There was a thread on this a while back you might find interesting: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/14593/what-is-logic/p1

Stage 3: Even pure being implies logic Even if we take the concept of pure being, logic still arises. We are gesturing to a concept, being, and automatically differentiating it from its negation; the idea of nothingness. As we did earlier with the chair, we are taking a concept (pure being), differentiating it from something else (nothingness)< and from here emerges the fundamental laws of logic. If being is A, then we now know that A=A, A != not A, etc.

Or, as Hegel has it, it also "implies" much else, since sheer, indeterminant being ends up being indistinguishable from nothingness and collapses into its opposite. Houlgate's commentary is excellent here. For Hegel, this necessitates the sublation of nothing by being, leading to becoming, whereby being is constantly passing into nothingness.

You can describe this in information theoretic terms too (as Floridi has done). An infinite stream of just 1s, or the same 1 measured again and again, ad infinitum, is incapable of conveying information. Indeed, it can only "be a 1" as compared against some background that serves as a 0. Spencer Brown's Law's of Form are another way to get at this. Likewise, you can imagine a soundwave of infinite amplitude and frequency (the sheer fullness of being). All the waves will cancel out, due to the infinite frequency and amplitude, with each peak being offset by an identical trough, and the result will be silence (albeit a pregnant silence, the silence of the Pleroma if you will).

Stage 4: Being itself generates logic The conclusion: Logic isn't a set of rules we invented to think clearly. It's not even something minds discover about reality. Logic is the automatic byproduct of existence itself. The moment anything exists - anything that has potential for differentiation - logical structure emerges naturally. Where there's being, there's logic.

I think this is another thing that can be formulated quite well in information theory, although I have a suspicions that all these different ways of looking at it are isomorphic in a way.



Right, Stage 1 reminded me of the opening of the Phenomenology of Spirit, where sheer sense certainty collapses into contentless sheer abstraction. Of course here, it is experience that is most abstract (for Hegel at least). As Hegel quipped, "gossip is abstract, my philosophy is not." That the particular individual (or particular individual interval of experience) is less abstract (more real) is itself a sort of presupposition (one C.S. Peirce goes as far as to label satanic, lol).

And note that Hegel is not idiosyncratic here, but is following the classical tradition he drew so much from. This ordering would hold true for Plato, Neo-Platonism, Augustine, Aquinas, high scholasticism, much Islamic thought, and arguably Aristotle. It's worth considering here then that the inversion of this tendency in modern thought (the preferencing of immediate experience and the particular) was first only countenanced on epistemic grounds. That is, it applied to the order of knowing. But this already applied to the order of knowing in the classical thought, according to the Aristotlian dictum that "what is known best to us" (concrete particulars) is not "what is known best in itself" (principles). Yet materialism turned this epistemic stance into a full blown metaphysical dogma. Robert M. Wallace is pretty good on this sort of thing (i.e. the greater reality of form), at least in Hegel and Plato.

Still, something must account for why experience is one way and not any other. And this suggests a prior, determinant actuality, which must include difference.

I'll also note that I disagree here:

Now, you probably recognise that when we talk about separate objects like "chairs" and "tables," the mind is arbitrarily cutting up reality into conceptual pieces - these aren't necessarily fundamental divisions within nature itself. BUT the key point is that there must still be genuine differences between one part of reality and another, rather than complete uniformity. Even if our specific conceptual boundaries are arbitrary, there's still real distinctness and differentiation in the fabric of reality itself.

Strictly speaking, an entirely arbitrary relationship between reality and appearances destroys the very notion of a reality/appearance dichotomy. If the relationship were such, then "reality" doesn't really have anything to do with appearances, since it "effects" it completely randomly (and so doesn't really effect it at all). We could never have access to "reality" if it was arbitrarily related to appearances. Yet, if all we have is appearances, and it is all we can ever have, by what grounds do we posit this separate, arbitrarily related "reality?"

However, if there is only appearances, then appearances just are reality.

That said, I don't think we have any good reason to think appearances are arbitrarily related to reality. That there is being prior to our experiences, and that it is determinant, is implied by the regularity of experience and the very possibility of intelligibility.

Still, there is a difficulty in calling "logic," as relates to human practices, by the same term as the "logic" of being. The two would seem to be related analogously. I am not sure what term to use here. I have considered "logos" for the "logic of being," with "logoi" for the discrete principles (in line with Patristic/Scholastic Greek usage). I actually think the Book of Causes (which no one reads anymore because it is an anonymous "rip-off" of Proclus' Elements) is a decent lens for explaining this. Maybe.

This conversation reminded me of a passage from D.C. Schindler's the Catholicity of Reason that focuses on the major presumptions made by those who, out of "epistemic modesty" set hard limits on reason.

First, he responds to the idea that we never grasp the truth, the absolutization of Socratic irony as the claim that "all we know is that we don't know anything (absolutely)."

[Here], the scope is universal: one expresses a general reluctance to claim truth, “absolute knowledge,” in any particular instance. But note: this stance implies that the question of whether or not one’s ideas, in one case or another, are true in fact is, for all intents and purposes, irrelevant. The phrase “all intents and purposes” is particularly appropriate here because the stance willy-nilly absolutizes pragmatism.

But there is an outrageous presumption in this: if pursuing the question of truth requires one to venture, as it were, beyond one’s thinking to reality, dismissing this question means resolving not to venture beyond one’s own thinking as one’s own, which is to say that one keeps oneself away from the world and in one’s own head [or perhaps language game] — which is to say, further, that one absolutizes one’s own ego over and against God, reality, others, whatever it may be, all of which is equally irrelevant to that ego.

What reason does one have for dismissing the question of truth and suspending one’s judgment? While it could turn out in a particular case or another that suspending judgment is prudent, there can in fact be no reason at all for a universal suspension of judgment, insofar as accepting a reason as true requires suspending this suspension. It follows that this suspension is strictly groundless; it is a wholly arbitrary a priori, which claims preemptively that no statement will ever have a claim on one’s judgment without obliging oneself to listen to and consider any given statement. It may be that one opinion or another that one happens to hold is in fact true, but the suspension of judgment neutralizes its significance for me qua truth, again for no reason. I thus absolve myself of all responsibility: if I make no claim on truth, then truth never has a claim on me.

pg.24

The second idea he addresses is a sort of "bracketing" out of "epistemic humility."

The second alternative above, namely, that I claim knowledge about things in a delimited area, but make no judgment one way or the other regarding anything outside the limits, is at least apparently less presumptuous than the first, ironically because it does indeed admit that some of its knowledge is true.

The difficulty is in fact twofold. On the one hand, as we observed at the outset of this chapter, one can set limits in the proper place only if one is already beyond those limits, which means that to the extent that self-limitation is strictly a priori, and not the fruit of an encounter with what lies outside of oneself [or language], the limitation is an act of presumption: one is acting as if one knows what one does not in fact know. On the other hand, and perhaps more profoundly, to allow oneself judgment on one side of a boundary and at the same time to suspend judgment on the other side is to claim — again, in an a priori way, which is to say without any sufficient reason — that what lies on the other side does not in any significant sense bear on my understanding of the matter or matters lying on this side. But of course to make this claim without investigation and justification is presumptuous.

It does not in the least do to insist, “But I am limiting my claims only to this particular aspect!” because this begs the very question being raised here...

For example, one might isolate economics from politics as a closed system in itself, which is evidently misleading insofar as the “agents” of economic transactions are living members of communities whose choices inevitably reflect in a significant way the nature and structure of those communities. Perhaps less obviously, but with analogous implications, one might also separate politics from philosophical anthropology, anthropology from metaphysics, or metaphysics from theology. The problem will be there whenever one isolates a part from the whole in a way that excludes the relevance of the meaning of the whole to the meaning of the part, which is to say that one fails to approach the part as a part, i.e., as related to what is greater than it, and so one (presumptuously) makes it an absolute in itself.

To avoid this presumption, one might first seek to attenuate one’s insistence on knowledge within the delimited sphere in light of one’s ignorance of the larger whole, which would seem to acknowledge at least in principle the significance of that whole. But in fact this is a retreat into what we showed above to be the greatest possible presumption, namely, the universal suspension of judgment. The only way to avoid the dilemma is in fact to achieve actual knowledge about the whole...

pg. 24-26

...ironically, the more one insists on modesty in science, the more “impenetrable” one makes it, i.e., the more one makes it an absolute in itself and so unable to be integrated into a larger whole. To set any absolute limit not only keeps reason from exceeding a boundary, it necessarily also keeps anything else from getting in.

pg. 28

This is, of course, not to suggest there is no benefit to setting things aside. And we can still respect Aristotle's advice that we should not expect explanations to be more precise than the subject matter warrants. But it does point out a way appeals to humility become totalizing.

Perhaps it also explains the tendency of theorists to want to go beyond claims of mere skepticism, and to instead claim that the whole of being or intelligibility must be contained within the limits of humility they have set.

I could give me my answers to the questions, I just don't think it would be particularly helpful. "Testability" of "falsification" are often offered as criteria for science. I do think this works. Theoretical work often predates the possibility of any sort of test or "verification" by decades. Mach famously decried the atom as unfalsifiable. A number of major physicists decried the quark on the same grounds. The quark and anti-particles were first developed as speculative theories and were not immediately testable. The theory had to come first though. Quantum foundations is often decried as unfalsifiable, but in fact some theories of objective collapse have been successfully tested (and seemingly falsified). This work has given us real insights. We wouldn't have Bell's work on locality without it for example.

And this sort of issue isn't limited to physics. You can see it in the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis debate in biology just as well. Information theory, and the idea that "biological information" is "really reducible to mechanism," is a particularly apt case, because it becomes a very philosophical question, really one of metaphysics when one wants to challenge the idea that dyadic mechanism is the way causation must be described. Understanding dynamical systems and a lot of complexity studies in quite similar.

If science only becomes science when it is testable, then a great deal of what scientists do, especially theoretical work, is philosophy and not science. So, like I said, the line is not very clear by this criteria, or at least it fails to corresponds to common usages.

