People like Kurt Godel, however, apparently thought that a Platonic world exists. As it turns out, Godel was also crazy, but that alone does not make his thinking dismissable.
Bashing on Godel, his incompleteness theorems points towards the noetic faculties of the mind that are capable of perceiving beyond that of which would be limited by his incompleteness theorems. That's actually a powerful argument for Platonic ideals, and/of which nobody really phrases the question about Platonic idealism in this way; but, I find the argument ad hoc persuasive.
On the question of the status of Platonic ideals, where are we? Where should we be?
I feel your essay is somewhat tendentious although I hasten to add that I don’t feel sufficiently qualified to properly criticise it. It’s inevitable when you try and compress thousands of years of intellectual history into a few paragraphs, and all conditioned by your prior conclusion as to what the platonic ideas might be.
I am hamstrung by the fact that I didn’t receive an education in The Classics - well, one year of Latin although that hardly suffices. But later in life I feel as though I have reached a kind of synoptic understanding of some important aspects of Platonism - which, I’m sorry to say, is not evident in what you’ve written above.
The central issue as I see it, is not what we understand as ‘ideas’, but universals. Platonism is realist about universals, and universals are not simply ‘ideas’ as you or I might think of them. The main point about universals is that, whilst they are only perceptible to a rational intelligence, they are not the product of the individual mind.
Actually for an effective short primer on such matter, have a peruse of Edward Feser’s blog post, Think, McFlly, Think (I think that’s a movie reference). He discusses the distinction between concepts, intellection, sensation and imagination.
I think the key point about your approach is that it subjectivises ideas i.e. sees them as the attribute of individual minds. Whereas in Plato, you see the origin of objective idealism, that is, the understanding that ideas in the form of universals are intrinsic to the fabric of the cosmos. But they are so in a way which is unintelligible to enlightenment rationalism, for the precise reason that this outlook inherited the attitude of the early nominalises, e.g. Ockham, Bacon et al. This is the subject of a very good long read, What’s Wrong with Ockham: Reassessing the Role of Nominalism in the Dissolution of the West.
All of this is a deep study, and as much a matter of intellectual history as of philosophy per se. Or perhaps you could say it’s a study in meta-philosophy.
As to his incompleteness theories, I do not think you understand them - maybe at all.
No, I have a pretty good understanding of Gödel's incompleteness theorems. But, don't take it from me, by all means... I actually understood his work in regard to reading about it from Tarski's undefinability theorem, who arrived at the same conclusions somewhat latter (another case of Newton vs Leibniz wrt. to truth, in my mind).
Great. Have at it, a guy who was best friends with Einstein taught at Princeton and completely demolished Hilbert's program is... crazy. Is this shitposting taken to a new level on TPF?
Deleted UserNovember 18, 2019 at 22:35#3539740 likes
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Hostile to Kurt Godel? Are you kidding me? I idolize the man in many regards. I see we're on completely different wavelengths here, so I'll stop the projecting, which (according to you and your "consensus" about him being a paranoid schizophrenic is entirely made up in my mind).
Look, I see you edited your post two or three times, about him being a paranoid schizophrenic at it being an established "fact". So, I rest my case. This discussion seems to have evolved into giftedness and "craziness", so it's up to you to either take it in that direction or not.
Great. Have at it, a guy who was best friends with Einstein taught at Princeton and completely demolished Hilbert's program is... crazy. Is this shitposting taken to a new level on TPF?
Hey, I've watched A Beautiful Mind. Being crazy doesn't mean you can't also be an accomplished genius. And I was only referring to the part about starving yourself to death out of food paranoia. That sounds like an untreated mental illness.
On the question of the status of Platonic ideals, where are we? Where should we be?
It turns out the nominalists were right. Ideas are as fragile as the parchment they’re written on. They are carried in our artifacts, not in some other realm.
Hey, I've watched A Beautiful Mind. Being crazy doesn't mean you can't also be an accomplished genius. And I was only referring to the part about starving yourself to death out of food paranoia. That sounds like an untreated mental illness.
It could be, don't really know. I tend to suspend judgment calls on such matters.
Deleted UserNovember 18, 2019 at 23:40#3539980 likes
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Deleted UserNovember 19, 2019 at 00:16#3540010 likes
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The passage that strikes me in this essay is the following:
Thomists and other critics of Ockham have tended to present traditional realism, with its forms or natures, as the solution to the modern problem of knowledge. It seems to me that it does not quite get to the heart of the matter. A genuine realist should see “forms” not merely as a solution to a distinctly modern problem of knowledge, but as part of an alternative conception of knowledge, a conception that is not so much desired and awaiting defense, as forgotten and so no longer desired. Characterized by forms, reality had an intrinsic intelligibility, not just in each of its parts but as a whole. With forms as causes, there are interconnections between different parts of an intelligible world, indeed there are overlapping matrices of intelligibility in the world, making possible an ascent from the more particular, posterior, and mundane to the more universal, primary, and noble.
In short, the appeal to forms or natures does not just help account for the possibility of trustworthy access to facts, it makes possible a notion of wisdom, traditionally conceived as an ordering grasp of reality.
The main thrust of the essay is indeed 'how to conceive of universals'. It notes:
In doing away with forms, Ockham did away with formal causality. Formal causality secures teleology—the ends or purposes of things follow from what they are and what is in accord with or capable of fulfilling their natures.
As to whether Joshua Hothschild would agree with Gilson or not, I do not know, but his credentials are impressive (and include being a founding member of the Society for Medieval Logic and Metaphysics.)
As for Godel's Platonism, there's an excellent article by Rebecca Goldstein (who happens to be married to Steve Pinker):
Gödel was a mathematical realist, a Platonist. He believed that what makes mathematics true is that it's descriptive—not of empirical reality, of course, but of an abstract reality. Mathematical intuition is something analogous to a kind of sense perception. In his essay "What Is Cantor's Continuum Hypothesis?", Gödel wrote that we're not seeing things that just happen to be true, we're seeing things that must be true. The world of abstract entities is a necessary world—that's why we can deduce our descriptions of it through pure reason.
What appeals to me, is that there *is* 'an abstract reality. Because, if true, then it turns out materialism is falsified, as there are real but immaterial things.
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You appear to claim that universals themselves exist; is that your claim? If they exist, were they produced (somehow)? By what agency if not mind? (And currently the only minds we have any knowledge of is animal minds - subject to adjustment when the spaceships arrive, but not until, except as a matter of speculation.)
I'll enlarge a reply to this later.
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By no means I am an authority on the matter; but, let's suppose that we could envision an uncountable alphabet, then doesn't that suppose a mathematical realm in some objective sense, hence Platonism?
By no means I am an authority on the matter; but, let's suppose that we could envision an uncountable alphabet, then doesn't that suppose a mathematical realm in some objective sense, hence Platonism?
And, in a sense this "bypasses" Godel's incompleteness theorems, which Wittgenstein sought to point out as far as my limited knowledge spans.
I think required of us here, to make any sense of Realism (R) v. Nominalism (N), is to first determine what we are talking about.
Metaphysics. Neo-thomism (of which Gilson was an exponent) is a modernized form of classical metaphysics. The Feser blog article would help clarify these questions.
My own view is that the answer is obvious: Platonic ideals just are ideas of ideas. I have a pretty good idea of what a horse is. I can imagine the idea of a perfect horse, and I can also imagine that my ideas of such a perfection might themselves contain some imperfections, as judged by people who know more about horses than I do.
I agree.
[quote=McDowell]
I have urged that our perceptual relation to the world is conceptual all the way out to the world’s impacts on our receptive capacities. The idea of the conceptual that I mean to be invoking is to be understood in close connection with the idea of rationality, in the sense that is in play in the traditional separation of mature human beings, as rational animals, from the rest of the animal kingdom. Conceptual capacities are capacities that belong to their subject’s rationality. So another way of putting my claim is to say that our perceptual experience is permeated with rationality.
[/quote]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conceptualism
The important point, for me, is that concept isn't private. Concept is essentially public and social. What obscures this is its dependence on particular human beings as its 'host.' The mature, rational human being has learned to live in a humanized life-world. A chair is seen automatically as something to sit on. A sidewalk is seen automatically as something to walk on. Of course we also learn about justice, fairness, appropriateness.
The more perfect-exact forms are mathematical, like the perfect circle. These seem less local, less cultural than other forms/concepts and presumably have their foundation in our biology.
A last point is that forms/concepts structure philosophy itself. So while we know that concepts are 'only in our heads,' they also make such judgment possible. We have heads (as heads) because of concepts. So in some sense concepts/forms are prior to the mental/physical distinction as the condition of its possibility.
The more perfect-exact forms are mathematical, like the perfect circle. These seem less local, less cultural than other forms/concepts and presumably have their foundation in our biology.
See - biology. Evolution as philosophy. What evolutionary theory is intended to explain is the development of species. But now, as a matter (not to say "accident") of history, it has become a 'theory of everything' - well, everything about us.
But, a circle is a circle in all possible worlds, whether h. sapiens has evolved to understand it or not. And when we do understand it, then we understand something that is in no way 'founded in biology'; we've evolved beyond the exigencies of biology at that point (to become, in Greek terms, 'the rational animal', which is a difference that makes a difference - an ontological difference, I claim.)
In metaphysics, conceptualism is a theory that explains universality of particulars as conceptualized frameworks situated within the thinking mind.
What does 'within' mean? Within what? What is the ontological status of ideas? That suits 'naturalised epistemology' very well, because evolution gives rise to brain gives rise to mind. But that is exactly what is at issue here. And furthermore, does evolution give rise to the 'furniture of reason'? Can the law of the excluded middle be "explained" as a consequence of, or on the grounds of, biology? I say not - that there would be no "science of biology" were we first not able to recognise the law of the excluded middle.
The Hothschild article talks about 'conceptualism'. It's too detailed and long a discussion to summarise, but it starts by saying of conceptualism that 'This middle position is usually characterized as holding that while universals are not real things, they are not mere words either, they are concepts.' There's then a discussion of the medieval debate about the ontology of universals, which shows that it became a discussion about 'mechanisms of meaning'.
But he goes on to say that Aquinas' theory of scholastic realism is grounded in the 'inherence theory of predication', to wit:
Words signify forms—this is the heart of Aquinas’s “realism.” It is not that these signified forms are universals or have any universal existence; they exist only as the individual acts of being characterizing individual things. (And, as we will see, even the sense in which they “exist” in individuals can admit of great qualification.) But as the individual forms of individual things, they have a potential intelligibility which can be abstracted by the mind; abstracting this potential intelligibility—making it actually understood by the mind—is the formation of the concept. It is by means of such a concept that a word signifies, and the mind is aware of, many things insofar as they all share that same form. This is why Aquinas said that universality is a feature of individual forms existing in the mind, insofar as those individual forms relate that mind to many things.
This is supported by a quote from another source:
if the proper knowledge of the senses is of accidents, through forms that are individualized, the proper knowledge of intellect is of essences, through forms that are universalized. Intellectual knowledge is analogous to sense knowledge inasmuch as it demands the reception of the form of the thing which is known. But it differs from sense knowledge so far forth as it consists in the apprehension of things, not in their individuality, but in their universality [sup] 2 [/sup].
So that is close to how I understand the knowledge of universals: that when we see a particular being, we recognise its form to say it is 'man' (etc) - something which is true of all men (hence, universal.) That is where you can see the intuition alluded to in the OP still living and breathing. Whether universals exist is another matter. I say that they exist in a sense - but you will find, modern thinking has no scale along which that expression is intelligible. For us, things either exist, or they don't. And that too has its origins in medieval scholasticism - it is the loss of the sense of there being 'degrees of reality' which is at issue, in my view.
I note this passage:
McDowell:Conceptual capacities are capacities that belong to their subject’s rationality. So another way of putting my claim is to say that our perceptual experience is permeated with rationality.
Completely agree. Compare that with this claim by Jacques Maritain - that 'what the Empiricist speaks of and describes as sense-knowledge is not exactly sense-knowledge, but sense-knowledge plus unconsciously introduced intellective ingredients, -- sense-knowledge in which he has made room for reason without recognizing it.' Which I think is a precise characterisation of most modern empiricism. The 'rational subject' is bracketed out by the initial 'grand abstraction' of science, which purports to deal with 'ideal objects'; and then having been bracketed out, is forgotten about. Which is how you end up with Daniel Dennett.
creativesoulNovember 19, 2019 at 08:58#3541250 likes
Conceptual capacities are capacities that belong to their subject’s rationality. So another way of putting my claim is to say that our perceptual experience is permeated with rationality.
— McDowell
The important point, for me, is that concept isn't private. Concept is essentially public and social.
When you say, “that concept isn’t private”, do you mean to say by “that concept”, McDowell’s claim?
Or maybe you meant the important point is that conception isn’t private, and thereby conception is essentially public.
I submit that anything belonging to a subject’s rationality, per McDowell, is private, and to suggest that the totality of subjects in possession of rationality is the same as rationality itself being “essentially public and social” does not follow. And if rationality is not essentially public, thus is private, and rationality is grounded in “conceptual capacities”, then conceptual capacities are equally private. Which is why your “concept is essentially public and social” is false, or at least needs clarification.
——————
So while we know that concepts are 'only in our heads,' they also make such judgment possible.
.....which is correct in the philosophical sense, which seems to indicate concepts are indeed private, but just serves as either a self-contradiction (“concept is essentially public”), or, my lack of understanding.
Help me out?
Deleted UserNovember 19, 2019 at 14:49#3541720 likes
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I consider myself a 'fallibilistic epicurean spinozist' (of a quixotic sort) with a strong affinity for Deutsch's QTM, Rovelli's RQM & Tegmark's MUH, for instance; with that said ...
On the question of the status of Platonic ideals, where are we? Where should we be?
"Ideals are real" (e.g. horseness, redness, treeness, etc) is a reification fallacy. Plato proffered a solution in search of a problem: as Epicurus et al taught in antiquity, appearances are not false but rather it's our interpretations which are mistaken or false. Reality is intelligible but not transparently or simply so; it does not fool us, rather we fool ourselves with our self-serving simplifications (i.e. idealizations).
What appeals to me, is that there *is* 'an abstract reality. Because, if true, then it turns out materialism is falsified, as there are real but immaterial things.
Explain what you mean by "abstract" and "reality" and "things". (The above seems like language gone on holiday again.)
[quote=Wayfarer]The 'rational subject' is bracketed out by the initial 'grand abstraction' of science, which purports to deal with 'ideal objects'; and then having been bracketed out, is forgotten about.[/quote]
Subject (pov)/gauge-invariant scientific models either defeasibly explain some transformation - physical or formal - or they don't. That's all they are used for. "The 'rational subject'" which uses scientific models cannot also be the object of scientific modeling anymore than eyes can also be within their field of vision. Territories necessarily exceed maps, or abstractions (i.e. informational compressions - simplifications) of territories; the map-maker - map-making - is always the enabling lacuna of every map and any lacuna-free map - corresponding 1:1 to a territory - would be useless as a map.
Thus, the inefficacy - usually patent failure - of idealism, no matter the flavor (e.g. platonic, subjective, critical, absolute, phenomenological ...), or antirealism, or immaterialism to provide corrigible, testible, robustly fecund explanations of matters of fact from which unique predictions can be derived and open-up further inquiries - paths of research - into other unforeseen matters of fact which in turn require extending current explanations, formulating new explanations, or even (rarely) adopting new paradigms of explanation.
