That, or something very like it, is indeed the traditional argument for them. But, for many, what happened in Germany in the first half of the 20th century has more or less destroyed that argument. At the very least, we have to note that love of the humanities is not sufficient to prevent people going down some very wrong paths

Well, the irony here is that Germany is very often the primary example advocates of the classical education use to push their case (with at least some degree of plausibility IMHO). The modern research university is based on the German model that eschewed the liberal arts and the classical education structure and focused on technological progress and technical training instead. Germany was the poster child for a move towards rigidly technical education. Public debates in the US and UK specifically centered around the fear that this was giving them a leg up in economic and military competition as they rushed into their own reforms.

Nazism was also not particularly a project of the intelligentsia in the way communism was in Russia, so it seems harder to blame elite education.

This is a very strange debate. You seem to be arguing that the world is going to hell in a handbasket because of the dominance of liberalism. But I believe that the world is going to hell in a handbasket because of the increasing dominance of illiberal forces, some of which call themselves neo-liberal. We agree about something! On the other hand, I'm not sure there has ever been a time when the world wasn't going to hell in a handbasket. Certainly, not in the last three hundred years.

Well, my claim is that contradictions and problems in modern liberalism are causing the rise of those illiberal forces. If it weren't for these internal dynamics, the external threats would be quite manageable. That is, liberalism in its current form is self-undermining. That's not saying that there is nothing good about liberalism, capitalism, modernity, or republican government. Quite the opposite. I find these trends particularly disturbing precisely because I see the benefits of republican government. Right now though, I think liberalism is destroying the future of republics, or at least putting them in jeopardy. At a certain point, an Augustus does become better for most people than rule by recalcitrant oligarchs. That was the reality of the death of the Roman Republic; it led to the best governance in a very long time.

Yes. It is certainly true that the successes of liberalism in, let us say the 19th and 20th century were the result of deep commitment and dogged determination. So it is odd that you think that people of that kind are "thumos-phobic" (if I've understood what you mean by that correctly). Their positions were based on rational argument, so it is also odd that you think that they were "logos-sceptical" (If I've understood what you mean by that correctly)

Right, I think you're missing what I've said about the timing. I said skepticism about thymos (always present to some degree) increases after the World Wars, and increases again in the post-modern/neo-liberal period after 1970. Logos-skepticism doesn't really enter the picture until that later period. As I pointed out, you can see quite the opposite attitude in the 40s and 50s. Now, truth and reason are seen as in someway inimical to democracy if they do not allow for a "bourgeoisie metaphysics" that allows for multiple, conflicting truth claims (pluralism). Previously, truth and reason were seen as supporting democracy, because people could be led towards the best path by reason and commitment to principles.

The erosion of culture by capitalism no doubt plays a role, because culture directs logos and thymos, but in our fractured environment culture lacks the capacity to act as a unifying force.

The problem with it, for Plato at least, is that it needs to be directed correctly.

Exactly. My claim is that today, we don't direct it so much as we just try to suppress it. It conflicts with "reasonableness" and a focus on safety.

In any case, it seems to me that the widespread condemnation of epithumia is wrong-headed. Our appetites include things that are not merely pleasurable but essential. The problem arises when they are pursued to excess or in the wrong way.

I agree 100%. There is nothing wrong with epithumia. What is problematic is when a society is led by epithumia, when it becomes epithumia-(appetite and safety)-centric. In our current case, this happens because of thymos-phobia and logos-skepticism (or even logos-phobia; I can't tell you how many times I have seen people argue for robust pluralism/relativism, including the wholesale violation of the principle of non-contradiction, because to do otherwise would court autocracy).

On the other hand, I'm not sure there has ever been a time when the world wasn't going to hell in a handbasket. Certainly, not in the last three hundred years.

Yes, but just because problems are perennial doesn't mean they don't get better or worse. The state of the West, or of the US specifically, is arguably more dismal that it has been in a long time, and the forces leading to this seem unlikely to abate or be mastered any time soon without significant change. Again, this is because the challenge to liberalism comes from within liberalism itself. If China and Russia fell into revolt tomorrow, the prospects for the West would not look particularly brighter. Indeed, the lack of external threats might accelerate the decline, the way it did for Rome after victory in the Second Punic War.

I don't see how it's a caricature. That's the view of the world that unites the Ionian materialists. As mentioned in the post, different thinkers did have their own "x factors" to add to the view (e.g. Anaxagoras' Nous). Corpuscular mechanism, and the idea of primary qualities, was also quite popular, although again, some models included different additional factors or forces (yet some didn't).

Even in later periods, someone like Bertrand Russell, who was well-versed in the science of his day, could write:

That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the débris of a universe in ruins—all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.

It's, at the very least, the view of "how science says the world is," I grew up with, and one I've heard repeated back to me many times over the years.

Plus, a lot of popular philosophical problems are framed in these terms. For instance, the "Problem of the Many," tends to assume that it's fair to say things just are nothing but "clouds of particles." That's precisely why the problem emerges.

That's true. But the embrace of reasonableness was intended to avoid the necessity of storming beaches and resisting sieges, which were regarded as grossly uncivilized activities. Risks, by all means, but avoidance of barbarity as a priority.

Right, but the arc of the argument is that people who won't storm beaches or resist sieges (who lack thymos) also won't stand up to public corruption or resist the temptation to public corruption, and won't forgo current consumption for the sake of future goods (e.g. Europe's response to Russian aggression, the inability to moderately curtail consumption to address what appear to be unfolding environmental and fiscal disasters for future generations). So it isn't just about an ability to engage in war, but an ability to avoid war and crisis in the first place.

One reason for this is that the empiricist psychology undergirding liberalism tends to be fairly impoverished (in a number of ways). One way this manifests, in classical terms, is essentially the claim that man only has concupiscible appetites (i.e. an attraction to pleasure and aversion to pain), while ignoring the existence of irascible appetites (i.e. an attraction to the pursuit of arduous goods, where hope, not pleasure, is the key positive motivating force). Indeed, a lot of economics and political science is explicitly built on an anthropology that explicitly lumps all motivation into a concupiscible utility. And it is considered "reasonable" for man to be wholly concupiscible, a creature of epithumia, as is evident when people are chastised for voting "against their own economic interests," as if this, above all else, is what politics seeks to provide. Well, in liberal theory, that's perhaps true, the "common good" is just an aggregate of individual concupiscible goods, of consumption.

But Fukuyama's point, which seems to have been borne out quite well, is that human nature and the drive to meglothymos doesn't disappear just because one wants to banish it. Calling it "unreasonable" does little when the life of epithumia is itself not self-justifying, if it is ultimately "meaningless and purposeless," and the result of an irrational pleasure drive that reason can only do its best to satisfy. C.S. Lewis makes a similar but more nuanced point in the Abolition of Man, which is that, not only will thymos not disappear, but it will be destructive if it isn't oriented properly, and that orientation cannot be to epithumia, but must come from logos.

. They perceived that those narratives involved a great deal of irrational myth-making, which could not stand up to a rational critique

I think the voices that helped develop our current thymos-phobia and logos-skepticism were themselves plenty dogmatic and stuck living out their own myth, both the Russell-Stace-Camus types who declared the "obvious" meaninglessness and purposelessness of reality, and the later post-modern logos-skeptics, who themselves never challenge the empiricist presuppositions that led them towards skepticism.

That is certainly true. Are you suggesting that it is not a problem?

No, I think it's a huge problem. It ignores what the liberal arts are for. They are the ground, as you say, for making men capable of self-governance and self-rule (collectively and individually) as well as the ground for a common stock of ideas for political life, the pursuit of a common good. The move to make English all about "on the job communication," is atrocious in this regard.

I'd disagree about the value given to them in previous epochs. When Saint Augustine regularly cites Virgil, etc., he is drawing on a common culture and set of ideas as a vehicle for his thought. These played a quite large role in thought and politics, as the surviving texts themselves show. The liberal arts might be preparatory, but they are extremely important in this regard. You see this in John Milton being invited to essentially take on a role akin to Secretary of State in revolutionary England because of his learning for instance.

It was only in the 18th and 19th centuries that the status of the Humanities improved and became the mark of a civilized, cultivated person. This was a rational response to the improved market for an education for those who would never need to work.

They were considered essential for those entering public life from antiquity. This is why ancient political works and the works of the Church Fathers are full of literary references. I would also suppose it's why they tend to have good rhetorical style, that even comes out in old translations. You could give Origen or Augustine to a high schooler and expect them to come away with something fairly clear, without being bored to tears, which is certainly not true of a lot of philosophy or theology.

:up:

I don't think materialism as a whole is intuitive. However, the main intuition, that "what is most real is what is common to what I can see and touch" does have a certain deep appeal. I suppose it also has to do with what can be verified. What can be sensed can be verified, and what can be sensed with several senses (the common sensibles) is most secure.

But I tend to agree with you. There is this fairly common narrative where materialism was just humming along swimmingly in the 19th and early 20th century and then-BOOM-all the sudden quantum nonsense and other problems crop up, ruining it all, and this is why we need pragmatism, idealism, [insert your prefered ism here]. Maybe the narrative even as some truth to it. But materialism always had many problems (not just consciousness, but even the goal-directedness of plants, gravity, magnets, electricity, mathematics itself, etc.) and you can certainly find people who pointed these out throughout its entire history, Berkely probably being the funniest:

After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley's ingenious sophistry to prove the non-existence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal.I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it, "I refute it thus."

James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson

Funny enough, that post originally included a paragraph about the old trope that: "no critic of post-modernism has ever understood it, and even if they have understood it, post-modernism has never actually effected anything" You know, the old "no true post-modernism," or "real post-modernism has never been tried." But I thought it was too long.

Well, it is a slippery term, not unlike "existentialist." But I do think it's a term we need because there is a real difference between early to mid-20th century liberalism, and the later "post-modern" "neoliberalism" (there might be "no true neoliberalism" either though). This difference accelerates with the decline of the USSR, and is exemplified by strong skepticism vis-á-vis grand narratives, an embrace of strongly relativistic theses, a heavy focus on debunking as opposed to positive argument (although this is already being identified in the 1950s), a heavy embrace of irony and desacralizarion , and I would say "logos-skepticism." By "logos-skepticism," I mean skepticism about the capacity of logos (reason, rationality) to be the organizing principle and asperation of society and individual life.

For instance, early Christian thought, particularly Origen and Clement of Alexandria, is extremely logo-centric in this way. Homer's Greeks are thymos-centric. They have an arete culture where "excellence" is the key pursuit of human life. Virgil would be a sort of mid-point, pivoting from arete to pietas, an alignment of honor to principles.

William Stace is a fine example because he thinks we face nihilism, but still has faith in logos, in principles. "To be genuinely civilized means to be able to walk straightly and live honorable" without "childish" props such as religion and teleology. There is a refreshing lack of irony in "Man Against Darkness."

Like I said, I think the biggest factor here is how the new outlook permeated the liberal arts, down to high school classrooms. Hanson and Heath's "Who Killed Homer?", now almost thirty years old, covers the effects on the discipline of classics for instance. There is the shift to focusing on "subverting," "decolonizing," "deconstructing," "constructing," "queering," etc. texts on the one hand, and then the tendency to begin cramming the latest scientific and mathematical jargon into humanities studies on the other, as well as a pivot to the abstruse (if not downright obscurantist).

There is a lot going on there, but one theory I like is that the reason the humanities latched on to this sort of style and thinking so readily is that the early-20th century focus on the primacy of science left the humanities as "a mere matter of opinion and taste." They weren't rigorous enough. They didn't produce "progress." They didn't fit in well with the now-dominant German conception of the "research university" as a place primarily concerned with publishing new technological findings. Aping the style of the sciences gives the humanities at least something of the atmosphere of the "legitimate fields," while being aligned towards "progress" gives them a claim to be doing something for society akin to what the natural sciences do through the development of new technologies.