Ethics is not necessarily the study of ends, but the ends in relation with some intent because we see people that accidentally caused harm different than people that intentionally caused harm.

Right, because the former are seeking different ends from the latter.

What people do and what is best for them is different than what an individual does and what is best for the individual, which could conflict with what is best for the group.

Potentially. That's a question ethics and politics studies, the role of the "common good" being key here.



Good questions. The difficulty in answering these are precisely why I don't see a particularly strong line between the two.

My guess is that the number of assents which involve the will in such a way is very large. It doesn’t seem to be practicable to avoid all such assents, which is probably why people like ↪Russell and Banno so often overreach their own intellectualist criteria. Janus is someone who gives a very idiosyncratic approach to this problem by positing a set of non-rational assents which are justifiable to oneself but not to others. Williams James seems to go too far in collapsing truth into will altogether. Pascal’s Wager represents an especially potent leveraging of the problem. But even after dissecting all of the errors, it is very hard to deny that there must be some rational assents which are not derived entirely from the intellect.

The Medieval answer to this philosophical problem is found in both a robust understanding of the relation between the intellect and the will, and also in the doctrine of the convertibility of the good and the true.

This is a very interesting post. It reminds me of how Aristotle (or maybe it is Aquinas in the commentary), likens moral reason to advice given by a father or friends, rather than the strict informing of theoretical reason vis-á-vis demonstration.

One idea here in the medieval context is that, because we only ever encounter finite goods, the will is always underdetermined. Thus, there is always a "choice factor" in our pursuits (and from a theological point of view it is this separation that allows/is necessary for man to transcend his own finitude and so to become more "like God"—at least this is one answer for "why were Satan and Adam not created fixed on God?")

@J might find this interesting because, if I have understood him correctly, this relates to why he thinks all moral reasoning is always hypothetical? That is, we can tell what follows from moral premises, but never be led to any particular premise (even though the premises are indeed really true or false, and knowable as such, which is the part I don't get, since this would seem to imply non-hypothetical judgements are possible).

I think this goes too far. There are at least some things that can be known as good vis-á-vis human nature, particularly ceteris paribus, and if the good is more choice-worthy than the bad, then we have a clear intellectual line to the preferability of at least some habits, i.e., the virtues (intellectual and moral). But I'll certainly grant that this does not apply to every case, and is not without difficulties in particular applications. Nor do I think this suggests the absolute priority of the intellect in the pursuit of virtue, in that the appetite for knowledge, including knowledge about what is truly best, always plays a role.

I think such remarks are self refuting and mischaracterise both mathematics and philosophy by falsely implying that they are separate language games. Indeed, formalism fails to explain the evolution of mathematlcs and logic. There's nothing therapeutic about mischaracterising mathematics as being a closed system of meaning.

Right, reason becomes trapped in the disparate fly-bottles of sui generis language games. Man is separated from being, either by the mind, or later by language. He is like the separated lover who can never reach his other half in the Symposium. Language, the sign vehicle, ideas, etc. become impermeable barriers that preclude the possibility of union, rather than the very means of union.

D.C. Schindler has a book on the "catholicty of reason," the way it always relates to the whole and always is already beyond itself that I quite like. It's very continental though, which is not everyone's cup of tea.

From the text:

One of the first and most decisive forms of this self-restriction of reason is no doubt Kant’s determination to set limits to reason “in order to make room for faith." Such a determination seems eminently reasonable: the remedy for presumption is modesty, and modesty would seem to be best ensured by restricting reason’s scope, which would cause it to respect what lies beyond it as genuinely “beyond.” But our argument is that setting limits to reason in this way in fact makes modesty impossible, and that the only way to avoid a closed system is vigilantly to insist on “totality.” The problem with Hegel, for example, who is typically presented as the very peak of Western rational presumption, is not that he claimed too much for reason, but too little: his system closed in on itself the moment he allowed reason to lose sight of the whole.

You know, the old Hegelian dictum that: "to have recognized a limit is to have already stepped beyond it."

How about what makes science a good way to know things is that it is the only method that has provided answers and philosophy has provided none. Name one answer philosophy has provided that did not involve some semblance of the scientific method - observing and rationalizing one's observations

But you made a distinction between philosophy and science. As commonly conceived, philosophy deals in observations all the time. This is true of phenomenology, ethics, metaphysics, etc. Is the claim that whenever these involve observation they are actually "science" and not "philosophy?"

I would just say that this would make most (perhaps all) philosophy into "science," or at least "scientific" (in virtue of involving observation). Indeed, it's a popular axiom in philosophy that "there is nothing in the intellect that was not first in the senses [i.e. "observed"]. And this other sort of "philosophy" that doesn't involve observations would either be very small or non-existent.

Are we talking about them from the "internal" position of distinguishing right and wrong and beauty and plainness, or "externally" with ethics and aesthetics simply being one of the many means humans use complex social behaviors to improve their social fitness?

I'm not really sure why these should be different. Ethics is the study of ends. Politics, as a sort of archetectonic study of ends in the broadest sphere possible, is both a study of what people do and what they would benefit from doing, and this is recognized in the contemporary social sciences.

Right, there are all sorts of modifications possible in quotation, ampilation, appellation, etc. But these are hardly counterexamples. Descriptive sentences, claims, signify "what is." But truth vis-á-vis sentences just is the property of signifying "what is" If descriptive sentences, claims, facts, etc. did not signify "what is" it's hard to see how they even have content. We are, after all, predicating something of something, which is to say that something is, which is also to say that it is true that something is.

Would we ever claim: "x is y, but it is not true that x is y?" (And please, no examples using quotation, this obviously applies to actual claims only). If not, then there is a convertability and it is related to the possibility of signification and content. Appellation, etc. are certainly important, as is the question of assertoric force, but those are unrelated as far as I can see. The convertability deals with cases where there is assertoric force, and surely, there is at least sometimes assertoric force, and this is crucial for signification.

The strong counterexample would be that there is never assertoric force, or that saying "x is y," doesn't entail that it is true that "x is y," i.e. that x can actually be y, but this isn't true of x. Or, that saying something about what is is not basic.

Indeed it is. But we agreed:

You cannot answer the question: "in virtue of what does 'anything not go' given we have already said that we do not possess the truth?

The rest is just an example. Feel free to ignore it. Surely you have some criteria in mind by which it isn't "everything goes?" Or do you? Is it sentiment? Another appeal to democratization?

That was the question. I cannot see why it requires me explaining my conception of wisdom, and my understanding of principles (in formal logic even), in order for you to answer a question about how you determine "acceptable/correct/true narratives" and discard "unacceptable/incorrect/false narratives," or if correct/acceptable/true narratives can contradict one another? Can they contradict each other? That was one of the questions.

Of course there are truths, and we can "have" them.

Ok, but you were the one who made "I have truth" a claim of hubris. Instead we need: "something to sit between "I have the truth" and "Anything goes." (Your words).

What is that "something?"

You often accuse arguments of being "merely rhetorical," but what exactly is it that such arguments lack once logic is determined by usefulness and "I have truth" is off the table?

Here you have it again. I don't see that you have explained how "wisdom" (our present example) is a vacuous term

I didn't claim wisdom was vacuous, I merely said it cannot be the standard by which accepted narratives are judged if it is vacuous. Likewise, the love of wisdom would be the love of nothing, or nothing in particular, if wisdom doesn't mean anything. I don't think that's that difficult a point. No need for formal logic. Vacuous terms don't do anything. Wisdom has to signify "something" in that it cannot signify "absolutely nothing."

When you say apprehension comes prior to judgment I can't help but think of Kant whose whole project can be read as "Judgment is the single fundamental unity to Reason in all matters philosophical" :D -- I'm not sure there's such a thing as apprehension prior to judgment at all.

In Kant? Isn't there apprehension prior to judgement? There is intuition/understanding/reason, which is clearly influenced by the three acts. He takes quite a bit from Aristotle. That's sort of Hegel's critique. "Oh look, I started presuppositionlessly and just happened to find Aristotle's categories." (I never found this critique of Hegel's strong, maybe the categories have held up because they are themselves strong).

Kant would deny truth as the adequacy of thought to being in the strong sense, or the idea of form coming through the senses to inform the intellect. I suppose the response here is that he rejects this because he presupposes representationalism and he has no good grounds for doing so (totally different subject). I'm also pretty sure he falls into identifying falsity with negation. So there would be other differences. I just don't know if the differences hold up without also accepting the fundamental axiom of "we experience only ideas/representations/our own experiences, not things," and of "knowledge of things in themselves," (as opposed to things as revealed by acting, actuality) as a sort of epistemic "gold standard" to aspire to.

More that our ideas give us an idea about what's important to consider, and this is a learned kind of judgment, and there was no such thing as apprehending before learning how to judge -- it was just ignorance.

I think this is perhaps missing the point. To judge "x is y," predication, one must first understand x and y. Now if we are talking about a judgement of something newly experienced in the senses, it seems clear that "x" must be there for "x is y." How could one even say y of x without specifying x in at least some way?

In the state of ignorance we lack any sort of notion of either truth or falsity.

This is fair. I think this is consistent with both Aristotle and Kant in a way. A notion of truth as truth does require judgement. Aquinas has it that truth is most possessed when we know something and we know that we know it as true. Obviously, simply being aware of something, does not represent this sort of grasp. So, the priority of truth in the mind hinges on the idea that truth is the adequacy of the intellect to being, but that we can also speak analogously of truth. Hence, sentences can be true. Speech can be true in several senses (e.g. lying vs truthful speech, truth vs falsehood), models can be more or less true to life, and there must be truth in the senses to some degree, as well as in things (as the measure of truth). The truth that is prior to judgement is not as fully truth. Likewise, judgements that are known as true judgements are even more fully the realization of truth.

But if a duck is the measure of true things said about a duck, and a tree is the true measure of judged of the tree, then truth is first in the measure, and only later in judgement. Man is not the measure of all things. Kant tries to preserve this, even as his representationalist assumptions make this difficult for him. So this is another sense of priority. That is, it does not become true that the duck has wings when we judge it to be so. It was already true prior to our judgement (when the possibility of falsity enters the picture).