Methodological, not metaphysical, materialism no doubt is the worst, least true, intellectual commitment made in human cultural history, except, of course, for all the others tried so far in the last three plus millennia vis-à-vis progressively disclosing how the world (which includes subjects-in-the-world ... as opposed to shibboleth "rational subjects" or "transcendental egos" or "immaterial souls" etc) works.
[quote=Wayfarer] Which is how you end up with Daniel Dennett.[/quote]
Yeah. A wry, scientifically literate, world-class, analytical philosopher emeritus who doesn't proselytize pseudoscience by preaching fatuous woo. For my filthy lucre, Dan Dennett's work is easily worth more today to intellectual culture anywhere than the biggest, funkiest, ashram-load of Deepak Chopras, William Lane Craigs, Jordan Petersens & other - so-called scholarly, "new age" or p0m0 - mystifying obscurants.
All you are saying is: scientific models are models, the explain something specific - 'they explain some transformation' - which is perfectly true, whereas
....or immaterialism to provide corrigible, testible, robustly fecund explanations of matters of fact
Idealism (etc) does not, being a reflection on the act of knowing itself, being philosophy as distinct from empirical science. ('According to Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1964), philosophy is “the set of questions in which the one who questions is himself implicated in the question” ' .) Which is your only point, along with your endless reiterations of your detestation of anything you deem 'spiritual' (only ever illustrated with comic-book examples.)
A lecturer I had used to say of Hume's famous remark '“If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion" that it applies to the very book of which it is the conclusion. He compared it to the uroboros, the mythical self-eating snake, saying, 'the hardest part is the last bite'.
A wry, scientifically literate, world-class, analytical philosopher emeritus who doesn't proselytize pseudoscience by preaching fatuous woo.
What Dennett does, is methodically apply the techniques of philosophy to undermining philosophy (the 'acid of darwin's dangerous idea). So how that is not 'fatuous woo' I will never know, clothed in the garb of science.
Or maybe you meant the important point is that conception isn’t private, and thereby conception is essentially public.
Yes, this is more like what I was getting at. I'm influenced by thinkers like Heidegger and Derrida. While it's an overstatement, I think there's truth in the notion that language speaks the subject.
And if rationality is not essentially public, thus is private, and rationality is grounded in “conceptual capacities”, then conceptual capacities are equally private. Which is why your “concept is essentially public and social” is false, or at least needs clarification.
How could it be false or need clarification if rationality is private? If rationality is private, it's true because I think it is. I offer that playfully, only to emphasize my point.
I'll try to offer to better response later, when I'll have more time. At the moment I'd say roughly that we are stuck with (at least) two incompatible perspectives. We can try to build the world up as the dream of a private subject or we can derive the subject from system of concepts that are no longer simply concepts for just that reason. Because we know in an obvious, practical sense that 'consciousness' depends on the brain, we are tempted to start with the subject and move toward inter-subjectivity, etc. Yet a close investigation of this 'subject' suggests that it's more like a voice without a pure interior.
I see myself as trying to point out what tends to be overlooked. I don't have a final, settled theory and, indeed, don't think one is possible, given the nature of language.
If that doesn't count as being crazy... then nothing will.
Incredible. Instead of talking about his sentiments about Platonism, which can be gleaned through his incompleteness theorems or Turing's Halting problem, and his dismissal of mathematical formalism and with that a deathblow to mechanism, we're focusing on whether he was "crazy" or not.
Reply to Eee I agree that formal concepts are 'not private' in that they're not the creation of individual minds. In that sense, they're 'public', although it is a strange way of expressing it. 'True for all observers' would suffice.
I agree that formal concepts are 'not private' in that they're not the creation of individual minds. In that sense, they're 'public', although it is a strange way of expressing it. 'True for all observers' would suffice.
Calling concepts 'true for all observers' doesn't seem quite right. Statements made possible by concepts might be viewed as true for all observers.
While my expression may sound strange, what exactly do you mean by 'all observers'? Presumably you mean those not yet born. An infinite or ideal subject seems to be implied, which is to say a concept of the human mind in general or rationality.
And if rationality is not essentially public, thus is private, and rationality is grounded in “conceptual capacities”, then conceptual capacities are equally private.
I suggest that rationality is essentially public, while strangely being grounded in individual conceptual capacities. It's a shared dream, if you like, but calling it rational emphasizes its sharedness --or potential or ideal sharedness. For me there's nothing mystical in this. It just acknowledges what we are doing as philosophers, which is something like negotiating the real. One could joke that we are cyborgs, at least if language is understood as an external technology that is sewn into our 'consciousness.' But this 'external' technology is how we talk about or create an interior where the meaning of words lives in some imagined purity. It's not that traditional concepts become useless, since we need them in order to criticize them, but only that they aren't experienced as absolutes.
But, a circle is a circle in all possible worlds, whether h. sapiens has evolved to understand it or not. And when we do understand it, then we understand something that is in no way 'founded in biology'; we've evolved beyond the exigencies of biology at that point (to become, in Greek terms, 'the rational animal', which is a difference that makes a difference - an ontological difference, I claim.)
As far as circles being independent of humans, I don't see an easy way to prove that. How can we see around our own eyes?
That appeal to biology is a reasonable guess, it seems to me. Why doesn't my cat talk to me in English? Her brain is built not for it. It's possible that she understands everything I say and chooses not to talk.
What does 'within' mean? Within what? What is the ontological status of ideas? That suits 'naturalised epistemology' very well, because evolution gives rise to brain gives rise to mind.
I believe I already indicated that we can also start from concepts and understand the 'within' of the 'subject' as a theoretical fiction or sign among signs. The mental/physical distinction should not IMO be taken as an absolute, despite its utility and familiarity.
It is not that these signified forms are universals or have any universal existence; they exist only as the individual acts of being characterizing individual things. (And, as we will see, even the sense in which they “exist” in individuals can admit of great qualification.) But as the individual forms of individual things, they have a potential intelligibility which can be abstracted by the mind; abstracting this potential intelligibility—making it actually understood by the mind—is the formation of the concept. It is by means of such a concept that a word signifies, an
Intellectual knowledge is analogous to sense knowledge inasmuch as it demands the reception of the form of the thing which is known. But it differs from sense knowledge so far forth as it consists in the apprehension of things, not in their individuality, but in their universality 2 .
This seems more or less right to me. I see Fido as a dog. I agree with Heidegger and others that much of our understanding is far more automatic than this. But at the theoretical level we can speak of the dog we saw on our walk and not specify Fido. We understand classes.
Whether universals exist is another matter. I say that they exist in a sense - but you will find, modern thinking has no scale along which that expression is intelligible. For us, things either exist, or they don't.
I'd say beware of generalizations like 'modern thinking.' Who are the most famous philosophers of the 20th century? And what did they worry about? Heidegger obsessed about the meaning of being.
[quote=SEP]
Let's back up in order to bring Heidegger's central concern into better view. (The ‘way in’ to Being and Time that I am about to present follows Gelven 1989 6–7.) Consider some philosophical problems that will be familiar from introductory metaphysics classes: Does the table that I think I see before me exist? Does God exist? Does mind, conceived as an entity distinct from body, exist? These questions have the following form: does x (where x = some particular kind of thing) exist? Questions of this form presuppose that we already know what ‘to exist’ means. We typically don't even notice this presupposition. But Heidegger does, which is why he raises the more fundamental question: what does ‘to exist’ mean? This is one way of asking what Heidegger calls the question of the meaning of Being, and Being and Time is an investigation into that question.
[/quote]
Completely agree. Compare that with this claim by Jacques Maritain - that 'what the Empiricist speaks of and describes as sense-knowledge is not exactly sense-knowledge, but sense-knowledge plus unconsciously introduced intellective ingredients, -- sense-knowledge in which he has made room for reason without recognizing it.' Which I think is a precise characterisation of most modern empiricism. The 'rational subject' is bracketed out by the initial 'grand abstraction' of science, which purports to deal with 'ideal objects'; and then having been bracketed out, is forgotten about.
Yeah I do think that can happen with thinkers. They ignore the lifeworld that grounds science. This is possible because fundamental concepts are so 'public' and 'automatic' that they are perhaps ignored as uncontroversial. We have to already share a world in order to make observations and present intelligible hypotheses. So in some sense philosophy is more difficult or ambitious than physical science, which contributes perhaps to its results being endlessly disputable. Working technology is overpowering, and perhaps it's not materialism but really just being dazzled by technology that obscures other forms of being.
Consider that when you think about triangularity, as you might when proving a geometrical theorem, it is necessarily perfect triangularity that you are contemplating, not some mere approximation of it. Triangularity as your intellect grasps it is entirely determinate or exact; for example, what you grasp is the notion of a closed plane figure with three perfectly straight sides, rather than that of something which may or may not have straight sides or which may or may not be closed. Of course, your mental image of a triangle might not be exact, but rather indeterminate and fuzzy. But to grasp something with the intellect is not the same as to form a mental image of it. For any mental image of a triangle is necessarily going to be of an isosceles triangle specifically, or of a scalene one, or an equilateral one; but the concept of triangularity that your intellect grasps applies to all triangles alike. Any mental image of a triangle is going to have certain features, such as a particular color, that are no part of the concept of triangularity in general. A mental image is something private and subjective, while the concept of triangularity is objective and grasped by many minds at once.
Elsewhere he discusses how for example algorithms and scientific theorems fall into the same general category. For instance the laws of motion are determinate and exact (for the range within which they apply.) So such principles are the 'ligaments of rationality'.
Who are the most famous philosophers of the 20th century? And what did they worry about? Heidegger obsessed about the meaning of being.
Right - and he is as far from the typical anglo-american reductionist as you can get, right? Heidegger has had a huge impact on 20th c philosophical theology. He's not the kind of person I have in mind when criticising reductionism.
That appeal to biology is a reasonable guess, it seems to me. Why doesn't my cat talk to me in English? Her brain is built not for it. It's possible that she understands everything I say and chooses not to talk.
Sure. I'm not denying the fact of evolution, what I'm objecting to is the widespread belief that this provides what amounts to a philosophy of mind. My view is that once h. sapiens evolves to the point of being a language-using and meaning-seeking being, then we have capabilities that are beyond the scope of biological theory per se. (This was also Alfred Russel Wallace's view but of course he can be conventiently dismissed as a Victorian spiritualist in contrast to the hard-headed materialism of the 'Scottish enlightenment'.)
ValentinusNovember 20, 2019 at 00:49#3543120 likes
Reply to Wayfarer
I agree that the use of universals in the mode of seeing creation as "intelligible" existences having relationships with each other is far enough away from the focus of concepts as what humans "do" that the latter is not in a position to opine upon the former.
Conversely, however, the limit works the other way. Both sides will never lose their Home games.
Something is missing from both sides.
Making clear statements about someone's insanity is not bashing. Godel was one of the brilliant ones for many reasons... "Crazy" ain't always a slur my friend.
:wink:
Lighten up.
Deleted UserNovember 20, 2019 at 02:34#3543520 likes
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Explain what you mean by "abstract" and "reality" and "things". (The above seems like language gone on holiday again.)
and while you're at it, Wayf, how about this too (unless, of course, you can't because ... y'know ... you're full of __it): "materialism is fallacious". :yawn:
I submit that anything belonging to a subject’s rationality, per McDowell, is private, and to suggest that the totality of subjects in possession of rationality is the same as rationality itself being “essentially public and social” does not follow.
This might help too.
[quote=link]
Heidegger constantly reminds us throughout Being and Time, the account of 'inauthentic' life of everyday anyone is not to be interpreted evaluatively or morally but rather ontologically. It is an a priori Existential of being human: "the anyone is the condition of possibility of all human action" (p. 2). Thonhauser writes: "To be socialized in the framework of established modes of intelligibility and regulated modes of comportment is the prerequisite for becoming an agent in one's own right" (ibid.).
First of all and most of the time (Heidegger's zunächst und zumeist, BT 370), humans live following the social rules that they apprehend in some kind of mindless, non-explicit, anonymous manner.
[/quote]
What I have in mind is something like this 'Anyone.' In some sense the 'we' is prior to the 'I' as a kind of software that makes the hardware fully human. Kant could only write the CPR because he knew German, because he was 'in' German. He was anyone before he was someone. And we love Kant not as a fountain of opinion but because he is reasonable. He speaks to what is rational in us.
[quote=Robert Solomon]
The world may have been created by God, but it was now in the hands – for better or worse – of humanity. The world was a human stage, with human values, emotions, hopes, and fears, and this humanity was defined, in turn, by a universal human nature.
[/quote]
The idea is that a theological notion was humanized. Reason is a transformation of the Holy Ghost, metaphorically speaking. (To me it's all thoughts and feelings and metaphors. While you know Kant better than me, I mostly feel like some kind of Kantian, exploring the limits of cognition from the inside.)
My view is that once h. sapiens evolves to the point of being a language-using and meaning-seeking being, then we have capabilities that are beyond the scope of biological theory per se.
To me this is akin to the notion that biology is no substitute for philosophy, which with I agree. This theme is well explored, too, in I am Strange Loop.
Reply to tim wood Another key passage from Gerson (who is incidentally considered one of the leading academic specialists on Platonism):
[quote=Lloyd Gerson]seven key themes (of 'ur-Platonism']:
1. The universe has a systematic unity;
2. This unity reflects an explanatory hierarchy and in particular a “top-down” approach to explanation (as opposed to the “bottom-up” approach of naturalism), especially in the two key respects that the simple is prior to the complex and the intelligible is prior to the sensible;
3. The divine constitutes an irreducible explanatory category, and is to be conceived of in personal terms (even if in some Ur-Platonist thinkers the personal aspect is highly attenuated);
4. The psychological also constitutes an irreducible explanatory category;
5. Persons are part of the hierarchy and their happiness consists in recovering a lost position within it, in a way that can be described as “becoming like God”;
6. Moral and aesthetic value is to be analyzed by reference to this metaphysical hierarchy; and
7. The epistemological order is contained with this metaphysical order.[/quote]
I regard that as a succinct statement of the 'grand tradition' of Western philosophy. I also recognise that it is thoroughly unfashionable and probably pretty Non-PC too boot.
Explain what you mean by "abstract" and "reality" and "things". (The above seems like language gone on holiday)
Language is a universalizing activity. Whenever you say that 'something is something', or 'something means something', then you are making a rational judgement. But the elements of rational judgement have no physical equivalent. Certainly you can, and we do, represent the elements of rational judgement in symbolic form, which is the basis of written language, logic and arithmetic. But those elements are not themselves material or physical in nature, their nature is purely intellectual or noetic. They can only be understood by a rational intelligence.
Your evolutionary account of intelligence is that mind is first and foremost an evolutionary adaptation. That is certainly arguable in the case of non-rational animals, but the problem with the argument is that it essentially claims that speech acts are like reflexes or patterns of behaviour that have no intrinsic meaning (which is how positivism and behaviourism depict them). The issue is, that if this account is correct, then it's utterances are meaningless. Alternatively, if they're not meaningless, then speech acts do have intrinsic meaning and the argument fails.
