What is metaphysics?
The question of why there is something rather than nothing was posed by Leibniz. Although his response was about God, we need not treat it as a theology question.
This is not a question usually answered by science because science does not address such questions. Sean Carroll, a physicist, has addressed the question, however.
Metaphysics is an active discipline these days as philosophers overcame the prejudice of the positivists that such questions are meaningless.
This is not a question usually answered by science because science does not address such questions. Sean Carroll, a physicist, has addressed the question, however.
Metaphysics is an active discipline these days as philosophers overcame the prejudice of the positivists that such questions are meaningless.
Comments (291)
https://philpapers.org/browse/metaphysics
"I believe, and so do you, that things could have been different in countless ways. Ordinary language permits the paraphrase: there are many ways things could have been besides the way they actually are. I believe that things could have been different in countless ways; I therefore believe in the existence of entities that might be called ‘ways things could have been.’ I prefer to call them ‘possible worlds.’ (1973a: 84)
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/david-lewis/
In mathematics, a dynamical system might proceed to evolve along alternate paths at points of bifurcation. But what happens in math may be mere fiction in the physical world.
The idea of the multiverse is what I think possible worlds refers to. There is no universe, just multiple universes.
:up: Nice!
The problem raised by subjectivity is similar, because the fact that anything we think of is conditioned by our subjectivity makes our thoughts dependent on the variability, unreliability of subjectivity.
In other words, the defect of metaphysics is its intention to reach a system of ideas that is expected to be stable, definitive, ultimate, objective, reliable, solid.
We can mean metaphysics in a more flexible and humble perspective, but in this case it seems to me that what we are doing is not philosophy, but science. When science makes its hypotheses, it doesn’t build them with the intention of reaching an end to research. On the contrary, science makes hypotheses as simple intruments to acquire better and better knowledge of the world, without any intention to stop.
So, I would say: if you suppose, for example, that the moon is a planet, just to see how this idea works in comparison to the results coming from observation through technical instruments, then “the moon is a planet” is a scientific hypothesis, which means, there is no intention to make it the ultimate, fundamental system of ideas about the moon.
If you say “the moon is a planet” with the intention to build an assertion that should resist to any criticism, any objection, any doubt, so that, if different conclusions come from observation, we should think that most probably observation is wrong, then you are trying to build metaphysics.
If we think that 2+2=4 is an eternal truth, indesctructible, unassailable, impossible to question, then you are thinking of it in a metaphysical way. As such, this kind of thought has the defect that not only tomorrow 2+2 might give a different result, but also our thoughts about it might change, because ideas are subject to time, change, becoming, as well as anything else.
This way, any attempt to build a system of ideas, with the intention to reach something stable, is metaphysics. So, even when I say that everything is subject to change, if I treat this assertion as a stable and permanent theory, I am doing metaphysics as well.
I do not think that is true.
And that is doing metaphysics.
Can you give an example? I mean, lots of philosophers publish papers on metaphysics and criticize each other.
Quoting Jackson
In my understanding, possible worlds are different from the multiverse. Possible worlds are metaphysical entities while the multiverse is, at least purportedly, science. It is also my understanding that neither possible worlds nor a multiverse associated with quantum mechanics are even theoretically observable. A multiverse associated with cosmic inflation may be.
A possible world is a logical structure, so a multiverse would qualify.
From what I've seen, multiverses are proposed as physically existent entities, not logical ones. If a parallel universe is not physically observable, one of three conditions apply 1) It is metaphysics and useful, 2) It is metaphysics and not useful, or 3) It is meaningless. In my understanding, multiverses associated with quantum mechanics are not even theoretically observable.
I don't agree. But I am not an expert on physics and cannot cite current research. That said, a parallel universe is not part of multiverse theory. I think of it this way. If we say there is one universe we have to explain why there is nothing which unifies that reference other than 'all that exists.'
You don't agree that multiverses are proposed as physically existent entities or you don't agree with my exposition on metaphysics?
Quoting Jackson
Are you saying that the universe/multiverse distinction is only one of language? I don't think that's what you're saying. Let's define "universe" as everything that is or previously was observable, at least in theory.
Right, I am saying that is an indeterminate reference.
As a scientist , one understands the meaning of ‘moon’and ‘planet’ in relation to an overarching theoretical orientation than offers a predictive astronomical account. One’s
technical instruments, how they are used to observe and measure, contribute to the production of the theoretical orientation itself. Even as ‘there is no intention to make it the ultimate, fundamental system of ideas about the moon”, the wider metaphysical assumptions informing the general aasumptions concerning the moon and its connection with astronomical theory is left unexamined by that science. No amount of openness to disconfirmation via evidence will by itself alter that overarching metaphysics to the extent the scientist is not aware of the fact that observation and disconfirming evidence are moves within the frame. Changing the frame is not simply a matter of being beholden to evidential results from
one’s measuring instruments, since those instruments are themselves expressions of the frame.
The aim of metaphysics is to go beyond physics, beyond science, to get some stable, unassailable truth, that must be impossible to reach by science. If it is possible to reach it by science, then it is subject to all the changes that science is able to bring, like new discoveries, new instruments, new evidence. As such, it is not metaphysics, it is science.
So, if we realize that “the moon is a planet” is something that can be proved or disproved by science, then it is not a metaphysical truth.
An example of truth not reachable by science is this one: the ultimate meaning of the world is to be an instrument to make humans happy. Or: the world was created by God. The purpose of these statements is to reach levels of knowledge that science is unable to reach. This way, metaphysicians feel that they have found a remedy to two problems of science: 1) what science says is changeable by new discoveries; as such, it is not stable, it has not the absolute reliability of eternal truths; 2) science is unable to give us any knowledge about transcendent things, like God, meaning of existence, spirit, interpretation of life.
Science can deal with metaphysical concepts, but when these concepts are dealt with by science, the aim of research about them is not to find anything stable: science has no interest in finding stable things; science has interest in making research based of measurable evidence. So, for example, science can be interested in dealing with the meaning of human existence, insofar as it is possible to find in this question some measurable elements, like, for example, statistics, history, geography. In this context, science is not interested in finding a meaning of existence that must be the ultimate, the definitive one.
After having clarified these things, we can go on by exploring how weak or strong metaphysics is.
That is just not true.
I am interested in seeing how it is not true, according to what philosophers.
What articles or books in metaphysics are you referring to?
Sounds reasonable to me. How about this?
“In seeking a comprehensive account of everything, metaphysics is continuous with science, going beyond particular scientific theories.”
(Metaphysics of science between metaphysics and science, Michael Esfeld)
Sorry, did not understand that. Why does metaphysics have to be about science?
You can have a look here, as an example.
I know this roils some, but Wiki is not a good source for philosophy.
Anything can be not good for anyone. Can you say any source that is good for you and shows that what I said is wrong?
Many scholars say Aristotle did not name his text "Metaphysics." Or that it simply referred to what he wrote after the Physics.
In the Metaphysics Aristotle describes the project as "first philosophy." Or, analysis of basic concepts.
Is there any metaphysics that does not offer a grounding of the sciences, if not explicitly then implicitly?
I asked you to name a book or article you read that is doing metaphysics in a way you do not approve.
Let us look at some examples.
I think we need to shake the traditional views of Parmenides and Heraclitus. This "being versus becoming" is a false one. Why should we presume that "being" means something opposed to "becoming"? This essentially equates being to permanence.
Beings exist. Beings change. Change -- becoming -- itself is a being. Not a "physical object," of course, but a process. Processes exist. Change exists. Thus, change is "in" being as much as permanence is "in" being.
It's a false dichotomy. Heraclitus and Parmenides are saying the same thing. Here I agree with Heidegger.
I was not aware metaphysics had to be about grounding science. Not a definition I would abide by.
Agree with that. Many confuse metaphysics with theology.
Yes, I’ve heard that. Given that the meaning of the term varies depending on which approaches in philosophy you favor, maybe the question here should be what would you like the definition of metaphysics to be.
As a postmodernist, I tend to think of metaphysics as synonymous with worldview, and worldviews are inclusive frames that address all aspects of culture , from the sciences to the arts to ethics and politics. What do you understand metaphysics to be?
My own understanding is that it addresses the question, What kind of thing is the world?
Does the universe have a beginning? Did it come from somewhere?
Metaphysics overlaps with epistemology--and aesthetics--so the clear delineation is not useful to make.
The positivists obsessed with telling us what we're not supposed to be able to think about. That legacy is still with us, though receding.
To be clear, I don't think metaphysics is about referring to how the world really is, but what we say about the world.
If you consider change as a kind of being, I think this is not really consistent, because, if you really want to be consistent with a perspective based on change, you must consider change also about your idea of change. In other words, if I say “everything changes”, I must admit that this very statement and its meaning must be included in the set of things subject to change.
If you think about change as a way of being, then you are assuming that, along the change, being remains being. But, if it remains being, then you are excluding it from change, you are excluding your statement from the field of things that change.
Heidegger was able to include change in the category of being because he actually modified the meaning of being: being in Heidegger is not absolute, but conditioned by time, by the human condition.
In this context, the meaning of “being” is itself exposed to change. This way Heidegger forced the meaning of “being” to something that actually means human condition, subject to time and death. In this context we cannot say that change is an expression of being, because being itself hasn’t any stable meaning. In other words, Heidegger wanted to keep his philosophy in the terminology of being, and the price for this was to force the meaning of being to something subject to the human condition. This forced him to have nothing to say at a certain point. I think that after Heidegger no other philosophers have reached the high level of his philosophy so far, but I think also that we can do better, we can take his research to better levels.
So, if I thought about my grandmother the other day, they'd say that is a physical process. To which I'd say, so what?
If all my thoughts are physical, that only accounts for necessary conditions. But the principle of sufficient reason says, why did you think about your grandmother rather than something else.
This sounds to me more like meta-science , a questioning approach that takes for granted the main methodological assumptions operating within the sciences of its day. It seekes only to organize , categorize and clarify within a given set of overarching normative conventions. This is different from what the major continental philosophers throughout history have done, which is overturn these accepted assumptions. For instance, the shift from hypothetical inductive to deductive method as we move from Bacon to Popper. In order to embrace this definition of metaphysics one has to first recognize that there is no fixed definition of what science does or how it does it. There are instead assumptions scientists share with the rest of their culture that informs what they think they are doing.
I guess. Science actually means very little to me in terms of how I live and what I believe.
And I have a undergraduate degree in math and read about quantum physics and cosmology. Interesting, but does not itself tell me much about the world.
What does tell you about the world?
experiments to prove it, yet he is confirmed by Einstein. This, to me, means that science is just a how things are explained, not what they are.