Sure, but falsity is not related to truth as negation (contradictory opposition), but as a contrary.

Aristotle has a distinction that I think holds up:

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

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

We can also consider the "three acts of the mind:"

1. Simple Apprehension, "What is it?" (produces terms - deals with essence)

2. Judging, "Is it?" (produces propositions - deals with existence)

3. Reasoning, "Why is it?" (produces arguments - deals with causes, or we might say "reasons" today because "causes" has been butchered).

All of these related to the adequacy of thought to being. Now apprehension must come prior to judgement or else there is no content to make judgements about through predication, composition, division, concatenation, etc. And there must be an analogous sort of "sense knowledge" prior to any intellection about what is conveyed by the senses. So, positive apprehension, i.e. some content (adequacy of the intellect) must be prior to the judgement stage where falsity enters the picture.

Likewise, nothing can be known as false without knowing at least something as true already, because no inference, to truth or falsity, can be made from nothing. Hence, falsity is posterior.

Consider the limit case. There is only God, who is omniscient, and the seven spheres He has created. Now, that the spheres exist is true. It is true because truth is convertible with being. If they exist, it is true that they exist.

There is arguably logical convertability as well. To say "a man is standing," is to say "it is true that a man is standing," (assertoric force), which is also to say "one man is standing" (unity).

God knows everything that is, so there is adequacy of the intellect to being. But there are no false beliefs, since God is the only intellect. Yet God knows and knows that He knows, fathoms and understands.

No thanks, C.S. Peirce is my go to American. Pragmaticism, not pragmatism, thank you :grin:.

Now, that's just co-occurrence to demonstrate a dyad between the two to the standards you laid out. But I think that "...is true" and "...is false" presuppose one another to be made sense of. That is, there is no "...is true" simpliciter, but rather its meaning will depend upon the meaning of "...is false", and vice-versa.

So there is no prioritizing one over the other.

While they are contrary opposites, on the view of truth as a transcendental property of being, falsity is parasitic on truth for the same reason that evil is parasitic on good—it is an absence. If truth is the adequacy of the intellect to being then its lack is a privation. Likewise, without ends, goods, the entire concept of evil makes no sense, since nothing is sought and so no aims are every frustrated.

Banno, I asked:

...in ruling out, "anything goes," you are denying some positions. So, considering that you are also ruling out: "I have truth," in virtue of what are you ruling out all those views which, according to you, "don't go?" What's the standard?

It's a question. Surely you have some criteria in mind. I just offered wisdom as an example.

You are treating "wisdom" here as an individual, and making an existential instantiation? That is,
∃(x) (x is wisdom) ⊃ (a is wisdom) were "a" is a new individual constant.

That's inconsistent with your claim that wisdom is not a thing:

You are once again conflating "something" and "some thing." You seem to be making the same mistake you accused Plato of re the Forms. Yet my point is merely that a vacuous term (or one that is indeterminately mutable) cannot be the criteria for "what goes," (i.e. which "narratives" are accepted) else "anything goes." This is merely the observation that if a term applies equally to everything, it lets everything in. If the term is meaningless, then it cannot keep anything out. If it is unlimited in its mutability, then it can let anything in.

I'm not going to respond to the rest because it's the same mistake.

Instead, what we might do is map out how we find people using the word "wisdom" in various situations, noting the similarities and differences and so developing an open map of the ways the word functions in our community.

But if "wisdom" were the standard by which "not anything goes" and wisdom judges between "narratives," then this would effectively be an appeal to the democratization of knowledge, no? What is true is what the many believe?

Except that, for terms like beauty, wisdom, true, good, etc., you would also end up encountering many mutually contradictory theories.

It seems obvious that this would be a poor method for trying to inquire into many terms. For instance, if you want to understand "quantum indeterminacy," you ask the physicist, not the many; if you want understand "pseudoexfoliation glaucoma," you ask the opthalmologist, not the many, etc. Nor did these people come to know what they know by asking the many, but rather the opthalmologist studies eyes, the historian studies history, etc.

It's an interesting framing because I think sophia would have implied something like knowledge (maybe "gnosis" is better). "Wisdom" has taken on a much more amorphous meaning in English, more "practical," less "theoretical."

I don't think wisdom can ultimately mean "believing what makes you happier though." I know you weren't necessarily implying that. I think praxis is part of wisdom, but so is theoria. That is, the sage knows why he acts. And not just from a narrow, self-interested point of view.

That's a crucial difference. I think this has to be the case, because we seek wisdom, in part, because of the sort of self-determination, self-government, and liberty it brings. It's a liberty from ignorance, in a sense, but not really in terms of gaining "episteme" (scientific-like knowledge). Plus, I think wisdom also implies having overcome weakness of will, such that one knows what to do, why one should do it, and then actually does it, even if it means drinking the hemlock.

No, I just had in mind the idea that "wisdom" cannot be vacuous or apply to everything equally.

Which is just to say, the term wisdom has to have some determinant content or else philosophy, the love of wisdom, would be the "love of nothing in particular."

So:

...in ruling out, "anything goes," you are denying some positions. So, considering that you are also ruling out: "I have truth," in virtue of what are you ruling out all those views which, according to you, "don't go?" What's the standard? Apparently it cannot be truth. Is it wisdom?

If it's wisdom, it would have to be something. Otherwise "anything goes." But then what is wisdom, or any other criteria that you'd liked to recommend, that stops "everything from going?"

and quite another to get the barest glimpse of Kant or Aristotle or Wittgenstein and then believe you're in a position to refute some key point. This is especially egregious when the refutation is scornful, implying that K or A or W must have been really unintelligent because you have shown them to be wrong! Such arrogance.

There is an irony here in that many of the "great names" do this to each other. Nietzsche is obviously offender #1, because he calls out people by name or obvious reference, and is quite scornful, although he is, in at least some of the cases, not very well informed. Russell's history is a standout example as well (Grayling's is as bad on medieval thought and suggests people were involved in councils while dead/not yet born). But it happens to everyone. Kant thought the new critical philosophy cut deep enough to brand the bulk of what came before "twaddle" (although I think that's in a personal letter), and the idea that all (or most) of the problems philosophers have spent their lives on are just a failure to use language correctly requires at least a bit of hubris (particularly if one has not studied them). Hume recommending consigning the bulk of all prior thought to the flames.

I think that's just a trade-off for swinging for the fences. You're more likely to hit a home run, but your batting average goes down. Sometimes you also need the courage to say something stupid.

I'll just add that charity is tricky. Sometimes people's idea of charity seems extremely uncharitable, like when religious claims are reinterpreted as "not truth-apt." I would rather say we should try to interpret people as they themselves do, but trying to save their ideas from their own interpretation is also a great philosophical art. That's how we got Hegel and Fichte.

Why must wisdom "have some determinate content"? There's the idea again that if it has no "determinate content" then it is nothing, but that doesn't follow. The assumption is that without determinacy—without clear, specifiable content—“wisdom” is vacuous. But this is not a necessary conclusion. The leap from indeterminacy to meaninglessness is unwarranted.

Yes, it absolutely does follow. At least, as I intended "some determinant content."

How are you reading that? Are you advancing the claim that a term can lack all determinant content (i.e. possessing not even "some" content), and thus refer to nothing more than anything else," and not be vacuous? "Lacking any (i.e. not even 'some') determinant content" sounds to me like a definition of a vacuous term Banno.

But this is not a necessary conclusion. The leap from indeterminacy to meaninglessness is unwarranted.

"Possessing at least some determinacy" doesn't suggest "it must lack all indeterminacy," rather it suggests "it must have at least some determinacy," i.e. not none at all.

So, I won't respond to the rest, because it's all based on this misreading. I was hoping you would reply to the substantive points and not make the entire reply about reading "must have some determinant content" as being equivalent with "must be absent of all indeterminancy."

Or, to add another quote, from Plato's seventh letter: "There neither is nor ever will be a treatise of mine on the subject [of metaphysics]. For it does not admit of exposition like other branches of knowledge; but after much converse about the matter itself and a life lived together, suddenly a light, as it were, is kindled in one soul by a flame that leaps to it from another, and thereafter sustains itself... Again, if they had appeared to me to admit adequately of writing and exposition, what task in life could I have performed nobler than this, to write what is of great service to mankind and to bring the nature of things into the light for all to see? But I do not think it a good thing for men that there should be a disquisition, as it is called, on this topic-except for some few, who are able with a little teaching to find it out for themselves. As for the rest, it would fill some of them quite illogically with a mistaken feeling of contempt, and others with lofty and vain-glorious expectations, as though they had learnt something high and mighty."

Or, as Saint John of Damascus puts it: "neither are all things unutterable nor all utterable; neither all unknowable nor all knowable. But the knowable belongs to one order, and the utterable to another; just as it is one thing to speak and another thing to know. Many of the things relating to God, therefore, that are dimly understood cannot be put into fitting terms, but on things above us we cannot do else than express ourselves according to our limited capacity."

Difficulty arises when the order of being is reduced to the order of knowing, or the order of knowing reduced to the order of speaking, or the order of speaking to the order of justification. For, in the order of justification alone, understanding of what is being justified is excluded.

That's just what jumped out at me. It has been a while since I read C&P, but it makes sense to me.

I think one thing to recall is that horses were still primarily "beasts of burden" at this point. They were a means, like a car. But obviously, people also knew they had feelings, "personalities," etc., and some treated them more like pets. I think one of the points here is that, without any orienting telos, no truly better or worse way to live a human life, everything becomes instrumental. You beat the horse if it gives you pleasure, because, in the end, everything should be viewed through the lens of maximizing pleasure. There is nothing else to seek.

