It's seems worth noting that chora/khôra conventionally means "space," since I didn't see the non-technical translation here.

This is maybe a bit more helpful with an idea of how the Greeks of the period conceptualized space, and their distinction between magnitude and multitude in mathematics, but that's a bit of a digression, and we have to reconstruct such a view through Aristotle and his quotations anyhow.

A helpful comparison to a more discussed concept occurs in Book IV of Aristotle's "Physics."

This is why Plato in the Timaeus says that matter and space are the same; for the 'participant' and space are identical. (It is true, indeed, that the account he gives there of the 'participant' is different from what he says in his so-called 'unwritten teaching'. Nevertheless, he did identify place and space.) I mention Plato because, while all hold place to be something, he alone tried to say what it is.*

Matter for Aristotle is potentiality, and prime matter (nothing but matter) is sheer indeterminate potency. Matter is what "stays the same" when things change. For example, it helps to resolve Plato's Meno Paradox because we can explain that we know things potentially before we know them actually.

Prime matter never exists without form. If a thing is any thing at all it has some form/eidos. So, similarly for Aristotle, the approach to "knowing of it" is indirect.

Anyhow, an interesting comparison in approach here is Plotinus. Plotinus wants to extend Plato, but he doesn't pick up on the approach here (i.e., stories within stories). But neither can the approach be direct. Rather, it relies on affirmation and negation, saying something (normally of the One) and then denying it in any normal terms (this is arguably more confusing than Plato, and it makes it impossible to cite short passages decisively). This also plays off Aristotle's use of analogy, and some of his other work, although it also offers stark corrections, implying a sort of dunamis in God (as opposed to Aristotle's "pure act"), but then this dunamis isn't the same as Aristotle's and often gets rendered as "power" instead of "potency/potentiality."

Anyhow, what I think is interesting and informative for these later developments that relate to the OP involves questions of both method and theory.

In terms of method, there is the idea that these questions cannot be tackled head on. The author of the Seventh Letter (presumably Plato) speaks to this difficulty directly and "talks shop" about trying to teach such things. Aristotle appears to differ from Plato in some key respects, often drawing a distinction between "the Platonists''' position and his own, but the methodological difficulties remain. Later inheritors of both the Platonic and Aristotlean tradition would try to develop this a bit. For example, St. Thomas draws on Aristotle and Boethius to make the case that natural philosophy (what we often call science), mathematics, and metaphysics each involve different acts of the mind. In the commentary on Boethius' De Trinitate he will claim that metaphysics involves an act of "separation" that entails separating things that in reality can never be distinct, and matter/indeterminate space would be one of the things approached in such a way.

However, Plato's technique of images would remain popular. We might consider as examples St. Bonaventure's series of images in Itinerarium Mentis in Deum, or Dante's implementation of philosophy in images in the Divine Comedy.

Theory wise, the one development I wanted to point out lies in Eriugena, "who distinguishes “nothing through privation” (nihil per privationem), and “nothing on account of excellence” (nihil per excellentiam). Basically, is something nothing on account of total absence or lack, or nothing because it contains everything and so is indeterminate as any one thing? The metaphor I like here is a sound wave. We might imagine the total absence of sound in a classical vacuum. But then we can also consider a sound wave of infinite amplitude and frequency. As the waves get ever closer together, approaching infinite frequency, the peaks and troughs cancel each other out, resulting in silence. But this is a pregnant silence (a womb), one that can actualize any possible sound through substraction, not addition. Yet such a substraction requires something else—the "father"—and this sort of difficulty shows up in a lot of thought, for instance, Plotinus' desire to affirm freedom for the One but not multiplicity or a composite nature.



*Notably, Aristotle often refers to "the Platonists," but here refers to "Plato." Although, this could simply be due to the fact that he is quoting a specific work.

I think you might be misjudging the sense in which these terms become "incoherent." MacIntyre does take a very broad approach, which has some deficiencies, but his paradigmatic criticism of Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment ethics is Nietzsche, whose attack on ethics is particularly broad, but which has also generally been accepted as applying broadly (i.e., a serious challenge, even if it can be overcome).

He is not claiming that all modern ethicists are emotivists. This would be a silly thing to try to argue, because of all the counter examples that exist. He is claiming that the emotivists, or those reducing ethics to power, etc., actually have very strong arguments vis-á-vis contemporary ethics. It is indeed a weakness of the book that it doesn't really get into these critiques as much as one might hope. I don't think MacIntyre initially imagined how popular it would become, and probably figured people would be familiar with the references. But then another feature of modern ethical debate he focuses on to make his point is the inability of people to agree on almost any principles, and how this differs from earlier thought


In terms of contemporary thought, he looks to the analytic tradition a bit, focusing on Moore for a while, but since he was a Marxist, Marxism comes in for particular critique. The contemporary example he uses towards the end of the book is how the debate between partisans of Rawls and Nozick is interminable because of the historical issues he traces through Hume, Kant, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche.

I think Charles Taylor's "A Secular Age," is a useful corrective here because of the dominance of what Taylor calls "subtraction narratives" of the emergence of secularism. These basically say: "We inherited all sorts of maladaptive, superstitious dogmas. Secularism is just what emerges when you cut all that garbage out." Taylor's main point is that this is a false narrative. Secularism was positively constructed, and in particular it was positively constructed on religious grounds in a theologically informed context. This is relevant to the idea that the problems of modern ethics—their shape and structure—were in some way inevitable once the "historical baggage weighing us down" was jettisoned. But the book also takes a broader look at how notions of human flourishing evolved in ways that make doing ethics difficult.

Might this simply have to do with the fact that most immigrants no longer come from Europe? It's fairly easy to find many of the charges laid against Syrian and African refugees and immigrants in 2015 now being leveled against Ukrainian refugees. And in extreme far-right spaces, rants against "Slavic subhumans," could be copied and pasted right from Nazi Eastern Front political orders of the day.

No doubt, racism undergirds much of these sentiments, but they are generally explicitly (and not always implausibly) formulated in cultural terms, not in racial terms. And research shows that conservatives actually have a marked bias in favor of minorities who adopt conservative political positions, perhaps because supporting them helps alleviate cognitive dissonance over claims of bias.

I don't think "self-hatred," is going to be a good way to explain Trump winning the majority of Latino men at any rate.

My thoughts are that the salience of group identity can shift dramatically based on other cultural and economic conditions. This is how you get tribal/ethnic identities in the Middle East taking center stage in regions where a single unified rule has made such identities more ancillary for long stretches of history. And people often shift the identities they most embrace, for example elevating their religious identity over their ethnic identity. You see this a lot, particularly with more conservative African and Latin American migrants, who proclaim that they are "Christians first." Broad conservative alignment with Arab Christian groups is an example here.

point is that we shouldn't be beguiled by the idea that a loss of connection with a particular older tradition renders the entire discipline incoherent. Make Philosophy Great Again? I don't think so.

I don't think this is MacIntyre's point. He goes into great detail on why he thinks the collapse into emotivism happens with a series of case studies. The thesis isn't that "only the classical tradition is coherent and so moving away from it results in incoherence." Rather it is "these developments led to incoherence because of x, y, and z (with particular attention to and affirmation of Nietzsche's critiques of ethics)," but these problems do not apply to the tradition.

But then the sub-thesis is that the abandonment of the tradition has helped lead to this incoherence precisely because our moral vocabulary was developed in the context of the old tradition, and we continue to lean on this vocabulary even when it has been uprooted from the context where it makes sense. For example, he talks about equivocation in lists of the virtues in philosophers, but also in Jane Austen, Benjamin Franklin, etc., and the further equivocation as vice becomes the "vices" of the "vice unit" (i.e. primarily prostitution, gambling, drugs, and alcohol) and virtue becomes a sexually loaded term for women.

I think it's a very similar to the arguments that Deely makes in "Four Ages of Understanding," and the "Red Book," re the shift in epistemology, the philosophy of perception, and semiotics in the early modern period and on. The claims are similar; terms like "objective" and "subjective" come to take on meanings that are in some ways the opposite of their original meaning and which lead to incoherence because their original framework has been not only abandoned, but forgotten. Some parts might be stronger than others; Deely seems to be on particularly solid ground on the points relating specifically to the philosophy of signs and signification.

I think you could probably write a similar book about metaphysics and terms like "substance."

Such historical arguments can of course be biased or oversimplifying, and they become less plausible when they rely significantly on relatively recent "new readings" of old thought.

Heidegger makes this sort of argument going way back with the "ontotheology" thing, and I think that, even if it fails as a historical piece, we might consider that it applies to much philosophy, if not all the philosophy he thought it applied to. Gadamer has a pretty good critique of why Heidegger's history might be thought to fail a bit (basically, it assumed that the late scholasticism with which Heidegger was most familiar—e.g. Suarez—was representative of all scholasticism or even the whole of "classical metaphysics," but it isn't really.)

Then you have your out and out polemics, such as Weaver's "Ideas Have Consequences." These can still have value, but tend to run into much more simplification and bias. Another example here might be the many attempts to frame Aristotle and Plato as essentially representing the empirical/rationalist (Anglo/Continental) divide, when they really don't fit these neatly at all.

:up:

I suppose I was thinking in terms of metaphysics and a more general notion of goodness. You know, a plague spore would be "better" than a prion, or a hurricane "better" than a rock.

before...If all these illegal immigrants were lily white people from Norway, you think you'd be hearing that kind of rhetoric from Trump?

The last (and only) time US had migration levels (i.e. share of the population that is foreign born, or, alternatively, share that is either foreign born or has at least one foreign born parent) this high was was in the early 20th century. Then, the migrants were overwhelmingly from Europe, particularly Germany, Ireland, Italy, and later Eastern/Central Europe. The same sort of rhetoric prevailed then and massive draconian restrictions were put in place on migration that were designed specifically to not only disallow non-European migration, but also migration from much of Europe (particularly non-Protestant regions).

Migration status became a less salient issue in the years that followed due to both vastly curtailed migration and the fact that the US attracted fewer migrants after it blew up its own (and the world's) economy in the Great Depression. By the time debate on reopening migration occured migration levels had been very low for a long time and migrants had been increasingly assimilated, with this being helped along by the shared experience of WWII and the mass conscription it involved.

See:



Pew, hardly a far-right organization, did a retrospective on the effects of the 1965 migration reforms in the mid-2010s. The shift had brought migration rates on par with the early 20th century, with close to 1 in every 8 residents being foreign born and 1 in 4 being either foreign born or having at least one foreign parent. These figures can shift a bit depending on if undocumented immigrants are counted and how they are counted since they represent a significant proportion of the population, but there are large variances is estimates of the size of this population. The change is not small, IIRC, Pew estimates that the US population would be around 270 million without the reforms, as opposed to around 335 million. You have similar shifts in Europe, where Europeans have been projected to become minorities in many of the larger economies by the end of the century since at least 2000 (and have become minorities in urban hubs already).

This creates political challenges, not only because of the effects on the labor market, housing market, inequality, etc., and the displacement issues often highlighted in debates on "gentrification," but also because there is a large difference between the age distributions of the populations. For an example, during the height of the BLM protests there were student/parent protests over the fact that the teaching staff of Worcester, Massachusetts was largely white, while the students are largely Hispanic. But, one of the obvious reasons for this is that the median age for Hispanics in the region was 20, too young to have completed college, a prerequisite for being a teacher, versus over 40 for white residents. Much could be said on this, but it just highlights the age differences.

Anyhow, this plays into tensions over immigration because different age groups also often have very different priorities and time horizons. This sort of difference is at play in Europe as well. So you get a transference of intergenerational conflict into ethnic terms, and this is particularly acute if you have surging senior benefits crowding out future investment. You end up with a far more diverse working population seeing investment for their children crowded out by a significantly older native population that also holds most of the wealth.

So, I think the tensions are unfortunately predictable, but they are made more acute by the age gap, and they have been managed poorly in terms of messaging (xenophobic rants versus the idea that all debate on migration is inherently racist).

