:clap:

Enjoy.

Quite hard but beautiful language.

It's part of the same old playbook, if you agree with out economic policies, you're in the club, if you don't, we don't care.

Some European countries can ignore this on some occasions. As can China and Russia, but not others. Obviously this isn't liked by the powers at be.

Maybe.

Then again Greece doesn't have much of a military itself, so a war in that situation would be rather quick and favor Turkey. Of course, if you have alliances then it can become a big problem.



I think they need to save face on both sides and Ukraine should stay out of NATO, maybe get some "concessions" from Russia. If that's appeasement then, I rather that than war.

NATO's not going anywhere regardless of what should happen. What I fear is that the hawks inside this situation think that using diplomacy to settle this is the equivalent of appeasement.



It would be beyond crazy if Western Europe got itself in another war with itself. I don't think this would happen anymore. Germany is now extremely reluctant to use military force, and would likely be somewhat of a restraint to others.

But again, NATO is not going anywhere.



Ok.



The "West" merely want a president who is favorable to them economically as you say, and which doesn't protest with actions, against powerful actors. I think saying that they want to destroy Russia is a bit much, they want a client state. One may argue that this destroys a countries autonomy, and sure, this makes sense.

While I understand the troop deployment, it's a tense situation. One mistake by a soldier or general and this would get very ugly. I wouldn't want to be Ukrainian right now.

And yes, I agree. I'd only add that it not only applies to NATO, EU and the US, ANY major power wouldn't admit to making mistakes or admitting faults in international affairs. It's almost never done. Exceptions being WWII, to some extent.

It's mind boggling that after Iraq and Afghanistan and the rise of ISIS, people who normally lambast the media for being BS artists, now rely on these same sources as being a good source of info for yet another potential war. Craziness.

I can only speak of the larger significance of Chomsky's linguistic theory as it pertains to philosophy. I know a little about the linguistics aspects, though nowhere near enough to speak about the specific details with the authority I would like.

His program tends to be a minority one in linguistics, though obviously this doesn't speak to the truth or falsity of his theory. A glance at some of the literature reveals that a good deal of the criticism is based on empirical assumptions that are just wrong, as a matter of fact. This is shown most strongly in the dogma of externalism in relation to language use.

Connected to this is a view which seems to me to restrict what "empirical" evidence means, to that which is publicly observable. This happens to leave out that which allows us to observe and make theories in the first place: experience. That's not publicly observable, but it is empirical. You can deny it if you wish, just as one can deny how old the Earth is, but it doesn't touch the fact.

Since we can see that people use words to refer to things, and the things referred to are observable, it's assumed this is what language does, refer to external things.

What's also left out, is this extremely rich, sophisticated and extremely sublime aspect of innatism. It's never denied for any other animal, so far as I'm aware (perhaps with the exception of radical behaviorism in the 50's). There's a lot to say about this topic, much of it fascinating - particularly in the philosophical tradition, in which some history has been obscured and important figures, like Cudworth or More are not even known.

But's that would be the topic for another thread.

Beyond this, I can't really say much.

Yes, Germany has it tough in terms of military. France used to have an independent path in world affairs - more or less - and did not join NATO until rather recently. If they so wished, they could theoretically form a kind of military union with the UK, though again, one would have to see what the US says about this.

I mean, I agree, NATO has no reason anymore, to continue as an entity. Alliances between countries should more than suffice. The USSR no longer is a threat, not that was a big threat before - compared to US power anyway.

What you say about Russia doing a quick attack - yeah maybe, but it would be very, very risky. I highly doubt this would happen, but we don't know. NATO should soften a bit, in return for some Russian troops leaving, ending with a formal signed statement that Ukraine would not be allowed to join NATO.

Something like that.

Out in the streets, handing tickets out for God.

It's an interesting tension. The EU could have it's own military alliance, not dependent on NATO. Yet they don't do it, I think they don't want to pay the bills when they have very strong military support.

I also think that in principle all these things should be left to a free and open democratic community. But we still have the problem of making the EU democratic, which is very far away. I don't know how the EU could be made to change internally, because it's a mess. They need more transparency, more communication with the population and much more.