Hence, the creation of analyses like:

This chapter is devoted to the narrative, situation of complex narrator-text or embedded focalization, NF1[F2Cx]. There is embedded (or secondary) focalization when the NF1 represents in the narrator-text the focalization of one of the characters. In other words, the NF1 temporarily hands over focalization (but not narration) to one of the characters, who functions as F2 and, thereby, takes a share in the presentation of the story. Recipient of the F2's focalization is a secondary focalizee (Fe2). (I. J. F. de Jong, Narrators and Focalizers. The Presentation of the Story in the Iliad [Amsterdam, 1987}, p. 101)

This is quite far from the "liberal arts" as the arts that "make men free" in terms of a capacity for individual self-governance and self-rule, although at least the less pessimistic, more Marxist thread in this shift still maintains something of this focus by still maintaining at least some idea about what exactly is being progressed towards.

For a range of thinkers, from Wittgenstein and Husserl to Deleuze and Heidegger, the critique of grand narratives involves anything but skepticism concerning truth. That is to say, for them it is the belief in foundational truth that courts skepticism, and the way beyond such skepticism requires the invocation of a groundless ground, a non-foundational yet determinate notion of truth.

I think this is debatable. Arguably there is an equivocation on what is meant by "truth" in play, but that's not what I meant by logos-skepticism at any rate.

What about literary theory? That's a bit like musicology I suppose.

There is an idea, and I'm not really sure how much I agree with it, that the humanities (which classically, would not tend to include philosophy) deals with "humanistic knowledge."

Humanistic knowledge, on these accounts, comes from our reflections on art, literature, and the human experience. It is an immediate knowledge of the human condition, including our emotional, social, intellectual, and sensory lives as we experience them. Of course, some literature addresses or even attempts to dramatize philosophy. This means that work in the humanities sometimes points towards universal and necessary truths (i.e. in theory, the type of truths that demarcate science). Epic poetry is a great example here, or the works of Dostoevsky, or Borges, etc.

One of my favorite “strange books” is William Bloch’s The Unimaginable Mathematics of Borges' Library of Babel. The book details the mathematics of Borges’s story. Bloch goes through many fields of mathematics to investigate the necessary principles at work in fathoming such a library. Borges, by contrast, shows how human experience interacts with these principles, e.g. the desperation of “librarians” as they search for a book that will contain their life story and vindicate all their acts, or the way meaning becomes divorced from language if there is no intentionality behind it.

The elements Borges brings to his engagement with the mathematical construct of the library involve a sort of connatural knowledge, an intuitive humanistic knowing that is not reducible to analysis and concepts. He doesn't need to bring in mathematical knowledge to explore the topic. Such knowledge is profound, but pre-conceptual. The story is partly a look at our emotional reaction to the (practically) infinite.

That's the idea at least. It makes some sense to me. Some elements of literary theory strike me as more scientific (although they are sometimes ill-advised in this). But work on literature proper seems fairly distinct to me. Actually, I think the drive to make the humanities more "scientific" has tended to be bad for the humanities, leading to obscurantism at times and unhelpful approaches. I think the liberal arts in particular have a no less important, but quite different role to play (in some ways, a more essential role for a functioning republic).

2) Again, pragmatism for me isn't about truth.

Right, but what do you mean by "there are no true ontological positions?" Maybe I have misunderstood. My assumption was that this meant there simply is no truth (or falsehood) as to positions about what really exists. For example, historical anti-realism. The position: "the Declaration of Independence was signed on July 4, 1776" would be a position about what exist(s/ed), right? If there is no truth about this (an ontological position) but only measures vis-a-vis whether or not the methods we are pursuing are getting us the results we want, that seems to me to imply something like historical anti-realism, and a whole bunch of other anti-realisms.

But these sorts of anti-realisms bring up a host of issues. For instance, what is "justice" when facts (ontological positions) about the past (including murders, assaults, etc.) don't exist (cannot be true or false), but we are instead only interested in methods that produce the outcomes we seek? I feel like these are impossible to disentangle. Our desire for justice is bound up in questions of truth.

Maybe that's not how you meant it though?

1) As I see it, "what do I do next" is the fundamental question.

I'll be honest, I don't think I can fathom a psychology where this question isn't going to virtually always be massively informed by what someone thinks is true. I'm not sure how a method itself can be true, except analogously, by resulting in true judgements. Whereas, if "true method" just means "effective," then that starts to look to me a lot like "true = producing what I currently desire." Why? Because doesn't "effective" here just mean "producing the result we currently desire?"

Where am I going off the rails here?

I didn't say we should define truth in terms of usefulness. I don't remember bringing usefulness into this discussion at all. I said truth is a tool we use to help us decide how we should act.

See above. I may have misunderstood. The idea that "true methods" are those that get the results we want suggested to me that "true" here means "doing what we want," i.e. "useful towards some end."

Something else I didn't say.

Right, I just think it's something that follows from the denial of any truth/falsity for ontological positions. What exactly is episteme in if there are no true ontological positions?

Keeping in mind you have ruled out adequacy

I did?:chin:

Pretty sure that's the definition I gave. What exactly is the counterpoint, that thought cannot be adequate to being? Epistemic nihilism?

Would you allow an edit to, "Truth is the seeming adequacy of thought to apparent being"?

No, because it seems obvious that there is a difference between what is true and what merely appears to be true. Indeed, one cannot have a coherent appearance/reality distinction if there is "nothing but appearances." In that case, appearances just are reality, and we have something like Protagorean relativism.

But I would want to lay a lot at the feet of democratic culture. I think most people like pluralism because they like democracy, and truth is always a threat to democracy insofar as we accept the modern notion of liberty as liberty to follow one's passions.

On the other hand is the idea that truth brings with it coercive imposition, which threatens the dignity of each human to choose for themselves. Either way, I tend to view the motive as moral more than speculative, especially for the non-academic masses

I'm replying to this comment in this thread because my thoughts are more on topic here.

I think the above is largely correct. However, the question then is: "why do people now think truth is incompatible with democracy?" A very robust appreciation for democracy existed in the United States in the early 20th century without an embrace of this sort of pluralism, without any apparent conflict.

Superman fights for "Truth, Justice, and the American Way," a phrase which could be delivered back then without any undercurrent of irony. In 1948, even "the world is essentially meaningless and purposeless" types like William Stace could espouse faith in logos and man's capacity to follow it. There is, up through the early Cold War, a "cult of the Founding Fathers" that tends to present them in terms not unlike how the ancient Greeks saw figures like Solon. And then there is stuff like the broad success of The Lord of the Rings and Chronicles of Narnia in the earlier context, versus the sorts of stories that are popular today, like A Game of Thrones and The Hunger Games. The latter two are considered "more realistic," in part, precisely because of uninspiring, more cynical endings.

I think post-modern skepticism re grand narratives, and a more general skepticism of logos's capacity for leading human life, has a larger impact on popular culture that is often acknowledged (through a variety of pathways, particularly its effect on the liberal arts). I'd argue that it is this skepticism that makes truth threating (rather than empowering) for democracy. That is, truth and reason should make democracy more secure, but in this climate the two come into conflict.

Also, the fact that logos is no longer fit to lead human life redoubles the modern liberal phobia of thymos (spiritedness, honor culture, etc.) sparked by the World Wars. So what you get is a society focused on epithumia (sensible pleasure and, in particular, safety) and "reasonableness" (which seems to often tie back procedurally to safety). This is, pointedly, not unlike how Juvenal and Tacitus saw their own society as its citizenry allowed the Roman Republic to die.

Now, I'll catch some flak for this, but for historians and theorists who use something like the epithumia, thymos, logos distinction, there are two types of "societies of epithumia:" the primitive, which must struggle to meet basic needs, and the decadent. Ibn Khaldun might be an example here. Or as William Durant puts it: "every civilization is born a Stoic, and dies an Epicurean."

To bring this back to Rawls:

A common critique of Rawls is that his "reasonableness" isn't enough to motivate citizens to attain arduous goods. It's procedural, and motivated by safety. Other liberals tend to draw on a similar sort of motivation (e.g. Stephen Pinker, Sam Harris, etc., i.e. "it's safest to prefer the progressive liberal social order; it's most likely to get you 'good enough' circumstances"). Hence, it doesn't really address Fukuyama's point about the inherent human drive towards megalothymia. More to the point, people are unlikely to want to storm beaches or resist sieges in the name of "reasonableness," i.e., to take the sorts of personal and collective risks that civilization requires.

I think those are fair critiques, but I would add that "reasonableness" also isn't a strong enough motivator to keep societies' leaders and elites honest. When faced with tensions between duty and personal pleasure or self-aggrandizement, reasonableness is not the sort of principle that gets people to do the hard thing, especially not when that means taking on significant risks. For that, you need a sense of thymos, arete, and pietas, all the old civic virtues. Hamilton for instance, wasn't willing to storm trenches because he thought his system would be a reasonable maximization of the self-directed pursuit of utility, but because he (like many Founders) self-reflectively thought of himself as a modern-day Cincinnatus or Cocles.

Certainly, thymos can lead to great evils, but it also leads to great goods. That's Plato's whole point. Logos needs to rule through thymos. Liberalism tends to cut out thymos because it will not allow any standard for human greatness or just desert to enter the public sphere (Rawls explicitly bans just desert from consideration). More to the point, in its contemporary form, it tends to preclude the "rule of reason" because reason, once deflated and deprived of proper authority as logos, only speaks to "how to get what we all want," and not "what should we want."

So, as Rawls might put it in his deontological contractarian terms:

Human beings have a desire to express their nature as free and equal moral persons, and this they do most adequately by acting from the principles that they would acknowledge in the original position. When all strive to comply with these principles and each succeeds, then individually and collectively their nature as moral persons is most fully realized, and with it their individual and collective good” (1971, 528; 1999, 462–3, emphasis added).

Yet we face the same sort of challenges one sees in criticisms of Hume:

Such a common end or desire, however, and the common flourishing in which this desire is fulfilled are simply not possible as such if we accept one key premise that Rawls himself has articulated and indeed started out from in the first part of his theory of justice: namely, that the good of each individual is essentially whatever he or she desires, that each individual determines (not discovers or discerns) his or her own life plan comprised of a “separate system of ends.” Recall Rawls’s famous example of the person who dedicates his life to counting blades of grass (1971, 432–3; 1999, 379–80). If this person does not affirm the principles of justice, or the social union of a well-ordered society, or the excellences of others enjoyed in that society as parts of his individual good, so be it; if after attempts at friendly persuasion he remains unconvinced, we have no theoretical or anthropological grounds to conclude that he has misunderstood who he really is and what makes for his truest personal and social happiness. He is simply different from us. On Rawls’s own terms, therefore, we cannot convincingly maintain that justice is congruent with the good for all persons; Rawls himself admits this towards the end of TJ (cf. 1971, 575–6; cf. 528–9; 1999, 504–5; cf.) Because “goodness as rationality” hinges on individuals’ separate systems of ends, a fully common good and ultimately the (ontological) “common or matching [moral] nature” (1971, 523; cf. 528; 1999, 459; cf. 463) on which it must be founded cannot be said to exist within Rawls’s liberal paradigm.

Mary Keys - Aquinas, Aristotle, and the Promise of the Common Good

Rawls has a "thick" theory in some respects, but this conception of the common good is thin. I don't think it's thick enough to support the demands of civilization in the long run, although it might work well enough for a while, especially for a civilization with economic and martial hegemony already in place and an existing culture it can draw on for values. But we're now seeing both of those factors evaporate.

Not to mention that Rawls himself is undermined by the advance of skepticism since the 1970s. Even his instrumental, Kantian reasonableness starts looks shaky in the face of today's logos skepticism.

To call these "post-modern" is a stretch. Or is it? Is pragmatism related to post-modernism? "Do what works" could be seen as a pretty pluralistic position.

People have always been pragmatic, engaged in bracketing, put more fundamental questions aside to focus on more pressing concerns, etc. I think the shift I am referring to is much more distinct, i.e. the claim that truth itself is "pragmatism all the way down." That "true = what gets me what I currently want."