You can see the latter problem pretty clearly in the use of the "Great Replacement," narrative. To be sure, there are extremely racist, right wing fever dream versions of this narrative where "the Jews" have organized it as a means of "white genocide." But the general line that Democrats look at migration as a boon because they see it a way to shift demographics in favor of their party is hardly conspiratorial. I first heard this line when I was working for Democratic campaigns. The idea that "Texas will keep becoming more Latino, tipping it blue, and then the Presidency will be assured prepetuity," is an idea you can find all over progressive political opinion pieces in the last thirty years. And there are critiques of such thinking that aren't racist.

It also seems wrong. Even as a teenager I had the thought that if Hispanics grow up in the US they will end up having political opinions in line with the US average, which means about an even split between the parties (or even in favor of the GOP given the states where Hispanic immigration is highest). And this seems to be at least partially vindicated by Trump winning a majority of Hispanic men over, and the shift in his favor across urban centers in the Northeast (but still losing by landslide margins, just 30/70 instead of 20/80 in 2016 and 2020). Anyhow, I think the decision to generally frame the discussion in terms of the most abhorrent narratives is actually a disservice to liberal political ambitions.



Does Gopnik give any examples of the economies "untouched by neoliberalism?" The US maintains UBI and universal healthcare for its seniors, but the inability of neoliberal reformers to roll back popular entitlements doesn't mean they haven't radically altered other areas. European states with strong welfare states have still seen the off-shoring of their industry, sea change reforms in migration (Japan would be a good counterexample comparison here), a decline in the political influence of unions, and the influence of trade agreements that have radically altered the legal framework for businesses in line with neoliberal preferences. The way the Eurozone operates would be another example, or how economic policy intersects with policy on Russia.

MacIntyre discusses Canticle at length in the opening, and I always thought Canticle itself was supposed to be a metaphor for the collapse of the Roman Empire and the preservation of knowledge by monastics (based on what I know about it, I haven't made it around to that one yet). Also, it had been fairly common to see the work of Dark Age scholars as "corruptions" of the original thought (which had been helpfully "recovered" in the Enlightenment move to "reboot" philosophy).

I think scholarship increasingly tends to reject this "corruption" thesis, recognizing that works in this era, e.g. Eriugena's Periphyseaon, represent significant, novel shifts in philosophy, rather then the old "reason enthralled to backwards Christianity," meme (which also makes no sense because wider advances in the Orthodox and Muslim East overlap the Latin Dark Age slump.)

This is sort of relevant to MacIntyre's thesis though because, not only did the Enlightenment jettison prior ethical theory, but it also ripped up the metaphysics it grew out of, essentially "starting over" (explicitly in Descartes' theory for instance). At the same time, philosophy was radically democratized and moved away from being largely the domain of highly trained specialists, with most living ascetic and contemplative lives, to becoming more the arena of anyone with the means to write. Then, the printing press and pamphlet sales becoming a measure/means of success further democratized things. And you can see this in some pretty famous Enlightenment texts, for instance when Hume dives into philosophy of religion while being seemingly ignorant of why assuming the univocity of being might be problematic, or at the very least question begging.

Point being, I think you could expand MacIntyre's thesis outside of ethics, and this would explain why so much contemporary philosophy has involved the recovery or rediscovery of old ideas from the "lost period" (e.g. semiotics, phenomenology, group minds, etc.).

Charles Taylor's "A Secular Age," is an interesting supplement to MacIntyre's because it shows how much of these changes were also theologically motivated, even though these changes then work themselves into major atheist thinkers (e.g. Nietzsche's German Protestant background comes through strong). For example, you cannot have an ethics of virtue (excellences) if man is totally depraved and is only ever good through miraculous grace. Nor can you have much of a philosophy of ethics if true Goodness, God's Goodness, is cut off from our own notions of goodness by total equivocity, hence you focus on rules instead, first drawn from the Bible, and only later for "all rational agents."

The issue with the Matrix for any human is that the humans are not in control at all. Suppose the machines discover that human beings not only are less likely to wake up, but also produce more electricity if the entire 10 billion person population exists in the equivalent of a simulation of the worst Soviet gulags. What stops the machines from implementing such a plan?

I suppose the machines have some concern for humanity, since they originally make the simulation a paradise, but there is always the chance they evolve past that sentiment. Similarly, they could just find a non-convoluted source of power, and just decide to cull the whole human population.

The unreality of the "perfect simulation" of the Matrix comes to the fore when you consider that the person in the Matrix is essentially powerless because they are trapped in the illusion. It robs them of, if not all agency, then at least important aspects. Moreover, it robs humanity as a collective corporate body of agency and the ability to pursue its own freedom. What historical progress can be made if history gets reset every 20 years or so?

I feel like there are lots of ways for the metaphor to break down, but an important aspect of it is the way in which the humans of the Matrix are powerless, like an ant colony with a vindictive child's foot perched just above it, or livestock in a feedlot.

Of course, we can assume beneficent machines, and this alleviates the problem, but it would seem to resolve the problem precisely because truly beneficit machines would try to empower their subjects until they could work together to resolve the whole energy issue through some better solution.

Do they? Who? It's a bizarre claim. The Wermacht and bubonic plague were both complex for instance.

My sympathy has always been with those in the cave. Why leave? You have everything you need there, including predictability. Ignorance has its charms and there is something dismissive of the real world (where most of us live) built into the allegory.

Well, the people in the cave might have what they need and be having a good time. Recall, there is a second tier of people in the cave, those who, while still being bound to the cave, get to manipulate the shadow puppets. Who do we have up there? A more benevolent ruler along the lines of Ceasar Augustus or Trajan, or a Stalin?

To take up Boethius' extension of Plato's thought, the problem for the cave dwellers is that they are not in the driver's seat. They might have good fortune, and have good cave masters who bring them food, stability, etc. and they might not. They are not in the driver's seat, so even if they are happy, their happiness is unstable, threatened by the whims of fortune. This is Boethius great victory. He was the second most powerful man in Rome. He had a loving wife. Two faithful sons named consul. And he lost it all and was tortured and killed for doing what he thought was right (fighting corruption and pursuing justice). Yet he discovers how to be happy without relying on the vicissitudes of fortune. As St. Augustine puts it, better to flourish according to what cannot be taken from one.

And even if the cave dwellers set up a system where they vote amongst themselves to decide who will be unchained to manage things, there is the problem that they will be making uninformed decisions about who should go up while the leaders themselves will also be ignorant. Certainly, free and fair elections can still sometimes put (and keep) ruinous demagogues in power.

To stretch the metaphor a bit too far, the reason leaving the cave is good is not just the beauty of the sun, but also the ability to see how the cave should be run. And even if we cannot actually get out of the cave, we might suppose that getting ahold of the torches and learning how the shadow puppets really work might be useful. Of course, if we don't know what is truly best, we can also accidentally make things worse. There is a relationship between knowledge and self-determination.

But it's somewhat traditionalist and conservative isn't it? Which doesn't bother me too much, but I can certainly imagine an elaborate critique.

I think in a certain sense, yes. Lewis is a scholar of classical, medieval, and renaissance literature. He is trying to translate what he finds to be most valuable in those traditions, and in The Abolition of Man and some other places he also branches out to include what he finds valuable in Eastern traditions. I don't know if this necessarily puts it on the political "right" though, because those traditions have a lot of aspects that don't jive well with the political right, particularly how they view wealth and economics, and their more communitarian and corporate focus. It's sort of like how we could see an appeal to St. Gregory of Nyssa as an appeal to "tradition" in the 19th century, while nonetheless if his arguments against slavery are being invoked they can be quite radical.

I understand this project and it will help with certain matters and probably enrich civic culture, but will it help us get a useful reading of Derrida or Kant? My concern lies with the often impenetrable complexity of philosophical discourse and literature.

Right, there is also the question of people's aptitudes and interests too. Unfortunately, since philosophy isn't often valued as a core part of a basic education, translational work (i.e. making others' work accessible and applicable) also sometimes isn't valued as much. But I think that in philosophy, as in science, a bulk of the work is digesting a new paradigm and making it easily intelligible and seeing how it can be applied (e.g. the whole Patristic period, with lots of great thinkers, is in a way synthesizing and digesting Plato, Aristotle, and Stoicism). If you want to read Hegel or Kant, great, but something like Pinkhard's version of Hegel is particularly valuable in that it isn't really a struggle to get through.

But my point here is that saying something is more complex is different to saying it is of greater worth.

Ok. I don't know of anyone who has advocated such a position.



We might be differing on what is considered a metaphysical claim. I am thinking of things like Empedocles' claim that everything is made of different arrangements of earth, water, air, and fire, mixing according to the principles of love and strife. Or Thales claim that water is the principle of all things.

"Water is an undividable primitive" is the sort of supposition that is open to empirical investigation. No doubt, we could easily reformulate these models (or something like them) using new, ever smaller primitive elements, as materialists did. In some sense, they are unfalsifiable in that we can always posit ever smaller building blocks at work in a "building block ontology," but we might have other empirically informed grounds to reject such a view.

Granted, people could also reject the grounds for thinking that water is a composite substance, but I am thinking in terms of what most people are generally going to accept.

When people hold up the surfeit of apparently purposeless suffering in the world as a counter argument to metaphysical optimism they are making a similar sort of argument, and I don't think these arguments are implausible.

So now you have real, existing and being. A proper muddle.

Nonsense, the central argument of the Metaphysics is quite simple: "being qua being is being per se in accordance with the categories, which in turn is primary ousia, but primary ousia is form/edios, while form/eidos is quiddity and quiddity is actuality." QED. :grin:

But in all seriousness, it isn't that much of a muddle, Aristotle uses lots of concrete examples and spends a lot of time on definitions.

Telos is a rather slippery notion. That's why it dropped out of use.

Has it? It's used all over economics, pol sci, and other social sciences, e.g. the notion of "utility." It's all over organizational psychology, or other areas of psychology. It's used in biology in the form of "teleonomy" and "function." It's used everywhere in medicine and public health. It even shows up in the pedagogy of physics in the way that the properties of end states make them more likely (sometimes to the point of being, for all intents and purposes, determined) to occur. Even more reductionist biologists like Dawkins feel the need to rely on the idea (e.g. "archeo vs. neo purpose).

As the biologist J. B. S. Haldane observed: "Teleology is like a mistress to a biologist: he cannot live without her but he's unwilling to be seen with her in public."

I think Etienne Gilson has the right of it when he says that "teleology" is to "astrology" as "teleonomy" and related terms are to "astronomy." In both cases both sets of terms develop out of the same history, and come with a lot of baggage (particularly because of the way the literary tradition used to be blended with the philosophical/scientific tradition). The new terms (astronomy and teleonomy) serve to try to separate that baggage (with disagreement over what counts as useless baggage in the latter case).

What's with the unattributed quotes and references?

Like I said, those are my notes.



There are a lot of related ideas in psychology, e.g. "self-actualization," or "individuation." "We might consider the psychiatrist Viktor Frankl's "logotherapy" as well, humanistic psychology, and a whole range of similar movements. These have been subject to empirical study, in a variety of formats, although "therapy for mental illness" would probably be the most common lens. And the connection to the philosophical tradition is often explicit. For instance, when Martin Seligman was head of the APA he pushed "positive psychology" (also quite popular) in a context that drew heavily on the Aristotelian tradition to define the program.

"Is there empirical support for Plato's thesis here?" is probably a question that is way too broad for useful analysis. A lot of traditions/movements in psychology (both therapeutic and research based) have drawn on the wider philosophical tradition, but you're not going to be able to generate a metanalysis that cuts across all of them that will be worth its salt because the way the question has been instrumentalized and investigated are too disparate.

You could break the question up though. For instance, we could ask about Aristotle's thesis that the virtues (and vices) can be trained and are properly thought of as habits (habits we nonetheless are born with or without talents for). I think the empirical case for this is quite strong, and indeed empirically informed "self-help" literature by psychologists in this area often name drops old Aristotle.

You might find this New Yorker article on philosophers doing therapy interesting. A key difference would be the consideration of how "what one ought to do is addressed." I don't know of empirical work on this sort of therapy. The article mentions success stories, and also the opinion of some psychologists that this work wouldn't work for people with severe mental illnesses. That sort of goes along with a lot of the philosophy though; there is a certain level of stability and unity that is a prerequisite for fruitful inquiry.

