Are you more rationalist or empiricist?
Do you easily and naturally believe that the outcome of a thought experiment can tell you something important about the world? If so, you, along with Leibniz, Newton, Spinoza, and Einstein (among others) lean toward rationalism.
Do you tend to squint an eye at grand theories and prefer instead to be guided by good quality studies and experimentation? Then you, along with most doctors, engineers, and John Locke, lean toward empiricism.
Does your approach to the world lean? In which direction, and could you say why?
And if you object to the way things have been categorized here... again, I'd appreciate your outlook.
Do you tend to squint an eye at grand theories and prefer instead to be guided by good quality studies and experimentation? Then you, along with most doctors, engineers, and John Locke, lean toward empiricism.
Does your approach to the world lean? In which direction, and could you say why?
And if you object to the way things have been categorized here... again, I'd appreciate your outlook.
Comments (44)
Empiricist for knowing the world outside of mind.
In any case I'm a realist about philosophical questions but am uncertain as to how to approach them. I have a certain amount of skepticism regarding intuitions, unless we're talking about something that is straight up dependent on intuitions, like ethics. Your mind does not constrain reality, reality constrains your mind.
Could you accept a scientific theory whose conclusions can't be verified experimentally, but which is satisfying by virtue of the number of loose ends it ties up?
Well no scientific conclusion can be verified - they can just be falsified. I believe reality is rational - thus the scientific conclusion in question has to fit in with everything else we know, just like a specific piece fits in a puzzle. So that is at minimum a condition I expect all scientific hypotheses to meet. If someone brings up the hypothesis that eating grass cures testicular cancer - well then I will dismiss it out of hand, because (1) a mechanism through which such a cure is achieved isn't provided, and (2) it disagrees with all the background knowledge we do have.
Depends on the particular situation, I don't have a set of rules which would always apply, simply because there are too many variables involved. Generally if I disagree with a certain research and its conclusions, I will either disagree in its interpretation, or I will pinpoint some defects that have to do with its methodology. It is quite easy to engineer a result if you need it through your research method.
No. The universe, for me, consists of physics, and stuff amenable to physical investigation. Existence is larger than just this however. Nothing - no scientific conclusion - has anything to do with religion. All that it has to do with is the physical world. Regardless of what the physical world is like, the other realms of experience are left unchanged - hence meta-physics - valid for all physics.
Could you expand on this? I'm not quite understanding.
Existence contains non-physical elements (which are objective - they really do exist - contrary to what some are inclined to think) - meaning, love, hope, value, etc (as well as the universe). The universe contains physical objects - chairs, atoms, houses, bodies, etc.
How is that different from saying that non-physical things exist?
It isn't. But they certainly don't exist "in" the universe. For to exist "in" something is to be physical. They existence "in" only by analogy.
Which aren't physical, so in-so-far as this entails not having a location, yes.
For me, you are performing an incoherent separation here. "Meaning, love, hope, value" are not in things in the sense of "being contained' by them, but in the sense of being inherent in them. This is just what it means to say that God is immanent, 'right here with us', as opposed to transcendent ' impossibly distant from us'. So, to refer back to our other discussion it is not a matter of "immanentizing the eschaton"; the eschaton is inherently immanent, and how could it be intelligibly otherwise?
I agree with Aristotle about most things - forms are immanent. But the Neo-Platonists also have a point about Forms which are transcendent - don't have an object in this world.
Quoting John
Immanent also has connotations of meaning something that can become another object for you. Something is immanent - it can be an object to a subject. God cannot be an object to a subject. Therefore God is not immanent.
Quoting John
The end of history is immanent? Where is it? I don't see an end anywhere. That's precisely what is meant by transcendence. The "end" that you speak of never occurs - not in this immanent sense. There will never be an "end of history" or "end of the world" in this sense. The transcendent end - that is a different story, and Voegelin does agree with a largely Augustinian historiography which separates the City of Man from the City of God.
Strictly speaking, the sorts of things he is talking about do not exist at all. Rather, the are logical expressions. Existence (the physical) means in ways which do not exist-- from the meaning of somone's happiness, to the ethical significance of an action, the meaning of a rock or the significance of a fiction.
Are you a physicalist? My original theory was supposed to match-up rationalists and empiricists with beliefs about divinity, but it's not working out so far.
So how about you? What do you think of
1. Scientific theories which are intellectually satisfying, but can't be proven experimentally, and
2. Research, the conclusion of which defies reason.
I would agree, obviously, that forms are immanent, but not that any forms have objects in this world; they are objects, or modes of being, in this world. There is no Form of love, hope, or meaning separate from the forms of love, hope or meaning, for example.