And an EU FP could still be aggressive, like all major states are. Nevertheless, they should have the option, of course. It's just amazing to see that after two World Wars, they can't organize together.

Russia is acting according to its own interests, of course, and what they're doing makes sense from a "real politick" perspective. And they don't merely back down because they're threatened.

And sure, Russia also has serious internal problems with corruption, inequality and undemocratic aspects. I hope they can improve, it's a tough situation.



Yeah. The Nazi's did what they did for a reason, as did the Soviets. Had legitimate German concerns been listened to years before WWII, the whole thing could have stopped the war. It's easier to just label them as evil (which they were, no doubt) and not think about it anymore.

Same with the Soviets, in the end, elite interests within the Party overthrew democratic institutions in favor of strong, authoritarian state bureaucracy.

There are no "good guys" in world affairs, or it's very rare. There are good people and groups and acts, and many horrific ones too.

Makes sense, they need international partners after all.



As I've told him, I don't agree with the way he expresses himself and some of his claims, I wouldn't agree with. I don't think this is helpful analytically or for communication purposes.

However, I'm fully aware that I could be called a coward or lacking a spine or convictions. It's a matter of temperament.

However, he's obviously very knowledgeable, has always been nice to me and reads some very interesting books.

I don't know what will happen, I'm keeping my fingers crossed that diplomacy will work.

I believe that if an agreement is made that Ukraine will not join NATO, the troops will leave. Otherwise, it's suicide.

I don't know, people differ a lot in politics. I tend to avoid thinking in terms of "good guys" or "our side" vs. "bad guys" or "them". It's just a different set of (very often) elite interests.

That's how I view it anyway.

Building up forces around and in Ukraine. Putin may be many things, but he isn't stupid, much less suicidal. If he invades Ukraine, it's game over. Nevertheless, if he doesn't put troops in the border, Ukraine may feel it could join NATO without consequence, seeing Russia doesn't seem to mind.

He is feeling threatened because Ukraine was gesturing towards joining NATO. As would the US feel threatened if Mexico gave signals it wanted to join the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.

What's this out of the blue?

It's not black or white. We can say things clearly: Ukraine has a right to self-defense, Russia has a right to safe borders, what NATO is doing is extremely dangerous and leaves Russia with little option.

The reason they have an army there is to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO. If they just sit back and bend over, they'll get it, as they have been since the USSR collapsed, NATO moved, not inches to the East, but hundreds of miles, when they were promised "not an inch".

What's crucial here is that Ukraine does not border the US - in fact, it's very far away.

If Russia was seriously considering joining a military alliance with say, Mexico, then they would be the aggressors and the US would have the right to place troops on its borders.

Nothing to do with being "Anti America", that's an empty phrase, with virtually no meaning.

There's no reason to expect a species to need science to survive. Most living organisms are bacteria, they do quite fine without positing any theory at all.

It's very much going to sound like "stoner talk", but, I think the correct take is to ask "how does this even make any sense?" to almost everything.

We all have the intuition that nothing would be "cheaper" than something - maybe that's wrong as a matter of cosmological fact.

But it doesn't make sense, because, clearly nothing is less problematic than something, but then it isn't. And what are numbers anyway, why can't we seem them in the world?

How can I even lift my arm up? And so on. That's how I think.

There are practical limits to understanding: brain size, limits to our senses, etc. In short, there's no reason to expect us to understand anything. That we can understand anything, to any degree, is remarkable.

These power systems don't go down without a fight. And as usual, the so called "national interests" reflect the interests of the elite within that society, US, UK, etc.

When elites differ, you can have divergent policies in economic and military affairs, though these aren't too common.

Correct. Same with Japan, they had an internal debate as to how to handle the post WWII world.

The world needed supplies, the US needed market for surplus production.

Of course, the US needed allies and a market for exports. The Marshall plan was not done out of pure charity.

It's very misleading. Putting a long story short, what Israel does, however horrible it is, does not bother the US much, rhetoric aside. Public Opinion is now pushing the US government to be more critical of Israel, and is having some effects. But case after case, the US calls the shots.