So, to the earlier question: - it reminds me a bit of Achille's shield in the Iliad. Why is it too terrifying to look at? Well, going back to antiquity, a common answer is that it shows the meaninglessness of life. The shield is incredibly detailed and shows "the city in war" and "the city in peace." In the former, there is opportunity for glory, thymos. In the latter, there is time for pleasure, epithumia. But there is no greater logos orienting things. The shield is a circle, and the world it depicts an endless cycle where all, even those of the greatest glory and virtue ultimately go down to the grave to become gibbering nothings (in the Odyssey, when Odysseus goes to the underworld, Achilles tells Odysseus he'd rather be the slave of a poor man than "lord it over all the exhausted dead"). There is no purpose to anything. It is, perhaps reminiscent of Ecclesiastes, and it recalls the Aeneid in that Virgil does add a higher logos and historical dimension to his world, even if it remains bitterly pessimistic.

Dostoevsky is seeing the same thing returning with the "death of God." So, in this post I go into why so many people oriented towards the classical tradition see nominalism as "demonic." This goes back to the Desert Fathers, and other early influential Christian thinkers, who tended to see a life led seeking advantage (reason become wholly instrumental and without telos) as essentially a "diabolical" way of thinking. I know the Patristics have always been quite big in the Orthodox tradition, because they are all over the liturgy, so Dostoevsky might well be familiar with these ideas since they were transmitted down the ages.

And, as you point out, the way people wallow in sin is a big focus of Dostoevsky. Also their attempts to hang on to some shred of dignity, and how this often backfires because their thymos is misdirected, all out of balance with the purpose of life. Katrina Ivanovna in the Brothers Karamazov is a good example too. This goes with the Patristic idea, still big in Orthodoxy, of man's mind being clouded in the fall, his nous fundamentally malfunctioning and in need of "Christ the physician."

A well-constructed, nicely written essay, which for me, however, only showed that older concepts of reason incorporated what we would today class as the creative imagination. The notion of 'intellectus' or intellectual intuition, basically conjectures that the creative imagination is a reliable source of metaphysical and ontological insight. That is what is denied, or at least questioned, by the modern secular mind.

I think this is a pretty major misunderstanding of the concept. Intellectus has nothing to do with the creative imagination, which is its own faculty in medieval psychology (and roughly parallels what we tend to mean by the term today). Perhaps you meant to say that you think the faculty of intellectus is just creative imagination? That would make more sense.

Although, this still has very large difficulties if it is to be a total rejection, because acknowledging nothing but ratio would essentially commit us to something like eliminitive materialism and behaviorism (i.e. understanding would be illusory, or at least "theoretically uninteresting" as Dennett put is re Nagel's "What is It Like be a Bat.") For anything more robust, ratio needs to take on some of the properties of intellectus vis-a-vis cognitive understanding, else reason would simply be rule following devoid of content.

C.S. Lewis explains this pretty well:

We are enjoying intellectus when we 'just see' a self-evident truth; we are exercising ratio when we proceed step by step to prove a truth which is not self-evident. A cognitive life in which all truth can be simply ' seen' would be the life of an intelligentia, an angel. A life of unmitigated ratio where nothing was simply ' seen' and all had to be proved, would presumably be impossible; for nothing can be proved if nothing is self-evident. Man's mental life is spent in laboriously connecting those frequent, but momentary, flashes of intelligentia which constitute intellectus.

When ratio is used with this precision and distinguished from intellectus, it is, I take it, very much what we mean by 'reason' today; that is, as Johnson defines it, 'The power by which man deduces one proposition from another, or proceeds from premises to consequences'. But, having so defined it, he gives as his first example, from Hooker, 'Reason is the director of man's will, discovering in action what is good'.

There would seem to be a startling discrepancy between the example and the definition. No doubt, if A is good for its own sake, we may discover by reasoning that, since B is the means to A, therefore B would be a good thing to do. But by what sort of deduction, and from what sort of premises, could we reach the proposition 'A is good for its own sake' ?

This must be accepted from some other source before the reasoning can begin; a source which has been variously identified-with 'conscience' (conceived as the Voice of God), with some moral 'sense' or 'taste', with an emotion ('a good heart'), with the standards of one's social group, with the super-ego. Yet nearly all moralists before the eighteenth century regarded Reason as the organ of morality. The moral conflict was depicted as one between Passion and Reason, not between Passion and 'conscience', or ' duty', or ' goodness'. Prospero, in forgiving his enemies, declares that he is siding, not with his charity or mercy, but with 'his nobler reason' (Tempest, v, i, 26). The explanation is that nearly all of them believed the fundamental moral maxims were intellectually grasped.

Lewis focuses on moral reasoning, but the same would hold true for theoretical reasoning. Ratio alone cannot justify any inference rules without already having decided on some inference rules. There are an infinite number of possible logics and one would have no way to pick between them without some starting point. Likewise, there is a qualitative, first-person experiential element to understanding, the grasp of the quiddity (whatness) of things, that must be moved over to ratio if intellectus is denied (or else one of the more narrow forms of eliminitivism will follow).

These problems have not been missed in contemporary philosophy. They represent some of the most significant theoretical puzzles occupying current thought. The Chinese Room gets at these issues, as does Mary's Room, the question of "what it is like to be a bat," and the Hard Problem, Symbol Grounding Problem, etc. The Chinese Room and Symbol Grounding Problem are more specific to intellectus, the Hard Problem encompasses a more general problem with first person experience, of which intellectual knowledge is particularly difficult for reductionist theories to explain.

The idea of intellectus cannot stand on its own it seems―it requires the belief in God, the human-inspiring Divine intellect, to support it.

This is not the case even in medieval thought. There are illuminative explanations of noesis, which Mark Burgess covers well in his dissertation, but there is also the Aristotlian conception of "natural" noesis, which is a biological function. It flows from the basic idea that:

1. Things exist as some definite actuality prior to preception.
2. For perception to be "of things" it must involve to communication of some of this actuality (form) through the senses (even through sensation is "of" the interaction between the sense organ and the surrounding media, form travels through the media in the form of light, sound waves, etc.)
3. The senses inform memory and intellect.
4. The active intellect is able to abstract the form communicated through the senses, and thus the form of what is known is partially in the knower.

This is given more semiotic explanations as well. Many medieval theorists subscribe to both these conceptions, and Aquinas and Dante would fall under this category. Now, God is involved in everything for them, but that does not mean all intellection is illumination.

It's fun to approach Dante as a philosopher instead of just a Poet. At the same time, the Divine Comedy is not a systematic treatise. Is the author over interpreting what he/she sees as philosophical claims rather than poetic symbolism that have varying interpretations? I'm not knowledgeable enough to tell but I do wonder.

Dante is most explicit about the philosophy in the Paradiso, but he has other texts and letters that give us a pretty good idea about his personal philosophy. He is not particularly innovative, but he is extremely well-educated on the philosophy and science of his era, and brings them in quite a bit. For instance, he has Virgil citing Aristotle to him in a number of places.

After dealing with Hume; shouldn't the writer have spent some time on Kant's practical reason that seems to be a reformist model of reason? There may be other more modern writers who made similar attempts.

The longer version does address Kant a bit more in the section on Limbo at the end.

Those in Limbo are different. It seems that they might even have attained what Dante has as he reaches the summit of Mount Purgatory. If we were to look for a parallel to their case in modern thought it might lie in paired back, “secular” versions of ancient ethics, or perhaps in the deontological ethics of the “good will that wills itself.” Such a conception of reason and its role in human life allows that we may pursue knowledge of the Good for its own sake. However, it denies the possibility of any true union with this Good. Indeed, the deontological focus on duty, and on a sui generis “moral good” that is divorced from the sensuous goods that dominate everyday experience, seems to suggest that this knowledge is always at arm’s length. It is in some sense sterile. An isolated “moral goodness” of sheer duty lacks the fecundity of the pre-modern Good, which brings forth all finite goods through its very infinite nature, a sort of overflowing abundance.

This difference should not be surprising, given the different conception of knowing at work in theories subject to the deflation of reason. On these views, ever if we attain proper knowledge of our duties, it is often not clear that this will be “good for us,” or enjoyable, let alone that it will result in beatitude. Such “knowledge of our duties” remains in the realm of ratio, it is not thenuptial union and knowing through becoming of Dante’s vision. Dante’s vision ultimately rests on the hope of a beatific union after death, but it’s important to note that he also thinks this union and “knowing by becoming” is possible for us to some degree in this life. Indeed, this is why those who were contemplatives in life occupy the highest sphere of any mortals in the Paradiso. The erotic ascent is not something that must wait until after death, with only the cold comfort of duty to guide us until then.

To be sure, in a philosophy centered on the pursuit of an infinite Good that we shall never attain (symbolized by Limbo) we are still able to transcend current belief and desire, and so to attain some degree of self-determining freedom. Yet this is a motion that never ends in rest. It is ultimately futile. To that extent, it is a movement that is every bit vain as Satan’s kicking, and so, in some sense, less than fully rational. T

This is why Limbo is a place of “sighs of untormented grief.” This is the state of of human reason (Dante’s ascent led by Virgil) if it cannot be joined to its love (the hand-off to Beatrice, divine illumination). Finite, discursive human reason can never attain to an infinite Good or Truth for the same reason that one can never traverse an infinite distance at a finite speed, in a finite amount of time. Indeed, this mathematical analogy is apt, for, no matter how rapid one’s pace, and how long one continues one’s journey, the share of an infinite distance covered by such a traverse will always be infinitesimal.62 Dante’s final vision must culminate in a “great flash of understanding str[iking] [his] mind, suddenly [granting his] wish” to know.63

And yes, I know that isn't much. I didn't have room for Kant, except in a longer end note. IMO, this captures the main essence though. Knowing by becoming is essential for Dante. It's why the saint also has the greatest and most secure happiness (e.g. St. Francis happy in a hovel with nothing, St. Ireneus sublime facing a gruesome death; Socrates as well). Kant at least represents a move that is far from this sort of 'knowing as union.' Indeed, the mind seems to become a sort of barrier between the soul and being, like Aristophanes' myth in Plato's Symposium, we are forever separated from our other half by the mind, or more recently, "language." And he also represents the cleavage between a "moral good" of duty and all other goods, and a practical reason that is forever separated from aesthetic and theoretical reason, rather than ultimately being oriented towards one thing, like a light that has passed through a prism.