Almost anything. I know there is a physical world. I hardly think that explains reality.
Quoting Jackson
But do you think positing non-physical stuff will help?
Even Bertrand Russell admitted that the very definition of matter was incoherent.
I don't think he meant to posit the existence of non-physical stuff. Do you?
I did not say there is non-physical stuff. I said the very concept of the physical is incoherent.
"All that physics gives us is certain equations giving abstract properties of their changes. But as to what it is that changes, and what it changes from and to—as to this, physics is silent. (Russell 1959: 18)"
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/russellian-monism/
Ask yourself this: is change a "thing" of any kind? I'd say "Yes, of course -- it's at least a concept, a word, etc." So it is a being -- it is "something." It has existence. It "is."
This is, as far as I can tell, not very controversial.
What would be the alternative? Is change nothing?
Quoting Angelo Cannata
I don't see how this is relevant. I'm not denying that things change, nor did I say anything about a "perspective of change." The only point was that change -- whatever it is -- is, at bottom, "something." It's not nothing. Whether a physical process or a word or a thought or concept or an abstraction, it's something. Thus, it's a being.
The sentence "everything changes" is itself subject to change -- so what?
Quoting Angelo Cannata
I didn't say change was a "way of being," I said that it was a being. "Being remains being," or "being is excluded from change" is, again, equating "being" with permanence. That's exactly what I'm arguing against. Being is not permanence and it is not change. Being is not "a" being at all.
So I'm not excluding being from change, and I'm not equating being with change.
Quoting Angelo Cannata
I wouldn't put it that way. To say being is "conditioned by time" is meaningless to me. Rather, my understanding of Heidegger is this: human beings are temporal beings, and when they interpret being they do so with time as their standpoint. They interpret being in terms of time. Hence why the distinction between "being and becoming" is so ancient. Change itself assumes time. No time, no change.
Quoting Angelo Cannata
Again, I don't agree with your formulation. The meaning of being as "something that actually means the human condition" doesn't ring true to me, except in the sense that it can be interpreted as what I said above -- that humans interpret being (and beings) in terms of time, because (at least in Heidegger's analysis) we "are" time (or, in his vocabulary, "temporality").
Regardless, being doesn't have a stable meaning -- true. There are many meanings and interpretations. But the same is true for change. The point, though, that change is "something" -- which is all I'm claiming -- and is thus a thing, and thus a being, etc., seems fairly obvious.
Why I started this thread, to have a discussion.
My recommendation: read Heidegger's "Introduction to Metaphysics."
I read it. I also read Being and Time cover to cover in grad school. Quite familiar.
If you consider “being” as "something”, but not permanent, how are you able to give it a name, which is, the word “being”? It seems to me that we can use names only if we consider that something remains unchanged over time. For example, if what I call “sky” today is a “horse” tomorrow, it is completely impossible to me to give it a name, I cannot even figure what I am thinking about. But you call it “being”, which means that, in this something that you call “being”, something remains the same over time, so that today and tomorrow you can still call it “being”. This seems to me that actually you are not conceiving “being” as something really completely changing, really not permanent.
Ontology comes from the Greek, ontos. When Aristotle is translated as talking about being, or beings, he really just means, "things." Nothing fancy, just things, ontos.
Sure. A physicalist has no objection to that. Metaphysics as the philosophy of physics.
But your example was
Quoting Jackson
Which appears to argue for the non-physics of mind.
The multiverse is new age pseudo science on the same level as the god of the gaps to explain unexplained phenomena. "Purportedly" is a sophistry way to put it.
:up:
Quoting Angelo Cannata
Being is not a being.
But beyond that -- if what you say is true, and we cannot assign a name to anything that changes -- then we can't name anything, including change itself.
Quoting Angelo Cannata
There are many words, in many languages, that express the same concepts. In fact, we know very well that using codes, like binary code, can convey all kinds of information. So if tomorrow we call the sun "horse," it won't change that bright ball in the sky.
I repeat myself: being is not permanence, and it's not change. I never made either claim. It's not a being, and it's not a property. It's not what's left over when you take everything else away, for example. It's not like water or matter -- which can change forms, etc.
Quoting Angelo Cannata
I never said being was "completely changing," I said we should not equate being with permanence. I also said, at least twice now, that being is also not therefore "becoming." Permanence and impermanence is not what "being" means. Take "being" to mean "existence," if that's more helpful. That gets closer to what I mean. We wouldn't say "existence" is an object or a property -- we wouldn't say existence is "change" or "permanence."
I think the quest was for 'the immortal' - that which is not subject to death and decay. And the motive for that is not hard to discern, as the human condition is blighted by awareness that all that we treasure will perish. The underlying motivation of Parmnides was (as one of the books about him is subtitled) to 'think like a God' - to attain a realm of being which is beyond the vicissitudes.
I do not say mind is physical or non-physical. That is a dualism I do not subscribe to.
Generally I appreciate your perspective, but I don't think that is a valid line of argument. The reason the ancients valued logical and arithmetical truths was precisely because they are not subject to time, change and becoming. Furthermore, if you think it through, it is impossible to envisage a world where there are no necessary facts. So basically, what you're positing here is: chuck out philosophy entirely. Get rid of it. Your perogative, of course - but this is a philosophy forum.
I disagree.
Quoting Haglund
I used that word specifically to express my skepticism.
Quoting Haglund
CalTech (now Johns Hopkins) physicist Sean Carroll believes in the multiverse. It is not fake science.
Several traditions of metaphysics start from the first-person subject perspective instead of the third-person "objective" perspective. The most prominent of which are among Husserl's Phenomenonology which regarded the study of phenomena as a science and its first philosophy, and perhaps Kitar? Nishida along with many, many others.
Moreover, it should be made clear that the philosophy of mind in itself, whether it was primary or peripheral, in various systems of metaphysics, was historically considered "specialized metaphysics" as opposed to "general metaphysics," concerned with the ontos in general.
This is the first part of why subjectivity is not ignored. As for time, with all respect intended, you could not have been more incorrect. Time is one of the more important topics in metaphysics, and has been investigated in particular among Heidegger's Being and Time, McTaggart's Unreality of Time and most importantly the tradition of process philosophy itself with Whitehead and others who focus on time as a central notion with static being as accident to the actual entities.
So I'm of the opinion this is no critique of metaphysics.
That's fine by me. If you consider it science, feel free. I think it's a wild unfounded fantasy on equal footing with a god of the gaps. A fantasy inspired by lack of a better theory. There is no evidence for many or parallel worlds.
Because he uses it it's no fake science? Scientists use fantasies too. There is no evidence to support many worlds.
Not a fantasy for him. Empirical.
Cosmic inflation is indirect evidence.
It's a fantasy of the gaps. Where is his evidence?
Sean Carroll:
"Quantum mechanics says that an electron can be in a superposition of all possible locations. There’s no such thing as the position of an electron. But when you observe the electron, you see it in one location. This is the fundamental mystery of quantum mechanics. Its description when no one is looking is different from what you see.
Many Worlds says, why don’t we just treat you, the observer, as your own quantum mechanical system? You’re made of quantum mechanical particles also. So what happens when you, the observer, looks for the electron? The electron starts in a superposition of many possible locations. When you look, you evolve into a combined system of you and the electron in a superposition. The superposition consists of the electron being here and you seeing it here, plus the electron being there and you seeing it there, and so on. Hugh Everett’s brilliant move was to say that the different parts of the superposition really exist. It’s just that they’re in separate, non-interacting worlds."
https://www.wired.com/story/sean-carroll-thinks-we-all-exist-on-multiple-worlds/
I don't know what you mean by "gaps."
So you can say that the universe is indirect evidence of God. Cosmic inflation is no indirect evidence BTW. But this is not the place to go into technicalities.
Like in god of the gaps. A fantasy used to explain something you haven't a good explanation for yet.
No, just the opposite.
Then where is the direct evidence? I can just as well state that our universe inflated in a stationary 4D space with the right properties.
Okay.
You see? Also cosmologists use things there is no evidence for. Like theists do.
Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm-manyworlds/
I am not a scientist. But the entry in the SEP discusses it in more detail. Point is, it is not a "fantasy."
The MWI no fantasy...? Then where is the evidence? Maybe there are hidden variables...
But feel free to believe it! If you feel good with it...
"Quantum mechanics says that an electron can be in a superposition of all possible locations. There’s no such thing as the position of an electron. But when you observe the electron, you see it in one location. This is the fundamental mystery of quantum mechanics. Its description when no one is looking is different from what you see."
That last sentence is his metaphysics. According to a different metaphysics (or interpretation) the electron always has a well-defined place and momentum. The electron has an accompanying pilot wave. In Copenhagen it was once decided though (to the dislike of Einstein) that the more parsimonous path of chance should be followed. Had they decided to take the pilot wave course, then the QM books wouldn't have looked much different but there would be no talk about interpretation. MWI would probably not have been invented. In principle experiment can decide if they're there.
I didn't say that we just call it differently. That would not be a real change. I said "is": if what we today call "sky" tomorrow stops being sky, but rather is really, objectively, as a fact, a "horse", I cannot give it a name, it is impossible to give it a name.
We assign names because we see that, together with elements that change, there are elements that don't. If all elements of an object change, we cannot give it a name, it is impossible.
This is your opinion, your philosophy, other philosophers don't think so.
My description of metaphysics is not history of philosophy: since there are so many concepts about metaphysics, I already hinted that the title of this thread is not so correct: it is impossible to answer, because of the plurality of concepts about it, unless you want just to describe a history of how metaphysics has been conceived over time. My description of metaphysics is a choice to build a philosophy of metaphysics that opens perspectives of research, rather than just describing passively how the different philosophers have conceived it.
That bright ball in the sky is a ball in the sky only when adopting a certain perspective. Changing the perspective changes the perception and thing perceived. To one person I am a kind and gentle person, while in the eyes of someone else I'm an arrogant bastard. Am I still the same in both cases?
You are talking about perspectives on objects that are actually the same over time. I am talking about things that change, really change and are not anymore what they were before. If tomorrow the sky stops being the sky, we have no more sky, the sky doesn't exist anymore, the sky has become a horse, a real horse: how can you give a name to it?
That's the ancient problem of change. Can a vase change into spoon? Is the spoon then a transformed vase?
That's why I think it is wrong considering change as being.
Doesn't the very word, being, imply change? Can you be without change? Is being changing, or changing being? Or neither? Is change an a priori for being or becoming? Is the real state of being static, like a block universe? Fairy circles in the desert are still not explained scientifically, and neither is the sticking of gauge blocks after wring them together...
