Without adhering to Plato's purely spiritual and the good as purely spiritual. — Vaskane

Don’t forget Deleuze’s dogmatic image of truth, gifted to Western philosophy by Plato.

↪Steven P Clum
Are you familiar with Factcheck.org or Politifact?
If so do you have an opinion on these organizations? — Mark Nyquist

I can’t believe you’re seriously asking him this.

I tune into Fox, Huffington Post, Breitbart, realclearpolitics, and NBC news throughout the day in an effort to garner a mean understanding of what is going on in the world — Steven P Clum

If I had to watch any news outlet throughout the day I’d end up shooting myself. I grit my teeth just to glance at the headlines online for a couple of minutes. I dont think being a news junkie today is good for anyone’s mental health. It’s designed not to inform but to provide a 24 hour source of sensationalistic entertainment, and all this is doing to viewers is instilling hostility, resentment and contempt (kind of like the vibe I’m getting from the OP).

yep

Don't forget that his son is a crack-addict and a kid-toucher, and Joe Biden covers up for him. It is revealing of the family's ethics, and consequently of people who support that whole circus. — Lionino

Or perhaps it is more revealing of your susceptibility to sensationalistic ‘news’ reporting, the circus you’re supporting by repeating their garbage.

Most people can't read Nietzsche. Reading Nietzsche without having first read Kant, Hume, Plato and the pre-Socratics is like watching 2001 A Space Odyssey without having learned how to count. — Lionino

These may help you to read him (they didnt particularly help me), but to understand what he’s critiquing you may want to familiarize yourself with Hegel, Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard.

Most gun related crimes committed in this country use illegally acquired guns. As of 2010 more than 50,000 guns were smuggled into this country every year. — Steven P Clum

There’s always more than one side to every story.

Ask a cop on the beat how criminals get guns and you're likely to hear this hard boiled response: "They steal them." But this street wisdom is wrong, according to one frustrated Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) agent who is tired of battling this popular misconception.An expert on crime gun patterns, ATF agent Jay Wachtel says that most guns used in crimes are not stolen out of private gun owners' homes and cars. "Stolen guns account for only about 10% to 15% of guns used in crimes," Wachtel said. Because when they want guns they want them immediately the wait is usually too long for a weapon to be stolen and find its way to a criminal.

An intriguing passage, but even if atoms are not the supposed ultimate indivisible particles of atomism, they are also something more than a subjective fiction. — Wayfarer

What Nietzsche means by fiction is a bit tricky. He can’t mean false as opposed to what is truly real, given his assertion that nothing lies behind appearance. What he means by fiction is the claim of scientific facts to some sort of status that transcends their condition of possibility in contingency. What makes this thinking of atoms a fiction, then, is not that it isn’t a useful construct, but that it conceals from itself that as a construct, it is historically contingent, and subject to wholesale transformation of its sense via the movement of paradigmatic change.

On a side-note, do you think Nietzche's 'will to power' can be traced back to Schopenhauer? — Wayfarer

Nietzsche’s concept of will to power is a critique of Schopenhauer’s notion of will.

There are still harmless self-observers who believe in the existence of “immediate certainties,” such as “I think,” or the “I will” that was Schopenhauer's superstition: just as if knowledge had been given an object here to seize, stark naked, as a “thing-in-itself,” and no falsification took place
from either the side of the subject or the side of the object… Philosophers tend to talk about the will as if it were the most familiar thing in the world. In fact, Schopenhauer would have us believe that the will is the only thing that is really familiar, familiar through and through, familiar without pluses or minuses. But I have always thought that, here too, Schopenhauer was only doing what philosophers always tend to do: adopting and exaggerating a popular prejudice.

