It's difficult to separate, in fact probably not possible, our biological inclinations with our developed reflective nature. The tendency in nature of living beings, is to continue existing. The vast majority of everything has died, so those that remain must have some kind of "optimism" built-in, if not blind willing.

It doesn't refute anything. One can say that human nature affirms a tendency to go on living, but that's most of life.

Our experiences combined with our particular genetic makeup, is what creates our worldview.

Perhaps pessimism, to some degree, is an ability of considered reflection, as opposed to mere instinct.

Naive optimism is not better than hopeless pessimism. But there are degrees in all views. I think optimism of the will, as Gramsci said, is the best we can strive for. But not optimism of the intellect, world situations considered.

Ah, well once it gets off into mathematics I get lost.

Which is why looking for an epistemic-metaphical example suits my needs. If I can grasp that, the I can proceed to apply it to other areas, perhaps. But if I can't apply it to "ordinary experience", that is, lived everyday manifest reality, I can't work with it well. I think I begin to see a logic based on what you and aletheist are saying, though there are divergences.

You're saying that getting hit by a red ball is a firstness, aletheist says it's a 2ndness. Firstness for him, as I understand him in this example, would be the sensation of rubber I feel from the ball, but me getting hit would be a second.

Yours is broader, as I see it.

Damn man, Ducks Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann was an awesome book. 1000 pages, one sentence (yes, one.), stream of consciousness. Delightful, quirky, empathic, intelligent, demanding, insightful and more.

It might not be "postmodern", but surely a masterpiece. It will take considerable effort and you may not like it but, I must add to the "hard books worth reading".

@180 Proof @jamalrob @Deleteduserrc

You guys might want to consider checking it out, if you're up for the challenge. I can't vouch for it like I do for Novel Explosives, which is a must for philosophical-literature fans but, it's worth knowing about.

Yes, it does help quite a bit.

My doubt would be with 1sts then. If I "do away" with firsts, it would be a ball lacking colour "only"?

It's difficult to imagine 1sts without concrete instantiations of a quale, as in, I don't know if such things could exist: a quale or phenomenal properties without concrete instantiation.

Even just the brute impact of the ball on you is 2ns, independent of your sensation of it — aletheist

How can I register an impact without a sensation?

I think I get 2nds and 3rds better, but I'm having trouble with 1sts.

:clap:

Thanks for that very detailed post. I'll be sure to read it several times to make better sense of it. It covers a lot of ground.

Just as a general reply, I'll use the most simple example that comes to mind, which is Peirce's correspondence with Lady Webly, explaining the categories to her. He says that:

"Firstness is that mode of being of that which is such as it is, positively and without reference to anything else."

"Secondness is that mode of being of that which is such as it is, with respect to a second but regardless of any third."

Thirdness is is that mode of being of that which is such as it is, in bringing a second and third into relation with each other"

He says that "typical idea of firstness are qualities of feeling, or mere appearances. That scarlet... the quality itself ..." he also speaks about the idea of "hardness" being an example of firstness.

With secondness he speaks of "effort" as when one experience forces itself on you.

Thirdness is like tying together firstness and secondness. In a triadic relation, he says, "brute action is secondness, mentality is thirdness."

This is of course a gross generalization and simplification.

You appear to apply these categories as widely as possible, which was likely his intent.

I've always thought using an empirical example would be extremely helpful, as in, speaking about a red ball in a game of dodgeball so I can better visualize the categories:

For instance seeing the red of a ball is an instance of firstness, me reacting to someone throwing the ball at me and felling the rubber of the ball would be secodness and me thinking about whom to hit in this game would be thirdness.

And then I'd expand these categories to everything. Something like that.

Is that possible or is this situation too artificial to use as an example?

I think that we can put it aside and leave this thread as a general discussion of Parmenides, that way if someone wants to speak about him, whether his own Poem, or different articles, they can do that.

This is an interesting interpretation of Parmenides by Raymond Tallis. Just something to think about:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8K9bes5UcjA

Yeah, this dialogue is just not fun. It's interesting in so far as it offers a critique of the theory of forms, but it assumes this type of "the one", which may not even exist. Is it a thing? A concept, maybe. But then the concept would be different from the one, but the one cannot have something different from itself, so it's part of the one.

I think the Sanford Encyclopedia on Parmenides is better than the dialogue.

In any case Parmenides is urging reason above sense data, which is a good point. Unless your reasoning clouds the way you interpret the world. In this case, his "the one" is a kind of trap. I can understand the appeal of this logic thousands of years ago, but today, there are better ways to articulate issues of monism and change or non-change.

Hah! You're sharp.

Better to push a boulder up a mountain for eternity, than hitting your head on the wall repeatedly.

Cheers.

That's fine and understandable.

The only issue you may have is that when people ask do we have selves or is the world ideal and the like, you'll find yourself in a situation in which you'll say "that's not metaphysics, metaphysics deals with propositions." That's not what Schopenhauer or Peirce would say.