Condition aid to Israel based on withdrawal from the Occupied Territories.

As they go on fulfilling promises, aid may be given. If not, it can be reduced or taken away.

Sure. Nothing's ever innocent in this respect, as long as we're human beings, we are going to have biases for everything, if we didn't we'd likely be dead, that's the way to avoid bias. And by "bias" here, I simply mean having a certain perspective on how things should work or look like.

Today, we are dealing with very sophisticated and strange theoretical posits, such as "Many Worlds" or the multiverse and other strange hypothesis, which could turn out to be correct.

And sure, in 300 years, we are going to develop different intuitions and lack certain others. We can't get rid of some of them, such as seeing the sun rising and falling, even though this does not literally happen in the universe, but we can't deny our eyes, even if we know better.

But other intuitions, we take for granted, like gravity on a day to day basis, for some people anyway.

Varoufakis' And the Weak Suffer What They Must? his book and many lectures on Adults in the Room, and Mody's Eurotragedy are very eye-opening.

Euro leadership is essentially a power struggle in which they French thought they would be able to command the German economy. And no political union worthy of the name, was ever seriously considered.

The bureaucrats in the EU in the end had a far more conservative (neo-liberal) approach to the economy compared to the US! It's insane, some kind of market worship. Germany mostly wins, at least the German elites.

But it's hard to see them turning around. A crisis like this does not help.

One of the positive consequences of Trump, totally freak-ish, but, could have led to something, was when Germany (and maybe France too) said, essentially, it's time for Europe to have it's own defense. Which makes sense, but, never materialized. I doubt the US would permit it, because NATO has to have a reason to continue existing.

As for bullying China, well, they're getting bullied with Taiwan, with serious provocations on both sides, but more incendiary for the West, generally. Not that I think China should just invade Taiwan, which has a pretty decent government, and so on. But even if they wanted to invade, that would also lead to a nuclear war, Taiwan could not defend itself against China for too long.

I know, the Germany thing is a pipe dream, but, at least its being vocal about it. It's nice to have some opposing voices when this situation is so tense. I totally agree that the US, Europe AND Russia should form a coalition.

I believe Putin once asked Clinton, only half jokingly, if Russia could join NATO, I think Clinton asked the generals, they didn't like that idea.

Man, once you dig into the EU as an institution, you just see a total tragedy. They out of all people in the world, because of two World Wars, should now better. The leadership, apparently does not.

It makes sense for China to support Russia here, given the Taiwan situation, which surely merits its own thread. In that case, I think there is more room for considerable nuance, but still tense.

In any case, it's not as if NATO is giving Russia much of a choice in terms of having partners. Incidentally, as you know, the US has been losing power since WWII, so they just can't stand other countries defying "the international community" [aka whoever supports the US]. The opinion of the rest of the world, doesn't fit into this scheme.

What gets me is that, pointing these things out, somehow makes others think that one is "Pro Putin" or "Pro Xi". This is silly.

Ugh the EU, what a mess. It could be a great example for the world, but having a monetary union without a political one may lead to its disintegration, following fanatical market thinking.

I hope Germany could persuade cooler head to prevail. The UK is lost cause at this moment.

Noumenal for Kant would be what Lucy Allais describes as "intelligibelia". There are positive and negative conceptions of the noumena, on this reading.

Positive noumena would include things like Leibnizian monads or Cartesian souls, things which we don't know if knowledge of them is even possible, nor how we could cognize them.

She says: "Understood in the negative sense, the concept [of noumena] simply involves thinking about spatio-temporal objects of our experience and abstracting what we know about the through the senses."

I agree with that. While Biden has done decent things - at the very beginning - for people, his foreign policy in action, not in rhetoric, is not much different from Trump's.

Which is scary considering how bullish Trump was.

Not much good will be achieved by escalating tensions even more.

Wrong thread....

Can Kant’s noumenal world to be understood to potentially have any kind of physical form (waves, for instance) which we cannot apprehend directly? Or is the use of the word ‘physical’ here entirely superfluous? — Tom Storm

Not physical, no. But not mental either.

It's unknown grounds, according to him. One can read him as a neutral monist in this respect.