The same arguments are frequently brought against Dennett. His book Consciousness Explained was mocked as 'Consciousness Ignored' by his academic critics. And if he was consistent, then he would say nothing, because if his argument is correct, then philosophy is just meaningless noise. And if it's not meaningless noise, then his argument is not correct.
Ok. The modern version of universal forms, ideals, sentiments, various sundry renditions of.....
“...that which exists a priori in the mind...”
......because.......
“.....the distinguishing characteristic of their nature consists in this, that they apply to their objects, without having borrowed anything from experience towards the representation of them....”.
.......meeting the criteria of my personal favorite, a transcendental object. My main concern with the inquiry (what is a formal concept) was, so long as, e.g. “triangularity”, is not given the authority of a category, it can be given any theory-specific name its creator deems fit. I say this because the formal concepts are reducible, insofar as triangles and thereby triangularity, presuppose quantity and relation, specifically.
———————
A mental image is something private and subjective, while the concept of triangularity is objective and grasped by many minds at once.
I hesitate in granting that any concept is objective simply because it is grasped by many subjectivities.
Even if “....to grasp a concept is simply not the same thing as having a mental image...”** is true, because the reverse is actually the case, it does not follow that grasping concepts is objective. Rather, the objects of conceptions are objective, iff one communicates his understanding of them, and they meet with congruency by other minds. Upon being asked to illustrate an object, a plurality of minds will all draw from a conceptual ideal per-existing a priori, and the drawings will all be different in particulars while similar in form. And the drawings will differentiate in direct proportion to the complexity of the concepts required for it, re: the drawings of stop signs will be closer to each other in appearance than the drawings of a house. To then say the conceptual form of these objects is objective contradicts the laying of it a priori in the mind.
Anyway...thanks for the Feser reference and the explanation.
In some sense the 'we' is prior to the 'I' as a kind of software that makes the hardware fully human.
Understood, and agreed, in principle. On the one hand, no human is possible without the antecedent humanity, but on the other, a general condition of some empirical unity is in itself insufficient to explain the multiplicity of disparate conditions of its particulars. In other words, why I’m this, or why I think this, doesn’t explain why you’re that, or why you think that, merely because we’re both human. Being human is sufficient for those, but insufficient to explain why those. And if what we want to know is why, which is almost always the case, then we see it just won’t answer anything if we ground our investigation on some fundamental ontological condition.
—————-
I mostly feel like some kind of Kantian, exploring the limits of cognition from the inside.
As well we all should. When the lights go out at the end of the day, there’s nobody there but ourselves. “Know thy-self”, and all those other colloquial admonishments, doncha know. Which, ironically enough, leave off “as best you can”, or, “but you’re probably wrong”.
The main reason for my comments, I guess, is your McDowell passage, which I find agreeable, followed by the saying of things seemingly diametrically opposed to it, which I don’t. After your furtherances I understand you better, but not the opposition to McDowell. Just trying to learn something, is what it boils down to. Same with the Feser comment.
Deleted UserNovember 20, 2019 at 17:21#3545440 likes
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The gratuitous, improper, and inappropriate use of these words in what is straight and uncut theology cries out the usual fraud to me, of wanting a place at the wrong table, and signaling that whatever this writer has to say cannot be taken at face value.
As you say, your understanding of 'what is real' is constituted by what is 'materially existent', and the only role of religion is to provide a 'safe space' where people are allowed to entertain comforting fantasies about things that aren't real but which are at least edifying. That's about right isn't it?
The point about Platonic metaphysics is that it purported to be rational and not based on 'pistis' or 'doxa'. But over the course of centuries, it was incorporated into Christian theology such that it became identified with religious belief rather than philosophy as such. And in our secular culture, 'religion' is fenced off, not the subject of discussion for sensible people.
But the point about Platonist philosophy is that it makes a strong argument for the sense of a reality beyond the physical - hence 'meta-physical' - which can nevertheless be known - hence 'epistemological'.
Your logorrhea explains nothing, Wayf, certainly not what you quoted me requesting.
Like I said before - I can explain it to you, but I can't understand it for you. It requires a shift in perspective, one which you're not the least interested in, so let's just leave it at that.
I agree that formal concepts are 'not private' in that they're not the creation of individual minds. In that sense, they're 'public'
My rendering of concepts is not objective hence private, your rendering of formal concepts is, in a sense, public. Can you illuminate the difference between private concepts that facilitate judgement of objectivity, and formal concepts that are not creations of the individual minds?
Can you illuminate the difference between private concepts that facilitate judgement of objectivity, and formal concepts that are not creations of the individual minds?
A question that occurs to me is whether mathematical proofs are objectively true? I mean, they are in a sense, but on the other hand, strictly speaking they don't appeal to objects as such; they're perceivable by reason alone. But mathematics is used to arrive at determination of what is objectively true, in the case of scientific experiments and observations.
So what interests me about that, is that if you ask what is the ultimate truth criterion, most people will say what is 'objectively' so. But it seems to me there are domains of discourse, like mathematics, and logic, where that is not exactly the right word. And I think that says something.
Reply to Wayfarer
Mathematical proofs are only 'true' within the system of mathematics. For they rely upon the axioms, symbols and rules of the system. Hence they cannot be said to be 'objectively true'. I am talking about pure mathematics here, which is where mathematical proofs are found. Applied maths is a different story.
A mental image is something private and subjective, while the concept of triangularity is objective and grasped by many minds at once.
The exactitude of ideal triangles is something which we stipulate against the realization of the inexactitude of actual triangular objects; it is just the realization that exactitude is conceivable.
My view is that once h. sapiens evolves to the point of being a language-using and meaning-seeking being, then we have capabilities that are beyond the scope of biological theory per se.
This says nothing more than that the evolutionary advent of symbolic language enabled the genesis and evolution of shared cultures which cannot be exhaustively described and explained in purely biological terms. Biological evolution itself cannot be described and explained in terms of physics either.
These kinds of insights seem fairly obvious, but what further conclusions do you think you are rationally warranted in deriving from them?
On the one hand, no human is possible without the antecedent humanity, but on the other, a general condition of some empirical unity is in itself insufficient to explain the multiplicity of disparate conditions of its particulars.
And if what we want to know is why, which is almost always the case, then we see it just won’t answer anything if we ground our investigation on some fundamental ontological condition.
I read this in terms of a wariness about pseudo-explanations. For instance, 'God' is often (not saying always) just rug under which we hide our ignorance. 'God' can also be used symbolically, not in an act of science/philosophy. And there's also the issue of whether literal and metaphorical meanings can be cleanly separated.
When the lights go out at the end of the day, there’s nobody there but ourselves. “Know thy-self”, and all those other colloquial admonishments, doncha know. Which, ironically enough, leave off “as best you can”, or, “but you’re probably wrong”.
A question that occurs to me is whether mathematical proofs are objectively true? I mean, they are in a sense, but on the other hand, strictly speaking they don't appeal to objects as such; they're perceivable by reason alone.
I find it helpful to recall that objective is just unbiased. That we tend to conflate it with objects speaks perhaps to how uncontroversial talk about couches and cars tends to be. The objective view is one that is purified of subjective distortion and/or the intersection of a personal perspectives.
In proofs without words, the background assumption seems to be that we all perceive/intuit space in the same way, which implies a kind of ideal, shared subject. 'Anyone' can see that area is preserved by the mere translation and rotation of shapes and therefore grant various formulas for the area of a triangle as necessarily true. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5x-NFKZrnMM
We expect such theorems to remain true, which suggests that this Anyone is fixed or outside of time. This allows us to imagine aliens who are partially human in the sense of participating in this Anyone.
Christian Realism, per Gilson, is the result of a conscious choice of the church fathers in putting together Paganism and early Christianity. In so putting together, they created problems that blew up c. 1325 AD. For details, Gilson's account is a marvelous read, at Amazon or AbeBooks or your public library.
As you mentioned Etienne Gilson, you might be interested in this analysis by Peter Redpath, in a talk given called Why Gilson? Why Now? It's the authors view of Gilson's critique of modernity. I don't know for sure, but I think there would be a fair degree of convergence between Gilson's view, and that of Hothschild, whose essay on Nominalism I referred to.
(Catholicism, due to the presence of the Scholastic tradition, is in some ways the last surviving outpost of Greek philosophy in a living tradition. I'm not Catholic, but as an intellectual philosophy I certainly prefer neo-Thomism to modern scientific naturalism.)
Subject (pov)/gauge-invariant scientific models either defeasibly explain some transformation - physical or formal - or they don't. That's all they are used for. "The 'rational subject'" which uses scientific models cannot also be the object of scientific modeling anymore than eyes can also be within their field of vision. Territories necessarily exceed maps, or abstractions (i.e. informational compressions - simplifications) of territories; the map-maker - map-making - is always the enabling lacuna of every map and any lacuna-free map - corresponding 1:1 to a territory - would be useless as a map.
I like this. 'Enabling lacuna' is great. Complexity lurks in 'explain.' While I'm not eager to collapse explanation into prediction and control, it does seem science's prestige is largely founded on the power it gives us. We can employ and develop models that don't agree with our intuition.
[quote=Feynman]
If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't understand quantum mechanics.
[/quote]
So are explanations can indeed only partially intelligible if they empower us. The problem for philosophy is or can be that the philosopher claims a profound understanding of reality that may not be recognized by others and also fails to manifest an uncontroversial/'worldly' power. We are 'forced' to listen to those who can destroy us, outperform us. The alternative is some form of antithetical, world-rejecting metaphysics. The first are not really first but perhaps last.
I hesitate in granting that any concept is objective simply because it is grasped by many subjectivities.
If we understand 'objective' to mean unbiased or ideally intersubjective, then the problem disappears. I think you are suggesting that we can't see around our own eyes, with which I agree. Placing shared concepts in some realm beyond doesn't make sense to me. I understand, though, why philosophers want to talk about such a realm.
[quote=link]
Popper's World 3 contains the products of thought. This includes abstract objects such as scientific theories, stories, myths, tools, social institutions, and works of art.[2] World 3 is not to be conceived as a Platonic realm, because it is created by humans.[3]
[/quote]
As I see it, we have repeatable insights. Anyone who repeats the thought process can come to something like the same conclusion (ideally, anyway). This 'anyone' is relatively immortal. It doesn't die with the individual. But it quite plausibly dies with the species. The temptation is to place this cultural realm in a beyond that is 'really' there, even when we aren't. Hence my interest in this 'subject' or 'Anyone' as a them running through philosophy.
Deleted UserNovember 21, 2019 at 00:06#3546780 likes
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I don’t want to go too far afield here; it’s Tim’s barndance after all, and I’m not qualified to speak Plato or Platonic ideals. While I didn’t dig an accommodating response out of you comment pursuant to my query, I didn’t find anything disagreeable either, so.......call it a draw.
Deleted UserNovember 21, 2019 at 00:20#3546860 likes
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As you say, your understanding of 'what is real' is constituted by what is 'materially existent',
— Wayfarer
No. no. no.
Forgive me, but I was harking back to your recent thread on just this point, which started with what I took to be an unequivocal statement to just that end:
1a) Material existence shall be an absolute qualification for existence - the materiality, obviously, being demonstrable. If you might stub your toe on it, then it's difficult to see how it isn't.
Did you miss this?
I hold that belief is the gift that allows us to think and speak in substantive terms about things that aren't, the thinking itself usually to some end and for some reason.
— tim wood
I took it from the comment about 'things that aren't' that you believe the - how shall we say - subjects of religious philosophy are unreal, or at any rate, something that only exist in the minds of believers. Am I wrong?
, I have a fair idea what a triangle is, in terms of what is needed to use the idea of a triangle. Does that make the triangle real? And as well, on what kind of encounter with triangles would anyone suppose that there existed an ideal triangle, and how would he know?
That is just what is at issue. Lets say the subjects of geometry are real - in what sense are they real? I would say that they're real in that everyone who studies geometry is studying the same concepts, they are common to all who think. But you're not going to 'encounter' them in any sense other than through the mind's eye, so to speak. Ergo, real but incorporeal.
The temptation is to place this cultural realm in a beyond that is 'really' there, even when we aren't. Hence my interest in this 'subject' or 'Anyone' as a them running through philosophy.
Might interest you to know that Popper co-authored a book with neuroscientist Sir John Eccles on dualist philosophy of mind.
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On the one hand, no human is possible without the antecedent humanity, but on the other, a general condition of some empirical unity is in itself insufficient to explain the multiplicity of disparate conditions of its particulars.
— Mww
Could you elaborate on the second part of this?
Substitute any empirical unity. All trees are the unity of trees, but the unity of trees doesn’t explain why some are hardwoods and some are soft, some broadleaf, some needle leaf. There’s something more needed than just being trees, to facilitate trees being hardwoods.
Deleted UserNovember 21, 2019 at 00:53#3547020 likes
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If we understand 'objective' to mean unbiased or ideally intersubjective, then the problem disappears.
I won’t fight over that. Intersubjective still leaves concepts as purely subjective constructs with possibly real objects which conform to them, which we call experience.
I agree. Now, where do they [i.e. mathematical ideas] dwell when they're at home, these incorporealities, that I call ideas and house in minds.
The point is that they don't exist in any location; the so-called 'platonic realm' is real in the sense that 'the domain of natural numbers' is real. But it is real, in that 2 is in it, and the square root of 2 is not. So I am arguing that the expression 'domain' or 'realm' is a metaphor for an intellectual domain which doesn't exist anywhere, but is real nonetheless. It's part of the 'architecture of thought', the way that we make sense of the world, and in that sense, quite real. If you're an engineer and you get your numbers wrong, your rocket crashes, or your bridge collapses. I'm assuming, not without reason, that any rational being would discover principles like Euclidean geometry, and that the discovery of non-Euclidean geometry doesn't invalidate that.
I attend an evangelical Christian church and am plagued with these issues at every sermon, I'm inclined to be somewhat careful with phrases like "religious philosophy." In my experience, religions aren't philosophies.
Thank you for your candour. I hope you don't mind me saying that it explains many of your remarks on this matter. I came to the understanding I have (such as it is) of Platonist metaphysics through the route of a philosophical search. That is, I presume, very different to the evangelical attitude, for which there is only one true way and everything else leads to perdition, and that way is based on salvation by faith alone; believe it or risk perdition. Very characteristic of modern Western thought.
Hence, some of the remarks in that Gilson essay -
After Descartes and the Protestant Reformation had come on the scene, Gilson thought that something had been radically altered in the relationship between modern mathematical physics and the classical sciences of metaphysics, ethics, and politics. Just like the Protestant Reformers Luther and Calvin, Descartes showed a distrust for natural reason. Despite the fact that Descartes is celebrated for his declaration that truth lies in “clear and distinct ideas,” Descartes had actually located all human truth and error in strength and weakness of the human will, in what Friedrich Nietzsche would famously later identify as the “Will to Power.” ... for Descartes, because [he] uses clear and distinct ideas to view the sense universe, mathematical physics is the only science that can tell us anything true about the essence of the sense world [note also here the confluence with Galileo's 'nature is the book written in mathematics'].
At present, this several-hundred year project to divorce philosophy from science and reduce science to mechanized mathematical physics has created an essential conflict within Western cultural institutions, within our intellectual, political, and religious organizations. In Cartesian thought, truth and freedom are properties of will, not reason. Hence, freedom and truth are essentially non-rational. And rationality is essentially not free or true.