This is quite distinct from recognizing the benefits of pragmatic approaches to problem-solving. Plato, for instance, has a tremendous respect for techne, as does Aristotle. However, they do not think techne (arts for achieving ends) exhausts the human capacity for knowledge. That might be one way to frame the question ontological truth: "does episteme, sophia, and gnosis exist?" And, if sophia (wisdom, theoria) doesn't exist, what exactly is the philosopher, the lover of wisdom?

A question that rears its head when we define truth in terms of usefulness is: "but is anything truly useful?" Obviously, we very often do things that we think are to our benefit, or are a path to some end we seek, but they actually aren't, or we discover that the ends we pursue aren't truly choiceworthy. There are obvious examples, like Newton drinking mercury for his health, and less obvious examples where it seems more crucial to have a clear distinction between what is believed to be useful and what is truly best.

A lot of what is said by advocates of the pragmatic theory of truth is a helpful medicine for people who have grown overly committed to a calcified, doctrinal view of metaphysics. Nonetheless, on versions where there is some truth about what is actually useful, the new theory seems to actually not be that different from earlier theories, whereas otherwise, the result will tend towards a thoroughgoing relativism. There is a pretty big gulf between C.S. Peirce and Rorty for instance.

My understanding of metaphysics grows directly out of my reading and contemplation of the works of Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu and related works

Like other great thinkers of the Axial Age, these thinkers are skeptical of doctrines and the capacity of language to convey truth. But I do think this is quite a bit different from something along the lines of: "there is no Tao," and so "by Tao, we just mean what is in accordance with what we think works." I do not understand from these thinkers that there is truly no way to be more or less in line with nature—that wu wei can be consistent with whatever we currently think is beneficial.

It's intended to demonstrate that methods are not true or false, they are effective or not.

Ok, but are they truly effective or ineffective? I think the ontological question is going to worm its way back in with more complex cases.

Even if conflicting political approaches to metaphysics and epistemology maintain high standards for establishment of truth, it is often decisions about what questions to ask that demonstrate where political differences lie.

Indeed, but without a clear notion of truth, I don't get how one questions this sort of political influence. Yet I think it's obvious that it can be more or less pernicious. The point is, of course, not that we can step outside of political or historical influence, but that we can make judgements based on something that is not politics and history "all the way down." Otherwise, it becomes difficult to articulate what is wrong with an "Aryan physics."

If we claim it "isn't useful," we will just be faced with the question about the truth of usefulness. Surely, it was useful for the Nazis. Fiction presents us with a good extreme here. In 1984, it is useful, both for the Party, and for the citizens, to affirm "Big Brother is always right." It's so useful in fact, that the story closes on Winston having been tortured into loving Big Brother. Yet, just because society can be set up such that it is eminently useful to affirm:

WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

Or that "Oceania has always been allied with Eurasia and at war with Eastasia," even though the reverse was true just minutes earlier—does the fact that denying these will result in double-plus ungood consequences make them so?

That's pretty much the point. Institutions brought them fortune, power and fame and they're busily attacking and tearing down those institutions, in order to deprive other people of the protection they offer.

On their view, they are saving those institutions. That's pretty clear from the rhetoric. I don't think they are entirely wrong here, at least on the need to save those institutions from opposing forces, even if the counterattack is equally disastrous.

An interesting thing is that if you look at hit pieces on Peterson, the things he is being criticized for (e.g. obscurantistism) are precisely the things that made him a successful academic and could easily make him a "brilliant theorist" if he held more orthodoxly (in the context of the academy) left wing positions.

So maybe, a symptom of the "post-modernization of the right," although Nick Land, Curtis Yarvin, etc. are better figures representing that phenomenon.

<Science pertains to knowledge of the natural world, and where our knowledge of the natural world is more certain and reliable, there science is more present>

Science is also generally thought of as universal knowledge. But in complex systems, it is often the case that what seems like a universal relationship is subject to change after passing various tipping points. We deal in "moving landscapes" in more complex fields. For instance, several "laws of economics," revealed themselves to be merely tendencies which existed within the economic, political, and technological environments that existed in the first half of the 20th century. We discovered that they were not truly universal towards the end of the century—that sort of thing.

For another example, with biology, we have to consider the possibility of extraterrestrial life, life based on a molecule other than DNA, perhaps even non-carbon-based life. This throws a wrench into claims to universality.

This is a problem, although I think information theoretic approaches shed light on a solution by way of returning to the conception of science primarily in terms of unifying principles that explain (and virtually contain) many particular causes.

But, my particular opinion is that these issues, and the motivation for scientific anti-realism, or pluralism, are driven by a self-reinforcing constellation of philosophical positions—representationalism, positivism, nominalism and key assumptions about philosophical anthropology—nominalism being the most relevant. Because of these presuppositions, the problems posed by fallibilism, the possibility of scientific revision, of one theory superceding another, or of paradigm shifts, seem to necessitate anti-realism or pluralism, even up to an abandonment of the principle of non-contradiction (e.g. Latin Averroism or "hermetically sealed magisterium"). Indeed, I don't think people are wrong to think that, given those presuppositions, this is where they will be led, to a choice between nihilism and pluralism (whether the two end up being all that different is another question).

What I find particularly interesting is how this sets up a new dialectical of the "reasonable" and the "unreasonable" as opposed to the old dialectic of the rational and irrational. Rawls conception of the "reasonable" individual might be a good example here. The rational is too bound up in its new straightjacket to be of much use, but the reasonable is allowed to rely on a certain je ne sais pas to delimit the vast expanses left open by nihilism or pluralism.

:up:

Funny enough, I think the rise of information theoretic/complexity studies approaches to the physical sciences make a good case for a sort of "immanent realism" as opposed to a thoroughgoing nominalism (which opens up a number of epistemic challenges).

There is, a sort of definiteness to something like an ant. That is, ants were around as organic wholes organized around aims (life being "goal-directed") long before there were men to say "this counts as an ant." The ant is not an arbitrary ensemble; at least that's my position.

I also think this goes with Aristotle's idea that it is organism who are most properly beings (things like rocks or puddles being more nexuses of external causes). But of course, unity, self-organization, and self-governance occur on a sliding scale. Being a "whole" is not a binary distinction. Unity and multiplicity are contrary opposites, not contradictory. Some things are more unified as wholes than others, organisms being the best example (but dissipative systems with "life cycles" are interesting cases too).

To my mind at least, the opens up a via media for explaining why there are such things as trees, men, ants, etc. in a non-arbitrary way, instead of "just universal quantum fields" or "just a sea of particles," which we then "give names to." Afterall, if we give things names because it is "useful" to make such distinctions, we will next have to ask: "but why are these distinction useful and not others? Why did disparate linguistic groups all come to speak of ants, trees, etc., and have the idea of species?" Some prior cause seems necessary to explain the distinction. To my mind, the most obvious cause is that ants and the like already represented organic wholes.

But then the informational pattern by which something is an ant, even though it is defined by a relation to the entire cosmic order (i.e. not wholly intelligible in itself) is, nonetheless, abstractable, and so has a sort of unchanging being in abstraction.

I think one of the difficulties here is that the obsession with logic in late medieval/early modern thought led to a sort of calcification of realism, such that it became a real life strawman of itself. "Ant" had to be an eternal, unchanging univocal form, rather than being a certain sort of principle instantiated in all ants. Evolution is fatal to the calcification, but not really to more nuanced formulations that existed earlier.

There is at least an interesting etiology here, when you think about "information" defining thought (even in steam pipes perhaps!). Because the term "information" comes from the old "form," eidos (from whence we also get idea). Well, if computational theory of mind or integrated information theory are correct in some key respects, then there definitely is a link between "idea" and "(in)form(action)."

Interesting article, I still have to finish it.

I would question the figures being focused on to some degree, because I think it obscures how the issues raised here are topics of open debate within the Right. These aren't really intellectuals we would expect to have coherent platforms. Two of the figures have had quite public struggles with drug addiction and difficulties coping with wealth and fame, of the sort that obviously tends to lead to incoherence. They also interact heavily through social media, and I have found that social media tends to make even otherwise quite sensible figures say very silly things on a regular basis.

I think the tension that arises from the modern tendency to define freedom in terms of power/potency (the ability to choose or be anything), as opposed to in terms of actuality (the ability to actualize the Good) actually has a much wider reach than the focus of this article. It leads to deep tensions in progressive liberalism and modern communitarianism as well (actually, maybe this article does get at the tensions in right-wing communitarianism in some ways, since it cannot take over from Neoliberalism precisely because this ideal of freedom is so fixed).

I think it also may be missing the way in which the general movement represented by these figures often explicitly appeals to tradition and communitarian identity, not just individualism. Is there a contradiction here? Perhaps, and the article does a good job on some of that. But I think there are other figures who represent more serious efforts to overcome these tensions.

Liberalism, in its battles with its ideological opponents, ended up sublating key elements of socialism and nationalism. The Right certainly focuses heavily on individualism, but it does incorporate elements of both the aforementioned (normally the former being justified in terms of the later, a conception of a "people" who are deserving of membership in the welfare state, which tends to exclude migrants). Note that progressive liberalism also focuses heavily on the individual. The reason given for why we need more progressive redistribution, and the reason we need to focus on biological markers of identity (sex, race, etc. instead of class, religion, etc.) is because progressivism is ultimately still justified in terms of the individual getting to decide and achieve their own good.

I think the article misses how appeals to pre-modern tradition also figure into this though. The crowd around Trump really likes their ancient Rome memes. So does Musk. There is "Red Caesarism," etc. These elements tend to be far more communitarian, and are openly critical of libertarianism, and even sometimes critical of capitalism. Tariffs are and a push for autotarky are actually not out of line with this way of thinking. This is a tension within the Right that is out in the open, not something that is ignored.

Movements like Generation Identity in Europe are in some ways more grounded in national epics like the Nibelungenlied, the Poetic Edda, the Iliad, and ancient political theory than in modern liberalism/libertarian ideology. More Beowulf, less Ayn Rand. Certainly, they rely heavily on these sources for aesthetics, and these are romantic movements where aesthetics is given a very important role (e.g., a film like 300 might have more currency than many political dissertations).

It is certainly true that these movements often cannot abandon certain classical liberal precepts, and that this arguably makes them incoherent, or at the very least opens them up to grifters and abuse. But I do think there is more there than simple opportunism.

Go look at popular right wing spaces and I think you're far more likely to find discussion of Deneen's "Why Liberalism Failed," than Nozick. "Neoliberal" has become a sort of slur in these spaces. "Zombie Reaganism" and the "Boomerism" of the classically liberal GOP is almost as much of a punching bag as the Left. Wagner, particularly his epic Ring Cycle, starts to eclipse his friend Nietzsche in popularity, and names like Goethe, Schiller, and Schelling push out Hamilton, Locke, and Mill.

Which is just to say maybe that this internal contradiction actually seems to me to be more of an open civil war in the Right (also one that tends to pit the young communitarian traditionalists against the older individualistic liberals), and these figures, being broadly popular, are just nexus points for this conflict.

I'd also add that I don't think these sources are necessarily problematic. What is problematic is that liberalism, in its phobia of thymos, as so utterly starved young people (particularly young men) of any "education of the chest," that, in their desperation to find some source of thymos, the fall easy prey to the simplicity of "might makes right," and the "super individual," the "alpha Chad." But funny enough, Homer, Virgil, etc. are actually full of warnings against this sort of thing.

They are also taught to be skeptical of logos, the effects of post-modernism come home to roost, which removes the idea that thymos must be in service to logos (pietas), leaving only the sort of cannibalistic energy of Achilles (or ultimately, in his failings, Aeneas') thymotic rage (furor). Not to put too fine a point on it, but without logos leading, the parallels to Hitlerism seem fairly robust.

