis Nietzsche's positive claims: it they succeed in escaping nihilism or the charge of arbitrariness (or comporting with intuitions about the good). In virtue of what, ultimately, are new values choiceworthy? Nietzsche is a very keen diagnostician of Enlightenment ethics, but the vibrancy of the critique doesn't necessarily support any particular positive formulation to replace what has been undermined.

But, for purely descriptive readings of Nietzsche, I think there is a different sort of problem people often have, which is that a purely descriptive approach seems to fall victim to the same charges that are often leveled against advocates of "might makes right." All the value-laden language is then disconnected from the main theory, for if "the stronger (drives/wills) shall win" (indeed, is if this is how we know that they are stronger) then what more is left to say? One can hardly complain about who has turned out to be weak and who has proven strong, and to say: "but it would be better if these who have proven weaker were the stronger," requires giving some positive explanation of why this would be "better."

At any rate, I think a retreat into the purely descriptive and away from Nietzsche's aristocratic tendencies tends to do violence to the text, requires discounting as "unessential" vast segments of his corpus, and at any rate seems to obscure what is really valuable (to my mind at least) in his thought.

Or, to 's original point and 's clarification, I am not sure how the clarification points to anything desirable or good in a positive sense. It perhaps makes "putting power on a pedestal" less obviously bad (if one judges more conventional, liberal notions of power bad, or at least not desirable in themselves).

I am proposing that we could plausibly identify a property with the set of all things that have this property.

What exactly do you mean by "identify" here? I suppose one issue might be circularity. How do you know what belongs in a set? Suppose we take "justice" or "just acts." In virtue of what are all "just acts" properly members? If we identify the property of "being just" as simply "being a member of the set of 'just acts'" we don't seem to get anywhere.

Further, even if I had the set of all past just acts to refer to, how exactly does this help me determine which acts would be just in the future, or to identify new just acts? If all I know about justice is that "just acts belong to the set of just acts," then future identification seems impossible. I would have to instead look at the set and reason out a sort of definition, or at least an observable pattern, by which to identify future or potential members. But in this case, it seems to me that it is really the essence of justice, signified by the definition, that is actually what "membership is in virtue of."

Do you believe in a kind of perennialism, the idea that a lot of these religions or wisdom traditions point to a similar thing, but just use different conceptions for it?

Broadly, I think the perennialists have a very strong case. There are very strong similarities across disparate traditions, and in particular a sort of "virtue ethics" seems dominant across the pre-modern world. A lot of other ideas, such as the insufficiency of worldly goods, the need for freedom and self-determination to be cultivated, education as primarily the development of virtue, apophatic theology, the need to move beyond dependence on fortune for liberty, etc. show up in many places, as do similar metaphysical insights.

However, I think perennialists often bulldoze over crucial distinctions and misrepresent traditions to make them fit into the neat narrative they want to create. Different traditions share crucial elements, but then often diverge in crucial ways. For instance, Stoicism and even moreso the ancient skeptics tend to go, IMHO, too far in pursuing dispassion as opposed to "right passion." Speaking very broadly, "Pagan philosophy' tended to undervalue the body, and the metaphysical importance of embodiment in comparison to the early and medieval Christians.

Philosophy of history is a particular outlier here in that a great many traditions tend to flatten out the importance of human history (and so politics, and often individuality) due to their other commitments. This is a place where the modern tradition often gets more right in my view (although it often goes too far in this direction). This is certainly true of Christianity, although it has some of the standout counter examples in Dante and Solovyov. Attar of Nishapur's Conference of the Birds shares a lot with the Divine Comedy, but a key difference is the respect for individuality and the historical-politcal in Dante, because he is able to resolve the dialectic between the mutability of history and divine union in a more complete way (a synthesis versus a sheer negation), and the dialectic between individual freedom (as the openness of the rational appetites) and the observable fact that people exercise very real causal powers on the moral and intellectual development of others, and their freedom, for better or worse.

These differences are quite important though. Also, perennialists sometimes tend towards outright misrepresentations to make their subject matter more palatable to their key audiences (particularly in the New Age space) and we end up with weird things like "Meister Eckhart the Buddhist."




I forget exactly where, I think it's in a few places, Plato describes being educated as primarily "desiring what is truly worthy/good and despising what is truly unworthy/bad." He says that a formally educated, wealthy person might be able to give more sophisticated answers as to why something is desirable or undesirable, but that this is ancillary to being truly "educated." If the more sophisticated person is nonetheless not properly oriented/cultivated such as to desire the good and abhor evil, then they are in an important sense uneducated (unformed); whereas the unsophisticated person is educated, although lacking in sophistication.