This is connected with an expression I have become familiar with through these forums, namely that of the 'cartesian anxiety'
Cartesian anxiety refers to the notion that, since René Descartes posited his influential form of body-mind dualism, Western civilization has suffered from a longing for ontological certainty, or feeling that scientific methods, and especially the study of the world as a thing separate from ourselves, should be able to lead us to a firm and unchanging knowledge of ourselves and the world around us. The term is named after Descartes because of his well-known emphasis on "mind" as different from "body", "self" as different from "other".
Richard J. Bernstein coined the term in his 1983 book Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis.
Whereas, for the scholastic metaphysics (and fully acknowledging that this often also amounted to stultifying dogmatism in practice), as the Hothschild essay noted:
With forms as causes, there are interconnections between different parts of an intelligible world, indeed there are overlapping matrices of intelligibility in the world, making possible an ascent from the more particular, posterior, and mundane to the more universal, primary, and noble.
In short, the appeal to forms or natures does not just help account for the possibility of trustworthy access to facts, it makes possible a notion of wisdom, traditionally conceived as an ordering grasp of reality.
It is just that which is lacking in modern materialistic science, which is manifesting now as the insoluble arguments about multiple universes and the like. You yourself exhibit this split between science, which you feel is a sure guide to reality as it really is, and religion, which you place in a different although very important realm. And that is not a personal attack - that is the situation of the culture in which we find ourselves. Everyone feels it, I think.
You equate unreal with only existing in the mind. Granted that's a distinction that can be made in the sense of material existence - but that not relevant here, though. Why would you think that ideas are unreal? You already grant them existence!
No, what I'm saying is that intelligible objects, such as logical principles and geometric axioms, are real, but they're not phenomenally existent; they're objects of mind (so to speak) but no less real for that. In Platonism, they have a higher degree of reality than objects of sense - which goes right back to the point you were trying to make in the OP!
intelligible objects, such as logical principles and geometric axioms, are real, but they're not phenomenally existent; they're objects of mind (so to speak) but no less real for that. In Platonism, they have a higher degree of reality than objects of sense
That’s how I understand it as well, in Platonism. Enlightenment philosophy subsequently dropped objects of mind down a peg or two, making them equal in degree of reality with objects of sense, calling them both representations, but arising from different faculties, thus having different rules of use. That, and logical principles and geometric axioms took on the name and form of judgements, the subjects and predicates thereof being objects of mind. When it comes right down to bare bones, all objects are objects of mind, except the real, and even those are represented as objects of mind (so to speak).
schopenhauer1November 21, 2019 at 14:23#3548380 likes
Reply to tim wood
From what I know of Platonic Ideals and Platonism in general, if we are to historicize it, is that its origin has more to do with combining elements of the pre-Socratic philosophies of Heraclitus, Parmenides, and even Pythagoras. That is to say if Heraclitus' metaphysics represented a reality that is always in flux, Parmenides one that is unchanging (which Pythagoras can be said to be a special case of this with mathematical principles), then the Ideas and the shadows on the cave are like a synthesis of these two things. Reality is actually unchanging and can be displayed in universals and mathematics, but our consciousness and sense perceptions are a dim version of this, only seeing the imperfect and "flux" versions of the unchanging realities.
I think Schopenhauer actually did one of the best interpretations of Plato. He essentially interpreted from Platonism that Platonic Forms are in a sense timeless templates of objects that become temporal due to our epistemological natures which comprises time, space, and causality. Anyways, I don't really buy this conception, but I think it takes Platonism to its logical conclusions.
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I'm inclined to be somewhat careful with phrases like "religious philosophy." In my experience, religions aren't philosophies.
None other than (surprised?) Freddy Zarathustra says, “Christianity is Platonism for the masses." And I agree. Whereas religions traffic in (i.e. answering via) 'images & iconography' for anxiety / terror management, philosophies proceed by (i.e. questioning via) 'concepts & iconoclasm' for intellectual and moral agency development - the latter being the elitist version(?) of the more populist former (e.g. chemistry & ALCHEMY, Shakespeare's plays & SOAP OPERAS, astronomy & ASTROLOGY, Bebop & HIP HOP, democratic praxes & CONSPIRACY THEORIES, etc). I suppose, then, the inverse formulation follows: philosophy is religion for the ... elites. :yikes:
That’s how I understand it as well, in Platonism. Enlightenment philosophy subsequently dropped objects of mind down a peg or two, making them equal in degree of reality with objects of sense, calling them both representations, but arising from different faculties, thus having different rules of use
The key point being that this enabled philosophers to regard ideas as properties of matter - as everything became. (Glad at least someone else gets it, although in this matter it’s oddly reassuring to be thought wrong by almost everyone.)
"They're objects of mind." If they're objects of mind, does not that place them in the mind in the sense that matters here?
The point I want to make is that such objects would be found by any mind in any possible world. They're not dependent on the human mind for their reality, but are independent of any and all minds. However they can only be grasped by a mind. That is the sense in which they're 'objects of mind'.
What evolutionary naturalism says is that ideas are the product of the evolutionary process, which can then be understood through the prism of genetics and neurobiology, which therefore grounds knowledge in the exigencies of biology and in the phenomenal domain. That is, nowadays, the single largest factor underlying empiricist and naturalist philosophy, and what vitiates it (as spelled out in Thomas Nagel's 2012 book, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False.)
Without denying the facts of evolutionary biology, I am arguing that at the point of the development of language and reason, h. sapiens is no longer understandable solely through the evolutionary perspective, but is capable of insights into the nature of being which are beyond anything available through a purely biological perspective. In other words, to understand that which transcends the biological and the phenomenal. Platonism, generally, is one of the products of that capacity, and many of those criticising it fail to even understand what it is they’re wanting to negate.
The key point being that this enabled philosophers to regard ideas as properties of matter - as everything became.
I‘ll be the first to say I guess I don’t get it after all. You said logical principles were higher reality objects of the mind. I said later philosophy put sense objects and objects of the mind at more or less equal reality, all as objects of the mind. Then you said this allowed philosophers, presumably in Plato’s time, to regard ideas properties of matter.
I can’t make the connection from universals, which apply to logic as I understand it and to real objects in general, re: universal forms (?) but where do whatever allowed philosophers to regard ideas as properties of matter make the scene? Even if I don’t grant logical principles as universals having a higher reality but see how it can be said to be that way, how do I get from that to properties of matter?
My favored.......and long-ingrained......epistemological framework is getting in the way.
I can’t make the connection from universals, which apply to logic as I understand it and to real objects in general, re: universal forms (?) but where do whatever allowed philosophers to regard ideas as properties of matter make the scene? Even if I don’t grant logical principles as universals having a higher reality but see how it can be said to be that way, how do I get from that to properties of matter?
Because there's a connection between 'ideas' and 'forms'. The platonic 'ideas' are in some sense like archetypes or essences, the forms that give a particular its identity as a type.
The reason they were judged to be 'higher' is because their forms or types are universal, i.e. socrates is an examplar of the universal 'man'. This is what informed 'hylo-moprhic' i.e. matter-form dualism. The matter was basically dumb stuff out of which particular things are fashioned. (Actually Aristotle adopted a word for 'timber', hyle, as generic 'stuff'.)
So from there it's not too great a leap to suppose that the 'maker' of individual particulars is Plato's demiurgos, who later becomes identified as 'God' by Greek-speaking Christian philosophers.'
Also consider how this intuition went on to become the basis of scientific taxonomy, as originated by Aristotle, and later refined by Linnaeus.
ValentinusNovember 22, 2019 at 01:27#3550850 likes
Reply to Wayfarer
One thing to note about universals expressed within the Plato writings; There are many different views about what participating in the expression of a form is like. The interest in the matter was not just about validating a set of presuppositions but an investigation of what what was going on.
Substitute any empirical unity. All trees are the unity of trees, but the unity of trees doesn’t explain why some are hardwoods and some are soft, some broadleaf, some needle leaf. There’s something more needed than just being trees, to facilitate trees being hardwoods.
Ah, yes, that's clear. So we have something like subsets. I like the idea that concepts exist in a system or a web. To make sense of one is to rely on others close by in the network.
I won’t fight over that. Intersubjective still leaves concepts as purely subjective constructs with possibly real objects which conform to them, which we call experience.
Right, and I agree with that. All that I personally add is that this subject is not quite absolute, in the sense that subject is one more concept/object in the (ideally or largely) impersonal and interpersonal concept scheme. In short, I think there's some truth in 'language speaks the subject.' To be sure, common sense almost demands that we focus on consciousnesses in individual brain being linked by language and action.
Might interest you to know that Popper co-authored a book with neuroscientist Sir John Eccles on dualist philosophy of mind.
Dualism gets something right. In practice, we seem to live and talk as dualists. We all agree pre-theoretically that there are dreams and chairs. I'll look into Eccles.
One person understands something about the world and teaches - communicates with - others so that they understand; the knowledge then, because that is what it is, becoming a general community property (of those educated and able to understand). And where is this general community property kept? Nowhere else but in the minds of individuals, there being enough of them to obscure the nature of the keeping place(s).
I agree with this framing of the situation. The issue seems to be about the interpretations of minds, communities, and languages, all of which are obviously intimately related. We can talk about 'understandings of being' or 'impersonal conceptual schemes' or 'non-material realms.' We call also imagine signifieds somehow disconnected from their signifiers, (pure) meaning apart from and above all the sounds and marks that we nevertheless need to store and transmit it.
Ideal, universal truth seems to assume a ideal, universal human nature. All rational minds can repeat the 'meaning act' and join in the single truth. Does some organ in us gaze into a realm that is not material? I think this is metaphorically true. What do we mean if we say more? But what is the material world that the tough minded offer for contrast? Another metaphorical separation of a lived unity?
I am arguing that at the point of the development of language and reason, h. sapiens is no longer understandable solely through the evolutionary perspective, but is capable of insights into the nature of being which are beyond anything available through a purely biological perspective.
I think this is true. We are symbolic, historical, metaphorical beings. We are profoundly social, able to talk across oceans with our sharing in English.
[quote=A]
He who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god.
[/quote]
However we position platonic ideas or concepts, we are beasts without them --not fully human. So we are not fully human without our fundamental tool, which we might call meaning or intellect. And this tool is intrinsically social. Does the debate boil down to deciding what to call this stuff that a community swims in? The stuff that makes private theorizing and disagreement possible in the first place?
Can be boil down the question to this? Can the platonic ideas or concepts survive the death of the species?
Interesting passage. I can see the development of subsequent philosophies from it. But still, how closely did Thomist epistemology follow Platonic? We were talking Plato, yet you used Aquinas for reference, so shall I assume the latter built on the former without much advancement?
From the link:
“...Now possible intellect is supplied with an adequate stimulus to which it responds by producing a concept.”
........possible intellect assumes the name understanding, the adequate stimulus assumes the name phenomenon.
“...Abstraction, which is the proper task of active intellect. The product of abstraction is a species of an intelligible order...”.
........active intellect assumes the name pure reason; species of intelligible order assumes, or already had assumed, from Aristotle, the name categories.
Not too hard to see that, with physical science in general and astronomy in particular, well underway by or in the Enlightenment, this version of species-common epistemology became untenable. Thus the thesis that the matter of objects of sense are given their properties by the understanding by means of concepts, rather than “....divesting the form of every character that marks and indentifies it as a particular something...”.
I like the idea that concepts exist in a system or a web. To make sense of one is to rely on others close by in the network.
Concepts exist in a system, yes. But the system is (mostly) used to make sense of the world, so to say relying on one member of the system to make sense of another, isn’t quite right. It would be nearer the case, that one is used in conjunction with another.....
“....Without the sensuous faculty no object would be given to us, and without the understanding no object would be thought. Thoughts without content are void; intuitions without conceptions, blind....”
“....understanding cannot intuit, and the sensuous faculty cannot think...”
......in order for the system to work in making sense of the world.
————————
subject is one more concept/object in the (ideally or largely) impersonal and interpersonal concept scheme.
Agreed. But the vast chronology of our individual existence is spent alone in our own heads, exempt from the interpersonal concept scheme, wherein the absolute subject rules in speechless dictatorial fashion.
But still, how closely did Thomist epistemology follow Platonic? We were talking Plato, yet you used Aquinas for reference, so shall I assume the latter built on the former without much advancement?
They were a long way apart in many important ways, but they are still more alike than they are like anything in post-Cartesian philosophy. It is said that Aristotle rejected Plato's 'theory of ideas' but in so doing, he still preserved the theory of forms, but was said to have 'immanatised' it - rejected the idea that they are real independently outside the material forms in which they are instantiated. But Aristotle was still a student of Plato, and even where he disagreed with him, he still carried his ideas forward and Aristotle was central to later philosophy, including Aquinas (although of course Aquinas modified Aristotelian ideas to conform with Christian principles.)
But the striking thing about that particular passage I quoted is the way it lays out the principle of Aristotelian dualism with brilliant clarity - it makes profound sense to me, in a way that Cartesian dualism never did.
They're not dependent on the human mind for their reality, but are independent of any and all minds.
— Wayfarer
Imo, substitute for "reality" "possibility." The realization of the possibility being the reality.
But, there are "real possibilities" - that is, possibilities that actually exist, and others that are mere fantasies.
What is the Schrodinger wave equation, if not a distribution of possibilities? Before an object is observed, it doesn't exist in any place, all you have is a literal potentiality, described by that equation.
three scientists argue that including “potential” things on the list of “real” things can avoid the counterintuitive conundrums that quantum physics poses. ...At its root, the new idea holds that the common conception of “reality” is too limited. By expanding the definition of reality, the quantum’s mysteries disappear. In particular, “real” should not be restricted to “actual” objects or events in spacetime. Reality ought also be assigned to certain possibilities, or “potential” realities, that have not yet become “actual.” These potential realities do not exist in spacetime, but nevertheless are “ontological” — that is, real components of existence.
“This new ontological picture requires that we expand our concept of ‘what is real’ to include an extra -spatiotemporal domain of quantum possibility." 1.
Deleted UserNovember 23, 2019 at 03:49#3554840 likes
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Deleted UserNovember 23, 2019 at 03:52#3554850 likes
It seems to me worth adding that Plato also was much concerned with the abuses of rhetoric called sophistry, his notions of ideals coming into play as a defense against lies. That is, if you can say what something is in some sense, then you can say what it isn't. And if you can't the former, then the latter becomes difficult, contentious, ultimately a matter resolved by force.
Yes, makes sense. Ideals as a shield against extreme relativity. It is interesting.. I wonder if a certain form of perfectionism has pervaded Western culture as a result of the notion of Ideals. If there is a perfect X, how am I not living up to that perfect X? However, in a roundabout way some evolutionary psychology purports that indeed, there may be ideal templates humans look for in things like mates (though I believe this to be too simplistic, reductionistic, and "just so" to be considered absolutely true), and just in nature in general. However, the downsides are believing things have to be "perfect" and general displeasure to anyone that doesn't live up to this standard. That's just some offhand armchair sociological implications I can see perhaps coming from the notion of Ideals.