Whilst simultaneously appreciating the appalling nature of such thought systems, perhaps?
Can't we think about being without the limitations of the human condition? A transcendental state can set us free from these limitations. The static whole of the transient, transgressive, changing, differentiating, or becoming nature of subjective being can be experienced as a solid, static, transcendental state of eternal, infinite, and objective, absolute essence, dissolving all distinctions, boundaries, perspective, and diversity in still unity.
Some things never change. An elementary particle stays an elementary particle eternally. Only it's relation to other particles change.
Not. You're talking about atoms, 'indivisible particles', but there are none. Nowadays a particle is an excitation of a field.
Quoting Tom Storm
Didn't think it worth pursuing, again.
I talk about what the field, a mental construct, is able to operate in. Particle states. There are not really operators in nature promoting particles from virtual to real, or changing their momenta. All there is are particles, virtual or real, interacting by coupling to virtual particles. The number of virtual particles and real particles is constant.
What you said can be criticized two ways, depending if you are talking from a scientific or a metaphisical perspective.
From the scientific perspective, assuming that what you said is true: tomorrow a scientific discovery might find evidence that what you said is wrong.
From the metaphysical perspective: as such, it is a mental costruction, not more valid than other mental constructions.
Particles a mental construction? They are out there, and in there, for that matter...
This message as well can be criticized from both perspectives.
In science: you can give evidence that they are there, but science doesn’t care if tomorrow something different will be discovered: science is based on measurements, discoveries, hypotheses, it doesn’t have any interest in finding things that must be unchangeable.
In metaphysics: you have no way to give proof that they aren’t a dream, an illusion; whatever we do can be a dream; we can’t even say that we know what a dream is. We can’t state anything for sure, we can only build mental constructions and even what I’m saying can be criticized the same way, making uncertainty endlessly more and more extended.
No, this is exactly what we cannot do. We must respect the fact that thinking about anything, is, by its very nature something limited by the human condition. So it is absolutely impossible to "think about being without the limitations of the human condition". "Thinking" is fundamentally limited by the human condition therefore these limitations inhere within the thinking. So if we want to take the perspective of some sort of disembodied being, we are not even talking about "thinking" anymore, nor would this disembodied being be properly called an "intellect", as "intellect" is attributed to a thinking human being. We can't even properly call it a "being"
That's why this whole approach is fundamentally flawed. The appropriate approach is to recognize the reality of our limitations, attempt to understand them and determine how they influence our thinking. So from the Kantian perspective for example, we should see that these fundamental limitations are described as the a priori intuitions of space and time. These base intuitions inform the way that we see and apprehend things, in a way which we cannot avoid. When we come to understand this basic reality, we can move beyond these intuitions, to a deeper level, to see how these intuitions themselves, might be altered toward something more real, by locating the basic limitations at an even deeper level.
Just wonderin’.....if a base a priori intuition informs unavoidably, how might it be altered? Wouldn’t experiential consistency be questionable?
Do you say that any things are non-physical?
What I mean is to let go thinking, perspectives, interpretations, knowledge, views, angles, POV's, etc. all together. To transcends the boundaries, limits, stipulations, concepts, conditions, the brain and body, or physical reality, to step step over or out of them and roam in the no one's land of the pure divine creation, into pure pristine and divine essence. To be the static and eternal infinity created by the gods in their efforts.
Do you say that life is a dream? If so then I dont agree. Most of the time I can tell if I'm awake. It's true though that while dreaming you often don't know that you're dreaming until you wake up.
I would even say that we are for sure in a dream, we are a brain in vat for sure, simply because whatever we think about is filtered by our brain. The vat is our brain itself.
We need also not to forget that even the idea of being in a dream is questionable, otherwise we would have the reassuring certainty that we are in a dream. But we don’t even know what a dream is, what reality is, what “being” means, we don’t know anything and even this not knowing anything is completely uncertain. In this context, I disagree with Socrate’s assertion “I know that I don't know”: we don’t know the meaning of knowing, nor of not knowing. We use a lot of words and concepts just because we feel it possible, we like it, but we need to be humble about whatever we think.
I disagree.
Sure.
You aren’t listening.
Change is something. Therefore change “is.” Is-ness is being.
Unless you’re claiming change is nothing— which is an absurdity— then there’s no disagreement.
“Being” is not permanence.
For example?
Saying “change is something” is a human conceptualization, which is, metaphisics. As such, it is exposed to criticism. It is humanly impossible to guarantee that our reasonings are true and correct: we never know if tomorrow we might discover an error in our reasoning. So, you have no way to guarantee that your statement “change is something” is true or correct; this applies all the same to the consequence that you think you can get: “therefore change is”.
Most of our life has nothing to do with physicality. Like our ambitions, hopes, memories, relations to friends.
I don't agree with your definition of metaphysics that it only refers to absolute and unchanging objects.
Your good right! If you want to take a fantasy as explanation, feel free!
Thesis: Gods created spacetime and particles.
Observation: There are particles and spacetime
Thesis proven
If an object is changing, that change must be measurable, then it belongs to the realm of science. May be it is not measurable just because we have not powerful enough instruments, but in that case it still belongs to science, if it is just a problem of powerful instruments. If it is not measurable because it belongs to a realm different from science, then how did you realize that it is changing?
In other words, the question that your message gives rise to is: what is then the difference between science and metaphysics?
I don't see any relation between science and metaphysics. Or, science and aesthetics. Or, science and ethics.
No one is talking about God on this thread. At least not me. Metaphysics need not even address the issue of God existing or not existing.
Gods are the ultimate metaphysics. The MWI or eternal inflation fantasies pale in comparison, though gods are no fantasy, while eternal inflation and MWI are.
Not sure I understood. Your belief in God is true but physicists talking about a multiverse is fantasy?
Almost. God is true, the models are a fantasy, explaining nothing about the nature of quantum mechanics or inflation. The are metaphysical fantasies to bridge a gap in knowledge which themselves are not knowledge with observable features. No one has seen a parallel world or eternally inflating space, which is a totally ridiculous assumption.
Okay. I do not agree with anything you said.
I don't disagree with initial inflation. I disagree with the eternal variant.
Be my guest!
Do you mean you have seen parallel worlds?
I never mentioned parallel worlds.
Didn't you cite Sean Carroll?
Yes.
And that was in relation to the MWI?
Yes.
Well, aren't there parallel worlds in the MWI?
It's not a question of what you and I agree with, it is what the current state of knowledge in cosmology indicates. Again, I'm not saying it's perfect, but it is evidence. Maybe you'll turn out to be right, but for now, it's reasonable for me use the current state of knowledge as evidence.
Not that I am aware of.
Also, it is my understanding that astronomers are currently looking for evidence of other universes associated with inflation.
Like I said, feel free what you think. There is no evidence that we are a pocket in an eternally inflating fantasy. If you are okay with that, knock yourself out!
I read that too. The popular press...
There are even infinite many worlds in MWI. Right now you should be branching into a multitude of them.
Okay.
So, can you prove they are there? No.
I have provided evidence. You haven't refuted it. You haven't even responded to the substance of my argument. Your only response is "That's fantasy." That's not an argument.
No need to respond. I'm done with this.
Prove what are there?
Your assessment is accurate.
The many worlds.
I am fine with you not subscribing to it.
That's the usual reaction of people who don't like to admit defeat.
Like I am with you not believing in god. But where is the evidence of these many worlds?
Rude. As has been said, we are done.
You take my comment seriously? About being defeated. You do exactly the same as theists. Claiming without evidence.
Not really. To recognize anything whatsoever is not metaphysics. We see the world in terms of entities in that world. Beings. That’s simply consciousness, awareness, perception, experience, etc.
We can call it a conceptualization…but in that case everything is conceptualized. Not just a particular being, like change, but any being whatsoever. The world then becomes “conceptualized.” And here we’re back to an idealism.
Quoting Angelo Cannata
But I’m not referring to “reasoning.”
I don’t understand what you’re arguing against — that things exist at all? Or that change is not a thing?
If neither, then fine — because both are absurdities. But it seems as if there’s disagreement somehow…yet if you truly understand what I’m saying, it’s not at all controversial. It’s essentially truism:
1) there is.
2) There is something.
3) Change is something.
Where does the disagreement lie?
Quoting Angelo Cannata
That there is something is a given, prior to (and assumed before) truth or falsity in the sense you’re using (viz., propositional logic).
The notion of truth you’re using, yes any statement whatsoever can be analyzed as true in terms of “correctness,” and so can be doubted. We can doubt the existence of everything we think and experience— as Descartes famously did. This already presupposes an ontology, a notion of truth, a subject/object distinction, and a notion of correctness.
It’s a ploy often used when one wants to get out of an otherwise weak argument or misunderstanding. Better to attempt to undermine truth, fact, and reality rather than “lose.” It’s an unhealthy habit— I’ve done it myself. Worth losing.
I think experiential consistency is questionable. That's why we have difference of intuitions, differences of preference, and so on. These are the peculiarities of the individual. We can see that in standardized moral training, and standardized education in general, we attempt to create consistency. I believe this tendency to produce conformity is itself deeply intuitive. It's the reason why evolving living beings exist as distinct species, rather than just a whole bunch of different varieties.
This is exactly the problem of metaphysics: how can you say that something is a given, since, in order to say it, you need to use your brain?
Your position sounds similar to the ancient philosopher Cratylus, "you cannot step in the same river once."
No— in order to say it, or think it, you have to be. Anything we think, say, feel, or do presupposes existence.
I’ll repeat: unless change is nothing, it “has” being.
So again:
Quoting Xtrix
If you’re arguing that nothing exists— or knowledge of any kind, or statements of any kind are impossible, which is what it sounds like, then that’s your own business. I can’t argue with absurdities.
If change is a thing, it’s part of existence. This is logic— this is truism.
Makes sense to me. Not sure what Angelo is objecting to.
I’m not sure either, frankly.
Sure you can. But not twice. :roll:
It seems pretty clear to me. He says that in order to say anything is given you have to use your brain to say it's given. So the given is always a mental construction. Which overlooks the fact that there is a connection between the mental construction and the given. There are two mental constructions for change. It's us changing along a static reality, our particles moving along thee static pre-established solid iron worldlines in spacetime, or there is a dynamic reality of which we are part.