Quoting Agustino
Being immanent has no such connotations for me. Immanence is the being of things; being cannot become an object for a subject, to say that is to evince an incoherent dualistic mode of thinking, that is, if you intend it to carry any significance beyond being merely a convenient mode of locution; to repeat: being is immanent in both subject and object.
Quoting Agustino
Again, this expresses a misunderstanding of Hegel. A man so extraordinarily brilliant, quite possibly the greatest philosopher ever (or along with Aristotle) wasn't stupid enough to believe that after his philosophy was completed, humanity would cease to change and evolve. He only believed that his philosophy has completed the circle of the historical dialectical unfoldment of consciousness as philosophy. Thus, there are no possible new questions now, that is. Philosophical questions now are, to quote Hegel, "the same old stew, reheated". Barfield thinks that Hegel has completed philosophy to make way for anthroposophy (as he [Barfield, that is] was a disciple of Steiner's work). Now, with modern science being where it is, spiritual science is possible; which will yield endlessly new knowledge in the spiritual evolution of humanity, if all goes well.
In a sense, yes. All states of existence are physical. I'm not a reductive physicalist. The world is more than any description of any state of existence. All states are material though, whether they be rocks or experience. There's no gap in causality which logic needs to fill. (i.e. idealism or anti-realism).
So 1. impossible. Any scientific theory proposes an empirical state which may be tested. Sometimes it may be such that a hypothesis is not tested, given that we have not yet made the relevant observations, in many cases due to lacking the tools to make the observation-- e.g. relativity, Higgs-Boson, etc.,etc. All that means is that a relevant observation hasn't been yet. Any scientific hypothesis or theory may be tested and proven (even if no-one ever does).
2. is also incoherent because any hypothesis or theory assumes a meaning. To say anything about the world involves speaking ita logical expressions. Research can only be coherent and senisble, else one cannot be talking about the world and one is not doing research at all.
Either may be the best approach, depending on the problem and the resources at hand. I suppose I lean towards empiricism. I'm a simple peasant and I like evidence that can be cut and dried. Rationalism is probably way over my head.
Me as well. The conclusions of good research seem concrete to me in a way that elegant rational projects don't.. although I occasionally find I have a lot of respect for people who do put their eggs in a rationalist basket.
So what about the place divinity holds in your views? Or perhaps maybe the question should be: are you a physicalist? I think in some ways it might end up being the same question.
I would say that it's unreasonable, even, to favor one side over the other. Neither can stand in substitution or even in superiority to the other -- as far as (scientific) knowledge is concerned, they are interdependent.
But, with respect to knowledge, I'd say that knowledge is situation outside of an individual mind-body, and that mind is separate from knowledge -- I'd situation knowledge socially rather than mind-centrically. (just noting this bc of the previous question. Not sure if that's what you were after, but I thought it worth mentioning)
How do you justify such philosophical naturalism?
Regarding 'all states being material', explain this: a set of materials can be arranged to mean something. For instance, you can write a sentence, or a formula, in chalk or pen, binary code, carve it in stone, or hire a skywriter to draw it in vapour in the sky. In each instance, you write the same thing, although not necessarily in the same language. Now obviously the material states are all completely different - but the meaning is the same! Hence, meaning can't be reduced to material states.
Have you yet started praying so that Schopenhauer won't see those words? ... X-)
Quoting John
Yes but Being itself is different than any particular being. Being is transcendent relative to being.
Quoting John
Why would this not hold true in the time of Aristotle? Voegelin's vision would be the possibilities of consciousness are always there - whether in Aristotle's time, or Hegel's. Thus history cannot be divided into blocks, or assessed linearly.
Quoting John
This seems to be a very gnostic structure - I'm not sure what will actually happen - I don't know the end of history, and I think it is a mistake to think we do.
Divinity, divinity, divinity... drums fingers on table. What place?
I've tried several methods of incorporating divinity into the physical system.
The divine (God) infuses everything. The divine and the material interact.
The divine (God) is utterly apart from the physical world. No interaction.
The divine (God) and the physical world are side by side, but do not interact.
Mostly now I think God doesn't exist. No divinity, the material is all. This is not an entirely happy conclusion. I had liked the presence of God in my universe.
I was looking into Rescher lately and it opened my eyes a little bit to just how much of experience is mediated by the rational. Look around the room you are in. You know what those objects "are." You have names for them. You can put them to use. You know where they came from. Crucially, you can include them in your plans for the future. "Bare" experience is an unthinkable limit, perhaps. I find this in Kojeve, too. History haunts our objects. To fully understand the presence of a table is to got back to the factory and then to the creation of factories as well as the evolution of the trees or metallurgy involved. All of this is present for us as we follow the train of our thought, sitting in our chair. And yet none of this thought would have evolved (as we know thinking) if not for embodiment, hunger, ambition, lust, etc. We had to tear into the environment, our own minds, and the bodies of others to build this kingdom of thought.