It's difficult.

No no no. That won't do. Metaphysics is the stuff of the transcendent. Metaphysics is that which lies beyond the physics. Metaphysics is what Kant tried to ask how is it possible. Metaphysics is whatever Hegel said. And worldmaking, and interpreting physics, and seeing spirits and is gobbledygook and also profound.

It's pretty obvious.

I recall that the main point was being hammered over and over again, but that was a few years ago. I'll refresh my reading, if I get the same feeling again, then I'll just go with my impressions.

But good to know other people think the same.

https://www.amazon.com/Giants-Global-Power-Peter-Phillips/dp/1609808711/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3D30EJ0V165AY&keywords=giants+the+global+power+elite&qid=1636314271&s=books&sprefix=giants%2Cstripbooks-intl-ship%2C138&sr=1-1

I had that book, but gave it to a friend. It's more of a kind of detective work than a straight out read. But you do get names.

It's more the .1%, technically.

It might be better to say "metaphysics" is, whatever people who work and study on this subject say it is.

That will lead to some poor quality New Age stuff, but that's unavoidable.

But these posts will continue to arise. I suppose I kind of like them.

Existence of the universe, existing universe. That's probably a term that would lead to less troubles than causes or reasons.

Yup. :up:

The argument that I'm making is that yes, the universe could be finitely or infinitely regressive, but that there logically can be no cause for why this should be. Many people say, "The universe could not have formed on its own," but my conclusion is, "The universe necessarily formed on its own". — Philosophim

The best we can say is that the universe is all there is, unless the multiverse theory happens to be true, which is difficult to test at the moment.

If it is infinite however, it was never formed, it just is.

We have some evidence for a Big Bang, so maybe that happened and nothing occurred before that. In either case, I agree, I don't see why something other than the universe is needed, save the multiverse, which just pushes the question further away.

Ideally, that would be nice.

If there exists an X which explains the reason why any infinite causality exists, then its not truly infinite causality, as it is something outside of the infinite causality chain. That X then becomes another Y with the same 3 plausibilities of prior causality. Therefore, the existence of a prior causality is actually an Alpha, or first cause. — Philosophim

Maybe this is the case, maybe it's not. We have to "stop the buck" somewhere otherwise we go down an infinite chain of postulates. We don't know enough to say either is the case.

An argument could be made for both needing a first cause (or an uncaused cause) or not needing one, in the case the universe is actually infinite.

Depends on how we think of cause. It's not impossible that the universe came into being for no reason or cause. Someone can say that makes no sense at all, but it could be the case for all we know.

I share the intuition that something must be the cause of the universe, but maybe there are no causes when we get to issues of this depth.

:up:



The universe doesn't give a damn if it follows our logic or not.

Things remain the same. People will continue to speak about metaphysics and you'll be limited to speaking about "C-metaphysics".

It's good you found a solution.

It seems the problem with the term is here to stay.

Depends on which field you want to go in. Most analytic philosophy, if not a good part of it, is rather technical focusing often on extremely narrow topics. There are exceptions of course and there are other traditions you could follow.

I personally had to take classes belonging to the European phenomenological tradition, though not much Husserl, more so Michel Henry and Patojka and a few others I forgot, plus some of the classics.

I ended up doing my own thing, that is, I did my work for each class, but for research and projects, I already found interesting people not belonging to the mainstream. So in the end it will boil down to what attracts you and how much freedom you are given to pursue your own interests, given that you don't like any of the established schools already.

Perfect, I'll likely do the same then. :up:

Didn't get around to reading it today. I'll continue tomorrow.

It's definitely Plato's hardest dialogue.

The notion of there being greater and lesser degrees of reality is, I contend, something that has dropped out of modern philosophy. — Wayfarer

Susan Haack picks up on that in her The World According to Innocent Realism. She discusses fiction and how it relates to the world and concludes that reality comes in degrees or parts. But you're right that it's not a subject much dealt with at the moment.

It should be mentioned that when Galileo overthrew Aristotelian physics, the Aristotelian notion of 'causation' was rejected along with it - the idea of formal and final causes, or the reasons for a thing, in the sense of its telos. — Wayfarer

Yes. So these things need a rearticulating of sorts.

That's the problem. We have many definitions, sometimes incompatible with each other, so we have to choose one. Or leave the topic ambiguous.

I think that if we want to keep the spirit of Aristotle's "being qua being", metaphysics has to be reinterpreted epistemologically. Our physics would today, be Aristotle's metaphysics back then.

The goal of metaphysics was to explain the world. Now we know that we can say less about the world than was thought in antiquity. Aristotle wanted to (for example) show what a house was. Today we'd say that a house is mind-dependent not a aspect of the world.

If we want to talk about houses, or statues or clocks or people, we have to elucidate how these things appear to us, how do we think about them (is a cave a house?) and what can we say about the world for people (are colours a property of the world?, is our ordinary picture of the world misleading?, etc.).

