Incidentally I've just been listening again to a (long!) online debate between Vervaeke and Kastrup. It's reasonably congenial, although Vervaeke throws up many objections to Kastrup's idealism. — Quixodian

I'll check it out.

— Does Reason Know what it is Missing? Stanley Fish, NY Times — Quixodian

I've often enjoyed Stanley Fish - he's provocative and witty.

Anyway, Vervaeke's main concern is 'awakening from the meaning crisis' - that Western culture is undergoing a crisis of meaning, which manifests in a huge number of ways, rooted in the 'scientistic' view that the Universe is basically devoid of meaning. — Quixodian

Indeed and this has been a preoccupation of 'public intellectuals' for decades, from Aleister Crowley to Alan Watts. Carl Jung ran a similar project.

Australian academic John Carroll wrote a vicious tirade against humanism back in 1993 - Humanism: The Wreck of Western Culture. His message was similar. It started me thinking about those themes.

I suspect there has been some kind of meaning crisis throughout human history. But since the project of modernism has been to foster independent thinking and living as a reaction against the inflexible strictures of religious orthodoxy and the bigotries this has generally entailed, it's no wonder that people today are spoiled for choice and many feel adrift. Certainty has gone and society seems atomized - I find this exciting, but many fear it.

So, in this thread I am interested in exploring and considering this in relation to the understanding of the Christian story. How was Christianity constructed and how may it be deconstructed, especially in relation to the quest of philosophy. — Jack Cummins

I guess you may be asking in essence how do the teachings of Jesus stack up against other ethical systems in philosophy. We don't really know what the historical figure (assuming he existed in some form) Yeshua taught, but we do have old books - translations of copies of translations of copies, written anonymously many years, decades after the events. I'm not sure any definitive conclusion is possible.

How do you see Christianity as part of philosophy (are you talking about cultural Christianity and the influences of Stoicism and neo-Platonist thinking) or are you being less ambitious? There are many types of Christianity today and doctrines and beliefs are a question of interpretation and personal preferences. How are you proposing anyone can get to what it all really means?

I've watched a few of his talks and lectures. Interesting material. I'm curious about transjectivity (transcending categories of subjective and objective through co-creation/relatedness). There seems to be a bit of a wave of this material about - an attempt at rebuilding a discourse on meaning from the wreckage of humanism/scientism/materialism towards transcendental matters. Is Vervaeke a Platonist? I forget. I'm not sufficiently immersed in any of the important literature to get all that much from these on line sages but Vervaeke is an improvement on fellow Canadian Jordan B Peterson, who (and I may be wrong here) often seems to attempt a similar project, a type of restorative transcendentalism.

Thanks.

Ok but I'm not understanding how this relates to arts the master distains. What is an example of such an art?

One half of the Hegelian view is that the servant learns about power through becoming accomplished in arts the master disdains. — Paine

Intriguing. What is learned about power through this? Can you expand a little?

So, the thinker is assumed but the idea of thinking isn’t? — ItIsWhatItIs

No. I already made this point. Both are assumed.

Doesn’t the fact that those people think that presuppose that they’ve already determined themselves as thinkers in contrast to others? If not, how could they think that they were getting thoughts from someone else, i.e., distinguish between a sender & a receiver mind (so to speak)? — ItIsWhatItIs

The salient point is that there may not a straight forward 'I am' as the Cogito suggests. The experience of thought insertion leads some folk to doubt that they are a self and that their thinking may not be their own.

Aren't there problems with the cogito? Assuming that there is an 'I' doing the thinking. And what exactly is it we know about thinking?
— Tom Storm

What makes something an “assumption,” according to you? — ItIsWhatItIs

It's not about what I think assumption means. The idea of thinking assumes there is a thinker - that's essentially what the cogito says, right? "I" being the thinker ('therefore I am'). Here's one issue; I have known many people who experience thoughts who are convinced those thoughts are coming from someone else. How do we determine that any thinking you experience is yours, that there is a you, an 'I am'? In relation to "I think therefore I am' Nietzsche also argued that there is an assumption being made that there is thinking and that I know what thinking is.

Interesting. I haven't seen a Nolan film I've much likened to be honest - I find them contrived, dreary and portentous. But I thought it was just me. Friends have seen 'Oppy' and really liked it.

Besides the cogito, what absolute knowledge do we have? — Cidat

Aren't there problems with the cogito? Assuming that there is an 'I' doing the thinking. And what exactly is it we know about thinking?

I worked for many years with people experiencing schizophrenia, many of whom have thoughts they can't explain and that they believe not to be their thoughts. Thought insertion is a fairly common phenomenon.