How about the 1927 Solvay Conference in Physics as the mother of all paradigm shifts in modern science and philosophy? I say it marks the boundary between the Modern and Post-Modern periods — Wayfarer

Darwin’s work made possible American Pragmatism, psychoanalysis and Piaget’s genetic epistemology, among other innovations. These ways of thinking are grounded in the understanding of unidirectional time as a fundamental organizing principle. Physicists in 1927 still tended to see time as irrelevant to physics ( and many still do). This was because their thinking was more consistent with Kant than with Hegel. Physics is just now catching up with post-Darwinian thinking. Then of course there’s Nietzsche, who wrote this 40 years before the Solvey conference:

“Physicists believe in a “true world” in their own fashion…. But they are in error. The atom they posit is inferred according to the logic of the perspectivism of consciousness—and it is therefore itself a subjective fiction. … And in any case they left something out of the constellation without knowing it: precisely this necessary perspectivism by virtue of which every center of force—and not only man—construes all the rest of the world from its own viewpoint, i.e., measures, feels, forms, according to its own force— They forgot to include
this perspective-setting force in “true being”—in school language: the subject.”(The Will to Power)

I don’t get it. Paradigm shifts in science are not ignored, couldn’t be by definition actually, so what’s wrong with the logic of my submission, exactly? — Mww

You said “ Maybe nothing more than who is still the more referenced, after the longer time.”

As overthrown scientific paradigms from earlier eras fade from memory, they will become referenced less and less. Just as in philosophy, Aristotle, Plato and Kant get all the attention , the first two as the founders of Western philosophy and the latter as the founder of modern philosophy, Aristotle, Euclid and Pythagoras get the attention for founding the logic-mathematical basis of science, and Galileo and Newton are credited with the grounding of modern science. But we no more ignore all the philosophical paradigms between the Greeks and Kant, or after Kant, than we do all of the scientific paradigms other than those associated with the Greeks and Newton. Is all modern philosophy just a footnote to Kant? No more so than Kant was just a footnote to Leibnitz, or Spinoza to Descartes, or Descartes to Aquinas.

What are such paradigm shifts in Philosophy?
— SpinozaNietzsche

Maybe nothing more than who is still the more referenced, after the longer time.

I submit, under that criteria, there are but two: Aristotle with pure logic, Kant with pure reason. All others construct philosophies ultimately grounded in, or at least conditioned by, presuppositions of them. — Mww

According to that logic, most of what Kuhn considered to be paradigm shifts in the sciences would have to be ignored.

It still seems impossible, or better put, an absurd possibility, for me to imagine I could prove to myself that myself is not there, but then again, I began this wondering in the first place, and I still have no idea what a “myself” actually is.

It is no wonder I know so little of the world; I can’t even see my face in a mirror, and further, I can’t see my face in a mirror even while it is appearing the mirror itself is me — Fire Ologist

Have you read any Wittgenstein, particularly his later work? He tried to show how the kinds of questions you’re asking result from confusions caused by how our language is grammatically structured around the subject-predicate relation. This linguistic heritage straitjackets the way we think about meaning into boxes, generalities and abstractions like assuming the mind as some kind of container, the existence of a thing as an inert property , and factual knowledge as divorced from the context of interactions in which we use that knowledge and make it relevant and intelligible. In other words, your puzzlement comes less from the way the world is than the presumptions you are tacitly relying on in posing your questions. Start by asking yourself , not what something means in itself, but what you are trying to do with it.

↪Joshs Yes, I can see you two wouldn't get along. Talis is a reactionary from the post-modernist pov, but then that probably applies to me also :yikes: — Wayfarer

Please don’t be a reactionary. I highly recommend
Lee Braver’s ‘A Thing of this World’, in which he discusses and compares Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Foucault, Heidegger and Derrida. He is well known for translating the challenging prose of poststructuralist writings into clear and accessible concepts. Do me a favor and send the book to Tallis, too.

These and the many other advances in neuroscience make me think that philosophy might have to change its mind — Rob J Kennedy

Philosophy changes its mind all the time, usually well before the sciences do. The kinds of neurological ’fixes’ you describe have little to do with the meaning of paradigm shifts as Thomas Kuhn meant them. Improvement in a technology need not require any global transformation in thinking.

I wrote to Tallis after getting one of his books, and he replied very positively. I will look out for that title! (Looking at the Amazon page, one of the reviews comes from James le Fanu, another UK writer from a medical background, who's book Why Us? also really impressed me, about 10 years ago, which is of a similar genre. ) — Wayfarer

I had never heard of Tallis until you mentioned him. I’m sure he has interesting ideas to offer, but he’s an ignoramus when it comes to poststructuralism. Reading the following nauseated me.