Also, there seems to be the notion of The Good in Plato. Clearly then, perfection (seeing, understanding, experiencing, following, being the Ideal) is equated with The Good. This of course filters into late Roman and Medieval religious philosophies of understanding The Good and equating it with God (the one from Christianity). This of course, ignores particularities for generality, as the "garb" of the shadow-cave illusions of everyday life are but distortions on the pure Ideals that are not only perfect but Good.
I think again, Schopenhauer has the most interesting take on it. The reason for our aesthetic experiences of beauty in nature and art is because of the non-temporal aspect of the experience. Looking at something without "wanting" or "desiring" brings about some sort of ecstatic feeling that is not normally had in the everyday experiencing of always needing or wanting this or that particular object or experience. During the aesthetic experience one is seeing the Platonic Ideal of that object, and not the everyday distorted aspect that is in time. Again, I don't know if I agree with his theory, but it is certainly a cool twist.
Diagonal DiogenesDecember 12, 2019 at 06:13#3620980 likes
Hi, just saw the thread, and I have something of interest to add as it pertains to Platonic Ideals, so please forgive the necro.
I would like to mention that a very good fiction book by Neal Stephenson called Anathem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anathem) has platonic ideals as an integral part of reality, or at least, the argument between nominalism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominalism) and platonic realism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platonic_realism) in an interesting story narrative format.
Another major theme is the recurring philosophical debate between characters espousing mathematical Platonic realism (called "Halikaarnians" in the novel and associated with Incanters) and characters espousing nominalism (called "Procians" in the novel and who are the Rhetors).
It was the first time I was personally exposed to these ideas in such a clear and intriguing way (as opposed to introductory high school or college philosophy) that it captivated me and even now, ten years after the fact I still think about these ideas. I must admit that idea of "Ideal forms" existing independent of perceptible reality, or perhaps as emergent features of underlying reality, is an interesting topic of debate. Does the idea of "1" or "2" exist whether we can think of it? I would say that yes - just like trees falling with no-one around creates noise regardless of the availability of witnesses as a consequence of understood and generally accepted laws of physics.
The philosophical topic was so good that I would highly recommend a reading to get a different frame of reference when thinking about this topic:
As an appendix to the novel, Stephenson includes three "Calca", discussions among the avout of purely philosophical or mathematical content. ... The third discusses a "complex" Platonic realism, in which several realms of Platonic ideal forms (called the "Hylaean Theoric Worlds" in the novel) exist independently of the physical world (called the "Arbran Causal Domain" in the novel)
Now, the following is speculation, but consider:
Is it possible that "triangles" and other geometric shapes, as well as numbers and other exact concepts can exist in some sort of higher dimension beyond what is readily perceivable by our senses as base reality? Is is possible that our minds act as conscious antennas that can "receive" these ideas in thought and then apply them to the real world as shaped objects and written/spoken formulas or ideas?
I have heard from non-idiots that it is possible that a higher realm of ideas that contains all that is possible and knowable exists and we access it every time we have an insight.
It may seem like nonsensical woo, but it feels true.
Does anyone have any related material that would be worth diving into?
Cool, my Christmas cookies would be safe from him...
This is great. You see, I came to this forum for this discussion, that is Plato's Forms. I wrote something about them and I was wondering what others might think of the idea.
First may I ask though, in my readings of philosophy I think I have picked up from some sources that they felt that Plato's concept of Forms is considered by some to have been a major mistake that messed up philosophy for a long time after. Apparently his thinking on them was eventually rejected by Hegel based on the Atomic Theory (that was actually older than science) that objectively described all material objects, suggesting that everyone must be experiencing the same reality and basically the same way. This is the first question and what I came here to ask - Are Plato's Forms considered a problem in philosophy?
Now I am basically following that opinion but for a different reason. I'm just a simple biologist. I work on the idea that humans left the tribal ecology we were most adapted to when we created the farms and cities of civilization and now we need to adapt genetically and strategically to a new ecology that I refer to as civilization. I covered how we needed to adapt genetically and am working on how we can adapt strategically. I saw a problem and I think it relates to how we think ... going back to Plato's Forms. You see, he was looking for perfection. An engineer would know better and warn to" never let perfect be the enemy of good enough". This seems valid based on how evolution works. It never "tries" to achieve perfection. It operates on what works. So I see a problem when looking for how humans can survive into the future if their strategy is to contaminated by a quest for perfection. That is not necessarily the best way to survive. For some people it is like asking a computer to multiply by infinity. I wrote an essay on this that I feel is too long for this forum. You might find it interesting though so I'll put a link to it - What About God . It basically is about this topic but in the context of Gods such that it says that Gods before the current Christian concept of God were never like that because Plato's Philosophical ideas of Perfection were never applied to the. Most God's never had that standard applied and the result was ... weird when it was applied.
Anyway, here is the preface to that essay if you are interested.
I'm afraid that this essay cannot easily be understood without explanation, but it is extremely important. An engineer might say "do not let perfect be the enemy of good enough". Biology and evolution has operated that way as well. "Perfect" is an odd word and concept. There are basically two ways that the human mind can interpret "perfect". It can be real like a flawless work of art. It can also be imaginary like Plato's concept of Perfect Forms. The trouble is that for a human to think of anything like Plato's concept of "perfect" is very like a computer multiplying by infinity. It doesn't work. Some computers can pull out of it, some cannot let go of the problem. For humans it is the same. Some can pull out of it but for some it becomes an endless loop and it warps the rest of their view of reality. Plato's teachings became a basic part of Western thought, philosophy and religion. The concept of "perfect forms" contaminated philosophy until Hagel pointed out that the atomic theory showed that different people's perceptions of reality were the same. While this issue is discussed elsewhere in this story, this essay is mostly about how Plato's concept of "perfect" created an unusual view in religion that effects us to this day. In terms of a strategy of survival, it is probably a bad idea in the future. It really does need to be understood.
I appreciate any answers or thoughts. Thanks, Mikey
Diagonal DiogenesDecember 18, 2019 at 00:31#3640900 likes
Well, maybe it is a confusion, but if we mention the ideas of, for example, a perfect circle or a perfect equilateral triangle, that is a very clear and exact meaning.
This perfect meaning would also apply to any other geometric form idea - but never to a physical object representing them.
That does not work for something complex like - a perfect car - perfect in what way? What does perfect mean in that context?
Common misuse of the "perfect" adjective applies to:
The perfect woman.
The perfect life.
The perfect marriage.
The perfect [whatever].
In the above, we can substitute "perfect" for "ideal", but even then, that necessitates the definition of qualities or measures that make it ideal - and that is impossible because the judgement of those qualities are are always subjective.
For example: The perfect woman for me has to have nice hips, while for someone else that is irrelevant but she must be a really good cook. Notice that there is no measure of what "nice hips" or "good cook" means.
god must be atheistDecember 18, 2019 at 02:38#3641240 likes
As to his incompleteness theories, I do not think you understand them - maybe at all.
— tim wood
No, I have a pretty good understanding of Gödel's incompleteness theorems.
I used to have a dog that read the New York Times and the Montreal "Gazette" regularly. He was an expert of foreign affairs, and on thick mustaches and bad teeth on women.
But of course he read the papers silently, without saying out the words. That would be stupid... nobody reads the papers aloud.
That dog, my dog, never even moved his lips while reading.
Deleted UserDecember 18, 2019 at 02:42#3641260 likes
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god must be atheistDecember 18, 2019 at 02:45#3641280 likes
It was or could be seen as an awfully strong insult what I wrote, Wallows. I did not mean to be insulting, not even cuttingly sardonic, only funny, but it came out this way, sorry, I apologize.
But then again, there is my criticism. What does anyone understand that we can only test with his or her self-reporting of his or her own understanding?
Anyone, actually everyone, understands everything, and they will even give you an explanation, right or wrong, except when they can't understand something.
what I am trying to say is that a self can't give a measure of the same self with how much or not he does or does not understand something. One can give a measure neither quantitatively, nor qualitatively how correct his own understanding of topic or subject is.
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Reply to tim wood " I submit only a problem for folks" - That seems to be the problem. I have a buddy and he's a fanatic on a couple subjects - religion and free will. He is "opposed" to both, which is fine, but he's obsessed! I mean 20 years of arguing obsessed even when you ask him to go away. I'm into studying my biology. I have weird views, but I'm not nuts about it. The link goes to an article that follows up some discussion with him and sort of says that Gods were good concepts until someone applied "perfect" to one of them and a lot of bad things happened. Maybe Plato wasn't a nut case, but the people that took his ideas and ran with them seem to be.
I can go with math being called perfect if you want, but they warn you up front not do multiply by infinity or divide by zero. ... More pertinently, there are answers to those problems. "Perfect" can throw a person like my friend into an endless loop.
... Per my friend, he's also obsessed with replacing humans with machines because they are so superior to humans. "It must happen".
How are abstracts externalized in the first place?
Compare:
Some are loved, some are hated, many have known love, many have known hate. After an extinction, love and hate could be rediscovered. So, love and hate are existentially independent of any one person.
Love and hate are phenomenological experiences, qualia. Phenomenological experiences are existentially mind-dependent, i.e. subjective. So, love and hate are subjective.
Thus, commonality (independence) does not entail existential independence of persons.
Asserting otherwise might be charged with hypostatization (love and hate aren't somehow independent, though I'm sure some would say so).
What are the implications for abstracts and (the inert lifeless) Platonia, if any?
The unit-less number 7 (not a concrete count) isn't like love and hate, yet any/all concrete counts of 7 are subject to some ((re)discoverable) common rules and reasoning and such (algebra).
So, how are abstractions externalized anyway, supposedly inhabitants of some strange Platonia...?
Deleted UserDecember 19, 2019 at 22:20#3647080 likes
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Comments (120)
Bashing on Godel, his incompleteness theorems points towards the noetic faculties of the mind that are capable of perceiving beyond that of which would be limited by his incompleteness theorems. That's actually a powerful argument for Platonic ideals, and/of which nobody really phrases the question about Platonic idealism in this way; but, I find the argument ad hoc persuasive.
I feel your essay is somewhat tendentious although I hasten to add that I don’t feel sufficiently qualified to properly criticise it. It’s inevitable when you try and compress thousands of years of intellectual history into a few paragraphs, and all conditioned by your prior conclusion as to what the platonic ideas might be.
I am hamstrung by the fact that I didn’t receive an education in The Classics - well, one year of Latin although that hardly suffices. But later in life I feel as though I have reached a kind of synoptic understanding of some important aspects of Platonism - which, I’m sorry to say, is not evident in what you’ve written above.
The central issue as I see it, is not what we understand as ‘ideas’, but universals. Platonism is realist about universals, and universals are not simply ‘ideas’ as you or I might think of them. The main point about universals is that, whilst they are only perceptible to a rational intelligence, they are not the product of the individual mind.
Actually for an effective short primer on such matter, have a peruse of Edward Feser’s blog post, Think, McFlly, Think (I think that’s a movie reference). He discusses the distinction between concepts, intellection, sensation and imagination.
I think the key point about your approach is that it subjectivises ideas i.e. sees them as the attribute of individual minds. Whereas in Plato, you see the origin of objective idealism, that is, the understanding that ideas in the form of universals are intrinsic to the fabric of the cosmos. But they are so in a way which is unintelligible to enlightenment rationalism, for the precise reason that this outlook inherited the attitude of the early nominalises, e.g. Ockham, Bacon et al. This is the subject of a very good long read, What’s Wrong with Ockham: Reassessing the Role of Nominalism in the Dissolution of the West.
All of this is a deep study, and as much a matter of intellectual history as of philosophy per se. Or perhaps you could say it’s a study in meta-philosophy.
Not in college.
Quoting tim wood
In college.
No, I have a pretty good understanding of Gödel's incompleteness theorems. But, don't take it from me, by all means... I actually understood his work in regard to reading about it from Tarski's undefinability theorem, who arrived at the same conclusions somewhat latter (another case of Newton vs Leibniz wrt. to truth, in my mind).
https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1509/1509.02674.pdf
https://academic.oup.com/philmat/article-abstract/2/3/177/1455520?redirectedFrom=PDF
https://www.cairn.info/revue-internationale-de-philosophie-2005-4-page-513.htm#
Well, you made the annoying quip about him being crazy. He was paranoid about food and starved himself to death; but, not "crazy".
Uhhhhh .... sure.
Great. Have at it, a guy who was best friends with Einstein taught at Princeton and completely demolished Hilbert's program is... crazy. Is this shitposting taken to a new level on TPF?
Hostile to Kurt Godel? Are you kidding me? I idolize the man in many regards. I see we're on completely different wavelengths here, so I'll stop the projecting, which (according to you and your "consensus" about him being a paranoid schizophrenic is entirely made up in my mind).
Look, I see you edited your post two or three times, about him being a paranoid schizophrenic at it being an established "fact". So, I rest my case. This discussion seems to have evolved into giftedness and "craziness", so it's up to you to either take it in that direction or not.
Hey, I've watched A Beautiful Mind. Being crazy doesn't mean you can't also be an accomplished genius. And I was only referring to the part about starving yourself to death out of food paranoia. That sounds like an untreated mental illness.
It turns out the nominalists were right. Ideas are as fragile as the parchment they’re written on. They are carried in our artifacts, not in some other realm.
It could be, don't really know. I tend to suspend judgment calls on such matters.
Please do, and let us know what you think.
The passage that strikes me in this essay is the following:
The main thrust of the essay is indeed 'how to conceive of universals'. It notes:
As to whether Joshua Hothschild would agree with Gilson or not, I do not know, but his credentials are impressive (and include being a founding member of the Society for Medieval Logic and Metaphysics.)
As for Godel's Platonism, there's an excellent article by Rebecca Goldstein (who happens to be married to Steve Pinker):
What appeals to me, is that there *is* 'an abstract reality. Because, if true, then it turns out materialism is falsified, as there are real but immaterial things.
I'll enlarge a reply to this later.
I mean, this in the most abstract sense...
And, in a sense this "bypasses" Godel's incompleteness theorems, which Wittgenstein sought to point out as far as my limited knowledge spans.
Metaphysics. Neo-thomism (of which Gilson was an exponent) is a modernized form of classical metaphysics. The Feser blog article would help clarify these questions.
I agree.
[quote=McDowell]
I have urged that our perceptual relation to the world is conceptual all the way out to the world’s impacts on our receptive capacities. The idea of the conceptual that I mean to be invoking is to be understood in close connection with the idea of rationality, in the sense that is in play in the traditional separation of mature human beings, as rational animals, from the rest of the animal kingdom. Conceptual capacities are capacities that belong to their subject’s rationality. So another way of putting my claim is to say that our perceptual experience is permeated with rationality.
[/quote]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conceptualism
The important point, for me, is that concept isn't private. Concept is essentially public and social. What obscures this is its dependence on particular human beings as its 'host.' The mature, rational human being has learned to live in a humanized life-world. A chair is seen automatically as something to sit on. A sidewalk is seen automatically as something to walk on. Of course we also learn about justice, fairness, appropriateness.
The more perfect-exact forms are mathematical, like the perfect circle. These seem less local, less cultural than other forms/concepts and presumably have their foundation in our biology.
A last point is that forms/concepts structure philosophy itself. So while we know that concepts are 'only in our heads,' they also make such judgment possible. We have heads (as heads) because of concepts. So in some sense concepts/forms are prior to the mental/physical distinction as the condition of its possibility.