On the metaphysical side, there is an entire interdisciplinary field dedicated to self-organizing systems, and a great deal of crossover between homeostasis and "staying-at-work-being-itself," or other frameworks from the literature of dissipative systems. This literature also references Aristotle a lot. For instance, in Terrance Deacon's Incomplete Nature, an attempt to derive teleonomy from statistical mechanics, gets framed in Aristotelian terms.

But I also think it's important to keep in mind what empirical research can and can't do vis-a-vis these sorts of questions, particularly empirical research housed in a scientific apparatus that generally tends to either discourage metaphysics, or at least tries to keep it separated from your day-to-day scientific work. We can point to empirical studies to support metaphysical claims, just as Plato, St. Thomas, etc. often use everyday examples or examples drawn from technical professions, but it's going to often be impossible to run experiments on such suppositions.

If metaphysics is rightly above mathematics as the most abstract and most general science (the claim of Aristotle, Boethius, St. Thomas, etc.), then asking for experimental results is more akin to asking for an experiment to prove mathematical propositions. To be sure, we can demonstrate that some numbers are prime, or the rules of arithmetic, by using rocks and apples. We can use examples from the senses. And if our mathematics is diverging wildly from our observations, we might think we have something wrong on that side of the house. Yet I do not think we can justify metaphysics on empirical grounds, in the same way you wouldn't justify Lagrange's four-square theorem or the Pythagorean theorem by showing that it works in enough randomly selected examples to hit some p value threshold. At best you can falsify metaphysical claims.

I think it depends on what "logical" is supposed to mean.

I would maybe think of these issues as somewhat analagous to software bugs. Video games are a good example. Some classic games that are very well received are also very buggy. You can break them, either making them trivial or else just causing crashes or all sorts of bizarre behavior.

The game still serves its purpose. It does what we want. We just know, "don't do that or you will break it." And if "that" is not something we're likely to do by accident, it really isn't a huge problem. Yet we still might want to patch the bug, but this can also be done in ways that are straightforward and "make sense," or in ways that just seem like ad hoc papering over, just like you can do good body work on a car and restore it, or just pull out the Bondo and patch it.

But when it comes to "correct reasoning," we are talking about something essential to human flourishing, freedom, and even the rise and fall of civilization. So probably want to get to the bottom of any bugs.

Explosion seems like a bug. Suppose we think common paradoxes of self-reference involve situations where statements are really both true and false. Yet even if this is so, we will likely think that this does not constitute a good reason to think that everything is both true and false.

For these writers, it’s not just “we” who create ontological realities, as human beings or subjects. It is the world itself that continually creates itself, and we are just along for the ride.

Right, there is overlap on the background suppositions, but also differences that lead to different conclusions. I think the way in which "freedom" in conceptualized, as primarily potential or primarily act, is a big one, but this conceptualization also flows from other disagreements. There is obviously going to be disagreement on: "Philosophy does not consist in knowing and is not inspired by truth. Rather, it is categories like Interesting, Remarkable, or Important that determine success or failure."

I suppose the response to the adventure of rollicking new avenues of thought might be something like the comparison between a trained pianist and someone who has never played a piano before. Yes, the pianist is, in a sense, constrained by long habit, yet at the same time they are free to do things the novice isn't.

Edit: I would think that less focus being placed on the individual is probably less of an area of disagreement here, since this is also an area where the classical tradition varies from early modern and much contemporary thought (we could consider here the influence of Stoicism and particularly Epictetus.) To me, the disagreement lies more in the questions of "what is knowable?" "how is it known?" and "what drives how history and the world unfold?"

It's a question of cultural norms. Incest has historically been widely practiced to varying degrees, especially among ruling classes. Is morality a cultural phenomenon? Or is culture a moral phenomenon? You decide.

Might the bolded part not assume the answer here a bit?

Across history, there has been a wide amount of disagreement about the shape of the Earth (e.g. flat, spherical, cylindrical, etc.). Such beliefs tied into cultural norms, religion, philosophy, mythology, etc. Likewise, there has been widespread disagreement about the sources of infectious diseases, and these explanations have often been given culturally constructed moral dimensions (e.g. plague as God's vengeance). What people believed about these examples has varied by time and place, and people raised in one culture have tended to believe what others around them believed.

And yet, I don't think we would want to say that the shape of the Earth or the nature of infectious diseases is just about cultural norms. To be sure, our understanding of these is bound up in and filtered through such norms, since education, science, etc. are social practices, and the findings of science can fit into a metaphysical framework. But presumably we'd like to say that there is a "fact of the matter" about the shape of the planet or germ theory, and that this has been what has driven the evolution of cultural norms on this topic.

We don't generally think that "people have believed many different things about this at different times," represents a good reason to assume that most facts are primarily "cultural construction," so I think this appeal can be a red herring. It only makes sense if we assume that "what is good" is obvious. But what is "good" in many senses is often far from obvious, as the history of medicine can attest (e.g. treatments that do more harm than good).

I would tend to go with something like: "culture is a moral phenomenon," in the sense that Hegel lays out. E.g.:

• Institutions develop due to principles at work in the world, principles which are external to the thoughts or feelings of any individual. There is a certain logic to processes at work in the world, and this logic inexorably drives on the development of social institutions, shaping their essential structure even as historical contingencies also shape their specific actualization. (For example, there is an essence that all criminal justice systems share, but contingency also shapes the specific ways in which that essence is actualized.)
  
• When we talk about “the logic of development,” we can make a rough analogy to “the logic of natural selection,” which drives organic evolution. “Survival of the fittest,” is a description that “maps onto” the external world, and describes, in part, the process by which biological evolution occurs. Hegel believed he had identified a similar process at work in how institutions develop. (Note: Hegel is writing before Darwin, the comparison here is mine, not his).
  
• The logic that spurs on institutional development is deeply tied to our moral values. (This shouldn’t be surprising. If Hegel is correct, said institutions will turn out to be what actually shaped our individual morality in the first place!) This is Hegel’s foothold across the “is-ought gap.” He can now identify the origins of moral principles extrinsically in the logic of institutional development, in a process that is causally prior to any one individual’s development of their moral sense.
  
• Institutions survive and thrive because they promote justice and human happiness. In a sort of organic analogy, we could also say that they “survive and reproduce” because human beings find such institutions — free markets, courts, marriage, the state, etc. — to be beneficial and act to sustain and spread them. Moreover, this dynamic is intrinsic to states as entities made up of citizens. This is akin to how traits that facilitate the general health of an organisms’ cells will not be selected against.
  
• Human morality is clearly quite malleable. If one goes back far enough, the people of the past almost universally supported wars of conquest, slavery, etc. That humans today generally find these things abhorrent is itself the result of cultural conditioning. It is an obvious fact that most people tend to embrace the morality of their particular society.
  
• But — and this is the crucial point — it is institutions, the state key among them, that control the type of morality that a people comes to embrace. Thus, the morality embraced by a given people is not random, but tied to the development of their institutions. And these institutions themselves develop according to a specific, extrinsic logic (see above). They are also sometimes consciously reformed according to the moral preferences of individuals.
  
• Together, these points allow Hegel to ground the origins of morality in the external logic of the world. Such a logic is not “cut off from the world,” like a deontological logic that is born of pure, abstract reason, but neither does it collapse into relativism. Relativism is not a problem if we are able to recognize the essential principles at work in the development of our institutions and separate these principles from the merely contingent factors that shaped current institutions. These contingent factors will eventually be swept away by the progress of history if they contradict the essence that underlies the institution in question.
  
• And indeed, Hegel does think he can identify the core principle driving the evolution of human institutions: the promotion of human freedom!

For example:

A better reason for claiming that incest should not be considered as permissible is that the conditions for consent to it don't make that much sense, the hypothetical scenario in the OP is not representative of the scenarios where incest occurs. It's a bit like saying that murder is permissible since there are conditions in which killing is permissible.

This right here is an example of progressing from the particular prohibition, the "letter of the law," to the more general essence in question, "the spirit of the law." This is something people have an easier time doing if they live in a society that fosters human flourishing through education, etc.

We might disagree here that "consent" is the only issue at play, but either way we will be moving beyond "what norms are" towards "why they are," which in turn informs "what they should be," and our conception of "what they should be," in the aggregate, shapes what norms actually become.

Degrees also seem like a quantitative concept - as if one thing can exist more than another, or exist harder in a given way. As opposed to a qualitative one - like an idea might exist in a different sense to a cup. The former corresponds to changes in degree of reality within a type, the latter corresponds to differences type. Compare heights and masses, two different quantitative axes, differences of degree. Ideality and materiality, two different seemingly binary properties, differences in kind.

Yes, it is tricky. This notion is developed in St. Thomas through the concept of "virtual quantity" (more on that at the very bottom if you're interested).

So, to the skeptics, , I will offer up what I think is one of the better summaries of how this works in Plato, in a context focusing on his psychology and human freedom (freedom as self-determination and self-governance).

By calling what we experience with our senses less real than the Forms, Plato is not saying that what we experience with our senses is simply illusion. The “reality” that the Forms have more of is not simply their not being illusions. If that’s not what their extra reality is, what is it? The easiest place to see how one could suppose that something that isn’t an illusion, is nevertheless less real than something else, is in our experience of ourselves.

In Republic book iv, Plato’s examination of the different "parts of the soul” leads him to the conclusion that only the rational part can integrate the soul into one, and thus make it truly “just.” Here is his description of the effect of a person’s being governed by his rational part, and therefore “just”:

Justice . . . is concerned with what is truly himself and his own. . . . [The person who is just] binds together [his] parts . . . and from having been many things he becomes entirely one, moderate, and harmonious. Only then does he act. (Republic 443d-e)

Our interest here (I’ll discuss the “justice” issue later) is that by “binding together his parts” and “becoming entirely one,” this person is “truly himself.” That is, as I put it in earlier chapters, a person who is governed by his rational part is real not merely as a collection of various ingredients or “parts,” but as himself. A person who acts purely out of appetite, without any examination of whether that appetite is for something that will actually be “good,” is enacting his appetite, rather than anything that can appropriately be called “himself.” Likewise for a person who acts purely out of anger, without examining whether the anger is justified by what’s genuinely good. Whereas a person who thinks about these issues before acting “becomes entirely one” and acts, therefore, in a way that expresses something that can appropriately be called “himself.”

In this way, rational self-governance brings into being an additional kind of reality, which we might describe as more fully real than what was there before, because it integrates those parts in a way that the parts themselves are not integrated. A person who acts “as one,” is more real as himself than a person who merely enacts some part or parts of himself. He is present and functioning as himself, rather than just as a collection of ingredients or inputs.

We all from time to time experience periods of distraction, absence of mind, or depression, in which we aren’t fully present as ourselves. Considering these periods from a vantage point at which we are fully present and functioning as ourselves, we can see what Plato means by saying that some non-illusory things are more real than other non-illusory things. There are times when we ourselves are more real as ourselves than we are at other times.

Indeed, we can see nature as a whole as illustrating this issue of how fully integrated and “real as itself ” a being can be. Plants are more integrated than rocks, in that they’re able to process nutrients and reproduce themselves, and thus they’re less at the mercy of their environment. So we could say that plants are more effectively focused on being themselves than rocks are, and in that sense they’re more real as themselves. Rocks may be less vulnerable than plants are, but what’s the use of invulnerability if what’s invulnerable isn’t you?

Animals, in turn, are more integrated than plants are, in that animals’ senses allow them to learn about their environment and navigate through it in ways that plants can’t. So animals are still more effectively focused on being themselves than plants are, and thus more real as themselves.

Humans, in turn, can be more effectively focused on being themselves than many animals are, insofar as humans can determine for themselves what’s good, rather than having this be determined for them by their genetic heritage and their environment. Nutrition and reproduction, motility and sensation, and a thinking pursuit of the Good each bring into being a more intensive reality as oneself than is present without them.

Now, what all of this has to do with the Forms and their supposedly greater reality than our sense experience is that it’s by virtue of its pursuit of knowledge of what’s really good, that the rational part of the soul distinguishes itself from the soul’s appetites and anger and so forth. The Form of the Good is the embodiment of what’s really good. So pursuing knowledge of the Form of the Good is what enables the rational part of the soul to govern us, and thus makes us fully present, fully real, as ourselves. In this way, the Form of the Good is a precondition of our being fully real, as ourselves.