The target here is not you, but the notion that what language is for is "mapping" the world. We do far more than just that. As if a map were the same as a bushwalk. — Banno

Maybe that's my fault for the tentative title of my OP. I wasn't sure at the time how else to put my question, which I guess amounts to trying to understand a little of what philosophy has posited about the relationship language has to the world. I didn't have a map in mind, that was just the word I typed when I posed the question.

Cups, whether observed or not, are a part of our experience. Not knowing of "things" whether or not they are physical "in themselves" is really not an epistemic matter, but a semantic one: our talk about things and their attributes is relevant only within the context of human experience. To assert a metaphysics, whether materialist, physicalist, idealist or anti-realist of what is outside of human experience is to speak inaptly, and that is what I meant by "we don't know". — Janus

Nice. I was about to put up something along these lines myself - about the semantic nature of this discussion and the scope of the word 'reality'.

My tentative conclusion is that there is a reality available to humans which we seem to share and actions taken in it may have significant consequences (war, climate change, death, etc). But we are unable to step outside this reality, even if there are reasons to believe that it is contingent and partial. (can you improve on this frame?)

I think @Banno might ask us do we have any good reason to posit a reality outside of our experience? Even using the word reality is problematic. I suspect 'lifeworld' is better but if one is not a fan of phenomenology this too might be problematic.

I think idealism would have something to say about the reality of the cupboard too.

Have you heard any arguments for antirealism that you think are more persuasive than others?

What do you think, ↪Tom Storm? Is the cup still physical when unobserved? Does it still have a handle? — Banno

I take it as a given that the cup and handle still exist when we don't see them.

:up:

Interesting material. I have read a little George Lakoff who also talks about embodied cognition. It certainly resonates with me.

“...there is no real person whose embodiment plays no role in meaning, whose meaning is purely objective and defined by the external world, and whose language can fit the external world with no significant role played by mind, brain, or body. Because our conceptual systems grow out of our bodies, meaning is grounded in and through our bodies. Because a vast range of our concepts are metaphorical, meaning is not entirely literal and the classical correspondence theory of truth is false.”

― George Lakoff, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought

What do you consider to be the best 2 Murakami books?

The world our language does map onto is the cognitively, linguistically modeled intersubjectively shared world we refer to as "the everyday world" which includes everything we know, including science. — Janus

:up:

If we understand metaphysics to be confined by phenomenology, as Heidegger does, t — Janus

Can you just clarify what you mean by 'confined by' here?

if we think of metaphysics as dealing with the precognitive "world", then I think it is a fact that we have no ability to communicate successfully about metaphysics. — Janus

Hmmm...

Any talk or claim about the precognitive "world" is literally senseless. — Janus

I can see this.

So, we know what we mean when we say that the world we share is a physical world, because we all experience the tangibility and measurability of that world, the tangibility and measurability which just are the characteristics that our notion of physicality consists, and is grounded, in. It seems to me that we do not know what we mean if we claim that the everyday world is mental, because that is simply not a part of our basic common experience. — Janus

This seems to be a rich source for further exploration. I like that you describe the physical world as a grounding characteristic that has meaning to us but is not necessarily the truth about a reality 'outside' of this experience.

The idea we do not know what we mean if we claim that - the everyday world is mental, because that is simply not a part of our basic common experience - is interesting. Does this mean to you that we cannot effectively describe models of idealism because we have no way of doing so outside of, perhaps, some kind of mystical experience?

Suppose we agree that the sentence “The cup has a handle” is true. Put the cup in a cupboard. Does it still have a handle? A realist might say that it either does or it doesn’t, and perhaps add that since we have no reason to suppose otherwise, the unobserved cup on the cupboard still has a handle and the sentence is true. An idealists might in contrast say that the cup only has a handle in relation to some language construct, and that somehow as a result we cannot or at least ought not commit to the sentence being either true or false; instead it has some alter value, perhaps “unknown” or “neutral” or whatever. — Banno

Yes, this example makes sense. And we can get marooned by talk about which things exit when no one is there to see or hear. To some extent where you land on this seems to depend on the frame you want to use or how you interpret language. I can already hear the phenomenological talk about a cup only existing as such if we share an intersubjective community of agreement involving some anticipatory relationship with the object we can understand contextually as a cup, subject to a specific purpose - or something like this...

Some of this might be rich territory, but as a minimalist, with only so many years left to live, I don't think I can use this type of understanding.

Food for thought.

Our differences are perhaps of greater interest than our agreements, and so tend to grab our attention. But the things on which we agree overwhelm those disagreements. — Banno

Yep. Something many of us lose site of.

So I reject the suggestion that we live in different worlds. Rather it seems that we have different descriptions — Banno

Sure - I was using it metaphorically for this kind of distinction.