See - biology. Evolution as philosophy. What evolutionary theory is intended to explain is the development of species. But now, as a matter (not to say "accident") of history, it has become a 'theory of everything' - well, everything about us.
But, a circle is a circle in all possible worlds, whether h. sapiens has evolved to understand it or not. And when we do understand it, then we understand something that is in no way 'founded in biology'; we've evolved beyond the exigencies of biology at that point (to become, in Greek terms, 'the rational animal', which is a difference that makes a difference - an ontological difference, I claim.)
From that article:
What does 'within' mean? Within what? What is the ontological status of ideas? That suits 'naturalised epistemology' very well, because evolution gives rise to brain gives rise to mind. But that is exactly what is at issue here. And furthermore, does evolution give rise to the 'furniture of reason'? Can the law of the excluded middle be "explained" as a consequence of, or on the grounds of, biology? I say not - that there would be no "science of biology" were we first not able to recognise the law of the excluded middle.
The Hothschild article talks about 'conceptualism'. It's too detailed and long a discussion to summarise, but it starts by saying of conceptualism that 'This middle position is usually characterized as holding that while universals are not real things, they are not mere words either, they are concepts.' There's then a discussion of the medieval debate about the ontology of universals, which shows that it became a discussion about 'mechanisms of meaning'.
But he goes on to say that Aquinas' theory of scholastic realism is grounded in the 'inherence theory of predication', to wit:
This is supported by a quote from another source:
So that is close to how I understand the knowledge of universals: that when we see a particular being, we recognise its form to say it is 'man' (etc) - something which is true of all men (hence, universal.) That is where you can see the intuition alluded to in the OP still living and breathing. Whether universals exist is another matter. I say that they exist in a sense - but you will find, modern thinking has no scale along which that expression is intelligible. For us, things either exist, or they don't. And that too has its origins in medieval scholasticism - it is the loss of the sense of there being 'degrees of reality' which is at issue, in my view.
I note this passage:
Completely agree. Compare that with this claim by Jacques Maritain - that 'what the Empiricist speaks of and describes as sense-knowledge is not exactly sense-knowledge, but sense-knowledge plus unconsciously introduced intellective ingredients, -- sense-knowledge in which he has made room for reason without recognizing it.' Which I think is a precise characterisation of most modern empiricism. The 'rational subject' is bracketed out by the initial 'grand abstraction' of science, which purports to deal with 'ideal objects'; and then having been bracketed out, is forgotten about. Which is how you end up with Daniel Dennett.
If that doesn't count as being crazy... then nothing will.
Timely blog post from Edward Feser on Ur-Platonism.
When you say, “that concept isn’t private”, do you mean to say by “that concept”, McDowell’s claim?
Or maybe you meant the important point is that conception isn’t private, and thereby conception is essentially public.
I submit that anything belonging to a subject’s rationality, per McDowell, is private, and to suggest that the totality of subjects in possession of rationality is the same as rationality itself being “essentially public and social” does not follow. And if rationality is not essentially public, thus is private, and rationality is grounded in “conceptual capacities”, then conceptual capacities are equally private. Which is why your “concept is essentially public and social” is false, or at least needs clarification.
——————
Some clarification is here:
Quoting Eee
.....which is correct in the philosophical sense, which seems to indicate concepts are indeed private, but just serves as either a self-contradiction (“concept is essentially public”), or, my lack of understanding.
Help me out?
Quoting tim wood
"Ideals are real" (e.g. horseness, redness, treeness, etc) is a reification fallacy. Plato proffered a solution in search of a problem: as Epicurus et al taught in antiquity, appearances are not false but rather it's our interpretations which are mistaken or false. Reality is intelligible but not transparently or simply so; it does not fool us, rather we fool ourselves with our self-serving simplifications (i.e. idealizations).
Quoting Wayfarer
Explain what you mean by "abstract" and "reality" and "things". (The above seems like language gone on holiday again.)
[quote=Wayfarer]The 'rational subject' is bracketed out by the initial 'grand abstraction' of science, which purports to deal with 'ideal objects'; and then having been bracketed out, is forgotten about.[/quote]
Subject (pov)/gauge-invariant scientific models either defeasibly explain some transformation - physical or formal - or they don't. That's all they are used for. "The 'rational subject'" which uses scientific models cannot also be the object of scientific modeling anymore than eyes can also be within their field of vision. Territories necessarily exceed maps, or abstractions (i.e. informational compressions - simplifications) of territories; the map-maker - map-making - is always the enabling lacuna of every map and any lacuna-free map - corresponding 1:1 to a territory - would be useless as a map.
Thus, the inefficacy - usually patent failure - of idealism, no matter the flavor (e.g. platonic, subjective, critical, absolute, phenomenological ...), or antirealism, or immaterialism to provide corrigible, testible, robustly fecund explanations of matters of fact from which unique predictions can be derived and open-up further inquiries - paths of research - into other unforeseen matters of fact which in turn require extending current explanations, formulating new explanations, or even (rarely) adopting new paradigms of explanation.
Methodological, not metaphysical, materialism no doubt is the worst, least true, intellectual commitment made in human cultural history, except, of course, for all the others tried so far in the last three plus millennia vis-à-vis progressively disclosing how the world (which includes subjects-in-the-world ... as opposed to shibboleth "rational subjects" or "transcendental egos" or "immaterial souls" etc) works.
[quote=Wayfarer] Which is how you end up with Daniel Dennett.[/quote]
Yeah. A wry, scientifically literate, world-class, analytical philosopher emeritus who doesn't proselytize pseudoscience by preaching fatuous woo. For my filthy lucre, Dan Dennett's work is easily worth more today to intellectual culture anywhere than the biggest, funkiest, ashram-load of Deepak Chopras, William Lane Craigs, Jordan Petersens & other - so-called scholarly, "new age" or p0m0 - mystifying obscurants.
All you are saying is: scientific models are models, the explain something specific - 'they explain some transformation' - which is perfectly true, whereas
Quoting 180 Proof
Idealism (etc) does not, being a reflection on the act of knowing itself, being philosophy as distinct from empirical science. ('According to Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1964), philosophy is “the set of questions in which the one who questions is himself implicated in the question” ' .) Which is your only point, along with your endless reiterations of your detestation of anything you deem 'spiritual' (only ever illustrated with comic-book examples.)
A lecturer I had used to say of Hume's famous remark '“If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion" that it applies to the very book of which it is the conclusion. He compared it to the uroboros, the mythical self-eating snake, saying, 'the hardest part is the last bite'.
Quoting 180 Proof
What Dennett does, is methodically apply the techniques of philosophy to undermining philosophy (the 'acid of darwin's dangerous idea). So how that is not 'fatuous woo' I will never know, clothed in the garb of science.
Yes, this is more like what I was getting at. I'm influenced by thinkers like Heidegger and Derrida. While it's an overstatement, I think there's truth in the notion that language speaks the subject.
Quoting Mww
How could it be false or need clarification if rationality is private? If rationality is private, it's true because I think it is. I offer that playfully, only to emphasize my point.
I'll try to offer to better response later, when I'll have more time. At the moment I'd say roughly that we are stuck with (at least) two incompatible perspectives. We can try to build the world up as the dream of a private subject or we can derive the subject from system of concepts that are no longer simply concepts for just that reason. Because we know in an obvious, practical sense that 'consciousness' depends on the brain, we are tempted to start with the subject and move toward inter-subjectivity, etc. Yet a close investigation of this 'subject' suggests that it's more like a voice without a pure interior.
I see myself as trying to point out what tends to be overlooked. I don't have a final, settled theory and, indeed, don't think one is possible, given the nature of language.
Incredible. Instead of talking about his sentiments about Platonism, which can be gleaned through his incompleteness theorems or Turing's Halting problem, and his dismissal of mathematical formalism and with that a deathblow to mechanism, we're focusing on whether he was "crazy" or not.
Whatever dudes.
Mentioning that he starved himself to death because of a food paranoia tends to grab the attention.
Calling concepts 'true for all observers' doesn't seem quite right. Statements made possible by concepts might be viewed as true for all observers.
While my expression may sound strange, what exactly do you mean by 'all observers'? Presumably you mean those not yet born. An infinite or ideal subject seems to be implied, which is to say a concept of the human mind in general or rationality.
:mask:
My bad then...
I suggest that rationality is essentially public, while strangely being grounded in individual conceptual capacities. It's a shared dream, if you like, but calling it rational emphasizes its sharedness --or potential or ideal sharedness. For me there's nothing mystical in this. It just acknowledges what we are doing as philosophers, which is something like negotiating the real. One could joke that we are cyborgs, at least if language is understood as an external technology that is sewn into our 'consciousness.' But this 'external' technology is how we talk about or create an interior where the meaning of words lives in some imagined purity. It's not that traditional concepts become useless, since we need them in order to criticize them, but only that they aren't experienced as absolutes.
What is a formal concept?
As far as circles being independent of humans, I don't see an easy way to prove that. How can we see around our own eyes?
That appeal to biology is a reasonable guess, it seems to me. Why doesn't my cat talk to me in English? Her brain is built not for it. It's possible that she understands everything I say and chooses not to talk.
Quoting Wayfarer
I believe I already indicated that we can also start from concepts and understand the 'within' of the 'subject' as a theoretical fiction or sign among signs. The mental/physical distinction should not IMO be taken as an absolute, despite its utility and familiarity.
This seems more or less right to me. I see Fido as a dog. I agree with Heidegger and others that much of our understanding is far more automatic than this. But at the theoretical level we can speak of the dog we saw on our walk and not specify Fido. We understand classes.
Quoting Wayfarer
I'd say beware of generalizations like 'modern thinking.' Who are the most famous philosophers of the 20th century? And what did they worry about? Heidegger obsessed about the meaning of being.
[quote=SEP]
Let's back up in order to bring Heidegger's central concern into better view. (The ‘way in’ to Being and Time that I am about to present follows Gelven 1989 6–7.) Consider some philosophical problems that will be familiar from introductory metaphysics classes: Does the table that I think I see before me exist? Does God exist? Does mind, conceived as an entity distinct from body, exist? These questions have the following form: does x (where x = some particular kind of thing) exist? Questions of this form presuppose that we already know what ‘to exist’ means. We typically don't even notice this presupposition. But Heidegger does, which is why he raises the more fundamental question: what does ‘to exist’ mean? This is one way of asking what Heidegger calls the question of the meaning of Being, and Being and Time is an investigation into that question.
[/quote]
Quoting Wayfarer
Yeah I do think that can happen with thinkers. They ignore the lifeworld that grounds science. This is possible because fundamental concepts are so 'public' and 'automatic' that they are perhaps ignored as uncontroversial. We have to already share a world in order to make observations and present intelligible hypotheses. So in some sense philosophy is more difficult or ambitious than physical science, which contributes perhaps to its results being endlessly disputable. Working technology is overpowering, and perhaps it's not materialism but really just being dazzled by technology that obscures other forms of being.
OK. Thanks.
An illustration.
Feser, Some Brief Arguments for Dualism
Elsewhere he discusses how for example algorithms and scientific theorems fall into the same general category. For instance the laws of motion are determinate and exact (for the range within which they apply.) So such principles are the 'ligaments of rationality'.
Quoting Eee
Right - and he is as far from the typical anglo-american reductionist as you can get, right? Heidegger has had a huge impact on 20th c philosophical theology. He's not the kind of person I have in mind when criticising reductionism.
Quoting Eee
See remark above about triangularity.
Quoting Eee
Sure. I'm not denying the fact of evolution, what I'm objecting to is the widespread belief that this provides what amounts to a philosophy of mind. My view is that once h. sapiens evolves to the point of being a language-using and meaning-seeking being, then we have capabilities that are beyond the scope of biological theory per se. (This was also Alfred Russel Wallace's view but of course he can be conventiently dismissed as a Victorian spiritualist in contrast to the hard-headed materialism of the 'Scottish enlightenment'.)
I agree that the use of universals in the mode of seeing creation as "intelligible" existences having relationships with each other is far enough away from the focus of concepts as what humans "do" that the latter is not in a position to opine upon the former.
Conversely, however, the limit works the other way. Both sides will never lose their Home games.
Something is missing from both sides.
That remark isn't conclusive for me. We have the concept of the triangle and various images of it. All of this is still quite human.
Quoting Valentinus
Well said. I like to think of enduring stereoscopic ambiguity. But this is also a pleasure.
Making clear statements about someone's insanity is not bashing. Godel was one of the brilliant ones for many reasons... "Crazy" ain't always a slur my friend.
:wink:
Lighten up.
Quoting 180 Proof
and while you're at it, Wayf, how about this too (unless, of course, you can't because ... y'know ... you're full of __it): "materialism is fallacious". :yawn:
This might help too.
[quote=link]
Heidegger constantly reminds us throughout Being and Time, the account of 'inauthentic' life of everyday anyone is not to be interpreted evaluatively or morally but rather ontologically. It is an a priori Existential of being human: "the anyone is the condition of possibility of all human action" (p. 2). Thonhauser writes: "To be socialized in the framework of established modes of intelligibility and regulated modes of comportment is the prerequisite for becoming an agent in one's own right" (ibid.).
First of all and most of the time (Heidegger's zunächst und zumeist, BT 370), humans live following the social rules that they apprehend in some kind of mindless, non-explicit, anonymous manner.
[/quote]
What I have in mind is something like this 'Anyone.' In some sense the 'we' is prior to the 'I' as a kind of software that makes the hardware fully human. Kant could only write the CPR because he knew German, because he was 'in' German. He was anyone before he was someone. And we love Kant not as a fountain of opinion but because he is reasonable. He speaks to what is rational in us.
[quote=Robert Solomon]
The world may have been created by God, but it was now in the hands – for better or worse – of humanity. The world was a human stage, with human values, emotions, hopes, and fears, and this humanity was defined, in turn, by a universal human nature.
[/quote]
The idea is that a theological notion was humanized. Reason is a transformation of the Holy Ghost, metaphorically speaking. (To me it's all thoughts and feelings and metaphors. While you know Kant better than me, I mostly feel like some kind of Kantian, exploring the limits of cognition from the inside.)
I'd rather not. I already presented my rationale, earlier.
To me this is akin to the notion that biology is no substitute for philosophy, which with I agree. This theme is well explored, too, in I am Strange Loop.
[quote=Lloyd Gerson]seven key themes (of 'ur-Platonism']:
1. The universe has a systematic unity;
2. This unity reflects an explanatory hierarchy and in particular a “top-down” approach to explanation (as opposed to the “bottom-up” approach of naturalism), especially in the two key respects that the simple is prior to the complex and the intelligible is prior to the sensible;
3. The divine constitutes an irreducible explanatory category, and is to be conceived of in personal terms (even if in some Ur-Platonist thinkers the personal aspect is highly attenuated);
4. The psychological also constitutes an irreducible explanatory category;
5. Persons are part of the hierarchy and their happiness consists in recovering a lost position within it, in a way that can be described as “becoming like God”;
6. Moral and aesthetic value is to be analyzed by reference to this metaphysical hierarchy; and
7. The epistemological order is contained with this metaphysical order.[/quote]
I regard that as a succinct statement of the 'grand tradition' of Western philosophy. I also recognise that it is thoroughly unfashionable and probably pretty Non-PC too boot.