Philosophy is not intended to answer questions, but to ask them. The question enters the domain of science when it becomes testable, and it is here where we end up answering the question. I would just end with another quote from Confucius:
"The man who moves a mountain begins by carrying away small stones".

I don't agree with any strong distinction between science and philosophy, but let me ask: can we (ought we) ever ask questions about ethics or aesthetics? Would these fall under the category of "science?"

Second, it seems to me that the arts must answer at least some questions. For, if we did not have grounds to believe any particular historical narrative, or a grasp of historical facts (including recent events), we'd have no reason to have faith in science.

At the same time, it seems that there are at least questions about what makes science a good way to know things that must be prior to science, and which tend to fall into the common box of "philosophy."

Of course, the line between "philosophy of biology" and biology, or "philosophy of physics," and physics, is always quite blurry. So too the line between philosophy of science and epistemology and foundational questions of evidence and the role of mathematics and logic in scientific discourse and models. That's why I actually think the art/science distinction is more useful than philosophy/science.

To the Christian theists, sin is characteristically tied to the divine command. The divine command theorist associates that any evil deed is one that God condemns, and the fear of sin, and guilt that come from this divine-moral relation, is in the presence of divine moral law.

What is normally called Divine Command Theory is Protestant innovation born of volanturist theology. Certainly, it has echoes in some earlier thinkers, but I think that it's key to distinguish this. The Orthodox have tended to stay even further from this sort of vision (although, there are always exceptions).

I've read a good deal of Dostoevsky's corpus, had a class on him, and a bit of secondary literature, but I'm no expert. However, I don't think he would qualify under this label. He seems solidly Eastern Orthodox in many respects. And I am not bringing this up to nitpick, it's very important.

Ivan Karamazov is obviously not meant to be an exact mouthpiece for Dostoevsky, but Dostoevsky obviously does have the concern that: "if there is no God, anything is permitted." Yet this doesn't imply a framework where "good" is just whatever God proclaims, according to his inscrutable will though, nor a framework defined by command and obedience.

So to:

↪PartialFanatic As an atheist I didn't understand why the absence of divinity would necessarily lead to a world without righteousness

The problem is a lack of telos, and a lack of hope that man can ever fulfill his innate, infinite desires. The cosmos is no longer an ordered whole animated by love. You lose the great Eastern thinkers (e.g. Saint Maximus the Confessor, Saint Gregory Palamas) vision of a cosmos moved by love to union in love, the process of exitus et reditus whereby everything in the cosmos is sacramental, a revelation of God, and history a path towards theosis.

David Bentley Hart uses Dostoevsky as his main source for his book on theodicy, "The Gates of the Sea," and this is at least his reading too.

Gotcha.

Though reading some of your comments, I've wondered whether you shouldn't be developing a Greek sense of balance - it would help when considering issues of safety and such.

Well, that you think:

One might be tempted to conclude that the best option is to return to the belief that tradition is good and reason omnipotent. But there is a third possibility, to recognize that tradition has good and bad elements and that reason has its power, but also its limitations.

Needs to be said to me suggests a rather dramatic misreading on your part. What part of "liberalism has difficulties with thymos-phobia and logos-skepticism/phobia" suggested to you: "traditional is always good and reason is omnipotent?" was remotely on the table?

Where has anyone suggested anything like that? This has sadly been the norm throughout this thread. That all critiques of liberalism tend to get reduced to Stalinism or theocracy is actually something Fisher spends a lot of covering. "There can be no alternative, the solution to the problems of liberalism is always more liberalism."


Second, a concern for safety would motivate a proper acknowledgement and orientation of thymos to logos. Without this, liberal societies are subject to the decay of the state and norms we currently observe. This does not promote safety. Instead, it tends towards radical destabilization, e.g. active duty military forces being sent into major cities, a general support of lawlessness whenever it is "right," etc.

This is exactly what Tacitus and Juvenal say about their own epoch of republican decline. The citizens, desiring safety over justice and the arduous work of self-governance (agony in the Greek sense), ended up going down a path where they got (and deserved) neither.

Why should we limit wisdom to being either a particular, or a thing?

"Something in particular," not "some particular thing." Which is just to say, the term wisdom has to have some determinant content or else philosophy, the love of wisdom, would be the "love of nothing in particular."

And see how even here, at the first step, so much is presumed?

We need not assume the dilemma that either there is one true narrative, or else all philosophical positions were equally wise.

Hubris, to presume on has access to the one true narrative. That, and a certain deafness. One might cultivate a sustained discipline of remaining open to what calls for thought. One might work with others on developing a coherent narrative while not expecting to finish the job. Something to sit between "I have the truth" and "Anything goes".

Well, in ruling out, "anything goes," you are denying some positions. So, considering that you are also ruling out: "I have truth," in virtue of what are you ruling out all those views which, according to you, "don't go?" What's the standard? Apparently it cannot be truth. Is it wisdom? How can wisdom be a standard by which some positions are excluded lest it be determinant?

Second, by rulling out some positions, you have already committed yourself to a "true narrative." Is this hubris? You've said in clear terms in the past that the "true narrative" cannot contain Plato's forms, metaphysical notions of truth, Aristotle's essences (however you understand that), the "view from nowhere," opposition to abortion, etc. You seem to have lots of comments about the true narrative you feel comfortable making. But what are they made in virtue of given that a grasp of truth is denied?

Further, you might ask, can truth contradict truth? Claiming to know that "truth cannot contradict truth" is not claiming to know everything. It's a fairly limited position. But supposing any reasonable confidence in knowing any truths, these truthswill necessarily rule out contradictory truths (or else require finer distinctions).

Now, if truth can contradict truth, when and how is this so? An answer to this question is needed for anyone who countenances dialtheism, because if there is no limit then it follows that "anything goes" (and "doesn't go").


Finally, I would just point out that an embrace of pluralism or the claimed undecidability of "metaphysical" questions doesn't stop people from making strong metaphysical claims. Instead, because any opposing positions cannot be "wrong" it merely shifts the discussion over towards declaring the opposing view a "pseudoproblem," "not truth-apt," or else accusing opposing positions of being "meaningless" or "incoherent." Now, positions might be based on pseudoproblems, or they might be incoherent, but this charge is hardly a panacea and often seems to lead to bad faith argument. For, what makes something a "pseudoproblem" that cannot even be engaged with tends to depend heavily on epistemic and metaphysical presuppositions, and the move to focus on identifying pseudoproblems certainly seems to trend towards making these presuppositions transparent, since they are no longer a focus (indeed, they are assumed not to exist). And so you get broad, cursory dismissals of vast areas of philosophy as dealing in pseudoproblems. Rorty, for instance, in his chapter on Wittgenstein pragmatism, swipes away millennia of philosophy in a few sentences as a non-issue.

Less dramatic, but much more reasonable

"Reasonable" as in "known as true/good by reason," or "reasonable" as in the procedural, safety-centered sense of Rawls and co.?

As Benkei knows, it does resonate with me and my own thinking about the erotic as unity.

You might really like Byung-Chul Han's "The Agony of Eros" then. It is very much a "continental philosophy" text in its style, but I think it is a fairly straightforward read for the genre (and also not very long, which makes the style less of an issue).

It looks at a sort of "crisis of Eros" in modern culture, but its expressed very powerfully. It reminded me a lot of D.C. Schindler's "Love and the Postmodern Predicament," even though they are totally different "camps," Schindler being a Catholic philosopher who tends towards Thomism (although he is obviously deeply read in the continental tradition). That one gets pretty technical though and is a little dry.

Indeed, the erotic took a more prominent place, but reason still was, as far as I understood the ancients, still a rather ethereal cerebral faculty. It was the higher passions leading the lower ones, love for the body of the lover was surpassed by the love of love itself, as in Plato's Diotima.

I think this is generally true. The courtly love tradition that Dante is a part of actually tended to look down on the physical consummation of love (some exceptions not withstanding). A common motif is the lower born knight who pledges lifelong service to a lady who he knows he will never wed (or bed).

But the Christian tradition tended to have a more open view towards both the body and the irascible appetites (the spirited part of the soul, thymos). It saw all of these as good, if properly used and ordered. For instance, many of the Desert Fathers appeal to just anger having a proper use in chasing away the demons and other passions.

Early in the Inferno, Dante learns from Virgil how the beatitude of the blessed will increase once they have their bodies, and the punishment of suicides is to never return to the bodies they rejected (notably, Cato, a pagan suicide is seemingly among those destined for beatitude in Purgatory, so the sin seems to have more to do with the type of suicide then the act itself). That lust and gluttony must be purged on Mt. Purgatory suggests that the proper ordering of bodily appetites is essential to beatitude (and the explanation of the diaphanous bodies of the shades shows how the body has made itself part of the soul, like a wax imprint).

Virgil is sort of relevant here. Even in the Aeneid, we can see the idea of the cannibalistic thymos of the arete culture of the Greeks giving way (in the ideal hero) to pietas, i.e., thymos in service to logos, particularly the divine will and the unfolding of history (maybe even the telos of history embodied in Rome). But Virgil gives plenty of indications that he is skeptical of this working in the long run. I think Dante would probably agree, but for Christ acting as the physician of souls.

To this extent the deflation of reason is an emancipatory move making space for the body.

In some sense, yes, because there is definitely a "body-skeptic" thread in ancient and medieval Christian thought (although there is also a lot of sensual poetry, the focus on the Song of Songs, the cult of bodily relics, etc.). I think this is much more pronounced in ancient Christianity (e.g. Origen or Evagrius). However, in other ways, Charles Taylor's buffered self marks a further retreat of the body.

Yet I think some of the later thinkers who "bring the body back" are more a return towards appreciation of the body in early-antiquity (e.g. Homer) than the particular way in which medievals celebrated the body (bound up in the Incarnation, relics, etc.). Thymos too has been much reduced, particularly within the context of liberalism (Nietzsche is a trend bucker there too). The irascible appetites and the role of hope and fear get reduced in a lot of anthropology, which tends towards a dialectic of pleasure and pain alone, with reason as instrumental and procedural.