Grant, for the moment, that the notion of the a priori base intuitions space and time is the case for the way we see and apprehend things, which is, after all, just the same as experience itself. It follows necessarily that if the base intuitions might be altered, the way things are seen and apprehended must also be altered. If the way things are seen and apprehended change, the experience of those things must change. If the experience of things change, and I have experience of a thing at one time and place, what am I to experience in another time and place, when presented with exactly the same thing? And if it is the case I am not presented with exactly the same thing because the base intuitions might be altered, then how am I to explain, e.g., my experience of a pencil that is subsequently, merely as a condition by some other time and place, experienced as something not a pencil?
———-
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
But it isn’t; the human intelligence is experientially consistent. For any individual, a pencil apprehended today is apprehended as a pencil tomorrow, all else being given. It must be that either the Kantian notions of a priori intuitions as the unavoidable way we see and apprehend things is false, or, such notion is the case but rather, the idea that alteration of those intuitions into something deeper and more real, is false.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
You and I will have a difference of intuitions upon being presented with things not in common between us, yes. But that is not because we have deeper levels of our basic intuitions of space and time, but because we have not been presented with the same object. This merely represents a difference in intuitive quantity, not an altered deeper level of quality.
Yes, there are indeed peculiarities of the individual, but these are judgements made on things, as a consequence of intuitions of them. It still must be considered, how it is that you and I, and humanity in general, no matter the particular word used to represent it, see and apprehend this one thing, say, a pencil, and agree that it is an experience common to all of us. That cannot be the case if the basic conditions common to all humans, those being intuition of space and time, are susceptible to alteration toward something more real, or reducible to a deeper level. In other words, if your base intuitions were altered to a deeper level but mine were not, what would each of us see and apprehend upon perception of any one object?
I’m surprised that you, of most participants herein, would advocate the alteration to a deeper level, of that which is already given as a basic foundational conception. To suggest the reduction of a fundamental is self-contradictory, is it not? Furthermore, and possibly even more surprising, is what could space or time be altered to, such that there is a deeper level to them?
Then, too, if basic a priori intuitions are given as limits for seeing and apprehending things, which does seem to be the case, then to alter them to a deeper level implies the possibility for removing such limitations, which is also self-contradictory, insofar as we are certainly limited.
All that to say this: space and time do set the limits to what we see and apprehend, but we do not have the capacity to move beyond them, they are not alterable to deeper levels, and we cannot make them more real than they already are.
Still....I’d be interested in an exposition that suggests otherwise, or that I misunderstood what you meant.
Exactly: this is the radical problem of metaphysics: it doesn’t draw the consequences of its own statements, it doesn’t follow its own methods, its own procedures, preferring, instead, to stop in the middle of the reasoning. This is what happens:
1) metaphysics make statements that are universal, or we can say “a priori”, such as
Quoting Xtrix
2) Since they are a priori, universal, they must be able to take into account everything, they must be able to face any other consideration.
3) Taking into account everything means taking into account also the consideration that all the statements have been made by using a brain, a human mind, we can call it “subjectivity”.
4) The consequence of taking into account the subjectivity that has been inevitably involved to produce the statements is that the statements cease to be universal, because they are implicated in the non universality of subjectivity.
5) The conclusion is that kind of reasoning:
In other words: if something is universal, then it is not universal.
Even in shorter way: if being is, then it is not.
This is the radical contradiction that metaphysics tries to avoid, because it is too disturbing, too uncomfortable, destabilizing, not reassuring at all.
I have just described in a structured way what has already been noticed by Heidegger, nothing new.
But he went on with the idea of changing the meaning of metaphysics, keeping himself in the mental frame of “being” and forcing the meaning of “being” into a human context, implicated in time and death, while instead I, like postmodern philosophy does, consider clearer to admit that metaphysics is just contradictory, as well as the concept of “being”, as well as Parmenide’s principle of non contradiction.
In a post-modernist style of reasoning, we could consider the universals to be universal for the ones applying them.
I think this is contradictory. Saying “In my opinion this is universal” means “In my opinion I think that this is not just my opinion”. I understand that such statements can easily be found in everyday conversations, and in everyday conversation we can accept a lot of things that, instead, in the strict context of philosophy would be unacceptable because of being contradictory: they are just two different languages, the everyday language and the philosophical language.
In a philosophical context: how can you think that something is your opinion (“In my opinion I think...”) and at the same time think that it is not your opinion (“...I think that it is not just my opinion”).
You can state it in a context of research, as to say “I am making the hypothesis that this thing is not my opinion”; in this case you are keeping two things, one is what you believe is the fact (“In my opinion I think...”) and the other one is the hypothesis that it might be universal. Facts and hypotheses can coexist together without contradition.
By changing the definition of absolute, universal, independent reality. Connecting it to our mind. So to me absolute reality holds for me. For you, for you. I can declare my absolute reality be the one for all, the universal one, and so can you.
This is not necessarily the case. We just need to accept what Plato tells us, that the senses deceive us, and we obey reason instead of the senses. So we do not alter the experience, we simply accept with our minds, that the experience doesn't give us the truth, and we base our logic in something other than what sense experience gives us.
In a different thread I am discussing a good example of this, the heliocentric model of the solar system. Sensation gives us the experience of the sun coming up and going down, rising and setting. But we must move beyond this sense experience and accept that the earth is really spinning, and the sun is not revolving around the earth. To accept this, it is not required that we change our fundamental experience of the sun coming up and going down, we just need to accept that this fundamental intuition is actually wrong, discard it as a premise for our logic, and move along toward a better understanding. The better understanding is provided for by the fundamental assumption that our sense experience misleads us, but changing that experience is unnecessary.
Quoting Mww
So it's not at all a matter of learning how to experience something like a pencil as something other than a pencil, its a matter of recognizing that the empirical representation is fundamentally misleading. This is what modern science shows us very clearly. The thing you experience as a pencil is really molecules, or atoms, or protons, neutrons, and electrons, or fields, or whatever, which is way different from your sense experience of a pencil. When the reality of the heliocentric model was revealed to us, it opened our minds very widely to the fact that the way things appear through sensation is not at all like the way things really are. And the Platonic mantra "the senses deceive us" was given real credence allowing for philosophy like Descartes' "Meditations" to be taken seriously.
Quoting Mww
So this is not an acceptable dichotomy. There is some degree of consistency in experience, and as I said, consistency is cultured, propagated. However, there is also some degree of inconsistency, and even a small degree of inconsistency is evidence of something faulty within experience. The fact that there is inconsistency is evidence that intuitions can change over generations. And evolutionary theory supports this as well.
Quoting Mww
But I don't agree with this. I focus on the differences between individuals, and I argue that these differences are very clear evidence that the fact that there are similarities between us does not justify the claim that we have "the same" experience. And because we cannot say that we all have "the same" experience, we also cannot assert as you do, that there "is an experience common to all of us". That's a false assumption, so no inquiry as to how it is possible is warranted. The appropriate inquiry is as to why we have similar experience. And my answer to this, is as I said, it is propagated, and cultured, intuitively. So the true "deeper" intuition which is common to living beings, is the tendency to create sameness, similarity, within unique and particular individuals, whose true essence is to be different from each other.
Quoting Mww
The problem is that the "basic foundational conception" is wrong in a very fundamental way, as described above, "the senses deceive us", as described above. Therefore we must go to the deeper level to get a true understanding, a level deeper than sensation itself to get beyond the deceptive intuitions produced by sensation.
Quoting Mww
It's not contradictory, it's a matter of seeing these intuitions as wrong, and overriding them with the conscious mind, as described above. It's only if you subscribe to some form of naturalism, within which you would say that what "nature" provides us with is what is good, or correct, then you would say that the will to override these intuitions would be contradictory. But Plato thoroughly demonstrated the failing of such a naturalism. The natural tendencies are bodily tendencies, and we must use reason and will to get beyond these faulty tendencies.
Changing the meaning of words sometimes is inevitable, necessary, but it also creates a lot of difficulties. This is one reason of a lot of messages here and everywhere: just because a lot of philosophers have been changing the meaning of “metaphysics”, or the meaning of “being”, and now we are here struggling and debating in the forest of different and even contradictory meanings that they have created. In this forest I make my choices and I try to clarify them.
“Absolute” means disconnected, independent, 100% free, unbound. What is the advantage of making a new meaning that contradicts this independence, this unboundness, the moment you decide to enclose it into the subjectivity of your thoughts?
Quoting Haglund
This is what dictators do. The difference between this example and dictators is that dictators do not admit that what they think belongs to their subjectivity.
Perhaps your attempt comes from the everyday human experience that makes us think “I think that there is a stone out there”. Our everyday experience is so strong, we feel it so natural, so working and obvious, that it is difficult to us to realize that it contains a contradiction. This is the reason why a lot of metaphysicians find so difficult to realize the issues, the flaws of their reasoning: because nature has structured our brain to ignore our subjectivity: this has made possible survival, strength, conquering, dominating, it has made possible the human history that we all know.
The process seems natural and logical:
1) there is a stone there
2) I think that a stone is there.
These two points seem simple, until we start reflecting on them:
ok, there is a stone there. Now I think there is a stone there.
But...... how much can I trust this thought of mine? Why should I trust it? Why should I think that my thoughts are correct? What’s the point, the advantage, of thinking that I am correct?
Dictators do not admit other absolute realities by institutionalized force and try to make everyone part of their objective reality. That's the real difference. I don't know what they think is part of their subjectivity.
A king of cheap skepticism, I suppose. Maybe life is a dream! Etc. Descartes dealt with this years ago— and Kant, in his own way, after him.
That we “exist” is a given. If it’s a mental construction, then the mental construction exists.
And what’s the argument, exactly? That nothing exists, that everything is a mental construction, or that any proposition or truth is impossible?
Seems utterly ridiculous to me.
For the third time you failed to answer my question. Instead opting to apparently talk to yourself.
There’s no contradiction whatsoever in what is said, beyond what you’ve made up. Yes, thinking and talking is something done by the human being — no one denies that. Thinking and talking are beings.
You’re mistaking being for an object. It’s not. It’s also not permanence, which you seemed to indicate early on. It’s also not change.
Denying anything exists is worth doing — in high school. You can go on doing so it your please. I have no interest in it.
This is Descartes, “I think, then I am”. There have been other philosophers after Descartes.
Yeah, and also people who think it witty to subjectivize everything, and claim nothing exists.
No wonder post modernism is a laughingstock.
“Philosophy,” folks.
Quoting Angelo Cannata
Heidegger never ONCE made anything remotely like this claim. Either cite your source or stop with the fabrication.
Martin Heidegger, What is metaphysics? (1929)
“First, each metaphysical question always encompasses the whole problematic of metaphysics and in fact is the whole of metaphysics. Secondly, to ask any metaphysical question, the questioner as such must also be present in the question, i.e., must be put in question. From this we conclude that metaphysical questions must be posed (1) in terms of the whole and (2) always from the essential situation of the existence that asks the question.”