Now, Plato's point here sort of goes with what you each have said in different ways. In general, we do not love the good by default. While people might have more or less of a talent/inclination towards specific virtues and vices (e.g., tempers can "run in families"), in general they won't attain to a state of virtue without some cultivation. Indeed, without care and cultivation, at the limit, infants and children will die, so there always needs to be some cultivation (some "education").

So, this is obviously a broad view on education, one a bit at odds with how we use the word today in English. It has some appeal though. But education wouldn't quite be the same thing as wisdom. It is rather, a sort of virtue and desire for virtue, which is itself prior to (although also comingled with) wisdom (for Plato anyhow).

Doesn't society always attach that judgement on the individual while being equally convinced of its own inherent worth?

Do you mean "modern society?" I think this doesn't hold for many societies. For instance, surely it didn't tend to hold for American slaveholders vis-á-vis their slaves, nor in the context of the violent tribalism of the Near East, or even within Roman culture. I would say this notion is a product of a convergent evolution between different philosophies, with it being most strongly rooted in the West in the context of Christianity (for instance, this sentiment motivating, if not quite the end, then a precipitous decline in slavery throughout Christendom in antiquity and the taboo on infanticide).

Modern liberalism takes this up and tends to justify it in a different, more procedural way (e.g., Rawls). I think this has always been aspirational though. Certain individuals are not particularly valued by society as ends, and then individuals are also excluded from "society" based on convenient criteria (the immigrant, the overseas laborer who produces for the society, etc.)

But even if we accepted that individuals possess inherit worth, I don't see how that carries over to wisdom. Under liberalism, questions of telos, etc., the traditional domain of "wisdom," are generally privatized and the opinions of the fool are in a sense as sacrosanct as that of the saint or sage (e.g., Rawls' individual who sees counting blades of grass as the highest good).

Being worthy of love is something in the eye of the beholder.

Ah, but this is precisely what most wisdom traditions explicitly deny. This is more of an assumption of the liberal/Anglo-empiricist paradigm, the placement of "value" on the subjective side of the "subjective/objective ledger" (generally paired with the denial of the rational appetites for Goodness, Beauty, and Truth per se). For example, see above with Plato on "education," which is all about loving and despising what is truly worthy of each.

But this is hardly a judgement unique to the wisdom traditions of the West. The East also tends towards a position of "proper" beneficence and "proper loves." This is one respect where I think the modern tradition (and it's more true of empiricism) is an outlier.

But why would we use two words if we could do with just the one? My argument is that they are both basically the same thing, but then also completely different in terms of scale.

I guess I am questioning if they are generally understood to be the same thing. "Intelligence," as commonly used, tends to be viewed procedurally (i.e., as discursive ratio) or even computationally. Wisdom by contrast tends to deal with ultimate ends. An IQ test is supposed to measure intelligence, but it's unclear to me if it says much of anything about a grasp of ends (at least directly). So, I suppose my question is if "intelligence" covers the (ultimate) desirability of ends. If discovering what is truly worthy is "problem solving," it still seems like a particular sort of problem solving.

Certainly, intelligence as something like IQ doesn't seem to, even if we broaden it a good deal. But on a broader view of intelligence they do seem quite similar, and so I could seem them as perhaps largely being distinguished as a power versus a habit. Although, I think we can usefully distinguish between different intellectual virtues: practical wisdom versus science versus the traditional view of sophia, since they have different ends and ends define whether or not a habit/skill it being trained/developed well or poorly.

So the brain exists to do cognition (broadly speaking). And the primary functional division that then arises for the neuroscientist is between attention and habit. The intelligence of the ability to consciously focus and figure out something complicated, coupled to the wisdom of accumulated habit which allows you to react to everything else as if it were already completely familiar and reflexively understood.

I don't really disagree with the idea of comparing wisdom (or virtue) with a habit or, more loosely, a skill.

One of the early papers in the volume Cultivating Virtue: Perspectives from Philosophy, Theology, and Psychology (which you might find interesting @Tom Storm ) looks at how experienced chess players are better at reconstructing chess boards from memory. They are, however, not particularly better at reconstructing wholly random chess boards, only ones that would develop from normal, goal oriented play. And, when they narrate their construction, the experienced players tend to reconstructing games based on strategy, rather than blocks of pieces/color, as novices do. The experienced players vastly outperform novices despite not performing better on more general memory tasks.