I am sure that most would agree that the individual is sovereign and institutions are suspect. Institutions were created for the benefit of the individual. The individual is not there for the benefit of the Institution.

Who is "most?" I think Marxism, most pre-modern political thought, most Eastern thought, a lot of Continental thought, and post-modernism would all reject this to some extent, although for very different reasons. However, this is certainly the view of neoliberalism, which is currently the hegemonic ideology, but it's not like neoliberalism is without significant critics.

This is, for instance, not what one gets even looking at the old heroic epics. There is no Aeneas without the Trojans and future Romans. He is an exceptional individual. A hero. The son of a god. Yet his desires are continually subservient to the needs of the whole, and shaped by the destiny of the whole. Without the whole, he wouldn't be a hero.

Greek drama, likewise, tends to pivot around conflicting duties (e.g. to family versus polis), not on duty versus individual desire. There, the answer is (to them) too obvious. The individual cannot conflict with the polis absolutely because there is no individual without the polis. It's Christianity and Platonism, with their focus on a justice beyond the particularities of any one culture, social role, or historical moment that allows the individual to absolutely oppose the polis, but even here it is not the individual, but their ultimate duty (to principles) which is at question.

From what I’ve seen of your posts, I don’t think you really think this is a very interesting idea.

Quite the contrary, I'm quite interested on a number of fronts. First, I'm interested to see if such views can avoid essentially democratizing truth or, more to the point, reducing it towards something like "might (physical or political) makes right."

I'm also interested in such views' rise in popularity as a historical phenomena. When the positivists began attacking metaphysics, I hardly think post-modern pluralism was the goal they had in mind.

Nor is this a view of truth that would be embraced by classical liberal theorists, nor by most influential 20th century liberals. Rawls, Popper, or Berlin, for instance, cannot embrace the sort of "aletheiatic pluralism" often advocated for on TPF and other places without radically undermining their own claims; yet these voices are often called upon go support liberalism and pluralism.

Hence, I do wonder if it is a sort of progression from the 1970s that has gone underappreciated, i.e., that "modern liberalism" has been abandoned for "post-modern liberalism" without people paying much attention. That's certainly the claim of some theorists, and that the dangers herein only began to become apparent to many when the political right also adopted the post-modern stance, leading to all sorts of concerns about a "post-truth" world. So, with the Fuenteses of the world we advance from "my body, my choice," to "your body, my choice," and from "my truth, my choice," to "your truth, my choice." But, if the (language) community decides truth and justice, then he who asserts his rule over the community does make such decisions, and does so justly.

Of course, ideas like "we decide what is true" are likely to be much more appealing when one feels that one is part of the empowered majority, and that "history" is on one's side, which is certainly how progressive vanguard intellectuals tended to see themselves. I do suspect that the bloom will continue to fall off the rose in this respect, particularly as the forces of reaction have finally begun raising siege works around the Ivory Tower in a gambit to enforce their truth. Notably, as this has happened, appeals to Madame Reason, and Truth (capital!) from those quarters have suddenly grown much louder than they have been in decades.

To answer your question, I can boil water in a kettle or I can put it in a cup and heat it in a microwave. Is one of those methods true and the other false?

I'm not sure what this example is supposed to demonstrate. Surely one can explain how both heat water. Is the idea that truth is just getting the result you want?

How does this play out for the assertion of a distinct "Aryan physics" as set against a degenerate "Jewish physics?" Or a "socialist genetics" as set against "capitalist genetics?"

That sounds like one reality.

Right, if all realities (plural) intersect and are accessible to us, then they are, in some way, one reality. Whereas, if we are each locked in our own reality, the result is solipsism.

Now, for a reality versus appearance distinction to make sense, to have any real content, there has to be something other than appearance. If we face nothing other than a pleroma of appearances, then it would seem that appearance must simply be reality. But if multiform appearances are reality, then I don't see how this doesn't lead to the Protagorean conclusion that whatever we think is true, is.

There are many problems here, not least that, as Plato has Socrates point out in the Theatetus, this makes it impossible to be wrong, which makes philosophy worthless.

If change is all there is and is absolute, whatever we say about the many things changing before our many eyes will be burned up and lost to the change. So if “reality” is whatever we say about changing things, there are so many realities there may as well be none (and you may as well hold that “what we encounter instead are multiple realities.”) But if that really is the case, if as Heraclitus says, “all is change”, I find the concept “multiple realities” to be an equivocation on the word “reality” and that what is really meant and distinguished here is that “the one reality is change, always changing.”

If all things are mutable and subject to change then the proposition: "all things are mutable' is itself subject to
becoming false.

Note that Heraclitus himself avoids this with an appeal to the Logos.

I would make the claim that philosophy is concerned with the nature of being, rather than reality

Yes, good point.

Thanks everyone for the kind words. I will try to respond in more detail later.



Well, the bridge between the two is that our understanding of mathematics, at least initially, comes from our sense experiences of the common sensibles. This is true developmentally (we teach kids to count with beans, we teach them geometry with wooden triangles, etc.), but it is also true historically that this is how mathematics was conceived (as magnitude and multitude). Shifts, like the redefinition of mathematics in terms of "games" is a relatively recent development.

Essence versus existence seems like another reason. The ontic structural realist still needs to give some account of why some math 'exists' and some doesn't, or else seemingly be committed to an incredibly bloated ontology where Boltzmann Brains (or some variant) and "random universes" would vastly outnumber people with coherent lives (as opposed to randomly generated memories).

...or not. "Every Thing Must Go" seemed comfortable with just leaving this unexplained:

What makes the structure physical and not mathematical? That is a question that we refuse to answer. In our view, there is nothing more to be said about this that doesn’t amount to empty words and venture beyond what the PNC allows. The ‘world-structure’ just is and exists independently of us and we represent it mathematico-physically via our theories.

This makes sense to me. It set me thinking... Don't tell anyone else I said this, but I wonder if there are really no true ontological positions, only methodological ones. It's not what is real, it's where and how do we look.

If there are no true ontological positions, in virtue of what are some methodological positions true (or false)?

Goodman argues that "reduction" is basically a myth, with no known exemplars

There is thermodynamics → statistical mechanics, often offered up as the paradigmatic example, but there are very few examples that even fit that standard. Reductionism does not have a sterling track record, that's for sure, but it's also unfalsifiable, so it hasn't been "ruled out" either.

The alternative is to believe that there is only ever one thing to say, and anyone not saying that is wrong. But rather than see divergence as disagreement, it's possible in many cases to realize that it's only another perspective being offered. "But look at it this way ..." doesn't have to imply disagreement. Knowledge production is a communal enterprise.

I don't think this is true. Actually, I think bolded is generally a strawman of objections to pluralism (and it is one that gets hauled out on this site with extreme regularity). A rejection of pluralism re metaphysical foundations and ontological truth (we could say, a refusal to jettison to principle of non-contradiction), is not a blanket refusal to countenance some degree of relativism, contextualism, perspectivism, pluralism in descriptions, etc. Indeed, I think virtually every philosopher allows for some degree of cultural/historical relativism, some degree of contextualism (e.g. the truth value of "it is raining right now") etc.

Varieties of "aletheiatic monism" need not (and normally do not) need to claim that there "is only ever one thing to say," or appeal to the "One True..." (always in caps!). There can be many ways to express truth from many disparate angles. Different true descriptions might be more or less useful in different contexts.

Rather, what the monist says is that not every description is correct, that not all "things to say" are true, and that truth does not contradict truth (barring unclear terms, equivocation, or a lack of proper distinctions). That is, something cannot be both true and not-true, correct and not-correct, without qualification. All truthful descriptions then, will share some sort of morphism.

The monist can agree that "but look at it this way..." need not imply disagreement. However, they can also recognize substantial disagreement. Such disagreements might deal in matters of fact, and thus have reason as their arbiter (as opposed to power relations).



Right, given "we encounter... multiple realities," as a starting premises, "the pursuit of a single, foundational, unifying reality" would be superfluous. Perhaps? Do the different realities share anything in common? Or are there as many realities as possible assertions?

I want to say, because people don’t appreciate Aristotle.

The reason for so very, very many problems in modern philosophy... :rofl:

It's not that hard to give a definition. Truth is the adequacy of thought to being. Being a transcendental, "true" is "said many ways," as it is predicated analogously. For instance, we can think of an utterance in terms of it being a sign of truth in the intellect of the speaker (true versus false knowledge claims) or in terms of the utterance accurately reflecting the beliefs of a speaker ("telling the truth" versus lying).

In terms of logical truth:

To judge that things are what they are is to judge truly. Every judgment comprises certain ideas which are referred to, or denied of, reality. But it is not these ideas that are the objects of our judgment. They are merely the instruments by means of which we judge. The object about which we judge is reality itself — either concrete existing things, their attributes, and their relations, or else entities the existence of which is merely conceptual or imaginary, as in drama, poetry, or fiction, but in any case entities which are real in the sense that their being is other than our present thought about them. Reality, therefore, is one thing, and the ideas and judgments by means of which we think about reality, another; the one objective, and the other subjective. Yet, diverse as they are, reality is somehow present to, if not present in consciousness when we think, and somehow by means of thought the nature of reality is revealed. This being the case, the only term adequate to describe the relation that exists between thought and reality, when our judgments about the latter are true judgments, would seem to be conformity or correspondence. "Veritas logica est adaequatio intellectus et rei" (Summa, I:21:2). Whenever truth is predicable of a judgment, that judgment corresponds to, or resembles, the reality, the nature or attributes of which it reveals. Every judgment is, however, as we have said, made up of ideas, and may be logically analyzed into a subject and a predicate, which are either united by the copula is, or disjoined by the expression is not. If the judgment be true, therefore, these ideas must also be true, i.e. must correspond with the realities which they signify. As, however, this objective reference or significance of ideas is not recognized or asserted except in the judgment, ideas as such are said to be only "materially" true. It is the judgment alone that is formally true, since in the judgment alone is a reference to reality formally made, and truth as such recognized or claimed.

https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/15073a.htm

See also: https://www.newadvent.org/summa/1016.htm
https://isidore.co/aquinas/QDdeVer1.htm

My thoughts were that they are ultimately connected. Mathematics is, at least initially, based on abstracting the common sensibles from any underlying matter and other qualities, including from time. So you get a timeless, changeless "platonic," intelligible subject that is nonetheless based on what is common to the senses (i.e. the experience of magnitude and multitude through shape, number, extension, etc.).

So, I'd argue that mathematization is sort of a blending of the two. It is materialism pulled back up into the intelligible realm, or the intelligible truncated down to just what is abstracted from the common sensibles.

It's obviously also intuitive in much the same way, which is why it is almost as old (e.g., Pythaogreanism).

But, aside from the objection that this cuts out far too much, I think there is also a good argument to be made that a recognition of both magnitude and multitude is reliant on a measure (e.g. "one duck" must be known as such to know three ducks, or half a duck, etc.) and measure itself requires going beyond mathematics, to a recognition of unity and wholes (virtual, as opposed to dimension/bulk quantity, i.e. intensity of participation in form). That puts some recognition of whole, and so intelligible form, prior to dimensive quantity.

Second , mathematization struggles with existence. Even if one accepts that "what everything is" can be described by mathematics, this does not seem to explain "that it is." Hence, mathematization still tends to either tend back towards materialism (e.g. "these particular mathematical objects really exist just because, for no reason—which essentially puts potency before act or potency as actualizing itself) or towards extremely crowded and inflated multiverse ontologies. For instance, Tegmark cannot fathom how mathematics can explain existence (fair enough) so he had to suppose that every mathematical object exists (and that some just happen to have experiences).

I suppose empiricism leans towards the materialist side, rationalism towards the platonist side. Either way though, they have to somehow reduce the fullness of experience to a part of experience (quantity).

This paper argues that ungrounded certainties enable knowledge, rather than undermining it, and that hinges and Gödel's unprovable statements serve a similar purpose."