But presumably something that’s a precondition of our being fully real must be at least as real as we are when we are fully real. It’s at least as real as we are, because we can’t deny its reality without denying our own functioning as creatures who are guided by it or are trying to be guided by it.13 And since it’s at least as real as we are, it’s more (fully) real than the material things that aren’t guided by it and thus aren’t real as themselves.

From Robert M. Wallace - Philosophical Mysticism in Plato, Hegel, and the Present

The key thing here is "self-determination." But this can be taken to be "self-determination" in a more abstract, metaphysical sense as well, as it is in other readings of Plato, Aristotle and Hegel (who is in some sense very Aristotelian). For example:

[Hegel] thinks he has demonstrated, in the chapter on “Quality,” that the ordinary conceptions of quality, reality, or finitude are not systematically defensible, by themselves, but can only
be properly employed within a context of negativity or true infinity...

Note: For instance, one cannot understand “red” atomically, but rather it depends on other notions such as “color” and the things (substances) that can be red, etc. to be intelligible. This notion is similar to how the Patristics (e.g., St. Maximus) developed Aristotle in light of the apparent truth that even "proper beings" (e.g., a horse) are not fully intelligible in terms of themselves. For instance, try explaining what a horse *is* without any reference to any other plant, animal, or thing. This has ramifications for freedom as the ability to transcend “what one already is,”—the “given”—which relies on our relation to a transcendent absolute Good—a Good not unrelated to how unity generates (relatively) discrete/self-determining beings/things.

[Hegel] has now shown, through his analysis of “diversity” and opposition, that within such a context of negativity or true infinity, the reality that is described by apparently merely “contrary” concepts will turn out to be better described, at a fundamental level, by contradictory concepts. The fundamental reality will be contradictory, rather than merely contrary. It’s not that nothing will be neither black nor white, but rather that qualities such as black, white, and colorless are less real (less able to be what they are by virtue of [only] themselves) than self-transcending finitude (true infinity) is…

From Robert M. Wallace - Hegel's Philosophy of Reality, Freedom, and God

So, to 's point here: "Seems to me that again there is an is/ought problem here," the response from this wide tradition would be to say that there isn't precisely because the Good by which things are "good or bad" (note: not just morally, but also in cases like a "good car" or a "bad basketball player") are not unrelated to the Unity by which anything is any thing at all. Rather, the ability to say true things about things, or for there to be discrete entities that are relatively self-determining such that they are not merely bundles of external causes in a single truly global process, is grounded in aims, teloi. And these in turn entail some notion of goodness vis-à-vis ends.

The obvious rejoinder from the modern context here is that "rocks don't have ends," which seems true, but Aristotle doesn't think rocks are proper beings.* And, whereas being a substance in Aristotle has to do with contradictory opposition (i.e. a thing is either man or not-man, fish or not-fish), unity and multiplicity involve contrariety (i.e. privation, perfect privation, or relation), and so it occurs on a sliding scale. Hence, man is, of the sensible things we know, the most able to become unified, precisely because man has access to transcendent aims (but note that such transcendence does not preclude a naturalistic understanding of human essence or self-determination).

Of course, this position also relies on a notion of analogical predication. What is “good” for a tiger, an ant, or a daffodil is “good” in an analogous sense, just as what constitutes “healthy food” varies between a horse and a bee, or between individual human beings (e.g. peanut butter is not "healthy" for those who are allergic to it.) But on the classical view we must not make the mistake of assuming that this makes “goodness” equivocal or fully relativized; the same principle of unity is at work in each, but reaches a higher, more perfected form in some organisms, most notably man. And this same understanding is fruitfully applied to human organizations (also centered around aims), or human practices, such as the sciences (which in turn foster freedom and self-determination, by reducing ignorance, increasing our causal powers through techne, teaching us things about our own nature and habit formation, etc.)

Analogy is key to how there can be different "levels" to things. For instance, it is what allows St. Thomas in the Disputed Questions to claim that, while truth is primarily "in the mind," it is still secondarily "in things." The problem of moving beyond skepticism in modern thought can be usefully framed in terms of an inability to conceive of truth or knowledge outside of binary contradictory opposition. Peter Redpath has a lot of great stuff on this, although his lectures (on Youtube) are not always easy to follow.

Substance

The term had also morphed quite a bit by the time Descartes and Locke are working with it. In the Aristotelian context, substances are things. There are different types of thinghood. A cat is not a horse and a horse is not a mountain. "Being can be said many ways." "Green" and "fast" exist, as do "larger" or "heavier," but there are parasitic on thinghood. For something to be green or fast it has to be something.

Aristotle frames his project helpfully in a literature review of past thinkers, and the problem of how being can be one (i.e. everything that is, "is" in a certain sense and interacts with everything else, even if only indirectly) but also be many (i.e. our world is composed of many things of many different types.)

I think this is important to keep in mind because later critiques of substance (e.g. Deleuze) fall into equivocating on the later notion of substance and the Aristotelian one. And then it is also easy to think of "subjects" as "knowing subjects" and not merely the "subject of predication." But I don't think the conceptualization in terms of "finite" versus "infinite/transcendent," or "mental" versus "extended" are liable to be helpful, at least not for understanding a good deal of the philosophy that centers around different levels of reality.

Particularly, I think the "Great Chain of Being" makes significantly more sense when situated inside an understanding of the Doctrine of Transcendentals, but that itself is a particularly thorny issue that often gets written off in ways that don't understand it (e.g. Scruton's book on beauty jettisons it out of hand on the grounds that things that we generally agree are bad, e.g. MIRVs landing on their targets, might also be beautiful, which is really misunderstanding the position).

Not that aspect, more that the individual as the arbiter of value, and that all individuals are equal in principle. Within an heirarchical ontology, there are also degrees of understanding, where individuals might have greater or lesser insight. I had a rather terse exchange about that in your other thread from which this one was spawned (here). That said, I hasten to add that I support the aspect of liberalism as the ability to accomodate a diversity of opinions, but not necessarily that it means that every opinion is equal, just because someone holds it.

Right, the idea that doing ontology itself might be a limit on freedom in Derrida and Foucault, or Deleuze's attempt to save ontology by making it "creative," presuppose that metaphysics is more something "we create" and less something "discovered." If it is the latter, then not only can some opinions be more correct than others, but it will also be the case that wrong opinions lead to ignorance, and on very many views ignorance itself is a limit on freedom (e.g. the entire idea of "informed consent," or just the basic idea that one cannot successfully do what one doesn't know how to do.)


----




Anyhow, on virtual quantity, I have some stuff from my notes:

...]we begin by considering how unity (resistance to division) and its essential properties become the principles and measures that are the proximate cause of all species. Here, we must recall that Aristotle distinguishes between magnitude (continuous) and multitude (discrete) vis-à-vis quantity. This is, however, not the only distinction Aristotle makes re quantity. He also has a more basic metaphysical distinction between dimensive quantity and virtual quantity.2

Both magnitude and multitude are species of dimensive/bulk quantity. This is most obvious with magnitude given its obvious relation to figure. Bodies in our world have length, width, and depth. Yet multitude is also dimensive in that it relies on the distinction between different bodies (or numerous distinct parts in a part/whole composite).

By contrast virtual quantity emanates intensively from a substance’s form, rather than extensively from its matter, and is “caused by the accidental form ‘quality,’ not the accidental property [of] dimensive ‘quantity.’” As St. Thomas puts it: “virtual quantity is measured firstly by its source—that is, by the perfection of that form or nature… just as we speak of great heat on account of its intensity and perfection.”3

Virtual quantity is thus a measure of the degree to which an entity perfects its form (i.e. a measure of completeness, self-governance, and unity), becoming fully “what it is.” We can think of privation (absence) and possession (presence) as orienting the “number line” upon which such quantity manifests. We might also consider possession in this sense to be a greater degree of participation in the ideal to which a thing aspires by nature (e.g. in St. Maximus)*.

We can see a parallel of this idea in Plato, with the concept of entities being able to be “more real as themselves,” and man being becoming more fully real(ized) when he is unified by the rational part of the soul and the desire for what is truly good.4 I would argue that we can even see a vestigial element of this notion in Nietzsche and other existentialist philosophers. There, the focus is on becoming “more fully what one is.”5

* Just for notes on where Aristotle defines beings (which is also a major part of the Metaphysics)

At the outset of Book II of the Physics, Aristotle identifies proper beings as those things that are the source of their own production.1 Beings make up a whole—a whole which is oriented towards some end. This definition would seem to exclude mere parts of an animal. For example, a red blood cell is not the source of its own production, nor is it a self-governing whole. Lymphocytes, for example, can be seen as being generated and destroyed in accordance with a higher-level aims-based "parallel-terraced scan," despite being in some sense relatively self-governing.

On this view, living things would most fully represent “beings.” By contrast, something like a rock is not a proper being. A rock is a mere bundle of external causes. Moreover, if one breaks a rock in half, one simply has two smaller rocks (an accidental change). Whereas if one breaks a tree in half, the tree—as a being—will lose its unity and cease to exist (i.e. death, a substantial change).

Aristotle’s mention of Empedocles' elements early in Book II might suggest that all “natural kinds” possess a nature (e.g. carbon atoms as much as men). Yet a lump of carbon or volume of hydrogen gas are both in many ways similar to a rock in that they are mere “bundles of external causes. ”Yet there is also a clear sense in which something like an water molecule is a more unified than a volume of water in a container, the latter of which is easily divided. Hence, we might suppose that unity exists in gradations.2 We can also think of the living organism as achieving a higher sort of unity, such that its diverse multitude of parts come to be truly unified into a whole through an aim.

Now, if we step back and try to consider our original question: if being is “many” or “one,” it seems to me that the most readily apparent example of the multiplicity of beings and of their unity is the human mind itself. We have our own thoughts, experiences, memories, and desires, not other people’s. The multiplicity of other things, particularly other people, and the unity of our own phenomenal awareness is something that is given.3


1 i.e. “possessing a nature.” Actually, at the very start of Book II, Aristotle gives us a brief list of things that might constitute proper beings possessing their own nature, namely animals and their parts, as well as simple elements (i.e., Empedocles’ five elements). However, Aristotle revises this estimation in the second paragraph.

2 Very large objects like stars, nebulae, planets, and galaxies are an excellent example here. These are so large that the relatively weak force of gravity allows them to possess a sort of unity. Even if a planet is hit by another planet (our best hypothesis for how our moon formed), it will reform due to the attractive power of gravity. Likewise, stars, galaxies, etc. have definable “life cycles,” and represent a sort of “self-organizing system,” even though they are far less self-organizing than organisms. By contrast, a rock has a sort of arbitrary unity (although it does not lack all unity! We can clearly distinguish discrete rocks in a non-arbitrary fashion).

3 Hume, Nietzche, and many Buddhist thinkers have challenged the notion of a unified self. I don’t think we have to entirely disagree with their intuitions here. Following Plato, we might acknowledge that a person can be more or less unified. Indeed, we can agree with Nietzsche’s description of himself—that in his soul he might indeed find a “congress of souls” each vying for power, trying to dominate the others. But on Plato’s view (and many others) this would simply be emblematic of a sort of spiritual sickness. This is precisely how the soul is when it is not flourishing, i.e. the “civil war within the soul” of Plato’s Republic, or being “dead in sin” (i.e. a death of autonomy and an ability to do what one truly thinks is best) as described in St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans (Romans 7).

This is an interesting strand. I suspect that philosophy is unattainable for most people who lead lives where the barriers to philosophy are significant and sometimes insurmountable. We're never going to understand the difficult problems or comprehend works by significant thinkers. The barriers might be culture, time, priorities, available energy, disposition, lack of education, capacity to engage with the unfamiliar and the complex, etc.

Well, this is partly why, for Plato, most people have to be left inside the cave, even if the philosopher must descend to recover the whole (since the Good inherently relates to the whole). Given the technology available at the time, most people had to work in agriculture, and this did not leave time for education or inquiry.

But of course, it is precisely education and inquiry—fostering the development and perfection of techne—which has allowed us to move past this constraint. Today, almost everyone in wealthier nations has the option to pursue philosophy. Texts and lectures are at our fingertips, and society has the capacity to provide everyone with an education in it.