It's a fine line to walk. Health, strength, agility—these are all devalued vis-á-vis classical culture, as is honor, wealth, etc. But these are never bad in themselves, except as temptations. I think Boethius would be a paradigmatic example here. And, the warrior cultures of the Middle Ages don't allow the body to disappear in the way it did for the aristocracy of the late-Empire, nor did the particular focus on the Eucharist as the center of religious life.

Carnality could redeem itself as carnal knowledge, but the rider 'knowledge' was necessary. The carnal in and of itself, devoid of rhyme or reason, the orgasmic, the 'pornographic' for lack of a better word, was still feared and subjugated.

Indeed, the lustful are the first of the damned Dante meets in Hell proper. Interestingly though, the last sphere in heaven that lies "within the shadow of Earth," (which marks the blessed souls who suffered some deficits) is Venus, the heaven of redeemed lust. Cunizza da Romano's speech there is particularly interesting. It isn't a rejection of physical love so much as its sublimation to something better (we meet one of her former lovers in the Purgatorio too).

She says:

and I shine here
for I was overcome by this star’s light; [lust]

but gladly I myself forgive in me
what causes my fate, [i.e. fornication] it grieves me not at all—
which might seem strange, indeed, to earthly minds...

But we do not repent, we smile instead:
—not at the sin—this does not come to mind—
but at the Power that orders and provides.

For the classical mind, evil is nothing, so that sort of makes sense. Nothing is positively evil.

Also interesting, Dante has it here that Rahab the Prostitute was the first of the blessed set free from Limbo during the Harrowing of Hell, not Adam or Moses.

However, I presume (not having read it) that he would maintain sanctions against pre- or extra-marital sex.

Oh absolutely. This is couched in the language of marriage as a sacrament. The famous St. Maximus quote to the effect of "food isn't evil, gluttony is; childbearing isn't evil, fornication is—nothing is evil in itself, only in its misuse," is the sort of standard idea here.

Interestingly, marriage is a sort of "natural sacrament," in that it is recognized outside the Church. Previously married non-Christians have not needed to get remarried within the Church. Or at least, I've never heard of such a practice.

Non-material entities don't have parts in the way material entities are composites of parts. But we can make distinctions within them. The stuff on the intellect is open to a lot of interpretation though, which is why Islamic commentators ran in quite different directions with it (Averoese being a particularly interesting one).

Aristotle is in many ways a philosopher of quiddity. His main question is: "why are things what they are?" and not "why are things at all?" He thinks the cosmos is eternal. Hence, existence is not a question for him. That's what makes Aquinas, while very similar in some respects, quite different. He adds an existential twist that changes a lot

Aristotle throws out the idea of a number of pure actualities moving the world in the Metaphysics, although whether this speculation is actually consistent with the entire corpus, or just a dialectical suggestion, or a stray note is another question.

For Aquinas, there is no difficulty here. Angels and demons are only form, but they are not sheer existence. Only God is subsistent, pure being.

Actually, it's a debate in Thomistic studies whether matter is still the individuating principle or if it is the "act of existence," (and whether this is really a difference, and what it entails).

The focus on the act of existence is something I find very useful, in that it helps avoid conceptualizing form and universals as calcified logic entities. Ultimately, we have a process philosophy grounded by infinite being, which is something that comes across well in St. Maximus as well (who takes much from Aristotle).

I'm cautious about 'things possessing being', bearing in mind the term given here as 'thing' was originally 'ouisia', which is nearer in meaning to 'being' that what we think of as 'substance'. The expression in medieval philosophy was 'creatures' i.e. 'created beings', hardly synonymous with 'things'.

This has come up in a few threads. I think the difficulty is that "substance" gets used in two different, but related ways in ancient and medieval logic and metaphysics/physics respectively (the two being deeply related at that point). "Being is said in many ways," as Aristotle says. It is predicated analogously in science, while it must be used univocally in logic, on pain of equivocation.

In metaphysics and natural philosophy, it is organisms (and intelligences) who are most properly beings. There is further the notion, developed through Plotinus and Proclus and on into the Middle Ages, of the "Great Chain of Being," or the notion in Islamic thought of Tashkik al-Wujud, by which we can speak of different beings' greater or lesser unity, freedom, and hence full reality or "perfection." The knowing intellect can reach the highest degree of perfection because it, in a way, can "become all things."

However, in logic, we are up against the fact that we should like to predicate terms of things with weak or even artificial principles of unity. "The cloak is red." "The rock is heavy." "This volume of water is boiling." Surely these can be true propositions, terms predicated of "cloak" and "rock" as if they were substances to which accidents can attach.

Yet only certain things can be the bearers of predicates in a non-parasitic fashion. You cannot have just a "fast movement" with "nothing at all" moving. There is not redness without something to be red. We do not have just "roundness" with nothing that is round (at the very least, not in the physical world), but some thing that is round.

"Substance" here simply means "some thing (relative unity ) capable of bearing the predicates of the other categories (e.g. location, relation, etc.). There must be something for predicates to inhere in.

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

"Essence" is another one of these terms. Organisms most properly have essences/natures, but there is a sort of "essence" to roundness, yellow, etc. recognized as well.

Just an interesting side note. Here is might not be fully relevant because if truth is primarily in the intellect then it is clear that sentences, which lack an intellect, cannot be the primary bearers of truth, although obviously true and false can be predicated of them by analogy.

Suggestive of Diotoma's ladder of divine ascent in the Symposium. But doesn't a distinction need to be made between the erotic and the (merely) carnal? After all, in Plato, reason is the faculty of the soul which harnesses and subordinates the appetites and spiritedness. While I appreciate the deployment of the term ‘carnal knowledge’ to highlight the intimate, transformative aspect of knowing in Dante, in our cultural climate, the word 'carnal' carries associations that are far removed from Dante’s theologically infused vision of eros.

In some sense, yes. The image of love reproduced above all others was the Madonna and Child. However, in defense of "carnal" I'll throw out Dante's verses at the climax on his visit to the Heaven of the Sun (wisdom):

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

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

We could also consider here the medievals (and ancients) great love of the Song of Songs (St. Bernard, Dante's last guide's main exegetical focus, but also a focus since Origen), which imagines the soul/search as the bride/lover of God.

But the sacred is the opposite of the profane, and there is nothing profane here. The idea that has to be kept in focus here is that nothing is evil in itself, it can only be used for evil. Pope John Paul II's Theology of the Body actually draws a comparison between the Holy Trinity and marriage and the procreative act for instance. When "everything is sacramental," romantic love must also reveal God.

Everything created is a revelation of the creator. So the erotic (even in our modern sense) is not to be despised. Christians tended to be far more open to the goodness of the body and embodiment than their Pagan counterparts, and by the High Middle Ages this led to a fairly sensuous (and also cosmic) aesthetics.

If philosophy is the love of wisdom, it is presumably the love of something in particular, and it would seem that not all philosophical positions are wise.

This is not the same thing as "interesting." Hume and Nietzsche are interesting. I am not sure if they are wise.

But, supposing that one thought that all philosophical positions were equally wise (and unwise), that there were no ethical, metaphysical, aesthetic, etc. truths, and thus that "understanding" should replace critique and argument—wouldn't this itself be the demand that everyone else conform to the beliefs/preferences of the skeptic/anti-realist? That is, a sort of declaration of "victory by default?"

It does often seem like there are people here who are trying to understand what others think, and others who want everyone to think like them.

I don't think these are mutually exclusive categories. If truth is preferable to falsity, wisdom to being unwise, then obviously one will want to lead others to the possession of whatever wisdom and truth they have. Wisdom and knowledge are not goods that diminish when shared, but goods that grow the more people partake in them. Hence, the motivation for "conversion" (as Rorty puts it).

But note that someone seeking conversion still has motivations for understanding other's positions. First, because believing one is likely correct is not the same thing as thinking oneself infallible or in possession of the total picture. Hence, in fearing error, and in wanting to round out their position, they have reason to understand other positions. Indeed, where different, disparate traditions agree, there is something of a "robustness check" on the underlying ideas.

Second, conversion requires understanding opposing positions, both for translation and counter argument. Indeed, I can see how it might be the case that these might be some of the stronger motivations for understanding. If one believes positions are undecidable, more something akin to a matter of taste then truth and falsity, I don't see how this wouldn't, at least potentially, lead to being more close-minded, not less. Afterall, if one is challenged on one's own position, one can simply say that all positions have their own inconsistencies. Why learn about another position when all positions share a sort of equality? If you're enjoying your Flaming Doritos just fine, and you cannot be in error in enjoying them, why try to Extreme Nacho variety in the first place?

Now there are difficulties here. Commitment to any one tradition necessarily takes time away from others, and it is difficult to become conversant in many different traditions, particularly when some are very (perhaps intentionally) obscure. Yet it is worth the time, if only because all traditions tend to rely on at least some implicit presuppositions. These are often inherited, a sort of historical residue, and knowing their source is informative. Within a tradition itself, these sorts of presuppositions tend to be transparent.

Just for example, from 400BC to 1600AD a lot of philosophy was done. A lot of skeptical philosophy was advanced. Yet no one introduced a skeptical position all that similar to that of Descartes. St. Augustine had reason to formulate the Cogito before him, but it was in response to a quite different type of skepticism. The idea that all we know are our own ideas, and that even other people might be figments, hadn't occured to anyone. One might suppose from this then that other changes were necessary to pave the way for such a thesis.

This is important in that, for many people, this has become the philosophical issue: securing the "external world." A lot of contemporary thought is based around resolving this very issue. But, stepping behind it helps to reveal some of the common assumptions in play, even if one remains convinced that it is not a problem that can be "dissolved" because the presuppositions in play are valid.

Likewise, any philosophy of history that includes the history of ideas must traffic in the unfolding of such ideas. This is why Hegel's philosophy of religion must at least try to understand all religions, even dead ones.

Thank you for confirming my suspicion that my point was not impenetrable and too unclear to understand. I thought it was clear enough, at least clear enough to address.