But to answer your question: my "higher" or most fun self goes in for grand theories. I love math. I love philosophical visions. That's why I don't find pragmatism too dreary or unromantic. Pragmatism is the shoes on my feet. I still want diamonds in my eyes.
I agree. There's something "holy" or "eerie" about concepts. There's something at the heart of math, too. We have to recognize a symbol as the same symbol even though it's always written differently, even by the same hand. We have a inborn ability to recognize intelligible unity. Any attempt to reduce mind to matter (if that even makes sense) is going to have to use this ability, concepts. It's going to exist as a "truth" within the realm of concepts. The sign is that ill-named thing...that escapes the instituting question of philosophy: what the hell is it? Is it a thing or the condition of possibility for a thing to be a thing or...etc. etc. " [It] is."
Can he see them, you know, being dead and all? Why would I care in any case?
Quoting Agustino
Being is the being of beings, so how transcendent?Quoting Agustino
No, the dialectical possibilities of philosophy must actually be unfolded along with the dialectic. The ideas of for example Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz , Kant and Hegel are all new. Hegel's master idea of the whole of philosophy as the logical shapes of spirit is unprecedented. It closes the circle and brings the whole tradition together. Any ideas since have been merely explication revisitations of ideas already inherent in the tradition; or reworking variations on Hegel's system such as we find with Peirce and Whitehead, for example.
Quoting Agustino
Once philosophy as the unfolding of of all the logical shapes of rational/ empirical consciousness is complete, then the next step for spiritual science is into the supra-sensible realm of experience and knowledge. This makes perfect sense to me. although I do acknowledge that I am not personally clairvoyant, and I cannot offer any arguments that would convince anyone who is not already amenable to the idea.
It was a joke :)
Quoting John
Because there is an ontological difference to speak Heideggerian to you between Being and beings.
Quoting John
I have my reservations about this. What about Wittgenstein's philosophy? Or Heiddeger? What about speculative realism? What about Marxism? What about eliminative materialism? Many of these philosophies tackle quite new questions or have very new ways of approaching them.
Quoting John
Why do you think things have to continue in steps? There is an undiscussed assumption of progress underlying your discourse. And I'm not quite sure that assumption is justified, that's all.
I know, but i felt like taking it seriously, just for fun ;)
Quoting Agustino
If Heidegger thinks that makes Being (a word that is capitalized only on account that all proper nouns in German are capitalized, by the way) transcendent, then he certainly did not intend that to be taken in any metaphysical, but rather in a merely phenomenological, sense: Heidegger was very clear on his intention to make a distinction between Being and anything 'onto-theological'.
Perhaps we could say that being is not immanent to experience, (although even that is arguable: Do we experience being or beings or both, depending on how we frame the question?) so we might say that it is transcendent of experience. But in any case being is not transcendent of thought; without thought there can be no being, at least not for Heidegger, because being consists in aletheia or 'unconcealedness'.
Quoting Agustino
Heidegger's philosophy, as a phenomenology, can be understood to be a reworking of Hegel's phenomenology. Eliminative materialism is essentially prefigured by Democritus. Marxism is not philosophy proper but economic and political theory, and Marx very clearly understood himself to be reworking Hegel's dialectic in terms of materialism, in any case. Speculative realism is not even coherent philosophy, in any sense beyond spuriously reworking garden variety realism, at least from what I have gathered by reading Harman, Meillassoux and Brassier, and listening to what others have said about them on this and other forums. Wittgenstein and linguistic philosophy; I see as a one-sided narrowing of philosophical concerns rather than as a genuinely new approach. Much of it is implicit in Kant. That said there have been genuine innovations in logic and semantics; but they are not really what I would consider as philosophy proper,in the sense of "love of wisdom'; because they have no ethical implications..
I think that Whitehead's characterization of all philosophy as "footnotes to Plato", is pretty much apposite, until Hegel's great dialectical synthesis (which was certainly not implicit in Plato).
Quoting Agustino
I would say there has definitely been a progression. Philosophy has become more comprehensive; we now have much more to draw upon. Would you consider that to be progress? Have things become better, though, within the academie? Not necessarily unequivocally, since there has been a widespread narrowing and re-focusing of philosophical interests onto what might well be considered to be inconsequential questions. But maybe all this is a matter of post-Hegelian summing up, necessary to go through before people feel ready to move on. I don't know.