And we do provide people with an education in philosophy of sorts. It's just not very intentional. And in some cases it's pretty defective. For instance, the 19th century metaphysics of "everything is just little balls bouncing off each other in different ensembles," and "things just are the subsistent building-block 'fundemental' parts they are made of," isn't popular in physics and metaphysics/philosophy of physics anymore, but it's certainly what I was taught and is still commonly appealed to as a sort of "default" in popular works on the special sciences. Meanwhile, existentialism and some post-modern thought often makes it onto English curricula, as does at least some bits of the classical tradition (although this might be reduced to just a Greek tragedy or two).

The opening of C.S. Lewis' "The Abolition of Man," has a great example of how this can take place in terms of a textbook ostensibly just about writing:

In their second chapter Gaius and Titius quote the well-known story of Coleridge at the waterfall. You remember that there were two tourists present: that one called it 'sublime' and the other 'pretty'; and that Coleridge mentally endorsed the first judgement and rejected the second with disgust. Gaius and Titius comment as follows: 'When the man said This is sublime, he appeared to be making a remark about the waterfall... Actually ... he was not making a remark about the waterfall, but a remark about his own feelings. What he was saying was really I have feelings associated in my mind with the word "Sublime", or shortly, I have sublime feelings' Here are a good many deep questions settled in a pretty summary fashion. But the authors are not yet finished. They add: 'This confusion is continually present in language as we use it. We appear to be saying something very important about something: and actually we are only saying something about our own feelings.'1

Before considering the issues really raised by this momentous little paragraph (designed, you will remember, for 'the upper forms of schools') we must eliminate
one mere confusion into which Gaius and Titius have fallen. Even on their own view—on any conceivable view—the man who says This is sublime cannot mean I
have sublime feelings. Even if it were granted that such qualities as sublimity were simply and solely projected into things from our own emotions, yet the emotions
which prompt the projection are the correlatives, and therefore almost the opposites, of the qualities projected. The feelings which make a man call an object sublime are not sublime feelings but feelings of veneration. If This is sublime is to be reduced at all to a statement about the speaker's feelings, the proper translation would be I have humble feelings. If the view held by Gaius and Titius were
consistently applied it would lead to obvious absurdities. It would force them to maintain that You are contemptible means I have contemptible feelings', in fact that Your feelings are contemptible means My feelings are contemptible...

...until quite modern times all teachers and even all men believed the universe to be such that certain emotional reactions on our part could be either congruous or incongruous to it—believed, in fact, that objects did not merely receive, but could merit, our approval or disapproval, our reverence or our contempt. The reason why Coleridge agreed with the tourist who called the cataract sublime and disagreed with the one who called it pretty was of course that he believed inanimate nature to be such that certain responses could be more 'just' or 'ordinate' or 'appropriate'to it than others. And he believed (correctly) that the tourists thought the same.The man who called the cataract sublime was not intending simply to describe his own emotions about it: he was also claiming that the object was one which merited those emotions. But for this claim there would be nothing to agree or disagree about. To disagree with "This is pretty" if those words simply described the lady's feelings, would be absurd: if she had said "I feel sick" Coleridge would hardly have replied "No; I feel quite well." When Shelley, having compared the human sensibility to an Aeolian lyre, goes on to add that it differs from a lyre in having a power of 'internal adjustment' whereby it can 'accommodate its chords to the motions of that which strikes them', 9 he is assuming the same belief. 'Can you be righteous', asks Traherne, 'unless you be just in rendering to things their due esteem? All things were made to be yours and you were made to prize them according to their value.'10

What Lewis focuses on is the way in which, traditionally, a major goal of education was a proper orientation towards what is truly good, beautiful, etc., and the development of freedom as self-determination and self-governance. This is certainly something that has been deflated a good deal in modern education, particularly in the narrow focus on marketable skills that enable for higher consumption in the future. High levels of consumption become a sort of proxy for freedom, but of course many people are very wealthy and ruled over by vice.

If I could bring one bit of older philosophy back into curricula it would be the tradition of the virtues (originally given the boot on theological grounds at any rate). Because even if one rejects virtue centered theories, they still represent an excellent framework for understanding literature and other media, particularly why anti-heros and villains might seem very good in some senses, without being worthy of emulation.



One problem for Perl, or people talking a similar line on "two worlds Platonism" is that Artistotle sometimes seems to represent the position of the "Platonists" in the more simplistic terms (although this isn't always obvious because he is often brief). However, this could also simply be a move to show the difficulties in bad readings of Plato as well; he very often mentions "the Platonists" and not "Plato."

At any rate, I don't necessarily think "good readings" will always align with authorial intent. And we can also have readings where someone takes an authors work to its "logical conclusion," even if the author wanted to avoid that conclusion (e.g. Fichte and Kant).

But in terms of authorial intent, I am fairly suspicious of claims to have recovered it after millennia, whereas people who actually knew the author or who read the texts in their native language (as opposed to a long dead dialect) totally missed the point.

Don't think that Europeans aren't taking Trump seriously. They genuinely believe that Trump and his gang could take the US out of NATO. It's a genuine possibility that could happen

Legislation was put in place so that it would require a 2/3rds vote of the Senate to leave, and that's frankly not going to happen. He has some options for trying to get around that, but it wouldn't be that easy, and he would need elements on his side who aren't likely to go along easily.

He's much more likely to simply make America a much poorer partner in the alliance for the duration of his term rather than expend the political capital to leave. Plus, he isn't exactly great at follow through.

About NATO being the US' strongest alliance I am not so sure, though. It certainly is big and has potential, but Europe is currently without teeth. It is also situated on the other side of the globe from where the next real 'Cold War' is going to take place (the Pacific).

:up:

Right, and those allies have also been more on board with ratcheting up their own defense spending. The benefits vis-á-vis technology transfer have also tended to be better, e.g. Japanese technology being a key part of some of the cutting edge (back the ) features of the F-22. Partnerships with Europe are often rather duplicative, driving up costs to keep European defense industries going.

Certainly, European states have an interest in keeping their defense industries afloat. The US does the same sort of thing, creating its own light tank for the Pacific instead of buying the, by all accounts stellar, new Japanese option (which is of course overpriced, but it's overpriced because they aren't making many).

Also, these states, like Israel, are putting a premium on missile defense (given China has gone hard on the "missile spam" doctrine and missiles are Iran's main way to directly attack Israel) and you get a lot of synergy projects there. Europe certainly invests in these, but it's not likely to be the same sort of top priority given Russia's demonstrated ability to make missiles and their quality. Countermeasures against nuclear delivery systems are nice to have, but really only in China and the US' price range, and even if the US backs way out of Europe it's not like it's not going to want to stop housing its interception umbrella there because you need them along the periphery to have multiple methods of shooting down an ICBM, and you can't keep the fleet elements in the right places at all times.

I'm not really sure what this reply is supposed to mean. Is the claim that Plato doesn't really buy into the psychology and means of self-determination he lays out across several dialogues (not just the Republic, but the chariot of the Phaedrus, the Golden Thread of the Laws, etc.)?

But even on a highly skeptical view Plato can still get you this far, because his psychology will apply even if we only asymptomatically approach the Good. The rule of reason is the ground for proper inquiry and the ability to transform knowledge or informed opinion into action (in turn allowing for better inquiry). It's a recurring theme that the sophists crash and burn in dialectic because they cannot reign in their passions, but are instead driven by them.

Indeed, later thinkers drawing on Plato would often present such an asymptotic view, e.g. St. Gregory of Nyssa's continual movement towards/into the Beatific Vision. Or they draw a distinction between the asymptotic approach of discursive reasoning and direct apprehension in the Beatific Vision (e.g. St. Maximus, St. Augustine, Pseudo-Dionysus, etc., and arguably St. Paul himself: "love never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away." I Corinthians 13:8 —For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face 13:12).

Skepticism can only threaten the psychology if we cannot actually approach the Good (and the True) at all, or if we can never know if we have approached it. But I think such skepticism would need an understanding of appearances/images and their relation to the absolute quite at odds with Plato's. The appearance/reality distinction collapses if we only have access to appearances, and we lurch towards Protagoras.

But isn't it also possible that traditionalist interpretation of Plato - the mystical side of Plato, if you like - has been deprecated by secular culture?

That's certainly part of "creative" readings. Philosophers want to translate an older thinkers work into a form that will jive with modern intellectual trends, or sometimes they do it in service of an ideological end. You see this quite a bit with Hegel, in part because he can be very obscure. So, you have charges that folks like Pinkhard "deflate" Hegel, removing or playing down aspects that would be objectionable to contemporary secular audiences. And there is merit to this approach because it is a way to recover what might seem most valuable in the modern context. Or you have stuff like Bloom's commentary on the Logic which is more obviously a particularly Marxist reading looking to build up Marxist theory.

But then there is also just the drive for "novelty" and "creativity" in scholarship, which can sometimes have a pernicious effect. The path to pointless conflict often runs though moving to assert that one's new reading is the correct one, "what the author intended." Such claims can sometimes be litigated well, particularly if we have a lot of correspondence from an author discussing their own work, but in other cases they seem interminable. Aristotle is a good example here because the exact way in which the works were written, or even who set down certain parts, is up for debate.

My view would be that some readings are better than others regardless of the author's intent. It is sometimes useful to try to analyze how an author saw their own work, but it can also be either pointless (when good sources don't exist) or just an exercise in trying to appeal to a "great name" to boost one's argument.

So, Seth Rosen was mentioned above. Here is a case where most of the criticism points out that even if we think that the overall reading is implausible as "Plato's intent," it is nonetheless interesting and might still get at something in his intent/motivation that has been underdiscussed (e.g. ruminations on his own failed adventure in governance). We can take parts of this without having to go along with the idea that a core concern of Plato is the threat of rule by ideology, a problem that is highly relevant to us in the modern era, but which wouldn't really be relevant for centuries and centuries after Plato's death. Likewise, the account in question relies on "taking Socrates at his word," except when it doesn't as respects the whole purpose of introducing the city (and the psychology here is situated in many other dialogues without the social context anyhow).

It's also a reading where we can see what happens to Plato if we want to stick to a more modern notion of the Good. But the claim that "knowledge of the Good isn't actually useful for leaders and their practical concerns," is going to hinge on a more contemporary notion of the Good, one with more equivocal notions of goodness between different goods (and where knowledge of what is good doesn't necessitate right action).

But "everyone got Plato wrong for millennia, even Aristotle who worked with him for a decent part of his lifetime?" I suppose it wins for being more provocative. It also makes Plato into an extremely poor writer who badly miscommunicates, such that Aristotle, writing of "the Platonists," within living memory of Plato's teaching can ascribe to this group views entirely at odds with the "real view."

Anyhow, to your earlier point re science, I suppose the separation between science and philosophy depends on how one defines science. If science is a virtue, an intellectual habit and excellence, as in St. Thomas, then science is key to philosophy and also a pillar of freedom and self-governance/self-determination (which are themselves prerequisites for proper inquiry).

More narrow definitions of science will vary more from philosophy.

The effect issue is sort of ancillary. The issue is that 1 only follows from 2 given elements of logic that seem to be more a bug than a feature—that do not comport with common standards of "good reasoning."

As Priest says:

The notion of validity that comes out of the orthodox account is a strangely perverse one according to which any rule whose conclusion is a logical truth Is valid and, conversely, any rule whose premises contain a contradiction is valid. By a process that does not fall far short of indoctrination most logicians have now had their sensibilities dulled to these glaring anomalies. However, this is possible only because logicians have also forgotten that logic is a normative subject: it is supposed to provide an account of correct reasoning. When seen in this light the full force of these absurdities can be appreciated. Anyone who actually reasoned from an arbitrary premise to, e.g., the infinity of prime numbers, would not last long in an undergraduate mathematics course.

Now, what is now orthodox comes out of people being uncomfortable with where logic had been previously, fixing perceived problems, so if those moves were properly motivated, others attempts for satisfactory resultions seem like they should be too.

Right, appearances (as set against reality) are still really appearances. Radical skepticism sets in when one supposes that appearances can be completely disconnected from "reality," but this position has to suppose much about the "reality" of the "relationship between reality and appearance," to really get off the ground.

Radical skepticism collapses when it "goes all the way " into positing that there is "only appearance," and no reality. Yet, if there is only appearance, then the dichotomy collapses and appearances are reality.