Aesthetics entails a metaphysical standpoint.
Ethics entails a metaphysical standpoint.
Which is why threads starting along those lines, like this one, when placed in the hands of the Wittgensteinians, end up in this same conversation about language and not the thing language is speaking about (whatever the thing is). Sparring for the most consistent use of language instead of saying something about the world that another person might also say about the same world.

Well, this is the great sin of anti-metaphysics, right? It ends up being a sort of metaphysical position. It can hardly do otherwise. Indeed, in terms of recent history, it has been arguably the most dogmatic and overzealous, with a huge negative effect on quantum foundations up through the 2000s. Its practitioners still want to interject in metaphysical discussions, and still serve up their own metaphysical positions.

Which is fine. The difficulty is that, if one goes in assuming all problems are pseudoproblems, it lends itself to a tendency to ignore argument in favor of appeals to having "unmasked the pseudoproblem." Because the anti-metaphysician assumes that their position is somehow "non-metaphysical," it is taken to be immune from metaphysical scrutiny. Hence, threads like: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/15218/wittgenstein-and-how-it-elicits-asshole-tendencies/p1

Why is that the question?

Because you have denied the priority of not only Beauty, but of Being itself to language. So, if I want to move on to Beauty, wouldn't it make sense to demonstrate that Being and Truth are first prior to language?

Now, your earlier ad hominems said I offered nothing but rhetoric, so I set my and responses out in clear premises. You haven't responded them at all (despite claiming all I offer is rhetoric and not the vaunted "dissection" of argument you claim to prize). I have dissected your argument.

All you have offered in response is that this is now "off topic" and that now "knowing" is also too problematic of a term to use. So now "being," "exists," "prior," "posterior," (and so presumably "cause" and "effect") and "knowing" are out as problematic.

To be sure, these terms are difficult and could require unpacking, but do they really require much unpacking for my particular example?

My point is that things are prior to their being spoken of. Existence precedes speech. The order of speaking is not the order of being; the world is not "in language" as you put it. One does not need to "step outside language" to point out that this priority must exist.

Do we really need to unpack "know" here? I don't think so. Swap out "grasp of being" for "know" or put in "experience." The same thing will apply.

Do dogs have "experiences," or is "experiences" also a "loaded term?" If dogs have experiences, they presumably do not have them "within language," but presumably they are experiencing something actual that exists, else they would not have any reason to respond to their experiences one way and not any other. Likewise, infants either experience (or "grasp") being prior to knowing language, or they do not have experiences prior to having language. If it is the latter, how do they learn language without experiences?

Is it too problematic to say that infants experience things before having language? Do the disabled who lack language lack experiences? It would seem not. Are their experiences of "what is?" It would seem so. Presumably, their experiences aren't self generating and causeless. If they were, there would be no reason for them to be one way and not any other. Hence, what exists is prior to experience.

But if things exist prior to language, what of truth? If it is the case that things exist as determinant actualities prior to language, then surely "what is the case" is also "true."

This means that the world is not "in language." One never needs to "step outside language" to experience being. Infants are born experiencing without language. One does not need to step outside language to speak of ontological priority. If something can be experienced prior to language, it clearly exists prior to language. One does not need to step outside language to speak about what is not language. Again, you haven't backed up the need for this "stepping outside," you've just asserted it.



See below again, in line with your stated preference for dissection:


P1: We don’t grasp being by representing it from the outside, but are embedded in a structure of interpretation, where belief, truth, and world hang together.
C: Therefore, it is impossible to speak of anything being prior to language, or for language to refer to what exists outside the context of language itself.

The conclusion doesn't follow from the premises.


P1: One cannot use language to speak of anything without using language.
C: Therefore, "being isn't a content to be grasped outside language" (i.e. it lacks meaning outside language).

This also doesn't follow.

P1: Being is not contained in anything (including language).
P2: Language is not a container.
Conclusion: Any attempt to step outside all language to describe being as such is suspect.

This also doesn't follow, and as noted before, for the conclusion to be relevant it would have to be the case that one must "step outside" language to describe being, which would be an additional thesis that needs defense.

As I noted earlier:

You need additional premises like "knowing/experiencing something in any way requires language," and "what something is must be posterior to human speech about it" or "nothing can be actual prior to human speech about it," as well as "language only ever speaks about language and linguistic entities, never about what exists outside the context of human language." That is, you need to actually support a metaphysics of language that concludes that language cannot ever refer outside itself, else you are just engaged in question begging.

I don't really disagree with what you said here; but then isn't the arrangement of parts the form and the matter is just the parts themselves?

Wouldn't this represent an additional supposition along the lines of reductionism? I.e. that all wholes are just the sum and arrangement of their parts?

I think it's to its credit that Aristotle's system avoids this.

I think I see what you are saying here, now: I was conflating formality with 'structure of being'. The form of a thing provides the structure of a thing, but is not identical to it. Otherwise, you are right that what the thing is would not exist: it was just be 'that which it is' and this would change when its parts change.

Right, I think this is very tricky and I had to go over it with a professor pretty closely to clear it up for myself because I had similar questions. Obviously, the whiteness of Socrates' hair is something actual, and if something is actual it must be something, and so it must be form and not matter. But the form/matter distinction isn't rigid in that being white must be a property of Socrates or his hair. We can predicate accidents of Socrates attributable to his matter. The properties of what we consider matter vis-á-vis some whole would be considered form if we were analyzing the substrate in isolation.

Form is always actual, but there can be potential that isn't matter. The biggest example comes from De Anima. The intellect is immaterial, but there is distinction between the active (agent) intellect, and the potential (possible) intellect. The intellect can obviously change. We can merely potentially know French and then learn it, and actually know it. We actually get a gradient of first and second actuality.

Yet the intellect is not a composite of form and matter (although some Islamic commentators unhelpfully call the possible intellect the material intellect). It is immaterial, the idea being that it does not have a substrate in the way "material objects" like a statue do. Indeed, the mind is "potentially all things," making is strangely like prime matter in this respect. This is not to say the body doesn't affect the soul; Aristotle isn't anything like a Cartesian dualist. But the intellect is not simply composed of body. It can be, in a sense, anywhere its thoughts are. When we see a tree across the road, we see a tree across the road. The senses are not "in the head.' We don't see the tree "in our head" or know trees as a universal "within our skill," but rather where there are trees. I think this is a huge benefit of Aristotle, because he doesn't confuse physical dependence with some sort of containment.

This use of "material" has to do with what we might call "physical things." They have some definite location, and matter carries the potential to have location, dimension, etc., as well as the limitation of having some specific location, dimension, etc. Angels, being immaterial, do not occupy space, which is why they can all "dance on the head of a pin." In medieval thought, this capacity to occupy physical space was generally thought of as a limitation, rather than something like a power. Matter, at least as informed substrate, always carries with it an actuality such that it is here and not there, and never everywhere.

Confusingly though, people also speak of material causes in geometry, but this is because we are speaking of shape as abstracted from material bodies.

Also, consider that all of the atoms in a man's body are replaced very many times in his lifetime. If something just is its parts, then in virtue of what is a man the same man even as every part is replaced? If you say a man isn't his parts, but is rather a particular arrangement of substrate-like parts, that sounds identical to the form/matter distinction, just recreated. Whereas, if things just are the particular parts they are made of, then they go out of being as their parts are replaced and rearranged.

They cannot be just the parts, or the replacement of parts makes them cease to be. They cannot be just the current arrangement, or else when the arrangement changes (when Socrates breaks his nose) he ceases to be and becomes something else. Rather, things must be composites with some form accounting for identity and some underlying substrate accounting for change. We might call this "actual parts with potency" instead of matter, but it seems to be effectively the same thing. And it will still involve "real potency." If there were only illusory potency, things could not really change.

I don’t see why we would need to posit a real potency in the sense of a substrate of potential as opposed to positing that ‘real potency’ is merely the ways something that is actual can be affected relative to what it is (i.e., it’s form as received by its parts).

Let me see if you accept this rephrasing.

"We don't need 'real' potency because it is merely the ways in which something actual has the potential to be affected relative to what it is (i.e. a potential to change)."

I don't see how this is a real difference. You are still positing that things have a determinant actuality (what they currently are) and a potential to become something else. So you still need two principles: currently actual form , and the potentiality of form. But matter just is the potentiality underlying of form.

It's what allows us to distinguish substance from accidents. Being snub-nosed is not attributable to the substantial form of Socrates but to his matter; it is an accident (although obviously actual). You seem to risk collapsing this distinction and making all predication essential because all predication is of "form all the way down." If Socrates breaks his nose and becomes snub nosed, you now have to say that his form has fundamentally changed, because form is nothing but the arrangement of actual parts, and "snub nosed" is a new arrangement (or else else you need to somehow make a substantial form/matter type distinction, which again, then you aren't changing anything).

I am not sure what 'real potency' is supposed to denote in this case either, because you are still positing the idea that determinant, actual things "really" have the potential to change, which seems to me like a "real potency."

(i.e., it’s form as received by its parts).

Right, this is just the idea of matter as determinant substrate. The form of flesh is form as flesh and matter as the matter of a man. The form of the substrate determines its potential. So, a seed can become a plant. Ground seed cannot become a plant, but it can become bread. There are different potencies at play.

I don't get why you refer to "magical potency," but then form possessing both actuality and potential is somehow fine and, at any rate, this still makes form into two principles, one of which is a "real potential."

Further, if everything is simply an arrangement of subsistent parts that are completely actual, then you have basically just recreated early-modern corpuscular materialism. But this is a position rife with problems that Aristotle avoids.

If one acknowledges that things really do have the potential to change, I don't know why "real potency" is problematic or "magical."

You might be interested in what Aquinas says about angelic beings and intelligences. These are said to be pure form. However, they are not pure actuality, that would make them God. They have potentiality. They can rebel for instance.

But the analysis is instructive because it shows the problems that show up in denying matter. For instance, every angel must be its own species because it lacks matter to individuate it. Hence the form is always unique. But if every form is unique for material things, then there will be difficulties in explaining abstraction and universals.

You would need some other individuating principle and some other principle for determining species.