I was reminded of Roger when I read Intellectual Impostures by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont (henceforth S&B). Like Roger, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Lacan, Jean Baudrillard and Gilles Deleuze have the habit of using terms of which they have not the faintest understanding, in order to impress the impressionable. Unlike Roger, they did not grow out of it and, also unlike Roger, they were rewarded not with obscurity but with international fame and the adulation of seemingly intelligent academics the world over.

For many years, Lacan, Derrida, Kristeva et al got away with murder, confident that their readers would have only the slightest acquaintance with the areas of knowledge they expropriated to prop up their ideas and their reputation for scholarship, indeed for omniscience. Few if any real historians took note of Michel Foucault's eccentric periodisations; with a single exception, analytical philosophers did not think of Derrida as someone to engage in a debate about the contemporary significance of J.L. Austin and speech act theory; and for every ten thousand students who learned about Rousseau's ideas from popularisations of Derrida, there was hardly one who had read, and reflected upon, Rousseau's writings for herself.

Eventually the postmodern Theorists started to attract the attention of experts in the disciplines into which they had strayed. Linguists looked at their linguistics and found it littered with elementary errors. Derrida, for example, repeatedly confused the sign as a whole with the signifier and so have his many hundreds of thousands of obedient disciples. This error is one of the cornerstones of his work. Other linguists were amused by the Derrideans' ignorance of linguistics outside of Saussure -- this ignorance perhaps strengthening their confidence in their ability to pronounce on the whole of language. Historians have examined Foucault's egregious versions of the history of thought and have discovered that even the miniscule and eccentric empirical base upon which his broad sweep theories are poised is grossly at variance with the documentary evidence. His periodisation -- crucial to his vision of Western history and of man as `a recent invention' -- would, to take one small example, require Descartes to have lived sometime after he had died, in order to fit into the right episteme. Indeed, one does not have to be much of a scholar to demonstrate that Foucault's epistemes and the so-called ruptures epistemologiques separating them -- the central notions of the book (The Order of Things) that brought him his international fame -- correspond in no way to any historical reality

I hear the Existentialists are mighty fond of him, too.
— Joshs

What are your thoughts on the existentialist reading of Nietzsche? Is this illustrative of his fecundity, or is it a partial misreading in your assessment? — Tom Storm

To me it’s like interpreting a film on different levels. You can certainly read Nietzsche as an existentialist and get a lot of him that way. Understanding him as a postmodernist doesn’t invalidate the existentialist perspective so much as radicalize it, put it on steroids.

It has been said that all of today’s philosophy is built on Kant. I would add that all of postmodernist philosophy is built on [deliberately misreading] Nietzsche.
— Joshs
"Beware lest a statue slay you." :zip: — 180 Proof

I hear the Existentialists are mighty fond of him, too.

I do like Nietzsche like a writer, but I have serious doubts on his contributions on aesthetics, ethics, epistemology, and whatever branches of philosophy are taught in schools nowadays. The reason why Nietzsche might be the most popular "philosopher" in Europe I think is his writing ability, not his philosophy. — Eros1982

Don’t believe it. It’s been 135 years since Nietzsche went crazy and his ideas still haven’t been absorbed by most of today’s philosophers. That’s how ahead of his time he was, and a statement of how stagnant today’s intellectual scene is. It has been said that all of today’s philosophy is built on Kant. I would add that all of postmodernist philosophy is built on Nietzsche.

His aphorisms are masterpieces of world literature, but nothing great happens in Nietzsche's "philosophy". This is what I came to believe — Eros1982

But you also said in a previous thread that you have little background in philosophy, having wasted two years attempting to learn it.

If it is given that a thing is intelligible, in what sense are there conditions for the possibility of its being intelligible? For that which is given, re: those things that are intelligible, the very possibility of it is also given, so wouldn’t the conditions be met? — Mww

What Thompson means by condition of possibility here isn’t simply the generic givenness that things are intelligible but the specific way they are intelligible, their manner of being. Heidegger gives a good illustration of the blind spot for the conditions of possibility for the intelligibility of things.