What might be worth considering is if these two views are actually incompatible. After all, not just any sentence will do. If the cat is on the mat, yet someone insists that the cat is not on the mat, then there are a few possibilities. They may be using "cat" or "mat " in some alternate way; or they may just be wrong. What we can say about the world is in some way restricted by the world - that is, there is a difference between true statements and false ones. — Banno

Nice - yes this seems critical.

But there is a difference between those statements that are true and those that are not. Hence, one way or anther, there is a shared world that underpins that difference. — Banno

Don't disagree but the phrase 'one way or another' here might be said to hide a multitude of sins, from Kant to phenomenology. But I hear you.

Thanks.

I'd say language, being our primary medium of communication, is not capable of getting "behind itself" in order to derive "a realist theory of language". — Janus

I think this is right.

Language makes communication of ideas about the world possible, as evidenced by ordinary life — Janus

Yes

to ask for a realist theory that could explain that would be to already presuppose that language is capable of communicating ideas about the world and be asking for some more fundamental guarantor of realism than our merely taking it to be so, and the obvious successful practical communicative applications of language we routinely experience. — Janus

So if we have no fundamental guarantor of realism, what does this say about our ability to communicate successfully about metaphysics?

I feel like this is a Kantian matter - language is like our phenomenal world.

So the initial OP stated the following problem:

While we may wish to reject the materialist realism of science as a form of metaphysical prejudice, we cannot do so in favour of an alternative metaphysical framework that also claims to describe an ultimate reality be it a new form of idealism, panpsychism, or some Hollywood influenced Matrix version of 'we are living in a simulated reality' without having a theory of language that explains how any of these realist claims are possible.

Yes, it was Hilary Lawson writing this, but Lawson is incidental, it's the point I'm curious about.

I was initially wondering if all our conversations about idealism, etc, can cease if we accept this point. It seemed like a cute idea worth investigating.

What is clear is that there is a diversity of opinion on the nature of language and reality. As someone with no expertise in this area, I can't comment other than to say language appears to be a useful tool that affords us extraordinary power.

A realist might argue that there is a clear and fixed correspondence between language and the objects, events, and concepts in the real world. I am not so sure what 'real world' means. It seems to me there are a series of real worlds, subject to experience and context. Julian Assange, for instance, surely cannot doubt that he has had his freedom taken away.

Can we meaningfully talk about idealism without a theory of language that explains how realist claims are possible?

I accept that the social constructivists are right when they argue that language is socially constructed and that meaning arises from shared agreements and conventions within a particular community. The meaning of words and expressions can vary depending on cultural and social contexts.

I also accept that cognitive linguists are right when they argue that language is closely connected to human cognition and conceptual systems. Meaning is seen as being shaped by cognitive processes, metaphors, and mental structures.

Language and its ability to generate meaning seems a kind of conjuring trick of metaphor, or a type of game where contingent rules or customs rather that 'reality' determine meaning.

You're steeped in philosophical tradition - ordinary language philosophy - what is your take home message?

So, how Does Language Map onto the World?

Was anything decided? — Banno

I don't think so. We seem to employ language to communicate fairly well on many matters - that's as deep as I'm going.

Thank you that's a very succinct and informative summary of the position you've been articulating.

Yes.

Trying to be whole is like trying to relax, it has the opposite effect — unenlightened

Yes, this I get. I've made the same point many times. :up:

Such a conflict can be resolved instantly by seeing the whole of it from the inside, which means by fully, consciously, being both sides of the conflict. If I am the conflict, I no longer experience the conflict. As long as I am being one side of the conflict, I experience the other side of the conflict as the problem. — unenlightened

Ok. Thanks for clarifying. I'm unclear how this would work in practice (how would one become both sides of a conflict?) but I kind of see the argument as a theoretical position. Interesting.

Understand. This is a tendentious subject. I just like having a sense of the scope of enquiry. :wink:

Interesting. Thank you.

We are human beings, capable of telling likely stories, but incapable of discerning the truth of such things. Timaeus proposes it is best to accept likely stories and not search for what is beyond the limits of our understanding. — Fooloso4

That's generally been my game plan. I think I'll try to find a thread on the Forms to see what's been said here.

For me it's the things we should fix but can't see that matter most - biases, values, patterns of thinking and behavior that seem normal to us but are harmful or self-sabotaging. They aren't unfixable but it sometimes takes a serious mishap or situational crisis to highlight the problem to us. It's then in crisis that we may decide to make vital changes. Sometimes the changes endure, sometimes they don't. Sometimes it's too late.

Rarely will ever anyone say, "Yes, I worked hard, but I had the right connections & genetics, and that's what really mattered", or anything along those lines. — Judaka

I saw an interview with a successful actor recently (I forget who) he said that his success was attributable to luck and knowing the right people. Most ambitious people work hard, but only some succeed. Many of the wealthy and successful people I've met have said similar things about the role of timing and good fortune. I suspect there are cultural differences in how people interpret their success.