Now obviously a good deal of this is explained in terms of chunking strategies, data compression, etc. Yet the goal-directedness of play also seems to be a crucial component of reasoning. Chess, is of course, easy to study, but also very far from virtue or wisdom. The goal of chess is fixed. But an element of virtue, and particularly wisdom, has to be discovering which goals are actually choiceworthy (the end is not fixed, or is at least much broader), and this is precisely where I see the biggest gulf between common uses of "intelligence" and "wisdom." Boethius' musings in the Consolation on the instability of worldly goods, and the lack of freedom dependence on them generates, is for instance, not so much "problem solving," as "ends finding/valuing."

Commonsense ought to matter more in everyday life. But society has changed. Work itself has become more computational than practical. Or perhaps more polarised into computational and emotional intelligence as the focus of what people do.

So talk of IQ assumes a generalised intelligence or G factor score that you can attach to an individual. But we know it isn't quite so simple. And what the labour market prizes is itself evolving in time.

Yes, but I think it's fair to say that the market is often foolish. Whereas wisdom is generally judged according to the wise, no? The market doesn't value wisdom for the same reason the fools tends to spurn wisdom... lack of wisdom.

1. What happened to falsification, which is based on the argument that there can never be enough evidence to establish a theory? Falsification is much easier and can be conclusive when positive proof is not available.

Good question. Many thinkers think that falsification's role as the core criterion of science was badly weakened by an argument from Quine (and refined by others)... get this... from underdetermination.

That is, every seeming "falsification" can always be explained away in other terms that do not falsify a theory, and the choice between these explanations will be underdetermined by the evidence.

Plus, historians of science were quick to point out that, pace Popper, theories, and particularly paradigms, are often falsified and rather than being challenged post hoc explanations are offered. For example, Newton's physics was falsified almost immediately when applied to astronomy. But rather than reject it, astronomers posited unobserved, more distant planets to explain the irregular orbits of visible planets. These were eventually identified with improvements in telescope technology, but were originally unobservable ad hoc posits.

To be sure, falsification is still a very useful criteria. Quine's argument doesn't mean there aren't distinctions. Marxist theory, or arguably the anthropology of liberal political-economy, is unfalsifiable in a stronger sense. Literally any observation of human behavior is easily rendered explicable by the theory itself, and challenges to the theory can be explained by the theory (just as challenges to Freudianism was a sign of a "complex"). Falsification is still a useful criteria, but not a particularly strong one in light of the underdetermination problem.

2. There are several criteria, I understand, that are applied in order to choose between two competing theories - Occam's razor, elegance, simplicity etc. Kuhn suggests that the wider context - sociological, technological, practical considerations - all have influence here.

Right, and those "other criteria" are what are often used to suggest a fairly robust anti-realism, i.e., "sociology all the way down (with the world merely offering some "constraints"). Occam's razor is often poorly translated from Ockham into a straight preference for reductionism, but I suppose that's a different sort of problem—except this—implausible reductions and eliminations (e.g. eliminating consciousness or all mental causality) are often justified in terms of "parsimony " paired with the claim that any difference between reduction/elimination and its opponent theories must be "underdetermined by empirical evidence." This is precisely why "parsimony" wins the day.

3. If an alternative theory explains more data than the existing theory, it is preferable. If it explains less data, the existing theory is preferable. If both explain exactly the same data, how are they (relevantly) different?

This is a very tricky question when we get to philosophy of mind and language. I'd question whether many skeptical solutions actually do explain the data equally well. They often succeed by making constricting assumptions about what can count as "data" in the first place.

More broadly, outside the context of scientific models (which is less of an issue), your current experiences are consistent with the world, and all of our memories, having been created 5 seconds ago, no? And they are consistent with all other human beings being clever robots, and your living in an alien or AI "zoo" of sorts. But surely there is a metaphysical and ethically relevant difference.

4. Is there really anything special about our making decisions based on less than conclusive data? (We even have a special word for this - "judgement" - admittedly it is not always used in this way.)

"Special" how? It's certainly a very common experience. My interest though lay more in the use of underdetermination to support radical theses in philosophy, not so much basic model underdetermination. In part, this is because the historical comparison isn't that illuminative here. The ancients and medievals knew about and accepted model underdetermination ("saving appearances"), but the more interesting thing is that they didn't think this general form of argument led to much wider forms of underdetermination as respects rules, causation, induction, word meaning, free will, etc.

It's about living to your internal values rather than external values

WtP is obeying the tyranny of your highest drives that differentiate you into you

In virtue of what are these desirable, or more desirable than their alternative?

Would intelligence be desirable in itself, i.e., worthy of love?