If only all philosophy writing was as clearly written as this essay

I did very much like the paper, but this statement of the thesis (which occurs a few times) actually strikes me as somewhat ambiguous.

The point could be either:

A. That actually, fully self-justifying, air tight foundational systems would be somehow deficient (e.g. if logicism re mathematics could be decisively demonstrated it would somehow actually undermine knowledge); or

B. Because a fully self-justifying system is impossible, ungrounded certainties are essential for knowledge.

I assume from the paper that B is meant though, since it does not give any indication of why A should be the case.

The problem I see, which @Joshs gets at, is that B seems to risk equivocating re many common and classical definitions of "knowledge." A critic could say that knowledge is about the possession of truth simpliciter. It is not about possession or assent to "what is true given some foundational/hinge belief" (which itself may be true or untrue). This redefinition seems to open the door on "knowing" things that are false.

Hence, I think someone holding to a classical notion of knowledge as the possession of truth, and truth as "the adequacy of the intellect to being," might be inclined to say that the solution here is actually radically skeptical. All that is "known" is based on that which is not known. "Knowledge" ceases to be knowledge. Further, all demonstration from first principles would flow, ultimately, from premises that could be said to be less well known than their conclusions (making them bunk demonstrations from the Aristotleian point of view).

This would arguably be one of Kripke's "skeptical solutions" (as opposed to a straight solution), redefining "knowledge" in a fairly radical way (although perhaps not as radical as some moves, e.g. Quine).


An unrelated comment on that thesis statement: might the axiom not be more analogous to the hinge propositions than the unprovable statement? No doubt, the unprovable statement (as the existence of uncomputable or inexpressible statements) seems relevant, but I'm not sure if it fills the same role.

But this shifts focus on to why axioms are chosen. Certainly, it is sometimes "because they produce interesting results," particularly as mathematicians tinker with existing, established systems. Yet in general, they are selected because they are considered true, and indeed they are ideally indubitable. However, this is not "true given some prior axioms," but, hopefully, "true absolutely." For instance, Euclid's postulates held up so well because it seemed fair to dismiss someone who denied them as insane or acting in bad faith. "Take out paper, a pencil, ruler, and protractor and see for yourself." An ideal axiom hits that level, although obviously they do not always.

Great post. I have brought up this issue many times. One neat historical point here is that Plato's last (and best) argument in the Phaedo against the Pythagorean view of soul as simply being akin to a tuning on a lyre (i.e. an emergent epiphenomena) closely mirrors a lot of modern discussions here. This isn't totally surprising since the Pythaogrean view that being somehow is mathematics is quite popular today (e.g. ontic structural realism, Max Tegmark's "Mathematical Universe Hypothesis, etc.).

Let's take the first option. I, like many other materialists, believe consciousness to be a higher-order, emergent informational property of some kind. There is nothing particularly special about the matter that composes the brain; instead, what is special about it is how one part interacts and relates to another. It suggests that consciousness is not related to the actual substance in and of itself, but is instead an interactional/relational/informational property that is neutral to whatever substrate it happens to occupy. The only way I can see mental causation, in this case, happening without violating or massively changing our understanding of physics is via some sort of top-down, constraint-based causation.

So would a carefully constructed neural network made from pipes and water wheels that is set up to process inputs and outputs like a human brain be conscious? Could we carefully set up toilet paper rolls to be conscious?

My take is that, while I think the computational theory of mind view gets something right, I am not sure it gets everything right. For one thing, the reduction of thought to computation (essentially discursive ratio without intellectus/noesis in medieval thought) seems to open up a host of epistemic challenges that undermine our very faith in reason or science itself.

Also, if one adopts the popular view in physics that the universe itself is essentially a computer (endorsed to varying degrees by a veritable whose who of physicists: Tegmark, Lloyd, Davies, Landauer, Vedral, etc.) then the brain's "being a computer" is nothing special and cannot explain its uniqueness: But it actually turns out to be very hard to define computation in physical systems. Tight definitions are hard to justify and loose ones make it so that anything with enough informational complexity can be said to be computing anything else.

Perhaps one easy way out here is to say that contemporary neuroscience simply makes too many simplifying assumptions. Steam pipes cannot become conscious by being set up as neural networks because human bodies do way more than our neural networks. Perhaps all the very small actions of cellular metabolism, glial cells, quantum scale behaviors, etc. all play a role such that substrate is important because pipes and toilet paper rolls cannot actually do what the human body does. That quantum behavior has been found in phenomena like photosynthesis seems to me to indicate that it would be more surprising than not if life didn't take advantage of it in some ways in the nervous system.

In this view, mental states are not pushing particles around like little ghostly levers, but rather they emerge from and constrain the lower-level dynamics. Just as the macroscopic structure of a dam constrains the flow of water without being “extra” to the laws of hydrodynamics, so too might conscious informational states constrain the behavior of underlying physical systems without overriding physical laws. This allows for a kind of causal relevance without direct physical intervention—more like shaping and filtering what’s already happening. Consciousness, then, would be a structural property with real organizational consequences, operating within physical law but not reducible to any single local interaction.

Are you familiar with Terrance Deacon's "Incomplete Nature" or his other work?

You might be interested in this introduction . His theory works similar to this but brings in semiotics to help, although I recall that it didn't seem to totally lean into the triadic semiotic view (as opposed to dyadic mechanism, which is so dominant). John Deely is another interesting guy here. Deacon also ties his constraint-based absential influence back to Aristotle's notion of formal causality.

As Deacon notes, Jaegwon Kim has some very strong arguments against any sort of emergence from the perspective of a substance metaphysics of supervenience (i.e. one where "things are what they are made of," a building block/bundle ontology). However, process metaphysics avoids this issue (Mark Bickhard has a good article on this, although it simplifies a bit too much). So, again, Aristotle is a nice example of a process metaphysics that doesn't run into the problem of collapsing all being into a single monoprocess and making all predication accidental (a particular vice of process metaphysics that is sort of the mirror image of the excesses of reductionism, a sort of "bigism," e.g. "only quantum fields exist, and they are unified, so only the field of fields—just one thing—exists"). One nice thing about process metaphysics is that it also seemingly incorporates information theory better in some ways (instead of having it reduced to mechanism).

Actually, I think Aristotle can be more useful here through the later development of his thought in Neoplatonism, Islamic thought, and Scholasticism, but those are sort of a dark zone in contemporary thought.

Although, I'm also partial to the idea, advanced by David Bentley Hart in "All Things are Full of Gods," D.C. Schindler, and others, that the problem also one of framing. Mechanistic philosophy is essentially a giant inversion, orienting higher levels towards the lower, act to potency, form to matter, etc. Historically, one can see how this shift was motivated by a number of theological and political concerns, as a sort of reaction against the existing model (e.g. describing nature in terms of "laws and obedience" isn't any less anthropomorphic than speaking of "desires and inclinations," it's just motivated by a particular sort of theology). Smallism and reductionism grow out of this moment and they seem to make a number of phenomena impossible to explain.

Alternatively, we could consider anthropic selection. Perhaps there are many possible physical-informational configurations in the universe, and only some give rise to conscious experiences. Of those, only a tiny subset might produce systems where consciousness is psychophysically harmonious—where experiences like pain and pleasure are meaningfully aligned with behavior. From this perspective, we happen to find ourselves in such a system precisely because only those systems would contain observers capable of reflecting on this harmony. But while this may explain *why* we observe harmony, it doesn’t explain *how* such a configuration comes to be. It risks treating consciousness as an unexplained brute feature of certain arrangements rather than something that follows naturally from the structure of the system.

Right, this seems very unpalatable. It's almost a non-answer. It seems similar to some responses to the Fine Tuning Problem. These sorts of answers are only accepted so long as better answers don't exist.

I think the preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit is probably the most famous part of the book. Also the least accessible, which is really saying something. Apparently it was written in a hurried draft as Napoleon was bearing down on the city.

I wonder how many it has scared away (of course, it's not like the introduction is that much easier). I think a lot of lecturers actually have classes read it last though.

Delightful. I really like the pictures too.

Everything makes itself known by something it is not.

Indeed, just as old Denys said. The ranks of angels are ever joyously active, their gazes eternally fixed upwards by eros, as each communicates what they see downwards to the rank below them—agape cascading down. The world is theurgy, the descent of illumination and the ascent of theosis—exitus et reditus. Each being gives being, a gift, the present of the present, even as it receives it. Freedom, in its fullest sense, is a sort of perfect communication. From the seraphim and cherubim to the whales and crows, there is the cascading gift of the communication of Logos.

That all said, the bird is clearly more wrong. :rofl:

Funny enough, I think presentism might actually deny the reality of becoming as much as eternalism. For there is nothing to engage in becoming in presentism. There is just the present, just being.

Agreed, excellent work.

But from a psychic and qualitative point of view, the situation is not so straightforward. While disparate cultures conflict in their values, sometimes violently so, and homogenising them might therefore seem superficially desirable, values are the subject’s fulcrum of meaning and, beyond the dictats of pure survival, meaning is ultimately what lends quality to life.

:up: I am seeing a similarity to the thread of Schiller here.

From a social constructivist perspective, subjects simultaneously imply and ground each other.

And, interestingly, its a conclusion that follows from some quite different perspectives as well (a sign of rigor/resilience, the philosophical equivalent of a robustness check?). That things aren't wholly intelligible in themselves, and that they "give being to one another," through their interactions is an insight people seem to come to from many different angles (e.g. process metaphysics, systems biology, even elements of Islamic and scholastic "Neo-Platonism").

So, to this point:

But culture does not replicate itself with full fidelity because its subjects are not entirely defined culturally. And because of this, it can mutate quickly, especially when under stress

...I wonder if there is a useful analogy to biology, with both species' populations/lineages and individual organisms' ongoing struggle to maintain/achieve their form (entelecheia, "staying-at-work-being-itself"). But then there is an obvious difference in some ways as well. Societies are not organisms. Men are more members than parts. An arm or a liver does not decide to drop off a body and the. go on to flourish more in isolation, but this may happen with a man.

That is, though social systems operate on the basis of “structural couplings” with agentic subjects, they can be considered semantically operative without minds or agency [ibid]. In this scaling up of the subject to the interoperative group, freedom, even if we grant it as implied by what we know as culture, is secondary to the functioning of communicative code and not something that society seeks to protect. It may offer adaptability advantages and that may be what has preserved it up until now, but that does not mean culture cannot theoretically leave freedom behind to a large or even total degree even if that ultimately means culture becoming so rigid it destroys itself as recognizably cultural and reverts to something more akin to insect sociality along the lines of Star Trek's “Borg”.

There are those that argue that liberalism, through spurring on increased economic and technological growth, makes itself more immune to internal revolt (through the provision of goods and services) and more resilient in the face of external threats (e.g. economic production and technology wins wars). Some consequential actions have been based on this idea. For example, some authoritarian states, e.g. the PRC, have liberalized specifically because they see it as a path to greater military and economic strength (and thus state/cultural survival).

This is a sort of "Whig history meets natural selection" (oftentimes Hegelian) narrative. I am not sure how well it will hold up in the face of history though. China only liberalized so much, but has grown plenty powerful. The liberal erosion of culture seems to offer some serious challenges for its own survival. So, it's an open question if the needs of survival push societies towards freedom.

But for Hegel at least, the mature state is different from what you've described. While the promotion of freedom and happiness are merely implicit in other institutions — an emergent phenomenon — Hegel’s state is a rational, self-conscious, entity — one which “acts in accordance with known ends,” and which, “knows what it wills.” Perhaps, even on some readings, a "group mind."

Arguably for Hegel, and for Solovyov later, or Dante as a precursor to Hegel, a key element of freedom is the freedom of societies, as a whole, to become the sort of societies they want to be (fullfilling their own idealization/form). This would, I would assume, mean not falling into dystopian "high level equilibrium traps" à la A Brave New World, the Borg, etc., but instead would feature a sort of moral and aesthetic freedom at the corporate level (which for Hegel, individuals positively identify with qua individuals). Basically, the social welfare function is shaped by the state and culture (which are shaped by history and reason at work in history) such that people prefer social states where each other's individual and corporate freedom is maximized. But how exactly this works is another question. The "natural selection + Whig history" narrative," to my mind, seems fully capable of producing dystopia instead (which, for a Hegelian, might just mean it is incomplete!).