To my eye, and I'd supose to the eye of many who have given it some thought, this use of "being" is fraught. The question as posed seems to depend on a very specific and perhaps equivocal sense of "grasping being," without clarifying what that would amount to. As such much of what you say here has a merely rhetorical quality.

The verbage of "grasping being" is yours Banno. You wrote that "being cannot be grasped outside language". Now it is "bad argument" and "merely rhetorical" to respond to someone's exact words? Was your statement that:

Being” isn’t a content to be grasped outside language

also "merely rhetorical" and an equivocation?

I might have said something like "knowing," although I think "grasping being" or "grasping truth " is fine. It's good enough.

The question is: can animals know anything? Can infants or those who have lost their language production and comprehension capacities? It would seem so. There seems to be a sort of sense knowledge that animals and infants are capable of, which implies a grasp of truth, i.e.., what is the case. It would seem that they can know what is without language. Hence, your claim that "being cannot be a content grasped outside language" seems false. Sense knowledge would seem to be a "grasp on being" if anything is.

However, per your previous claim that truth is a property of sentences, there would be issues here. If committed to this idea, we would have to say that either infants, the disabled without language, and animals somehow grasp or possess sentences, or else cannot understand if their beliefs or perceptions are false (which, based on research, seems false).

That is, you seem to have missed the point entirely.

Now It's clear that the picture you see before you makes sense to you. Uncharitably, you seem to think that God made the world in discrete pieces ready for the Greeks to name.

But that's a very suspect view.

Another ridiculous strawman mixed with bigotry. I said nothing about Greeks or God. Very briefly, the issue is that:


A. if the actuality of things is not prior to language, why would language "about things" be one way and not any other?" Likewise, if "meaning is use" this just brings up a similar question: "what determines usefulness?" Either something determines language or usefulness, and is thus prior, or nothing does. If nothing prior determines language or usefulness, why are they one way and not any other?

Aside from this difficulty, the idea that language or what we find useful can be "any which way," is deeply contrary to experience.

B. if the being of what is being interpreted is not prior to an interpretation, how could an "interpretation" actually be "of" anything? If being lacks determinant actuality prior to interpretation, then interpretations are "of" nothing in particular (nothing determinant).

You would have me respond to sentences such as that quoted above, but "being" is not a term I would choose to use, let alone defend. That we "grasp being" strikes me as verging on a nonsense expression. That I use the term at all is by way of showing how problematic it is.

You make metaphysical claims all the time. Then when challenged, you claim, without supporting argument, that every term involved in metaphysics is simply unusable (even though you yourself use them to make the claims you favor).

This is a non-argument. Stop making metaphysical claims like "the world is always already in language," if you're going to turn around and say "I cannot defend anything I am saying because all metaphysical language is too problematic." You're rejecting even basic terms like prior and posterior (actually, you claimed, with no supporting argument, that one needs a "view from nowhere" to discuss priority).

You say things like:

Of course being is not contained in language. Being is not contained in anything, and neither is language a container. Hence any any attempt to step outside of all language to describe being “as such” is suspect

This presupposes that language is something that must be "stepped outside of" to know or refer to the world. That is a metaphysical/anthropological claim.

But now "being" is in fact a nonsense term. This is reminding me of when you claimed that "correct logic" was also a "loaded term" in a discussion of logical pluralism, and I had to point out that it's a term in every major article on the subject, including the one you were citing (in the first sentences), and in the first sentences of the SEP article on logical pluralism.

Terms can be unclear. It is not good argument to just claim that all the basic terms of a field are "unusable" especially if you yourself keep using them to advance your own position. You have to show why a term is unclear.

Truth doesn't reflect the mind's grasp of being, it is the minds grasp of being. “Prior” suggests an ontological gap that can’t be made coherent. We don’t grasp being by representing it from the outside, but are embedded in a structure of interpretation, where belief, truth, and world hang together.

I can't see how to make sense of your attempt to foreclose on this. You bold "Nothing about this priority requires any claim about stepping outside of all interpretations" only to then say " The truth itself is grounded in being, and hence is already actual prior to any interpretation." You appear to just be smuggling back in the scheme/content distinction you reject.

This is the same old, tired false dichotomy. Either there is a "view from nowhere" or linguistic turn philosophy must follow. I already pointed out how your conclusion has no clear relation to your premises in other instances, and it is the same here:

P1: We don’t grasp being by representing it from the outside, but are embedded in a structure of interpretation, where belief, truth, and world hang together.
C: Therefore, it is impossible to speak of anything being prior to language, or for language to refer to what exists outside the context of language itself.

The conclusion doesn't follow from the premises.

You need additional premises like "knowing something in any way requires language," and "what something is must be posterior to human speech about it" or "nothing can be actual prior to human speech about it," as well as "language only ever speaks about language and linguistic entities, never about what exists outside the context of human language." That is, you need to actually support a metaphysics of language that concludes that language cannot ever refer outside itself, else you are just engaged in question begging.

"There is no view from nowhere," does not entail any of those additional premises. Indeed, since you're not making a skeptical argument i.e., "we can never know if anything is prior to language," but rather a positive one "nothing is prior to language and it is meaningless to claim otherwise," I think you'll need all of those premises.



Here are your previous arguments:

P1: One cannot use language to speak of anything without using language.
C: Therefore, "being isn't a content to be grasped outside language" (i.e. it lacks meaning outside language).


The conclusion doesn't follow from the premise.


Likewise:


P1: Being is not contained in anything (including language).
P2: Language is not a container.
Conclusion: Any attempt to step outside all language to describe being as such is suspect.


The conclusion doesn't follow here either. Nor have I argued for anything like the position that is dispatched by the conclusion in the first place. I have said that we can use language to speak of things that exist prior to language. That's not the same thing as "stepping out of language." It is using language. You need an additional premise:

P3: To ever speak about anything's being outside the context of human language, or ontological priority, requires not using language while you speak about it.

But P3 seems obviously false.


Are these merely rhetorical objections?

It’s a different description from Aristotle’s; it takes society into the consideration of individual character and posits an innate potential

Yes, but in some ways it is surprisingly similar. Also, if you consider that for Aristotle man is also "the political animal," the society part is definitely a major theme too.

I'd consider the wide appeal of virtue ethics, in not all that dissimilar forms, in Europe, the Near East, India, and China, throughout most of history, to be a sort of "robustness check" on the idea. It only really gets opposed by a late movement in the West that is explicitly trying to tear down everything about the old order.

This article is presented quite well. I will point out three things:

1.

Emergent properties are known to be partially independent from their grounds because they have attributes and functions not present in their grounds. Chief among these distinct attributes and functions is intent. Intent is a function of the designing mind that thinks strategically about “that which is not yet but will be.”

Are they known as such? This is a topic of huge debate. The author might be interested in Jaegwon Kim's monographs. He is considered to have offered a devastating critique of the idea of anything like "strong emergence" under a supervenience metaphysics. But this article avoids the problem of "how do chemicals interacting cause first person experiences, emotions, intentionality, sensory experience," with this appeal to emergence, while still seemingly embracing a substance metaphysics of supervenience. This would be something to address to make the argument tighter. Process metaphysics is often suggested as a potential avenue around this, but process metaphysics rejects supervenience (and might not be considered "materialism" in the normal sense).

Weak emergence is pretty much just data compression, so it doesn't solve the problem here at all.

Second, as a number of authors have pointed out, whatever emerges from strong emergence is in some sense fundamental because it cannot be accounted for by what it emerges from. So, even if the mental is a product of strong emergence, it would not seem to be the case that it could be adequately explained in terms of neurons. It would rather be the case that neurons, etc. are a prerequisite for mental phenomena, but cannot fully explain them. That is, physical sciences couldn't fully explain mental life. Would that still count as what the author means by "materialism?"

This is a tension, since arguably this is exactly what people mean by "non-material" many times, right? This leads to...

2. Material and non-material are never defined. This makes it difficult to understand what exactly is being argued against or for. The main explanation of what the non-material must entail sounds like substance dualism. This is a popular punching bag, but not a popular position. It might be good to take on some more popular positions as a means of clarifying what the positive position is, or just clarifying the positive position. That the body is a cause of experienced isn't really denied by many metaphysical theories, so the basics that get outlined don't clarify this much.

3. The brain in the vat example seems to actually stress the idea that brains don't cause consciousness on their own. Any brain locked in vacuum will be a dead brain. Brains only ever produce consciousness in bodies, outside of sci-fi situations bordering on magic. They need a constant exchange of energy, information, and causes across their boundaries to produce any experience at all. Bodies also only produce experience within a very narrow range of environmental conditions. They won't do so on a star, in space, or at the bottom of the sea. So it's really a much larger physical system that is required to account for even tiny intervals of mental life. And these include elements outside the body.

The author sort of gets at this, I just think it undermines the early framing of things largely in terms of neurons. Neurons are important, necessary, but apparently not sufficient for experience. You always need a body and an environment. These can just be more variable, but still must comport to a very narrow range in the grand scheme of things.

Finally, some views of "materialism" rolled out by physicists are so thoroughly mathematized that they seem more like idealism. This is just another reason why 'materialism' needs to be defined. Otherwise, it seems vulnerable to Hemple's dilemma and the charge that " material" is just a vague term for "real."

This goes along with the idea that you cannot change a rabbit into something like a frog. Being a frog is not a potential of rabbits. This is an act of sorcery. What it would amount to is replacing a rabbit with a frog, not change, but substitution.

But the body of a rabbit can be broken down and become a frog. A thing's potential is not the same as its composite parts. Likewise, flesh and bones cannot speak lest they be part of a living man.

Removing this distinction risks destroying formal (and thus final) causes because a thing's form now lets it be any other thing. How can it have a proper end then? And if modality is to rely on potentiality, it also causes all sorts of problems there (e.g. a man is no longer necessarily not a cat, etc.) Everything is now potentially everything else in virtue of its form. But then, as pointed out earlier, you still need potentiality (or "possibility"), and so the reduction from one principle to two hasn't been accomplished either.

Also, prime matter is arguably not anything at all. Check out the Timaeus and then consider that Aristotle himself identifies the chora with his notion of matter.