Because the sage always confronts difficulties,
He never experiences them. — Lao Tzu

I rarely make sense of Lao Tzu. How does confronting a difficulty allow you not to experience it?

Not really for this thread, but I understand Plato's notion of the Forms evolved throughout his writings and that he was sometimes 'self-critical' - there are explorations of the problems of participation (Phaedo) and the issue of infinite regress, 'the Third Man Argument' (Parmenides). But does Plato stop thinking of the Forms as a source of truth and ultimate reality?

Bertrand Russell says in his chapter on Pythagoras that the numerological and rationalist tendency in Pythagoras and in the later Greek tradition is one of the things that differentiates it from Asiatic mysticism. — Wayfarer

Yes, this is where I was heading. Reason as pathway to higher awareness - very different. It does strike me that the notion of a reawakening of the wisdom we held before brith 'anamnesis' has within it some of the characteristics of enlightenment traditions.

Seems to me that the Greek approach was far more likely to give rise to later science than the Indian and Chinese traditions. — Wayfarer

Yes, this is also what I was wondering. Thanks.

There is no axis along which the idea of ‘higher’ makes any sense. — Wayfarer

We retain some of the ghostly afterlife of this through various notions of wisdom, I guess, but it's faint.

I frequently cite in support include Bertrand Russell's chapter on The World of Universals, the transcript of a lecture by Jacques Maritain The Cultural Impact of Empiricism, a book section about Augustine on Intelligible Objects, a book called The Theological Origins of Modernity by Michael Allen Gillespie. And this excerpt from a book on Thomistic philosophy which re-states, I think, the same argument Gerson refers to in respect of the immateriality of nous. — Wayfarer

A digression via some questions. Plato seems to regard nous as the highest form of understanding - the ability to contemplate the ultimate nature of reality via the Forms. Do you consider this to be approximately the same as enlightenment? Or something not quite as elevated? And is the idea that reasoning or intellectual intuition can help us to access a higher realm of knowledge - i.e., the reality behind the world of appearances? I'm interested in how this access is theorised to work. A rational process. I understand we can get there through anamnesis 'remembering' as we become reawakened through dialogue and learning.

What does having direct access to the Forms do for the perceiver?

I think the misunderstanding arises in no small part from amateur hedonists who, while trying to defend their theory, end up falling back into something which is so safe as to be merely descriptive. — Leontiskos

A good point. I think of them as untheorized hedonists - they are more likely to be using the term in an undifferentiated fashion to describe 'pleasure seeking' despite the consequences. Dissipated voluptuaries tend to have a limited shelf life.

.So maybe Epicurus is odd to us in part because we are surrounded by such lazy hedonists. :grin: — Leontiskos

What I've liked about Epicurus is the setting of achievable standards for hedonism - we do not really require all that much in order to be happy. It lends itself to a minimalist spin on the idea of contentment which contrasts well against the avaricious, materialistic acquisitiveness of consumer capitalism, even when pursued at an unambitious, middle-class magnitude.

The chances of any given person in the sex business getting a raw deal are pretty high. — BC

No question about that.

I don't really have answers to your questions. I do have a comment on labels. Where I work, we've assisted many sex workers (street sex to brothel sex) who frequently also had substance issues and untreated mental health concerns. They usually prefer the term sex worker to prostitute as it is held as more respectful and less stigmatising. Like most folk, I am in favour of using language carefully in a way that is more likely to build respect. I believe there is such a thing as 'sex work' and this therefore needs protections and appropriate, safe conditions for those who undertake it.

I have been criticized by more philosophical types that my philosophy is too dependent on introspection, which they find suspect. I've started at least five discussions that examine what different types of mental process feel like from the inside. — T Clark

That's really interesting. What things feel like on the inside has never captured my imagination. I'm not even sure what that would mean experientially for me. However I do have an intuitive grasp of my process. :wink: To some extent I know my limitations, my attractions and repulsions, my biases, my patterns, my omissions and my strengths.

Mostly when it comes to intuition or thinking I have instant access to a thought and it generally has no feeling attached to it or anything additional to the thought itself. Maybe this is why I don't care much for poetry and you do - it's in how we are wired to experience things. Or something like that. Do you think there is a connection between intuition and a love of poetry? Curiously, I am not very interested in stories or plots in books or films. I am more interested in language, atmosphere and character.

I only gave my religious leanings so that others may better understand what sort of animal they are dealing with. :smile: — Leontiskos

Probably for somewhere else on this site but I don't think a person's religious leanings help us understand anything about them. For the simple problem that no two people (even within a single faith) seem to beleive in the same kind of god or hold the same account of religion and morality. When someone says they are a Christian, for instance, they might be misogynist, homophobes, or inclusive flag waivers for LGBTQ rights.

Who knows? :wink: