Can you state just why you think that incompatibility obtains? — Janus
There is a longstanding dispute over the univocity of being (and predication) between the Thomists and the Scotists beginning in the Medieval period. The Scotists held to univocity (and Heidegger's first dissertation was on this topic, on a text then believed to be Duns Scotus'). — Leontiskos
Like Macbeth, Western man made an evil decision, which has become the efficient and final cause of other evil decisions. Have we forgotten our encounter with the witches on the heath? It occurred in the late fourteenth century, and what the witches said to the protagonist of this drama was that man could realize himself more fully if he would only abandon his belief in the reality of transcendentals. The powers of darkness were working subtly, as always, and they couched this proposition in the seemingly innocent form of an attack upon universals. The defeat of logical realism in the great medieval debate was the crucial event in the history of Western culture; from this flowed those acts which issue now in modern decadence. — Richard Weaver, Ideas have Consequences
The conjecture of 'Fine Tuning" raises the spectre of Intelligent Design — Gnomon
Does life have any potential to be anything beyond suffering, or is that too much of a pessimistic stance? — Arnie
The value of a single human life? — Gingethinkerrr
I've tried to have you fill this out explicitly. If what you say here were so we would have a neat case of quantification variance to work with - the difference between real and existent. But i do nto think you have been able to proved a coherent account. — Banno
I don't agree with the premise of the argument - that naturalism is our "best" epistemic theory. — Banno
Quine’s belief that we should defer all questions about what exists to natural science is really an expression of what he calls, and has come to be known as, naturalism
I believe in evolution but the Theory Of Evolution is woefully incomplete. I don't believe mutations can create a person, the works of Shakespeare, a Mozart symphony... — EnPassant
you want to deploy the indispensability argument, no? — Banno
Quine’s belief that we should defer all questions about what exists to natural science is really an expression of what he calls, and has come to be known as, naturalism. — Banno
Seems an odd position for you to be defending. — Banno
It's not complete, but it is better than looking for platonic realms. — Banno
Your article says "We learn about ordinary objects, at least in part, by using our senses." — Banno
This is where "reality" becomes a tempting term to introduce. — J
Forum content on a database can be worth a lot. — Shawn
I wonder what you mean when you say that numbers are real. — Janus
I'd love to agree. But where? Where can you show me innate good without walking me through constructs? — ENOAH
Republicans, led by former president Donald Trump, are refusing to commit to accept November’s election results with six months until voters head to the polls, raising concerns that the country could see a repeat of the violent aftermath of Trump’s loss four years ago.
The question has become something of a litmus test, particularly among the long list of possible running mates for Trump, whose relationship with his first vice president, Mike Pence, ruptured because Pence resisted Trump’s pressure to overturn the 2020 election.
In a vivid recent example, Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) was pressed at least six times in a TV interview Sunday on whether he would accept this November’s results. He repeatedly declined to do so, only saying he was looking forward to Trump being president again.
He continued to evade the question even as the interviewer, NBC News’s Kristen Welker, reminded him that a “hallmark of our democracy is that both candidates agree to a peaceful transfer of power.”
“This is why so many Americans believe that NBC is an extension of the Democrat party at the end of the day,” Scott said at one point. “… I believe that President Trump will be our next president. It’s that simple.” — Top Republicans, led by Trump, refuse to commit to accept 2024 election results, Washington Post
In his seminal 1973 paper, “Mathematical Truth,” Paul Benacerraf presented a problem facing all accounts of mathematical truth and knowledge. Standard readings of mathematical claims entail the existence of mathematical objects. But, our best epistemic theories seem to deny that knowledge of mathematical objects is possible.
Mathematical objects are in many ways unlike ordinary physical objects such as trees and cars. We learn about ordinary objects, at least in part, by using our senses. It is not obvious that we learn about mathematical objects this way. Indeed, it is difficult to see how we could use our senses to learn about mathematical objects. We do not see integers, or hold sets. Even geometric figures are not the kinds of things that we can sense. Consider any point in space; call it P. P is only a point, too small for us to see, or otherwise sense. Now imagine a precise fixed distance away from P, say an inch and a half. The collection of all points that are exactly an inch and a half away from P is a sphere. The points on the sphere are, like P, too small to sense. We have no sense experience of the geometric sphere.