Richly cognitively endowed, yes. So far as the manifest image goes, it works rather well for ordinary affairs- day to day stuff.

It becomes hard once we begin attributing our manifest image to a mind independent world, that's when our ideas should be suspect.

These are different domains of intellect and cognition, I think. Chomsky calls it a "science forming faculty".

If I have trouble explaining myself, I may well have trouble ironing out these issues. I'm working on that for a project I want to write, but requires much more reading and thinking.

In any case, thanks for the exchange, you always seem to get the main gist of what I'm saying, which is a relief, frankly.

That makes sense to me, in so far as things like this can make sense. That koan proceeds to take apart what we take for granted.

What is curious is to see how far can we push our ordinary commonsense understanding in everyday affairs.

The issue, as Magee put it, is to not confuse an epistemology (what we experience) for an ontology (what there is). This is what happens to certain strands of empiricism, the textual evidence for Locke and Hume is much more subtle though.

As Chomsky puts it in a related essay to this one, we have a "given" in experience. The thing is that the given is already formed by us. So it's not actually given.

It's as Tallis says somewhere, "there is no given without a taken."

There's nothing else in nature remotely like h. sapiens, but this seems a forbidden truth. I think it's one of the pernicious consequences of adopting Darwinism as a philosophy, which it is not. — Wayfarer

I agree.

We mostly disagree on terminology: "naturalism", "empiricism", etc.

But the terminological oddities are mine, you use them as they are commonly employed in contemporary philosophy. I think these terms are misused, but it's splitting hairs.

I mean, our vocabulary changes with the times, that makes sense. And we can still use the word "soul", as in, "that moved my soul". If it has religious implications, implying supernatural causes, that is, causes not found in nature at large, then it's not going to be attractive to many people.

Of course, this depends on how we think about "nature", which can be very varied.

I think one can hold that view that we are quite special creatures, we have the capacity for reflection and explicit knowledge. But we are still part of the world.



That's a supremely difficult question and answers will depend on sensibilities.

Let's take a mountain. Plainly a "mountain", as a word and as a concept, is human specific. There likely is more to concepts than words, but words are necessary at least.

I see a mountain. But now I close my eyes. There's still a mountain there, I can touch it, hear it, and so on. But suppose I lost my sense of touch and smell and proceed so on down the line, there's precious little left to say, as far as our sense go.

But now consider this: deaf-blind people, who acquire the capacity to read braille, show a remarkable capacity for a very rich inner life, based on some small bumps on a page. Likewise by merely putting there hands on your throat, they can understand the words you say.

The stimulus is poor (as Chomsky would say) , the reply is rich. That strongly hints, at least to me, that we overwhelmingly add things to the world, that aren't there absent us.

What would the opposite look like? If the world was rich, and our nature poor, I'd expect all species to have essentially the same cognitive capacities, which doesn't seem to be the case.

I mean, I think we can use the word "truth", with a lower case "t". I'm seeing letters on a screen is true, at one level of description. Photons are hitting my eye, likewise, etc.

But this is different from "Truth", which many seek to know.

:up:

I'm sympathetic to that view and it seems to me to be reasonable, again, given the creatures that we are.

I mean, this whole problem with "Truth", can send people down a rabbit hole. We can say some things about the world, which are subject to revision and refinement.

But there are far more questions than answers.

A global presence does not indicate aggression. — frank

You are right.

Britain was destroyed in WWII and the last solo act they tried at Suez in 56', was sternly rebuked by Eisenhower, who was stuck with the war in Korea. Since then, they essentially follow Washington's orders, with very marginal exceptions.

The US has been the world's peace keeper since WW2. As it declines, there will be turmoil. — frank

That's the way it's framed.

It was good for parts of Western Europe (though there were problems here, often glossed over), Australia and Japan.

Latin America, Africa, The Middle East and South East Asia might beg to differ.

I think the US has serious internal troubles it could fix first, instead of getting into everyone's business, especially in this day and age.

I think an alliance with Europe makes sense for certain circumstances. As would an alliance with any other country make sense for other circumstances.