Other theorists (e.g. Seth Lloyd [5]) have extended this “code primacy” further down through biology into physics to position communication as fundamental to reality. They posit a code-based metaphysics whereby the transfer, overlap, reconfiguring and layering of code is at the root of what manifests as physical, mental and social reality. Everything becomes reducible, in theory, to code-based systems which, while they ultimately manifest a form of human agency, again can’t be said to “need” it.

In this pan-semiotic ontology whereby matter in its observable form emerges from code and reality consists of layers of autopoietic coding systems, free subjectivity is just another layer that emerges when technics (in Simondon and Stiegler’s sense of symbolic affordances, especially language) appears in humans. But whether or not code goes “all the way down”, if human subjectivity is nested between code-based biological and social systems, which potentialize meaning without freedom, then agency is always contingent and precarious and should be recognized as such rather than accepted as humanity's biological and social given.

I used to be very taken with this sort of view, but it seems to me that it can be taken in two very different directions depending on whether or not we are talking about a "reduction" to information or not. "Code all the way down," can come to mean something based in a sort of computational mechanism, or it can mean something like "intelligibility from to top all the way down." There is a reducibility to information (the bit or qbit), but then also a context-dependence that always points outside itself. These point in different directions. The picture can be turned either way I guess (that's David Bentley Hart's point in All Things Are Made of Gods, although he things the picture only actually makes sense when the "lower/smaller/material" is ordered to the "higher/greater/intelligible.")

But whether or not code goes “all the way down”, if human subjectivity is nested between code-based biological and social systems, which potentialize meaning without freedom, then agency is always contingent and precarious and should be recognized as such rather than accepted as humanity's biological and social given.

:up: Although if freedom is at least partially defined in terms of a relative capacity for self-organization, self-determination, and self-governance, it would seem that the human individual is always a locus of these to some degree (as even the ant or fern is). But another level to self-determination would be the capacity of the individual to transcend the relative constraints of both the higher cultural level and the lower biological level, and to shape both. This seems to vary dramatically in different lives.

This goes back to the prior point about the reductive versus the global, bigism versus smallism, the world as a colocation of bits (symbols), versus as a single, universal code. There are a lot of interesting dialectical oppositions here, this being just one. It might be that a via media is needed to explain human freedom, and freedom for the whole might require the freedom of the member (as opposed to part) to mature first (as attainment to true personhood, hypostasis), as in Solovyov.

I suppose the exact nature and ontological foundation of personhood is important here.

They are, in Stieglers sense, “pharmacological” in nature; both a curative and a toxin [9]. As a curative, they offer us knowledge and contexts in which to creatively utilize them, marking us as unique individuals in so doing. This is what Stiegler, following Simondon, refers to as “individuation” [8][9]. But as a toxin, they “consume” subjectivity as a substrate and dissolve it, making us passive, conforming, and reliant (“disindividuation”) [ibid].

Very interesting.

, a society of individuals who cannot see themselves beyond how society sees them and define themselves limitedly as such

An apt description of the research I've seen on the mental illness/social media nexus.

This creative activity, or ethic, amounts to subjectivity taking a stand as a system in the hierarchy of systems by consciously situating itself as a locus around which other systems ought revolve rather than submitting fully to their pull.

Also interesting. "The Sabbath was created for man, not man for the Sabbath" (Mark 2:27). Although here, there is perhaps a tension, in that higher systems often fulfill the role of trying to reduce friction between individuals (including frictions over which individuals higher systems should revolve around). One of the defining features of late capitalism is that the state and technology must constantly expand into every corner of human life to fulfill this role because other institutions, norms, practices, etc. have atrophied away.

This underlines again the point that freedom has never been at the core of social organization, but has only ever been epiphenomenal. There has been freedom through organization but not freedom-based organization. Only an exceptional minority of individuals have ever acted as perturbations in systems and helped to reconfigure them through thinking against their sociocultural milieux. The norm has always been conformity whether or not socially recognized as such. That is, there has yet to be a society that directly arranges itself around the development of free subjectivity, its spectrum of affordances and capacities, and, above all, its essential creativity.

I wonder about this. Is the bolded, even if it is true, evidence of the preceding sentences? What is the relationship between freedom in society and the rejection of a society by its members? If conformity is a sign of unfreedom, would freedom necessarily be exemplified in the anarchic?

Not only are we as far as ever from a society where subjectivity comes first, where economic growth is the incidental outcome of the fostering of free and healthy subjectivities rather than vice versa, we seem to be intent on destroying the social and environmental grounds of subjectivity’s ongoing development in a blind effort at eternal expansion. In this respect, society itself seems to be suffering from the same irrational self-defeating compulsivity it inflicts on its members.

:up:

"My particular end should become identified with the universal end… otherwise the state is left in the air. The state is actual only when its members have a feeling of their own self-hood and it is stable only when public and private ends are identical. It has often been said that the end of the state is the happiness of the citizens. That is perfectly true. If all is not well with them, if their subjective aims are not satisfied, if they do not find that the state as such is the means to their satisfaction, then the footing of the state itself is insecure.” (G.W.F. Hegel - The Philosophy of Right)

This necessitates a form of ironic self-awareness whereby the theory acknowledges its transient symbolic situatedness in and dependence on the very structures it seeks to change. Theory must preach but also mock itself as an “idiot” in the church of the sacred—never a denizen but always a refugee

I do wonder if this sort of thing works against something like Schiller's notion of "play" though. There is always a sort of distancing, like the adolescent who is no longer sure they can embrace the vigorous play of their younger friend for fear of seeming foolish. Yet I also recall Pope Benedict invoking Schiller's same notion of play for the most serious of all things (from his perspective), the liturgy.

The theory of an EKM, by its nature, cannot be the theoria of the gnostikos, just as Virgil knows his Aeneas cannot be pietas itself. But Aeneas does try, even if he fails. The Dao that can be named is not the eternal Dao. The Logos that has begining and end, is not the Logos. Or something like that. :cool:

Really great. I'll have a lot to say later.

First and foremost,

In conclusion, any idealisation of liberty expressed within a state lies exposed to the slippery slope of utopian engineering. Therefore, true individual liberty, through Schiller’s aesthetic sensibility, provides a mediating association that can inculcate necessary changes to institutions and prevent them from stagnating by facilitating a means of universal discourse between a plurality of ideas expressed within the public sphere.

...I think this makes a lot of sense given your sources. I do wonder if we might not now be facing the opposite risk though (although one Schiller might still help with), a sort of "fear of the utopian and principled," a "lack of faith in logos (the life of reason)" paired with an outright fear of thymos (the life of spirit/honor/excellence). It seems that everywhere these days one can hear the call to "pragmatism" and suspicion about "narratives" and "values." Here, I think the aesthetic also can help to carry us out of a sort of politicized form of what Hegel called "the fear of error become fear of truth." Indeed, maybe precisely by mediating the allure of the totalizing and utopian, we can recover what late-modernity has tended to cast off.

The aesthetic also helps sharpen to tools of "universal discourse," such that they do not decay into irrelevant abstraction.

---

More broadly, this is actually on a topic similar to the one I meant to write about, primarily using Virgil's Aeneid, but didn't have time to finish. The initial idea I had there is that the "meaning of life" (and thus society) laid out in the vision of the thymotic "honor/virtue (arete, or "excellence") societies" in the Iliad (and Beowulf) already display a sort of hollowness in these texts themselves. Thymos degenerates into cannibalistic appetite at the limit and everyone loses in the long run. For example, in Book XI of the Odyssey, the now dead Achilles tells Odysseus: "“Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand for some poor country man, on iron rations, than to lord it over all the exhausted dead." All glory dies out in death.

Virgil has a much more political view he wants to put forth. Aeneas represents thymos (spirtedness and honor) in service to logos (to principles, e.g. mercy, justice, in a word, pietas). But on this point:

Many utopian ideals are presented and all of them are left wanting either in the justification of their aims, the responsibility given or taken, or in viewing some form of enforced equality. As Popper remarks, this predicament has been with us since the birth of civilization in our move away from the state of nature—closed society—toward the state of reason—open society (Popper, 1962).

...Virgil agrees in some ways. The utopian view is dangerous because it is never fully realized. Notably, after Aeneas gets his commission to found a civilization of virtue from his father in the land of dead, he ascends back to the land of the living through the Ivory Gate (as opposed to the Horn Gate), the gate through which lying, deceptive dreams go out into the world. And of course, the story ends not with "mercy and justice for the vanquished," but with Aeneas committing the vengeful murder of a surrendered foe. An epic about perpetual unity (in Book I: the "Gates of War" are locked and Frenzy bound in "a hundred brazen shackles") ends instead with:

His limbs went limp in the chill of death.
His life breath fled with a groan of outrage
down to the shades below

But I don't think Virgil's point is about a hollowness in logos, but rather the fact that it is never fully realized. That is precisely why we need pietas. We do not reach some abstract end, some political equilibrium point, at which point thymos and pietas become irrelevant. All beings struggle to fulfill their form. Natural, changing beings (man and his civilizations) only are what they are in virtue of this struggle of matter to fulfill form. Spenser realizes this in the Mutabilitie cantos of his epic, the Faerie Queene. Nature (change) is not an imperfection. On the Christian view embodied in Dante's own epic, it is only this mutability and open-endedness that allows man to transcend his own finitude and become more than what he is (a view of the relation of nature to logos embedded deep in the Patristic tradition).

Epic poetry, of course, targets the aesthetic. Given its enduring appeal and salience, we might suppose it does this better than any other art form. They have an element of Schiller's play, and they inspire the heart, not just the head. As Plato says, the head must rule through its natural ally in the chest (a fact as true for society as for individual men).

Today, we don't have epics. But we do have the fantasy genre. I think it's telling that modern epics must first bracket away the modern world before telling their story. The modern world, perhaps because of its fetishization of the mathematical and abstract, or perhaps because of its skepticism (enshrined in liberalism), seems to be hostile to epic, or, more importantly, to having anything properly aesthetic have the same sort of impact that epic once had on society and politics (Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen might be the closest thing we've seen in recent centuries).

What Schiller lends to Habermas’s idea here is a means to loosen up rational discourse and prevent ossification within the abstracted realm of the public sphere through the introduction of the playful impulse.

One risk counteracted here is the tendency to conflate the intelligible principles by which man lives and rules with the material institutions themselves. The latter only imperfectly represents the former. Commitment to ideals, logos, is not commitment to specific historical institutions or "systems." Systems and traditions are particular instantiations of logos, not logos itself (which is why the obsession with systems and the "one true system" is unhelpful). The late 19th and early 20th century saw a fanatical commitment to systems and parties as if they were the very principles themselves (Hegel's state as God walking through history). Our own era seems to have the opposite problem. Having become properly skeptical of systems, parties, etc., it has also become skeptical or principles and logos itself, as well as thymos and the aesthetic. The latter, it tries to make safely "matters of taste," keeping it quarantined from the abstract and mathematical realm of politics as technocratic science.

Yet man is both body and spirit, and the "End of History" cannot be one in which man is happy if it is bereft of play and aesthetic virtue. The End of History cannot be some abstract end of equilibrium and satisfaction (logos in service of epithumia, sensible pleasure and safety), but rather must be the fullness of history, including the aesthetic and thymotic. If it isn't, men will be dissatisfied with it, and thus they will rebel. Such a rebellion will bring an end to the "End of History," revealing it to be a false end.

Beauty has naught to say about morality nor rationality. What is beautiful is beautiful. All the moralising and reasoning in the world cannot change the impression of beauty on the individual taste. We cannot fool ourselves about beauty. Where beauty appears in our lives, we acknowledge it without the necessity of moral or rational judgment.