(Rationalist) philosophers claim that we have a special, non-sensory capacity for understanding mathematical truths, a rational insight arising from pure thought. But, the rationalist’s claims appear incompatible with an understanding of human beings as physical creatures whose capacities for learning are exhausted by our physical bodies.
But whereas you seem to be saying that these individuals are "real", I'm pointing out that they remain shorthand for an activity we can perform. — Banno
Rather, they are something we do. — Banno
Scientists tend to be empiricists; they imagine the universe to be made up of things we can touch and taste and so on; things we can learn about through observation and experiment. The idea of something existing “outside of space and time” makes empiricists nervous: It sounds embarrassingly like the way religious believers talk about God, and God was banished from respectable scientific discourse a long time ago.
"Platonism", as mathematician Brian Davies has put it, “has more in common with mystical religions than it does with modern science.” The fear is that if mathematicians give Plato an inch, he’ll take a mile. If the truth of mathematical statements can be confirmed just by thinking about them, then why not ethical problems, or even religious questions? Why bother with empiricism at all?
Massimo Pigliucci, a philosopher at the City University of New York, was initially attracted to Platonism—but has since come to see it as problematic. If something doesn’t have a physical existence, he asks, then what kind of existence could it possibly have? “If one ‘goes Platonic’ with math,” writes Pigliucci, empiricism “goes out the window.” (If the proof of the Pythagorean theorem exists outside of space and time, why not the “golden rule,” or even the divinity of Jesus Christ?)
↪Wayfarer seems to want two sorts of quantifiers, real and exist. He's immediately committed at least to some sort of free logic. He is this giving us permission to talk of things that do not exist, but are real - like numbers. — Banno
science presents us with a cosmos that seems to be almost infinitely older and larger than humanity, — Janus
All the problems come up when someone then asks you, Why make that choice? I don't mean just you, I mean anyone who wants to say something using words like "real" and "exist". What sort of case are philosophers supposed to make for their choices here? — J
Existence refers to what is finite and fallen and cut of from its true being. Within the finite realm issues of conflict between abound between autonomy and heteronomy. Resolution of these conflicts lies in the essential realm (the Ground of Meaning/the Ground of Being) which humans are both estranged and yet also dependent on. In existence man is that finite being who is aware both of his belonging to and separation from the infinite. Therefore existence is estrangement.
Do humans prefer altruism over selfishness? Is one ethically better than the other? — Joshs
I have no beef with entomology or evolution, but I refuse to admit that they teach me much about ethics. Consider the fact that human action ranges to the extremes. People can perform extraordinary acts of altruism, including kindness toward other species — or they can utterly fail to be altruistic, even toward their own children. So whatever tendencies we may have inherited leave ample room for variation; our choices will determine which end of the spectrum we approach. This is where ethical discourse comes in — not in explaining how we’re “built,” but in deliberating on our own future acts. Should I cheat on this test? Should I give this stranger a ride? Knowing how my selfish and altruistic feelings evolved doesn’t help me decide at all. Most, though not all, moral codes advise me to cultivate altruism. But since the human race has evolved to be capable of a wide range of both selfish and altruistic behavior, there is no reason to say that altruism is superior to selfishness in any biological sense. — Anything but Human, Richard Polt
Yes, well if you really drill this down to the very DNA or evolutionary psychology…. — Shawn
Couldn’t you say that the innate in conscience is where the good is gleaned, where the good is constructed? — Fire Ologist
Do you agree with this, namely that the notion of good in inherent in the primacy of experience, and not something that can be learned by simply looking up a definition and analyzing it? — Shawn
The botched and imperfect world we live in, full of design flaws and disease also seems to indicate sloppy work. — Tom Storm
In order to always have a secure compass in hand so as to find one's way in life, and to see life always in the correct light without going astray, nothing is more suitable than getting used to seeing the world as something like a penal colony. This view finds its...justification not only in my philosophy, but also in the wisdom of all times, namely, in Brahmanism, Buddhism, Empedocles, Pythagoras [...] Even in genuine and correctly understood Christianity, our existence is regarded as the result of a liability or a misstep. ... We will thus always keep our position in mind and regard every human, first and foremost, as a being that exists only on account of sinfulness, and who's life is an expiation of the offence committed through birth. Exactly this constitutes what Christianity calls the sinful nature of man. — Schopenhauer's Compass, Urs App
a distinction that I can't make sense of — Banno
It's (potentially) a choice between grammars, between languages. — Banno
Mathematical platonism has considerable philosophical significance. If the view is true, it will put great pressure on the physicalist idea that reality is exhausted by the physical. For platonism entails that reality extends far beyond the physical world and includes objects that aren’t part of the causal and spatiotemporal order studied by the physical sciences. Mathematical platonism, if true, will also put great pressure on many naturalistic theories of knowledge. For there is little doubt that we possess mathematical knowledge. The truth of mathematical platonism would therefore establish that we have knowledge of abstract (and thus causally inefficacious) objects. This would be an important discovery, which many naturalistic theories of knowledge would struggle to accommodate.