Risking a nuclear war to make a statement is insane to me.

So you're reading that as a sign of American aggression in the present, instead if the result of global conditions throughout the 20th Century, which is what it really is. — frank

It's the condition of the US as of last year. If you can show me massive cuts in military spending, then you can say that US power is going down, literally.

If they maintain bases all over the world, there isn't a measurable decrease in power.

Not to mention the US is essentially the driver of Japanese and South Korean foreign policy and the vast majority of Western Europe too, to this day.

You're not making much sense to me at this point. — frank

You're saying that the reason Russia wants to invade Ukraine is because the US is in decline. I don't see the evidence for this claim.

The biggest factor I've seen, is that Ukraine want to join NATO. Which renders a hostile military force at the borders of Russia.

What should they say "yes thank you?"

That's comparing the US military to all the other ones in the world. Has the budget for the Pentagon gone down?

What does China emerging as the bigger market have to do with Russia's plan's with Ukraine? Russia's power has vastly diminished since the USSR.

I don't know how this has anything to do with the crisis in Ukraine.

If you weren't so hell bent on seeing the world through the lens of the Cuban missile crisis, you might notice the plethora of signs that the USA is in decline. Putin noticed it. That's why he's preparing to invade Ukraine. — frank

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/9/10/infographic-us-military-presence-around-the-world-interactive

Refusing to cooperate by not sending more weapons, as Germany has done. Asking for more diplomacy instead of causing tensions to rise by repeatedly saying an invasion is imminent.

Is wanting to stop escalations to a potential nuclear catastrophe funny somehow?

I'm missing in on the joke.

I don't disagree at all. I mean, for me everything is essentially a mystery, science included. It's not as if science makes sense, as I've been saying through-out this thread (we don't understand the world, physics is mathematical, math is...?, etc.) .

I have a conflict with Peirce's quote:

"Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts."

I don't doubt colours exist, objects exist, music (for us) exists, etc. But my reason tells me otherwise. We add all these things to the world and would not exist as postulated by us, absent us. It's maddening because it's a constant conflict between feeling and reasons.

There have been some instances in which the EU has managed to stop the US doing its most possible damage, I'm thinking of the time the UK refused to join the US in bombing Syria, that stopped a large(er) scale operation from developing.

Not that the US and, in this case, even more Russia, didn't do its fair share of atrocities in Syria, but it could have been even worse, which is kind of hard to say given how bad Syria is now.

But I think there should be at least some attempts by a few EU countries to stop this inertia, something, is better than nothing, obviously.

But signs aren't good.

Historically, simplifying a great deal and looking at tendencies while skipping major figures, I think that Descartes invoked God as an assurance that we can't obviously be mistaken about our common beliefs. Though we can't explain mind, we can say a great deal about bodes.

Along comes Locke and says, we can't go that far, yes, ultimately, we are in the hands of the Almighty for ultimate causes, because we just don't understand them.

But already there are seeds that, by merely looking at ordinary objects, we have trouble, we can't really say if secondary qualities exist in the objects or not, but it doesn't matter for our practical affairs. Nor do we know essences - if they even exist.

Then Hume comes along and says, all we have empirical verifiable evidence for is constant conjunction, but this does not mean that's all there is to causality, it's merely what we can say with confidence about it.

Many things, including experiencing one object being the same after two different instances of perception are a "fiction" - his word - meaning, more than can be empirically verified, but a sensible postulate. Along with this, he points out that our individuating objects as one being different from another, is another fiction, useful, but not at all certain.

Beyond that, going through Kant and beyond, the project seems to me to simultaneously show how little we can say confidently about the world, while sticking to causal relations, connected by us and assumed to belong to the world - and we've had great success.

But as each major figure advances, the key is, as you say, being utterly baffled by what we assume to be true and realizing, after close scrutiny, that our common sense beliefs do not hold up to the mind-independent world. I think the case is both, our understanding is in fact incomplete and we have to catch ourselves from sweeping things under the rug. Today we hear people say "that obviously follows from learning/natural selection/laws of physics".

The problem here, is that the gap between physics and biology to the psychology of a human being, in terms of complexity, is just massive.