That's what I concluded after looking at this for some time, but, like anything else in philosophy people are going to disagree.

"They say that the name metaphysics is almost accidental, it was just the book by Aristotle that came after the book called ‘Physics’, so it doesn’t really have a meaning, but it’s not very difficult to say what it is, it’s just the attempt to study the most general characteristic of what is or may be and what must be”

- Galen Strawson

"Metaphysics... business is to study the most general features of reality and real objects.... Here let us set down almost at random a small specimen of the questions of metaphysics which press, not for hasty answers, but for industrious and solid investigation:... Whether there is any distinction between, other than more or less. between fact and fancy? Or between the external and internal worlds?... What external reality do the qualities of sense represent in general?

- C.S. Peirce

"I take metaphysics to be about the world, not just about our concepts, conceptual schemes, or languages; and to depend on experience—not, however, on the kind of specialized, recherché experience on which the empirical sciences call, but on close attention to familiar, everyday experience."

- Susan Haack

"Metaphysical enquiry employs the same cognitive power as is employed in commonsense and scientific judgements about the world of experience: the very same principles of reasoning as are employed in empirical judgements about tables and atoms, are employed in a purified form, in metaphysical judgements about God and the soul.”

- Sebastian Gardner

Well, I suppose this is why we are in philosophy forum, to argue till' we're blue in the face.

It only gets bad when we start arguing about trees existing or not. We're not there yet.

It's all good. I see you are busy here. Chomsky is a personal issue to me, so I couldn't resist a comment.

You have plenty to argue here anyway.

Saying something like that about Chomsky is quite remarkable...

They respected him deeply.

I suppose the appeal here is that the idea of one-ness is simple and difficult to argue against. Like if someone says there are many. Yeah, ok, but what about them? We look for similarities.

Do you think that it's possible to argue against the idea of "the one" as presented by Parmenides?

Funny that I saw your reply as I was typing, otherwise I would keep postponing.

By this point, it's impossible not to have our ideas contaminated by modern theories and other philosophers. I think that what can help with this distinction of time being an illusion vs time feeling very real to us, is that one is how time is independent of us (in some respects) and the other is time, as we experience it.

We obviously add much to time, that is not found in the universe. Ideas of "slow", "fast", "before" and "after" are meaningless to the universe. But not to us.

Well I'll start by saying something, otherwise it's easy to get intimidated and not say anything. Because this text is really dense and difficult. I've read a part of it, maybe a third or so, and highlighted some passages (copy pasted them actually) so that I could have something to build on.

As I read more and finish, and re-read, this may all radically change.

A lot of it is made more difficult due to the fact that we are in very different intellectual/cultural climates, so it's hard to understand why there should only "the one":

"if, on the other hand, one were in itself, it would also be contained by nothing else but itself; that is to say, if it were really in itself; for nothing can be in anything which does not contain it."

that which contains must be other than that which is contained? for the same whole cannot do and suffer both at once; and if so, one will be no longer one, but two?

It seems to me as if "the one" postulated here is rather rigid concept, such that anything which could possibly show a flaw in the concept of the one would be taken as part of the one, but the one cannot have parts.

Then we have the problem that a subject can think of the one, while being of the one, so the person cannot escape being part of the one.

I'd say the subject is one thing, the thought of the one is a different thing, while admitting that, in some very obscure sense, everything is part of a single "thing".

This thing could be the universe, or quantum fields or even the-thing-in-itself.

So initially, it looks like whatever this one is, for it to be rendered intelligible, must be the kind of thing which appears as many. And as appearances, they are different and multitudinous. So in this sense one could say that there are many things which at bottom belong to one.

These are my initial thoughts anyway.

It's "built in" to the way we experience the world. We just can't enter into the head of another person, we can only see bodies.

The closest analogy of getting inside someone else's head is to read a high-quality novel, which may give a rough impression of what you are pointing out. But even in this case it's only a distant approximation of actual experience.

Or so it seems to me.

"While we can isolate the element of the given by these criteria of its unalterability and its character as sensuous feel or quality, we cannot describe any particular given as such, because in describing it, in whatever fashion, we qualify it by bringing it under some category or other, select from it, emphasize aspects of it, and relate it in particular and avoidable ways."

- C.I. Lewis

We can't say what aspects of our own thought are futile. Maybe we realize that thinking about X was a waste of time or, one becomes aware that what one thought was misleading turns out to be correct.

What's more likely still is that we were wrong all the time and never found out. Might be the case given the history of thought.

What's a waste of time for one person, is the lifeblood for another.

And, we all die in the end. So futility is kind of built-in anyway. So... who knows?

There's all kinds of traditions, views and personal quirks. So I assume there are some who think so.

Like solipsism, it's not a question that can be refuted by arguments.

Welcome to my world. :naughty: :halo:

Never mind, poor attempt at mock surprise

Sure.

Here a link to the dialogue:

http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/parmenides.html