The most immediate state of affairs is, in fact, that we simply see and take things as they are: board, bench, house, policeman. Yes, of course. However, this taking is always a taking within the context of dealing-with something, and therefore is always a taking-as, but in such a way that the as-character does not become explicit in the act.

The non-explicitness of this “as” is precisely what constitutes the act's so-called directness. Yes, the thing that is understood can be apprehended directly as it is in itself. But this directness regarding the thing apprehended does not inhibit the act from having a developed structure. Moreover, what is structural and necessary in the act of [direct] understanding need not be found, or co-apprehended, or expressly named in the thing understood

But philosophy is not a science, and not necessarily subject to the sorts of historical analysis common to the sciences. Would you happily call pointillism a paradigm? Or Shinto? Seems a stretch. — Banno

Philosopher Lee Braver happily associates philosophies and metaphysical eras with paradigms. There is the Kantian paradigm, the Heideggerian paradigm, etc. He takes his lead from writers like Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze and Heidegger.

This is more of a stretch, but perhaps Thompson also recognizes how Stephen Law's Going Nuclear is of relevance in the case of many who profess idealism, and use idealist arguments to feign philosophical sophistication and to avoid the apperance of losing arguments. — wonderer1

I can’t help but suspect that Law would consider Thompsons’s thoughts below as a form of idealism.

I would give up both realism and anti-realism, then, in favour of what could be called a pluralist pragmatism. What the pluralist insists on is that there is no foundational version, one which anchors all the rest or to which all others can be reduced. The pragmatist insists that the world is both found and made: it is made in the finding and found in the making.To erase the boundary between knowing a language and knowing our way in the world gives us a fresh appreciation of the world. That world, however, is not given, waiting to be represented. We find the world, but only in the many incommensurable cognitive domains we devise in our attempt to know our way around. The task of the philosopher is not to extract a common conceptual scheme from these myriad domains and to determine its faithfulness to some uncorrupted reality; it is, rather, to learn to navigate among the domains, and so to clarify their concerns in relation to each other.

To make it complete, we need to realize that, given the described situation, we not only don’t have any contact with reality, but actually, as a consequence, we have absolutely no idea about what the word “reality” means. We need to realize that thinking that it is possible to think of the concept of “reality” is an illusion. If whatever we think comes exclusively from a contact with our own subjectivity, then the very idea of “reality” is an illusion. It is like those who have been born blind and, nonetheless, that try to figure some ideas about what colors are. They do it, they say that they have tried and they have been able to produce some ideas, but it is clear that, whatever idea they have been able to produce inside themselves, it can only be an illusion. — Angelo Cannata

This last option is from Berkeley? It would seem to just reverse the roles that subject and object play in a realist account, by placing an idealist subject in the position of the really real object. What you left out is a relativism which eliminates the distinction between reality and appearance. This allows for the existence of that which is outside of or other than the subject without claiming any foundational status for what appears.

The blind spot keeps us from recognizing these things.
— Joshs

What do you think of Thompson's comment towards the end of the video, about idealism being a philosophical crutch? — wonderer1

Not sure, since he didn’t have time to elaborate. How do you interpret it?

It's a similar argument to Nietzsche's, which is why I can understand it. In fact it seems Collingwood and Nietzsche share many similar positions. — Vaskane

God, I hope not. That would make me much less interested in Nietzsche.

↪Wayfarer The natural sciences are observational-experimental methods, force-multiplied by mathematical techniques, for the manifest purpose of publicly correcting "common sense" experiences (e.g. folk psychologies, customary intuitions (i.e. stereotypes, clichés, X-of-the-gaps stories, etc), cognitive biases, institutional (dogmatic) superstitions, etc) in order to testably explain aspects of the natural world and ourselves — 180 Proof

The natural sciences are conventionalized versions of philosophy whose ‘advantage’ over the latter is not that they secure better access to truths about the world, or that they progress and philosophy doesn’t , or that they progress faster than philosophy, but that they conceal individual differences in point of view by using a generic, flattened down vocabulary, which mathematics excels at. As such , they constitute a kind of common sense with respect to the more nuanced and particularized sense of the best philosophy. They represent the progress of an in-common standardized and technicized sense. Testability and falsification dont eliminate or minimize bias, they tighten up and standardize the conceptualization of a bias ( paradigm) so it can be utilized by a community of researchers in productive ways, and to make it easier to overthrow one bias is favor of a new bias.The blind spot keeps us from recognizing these things.

