Another argument is that what exists according to natural science, does not include the observing subject who stipulates the axioms upon which it rests. That is the topic of the innumerable and interminable discussions about the hard problem of consciousness. It is also the major topic of both phenomenology and existentialism, which will probably not be cowed with threats of ‘brute fact’. :wink: — Wayfarer

Ha! Isn't 'the observing subject who stipulates the axioms upon which it rests' another brute fact? :wink:

My nights I spend at a bar, smoking and drinking way too much, hunched over some book, being asocial, surrounded by good people who are used to it, like me anyway, and for the most part have no fucking idea why the heck I'm doing all of this. Maybe some of you can sympathize a little more. ;) — KrisGl

Ha! I spent a good 20 years drinking in bars (many of them smoking too). But mainly getting to know and appreciate complete strangers. Conversation is a minor hobby.

What does it mean to understand? Is this a term only to be used when "success" is evident - to understand is to understand correctly or there is no understanding at all - or is there such a thing as "wrong understanding"? — KrisGl

Interesting. I have always assumed we don't really understand each other, we just make sense of others the best we can. A primary interest of mine is the ideas people believe and why.

Truth be told, it is difficult to find people interested in these authors, so I hope to find some companionship in this forum. — KrisGl

This site has many actively engaged readers of esoterica, so you should find some people to talk to. Royce doesn't come up all that often, his absolute idealism could be interesting to hear more about. Welcome.

I’m posting that video here because I think it challenges us to re-consider what constitutes language. To what extent is an immediate relationship with our non-human surroundings a language? — Joshs

It does challenge us to reconsider. I expect that most people think of language as a social phenomenon. Mel's responses involve sense-making and interacting with the environment, structuring the world and the things in it. Her blog, Ballastexistenz, was fascinating too.

Maybe you should take that with a grain of salt given that my favorite Chandler movie is the “Long Goodbye” by Robert Altman. That was widely criticized as being far from the standard vision of Philip Marlowe, but it’s one of my all-time favorites. — T Clark

It's a magnificent film and, as a revisionist noir, with a twist and directed by a genius, it's hard to ignore. I quite like the world weary Robert Mitcham Farewell My Lovely (done as a period piece 2 years later). I think the books are all about dialogue and mood. The plots are incidental. I just reread The Lady in the Lake and thought it was pretty good. The problem with Chandler is that he did it so well he has been copied continuously since the 1940's and by now the situations and characters are worn out. Hence Elliott Gould in 1973.

Sure. Time wasting is my specialty.

Actually, on reflection I can see how your points have merit when it comes to my hypocrisy argument. Unless the person argues that all life is sacred, no matter what circumstances, it may not be hypocritical.

Neither of you have demonstrated that at all: Banno just keeps blanketly asserting "it's obvious!". — Bob Ross

I tend to agree with Banno on this one. If you require argumentation to establish that a bunch of cells trumps the personal autonomy and rights of a woman, there's a problem.

Are you saying the religious shrug their shoulders to worldwide hunger and withhold support where their non-religious counterparts are trying to assist? — Hanover

No, I was arguing that some of those who hold a faith in Gods (and the free market) seem to be against universal healthcare. In Australia, for instance, healthcare if mostly free if you are poor or homeless. People are less likely to die unnecessarily from preventable conditions. Many opponents of universal healthcare I've encountered are also opponents of abortion. It's not like they give that much of a fuck about life. Just this particular issue. It's also a curious read of the Gospels (for those who are Christians). Jesus would be a supporter of universal healthcare.

I'd also hold that the sanctity of human life encompasses the right to live to the ability to one's creation, so much so that I would be violating your human rights if I held you against your will in my basement, yet I don't think it hypocritical to incarcerate the guilty. What this means is we draw a distinction between justifiable imprisonment and unjustifiable imprisonment.

We can do the same for killing. Examples would be war, self-defense, and punishment. I get that you disagree that capital punishment should go in that list perhaps for a variety of other reasons, but someone who is opposed to murder can consistently and non-hypocritically be in favor or capital punishment just as someone can object to an unjustifiable X but support a justifiable X. — Hanover

I was talking specifically about capital punishment and abortion. These other examples are a distraction even if they are also examples of contradictions - there's a reason some religions spawn conscientious objectors. I am not making an argument against capital punishment, I am simply identifying a contradiction. It should be noted that there are some religious folk (famously Sister Helen Prejean) who do campaign against capital punishment who are also against abortion on the basis that only God can take lives.