But, in the modern context this distinction has become pernicious because instead of the more fundemental "reality versus appearance" distinction we get the "subjective versus objective" distinction, which often comes with a lot of extra baggage, the main one being the idea that we don't every experience anything directly, but rather "experience our experiences." So one doesn't experience an apple, but rather experiences the experience of experiencing an apple. And so who knows what the apple is really like? We don't even know the apple's appearance, but only our own experience of its experience. This extra regress is how you can start to slide towards appearances having an arbitrary and unknowable relationship with reality.

I asked a while back, but can anyone think of an example where at least one premise of an argument is necessarily false and yet the conclusion will not follow as an inference?

It seems like two definitions are often included in for validity, and often both are presented side by side:
1. An argument is valid when it is impossible for the premises to be true and the conclusion false; and
2a. The conclusion follows from the premises.
2b. The conclusion is contained in the premises.*

Normally, these overlap. If we accept our inconsistent premises as true we can move to the conclusion (but of course they aren't true). We can use disjunctive syllogism and disjunction introduction to move from our inconsistent premises to whatever we'd like. But this relies on a certain notion of implication and explosion, both of which have been controversial in the history of logic (if nonetheless mainstream), precisely because they seem counterintuitive and don't seem to capture natural language reasoning or notions of "good reasoning."

My thoughts were that a combination of relevance conditions for implication and changes to avoid explosion could perhaps get us to a case where an argument is valid under definition 1 but not 2? That is, we'd have inconsistent premises but no inferences connecting them to our conclusion even if we did affirm all the premises.

Can there be such a counter example where the two diverge?

I mentioned quia demonstrations vs. propter quid demonstrations earlier. Supposing that the two definitions do rightly overlap, it would seem like 1 would be a quia demonstration (going from effects backwards), while 2 actually gives us the "why." But in natural language, with our penchant for equivocal and analagous predication, fuzzy terms, and lack of clarity, I can see why people would like to hold to 2 over 1 even if they thought they properly overlapped. We might say, "1 is simply a consequence of 2."


*I am not sure how 2b works with explosion. I have seen Floridi and D'Agastino argue in the context of the "Scandal of Deduction," from an information theoretic lens that there is a certain sense in which some conclusions aren't contained in their premises, with some forms of inference injecting new information.

What's the reasoning here, that Putin would have been forced out of power but for the invasion?

I don't think I've ever heard any analysis along that lines and it seems implausible to me given how much power Putin already wielded in Russia. In terms of his thinking, I would guess the key factors would be:

-His role in history/legacy and the relative success of annexing Crimea and the intervention to save Assad in Syria
-The conviction that it would be something like the "three day special military operation," that would quickly topple the government.
-The fact that Belarus had just had a popular revolt, requiring Russian forces to be moved in, and that they also had to send troops into Kazakhstan just a month earlier (and similar events had played out across the old satellites).

Stuff like gas resources and pipelines seem ancillary based on everything written about him. The historical narrative and prestige also takes center stage in his own speeches and writings.

But the conviction that it would be easy and low consequence seems like the big one. I am pretty sure the thought process wasn't "well, there is a decent chance I'll have to flee the capital and go on air giving a dire warning about civil war as an armored column led by an ex-catering chef pushes towards Moscow without resistance in a year," or "1,000 days in we'll have lost the better part of a million men and be making frontal assaults with Chinese golf carts with steel plates welded to them and dirt bikes."

My guess is that when the history is all written Saddam's decision to invade Iran will be one of the closer parallels.

Edit: or Bush II's decision to invade Iraq for that matter!

Why do you think things broke down between the US and Russia? What went wrong?

You could go back and analyze a millions different variables, but IMO it really comes down to:
-the Russian invasion of Georgia (which didn't actually shift things as much as one might have expected, and wasn't a sea change)
-the Russian annexation of Crimea (where policy becomes overtly hostile but also pretty limpid, shying away from meaningful military aid)
-the Russian invasion of Ukraine (where US and EU policy becomes openly hostile)

I don't think these events are best explained by looking at US and EU policy. They're ancillary. Internal Russian politics, and Ukrainian politics are driving the bus. The mass uprisings in Belarus and in most of the Central Asian states that were once part of the USSR, and those Asian states' pivot into China's orbit also seen more relevant. US and EU policy is probably more relevant vis-á-vis Ukraine of course.

It's sort of like trying to analyze the Israel-Hamas war primarily in terms of US and Iranian policy. Are they relevant? Sure. Iran is probably significantly more relevant to Hamas' decision-making than the US is to Ukraine or Russia's, but the primary proximate decisions driving the current war seem to be very much out of Iran's hands.

Just for an example, the way the war was initially carried out, and what we now know about what was expected to occur, shows that the key variable driving decision-making on the pivotal event (the decision to invade) was a total disconnect between the Russian leadership's estimation of their military's capabilities and its actual capabilities, as well as the willingness of Ukrainians in general to resist, and specific Ukrainians' willingness to aid and abet them. The goal was a fait accompli with low loss of life, and Russian estimates for how the EU and US would have responded to that might have been over optimistic, but they probably weren't wildly off base. The real problem was an internal chasm between expectations and reality.

Ukraine potentially entering NATO is probably most relevant in that it would shut the door on reasserting control over Ukraine by force. If you read Putin's thoughts on the war and the history, I think it's really hard to come away with the idea that if NATO ceased to exist in say, 2020, the idea of reclaiming Ukraine would be a non-issue.

But the Socrates (or Plato) of the Republic is doing more than this. Here we specifically examine the difference between knowledge and "how it looks to us." Our modern talk about convergence etc. would be foreign to Plato, but I see him advocating a positive doctrine about knowledge that is meant to be independent of what Athenians, or anyone else, think of it.

Right, and this goes right along with the psychology presented in the Republic, the Phaedrus, etc. The rational part of the soul has proper authority because it can unify the soul, and move past what merely "appears to be good," (appetitive) or "is said to be good," (spirited/passions) in search of what is "truly good." There is here, on the one hand, the idea of self-transcendence, which we can find in much of the classical tradition and Hegel, Kierkegaard, etc., the move beyond the "given" and "what we already are." In the other, the idea of unity as the principle of self-determination and even the ground for beings (plural; the "One and the Many") that would become a cornerstone of the Aristotlean tradition, and much else.

But Plato's presentation flows from his thoughts on language and conception of images. The seventh letter is very helpful here because he "talks shop" about this directly, and explains why he doesn't present things in a sort of dissertation or set of doctrines, or even in the more constrained dialectical of how Aristotle develops his arguments.

An interesting thing here is Plato's appeal to "a long time spent living together," in a certain manner. One of the things that really sets modern philosophy apart from ancient and medieval philosophy (or from popular contemporary philosophy in the New Age movement or older religions) is that practice has largely dropped out of the picture. At least, I don't know of philosophy conferences where people go to fast, meditate, engage in group chanting, sit vigils, etc.

In a lot of ways, medieval philosophy seems most like contemporary philosophy (as opposed to ancient or early modern epochs) because it was also very academic and involved a great deal of rigorous training. Moreover, it has the heavy focus on commentary, the production of commentary, and its defense. But then when it comes to practice it's sort of the polar opposite, because in the earlier period a great deal of the thinkers are monastics whose entire lives revolve around practice.

I don't have any strong conclusions to draw from this, I just think it's an interesting difference, particularly because so much contemporary philosophy also seems to focus on similar ideas vis-á-vis the medievals, particularly phenomenology and semiotics.

have I completely mischaracterized Socrates, who swore up and down that he did not inquire into the heavens and the earth like some others, but only asked people questions?

Is this Socrates as variously encountered through Plato, Xenophon, and Aristophanes (probably not the latter I assume), and then "reconstructed?" Or the Socrates of the Platonic corpus?

Where does the Timaeus, etc. fit in such a view?

I've considered that even if the Clouds is farce and parody, it has to capture at least something of the man or else it wouldn't actually be funny to his fellow citizens.



Well, that's a broader academia problem, and I think it is often even worse in other fields. Provocative and "novel" arguments get citations, and there is a sense in which, particularly in the algorithm driven information era, "no press is bad press."

You see this fairly often in economics. Perhaps nowhere is it more obvious than in Biblical scholarship, where theses rise and fall without the underlying evidence shifting much. And the results for popular understanding are particularly dire there, as this forum can attest, because people will repeat with theses like Bart Ehrman's without understanding the massive amount of caveats introduced to allow them to pass the smell test, or that they are incredibly speculative. And if you are doing popular work and trying to sell it, this almost always gets worse, e.g. in interviews you get straightforward claims like "I have successfully psychoanalyzed the essentially anonymous authors of these Biblical texts and determined that they decided to 'make Jesus God' because of insecurities related to the deification of Roman emperors," or "I have successfully recovered what the Disciples really thought of Jesus before his death from the Gospel narratives," ("but also we don't have a single authentic scrap written by them.")

But large forces weren't needed because the great Rumsfeld said so

This is a fair critique. In particular, the widespread looting that occured during the second invasion poisoned public opinion against the US. The thought was "we tried to get rid of Saddam forever, the Kurds fought him, Iran fought him. The US can come in and effortlessly sweep him aside. Thus, if there is mass rioting and abuses, it is because the US wants it to happen."

But the idea wasn't entirely that you didn't need as many men. Certainly, you needed fewer in terms of the initial invasion, because Iraq's military had been badly battered by the Gulf War and sanctions and the US had already defacto partitioned the Kurdish third of the country. And so the idea was to use the Iraqi army for stabilizing unrest. That was the fatal flaw. There was a plan to have way more men involved, it just hinged on an extremely important factor that the US was powerless to guarantee.

Now, in their defense, militaries have often done this type of work after losing a war because order in defeat is still preferable to chaos (e.g. the French army being freed and rearmed to go fight the communards in Paris by Prussia). But they didn't in this case, and there was no backup plan. And the decision to stop paying the soldiers when they didn't show up (aimed at enticing them back) backfired monumentally.




Right, and by that point it was already becoming readily apparent that China would be the main rival the US had to contend with (whilst back in the 80s and 90s people did talk quite a bit about a reunified Germany and Japan's economic boom, something you still see in all the sci-fi of the era).

And this is precisely why a lot of foreign policy written at the time discusses what a wonderful ally a liberal, denocratic Russia would make, particularly if integrated into the EU. Such a move would:

—Put almost all the world's weapons production and knowledge base for weapons production, including nuclear delivery systems, into the liberal alliance.

—Offer a balance to Germany in the EU by adding another large economy/population (and recall that closer to unification and earlier in the EU the domination of Germany was a larger concern, although it is still a going concern, as it was in the fallout of the 2008 financial crisis).

—Russia, with the US, Canada, Mexico, etc. would represent a share of the world's energy resources to rival with OPEC, allowing for greater flexibility and insulation from instability in the Middle East.

—A Russia in NATO would give the NATO a giant land border with China, an absolutely massive asset in the current rivalry.

—The peace dividend from bringing Russia into the fold would be huge for Europe and even huge for the US given how expensive the nuclear deterrent is (on par with Russia's entire defense budget).

The idea that it was in US, or "Western" interests to pauperize or dominate Russia doesn't cash out. There was much to gain and the people making at policy at the time were extremely idealistic (and perhaps we can even say naive) vis-á-vis the ways in which they thought economic development would lead to liberalization and "win-win" situations for all.

For instance, China was never faced with something like Cold War containment doctrine as its meteoric rise really kicked off. The US (its firms and people) invested literally trillions in the Chinese economy, as did the EU. In particular, it moved the very heavy industry needed to wage wars over to China. What helped the US defeat Japan was its astounding ship building capacity. Today, the US makes about 0.1% of new tonnage. China makes almost more than the rest of the world combined. Commercial aircraft is another area where European and American investment and technology transfers have been very large.

Now, certainly generosity wasn't the main motivation here. This was done to exploit comparatively lower costs for production in China. And we might point out how this huge transfer of wealth and economic activity could actually have been said to hurt Western nations (while enriching some small segments of their population). But it also isn't the sort of policy one engages in if one is obsessed with preserving military advantage. And there is ample evidence to show that decision makers involved in this process really did believe that economic growth in China (and elsewhere) would result in liberalization and better relations.