Not three times.
Mathematical physics are dynamical systems where anything that is mathematically possible is also physically possible until the theory is shown to violate some physical law. This leads to some harebrained ideas that can be expressed less expensively by other mathematics. For example, actual multiple universes, where fictional characters can hop back and forth, can also be expressed as mere possible universes of which only one needs be actual at any one place and time.
Sure, agree. Nothing controversial there.
Not that this is about postmodernism, but....Even Heisenberg said subjectivity can never be eliminated from the scientific experiment.
The argument is that the given, the absolute, objective reality, is culture dependent. Claiming it to be not only serves to favor one's own given.
There is such a thing as objective truth. But what that's like depends on the cultural medium it's in, on the story told. To claim that's not the case is a move away from humanity.
It's reasonable that Cratylus was a great philosopher and not an idiot, otherwise what would have been the point to lampoon him?
What he said was that if one cannot step into what is ordinarily said as 'same' river twice then it follows that it is also impossible to step into that river 'once'.
I think that this river quote is both historically correct and is true given Heraclitean metaphysics. To make it true, the question becomes what metaphysical assumptions would Cratylus have to have held to make such an extreme statement true? And then why couldn't a great thinker like Aristotle be capable of understanding such a metaphysical simple? Why can't we?
It’s simple: you can’t step even once because, as soon as you touch the water, one instant later it is not anymore the same you touched initially, because it is flowing. It is similar to Zeno’s paradox of the arrow, but the opposite way. Cratylus sounds this way, changed to a paradox: if movement exists, then nothing can have an identity (the river can never have an identity). Zeno is the opposite: if the the arrow has an identity, then it cannot be moving, because identity implies permanence, which means stillness.
The old Greek paradox of the impossibility of change. If a spoon changes into a knife how can it have changed if its no spoon anymore? The spoon can only change if it stays a spoon. If the knife into which it's changed is still a spoon. This confused the old Greek enormously. How can something have changed if its no longer that some thing? Permanence seems at odds with change. Democritus found a solution. Atoms! Static, unchanging tetrads, cubes, spheres, octahaeders, dodecahaeders, etc., with hooks to tangle up with each other to form transgressive shapes, coming in and floating out of existence.
Quoting Angelo Cannata
Your quote from Heidegger:
Quoting Angelo Cannata
So again, I repeat: not once did Heidegger make a claim remotely like what you claim.
No one once denied that thinking and questioning presumes a human being. To claim something about "subjectivity" (which Heidegger would reject) or, further, to the "non-universality" of subjectivity, has nothing to do with Heidegger. Furthermore, the statement "if being is, then it is not" is also nonsensical. To claim this is reiterating -- in some way -- what Heidegger was saying is pure fabrication, as demonstrated by the fact that you cannot produce any citation that supports it.
What Heidegger is saying above you apparently don't understand, if you think it supports in any way what you've stated in the previous post. Do you know what he's talking about there? Briefly: With (1), he's talking about the question of being. With (2), he's talking about dasein -- temporality. If you haven't gathered that much, you shouldn't be quoting him.
So the fact that we're alive, that we exist, is culturally dependent?
So the statement "objective reality is culture dependent" is also culture dependent.
To deny anything exists whatsoever is an absurdity. That apparently is what's happening.
No one is questioning that human beings are involved in interpreting the world, or that culture has an impact on one's beliefs and values. No one. The simple and non-controversial claim is this: change, if it's anything at all, "has" being. I don't see how or why anyone would object to this. It's truism.
Quoting Haglund
Claiming it is also serves one's own given -- the given of cultural relativity.
Maybe gravity and digestion and circulation depends on culture too. :roll:
Existence is not culturally determined. Reducing this to cultural determination is itself culturally determined and, it so happens, completely wrong. Existence precedes culture. Culture can determine how existence is interpreted -- and often does. A look at geography and history shows this quite well.
The human being can not be eliminated from science. It all comes out of the human mind. There’s no doubt about that. Science is a human endeavor— as is philosophy, as is art. Thinking itself is a human activity.
Our consciousness, our thinking, our language, our logic — is all of this nothing? Does it refer to nothing whatsoever? If not, then it refers to something — something that exists, that “is.” Change, culture, human nature, truth, etc — are all, likewise, “things.” They’re mental or physical or emotional phenomena. They’re beings.
What is the beingness of beings? That’s being itself. The openness of being needs the human, and the human is only human insofar as he stands in the openness of being— according to Heidegger.
I've studied Heidegger. I have no idea what he means by "being."
Not really: Mathematical physics. A person engaged in this pursuit seeks mathematical ideas and procedures that might illuminate aspects of physics. Sometimes new math is developed in this quest, but there are over 26K separate topics in mathematics on Wikipedia so there is a wealth of material one might search for applications in physics. Also, mathematical physicists attempt to put foundations in place to prove certain math procedures in physics - like renormalizations and path integrals - are mathematically sound. Dynamical systems, a very specific area of mathematics, sometimes are referred to as classical mathematical physics.
The word "same" means persistence over a span of time in this case. The instant (t=0) your toe touches the flowing water all is frozen in time. Think of a photo taken at that instant. For t>0 the word same comes into play. This becomes an argument of time as instances vs time as periods. Think Einstein vs Bergson (1922).
Quoting Angelo Cannata Nice point.
You just throw the ball back: "But then your claim is culturally dependent too". So what? That doesn't mean that your objective reality lays behind that again. You have to face it. Existence is culture dependent. It's not just some interesting objective feature of an objective reality that can have meaning and plays a role, it constitutes an objective reality. The very fact we exist is a culturally dependent observation. I don't say there is no objective absolute reality, the same for all. I just say it's not the same for all. Your objective story is another one than mine. In my story you are an indirect creature of God, claiming that existence is objective. Which it isn't. Of course, you exist, I exist, our stomach digests. If you look at it in a certain way. Then what is "it"? You will, like me, probably say, the material structures in my belly". But that's already a culture dependent statement. But in another story you and I, maybe all creatures on Earth, are no more than specks of dirt (no offense!).
Now you can throw the ball back again and say that all I say is culture dependent talk and that your natural objectivity rules supreme.
Rightfully so. He gives no interpretation himself. He wants to look at the basis for all interpretations— which is the human being. If human being is temporality, then being’s interpretation is related to time. Namely, as presence.
That’s my understanding.
Quoting Haglund
You can’t have culture without existing. Rocks exist too— they have no culture.
Quoting Haglund
I never equated being with objective reality— whatever that means. In fact I reject the subject/object distinction you implicitly make.
Quoting Haglund
You’re just making things up now. I never once made claims about objectivity.
That human beings are creatures of God, or that the world is created, is an interpretation. Fine. I’m not even arguing that.
Being is not an object, in my view. Is it God? Is it substance? Is it energy? That depends on who you ask. But to deny there’s a world, or that anything “is” — or to claim being is “culturally dependent,” is just talking nonsense.
Quoting Haglund
The first sentence is all I’ve pointed out. It’s a truism. If you acknowledge that, then that’s the only point.
“If you look at it in a certain way”— no. It’s not about how you look at it, or interpret it, or think about it, or about the stories you tell about it. You start with it, and “in” it. You exist— period. Not controversial. The rest is, indeed, very much a matter of interpretation, culture, personal beliefs and values, etc. — but I’m not arguing that.
It’s as if we’re looking at a chair and you’re claiming “chair” is culturally dependent, but all I’m saying is “there is a being.”
Rocks existing is a mental picture. In reality objective existence is not viewd on, has no perspective, no focus, is without POV, without an angle.
But that statement certainly is. Namely, a sophomoric, silly perspective. Which happens to be complete nonsense.
And, non-trivially, I’ll emphasize that I have not once brought up “objective existence.” Being is not an object.
Given that people who want to spout absurdities don’t listen, this crucial point will no doubt continue to be ignored.
Quoting Haglund
:rofl:
:ok:
Then so be it... Better than having a so-called adult take on existence. Which is just another view. Existence exists. But existence is human or creature bound.
Being precedes views.
You’re just contradicting yourself because you’re confused by words. It’s about as profound as saying “that’s your opinion.” Riveting. But stick with it if you must.
That things “are” is non-controversial; to deny it or attempt to pretend like it’s “just a view” is truly embarrassing. Such is the state of “philosophy” I guess.
Think whatever you like. Views precede being. Only when there are views there is being. Without views no perspective, no limits, no boundaries, POV's, angles, no focus. If that's your kind of being, so be it...
:rofl:
Yes— because you can definitely have views when you don’t exist. I guess digestion precedes being alive, too. :roll:
Glad you choose idiocy over truism so you can argue for no reason — be happy with it!
Don't get excited! Bad for your digestion tract...your true being!
Well said.
"... all things move and nothing remains still, and he likens the universe to the current of a river, saying that you cannot step twice into the same stream" can also be read as referring to a moment in time that can never be twice. But a single moment, say now, cannot exist in a strict sense either because nothing can exist as a point occupying space on an endless line. Numbers as pointers to a geometric line can be talked about, but geometric points that occupy space on that line cannot be said to 'exist'.
Thank you for that explanation.
But I often find the talk pages on Wikipedia more informative than the articles themselves, especially on philosophical subjects.
I do also. In this case [mathematical physics] the talk section makes one's head spin!
But objective existence doesn't mean the existence of an object. It means an existence independent of our subjective existence. You can deny that by ignoring the distinction alltogether but then you will never know what that existence is about.
Then tell me what that being is without viewing
Actually Cratylus, after drawing further consequences from Heraclitus, forgot to draw further consequences from himself: if everything changes continuously, then it is never possible to know what we are talking about, because one second later it has changed its meaning. This actually brings us to Heidegger, that I already explained: all this endless drawing further consequences is a result of our subjectivity that is necessarily always involved in our metaphysics: metaphysics alone is not interested in drawing further consequences or meta-consequences, the same way a computer doesn't draw all the consequences of its calculations.
You mean what you’ve completely fabricated.
Please stop misleading people.
One can argue that everything changes continuously, but in such a way that we can think of events continuing to be the same differently. This is the basis of phenomenology and the work of Heidegger and Derrida.
Heraclitean and Cratylean knowledge of change cannot possibly be anything like Eleatic Aristotelian or modern language-philosophical knowledge of static objects or facts! Therefore we must be talking about at least two distinct notions of knowledge here.
What would you say Cratylean knowledge is like? Plato suggested that Cratylus believed in essences of ideal objects. That could have been so, since diffused ideals are logically independent of physical motion and change, but that sounds more like Plato than Cratylus.