I expect to come back around to liking it down the line, when I might try a different translation. — Jamal

I had the virtually same reactions to this breezily sardonic novel a couple of years ago - same edition. I wondered three things - was my ambivalent reaction a cultural matter, a problem of translation or had the bloody thing simply dated?

what do you mean. Please tell me. Please — AlienVareient

Just a joke. E.g., save you a lot of time so you can move on to something useful :razz:

I find your position very interesting and I respect it.

the result of some dogma that demands zygote = person without much thought into what that means and it obviously comes from a religious tradition foreign to my own that violates my views of the who we all are. — Hanover

Yes, that is probably the answer to my quesion to

And I say all this because I am about as religious a poster as posts here — Hanover

Yes. Perhaps my reaction to this is a banality - to identify as religious can signify different things to different people; it’s a very adaptable term. And seems to encapsulate some of our worst and best impulses. The 'religious' may have very little in common.

As a general matter, I advocate for sanctifying life, not just in a humanist way, but in a way that truly seperates life and humanity in a mystical way. — Hanover

Fair enough. I think in the end this 'mystical' perspective will always come down to the presuppositions we hold. Elaborate post hoc justifications are often built upon them. I'm not sure I know what sanctifying life means, except as a kind of poetry.

A lot of people I have encountered who pontificate about the 'sacredness of human life' are simple hypocrites. They're quite comfortable with capital punishment and don't seem to mind if the poor die in vast numbers through lack of affordable services.

Your question is illicit. The standing of Mrs Smith ought far surpass whatever standing you might grant the blastocyst — Banno

I agree with this. This is not a matter I generally debate as it's a cesspit of virtue signalling and philosophical bullshit. What do you think is happening when people make the sorts of arguments that makes?

Just looking for some tips and suggestions. Answers appreciated : ) — AlienVareient

Get out while you still can. :wink:

To be a living system is to maintain a normative pattern of interacting with an environment in the midst of changing conditions. Sense-making is about pragmatically relevant actions , not concordance with ‘reality as it is’, whatever that’s supposed to mean. This doesn’t make what sense-making reveals as an illusion, or mere appearance as opposed to the really real. It shows us that this is what ‘reality as it is’ IS in itself. — Joshs

Point well made.

@wayfarer I'm interested in your perspective on what @Joshs has written here.

Thank you. There's a lot there. Appreciated. Is there some Deleuze here in the notion of meaning and identity being shaped by relations and differences, not by intrinsic essence?

Our understandings of the world aren’t ideas in the head, they are activities of engagement.All other corners of the world untouched by our participation also are agentially perspectival with respect to themselves via their interaffecting within configurative patterns of interaction. Hoffman and Chalmers still think of consciousness as an Ideal substance. — Joshs

That's so interesting, but it's also a notion that's hard to adjust to given the way things are habitually described and understood.

I'm not clear how the subjective experience of eating chocolate, say, is a product of, shall we say, patterns of interaction within a network, shaped by how beings engage with their environment. I'm trying to understand what this frame contributes to a 'deflation' of the hard problem. Can you tease this out a little more for a layperson?

All this is insubstantial in the argument I presented to you. We have on the one hand a woman, perhaps a nurse, perhaps a CEO, perhaps a sister, mother, daughter, perhaps a care giver or volunteer. Someone who can express their needs, who makes plans and seeks to fulfil them and who has a place in our world.

We have on the other hand, a group of cells.

That you value those cells over the person who must carry them is heinous. — Banno

:up:

What explains a Habermas scholar being fooled by Habermas? Dumb? Perverse? Doesn’t really seem to fit. What, then? — J

Indeed. Isn't it traditional to dismiss as nonsense ideas we don't understand or ideas which sit at odds with our own sense making intuitions? There are numerous writers and thinkers I find unappealing, on the basis of their prose or subject matter. I would never mistake this for nonsense, except perhaps that I can make 'no sense' of their work. In my experience, many people believe they must grasp the entire spectrum of philosophical ideas. If they don't, they often conclude that the work itself is flawed.

What about an asylum seeker. — Samlw

Yes, in Australia asylum seekers/refugees were relabelled 'illegal immigrants' quite successfully to play to the bedrock of community prejudice against 'hoards of folk' coming in and 'stealing jobs and bringing crime'. The usual tropes. Immigration involves a range of complex issues, not just those at the point of entry - what happens to an established culture and values when different and perhaps antithetical values and beliefs enter in large numbers? What quotas do you set when there is an almost inexhaustible supply of refugees in the world? What is the future of the nation-state and national identity? I don't have enough expertise in the area to say.

To be a law of logic, a principle must hold in complete generality.
No principles hold in complete generality.
There are no laws of logic. — Banno

Well, that's logical...