People still make this sort of argument. "Take sanctions off Iran, they will develop a wealthy, educated middle class and liberalize." Whether one ought to believe such things given history is another question entirely.

NATO expansion happened in this sort of context, hope over an "End of History," and the idea that gradually all nations would liberalize.

Even W. Bush era policy contains a good deal of this idealism, which is why it made establishing liberal democracies in Iraq and Afghanistan war aims.

I didn't ignore it, I pointed out that your evidence to support your position is historically illiterate, listing colonial rebellions and literal staff work as "invasions." You then asked me to "do the homework," on if Russia has ever invaded Germany and France, which, given the relevance of the Napoleonic and World Wars, is frankly comic.

Also, arguing for "spheres of influence," what is this, 1938? You know who thinks Poland should be in Poland's sphere of influence? Poles. And the same sort of thing goes for Czechs, Finns, Ukrainians, etc.

If one takes historical subjugation to be a valid standard for wielding influence over one's neighbors that other countries should base their foreign policy around then China also should have a "sphere of influence," extending across virtually all its neighbors (including Eastern Russia). But then this cuts both ways because former German holdings in East Prussia overlap not only Poland, but the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad, and indeed into the Baltics as well. And Poland has historically ruled directly over the Baltics, Belarus, Ukraine, and parts of Russia, Moldova, and Romania. Austria has some shared overlap here as well. The Turks likewise, further south. Even if "historical control and influence," were a valid standard, NATO's core membership had just as much, and often more of a history in the expansion states when compared to Russia.

Out East this same exact sort of thing holds. Japan has historically held Korea, large swaths of China, and land controlled by Russia. But I have never seen anyone claim that the US military alliance with ROK should never have been formed because it is an affront to Japan and China's historical domination of their smaller neighbor, nor that a US alliance with Poland is troublesome because Austria and Germany dominated that area in the past and should get to in the future. Such facile arguments only ever appear in the context of Russia.

But then the next question. Why then thumb your noses at China?

Just then leave China alone. Why all the fuss about Taiwan? Why not have good relations with China? Is Taiwan a reason to have war with China? They have nuclear weapons too. A lot more than North Korea and are making more of them as we speak.

Good point. The expansion states are in the German and Turkish historical spheres of influence and conquest, same for Austria as a member of PFP embedded in NATO, so the historical claims thing only seems to be cutting one way in this reasoning.

Should the UK have a right to dictate India's military alliances and attack India to prevent new ones? No one says this but they have a longer history of continuous control and management than Russia does in some of the areas in question.

Well, sure, in the same sense that if you regularly drive black out drunk you might have a "justifiable fear of car crashes."

I'm not sure if the conclusion that "we blew it," flows from this though. Countries have lobbied hard to get into NATO because of a justifiable fear of Russian invasion and colonization. The counterfactual where NATO doesn't expand and Russia stops invading its neighbors is far from clear, it seems equally plausible that more countries might face invasion otherwise.

Anyhow, I get your point, and I think it's perfectly valid if it is framed in terms of the traumas of World War I and the Russian Civil War, and then the Second World War. That alone would be enough.

Yes, I'm painting with an extremely wide brush and vastly overgeneralizing. The article might not even be a particularly good example, I haven't read it in a bit. Obviously, a great deal of philosophy avoids these issues, runs counter to this claim, or is focused in such a way that it need not touch on them.

I am mostly thinking of advice I've personally received or complaints PhDs have written on the internet (some strongly discouraging anyone from considering a philosophy PhD). I don't think too many people would want to publish such a view, for obvious reasons. Might this just be the incredibly bad job market? I think that is probably the main driver. People often say as much. But then we might consider why the job market is so incredibly bad. Lots of "more unemployable" majors still draw in a lot of undergraduate students (generating jobs). NCES unhelpfully lumps philosophy in with religious studies, but given religious studies likely has more than half the numbers there, it's pretty slim (there is a more general slide in the liberal arts to consider as well here). I've worked with people who abandoned graduate programs in the social sciences who say somewhat similar things, so part of it is perhaps academia, but I don't think "how academia is" is totally separate from issues of philosophy.

Rather than digging, I'll just throw out something from "We Have Never Been Woke," which I just read:

I began my academic career as a philosopher. Many people are drawn to philosophy after encountering work by some great thinker who heroically tackled huge questions and tried to wrestle them to the ground as best they could. These works tend to be thrilling and mind opening— ambitious in their scope and argumentation. But when you become an academic philosopher in the United States, you quickly discover that producing work like this is not something you are practically permitted to do. Your readings will focus narrowly on secular, analytic, Western (white) liberals. The work that gets published tends to be extremely narrow in its focus— for example, here’s my interpretation of Martha Nussbaum’s response to Joseph Raz’s critique of John Rawls’s Theory of Justice. I literally published a paper like that.10 It’s pretty good, as far as these things go. But it’s not the kind of work that anyone goes into philosophy to do, I suspect.

And of course al-Gharbi is an Ivy League graduate with a tenure track position writing for public consumption.

Is this more an academia problem? I could certainly see the case for that, because on many philosophical views the goal of a philosophy teacher is not going to be publication, but teaching (really more mentoring), which of course certainly happens, but in academia there is the whole "publish or perish" thing that can often backload this.

Is that true? I doubt it. I'll let you do the homework.

Sure, look up how WWI started and how WWII ended. If starting a war, losing it, and getting invaded counts as "being invaded," then Germany was certainly invaded by Russia (twice in the 20th century), not to mentioned partitioned by it and turned into a puppet state for half a century.

How do you think the war with Napoleon ended? And the Hundred Days? And it's not like Russia hadn't made it into France proper earlier for lack of trying.

With Germany, I suppose the question is "when do you count Germany as coming into existence?" If you're looking at the same time frame and the Thirty Years War on, it's easy to generate such a list. And since the list counts even foreign interventions in civil wars, the French Revolution and its aftermath alone create such a list (plus all of Germany and France's wars). Or just England's myriad attempts to conquer France. I mean if the Chechen War is an invasion then the Haitian rebellion, or the US wars with the Sioux, etc. would be too.

The Origen story is probably a smear by opponents. In his commentary on Matthew he considers an extremely literal interpretation of this advice to be idiotic.

He was, however, tortured to death and never renounced his faith, and the story about him as a teenager wanting to run out to join his father in martyrdom, only to be stopped by his mother hiding his clothes, is generally thought to be genuine.

If it wasn't for some of his more Platonist speculations and the Origenst Crises that came after his death he'd almost certainly be a saint, and likely a doctor of the church. It's hard to thing of a non-saint who has more influence on theology (and we'd have another probable universalist as a doctor).

Well, we can consider the counter-examples: the Gulf War, the US interventions in the Balkans, the US' first intervention in Lebanon under Eisenhower, or even Korea, etc.

What made these different?

Certainly not the comparative military strength of the opponents. Saddam had a million men under arms, a military with a wealth of relatively recent combat experience, and Iraq had spent lavishly on high the Soviet and French equipment (and this was before the huge technological/qualitative gap between NATO and Russian equipment widened). But the result was an out and out rout. 147 Coalition servicemen were killed while Iraqi casualties were somewhere between 200,000-300,000, with perhaps 50,000 killed in action.

A clear difference with the GWOT is the goal of state building and a transition to liberal democracy, but this wasn't the case in Vietnam (where the US backed a coup and the state was far from a liberal democracy) nor in Korea (an authoritarian dictatorship at the time of the war; also, militarily, a draw).



Ok, but several of those "invasions," are counter invasions in wars Russia started. Particularly, they are former colonies/conquests of Russia fighting for independence or fighting off Russian attempts to recolonize them, and in some cases Russia had carried out sizable genocides against those peoples in living memory. In WWI, Russia mobilized first (Germany last), and invaded Germany first, they just lost. The "Continuation War," is the continuation of the Russian attempt to reconquer Finland, as it reconquered Poland and other lands with its military ally... Nazi Germany. Crimean War? Also kicked off by Russia invading its neighbor.

Sometimes, if all your neighbors think your the asshole and start buying guns and making alliances against you, you might consider what the common denominator is.

Also, one of those isn't even an invasion, but contingency planning staff work where a single shot was never fired...

Second, you could probably generate lists of equal or
even longer length for Germany or France, on which Russia's name would appear as "invader."

I don't think it's a bad piece. Like I said, I initially liked it quite a bit because it seems to offer a salve to some of the harsher egocentrism that existentialism can slip into. Yet it falls into the common trap of: "wow, philosophy is hard and we don't get the same sort of certainty the early moderns decided should be the gold standard, thus nothing really matters."

Something along the lines of "A xor B, not-A, thus B," where the first premise seems pretty dubious (i.e., your standard false dichotomy).

Maybe it's just my sentiments having read it close to half a century after it was published, when a lot more writers have brought up the point: "maybe the frame developed in the early modern period is just wrongheaded?" For instance, a lot here (anything really meaning anything at all!) hinges on "objective meaning," and "objective value," the absolute as the objective, set over and against the non-substantial "subjective." But the absolute, to be properly "absolute," includes all appearances, and the transcendent is not absent from what it transcends, so in I would want to simply reject this distinction (which is historically quite recent, and the subject of fierce critique, e.g. Hegel).

And IIRC, Nagel only offers a cursory analysis of the appeal to the transcedent in terms of "the glory of God," which doesn't seem to actually get at how Neoplatonism, the Patristics, the Scholastics, Christian existentialists, Sufis, etc. actually think of this. (Reminds me a bit of Hume)

Anyhow, I find it hard to think that such sentiments don't have something to do with philosophy becoming largely irrelevant. I've seen academic philosophers, in their books, personal correspondence, blogs, etc. regularly decry how their field largely focuses on extremely narrow and often quite worthless (sometimes their word) analyses, or advice to potential graduate students that "being a true believer in philosophy," is a liability, while a "narrow technical focus" is what one should display in a good statement of purpose." "Sterile word games," is another phrase bandied about.

Now every field bitches about itself. City managers bitch about their city councils, their residents, and their unions, even if they actually like all three. Doctors joke about beating hospital administrators with the stacks of checklists they send their way. Mechanics decry the sadistic engineers who decided that changing regularly replaced parts should require hands the size of a toddler's. But they almost never remark that their field is useless (and not useless in the sense of "valuable for its own sake," but useless).

And I don't think this is just a more general problem for academia. Political scientists and economists might have some similar complaints, but they still see themselves as an integral part of a whole, not the equivalent of an appendix.

Perhaps this is off base, but it seems like the areas of philosophy most bound by this problem are precisely those who can't get away from the aforementioned presuppositions. I'm not a huge fan of existentialism, but specialists here seem more apt to avoid this malaise. Robert Solomon speaks with fire in his belly for instance. And the same is true for pre-modern specialists. Now this could also have to do with the extremely poor job prospects philosophy PHDs face, but this also isn't unique to philosophy or even academia (e.g lawyers in the 2010s.)

You mentioned Matthew earlier, but might you be thinking about Mark 7:18-19?

"And He *said to them, “Are you so lacking in understanding as well? Do you not understand that whatever goes into the person from outside cannot defile him, because it does not go into his heart, but into his stomach, and is eliminated?” (Thereby He declared all foods clean.)"

This is the stronger formulation, with the parenthetical, which as far as I know shows up in the early texts as such (or the ancient equivalent).

But in many cases outside the NT the spirit of the law seems elevated above the letter, and so Jesus is not unique in this. And this goes along with the claim of misunderstanding the Scriptures at John 5:39 — "You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me." The spiritual interpretation gives life, the fleshly profits nothing (John 6). And or course in that Gospel Jesus also refers to himself as the temple itself, and at any rate it kicks off by introducing Jesus as the Divine Word through which "everything that has been created was created," so here is a claim to proper authority, "before Abraham was, I am."

But if you want a particularly strong violation of kosher dietary principles, look no further than: "Then Jesus said unto them, “Verily, verily I say unto you, unless ye eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, ye have no life in you."

Yet the Prophets are full of distinctions such as "the circumcision of the heart," as opposed to mere fleshly circumcision and the elevation of justice over ritual.