Quoting 180 Proof
Language is a universalizing activity. Whenever you say that 'something is something', or 'something means something', then you are making a rational judgement. But the elements of rational judgement have no physical equivalent. Certainly you can, and we do, represent the elements of rational judgement in symbolic form, which is the basis of written language, logic and arithmetic. But those elements are not themselves material or physical in nature, their nature is purely intellectual or noetic. They can only be understood by a rational intelligence.
Your evolutionary account of intelligence is that mind is first and foremost an evolutionary adaptation. That is certainly arguable in the case of non-rational animals, but the problem with the argument is that it essentially claims that speech acts are like reflexes or patterns of behaviour that have no intrinsic meaning (which is how positivism and behaviourism depict them). The issue is, that if this account is correct, then it's utterances are meaningless. Alternatively, if they're not meaningless, then speech acts do have intrinsic meaning and the argument fails.
The same arguments are frequently brought against Dennett. His book Consciousness Explained was mocked as 'Consciousness Ignored' by his academic critics. And if he was consistent, then he would say nothing, because if his argument is correct, then philosophy is just meaningless noise. And if it's not meaningless noise, then his argument is not correct.
Your welcome. I just saw this response. I'd be grateful for any feedback, even if it's disagreement. I enjoy your posts.
Ok. The modern version of universal forms, ideals, sentiments, various sundry renditions of.....
“...that which exists a priori in the mind...”
......because.......
“.....the distinguishing characteristic of their nature consists in this, that they apply to their objects, without having borrowed anything from experience towards the representation of them....”.
.......meeting the criteria of my personal favorite, a transcendental object. My main concern with the inquiry (what is a formal concept) was, so long as, e.g. “triangularity”, is not given the authority of a category, it can be given any theory-specific name its creator deems fit. I say this because the formal concepts are reducible, insofar as triangles and thereby triangularity, presuppose quantity and relation, specifically.
———————
Quoting Wayfarer
I hesitate in granting that any concept is objective simply because it is grasped by many subjectivities.
Even if “....to grasp a concept is simply not the same thing as having a mental image...”** is true, because the reverse is actually the case, it does not follow that grasping concepts is objective. Rather, the objects of conceptions are objective, iff one communicates his understanding of them, and they meet with congruency by other minds. Upon being asked to illustrate an object, a plurality of minds will all draw from a conceptual ideal per-existing a priori, and the drawings will all be different in particulars while similar in form. And the drawings will differentiate in direct proportion to the complexity of the concepts required for it, re: the drawings of stop signs will be closer to each other in appearance than the drawings of a house. To then say the conceptual form of these objects is objective contradicts the laying of it a priori in the mind.
Anyway...thanks for the Feser reference and the explanation.
** Feser, 2008.
Understood, and agreed, in principle. On the one hand, no human is possible without the antecedent humanity, but on the other, a general condition of some empirical unity is in itself insufficient to explain the multiplicity of disparate conditions of its particulars. In other words, why I’m this, or why I think this, doesn’t explain why you’re that, or why you think that, merely because we’re both human. Being human is sufficient for those, but insufficient to explain why those. And if what we want to know is why, which is almost always the case, then we see it just won’t answer anything if we ground our investigation on some fundamental ontological condition.
—————-
Quoting Eee
As well we all should. When the lights go out at the end of the day, there’s nobody there but ourselves. “Know thy-self”, and all those other colloquial admonishments, doncha know. Which, ironically enough, leave off “as best you can”, or, “but you’re probably wrong”.
Thanks.
The main reason for my comments, I guess, is your McDowell passage, which I find agreeable, followed by the saying of things seemingly diametrically opposed to it, which I don’t. After your furtherances I understand you better, but not the opposition to McDowell. Just trying to learn something, is what it boils down to. Same with the Feser comment.
:roll:
Again. Your logorrhea explains nothing, Wayf, certainly not what you've quoted me requesting.
As you say, your understanding of 'what is real' is constituted by what is 'materially existent', and the only role of religion is to provide a 'safe space' where people are allowed to entertain comforting fantasies about things that aren't real but which are at least edifying. That's about right isn't it?
The point about Platonic metaphysics is that it purported to be rational and not based on 'pistis' or 'doxa'. But over the course of centuries, it was incorporated into Christian theology such that it became identified with religious belief rather than philosophy as such. And in our secular culture, 'religion' is fenced off, not the subject of discussion for sensible people.
But the point about Platonist philosophy is that it makes a strong argument for the sense of a reality beyond the physical - hence 'meta-physical' - which can nevertheless be known - hence 'epistemological'.
Quoting Mww
Such concepts are not objective, they’re used to determine what can be considered objective. They're prior to judgements of objectivity.
Quoting 180 Proof
Like I said before - I can explain it to you, but I can't understand it for you. It requires a shift in perspective, one which you're not the least interested in, so let's just leave it at that.
Agreed, without equivocation or amendment.
Quoting Wayfarer
My rendering of concepts is not objective hence private, your rendering of formal concepts is, in a sense, public. Can you illuminate the difference between private concepts that facilitate judgement of objectivity, and formal concepts that are not creations of the individual minds?
Okay. I'll take that as your admission you don't know what you're talking about. Sure, let's just leave it at that.
A question that occurs to me is whether mathematical proofs are objectively true? I mean, they are in a sense, but on the other hand, strictly speaking they don't appeal to objects as such; they're perceivable by reason alone. But mathematics is used to arrive at determination of what is objectively true, in the case of scientific experiments and observations.
So what interests me about that, is that if you ask what is the ultimate truth criterion, most people will say what is 'objectively' so. But it seems to me there are domains of discourse, like mathematics, and logic, where that is not exactly the right word. And I think that says something.
Mathematical proofs are only 'true' within the system of mathematics. For they rely upon the axioms, symbols and rules of the system. Hence they cannot be said to be 'objectively true'. I am talking about pure mathematics here, which is where mathematical proofs are found. Applied maths is a different story.
The exactitude of ideal triangles is something which we stipulate against the realization of the inexactitude of actual triangular objects; it is just the realization that exactitude is conceivable.
Quoting Wayfarer
This says nothing more than that the evolutionary advent of symbolic language enabled the genesis and evolution of shared cultures which cannot be exhaustively described and explained in purely biological terms. Biological evolution itself cannot be described and explained in terms of physics either.
These kinds of insights seem fairly obvious, but what further conclusions do you think you are rationally warranted in deriving from them?
Could you elaborate on the second part of this?
Quoting Mww
This makes sense to me.
Quoting Mww
I read this in terms of a wariness about pseudo-explanations. For instance, 'God' is often (not saying always) just rug under which we hide our ignorance. 'God' can also be used symbolically, not in an act of science/philosophy. And there's also the issue of whether literal and metaphorical meanings can be cleanly separated.
Quoting Mww
I agree. So a sense of humor & play is helpful.
Me too, and I appreciate the feedback.
I find it helpful to recall that objective is just unbiased. That we tend to conflate it with objects speaks perhaps to how uncontroversial talk about couches and cars tends to be. The objective view is one that is purified of subjective distortion and/or the intersection of a personal perspectives.
In proofs without words, the background assumption seems to be that we all perceive/intuit space in the same way, which implies a kind of ideal, shared subject. 'Anyone' can see that area is preserved by the mere translation and rotation of shapes and therefore grant various formulas for the area of a triangle as necessarily true. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5x-NFKZrnMM
We expect such theorems to remain true, which suggests that this Anyone is fixed or outside of time. This allows us to imagine aliens who are partially human in the sense of participating in this Anyone.
As you mentioned Etienne Gilson, you might be interested in this analysis by Peter Redpath, in a talk given called Why Gilson? Why Now? It's the authors view of Gilson's critique of modernity. I don't know for sure, but I think there would be a fair degree of convergence between Gilson's view, and that of Hothschild, whose essay on Nominalism I referred to.
(Catholicism, due to the presence of the Scholastic tradition, is in some ways the last surviving outpost of Greek philosophy in a living tradition. I'm not Catholic, but as an intellectual philosophy I certainly prefer neo-Thomism to modern scientific naturalism.)
I like this. 'Enabling lacuna' is great. Complexity lurks in 'explain.' While I'm not eager to collapse explanation into prediction and control, it does seem science's prestige is largely founded on the power it gives us. We can employ and develop models that don't agree with our intuition.
[quote=Feynman]
If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't understand quantum mechanics.
[/quote]
So are explanations can indeed only partially intelligible if they empower us. The problem for philosophy is or can be that the philosopher claims a profound understanding of reality that may not be recognized by others and also fails to manifest an uncontroversial/'worldly' power. We are 'forced' to listen to those who can destroy us, outperform us. The alternative is some form of antithetical, world-rejecting metaphysics. The first are not really first but perhaps last.
If we understand 'objective' to mean unbiased or ideally intersubjective, then the problem disappears. I think you are suggesting that we can't see around our own eyes, with which I agree. Placing shared concepts in some realm beyond doesn't make sense to me. I understand, though, why philosophers want to talk about such a realm.
[quote=link]
Popper's World 3 contains the products of thought. This includes abstract objects such as scientific theories, stories, myths, tools, social institutions, and works of art.[2] World 3 is not to be conceived as a Platonic realm, because it is created by humans.[3]
[/quote]
As I see it, we have repeatable insights. Anyone who repeats the thought process can come to something like the same conclusion (ideally, anyway). This 'anyone' is relatively immortal. It doesn't die with the individual. But it quite plausibly dies with the species. The temptation is to place this cultural realm in a beyond that is 'really' there, even when we aren't. Hence my interest in this 'subject' or 'Anyone' as a them running through philosophy.
I don’t want to go too far afield here; it’s Tim’s barndance after all, and I’m not qualified to speak Plato or Platonic ideals. While I didn’t dig an accommodating response out of you comment pursuant to my query, I didn’t find anything disagreeable either, so.......call it a draw.
Forgive me, but I was harking back to your recent thread on just this point, which started with what I took to be an unequivocal statement to just that end:
Quoting tim wood
.Quoting tim wood
I took it from the comment about 'things that aren't' that you believe the - how shall we say - subjects of religious philosophy are unreal, or at any rate, something that only exist in the minds of believers. Am I wrong?
Quoting tim wood
That is just what is at issue. Lets say the subjects of geometry are real - in what sense are they real? I would say that they're real in that everyone who studies geometry is studying the same concepts, they are common to all who think. But you're not going to 'encounter' them in any sense other than through the mind's eye, so to speak. Ergo, real but incorporeal.
Might interest you to know that Popper co-authored a book with neuroscientist Sir John Eccles on dualist philosophy of mind.
Substitute any empirical unity. All trees are the unity of trees, but the unity of trees doesn’t explain why some are hardwoods and some are soft, some broadleaf, some needle leaf. There’s something more needed than just being trees, to facilitate trees being hardwoods.
Why would that surprise us given that we are all schooled in the language of geometry by, if nothing else, the buildings we inhabit.
I won’t fight over that. Intersubjective still leaves concepts as purely subjective constructs with possibly real objects which conform to them, which we call experience.
The point is that they don't exist in any location; the so-called 'platonic realm' is real in the sense that 'the domain of natural numbers' is real. But it is real, in that 2 is in it, and the square root of 2 is not. So I am arguing that the expression 'domain' or 'realm' is a metaphor for an intellectual domain which doesn't exist anywhere, but is real nonetheless. It's part of the 'architecture of thought', the way that we make sense of the world, and in that sense, quite real. If you're an engineer and you get your numbers wrong, your rocket crashes, or your bridge collapses. I'm assuming, not without reason, that any rational being would discover principles like Euclidean geometry, and that the discovery of non-Euclidean geometry doesn't invalidate that.
Quoting tim wood
Thank you for your candour. I hope you don't mind me saying that it explains many of your remarks on this matter. I came to the understanding I have (such as it is) of Platonist metaphysics through the route of a philosophical search. That is, I presume, very different to the evangelical attitude, for which there is only one true way and everything else leads to perdition, and that way is based on salvation by faith alone; believe it or risk perdition. Very characteristic of modern Western thought.
Hence, some of the remarks in that Gilson essay -
This is connected with an expression I have become familiar with through these forums, namely that of the 'cartesian anxiety'
Richard J. Bernstein coined the term in his 1983 book Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis.
Whereas, for the scholastic metaphysics (and fully acknowledging that this often also amounted to stultifying dogmatism in practice), as the Hothschild essay noted:
It is just that which is lacking in modern materialistic science, which is manifesting now as the insoluble arguments about multiple universes and the like. You yourself exhibit this split between science, which you feel is a sure guide to reality as it really is, and religion, which you place in a different although very important realm. And that is not a personal attack - that is the situation of the culture in which we find ourselves. Everyone feels it, I think.
Quoting tim wood
No, what I'm saying is that intelligible objects, such as logical principles and geometric axioms, are real, but they're not phenomenally existent; they're objects of mind (so to speak) but no less real for that. In Platonism, they have a higher degree of reality than objects of sense - which goes right back to the point you were trying to make in the OP!
That’s how I understand it as well, in Platonism. Enlightenment philosophy subsequently dropped objects of mind down a peg or two, making them equal in degree of reality with objects of sense, calling them both representations, but arising from different faculties, thus having different rules of use. That, and logical principles and geometric axioms took on the name and form of judgements, the subjects and predicates thereof being objects of mind. When it comes right down to bare bones, all objects are objects of mind, except the real, and even those are represented as objects of mind (so to speak).
From what I know of Platonic Ideals and Platonism in general, if we are to historicize it, is that its origin has more to do with combining elements of the pre-Socratic philosophies of Heraclitus, Parmenides, and even Pythagoras. That is to say if Heraclitus' metaphysics represented a reality that is always in flux, Parmenides one that is unchanging (which Pythagoras can be said to be a special case of this with mathematical principles), then the Ideas and the shadows on the cave are like a synthesis of these two things. Reality is actually unchanging and can be displayed in universals and mathematics, but our consciousness and sense perceptions are a dim version of this, only seeing the imperfect and "flux" versions of the unchanging realities.
I think Schopenhauer actually did one of the best interpretations of Plato. He essentially interpreted from Platonism that Platonic Forms are in a sense timeless templates of objects that become temporal due to our epistemological natures which comprises time, space, and causality. Anyways, I don't really buy this conception, but I think it takes Platonism to its logical conclusions.
None other than (surprised?) Freddy Zarathustra says, “Christianity is Platonism for the masses." And I agree. Whereas religions traffic in (i.e. answering via) 'images & iconography' for anxiety / terror management, philosophies proceed by (i.e. questioning via) 'concepts & iconoclasm' for intellectual and moral agency development - the latter being the elitist version(?) of the more populist former (e.g. chemistry & ALCHEMY, Shakespeare's plays & SOAP OPERAS, astronomy & ASTROLOGY, Bebop & HIP HOP, democratic praxes & CONSPIRACY THEORIES, etc). I suppose, then, the inverse formulation follows: philosophy is religion for the ... elites. :yikes:
https://www.dartmouth.edu/~matc/MathDrama/reading/Wigner.html
The key point being that this enabled philosophers to regard ideas as properties of matter - as everything became. (Glad at least someone else gets it, although in this matter it’s oddly reassuring to be thought wrong by almost everyone.)