I always understood thrownness as a limitation or boundary that might impact upon our anticipatory sense making. Are you suggesting the more salient dimension to this is how we are thrown into adaptation? — Tom Storm

Sort of. For Heidegger it’s not so much a matter of adapting to already formed external realities. Rather, it about creating possibilities.

““The essence of something is not at all to be discovered simply like a fact; on the contrary, it must be brought forth. To bring forth is a kind of making, and so there resides in all grasping and positing of the essence something creative…. To bring forth means to bring out into the light, to bring something in sight which was up to then not seen at all, and specifically such that the seeing of it is not simply a gaping at something already lying there but a seeing which, in seeing, first brings forth what is to be seen, i.e., a productive seeing.”

Maybe Heidegger is more helpful frame as he posits the idea of thrownness. We are "thrown" into existence, born into a specific time, place, and cultural context, without any control over these matters. — Tom Storm

Thrownness is an interesting concept. You’re right that some interpret this as meaning the history of external circumstances which shapes us outside our control. But others argue that thrownness has more to do with how the future comes toward us than how the past constrains us. In other words, thrownness is our creative muse, whispering in our ear, opening up new worlds of possibility. Even what we consider to be autonomously willed choice is something we are thrown into.

This play is undoubtedly characteristic of the ways in which we conceive of human perception, experience and judgement. Do you want to suggest that it has an actuality beyond that? — Janus

Yes. Every aspect of the world interacts with every other such that no laws , rules or fixities constrain it. Instead, interactions produce new interactions which produce new interactions. The cosmos is in the business of reinventing its past constantly. The ideality of this continual self-creation does not depend on the mind of a human subject. We are simply a participant in it, but a participant who can rapidly reinvent worlds. The fact that there are no laws constraining future possibilities on the basis of a fixed in place history does not mean change and becoming means chaos and arbitrariness. On the contrary, we live in natural and social circumstances of relative stability and familiarity. One does not need a universe of already fixed properties in order to be able to anticipate new events.

The non-locality of selfhood is serial aboutness: the self, as such, is a continual roadmap to somewhere else.* In its act of thinking, the self displaces itself from what it thinks about such that whatever it thinks about is not-yet-but-will-be. In this regard, thought is both manipulatable and unapproachable. Herein we get a whiff of Satre’s human freedom in the form of the uncontainable self as consciousness. Existentialism must therefore be about authenticity, and its impossibility. The authentic self, therefore, is rooted in a series of forward-looking fictions about the illusive_elusive self as once-was-but-no-longer-is. — ucarr

This absent-self idea comes from Heidegger but Sartre insisted on bringing back the Cartesian subject and freely willing consciousness as the basis of the self.

We are outside the minds of other people. Do you think that we can learn about the workings of other people's minds by observation of their behavior? Doesn't your statement amount to saying psychology is impossible? — wonderer1

There are approaches within psychology which argue that
‘mind’ is not an inside set off against an outside, but an inseparable interaction, a system of coordinations with an environment in which what constitutes the perceiving (the inside) and the perceived environment ( the outside) are defined and changed by their reciprocal interaction. Because as individuals embodied and embedded in the world we are already outside ourselves in this way, there is no radical distinction between perceiving ourselves ( we come back to ourselves from the world) and perceiving others.
Mind is thus treated no differently than organism , which has no true ‘inside’ given they it is nothing but a system of interactions with an environment it defines on the basis of its normative way of functioning. But neither is there a true ‘outside’. So this modifies Wayfarer’s idealism somewhat into a play better the ideal and the real in which neither side has priority.