E.g. Amos 5

“I hate, I reject your festivals,
Nor do I delight in your festive assemblies.
Even though you offer up to Me burnt offerings and your grain offerings,
I will not accept them;
And I will not even look at the peace offerings of your fattened oxen.
Take away from Me the noise of your songs;
I will not even listen to the sound of your harps.
But let justice roll out like waters,
And righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.

Or Psalm 51 (and plenty of others)

You do not delight in sacrifice, or I would bring it;
you do not take pleasure in burnt offerings.
My sacrifice, O God, is a broken spirit;
a broken and contrite heart
you, God, will not despise.

Or Hosea 6:6 "I desire mercy not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings."


Or the opening of Isaiah:

Hear the word of the Lord,
you rulers of Sodom;
listen to the instruction of our God,
you people of Gomorrah!
"The multitude of your sacrifices—
what are they to me?” says the Lord.
“I have more than enough of burnt offerings,
of rams and the fat of fattened animals;
I have no pleasure
in the blood of bulls and lambs and goats.
When you come to appear before me,
who has asked this of you,
this trampling of my courts?
Stop bringing meaningless offerings!
Your incense is detestable to me.
New Moons, Sabbaths and convocations—
I cannot bear your worthless assemblies.
Your New Moon feasts and your appointed festivals
I hate with all my being.
They have become a burden to me;
I am weary of bearing them.
When you spread out your hands in prayer,
I hide my eyes from you;
even when you offer many prayers,
I am not listening.

Your hands are full of blood!

Wash and make yourselves clean.
Take your evil deeds out of my sight;
stop doing wrong.
Learn to do right; seek justice.
Defend the oppressed.
Take up the cause of the fatherless;
plead the case of the widow.

At any rate, Paul for his part sees Christ as fulfillment. The Gentiles are grafted onto the vine of Israel, rather than one vine replacing another.

Alright I will do you one better. According to both Torah law and rabbinic law, a seminal emission places one in a state of ritual impurity. Yet Jewish men are required to procreate. Thus, one can knowingly and voluntarily enter into a state of impurity yet it be a good, obligatory act.

And God directly demands that Ezekiel to cook his bread over human feces(4:9), which the prophet at least seems to think constitute a violation of the same dietary restrictions that forbid eating carion (Leviticus 22).

Well, the 60 vote threshold to remove the filibuster doesn't require a constitutional amendment. It can be done with a simple majority. It's a very long standing Senate rule, but the Senate can amend its own rules (with a 2/3rds vote; however through a convoluted process you can curtail the filibuster, Rule 22, by creating a new "precedent," with a majority).

The reason it isn't changed is because control of the Senate flips often, and each party knows that it will eventually be out of power and doesn't want to be steamrolled by a simple majority. Nor do they want to be forced to stand up to their own party to prevent stupid but popular votes from passing. For example, Republicans tried to force Democrats to actually take a vote on the wholesale abolishment of ICE (something more radical members had submitted). But obviously completely abolishing your immigrations and customs agency rather than reforming it is idiocy, and so the Democratic leadership was almost put in the position of having to vote down their own bill, angering their base.

And honestly, this isn't necessarily bad thinking when you consider some particularly dangerous policies that have been recommended, such as Trump's push to make almost all federal employees with any decision making authority political appointees who can be fired based purely on political loyalty. This would be an unmitigated disaster, easily the most damaging policy proposed in recent memory. Many Republicans know this is idiocy, and the filibuster keeps them from having to actively switch sides to vote against it.

I don't quite follow what you mean by "more radical". Do you mean politicians who promise public good but then don't deliver?

In order to be a candidate in a general election you need to win your party's primary. Primaries have much lower turnout. Many people don't even know they are going on. In many states, you need to have become a declared member of either party to vote in that party's primary. This means that the people who vote in primaries tend to be:

-older
-wealthier; and
-more ideologically motivated

than the general electorate. Think about it, who is going to get themselves to the polls in the spring or winter, long before the general election (particularly for off years when there is no presidential race and much less media buzz)? Who is going to want to actively declare themselves as a member of either party? On average, these people tend to be more ideologically motivated.

So, by the time the general electorate votes, they have already had their options picked by a group that tends to have different policy priorities. Add in gerrymandering and you tend to get representative who are both significantly more liberal and more conservative than the median voter. And this of course makes compromise more difficult.

The American people must somehow not want healthcare and social services.

A public option for healthcare polls decently well (i.e. modest majority support, and support amongst a sizable proportion of Republican voters as well). The problem is that the US electoral system is pretty much set up so as to result in the election of representatives who are significantly more radical than the median voter, while major reforms also must pass the Senate, where representation not proportional, and generally must pass with 60 votes.

This could be fixed of course, in a variety of ways (e.g. fixing gerrymandering, ranked choice voting, open primaries, making it easier to vote, particularly in primaries, abolishing the Senate, etc.). The problem is that the candidates who win in the current system are not the type of candidates who are likely to win in a system that more closely aligns to median preferences, so they have very little incentive to push for such changes. Not that this would fix everything, far from it, because people would still be invested in the "culture war" as a new sort of religion of sorts, but it might fix a lot of issues.

This is a strawman. For one thing, a major focus of Al-Ghabi is the way in which elites choose to personally identify as "oppressed and marginalized," and this seems much harder to explain in terms of systemic constraints, particularly because it is a relatively recent phenomenon.

This is also a strawman of my position, because of course I acknowledge that even elites are bound to and by the very systems that give them their status. I have been commenting on what the American urban system produces. Should people be morally outraged by such a system? Sure, just as reformers were rightfully outraged over the excesses of the Gilded Age, slavery, etc.

American slave owners were surely also part of a system; that doesn't eliminate all of their moral culpability. And at any rate, even if it did and no individual slave owner bore any responsibility for the practice of slavery, it would still be the case that the system of hereditary chattel slavery in the US was morally abhorrent and in need of dramatic change. Likewise too for the Holocaust or the Holodomor. One doesn't need to embrace "Sartrean bad faith" to think these sorts of systemic events have moral valance. And if the outliers have moral valance, so to do the less outrageous cases of the Gilded Age or our new Guilded Age.

You've set up a false dichotomy where one either acknowledges systematic constraints (something Al-Ghabi certainly does) or gives systematic issues moral weight, but never both. Yet both are relevant. Those who campaigned to end slavery, serfdom, child labor, Jim Crow, etc. did so specifically because they saw them as moral issues, and they were successful, at least in part, because they eventually convinced others that their moral stance was correct.

The strawman lies in trying to reduce the entire project to a "gotcha." It isn't. If the books and scholarship that helped develop the ground for the "Great Awokening," and what has become the mainstream consensus in urban elite circles (e.g. Michelle Alexander's "The New Jim Crow") have value, then surely a study of, and reflection on, how this social movement has actually pursued its stated goals is just as worthwhile.

But that wasn't even my original point. My original point was that I wouldn't hold up America's urban centers as a shining example of what the future ought to be, precisely because they seem to generate a social structure more akin to Saudi Arabia or Qatar than the what the leadership class actually wants. Yet those states, despite their tremendous wealth, don't represent good models. They are inherently unstable (for instance, most of America's major urban centers erupted into widespread riots not all that long ago), so even if GDP growth and technological innovation were our sole criteria they would have notable flaws. And I would argue that these systems make even the elites in those societies less free. Nor are people entirely constrained by systems. Even a member of a ethnocentric, jingoistic bronze age priesthood could remark of his own ethnic group in the 6th century BC: "the people of the land practice extortion and commit robbery; they oppress the poor and needy and mistreat the foreigner, denying them justice" (Ezekiel 22:29, and note that this is not "Enlightenment individualism," the blame and punishment falls on the corporate whole precisely because society acts as a whole)

No doubt, institutions can constrain people, but people can (and often do) also change institutions, which is why it is hardly off base to point out cases where goals and actual policy are completely at odds. In particular, it's relevant when discussing why establishment parties in the West keep losing elections, particularly in cases where the populist right fields candidates with glaring problems.

I've seen the theory that it's a loyalty check, but also a way to create cover for other appointments. The Senate can reject Gaetz and show they have "some backbone," and then bow on everything else with some credibility.

Given just how hated Gaetz is by his own party, I wouldn't be shocked if this one actually fails, although it might very well go through. If he is withdrawn, maybe Giuliani can go in!

Actually recent scholarship from Christiaan Kappes has shown that the NT is explicit that they are not Jesus' siblings. There have always been very good arguments for that position (even apart from tradition), but Kappes co-authored a book in which he shows that the syngeneusin of texts like Mark 6:4 literally means "relatives of some other womb" (link). In any case, the Magisterial Reformers are all in agreement that Mary was ever-virgin (Luther, Calvin, Zwingli).

Thanks for this. I suppose this might explain why the Greek Fathers tended to write off Mary having had other children.

I didn't find that book overly interesting, either, but what he is doing at the beginning is trying to establish the primordial nature of dominance hierarchies (which he will later relabel as "competence hierarchies"). The idea is that hierarchical competence generates self-confidence and health (which at that lobster-level is seen primarily through serotonin). A large part of his point is that, pace Feminism, hierarchical orderings have been around as long as lobsters, and are not going away anytime soon. I see Peterson as correcting important cultural errors, but at a relatively superficial level. "Make your bed, do the right thing, be an effective communicator, do not fall into feminist traps, etc."

Sure, brutes have their hierarchies. Man can form his hierarchies much as the beasts do, or he can order them according to proper authority, in accordance with what is "truly good for the whole." We need authority and social structures, and we need those structures to be engineered in line with a realistic picture of human nature, while nonetheless enabling us to transcend that nature, what we already are ("the given") for what is "truly best." This is the idea of authority in Plato for instance, why he elevates the authority of reason (only logos can unify a person, just as it is the Logos who resurrects St. Paul from a death of personhood and autonomy, lost to a "civil war in the soul" in Romans 7). I think a similar notion can be found in St. Augustine, Aristotle, St. Thomas, or even Kierkegaard and Hegel.

I suppose what bothers me is the general tendency of naturalistic explanations of human hierarchies to lose sight of the role of the transcedent in human freedom. A naturalistic understanding of man—man as the rational/political animal—need not supplant the role of the transcedent, but it often does without careful attention.

The "competence hierarchy" sort of captures this, but not really. And anyhow I think historically, it's hardly chiefly feminism that has allowed for incompetence at the top. This has been a pernicious problem throughout human history, Marcus Aurelius elevating his incompetent son to the purple and ending the era of the "Five Good Emperors," for instance, or Tiberius, Caligula, and Nero taking Octavian's place through inheritance and sheer inertia. Or there is Tsar Nicholas II or Hitler's disastrous interventions in military affairs, and the great multitudes of men with good names who have "failed upwards" through history. The current state of the Russian military is another example.

At any rate, the dominant form of feminism (and much "anti-racism") seems to be largely comfortable with current hierarchies and disparities, so long as more diversity is seen at the top.

However, I will add that much criticism of Peterson, "how dare anyone assert that hard work and discipline might be good," is entirely off base.

But I find the whole topic of "Christianism" interesting (a term that some use for cultural Christianity). Roger Scruton, Jordan Peterson, and even Richard Dawkins to a minor extent hold up Christian culture as an important value, yet without professing Christianity.

IDK, it seems very much in the mold of the "post-modernism" advocates of "cultural Christianity" tend to rail against. Its focus on instrumentalism (a sort of outgrowth of the Protestant "prosperity gospel" perhaps?) seems to put it further outside the realm of Christian belief than belief in the "God of the philosophers" of antiquity (seemingly returning to some degree). I don't see how a family hewing to "Christianity as principles for success in modern life," wouldn't want to have Saint Francis committed to a psychiatric institution, or how Saint Augustine giving up his promising career and dispensing with all his family's wealth wouldn't be seen as "taking things a bit too far." The definition of human flourishing that makes Boethius or St. Maximus torture/mutilation and death (or most of the Apostles') "worthwhile" and even "choiceworthy" needs to be dramatically different.

Now, Charles Taylor does paint a more sympathetic picture of people who might consider themselves to be "cultural Christians," as those who admire and sometimes desire to pursue spiritual goals, but find themselves too drawn in and busy with the world. So I suppose my objection is more to the narrower range of cases where "Christianity" is advanced as a sort of set of principles for temporal success, as generally defined by secular culture.