I find myself completely disagreeing with this though. This places aesthetic reason forever at odds with practical and theoretical reason, whereas I would tend to say they are three facets of the same Logos. The problem here is that beauty becomes mere sentiment, which risks completely internalizing it, making it a matter of mere individual inclination. Yet if it is so, it cannot fulfill its role in leading and unifying men.

If the bolded were true, education would be a dreary business indeed. This is the contemporary liberal view of education as largely serving the function of empowering the individual to be able to fulfill whatever inborn, unchangable (and so immune to cultivation) irrational sentiments they just so happen to have, so that they can best pursue their satisfaction (avoiding friction with others perhaps, but only if this is in line with satisfaction).

Certainty, there is particularity in tastes. But tastes are also taught. A view that internalizes the aesthetic doesn't thereby stop "teaching taste," it just tends to educate tastes poorly.

My pitch would be: Beauty relates to the whole. Intelligible beauty is higher than sensible beauty. Beauty is that which "pleases when known." No doubt, completely clear ponds high up in the Adirondacks are quite beautiful. Who could deny it? But when one comes to know their role in the whole, and one comes to know that these are, in fact, sick ponds, ulcers on the eco-system, only "crystal clear" because acid rain has denuded them of life, they become less beautiful. That is the nature of beauty.

Or as Plato says:

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

But I still think Schiller gets something very right about the unity of the aesthetic and moral. Aeneas embodies pietas not because he is conditioned to like a machine, but because it wells up from the fullness of his being. This is what makes him heroic. All the great heros has an element of play in their heroism, even if it sometimes is what makes them tragic (e.g. Beowulf taking on the dragon at age seventy).

Actually, I think the play drive as mediator of the sense and form shares a lot in common with earlier investigations of Beauty as a transcendental, which tended to see it as the going out in appearance of Goodness and Truth.

Very nicely done. It's an interesting topic!

While our relationship to hinges involves unquestioning acceptance,

This would make hinges quite a bit different from many axioms. But must hinges involve unquestioning acceptance? Isn't that the whole history of skepticism, questioning such foundations? And for most of the ancient skeptics at least, this questioning wasn't an epistemic exercise, so much as a practical one. One questioned one's bedrock beliefs so as to attain equipollence, a sort of detached equilibrium between beliefs such that one was not concerned about anything and could attain apatheia.

Anyhow, I figured this might have relevance for reason as such (as opposed to any one system), since, as Hegel says, to have ever recognized a limit is to have already stepped over it. The fish doesn't know where the water ends; it's only the frog, who has actually broken the surface, who sees it as a limit. The sorts of hinges we accept unquestioningly would seem to have to be ones we could never even be aware of. It would have to be something more akin to the blindspot in the visual field (although even that example fails, since one can become aware of that with careful experiment).

Why is it we presume that foundational ('hinge') propositions can be or need to be justified by further analysis, and what are the implications of their not being so justified?

Indeed. And it's perhaps somewhat of a historical question because plenty of thinkers prior to the heyday of foundationalist aspirations take it as somewhat obvious (to them) that some truths (and really the more important, "foundational" ones) cannot even be expressed in human language, let alone subjected to something like a mathematical proof. For example, Saint John of Damascus says this in matter of fact terms at the outset of the Exact Exposition, Plato inveighs against the inadequacy of words and justificatory dissertations in his seventh letter, and then there is Saint Paul's famous mention of being "caught up to the third heaven" and hearing "inexpressible words, which a human being is not allowed to speak."

I would guess the Cartesian dream of a world reducible to mathematics is a major impetus here. Timothy Shutt has an interesting lecture where he suggests that the decline in epics is in part due to the fact that they lost their place as authoritative sources to mathematics (and this is a problem Milton is grappling with as he tries to write a new Protestant epic in an environment where epic and scripture is losing this authority).

it's not usually enough to have the information; one also should be able to act on that information.

It is enough for "knowing that." Someone who wakes up during an operation, but finds themselves immobilized , is obviously aware of the fact that their anesthesia is not working and that they are in pain regardless of their ability to do much of anything.

At the end of Braveheart, the prince's wife tells evil old King Longshanks, who has just had a stroke and is immobilized, that she plans on deposing his weak son and that the child she is pregnant with was sired by another man and that his line ends with him. But he can't really do anything about it, because of the stroke.

It can hardly be that he has to act in order to know though. For one, this would imply that we don't know things until we act on them, and yet why would we act on things we don't yet know? This would place the uninformed will prior to the intellect. We would "know by doing."

Knowing is an act of thinking though and thought does not necessitate any particular outward action.

So what do we conclude?

That not all knowledge is of arts. Knowledge of sculpting is revealed in sculpting. Knowledge of sailing is revealed in the art of sailing. Knowledge of shipbuilding is exercised in building ships. But this is not true of all forms of knowledge.

Knowing how to use a faucet is not the same thing as knowing that any particular faucet is working. A person demonstrates that they know how to use a faucet and that they believe a given faucet is working when they try to fill a cup with it. Whether or not they know that this particular faucet is working prior to filling their cup is a different question.

For instance, wolfing down horse dewormer to prevent yourself from getting COVID-19 is not the same thing as knowing that horse dewormer is a good treatment for that disease. Knowing that something is true is not equivalent with knowing how to behave as if something were true.

A priest having a crisis of faith about the Eucharist and one who isn't might behave in identical ways during the Mass, yet they have different beliefs. Further, their beliefs are one thing and the truth of transubstantiation, the existence of God, and other related questions, are yet another thing.

Of course, with a very broad definition of "doing" or "behavior," we can accommodate all sorts of knowledge to "knowing how," since we can simply refer to "knowing" or "thinking," or even "experiencing" as "things we do" or "behaviors/acts." But praying does not demonstrate knowledge of God in the way that riding a bike demonstrates knowledge of bike riding. Not all knowledge is of an art; some is speculative.

Knowledge would be justified beliefs, and beliefs are justified by both observation AND logic. Beliefs would only be justified by one or the other, or neither. Knowledge requires confirmation from both.

Can you explain in virtue of what a belief would be "justified" without any reference to truth? How does logic "justify" a belief without reference to logic's relationship to truth in particular?

It seems to me that this will be difficult.



Can you define "information" here? It seems to me that you are presenting something like: "knowledge is truth's presence in the mind?"

Presumably information can be false, right? So in virtue of what is "true information" true?



Funny, I thought it sounded similar to classical formulations of knowledge, which imply understanding. I guess it depends on what "information" is supposed to mean.

Direct realist asserts that our perceptions give us direct access to the external world in itself and we can know how the world is independent on the mental representations.

Or, as seems to be more common in my experience, "direct realism" denies a metaphysics of "representation" as well as knowledge of things "in-themselves" as a coherent "gold standard" of knowledge. They often favor the triadic semiotic relationship over a diadic notion of representation, and to the extent they embrace some form of "mental representation," these are not, primarily, "what we know," but rather "how we know."

In high scholastic terminology for instance, the idea is more "how things exist in us in the manner of an art," (i.e., our capacity for reproduction, as the form of a statue is in a sculptor before he sculpts) as opposed to being primarily objects or principles of knowledge.

Aristotle would say that sensation is "of" the interaction between the environmental medium (which interacts with the object perceived) and the sense organs, but that it carries the intelligible form of what is perceived. Sensation is always, in a sense, immediate, not in the imagination. This leads to very different conclusions.

Two scholastic adages are influential here:

A. "Everything is received in the mode of the receiver" (and this is as true for how salt interacts with water as for how we interact with an apple when seeing it)—this dictum becomes totalizing and absolutized in modern "critical philosophy" in a way that direct realists tend to find problematic and indirect realists tend to find unavoidable.

B. "Act follows on being." Only natural things' interactions with other things make them epistemically accessible (or at all interesting). Hence, the gold standard of knowledge is not knowledge of things "as they are in themselves,' (which would be sterile and useless) but rather "things as they interact with everything any anything else."

So, the Neo-Scholastic view tends to be to reject the underlying assumptions that lead to "critical philosophy," but it's worth noting that these principles have also influenced (or been rediscovered by) other camps. The semiotic camp grows out of scholasticism but is, in some outgrowths, quite estranged from its original heritage. Process philosophy tends to lean heavily on B, but this seems to me to be largely a case of convergent evolution in ideas.

The "metaphysics of appearance" are probably key here to. If act always comes before potency, i.e. if some prior actuality must always activate some power (e.g. sight), then any sensible appearance (i.e. the activation of a sense power) must correspond to some prior actuality. Hence, appearances, while they might be deceiving, are never arbitrarily related to reality. All appearances reveal something of being (they are really the way it appears).

Perhaps this is a bigger point than direct versus indirect. I am not sure if mediation really matters that much. Lots of pre-critical philosophy of perception and "metaphysics of knowledge" involves mediation. But it's a "direct" mediation in that it ties back to some determinant prior actuality (form). A thing's eidos is its form which is also its image, its interactions vis-á-vis everything else.

So how is it achieved?

A bajillion theories of reference (or supposition) have developed over the years; apparently it's a tough question.

Some of the "problems" that crop up seem to be tied to particular metaphysical assumptions though, e.g.:

Concerns of this sort are hardly new. W.V.O. Quine (1960), for instance, famously claims that reference is ‘inscrutable’, or that there is simply no matter of fact what a given referential term refers to. His arguments, however, depend on certain methodological constraints that many would now be inclined to reject. Not so with the related ‘problem of the many’, popularized at roughly the same time by Peter Unger (1980) and Geach (1980). To see the issue, consider someone using an utterance of ‘that’ to refer to a cloud in the sky. What exactly is this cloud? The obvious answer would seem to be: a set of water droplets suspended in the air in such-and-such region. But what about some droplet right on the edge of that region? Should it be counted or not? In fact, there will be innumerable such droplets, and we seem to have no systematic way of answering this question: if we say ‘yes’, we face a continuous march outwards; if we say ‘no’, we face a continuous retreat. Neither option seems even remotely satisfactory, and yet if we cannot provide an answer to the question of what exactly the cloud is then it might well seem that we have equally well failed to answer the question of what the relevant use of ‘that’ refers to.[19]

The "problem of the many" strikes me as only particularly problematic for a certain sort of supervenience metaphysics for instance.

An older question was: "what do our words signify, our own concepts, or things?" I suppose that if one goes with the first, some problems of reference (including the above) disappear, but you get new ones.

It seems obvious that people have things in mind that they intend to refer to in most cases. However, what about a stop light? It signifies "apply your breaks" to drivers, but not to pedestrians, and then reverses who it signifies "go" to with nary a thought.

Although "99.9%" probably undersells things. Do ants, or trees, or ducks, or men every give birth to tigers? Has anything but a tiger ever given birth to a tiger?

Even in hybrids, the hybrid's traits are an admixture. Horses and donkeys give birth to mules, not cats and frogs, etc.

Note that this also defines what humans find "useful." If one tries to breed one's male pigs to one's female sheep, the family will starve.

Good points there. I am not particularly sure if it makes sense to have more faith in recent scientific theories, as opposed to our bedrock understanding of the human experience, for these very reasons. Given the history of caloric, phlogiston, N rays, absolute space and time, vital substance, and the corpuscular view of the atom and molecule, it seems that more recent theories are more likely to be proven wrong.

Yet what would it take to convince us that our ancestors, in crossing streams or standing out in the rain, experienced an essentially different water from us? Or how would we be convinced that people did not *really* experience our modern tigers or trees?

I would maintain that if one had reason to doubt that the "water" and "rain" of Homer, the Aeneid, Chaucer, or Genesis is essentially what we still mean by "water," or that their "horse" is not what we mean by "horse," etc., this would be vastly more surprising then finding out that, though the periodic table was useful, it is superceded by some other formulation. Indeed, if Homer and Charles Dickens (and so Charles Darwin as well) could be speaking of essentially different forms of "water" and "horse" and "tiger," this would cast doubt on any grasp of human history, which in turn should cast doubt on any faith in scientific institutions.