Intellectus is not so far from sapientia, but in common parlance it seems to me that "intelligence" has often drifted a good deal away from "wisdom." In that context, to say they are the same seems to me a bit like saying that "beauty is just a sort of pleasure" or that "awe and the numinous" is just the experience of danger. There is of course a similarity, but I would perhaps say they are analogous, one more "sensible" the other more "noetic" (I'd say "intellectual," but that word has run away with "intelligence.")

And I know that there I just related "intelligence" to the sensible, but this is only because "intelligence" sometimes seems to become wholly estimative and computational.

In wisdom traditions wisdom usually involves letting go of desire.

At least in the Western context, it's generally letting go of bad/evil/unworthy/less fulfilling desires, and thus being free and able to fulfill good/worthy/truly fulfilling desires. So the goal is ultimately the fulfillment of a greater desire, and the ascent to a greater freedom. Not a "will to nothing" but to will the Good, where with greater knowledge and conformity, comes ever greater love and satisfaction.

The Platonists have the erotic ascent, the Peripatetics have properly educated appetites, etc. Desire is normally central, and deepens with ascetic practice. For instance, we get this vision in the Symposium:

And the true order of going, or being led by another, to the things of love, is to begin from the beauties of earth and mount upwards for the sake of that other beauty, using these as steps only, and from one going on to two, and from two to all fair forms, and from fair forms to fair practices, and from fair practices to fair notions, until from fair notions he arrives at the notion of absolute beauty, and at last knows what the essence of beauty is.

Or St. Augustine in the Confessions:

Late have I loved you, beauty so old and so new: late have I loved you. And see, you were within and I was in the external world and sought you there, and in my unlovely state I plunged into those lovely created things which you made. You were with me, and I was not with you. The lovely things kept me far from you, though if they did not have their existence in you, they had no existence at all. You called and cried out loud and shattered my deafness. You were radiant and resplendent, you put to flight my blindness. You were fragrant, and I drew in my breath and now pant after you. I tasted you, and I feel but hunger and thirst for you. You touched me, and I am set on fire to attain the peace which is yours.

Dante at the climax of the Heaven of the Sun (wisdom) in the Paradiso is even more sensual:


Then, as the tower-clock calls us to come
at the hour when God's Bride is roused from bed
to woo with matin song her Bridegroom's love,

with one part pulling thrusting in the other,
chiming, ting-ting, music so sweet the soul,
ready for love, swells with anticipation

And in general, this does not lead to a denigration of the love of finite things, but rather its increase (as in Saint Bernard of Clairvaux's "Ladder of Love). Wisdom, by revealing creatures' ultimate context, reveals their true beauty. And so too for Rumi and the Sufi tradition:

Always at night returns the Beloved: do not eat opium to-night;
Close your mouth against food, that you may taste the sweetness of the mouth.
Lo, the cup-bearer is no tyrant, and in his assembly there is a circle:
Come into the circle, be seated; how long will you regard the revolution of Time?

Why, when God's earth is so wide, have you fallen asleep in a prison?
Avoid entangled thoughts, that you may see the explanation of Paradise.
Refrain from speaking, that you may win speech hereafter.
Abandon life and the world, that you may behold the Life of the world.



Even the Stoics generally distinguish that it is irrational desire that must be overcome (although they come closer to fetishizing total dispassion). The Orthodox, while more focused on asceticism, speak of transfiguring, not removing the appetites (including those of the body; likewise, Dante has the appetites of the body educated, not destroyed in the Purgatorio). My exposure to Hindu thought has generally suggested something similar. There might be exceptions, but for the West at least I think Saint Maximus the Confessor's words generally hold:

Nothing created by God is evil. It is not food that is evil but gluttony, not the begetting of children but unchastity, not material things but avarice, not glory but vainglory. It is only the misuse of things that is evil, not the things themselves.

Or for another pithy summary, Saint Isaac of Nineveh:

The world" is the general name for all the passions. When we wish to call the passions by a common name, we call them the world. But when we wish to distinguish them by their special names, we call them passions. The passions are the following: love of riches, desire for possessions, bodily pleasure from which comes sexual passion, love of honor which gives rise to envy, lust for power, arrogance and pride of position, the craving to adorn oneself with luxurious clothes and vain ornaments, the itch for human glory which is a source of rancor and resentment, and physical fear.

Where these passions cease to be active, there the world is dead…. Someone has said of the Saints that while alive they were dead; for though living in the flesh, they did not live for the flesh. See for which of these passions you are alive. Then you will know how far you are alive to the world, and how far you are dead to it.

The passions then are only unworthy desires. The goal is rather a perfection of freedom, to: "Turn my impulses into rigging for the ship of repentance, so that in it I may exult as I travel the world's sea to the haven of Thy hope."