She does not wish to conclude that there are no laws of logic, and so argues that a principle need not hold in complete generality. Instead, they hold in given logics. — Banno

A likely concession! Well, it's pretty much off limits to me, I have no knowledge of logic or philosophy, so I'll need to leave it to the cognoscenti. Thanks for the clear explanations.

Why doesn't that surprise me? :wink:

:up:

A lot to think about here. One would almost assume that nothing can be known if paraconsistent logic is sound. At the very least, it suggests that how we deal with the notion of contradiction has to be revised. I fear the potential for quantum woo emerging from the dying embers of classical logic...

Just as the apparent contradictions between classical physics and quantum physics might be about how reality manifests in different scales, perhaps logics may vary depending on the calibration of the problem they are applied to. Or something like that.

Thank you.

But the substantive question relates to knowledge, which is why my first post in this thread concentrated on that topic. — Leontiskos

Well, yes, in the end that's what all this leads to. Fair point.

I suppose I was thinking of conservatism as something more along the lines of 'there is one truth and it can be discovered by philosophy'.

In relation to Haack, she seems to be saying that the scientific method is more like 'methods' - a diversity of approaches including creativity, but it is not quite 'anything goes'.

"Anything goes" is a recipe for conservatism, since if anything goes then the way things are is as viable as the way they might be, and there is no sound reason for change. — Banno

Yes, Chomsky says this is the effect of postmodernism (as you say a 'recipe') - radical skepticism about truth and objectivity has insulated the intelligentsia from popular movements and activism. But isn't the conservative approach per-say one where orthodoxy rules, where there is a right way and a wrong way to do pretty much everything? In the case of our question about logic, I'd imagine a conservative might balk against the possibility of logical pluralism. Just a thought.

This?
So Logical Nihilism has me returning to what I had taken as pretty much settled; that scientific progress does not result from a more or less algorithmic method - induction, falsification and so one - but is instead the result of certain sorts of liberal social interaction - of moral and aesthetic choice.
— Banno — Banno

along the lines of Feyerabend's "Anything goes". — Banno

Yes, I can see this to some extent.

Doesn't Susan Haack argue a somewhat tamer version of this?

https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/131210177.pdf

pp.13-15

To what extent does your disagreement on this involve, perhaps, one being a conservative and the other liberal?

Historically logic is the thing by which (discursive) knowledge is produced. When I combine two or more pieces of knowledge to arrive at new knowledge I am by definition utilizing logic. If logical pluralism were true then you could know X and I could know ~X, and we would both have true knowledge, which is absurd. When, "two logics over the same domain reach opposite conclusions," we do not arrive at an "interesting question." We arrive at contradictory conclusions and conflicting arguments, one of which must be wrong. — Leontiskos

Logical pluralists seem to argue that different contexts require different logics and this seems to be determined by the kinds of reasoning or the goals of inquiry involved. So, for the most part, I'm not sure if the result is different conclusions for the same matter, more like different logics used for different situations. But I am just a curious amateur, so for me it's all about the questions.

But how we might deal with a case where, say, two logics over the same domain reach opposite conclusions remains an interesting question. — Banno

How common would this be and how do we determine which logic to employ?

A logic to decide between competing logics. — Banno

This is a slightly scary idea. Could we end up with an infinite regress?

Sweet. Have you seen David Bentley Hart's dog book, described as a Platonic dialogue beast fable, Roland In Moonlight. Hart says it's the work he's most proud of.

Nicely put. Resonates also with the disenchanted world - Weber and Schiller.

The first effect is the attitude of dropping one's concern over controlling things out of one's control. If it hasn't been pointed out, that requires quite a lot of processing power on your brain. Eventually, one would be able to emote this attitude as apatheia or a passionless state. — Shawn

It's not much different to the practice of CBT strategies which was influenced by Stoicism. It isn't that hard to change mental habits. We see people doing it using CBT in large numbers all around the world.

I encountered RET (the precursor to CBT) when I was a young teen and taught myself some habits that have made life a lot easier. But I was always fairly detached, so it wasn't such a huge leap for me.

What is it that you desire or crave that you can't have and that makes you unhappy? The only thing I ever wanted was a better memory. Luxury seems dull to me, besides the average Westerner already lives in luxury, with running water, a bed, heating, good food.

The philosopher’s originality comes down to inventing terms. Since there are only three or four attitudes by which to confront the world— and about as many ways of dying—the nuances which multiply and diversify them derive from no more than the choice of words, bereft of any metaphysical range. — Janus

Interesting quote from E M Cioran. Thanks.