Plato believed that If the physical world changes continuously, then it is not possible to completely know any particular objects. Therefore Eleatic knowledge as justified true belief of particulars is insufficient. Something is still missing.
What we are talking about is different. In itself, language says nothing but nonsense. Meaning is primarily conventional, except for what little is natural (like imitative sounds) or comes from transcendent sources (as recollection). But once there is established meaning it is as fixed as their related Forms are.
If meaning is conventional, it means that what you wrote has a conventional, which means an agreed meaning in your perception. If you perceive that your words have an agreed meaning, how can you say at the same time that language says nothing but nonsense? Does what you wrote have an agreed meaning or is it nonsense?
Then you referred to an established meaning: how can we realize that it is established, since our mind is part of all the things that are subject to change?
To say that the world , language and mind undergo continuous change does not mean the inability to discern ongoing themes and patterns in the flux.
Exactly. I agree.
I think you have your finger on something here.
How do we know that all knowledge experiences are hermeneutical if the same hermeneutics applies to itself? How can logic say what logic is? How can permanence ever be discovered if impermanence lies within the very asking? If impermanence is presupposed in the very concept of permanence? It is here we have reached the end of philosophy, which is why, I am sure, Rorty simply gave up and started teaching Literature. He knew Derrida and Heidegger very well, and, I suppose was inspired by Heidegger's privileging of poetry and its special power to ironize the world and thereby make new meanings, determined the answers to such questions were "made not discovered".
But this issue if change is about Time, the "existence" of time, I might put it. Time is change, Kierkegaard's repetition that does not look back and recall, but is forward looking, ever forward looking. The is a lot of Kierkegaard's "Concept of Anxiety" in Heidegger. If you want understand the reconciliation between Heraclitus and Parmenides, as I see it, it lies not in Plato, but in Kierkegaard, and his nunc stans, the eternal present. Wittgenstein was a BIG fan of Kierkegaard.
One also has to keep clear: there is no past nor future. These "are" presence"s". One has never witnessed a past or future event. Of course, this problematizes the present as well, it meaning vanishes without past of future to contextualize it. Is this the way to some apophatic affirmation?
I think we need to be always careful in proclaming the end of things such as philosophy, literature, art, cinema, that I have seen proclaimed in several contexts: we should, more humbly, talk, if anything, of end of one kind of of philosophy, not of philosophy as such. It is the end of philosophy meant as domain over concepts, things, but actually, surreptiously, domain over people. In this context, the choice to teach literature, be interested in poetry, or in politics, can considered a symptom of need for a new way of meaning philosophy. The way Kierkegaard talks about time or eternal present is not a metaphysical way, is not a language organized in a dominating way; he talks in an existentialist way.
After realizing that we need a weak philosophy, we need to build a good relationship with metaphysics, because the things of the past cannot just be put in the bin and forgotten. I think that a good relationship with metaphysics should be in the form of a dialogue, rather than adopting passively metaphysics as if it was contraditions-free and well working to get domain over things, reality and people. Metaphysics can be helpful to tell literature and poetry that, even if we have a certain human ability to shape and even create reality, nonetheless we cannot ignore that we need to face humanly humiliating experiences, such as suffering, death, contradictions, inconsistency, forgetfulness. At the same time, we cannot be just pessimistic, because weak or postmodern philosophy, as well as art, literature and a lot of other human experiences, are able to show that we can make miracles, unpredicted wonders.
In this context philosophy ceases to be the place where people look for conclusions, answers, solutions, formulas, that is all stuff to exercise domain, and becomes instead perspective to work, do research, open dialogue, plan comparisons, explore horizons. When we realize this, we can see that philosophy is far from beind ended, there is lot to do and to work on, and it doesn’t need to retrieve any disguised metaphysics or masked realism to gain reputation or to keep afloat.
Unfortunately he didn’t. He thought Derrida was just being a trickster, and completely missed the complexity and rigor of his philosophizing. He also misread Heidegger’s notion. of transcendence as the use
of skyhooks. That’s why Rorty mistook literature as the antidote to philosophy, as if literary movements didn’t already share in the metaphysics embraced by philosophical eras.
Quoting Joshs
Care to speculate on why he misread or deliberately reconstructed Derrida in this way?
I liked Shaun Gallagher’s account in ‘Conversations in postmodern hermeneutics’:
“ I want to show that the conception of the conversation of mankind employed by Rorty and Caputo for
postmodern purposes is not a good model for postmetaphysical/ postmodern thought.”
“ The postmodern idea is not that there is one overarching conversation, but that there is a plurality
of conversations, some constituting relative differends in relation to others. It is still possible that fusions can happen between conversations, not in the sense of unifying or reducing different conversations, but in the sense of creating new and different conversations by linking one to another; or again, not in the sense of a fusion of horizons, but in the sense of a creation of new
horizons.”
it wasn’t deliberate. Doritos very difficult to understand from an anglo-American philosophical background
Rorty: "Admirers of Derrida like myself"
https://web.stanford.edu/group/csp/phi60/rortyintro.pdf
Not familiar. Where does that observation come from?
Yes, Rorty respected Derrida for deconstructing the metaphysics of presence but misread his method as mere poetic playfulness.
I don't remember Rorty saying that. And if you cannot cite something, there's nothing to talk about.
Quoting Jackson
From “Heidegger, Contingency, and Pragmatism
“There is no validating reality behind our narrative; Being and interpretive narrative arise together. Therefore, Rorty appropriates for pragmatism only Heidegger’s sense of contingency and the transitory condition of human life, along with the ability to radically redescribe Western culture. He sets aside Heidegger’s nostalgia for an authentic world-view that says something neutral about the structure of all present and possible world-views. By doing so, Rorty aligns himself more with John Dewey’s brand of anti-essentialism and anti-foundationalism than with Heidegger’s project.”( Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
But I don’t want you to be lonely. Besides, I’m driving home in rush hour traffic, which makes it hard to satisfy you need for scholarly rigor at the moment.
I think Heidegger's notion of the being of beings is meaningless. Some philosophers think Heidegger himself realized that the ambition of fundamental ontology cannot be realized. So he dropped the idea from Being and Time in his later writings.
Thinking and driving don't mix.
“In my view, Derrida's eventual solution to the problem of how to avoid the Heideggerian "we," and, more generally, avoid the trap into which Heidegger fell by attempting to affiliate with or incarnate something larger than himself, consists in what Gasch6 refers to disdainfully as "wild and private lucubrations."lo The later Derrida privatizes his philosophical thinking, and thereby breaks down the tension between ironism and theorizing. He simply drops theory - the attempt to see his predecessors steadily and whole - in favor of fantasizing about those predecessors, playing with them, giving free rein to the trains of associations they produce. There is no moral to these fantasies, nor any public (pedagogic or politicat) use to be made of them;” Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity)
He didn’t drop the idea. In one of his last works, Time and Being, he takes up the Being of beings again:
Heidegger begins Being and Time saying his aim is to answer the question of the meaning of being in general. But by the end of the book, he says he still hasn't quite answered it. He does define Dasein's kind of being as the ontological difference , the in-between , happening , occurrence , the ‘as' structure , projection.
“ Something like "being" has been disclosed in the understanding of being that belongs to existing Da-sein as a way in which it understands.”
“The ontological condition of the possibility of the understanding of being is temporality itself.”(Basic Problems, 1927)
“In Being and Time, Being is not something other than time: "Time" is a preliminary name for the truth of Being, and this truth is what prevails as essential in Being and thus is Being itself.”(What is Metaphysics)
But he leaves us with the following questions:
“The existential and ontological constitution of the totality of Da-sein is grounded in temporality. Accordingly, a primordial mode of temporalizing of ecstatic temporality itself must make the ecstatic project of being in general possible. How is this mode of temporalizing of temporality to be interpreted? Is there a way leading from primordial time to the meaning of being? Does time itself reveal itself as the horizon of being?”
In the 1962 work , On Time and Being , he answers this question in the affirmative, with an addtional feature.
“Time, which is addressed as the meaning of Being in Being and Time, is itself not an answer, not a last prop for questioning, but rather itself the naming of a question. The name "time" is a preliminary word for what was later called "the truth of Being." “ Being and Time is on the way toward finding a concept of time, toward that which belongs most of all to time, in terms of which "Being" gives itself as presencing. This is accomplished on the path of the temporality of Dasein in the interpretation of Being as temporality.”
In the 1962 work, Heidegger ‘grounds' being in temporality and ‘grounds' both time and being in ‘appropriation'. Here he defines being as a letting be of presencing (unconcealing) which stands within the realm of temporality.
And yet, if we take Rorty seriously about pragmatism, he makes the same claim. One just argues about which words or descriptions are better.
My point is that Rorty is impugning to Derrida something that Rorty thinks we should do instead of philosophy, but this ‘private fantasizing and free-associating’ is not what Derrida is doing.
Derrida is a sceptic. So a lot of his arguments are about the impossibility of knowledge.
Derrida is no sceptic, and he never argues that knowledge is ‘impossible’, only contextually embedded.
“For of course there is a "right track" [une 'bonne voie "] , a better way, and let i t b e said i n passing how surprised I have often been, how amused or discouraged, depending on my humor, by the use or abuse of the following argument: Since the deconstructionist (which is to say, isn't it, the skeptic-relativist-nihilist!) is supposed not to believe in truth, stability, or the unity of meaning, in intention or "meaning-to-say, " how can he demand of us that we read him with pertinence, preciSion, rigor? How can he demand that his own text be interpreted correctly? How can he accuse anyone else of having misunderstood, simplified, deformed it, etc.? In other words, how can he discuss, and discuss the reading of what he writes? The answer is simple enough: this definition of the deconstructionist is false (that's right: false, not true) and feeble; it supposes a bad (that's right: bad, not good) and feeble reading of numerous texts, first of all mine, which therefore must finally be read or reread.
Then perhaps it will be understood that the value of truth (and all those values associated with it) is never contested or destroyed in my writings, but only reinscribed in more powerful, larger, more stratified contexts. And that within interpretive contexts (that is, within relations of force that are always differential-for example, socio-political-institutional-but even beyond these determinations) that are relatively stable, sometimes apparently almost unshakeable, it should be possible to invoke rules of competence, criteria of discussion and of consensus, good faith, lucidity, rigor, criticism, and pedagogy.”
Me too. When quoting a text please cite the source.
Limited, Inc
Nicely done, but you're shifting around between different philosophies here. Heraclitus denied the value of non-scientific thought altogether. Plato, while not denying the value of 'poetical' thought was mainly busy developing formal meaning that is needed for the purposes of conducting communicative dialectic.