As long as the philosophy of mind does not make use of a sharp and categorically clear approach to the theory of science and instead loses itself in all kinds of irrationalities, it can be called dead.
In this form, it is of no use to science, nor does it provide an explanation for the nature of consciousness, but rather causes confusion. The instrumentalist approach of neuroscience and AI does not need such a philosophy. — Wolfgang

Perhaps the problem originates from the categorical nature of the distinctions you make between what you understand as the subjective and the empirically objective, the physical and the mental. Is instrumentalism in neuroscience a necessity or a choice? The research program of neurophenomenology would seem to be one example of a non-instrumental approach to neuroscience. Or is this irrational? I’m curious as to what other ‘irrationalities’ you have in mind with regard to philosophy of mind. Could you give some examples? This may help to determine whether the source of the difficulties you raise lies with the philosophical models or with the limits of your imagination.

It’s the Uber-pizza

The reliance on excessive vocabulary and technical jargon is the desperate cry for relevance and convincing others of its own importance. The more one relies on esoteric vocabulary, the more unnecessarily complex the idea becomes. This can give the illusion of complexity and intelligence where it does not exist — Philosophim

Do you have any famous philosophers in mind here, or just the hoi polloi?

I personally think that one can break the history of philosophy into two categories. These categories are the will to meaning and the will to power; Kierkegaard and Nietzsche were known for putting a focus on these, but I think the roots themselves go back to antiquity — Dermot Griffin

.

Nietzsche didn’t speak of will to meaning but will to truth, a subset of will to power. His notion of power wasn’t some kind of concentrated energy possessed by certain individuals or institutions to be used for good or evil. He believed that all meaning is the effect of differential relations within a system of values. Each individual psyche is organized as such schemes, gestalts, matrices of inter-affecting vectors of drives competing with and altering each other. Social power works the same way, as differential forces flowing though and between persons in a culture, so that each of us in our practices reciprocally affect each other to form social systems and institutions shaped in certain ways, producing and changing the meanings that they have for us. Power exerts its effects bottom up rather than top down, through all kinds of complex feedback mechanisms.

↪L'éléphant :up: No problem. I would also add that I never know who a person really is. — Tom Storm

No wonder. Ever notice how who you think the other person in your relationship is changes over time, and who they and you are changes through being affected by the reciprocal interaction of the growing relationship itself?

So, I don't think science has anything much to say here, as I see all of science as dealing only with things as they appear to us. I don't see the Popper/ Kuhn "split" as a significant polemic; I think the views of each can be accommodated within the views of the other — Janus

The Kuhn-Popper split is one of philosophy rather than science, and the two views definitely cannot be accommodated within each other, any more than postmodernism can be accommodated within realism. They both talk about the allegedly ‘same’ world outside of our schemes, but in terms sharply different from each other.

We can exercise our imaginations on that question without fear of incoherence or performative contradiction, but definite views are out of the question. That's the way I see our situation, for what it's worth — Janus

You may have a more definite view without being aware of it. That’s why I mentioned the split between Kuhn and Popper on how what’s out there impacts our scientific knowledge. This difference reflects a difference in understanding the nature of reality in itself. I imagine you have a preference between these two philosophies of science.

it deems logically impossible, but what appears from the vantage of that metaphysics as unintelligible, senseless and incoherent
— Joshs

Aren't those the same thing? — Lionino

Is logical impossibility the same thing as nonsense? Doesn't what is logically impossible conform to the criteria of meaning that allow a judgement of its meaningful incompatibility to be made? For something to be outside of this metaphysical criteria would be for it to appear as random, chaotic, not subject to logical judgement at all.

So, basically, when we say, it is metaphysically impossible for something to happen in a metaphysical system, we are saying, given a metaphysical system M and a proposition X, "In M, X is impossible", it seems that whether X is possible or not boils down to the semantics of M, that is, whether some of the properties or consequences of X are in contradiction to the axioms of M, making untrue analytic statements — Lionino

Wouldn’t the boundaries of a metaphysical system be defined not by what it deems logically impossible, but what appears from the vantage of that metaphysics as unintelligible, senseless and incoherent? What is logically possible and impossible would seem to be reciprocally implied, and both would define what is included WITHIN the system, not what is other than it.