The above never really occurred to me. Kind of like that observation that in literature there are only 7 plots (Chris Booker).

'Inventing terms' resonates. Richard Rorty often talked about philsophy as being an ongoing activity of "finding new vocabularies." In his view, you get philosophical progress from the creation of new ways of speaking and thinking through which we identify and tackle new problems and experiences, rather than through discovering objective truths. The search for a final vocabulary that represents reality "as it is" was a misguided one. Or something like that.

A logic to decide between competing logics. — Banno

Goodness. I'll leave this to the pros.

But how we might deal with a case where, say, two logics over the same domain reach opposite conclusions remains an interesting question. — Banno

That's fascinating. As above.

Thank you.

Really interesting.

Now it seems to me that Pluralism is the better of these options, but the devil is in the detail, and the discussion is on-going. — Banno

Sounds fair. Is there a risk with pluralism that one might simply select the logic one wants to suit ourselves? How do we determine which logic is appropriate for a given situation/problem? Sorry if this is a banal quesion.

If we were to take an investigation into the logical soundness of theism, for instance, which alternate logic would we use? Classical logic seem traditional.

Will technology replace the home? Is the metaverse already here in a sense and that we just simply have not really noticed that we spend our time 'at home' in the 'elsewhere' world of texting and (doom)scrolling? — I like sushi

Generally, as I understand it, a home is a physical place where one's tenure is secure, where one is safe and where one can peruse projects/hobbies without interference, where one is always welcome. Where one can have physical and hygiene needs met. There is a differnce between a home and a house. For me a home is a physical location which supports personal safety and belonging. Many people have accommodation, but no home.

I am very sympathetic to phenomenology but have a limited understanding of it.

I would say that I am a person. I am conscious and bodily to be sure, but I am not a mind or a body, and I don't have a body. — Kurt Keefner

No body either? Not sure if using 'person' is much help. What counts as a person? What elements does this appellation unify or make coherent? You may as well say you are a being. Personhood can be quite an elaborate and contested area. Is a person in a coma for 10 years still a person? Is a fetus? Etc.

I am interested in why this is important. If you are a whole, conscious physical unit, what does being a person assist you with in the world? What relationship does physical have to body in your view?

why building marriage, home, family and community as the important experiences of your life is a claim obviously false.
— ucarr

Imagine you did none of these things. You can still experience immense adventure, or war. They have no logical connection to one another. THe claim is both faulty (in that you're not being consistent in what you're claiming) and utterly absurd, in that you are claiming there are two motivations for all behaviour. Patently ridiculous. — AmadeusD

Totally agree. You saved me the trouble of saying this. Problematic assumptions are not good for philosophical enquiry.

There is a great danger in infantilizing our young, and in idealizing ignorance as a state of bliss.
Children are capable of understanding, learning and doing far more than we allow them to. — Vera Mont

Totally agree. I recall as a young child desperately wanting not to be innocent/ignorant because I wanted to engage with the world more fully.

So, would you consider the proper way of doing philosophy mostly conceived as with the analytic school, as philosophy proper or are we still struggling with how philosophy should be done? — Shawn

While I might agree that there can be wrong ways to do things, I can't see how philosophy can have a 'correct' way. It sounds too prescriptive and unimaginative. Zealots generally think it's their way or the highway.

Can't bring myself to think anyone is doing philosophy 'properly' but I can bring myself to think some do it 'improperly — AmadeusD

Indeed. :up:

Given anti-foundationalism, would some forms of postmodernism amount to logical nihilism?

But how can logical nihilism be supported by rational inference when it calls the basis of rational inference into question? If there are no unconditional facts to fall back on, is it not just meaningless verbiage? — Wayfarer

A performative contradiction?

Strange how gang members or criminals in the US have a thing for such people preying on the weak. — Shawn

Criminal codes like these are multicultural and well understood. They are only strange the way much human behavior is strange.

Again, I assumed that parents know or are responsible for maintaining the state of childhood called 'innocence'. — Shawn

I never saw it this way. My daughter is now 28.

But sure, you protect, where you can, children from safety hazards and from exposure to ideas/images that may harm them. But this is massively inexact and some exposure is unavoidable in the modern world. The key is to not overthink it and be one of those fabled 'helicopter' parents. The real job here is to help them make sense of things, not censor them.

When I think back to my own childhood, I consider innocence to be combination of ignorance, inexperience, naivety and inchoateness. I do not associate it with 'purity' as I tend to think of this word (when applied to humans) as having a Christian association - as in purity culture. As a secularist, I see no use for such a frame.