Following more modern science, I imagine that there is at least three kinds of thought -- formal, personal private, and deep-seated pictorial thought, expressed respectively by logical formal language, loosely structured common language, and by artistic imagination. One type of meaning cannot cover them all.
The purpose of conventional language is to find some common ground of meaning to communicate to other people. When I have pain of a kind somewhere in my body I seldom need to communicate the specifics to anyone else beyond saying that I'm in pain. To say that rivers flow is implicit, just as lakes do not. But what if I find the source of the Nile and I block it with my boot, does that river still flow?
Quoting Angelo Cannata
Those are two different things, aren't they? I agree with Plato that we have no direct access either to the outside world or to our minds. These both need to be sensed and perceived, but by different means. The expressive linguistic part of our mental functionality is small compared to our total capacity for thought. What is formal is still much smaller. Yet, this formal language is the only one that philosophy can manage.
That is a lovely obituary.
Literature is an evolving concept. It reflects the issues that arise and complicate our lives, and it has in this "relevance" and moves with the times. This is very different from philosophy which has its world grounded in basic questions, questions that do not change with politics, ethics and social norms.
That was perhaps off putting what I said, but philosophy is not going anywhere ELSE as I see it. As you would have it, it would devolve into the "philosophy of" this and that. For me, philosophy's world is the most basic questions, and these face foundational indeterminacy. Where Joshs says, "Derrida is no sceptic, and he never argues that knowledge is ‘impossible’, only contextually embedded," I say, this is simply putting basic questions on a par with auto mechanics, and you can't do this. Philosophy is that "undiscovered country" dimension of our actuality, not some theory that can be argued away. Heidegger's What Is Metaphysics was very Kierkegaardian, sans the religious fixation. This is the "existential" margin or threshold, and it affects different people in different ways. For some it is not an intellectual impasse, but momentous encounter with the Other of our existence. Levinas, Marion, Henry, et al, and their so called French theological turn explore this.
See Caputo on Derrida. I agree with this: Derrida brings us to the death of philosophy, where to speak at all is to put forth distance. We tend to treat our basic indeterminacy as something familiar, we "totalize" it, as Levinas would say. What is it not to totalize? See Husserl's epoche, for a start. From there, one stops asking, like the Buddhist, the answers are revelatory.
THE foundational insight is not intellectual, which is essentially pragmatic. It is affective. Rorty is right, the truth is made not discovered. But what good is truth as truth? None. This is just a confusion. Truth is, as Dewey put it, merely consummatory, and this is of a piece with the body of experience which is inherently affective. The division is analytic, merely. There is no division, really. Philosophy's real job is to "reduce" the world to its essential presence so that it may be encountered.
Quoting Constance
We cannot say what philosophy is before doing philosophy. What philosophy is is determined and evolved in the course of doing it. What the most basic questions are is determined and evolved while we deal with those ones we think they are.
I think that now philosophy is more and more realizing that the basic questions are about humanity, how to be human, rather than trying to understang how things work to master them, that is metaphysics.
Not a new era of nuts and bolts metaphysics. Religion is philosophy's new task. Popular religion did not survive the Enlightenment (as we witness its violent death throes today), but the issues that religion was there for on the first place are now exposed and open. Metaphysics is now REAL metaphysics: the encounter with the foundational ethical/affective deficit of being human minus the narrative and the faith. This deficit is of course an epistemic one, that is, we don't know, but the knowledge sought is not more of the Same (Levinas).
Yes, yes, about humanity; but humanity at the threshold, not the ethical nihilism of Rorty (see Critchley's critique of Rorty's private ironist). I think you are in this boat, committed to ethical nihilism, for what is this if not the refusal allow philosophy is proper place: as THE new "religion". Metaphysics can finally be purified, if you will, freed from God, freedom and and soul and useless metaphysics. What IS metaphysics, asks Heidegger? What is that primordial wonder? One thing: it is not a vacuous metaphysics. Why did Kant HAVE TO talk about noumena? Because it was there in the midst of phenomena, only he missed the grand point, didn't he? Phenomena revealed noumena because phenomena IS noumena.
The history of philosophy shows changes in the issues philosophers take seriously.
I agree, essentially. At this point, the problem is to find a good way as a continuation of philosophy. You said “religion”, I think that the concept of religion is too connected to an idea of perfection, referred either to God or to something else. I cannot Imagine a religion having something limited, imperfect, not completely consistent, as a central reference point. Isn’t actually metaphyisics a quest for a system of ideas that is expected to work with absolute perfection? I cannot conceive a metaphysics of something imperfect. In this context, I think that “spirituality” is better, because it has more human connotations, although a lot of people conceive it as a belief in some kind of transcendent realities. Hadot has already shown us that the first ancient Greek philosophers conceived philosophy as a spiritual experience, rather than an abstract, detached reasoning about the basic questions of the world.
All modes of culture, including the sciences, literature and philosophy, are evolving concepts which move ‘with the times’. This is why historical movements such as the Classical period , Renaissance, Enlightenment, Modernism and the Postmodern are defined by the inseparable interrelations among these cultural modalities. It’s meaning less to say that philosophy always asks the same questions if the sense and meaning of the questions changes with the times , which it does. If philosophy really asked the same questions over and over, it would come up with the same answers.
Heidegger (2010) expresses this well :
“Every questioning is a seeking. Every seeking takes its direction beforehand from what is sought. Questioning is a knowing search for beings in their thatness and whatness.... As questioning about, . . questioning has what it asks about. All asking about . . . is in some way an inquiring of... As a seeking, questioning needs prior guidance from what it seeks. The meaning of being must therefore already be available to us in a certain way. We intimated that we are always already involved in an understanding of being.”
So Derrida after all believes somehow in "meaning-to-say"? Interesting. But in what sense Derrida's texts make sense? (I , for my part, have had many experiences where they make sense.)
Just two things. One is that lack of signified. The self effaced signified is meaning self deconstructed. That is, deconstruction is self deconstructing, what Meister Eckhart was looking for is his plea to be rid of God, the way to apophatic affirmation. The other is ethics and value. It may be that the spectral analysis of star is bound to context for its meaning, but being in love is not. When we put words to it, certainly, but it HAS an altogether mystifying stand alone presence (knowing full well that my utterances here about this are contextually bound).
Sartre called it the superfluity of existence--this is really about the superfluity of value or affectivity. The philosophically the human situation is grounded in value, not vacuous signifiers. Another word for the lostness of signifiers-in-play is metaphysics (not the ridiculous kind), and this is no less than the palpable presence of affective meaning.
Not perfect systematizing of our affairs, but perfect happiness. The former is an entanglement, and the confusion take place in thinking the logical grid "upon which" the world sits and is divided (thinking of Wittgenstein's Tractatus here; but also Kierkegaard before him) is a model for human perfection. Such is the plight of rationalism). Call nirvana? But really, closer to home, think of Wordsworth and childhood. Was there not once a time when the world was almost perfectly realized? The trouble was, we were infants, we were, if you will, nobody, no reflective agency to realize the significant depths of the what was happening. Language and culture make this happen: in the evolvement of a human being there is that Heideggerian moment of geworfenheit (Kierkegaard called this posting spirit; Husserl's epoche is clearly in this-- I'm sure he had read Kierkegaard. Something of a profound moment, for me, anyway, this existential line that is crossed where all things recede in their implicit knowledge claims that possess everyday affairs, and the world is shrouded in mystery, Heidegger's "wonder" in What Is Metaphysics? But is it the vacuity of nothingness? Or is it a liberation?)
Is Emerson simply passé and naive? Certainly that "transparent eyeball" is an amusing image, but that walking through a bare common, glad to the brink of fear...curious at least. Is religion, essentially, just about systems of organizing our thinking about metaphysics? Or is it revelatory, and deeply profound?
Granted. But it can be argued that all of the elaborations and elucidations in philosophy are far more determinatively based that literature. The latter is the broad and inclusive world of engagement, the body of which is the body of literature. Philosophy is the aloof observation, closer to science, really, which is why philosophers often place themselves within the same rigor of standards of validation: it is specialized, like science, and has focus.
Having said this, philosophy as an historical discipline is at its end, or it will be, as soon as it completes its housekeeping duties, the "cutting out" of Occam's razor, of the legacy of religion and its language and the "bad metaphysics" that so entangles basic questions. I think Husserl points to the residua that remains once the coast is clear.
Literature is messy, in comparison, like life itself, allowing insights to emerge from the original fabric, but more poignantly. A great philosophical value of literature is that, not only does it not dismiss the affectivity of our lives, it highlights them. Rorty understood this.
I do not think philosophy has anything to do with science.
[i]The aim of the Meditations is a complete reforming of
philosophy into a science grounded on an absolute foundation.
That Implies for Descartes a corresponding reformation of all
the sciences, because in his opinion they are only non-selfsufficient members of the one all-inclusive science, and this is philosophy. Only within the systematic unity of philosophy can
they develop Into genuine sciences. (Husserl, Cartesian Meditations)[/i]
Okay.
Of course, this all gets very interesting further on.
Philosophy does not require a reference to physical objects in order to discuss an issue.
Philosophy discusses the presuppositions of knowledge relationships. No object, then nothing to discuss.
Notice I said, physical. Physical object.
This presupposes there is such a method to arrive at knowledge. But is there truly? Wouldn't we be able then to write a computer program, feed it with sensory data, and run the program?
All knowledge relations
Are you claiming belief is a physical object? Explain.
I believe that would be the algorithm.
Pull back from this, whatever it means. All things that are known to be can be analyzed as known in a knowledge relation. This relation bears analysis. Don't get hung up on object classifications.
Ok.
Not sure if gathering knowledge follows a program.
It's forward looking process of programmed responses. If......then..... is essential the structure. This reflects the basic structure of experience itself as it engages the world. What is a coffee cup? It is one of a number of this structures. If I hold it and lift, then the cup will rise, enabling access to the mouth, and so on. There are presumably an infinite number of such "programmed respo0nses," variations of such things, and on and on, in our relationships with the world. What is anything at all? Well, IF......THEN.....What is nitroglycerin? If it is thrwon with a certain velocity.....THEN it will impact in such and such a way.
We are all of us living laboratories, confirming hypotheses and theories about what the world is. The "is" of this is pragmatic.
Of course, this is just a construct. Our actual relationships (???) is pure metaphysics.
Surely not “just about systems of organizing our thinking about metaphysics”, but nonetheless it is an aspect that is needed. The only alternative for a religion, to having “systems of organizing our thinking about metaphysics”, that, as such, need to be conceived as perfect, would be to conceive its roots as a human creation.