As John Ioannidis points out in his paper "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False," a lot of scientific findings turn out to be the result of bias and statistical noise. We should have far less faith in recent peer reviewed papers, even those based on experiments, then on many non-experimentally verifiable claims such as "the Boston Celtics won the last NBA championship," or "the US Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776." If the former can be false, we have no reason to have faith in science. Yet our understanding of the former relies on things not essentially changing from age to age or moment to moment.

On a view where knowledge is entirely propositional (or even linguistic), "justified true belief," it makes sense to ascribe a sort of priority to the propositions of science. Personally, I find such a view problematic for a variety of reasons. Yet this cannot lead to the supposition that our ancestors "didn't know water" absolutely, without courting absurdity.

We establish "natural kinds" because we as humans can agree on definition and judgment as it is applied to our natural surroundings, not because we identified some essence that exists in all possible worlds.

And how do we do that? Why do we do that? What's the causal explanation? If natural kinds such as "ants" do not exist until man comes along and says "this counts as an ant," how does he decide on "ant" as a particular type of thing, instead of infinitely many other combinations he could have specified?

Further, why did disparate linguistic groups developing in relative isolation all come up with words to denote "ant" and other different animals? Why did all peoples develop words to denote different members of the same animal species if kinds did not exist until they were positively "established?" (Or did they already exist?)

To my mind, the most plausible explanation as to "why did disparate peoples develop names for the ant and identify different types of ants as ants," is "because ants already existed before man named them." Biology agrees on this point. But then there was something that made ants ants that existed prior to man calling them such. Organisms existed as organic wholes (the fern , the dinosaur, etc.) prior to language. Yet this is all the "essence" is originally called in to do in the first place, to explain how different sorts of things are (as opposed to merely being called) different sorts of things.



Also good points.

"Essence" and "substance" have been subject to profound mutations and many formulations, but this doesn't mean that there aren't well developed definitions for each individual different traditions. We actually have multiple well developed definitions that contradict one another.

The same applies to all sorts of important terms such as "true," "real," "physical," "matter," "virtual," "reason," "intellect," "form," "idea," etc.

So, such terms need to be understood in their context.

A key distinction was between "ens rationis" (beings of reason/mind) and "ens reale" (real being). "Ens = being" ("esse" is the verb form of "being") and reale comes from "res," which is often translated as "thing." Although "realis" can mean "true" as well (the unity of truth and being in the Doctrine of Transcendentals on display).

Funny enough, "ens" can sometimes be translated as "thing" too, so we could be distinguishing between "things of reason" and "thing things." :rofl: But "things of reason" and "true things" might be misleading, since the ens rationis are not illusions.

The best example I can think of are second intentions, which include things like genus. Animals truly exist, but one never will find just "an animal" out in the world. It is always a particular species of the genus. There is also a medieval distinction between the virtual and real. The virtual is contained in things as power (hence sharing a root with virtue/strength), but in the form of a potency that has not yet been actualized.

In "cogito ergo sum," "sum"—I am—is a form of "ens."

If philosophy becomes merely a matter of keeping our language games internally consistent, then it risks becoming a kind of syntax-policing—about saying what can or can't be said, not about what is or must be. That’s a long way from asking what is real and how it might be known.

I would have thought that the existence of necessary truth, and questions as to what that implies, or why they are necessary, are fundamental philosophical questions, about more than simply 'what we can say'.

:up:

The most direct way of responding would be that truth can be distinguished from delusion or falsehood.

Yes, and also what stays the same through mutability, since it does no good to speak only of what has since passed out of being.

Aside from Hume vs. Dante's Virgil, this is another really good example:

...What though the field be lost?
All is not lost—the unconquerable will,
And study of revenge, immortal hate,
And courage never to submit or yield:
And what is else not to be overcome?
That glory never shall his wrath or might
Extort from me. To bow and sue for grace
With suppliant knee, and deify his power...

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

Of course, many moderns have taken Milton's Satan as a sort of hero (surely, he has all the best lines), but the devout Milton is, although he wants to make Satan enticing, ascribing this sort of thinking to the Devil at the end of the day.

In Christianity Jesus talks about opening your heart to him to find God, not to "use your brain and think it through".

True, but "heart" had a much different meaning in both the Hebrew and Greek context (see below). The heart is often referred to as the "eye of the nous," the inner-most part of the mind that receives the highest forms of intelligible illumination in the Patristics (gnosis). It is not primarily a symbol for "emotion" or "sentiment," but often instead of the deepest possible sort of knowledge. Early Christianity is very much a religion of Logos in a way perhaps at odds with some contemporary sentimentalism.

I mention this not only because it's an interesting facet of changing language, but because it actually seems to have a lot to do with the rest of your post and this general topic. Knowledge used to be conceived of in very personal terms. It is also not for nothing that the path of knowledge in Plato, Saint Augustine, Boethius, etc. is called "the Erotic Ascent; Plato for his part speaks of the philosopher's desire for knowledge of the Good in terms of an ardor to "couple with the Good." The removal of these personal and erotic elements helps to explain the development of current notions of "objectivity," including the amazing shift whereby questions of goodness vanish from the "objective" frame.

The emergence of positivism is situated within a larger shift in anthropology, and particularly the anthropology of reason, so these changes all sort of tie together, there being a lot of interesting threads to explore.

I find it interesting that you mention computers' inability to motivate themselves. Reason has often been reduced to computation in modern thought (computational theories of mind might play a role here, although the shift predates them by centuries). On this view, the computer is sort of an idealization of rationality. But if it cannot act, does that mean all action comes down to a sort of non-rational sentiment? Something else?

Things are obviously quite different when "reason" or "the rational soul," has its own strong desires, which also tended to personalize knowledge.

Here is an interesting related quote:

But, having so defined [reason, as merely the power by which one goes from premises to conclusions], 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. If they had been using the strict medieval distinction, they would have made morality an affair not of ratio but of intellectus.

...The belief that to recognise a duty was to perceive a truth-not because you had a good heart but because you were an intellectual being-had roots in antiquity. Plato preserved the Socratic idea that morality was an affair of knowledge; bad men were bad because they did not know what was good. Aristotle, while attacking this view and giving an important place to upbringing and habituation, still made 'right reason' ( 6p6os Myos) essential to good conduct. The Stoics believed in a Natural Law which all rational men, in virtue of their rationality, saw to be binding on them. St Paul has a curious function in this story. His statement in Romans (ii. 14 sq.) that there is a law ' written in the hearts' even of Gentiles who do not know 'the law', is in full conformity with the Stoic conception, and would for centuries be so understood.

Nor, during those centuries, would the word hearts have had merely emotional associations. The Hebrew word which St Paul represents by Kap5ia would be more nearly translated ' Mind' ; and in Latin, one who is cordatus is not a man of feeling but a man of sense. But later, when fewer people thought in Latin, and the new ethics of feeling were corning into fashion, this Pauline use of hearts may well have seemed to support the novelty.

The Discarded Image - C.S. Lewis

Virgil's Aeneas is meant to be a man of "heart," but when he kills Turnus at the end in a fit of thymotic rage he is failing to live up to this archetype (just to include my own example :cool: ). What's interesting is that this does overlap the modern view to some degree (the exclusion of rage from reason), but not completely (i.e. doing the 'good thing' and living up to one's values being necessarily 'reasonable' is not such a strong connection today.)

This is a pretty dogmatic response, stating that the reason we can write such equations at all is that their effectiveness is dependent on or justified by the logic of identity, that accepting your argument would be tantamount to claiming that identity signs in physics are ambiguous and equivocal. Pretty harsh. My response to ↪J suffered from something like this, and perhaps Tim might say something similar. Are physical equations really that precise?

There are a lot of questions there, the relation of the equations of the current discipline of physics to physical reality, the indeterminacy of measurement, etc. Yet even on the mathematical side we might allow that:

6+7 = 13 = 13 - 3, and yet these are not the same computations, and this becomes obvious when one considers something like a large input Hamiltonian path problem where it might take until every star in the sky has burned out for the fastest super computer to finish processing the computation, and yet the input is said to "be the same thing" as its output.

Barry Mazur has an interesting paper on "When One Thing is Equal to Some Other Thing". However, one has to also consider what mathematics is and its application to the "material world" it has been abstracted from. The Scandal of Deduction, for instance, comes because no distinction is made between the virtual, potential, and actual, and the way in which physical computation always involves communications (which occurs over some interval).

:rofl:

I was going to say, "I guess my point (not poon) is that the "empirical" part of positivism has a sort of fuzzy definition that can be used, intentionally or not, to smuggle in a lot of assumptions.

John Locke, who was the emblematic British empiricist, was of the view that the mind is a blank slate, tabula rasa, on which impressions are made by objects.

Right, but it was Aristotle who first wrote in De Anima:

Haven't we already disposed of the difficulty about interaction involving a common element, when we said that mind is in a sense potentially whatever is thinkable, though actually it is nothing until it has thought? What it thinks must be in it just as characters may be said to be on a writing tablet on which as yet nothing stands written: this is exactly what happens with mind.

And the Peripatetic Axiom is "there is nothing in the intellect that was not first in the senses." Likewise, with representationalism, there is first the adage that "whatever is received is received in the mode of the receiver."

I don't mean to complicate things, just to point out that the very broad definition of "empiricism" (often employed by empiricists themselves in arguments meant to justify empiricism) lets in a great deal of non-empiricist philosophy. Locke is a fine example. He actually has a quite particular anthropology and view of how perception and reason must work that is essential to why he is considered properly an "empiricist." He ends up with problems (if you consider them such) like the circularity between real and nominal essences because of these assumptions.

I bring it up because I used to think: "who possibly couldn't be an empiricist?" But as your quote describes quite well, there is more to it than simply a philosophy that involves the senses, experience, and experimentation. What will constitute valid "experience" is itself defined by a prior anthropology and metaphysics.

With positivism, I find a similar problem. It's often framed that rejecting positivism is rejecting observation-based modeling, etc. But really, what tends to differentiate positivism is not accepting such things, but rather refusing to accept anything else.

I guess my poon

That’s precisely what Adorno will not accept. For him, the actual is the site of reason's failure, not its fulfillment.

Indeed, and I think this makes sense given his starting point in Kant, Hegel, and the broader framework of Enlightenment philosophy, which tends towards "philosophy as a system," and a distinct totalizing tendency within these "systems." This tendency is particularly acute in Hegel's philosophy of history.

Maritain is similarly motivated in his claim that philosophy can never be a system, and can never be closed, but is rather man's openess to being. It's a problem a lot of people seemed to be grappling with during this time period.

The common appeals to the Holocaust in these discussions, now the better part of a century later, start to strike one as properly historical in particular. If reason must lose its luster, or even its authority after the Holocaust, then it should have already shed these in the wake of the Thirty Years War, the conquistador conquests, the Mongol sweep across Asia, the aftermath of the sack that gave us the Book of Lamentations, etc. Wiesel, for his part, picks the 17th century's pogroms, as opposed to the 20th's, as the setting for his Trial of God," and while Enlightenment, "rational," Dr. Pangloss style metaphysical optimism ends up being the tool of Satan, neither does the play end up seeming to exclude the Logos of the generation of Jews who saw Masada fall. In this aspect, these debates sometimes remind me of Dostoevsky's Pro and Contra section of the Brothers Karamazov, that is, there is a "I humbly return my ticket," element.

My thoughts have tended more towards rejecting the particular Enlightenment notion of reason and systematicity tout court, but I can see why, within that tradition, Adorno's proposals make sense. There has to be an irrationality in consciousness because "rationality" has become so bound up in rules and systematicity (ratio) that it seems incapable of providing its own content and impetus. It is far from the old "infinite fecundity" and the erotic. Indeed, it's downright sterile. Other thinkers of this period also had to look for "new sources" in consciousness, Jung being a good example.