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.
the idealist, rather than being anti-realist, is in fact … a realist concerning elements more usually dismissed from reality.
I say “numbers exist”; you say “numbers do not exist”. — J
"in the same way", Frege says "that a pencil exists independently of grasping it. Thought contents are true and bear their relations to one another (and presumably to what they are about) independently of anyone's thinking these thought contents - "just as a planet, even before anyone saw it, was in interaction with other planets." — Frege on Knowing the Third Realm, Tyler Burge
Consider such a proposition as 'Edinburgh is north of London'. Here we have a relation between two places, and it seems plain that the relation subsists independently of our knowledge of it. When we come to know that Edinburgh is north of London, we come to know something which has to do only with Edinburgh and London: we do not cause the truth of the proposition by coming to know it, on the contrary we merely apprehend a fact which was there before we knew it. The part of the earth's surface where Edinburgh stands would be north of the part where London stands, even if there were no human being to know about north and south, and even if there were no minds at all in the universe. ...We may therefore now assume it to be true that nothing mental is presupposed in the fact that Edinburgh is north of London. But this fact involves the relation 'north of', which is a universal; and it would be impossible for the whole fact to involve nothing mental if the relation 'north of', which is a constituent part of the fact, did involve anything mental. Hence we must admit that the relation, like the terms it relates, is not dependent upon thought, but belongs to the independent world which thought apprehends but does not create.
This conclusion, however, is met by the difficulty that the relation 'north of' does not seem to exist in the same sense in which Edinburgh and London exist. If we ask 'Where and when does this relation exist?' the answer must be 'Nowhere and nowhen'. There is no place or time where we can find the relation 'north of'. It does not exist in Edinburgh any more than in London, for it relates the two and is neutral as between them. Nor can we say that it exists at any particular time. Now everything that can be apprehended by the senses or by introspection exists at some particular time. Hence the relation 'north of' is radically different from such things. It is neither in space nor in time, neither material nor mental; yet it is something.
It is largely the very peculiar kind of being that belongs to universals which has led many people to suppose that they are really mental. We can think of a universal, and our thinking then exists in a perfectly ordinary sense, like any other mental act. Suppose, for example, that we are thinking of whiteness. Then in one sense it may be said that whiteness is 'in our mind'....In the strict sense, it is not whiteness that is in our mind, but the act of thinking of whiteness. The connected ambiguity in the word 'idea', which we noted at the same time, also causes confusion here. In one sense of this word, namely the sense in which it denotes the object of an act of thought, whiteness is an 'idea'. Hence, if the ambiguity is not guarded against, we may come to think that whiteness is an 'idea' in the other sense, i.e. an act of thought; and thus we come to think that whiteness is mental. But in so thinking, we rob it of its essential quality of universality. One man's act of thought is necessarily a different thing from another man's; one man's act of thought at one time is necessarily a different thing from the same man's act of thought at another time. Hence, if whiteness were the thought as opposed to its object, no two different men could think of it, and no one man could think of it twice. That which many different thoughts of whiteness have in common is their object, and this object is different from all of them. Thus universals are not thoughts, though when known they are the objects of thoughts.
We shall find it convenient only to speak of things existing when they are in time, that is to say, when we can point to some time at which they exist (not excluding the possibility of their existing at all times). Thus thoughts and feelings, minds and physical objects exist. But universals do not exist in this sense; we shall say that they subsist or have being, where 'being' is opposed to 'existence' as being timeless.
This is a way of looking at human consciousness and intelligence, but it doesn't mean much since we are such a tiny fraction of the cosmos, — Janus