The point I want to make is that such objects would be found by any mind in any possible world. They're not dependent on the human mind for their reality, but are independent of any and all minds. However they can only be grasped by a mind. That is the sense in which they're 'objects of mind'.
What evolutionary naturalism says is that ideas are the product of the evolutionary process, which can then be understood through the prism of genetics and neurobiology, which therefore grounds knowledge in the exigencies of biology and in the phenomenal domain. That is, nowadays, the single largest factor underlying empiricist and naturalist philosophy, and what vitiates it (as spelled out in Thomas Nagel's 2012 book, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False.)
Without denying the facts of evolutionary biology, I am arguing that at the point of the development of language and reason, h. sapiens is no longer understandable solely through the evolutionary perspective, but is capable of insights into the nature of being which are beyond anything available through a purely biological perspective. In other words, to understand that which transcends the biological and the phenomenal. Platonism, generally, is one of the products of that capacity, and many of those criticising it fail to even understand what it is they’re wanting to negate.
I‘ll be the first to say I guess I don’t get it after all. You said logical principles were higher reality objects of the mind. I said later philosophy put sense objects and objects of the mind at more or less equal reality, all as objects of the mind. Then you said this allowed philosophers, presumably in Plato’s time, to regard ideas properties of matter.
I can’t make the connection from universals, which apply to logic as I understand it and to real objects in general, re: universal forms (?) but where do whatever allowed philosophers to regard ideas as properties of matter make the scene? Even if I don’t grant logical principles as universals having a higher reality but see how it can be said to be that way, how do I get from that to properties of matter?
My favored.......and long-ingrained......epistemological framework is getting in the way.
Because there's a connection between 'ideas' and 'forms'. The platonic 'ideas' are in some sense like archetypes or essences, the forms that give a particular its identity as a type.
The reason they were judged to be 'higher' is because their forms or types are universal, i.e. socrates is an examplar of the universal 'man'. This is what informed 'hylo-moprhic' i.e. matter-form dualism. The matter was basically dumb stuff out of which particular things are fashioned. (Actually Aristotle adopted a word for 'timber', hyle, as generic 'stuff'.)
So from there it's not too great a leap to suppose that the 'maker' of individual particulars is Plato's demiurgos, who later becomes identified as 'God' by Greek-speaking Christian philosophers.'
Also consider how this intuition went on to become the basis of scientific taxonomy, as originated by Aristotle, and later refined by Linnaeus.
Have a look at this passage.
One thing to note about universals expressed within the Plato writings; There are many different views about what participating in the expression of a form is like. The interest in the matter was not just about validating a set of presuppositions but an investigation of what what was going on.
Ah, yes, that's clear. So we have something like subsets. I like the idea that concepts exist in a system or a web. To make sense of one is to rely on others close by in the network.
Quoting Mww
Right, and I agree with that. All that I personally add is that this subject is not quite absolute, in the sense that subject is one more concept/object in the (ideally or largely) impersonal and interpersonal concept scheme. In short, I think there's some truth in 'language speaks the subject.' To be sure, common sense almost demands that we focus on consciousnesses in individual brain being linked by language and action.
Dualism gets something right. In practice, we seem to live and talk as dualists. We all agree pre-theoretically that there are dreams and chairs. I'll look into Eccles.
I agree with this framing of the situation. The issue seems to be about the interpretations of minds, communities, and languages, all of which are obviously intimately related. We can talk about 'understandings of being' or 'impersonal conceptual schemes' or 'non-material realms.' We call also imagine signifieds somehow disconnected from their signifiers, (pure) meaning apart from and above all the sounds and marks that we nevertheless need to store and transmit it.
Ideal, universal truth seems to assume a ideal, universal human nature. All rational minds can repeat the 'meaning act' and join in the single truth. Does some organ in us gaze into a realm that is not material? I think this is metaphorically true. What do we mean if we say more? But what is the material world that the tough minded offer for contrast? Another metaphorical separation of a lived unity?
I think this is true. We are symbolic, historical, metaphorical beings. We are profoundly social, able to talk across oceans with our sharing in English.
[quote=A]
He who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god.
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However we position platonic ideas or concepts, we are beasts without them --not fully human. So we are not fully human without our fundamental tool, which we might call meaning or intellect. And this tool is intrinsically social. Does the debate boil down to deciding what to call this stuff that a community swims in? The stuff that makes private theorizing and disagreement possible in the first place?
Can be boil down the question to this? Can the platonic ideas or concepts survive the death of the species?
Interesting passage. I can see the development of subsequent philosophies from it. But still, how closely did Thomist epistemology follow Platonic? We were talking Plato, yet you used Aquinas for reference, so shall I assume the latter built on the former without much advancement?
From the link:
“...Now possible intellect is supplied with an adequate stimulus to which it responds by producing a concept.”
........possible intellect assumes the name understanding, the adequate stimulus assumes the name phenomenon.
“...Abstraction, which is the proper task of active intellect. The product of abstraction is a species of an intelligible order...”.
........active intellect assumes the name pure reason; species of intelligible order assumes, or already had assumed, from Aristotle, the name categories.
Not too hard to see that, with physical science in general and astronomy in particular, well underway by or in the Enlightenment, this version of species-common epistemology became untenable. Thus the thesis that the matter of objects of sense are given their properties by the understanding by means of concepts, rather than “....divesting the form of every character that marks and indentifies it as a particular something...”.
Ever onward, right?
Concepts exist in a system, yes. But the system is (mostly) used to make sense of the world, so to say relying on one member of the system to make sense of another, isn’t quite right. It would be nearer the case, that one is used in conjunction with another.....
“....Without the sensuous faculty no object would be given to us, and without the understanding no object would be thought. Thoughts without content are void; intuitions without conceptions, blind....”
“....understanding cannot intuit, and the sensuous faculty cannot think...”
......in order for the system to work in making sense of the world.
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Quoting Eee
Agreed. But the vast chronology of our individual existence is spent alone in our own heads, exempt from the interpersonal concept scheme, wherein the absolute subject rules in speechless dictatorial fashion.
Is this to suggest dualism got something right as the exception to the rule that is usually doesn’t?
They were a long way apart in many important ways, but they are still more alike than they are like anything in post-Cartesian philosophy. It is said that Aristotle rejected Plato's 'theory of ideas' but in so doing, he still preserved the theory of forms, but was said to have 'immanatised' it - rejected the idea that they are real independently outside the material forms in which they are instantiated. But Aristotle was still a student of Plato, and even where he disagreed with him, he still carried his ideas forward and Aristotle was central to later philosophy, including Aquinas (although of course Aquinas modified Aristotelian ideas to conform with Christian principles.)
But the striking thing about that particular passage I quoted is the way it lays out the principle of Aristotelian dualism with brilliant clarity - it makes profound sense to me, in a way that Cartesian dualism never did.
Quoting Eee
As I said, were there another Earth-like planet we would have reason to assume that that culture would discover similar principles.
But, there are "real possibilities" - that is, possibilities that actually exist, and others that are mere fantasies.
What is the Schrodinger wave equation, if not a distribution of possibilities? Before an object is observed, it doesn't exist in any place, all you have is a literal potentiality, described by that equation.
That's a pretty sentence.
Yes, makes sense. Ideals as a shield against extreme relativity. It is interesting.. I wonder if a certain form of perfectionism has pervaded Western culture as a result of the notion of Ideals. If there is a perfect X, how am I not living up to that perfect X? However, in a roundabout way some evolutionary psychology purports that indeed, there may be ideal templates humans look for in things like mates (though I believe this to be too simplistic, reductionistic, and "just so" to be considered absolutely true), and just in nature in general. However, the downsides are believing things have to be "perfect" and general displeasure to anyone that doesn't live up to this standard. That's just some offhand armchair sociological implications I can see perhaps coming from the notion of Ideals.
Also, there seems to be the notion of The Good in Plato. Clearly then, perfection (seeing, understanding, experiencing, following, being the Ideal) is equated with The Good. This of course filters into late Roman and Medieval religious philosophies of understanding The Good and equating it with God (the one from Christianity). This of course, ignores particularities for generality, as the "garb" of the shadow-cave illusions of everyday life are but distortions on the pure Ideals that are not only perfect but Good.
I think again, Schopenhauer has the most interesting take on it. The reason for our aesthetic experiences of beauty in nature and art is because of the non-temporal aspect of the experience. Looking at something without "wanting" or "desiring" brings about some sort of ecstatic feeling that is not normally had in the everyday experiencing of always needing or wanting this or that particular object or experience. During the aesthetic experience one is seeing the Platonic Ideal of that object, and not the everyday distorted aspect that is in time. Again, I don't know if I agree with his theory, but it is certainly a cool twist.
I would like to mention that a very good fiction book by Neal Stephenson called Anathem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anathem) has platonic ideals as an integral part of reality, or at least, the argument between nominalism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominalism) and platonic realism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platonic_realism) in an interesting story narrative format.
It was the first time I was personally exposed to these ideas in such a clear and intriguing way (as opposed to introductory high school or college philosophy) that it captivated me and even now, ten years after the fact I still think about these ideas. I must admit that idea of "Ideal forms" existing independent of perceptible reality, or perhaps as emergent features of underlying reality, is an interesting topic of debate. Does the idea of "1" or "2" exist whether we can think of it? I would say that yes - just like trees falling with no-one around creates noise regardless of the availability of witnesses as a consequence of understood and generally accepted laws of physics.
The philosophical topic was so good that I would highly recommend a reading to get a different frame of reference when thinking about this topic:
Now, the following is speculation, but consider:
Is it possible that "triangles" and other geometric shapes, as well as numbers and other exact concepts can exist in some sort of higher dimension beyond what is readily perceivable by our senses as base reality? Is is possible that our minds act as conscious antennas that can "receive" these ideas in thought and then apply them to the real world as shaped objects and written/spoken formulas or ideas?
I have heard from non-idiots that it is possible that a higher realm of ideas that contains all that is possible and knowable exists and we access it every time we have an insight.
It may seem like nonsensical woo, but it feels true.
Does anyone have any related material that would be worth diving into?
Thanks,
Diagonal Diogenes.
This is great. You see, I came to this forum for this discussion, that is Plato's Forms. I wrote something about them and I was wondering what others might think of the idea.
First may I ask though, in my readings of philosophy I think I have picked up from some sources that they felt that Plato's concept of Forms is considered by some to have been a major mistake that messed up philosophy for a long time after. Apparently his thinking on them was eventually rejected by Hegel based on the Atomic Theory (that was actually older than science) that objectively described all material objects, suggesting that everyone must be experiencing the same reality and basically the same way. This is the first question and what I came here to ask - Are Plato's Forms considered a problem in philosophy?
Now I am basically following that opinion but for a different reason. I'm just a simple biologist. I work on the idea that humans left the tribal ecology we were most adapted to when we created the farms and cities of civilization and now we need to adapt genetically and strategically to a new ecology that I refer to as civilization. I covered how we needed to adapt genetically and am working on how we can adapt strategically. I saw a problem and I think it relates to how we think ... going back to Plato's Forms. You see, he was looking for perfection. An engineer would know better and warn to" never let perfect be the enemy of good enough". This seems valid based on how evolution works. It never "tries" to achieve perfection. It operates on what works. So I see a problem when looking for how humans can survive into the future if their strategy is to contaminated by a quest for perfection. That is not necessarily the best way to survive. For some people it is like asking a computer to multiply by infinity. I wrote an essay on this that I feel is too long for this forum. You might find it interesting though so I'll put a link to it - What About God . It basically is about this topic but in the context of Gods such that it says that Gods before the current Christian concept of God were never like that because Plato's Philosophical ideas of Perfection were never applied to the. Most God's never had that standard applied and the result was ... weird when it was applied.
Anyway, here is the preface to that essay if you are interested.
I'm afraid that this essay cannot easily be understood without explanation, but it is extremely important. An engineer might say "do not let perfect be the enemy of good enough". Biology and evolution has operated that way as well. "Perfect" is an odd word and concept. There are basically two ways that the human mind can interpret "perfect". It can be real like a flawless work of art. It can also be imaginary like Plato's concept of Perfect Forms. The trouble is that for a human to think of anything like Plato's concept of "perfect" is very like a computer multiplying by infinity. It doesn't work. Some computers can pull out of it, some cannot let go of the problem. For humans it is the same. Some can pull out of it but for some it becomes an endless loop and it warps the rest of their view of reality. Plato's teachings became a basic part of Western thought, philosophy and religion. The concept of "perfect forms" contaminated philosophy until Hagel pointed out that the atomic theory showed that different people's perceptions of reality were the same. While this issue is discussed elsewhere in this story, this essay is mostly about how Plato's concept of "perfect" created an unusual view in religion that effects us to this day. In terms of a strategy of survival, it is probably a bad idea in the future. It really does need to be understood.
I appreciate any answers or thoughts. Thanks, Mikey
This perfect meaning would also apply to any other geometric form idea - but never to a physical object representing them.
That does not work for something complex like - a perfect car - perfect in what way? What does perfect mean in that context?
Common misuse of the "perfect" adjective applies to:
The perfect woman.
The perfect life.
The perfect marriage.
The perfect [whatever].
In the above, we can substitute "perfect" for "ideal", but even then, that necessitates the definition of qualities or measures that make it ideal - and that is impossible because the judgement of those qualities are are always subjective.
For example: The perfect woman for me has to have nice hips, while for someone else that is irrelevant but she must be a really good cook. Notice that there is no measure of what "nice hips" or "good cook" means.
I used to have a dog that read the New York Times and the Montreal "Gazette" regularly. He was an expert of foreign affairs, and on thick mustaches and bad teeth on women.
But of course he read the papers silently, without saying out the words. That would be stupid... nobody reads the papers aloud.
That dog, my dog, never even moved his lips while reading.
But then again, there is my criticism. What does anyone understand that we can only test with his or her self-reporting of his or her own understanding?
Anyone, actually everyone, understands everything, and they will even give you an explanation, right or wrong, except when they can't understand something.
what I am trying to say is that a self can't give a measure of the same self with how much or not he does or does not understand something. One can give a measure neither quantitatively, nor qualitatively how correct his own understanding of topic or subject is.
I can go with math being called perfect if you want, but they warn you up front not do multiply by infinity or divide by zero. ... More pertinently, there are answers to those problems. "Perfect" can throw a person like my friend into an endless loop.
... Per my friend, he's also obsessed with replacing humans with machines because they are so superior to humans. "It must happen".
Compare:
Some are loved, some are hated, many have known love, many have known hate. After an extinction, love and hate could be rediscovered. So, love and hate are existentially independent of any one person.
Love and hate are phenomenological experiences, qualia. Phenomenological experiences are existentially mind-dependent, i.e. subjective. So, love and hate are subjective.
Thus, commonality (independence) does not entail existential independence of persons.
Asserting otherwise might be charged with hypostatization (love and hate aren't somehow independent, though I'm sure some would say so).
What are the implications for abstracts and (the inert lifeless) Platonia, if any?
The unit-less number 7 (not a concrete count) isn't like love and hate, yet any/all concrete counts of 7 are subject to some ((re)discoverable) common rules and reasoning and such (algebra).
So, how are abstractions externalized anyway, supposedly inhabitants of some strange Platonia...?