For example, let’s think about the faith in God that is in Christianity. In this context, God cannot be conceived but perfect. The only alternative, in order to conceive God as not perfect, would be to conceive God entirely as a human creation. If God is not a human creation, then he must be perfect. If God is a perfect being, he is exposed to all the contradictions implied by perfection, that are, in a synthesis, all about being not human. But we, as humans, need something human. This is the problem of all religions: they have depth, profoundness, they are revelatory, but they lack humanity, exactly because they need to be based on something conceived as perfect, otherwise, if it is not perfect, it cannot escape being a human fantasy.
This problem is solved by (secular) spirituality: it is revelatory, deeply profound, it is human, there is no problem at conceiving it entirely as a human fantasy, it doesn't need any metaphysics, it doesn’t need any kind of perfection.
But philosophy's job is avoiding the devolvement into fantasy. I take issue with it "all about being not human". God is constructed out of what is human. The issue is to avoid the enlightenment philosopher's talk that misses that misses the side of the barn by parsecs. See what Rorty says in a footnote:
All that I (or as far as I can see, Derrida) want to exclude is the attempt to be no propositional(poetic, world disclosing) and at the same time claim that one is getting down to something primordial--what Caputo calls "the silence from which all language springs."
See, he wants to commit to idea that the whole of our world, the logical grid of the tractatus, the being-in-the-world of B&T, Levinas' "totality" (which he gets from Heidegger and this probably comes Husserl somewhere), simply has no metaphysical foundation. My thinking is that it is ALL metaphysical, but not the extravagant Platonizing; just the, as Levina put it, realization that the desideratum exceeds the desire and the ideatum exceeds the idea. That is, our indeterminacy at the level of basic questions.
Anyway, the missing the barn door is here: it is not "the silence from which all language springs," as Caputo put is, but from which all affectivity springs! Language is nothing without affectivity; it is simply an abstraction. We are beings bound to a world of caring, of music and art, loving and hating, and on and on, and this is what cries out for meaning beyond the totality: it is that ethical/aesthetic dimension of our being. E.g., why are we born to suffer and die? And have blisses and miseries and horrors, and so on.
Non Christian philosophers almost Never go here. Metaethics has been theology and affectivity, well, a matter of "taste".
I agree that affectivity has a great importance in whatever is human. But it needs a language, we can say a language made not only by words, but made by life, by everything. This language has never been clarified, so that today affectivity is exploited in many ways to deceive people and make pseudo-science, pseudo-philosophy, pseudo-everything, that essentially means industrial, commercial science, commercial philosophy and so on. Is affectivity a good place to work on a meaningful, expressive and efficient language? And, after all, if we give so much importance to affectivity, what is the difference from psychology? These are some more reasons why I consider spirituality more suitable: it is philosophy practiced as an experience, involving the whole of our humanity, rather than just as reasoning. As such, it includes in itself the whole universe of affectivity, and we can also include love, passion, emotions, empathy. This way we are like a step forward from a purely rational philosophy and we don’t fall in the confusion with psichology, because psichology is not philosophy practiced as an experience. Spirituality (secular spirituality) is philosophy practiced as a human experience.
In the context of spirituality, language can be studied, settled, to avoid ambiguity and confusion. Today the language of spirituality is extremely confused and ambiguous just because common people understand it as belief in supernatural realities. But, once we clarify that spirituality is not a belief, but rather philosophy practiced as a whole human experience, the language of spirituality is automatically set in the context of philosophy, and philosophy has in itself a long and strong tradition about cleaning language from confusion.
Well yes, something like this I would agree with. The devil is in the details. Hesse's Siddhartha imagines a world where every young boy wants to be a sadhu, just run out to the forest and meditate and find God. No more than a nostalgia, now. I suppose for a society to take philosophical religion (??) seriously, it will require serval cultural revolutions. Perhaps when AI delivers us from all labor, or Skinner's Walden II catches on. Who knows.
I don't think it is such a hard job, because something like religion of philosophy, with spiritual exercises, was already practiced by the ancient Greek philosophers: Pierre Hadot has shown us this. Today there are several movements, like philosophy experienced as life, secular spirituality, atheist spirituality, postmodern religions, atheist Christians and so on. I think they just need to clarify their positions, to gain awareness of what the core of their tendency is. I think all of this can be fruitfully embraced by the umbrella term "spirituality", once it is cleaned from its confusion and ambiguities.
I would bow at the alter of the phenomenological reduction!
I think your response was most insightful.
(COMMENT)
I think it would be better if Metaphysics was thought of as the study of reality. It would be difficult to mention something that might not be entangled with the fundamental of reality.
Within the generalized material universe that is detectable, that is subject to examination by the Scientific Method, there are those things that are often talked about in Theoretical Physics that rightly belong to Metaphysics. (Imagine: String Theory, Dark Matter and Energy, the Multiverse, etc) These things can be imagined but not tested. Similarly, Physics today says that Dark Matter makes up about 80% - 90% of the tangible universe. You should be swimming in Dark Matter. That is as supernatural as the belief in the Supreme Being.
( ??)
Metaphysics encompasses many things in the alternative.
Supernatural Amino
Most Respectfully,
R
No, it isn't if you don't mind me saying. Dark matter is five times as abundant as normal matter and is made up from normal matter turned black holes. Dark energy, said to be 70% of the total energy, is no matter or energy at all. It's the structure of higher dimensional space the universe expands in. So both are known.
Many Thanks, I learn something new every day. You are very correct. LINK: I had my labels backward.. My Old Man Syndrome is showing.
My thought is that the distance between your perception, and my perception of "Dark Energy" and Dark Matter is that area in which you capture some quantity of each dark substance (which we cannot do) and put your observation to the test under the Scientific Method. If the observation is not testable, it is not science.
[b]What is the definition of a scientific hypothesis?[/b]
[*] The definition depends on the subject. In science, a hypothesis is part of the scientific method. It is a prediction or explanation that is tested by an experiment. Observations and experiments may disprove a scientific hypothesis, but can never entirely prove one.
Most Respectfully,
R
And some Nasa fools still struggle to see what is going on with these two. Do these suckers a favor and go tell them that.
I tried, my dear Dimosthenis! The fools are too worried for their jobs though... Isn't it clear? Small black holes whirl through the galaxies. With small radii. The closed universe expands on a higher dimensional hyperbolically underground space, the source of dark energy and inflation... The dumbos... :cool:
Every instance of time travel generating an infinite number of alternative universes might be thought to violate Ockham's Razor, especially since the idea that an alternative universe could be generated in the first place has disturbing consequences for the metaphysics of identity.
Interesting, doesn't it?
Yeah my dear Hillary.It is crystal clear that this is the reason.
If they had announced these already, they would have to be unemployed then,since there aren't much secrets left about universe as to keep their jobs. You are right . Damn Nasa bastards.
Damn Dimo! We understand each other! :lol:
But then, this is just what I have been talking about, reality. What else?
RE: What is metaphysics?
javi2541997, et al,
I am probably the least credible source in the discussion. So I thought I would relook at some of the latest news from the latest brains on the subject.
On the issue of "Dark Matter:"
On the issue of "Dark Energy:"
There is always some exciting news concerning "The Bulk" every time I turn around. But there is a connection to some potential problems.
There may be a number of backdoor approaches that may yield more at a more reasonable and cost-effective outcome.
Most Respectfully,
R
.
.
SUBTOPIC: Time
?? javi2541997, [i]et al[/I],
It is the concept of time and its paradoxes which I am most interested on metaphysics.
(EXPLORATORY QUESTION)
I am often caught in the fog of time. In fact, I get lost almost immediately when traditional physicists place a sphere (a three-dimensional object) is embedded on a space-time grid (a two-dimensional object).
(METAPHYSICS. THOUGHT EXPERIMENT)
We often see this to demonstrate how a mass wraps the space-time. However, we know that space-time is also a three-dimensional object on a vector expanding outward (we think) both space and time. And, it must be creating some sort of turbulence would be created. But, if the mass is quasi-stationary inside the 3d space-time, then the wakes in space-time will not be created. And, as space-time of the universe expands, everything else is dragged along.
Regards,
R
Dark matter: primordial black holes
Dark energy: the hyperbolic curvature of a higher dimensional space on which our universe, together with a mirrored version, inflates towards infinity.
No mysteries...
Are you an AI philosophical program or what?
SUBTOPIC: Time
?? javi2541997, Constance, et al,
I wonder what I did that caused you to ask that question?
No, I am not an AI Program.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
I believe you are correct. It is about "reality." But "reality" is a difficult subject ? that most people do not want to address. It requires a very careful vocabulary.
Regards,
R
The structure of the text that you have used remembers me from an AI program.
Exactly, this part: ?? javi2541997, Constance, et al,
What does it mean?
SUBTOPIC: Time
?? javi2541997, Constance, et al,
(COMMENT)
"??".= To the attention of
It is not so dissimilar to the arrow you select when making a reply in this forum.
" javi2541997, Constance," = Obviously the identification of those specifically mentioned or in response to
et al = Definition of "et al,"
Regards,
R
Ok. Thank you Rocco, I have learned something new today.
Regards,
Javi.
Or, it requires a clear reduction. It is not a furtherance of theory we are looking for, but a clearing of theory. What it is about the world that intimates "reality" is a clutter of historical metaphysics. But beneath this, one would ask, isn't there something intuitively foundational? E.g., when we speak of God, but deliver the concept from its fictions, is there not something undeniably there that necessitated the fiction in the first place? This is the "essence" of God, one could argue. The concept is only as meaningful as the meaning it possesses.
Being careful about vocabulary is right, but it also has put metaphysics IN language, the ALL of cognition, as Rosenzweig put it. But the language of the world is indeterminate.
SUBTOPIC: Metaphysics can sometimes be stretched too far.
?? Constance, et al,
[i]"But beneath this, one would ask, isn't there something intuitively foundational? E.g., when we speak of God, but deliver the concept from its fictions, is there not something undeniably there that necessitated the fiction in the first place? This is the "essence" of God, one could argue."[/I]
- Constance
There is a paradox to an intelligent discussion on the topic of "The Supreme Being;" or even lesser deities. It is exceptionally difficult to discuss an entity when:
The Abrahamic Religious factions all acknowledge the same Supreme Being. But the practice of morals are inconsistent when - one faction makes the claim that another faction is "impure" and "the world's dogs." This is an example of a "depraved indifference" to life. And Metaphysics cannot uniformly make that leap.
Regards
R