"Is morality objective or not?"

Boring. Try following the conversation.

"I don't think anyone fails to pursue happiness or health"

Yes, so far as we stick to the dictionary that is true, but when we ask what people mean by happiness we get diverse notions. Outside the circle of the mere vague idea of happiness or health, or intelligence, there is a gaping neighing openness.

You're amazingly boring. Try following the conversation and learning.

"good mental health then, even if he's otherwise healthy"

That's good, if I may presume to congratulate you. It seems one can say Health is ambiguous, if it extends to the brain? What is health? In the older discussion, one could speak of getting one's heart desire. What is health when one hates every aspect of the society one live sin, for example? It is perhaps an evil?

On the other hand, most of the time, we do want to be healthy rather than sick. So, what follows from granting the Pinkerites that improvements in medicine deserve to be called Progress, rather than mere change? It seems, yet, a limited kind of Progress.

Boring. Blank generalizations.

"How should I engage those? I don't get what you were expecting here."

For instance, by asking, does it make sense that moral naturalism is rooted in the sense of basic goods. If so, how many are there? And howsofar can they be said to be truly good? For instance, is health truly good? What about someone who was healthy but living in a CIA prison cell, surrounded by Sesame Street music played at highest volume 24 7. And this went on for seventy three years, since the man was quite hardy. Also, the color scheme of the room was scientifically calculated to be the most revolting possible.

Boring. You simply evade an investigation by naming vacuous generalizations. It doesn't do us a protozoa of good to know someone is the support of this or that vacant rubric.

Engage the straightforward examples given above or remain silent.

I don't understand why "prosaic" means "poetry"? Your lack of acumen in language comprehension surprises me. It is, at least clear: the Anglo-Saxon tongue is not your forte!

Well, health is the most common thing pointed to, as a thing good by nature. For instance, de facto (which is to say, though they are too thoughtless to see what they are doing, their betters infer it for them), the defenders of Steven Pinker think the idea of Progress is vouchsafed to human beings on the basis of improvement in medical techniques alone. But, also, intelligence might be named as a natural good, maybe strength. If this is true, one might suppose nature cares for humans, and that the question, how to live, answered in the form of wisdom, which then, in weaker copy comes out in law, might be intrinsic to the world rather than at bottom arbitrary.

Actually this article is boring, since the myth of rights, of sex, of inclusivity: all tire the gentleman of breeding. All pall.

“Only in respect of those aspects of reality which are amenable to quantitative measurement;”

That's simply not the scientific conception of reality. Reality is the measurable. What counts as foundation is what is measurable. Physics is thought not under a Lockean scheme, which is, I admit, like the “two tables” business, but which also makes no sense, since touch or solidity is also a subjective sense, people with no sense of solidity or pain, the two of which coincide, exist, just as do the blind. Though they often die young. No, Plank shows the foundation, the limit of quantifiability. And the rest is thought as emergent (notably in Comte), or, as sheer illusion. Ergo, one hears often, in the tradition stemming from Hume, of “folk” understanding. The folk world and the illusion of consciousness.

In other words, science in the strict sense deals with the measurable. The rest is unscientific.Science deals with reality, the rest is fiction. Hume goes so far to say this, as you will know, of causality. This is, parentheticaly, how the misuse of the notion of a genetic fallacy has come into the west. Since Kant granted that we could not say causality is false because of its limited or dubitative source in the human psychology, and the Logical Positivists took this up and started justifying everything out of it. Since, the alternative is to admit human judgment can’t be the foundation for logic and science.

No. It's more simple. Math is not for the senses strictly speaking. I'm saying just as when I count one, two, three, cups in the cabinet, I don't do math, since I don't deal in strict logical relations, 1 + 1 + 1 = 3, i.e., 3 units, available only to the mind, dianoia or episteme. No two cups are exactly equal. No triangle or geometric form is part of experience, neither anything done with them. Isn't it obvious that a rough drawing in dirt of a square is not a true and proper square? Neither any relations of angles, areas, and so on.

"Things are the same to the degree there are no differences that count. What's the problem there?"

Depends on what you want to do. Greeks were aiming at true knowledge of the cosmos, not building technology. Besides, it's not obvious there is anything close to reality there, I don't believe in thirty thousand years anything physicists now think is a good unified theory, or a Plank limit, or such things will hold up. Not even be taken seriously.

“ But then modern science brackets out the subject and claims, therefore, to arrive at a 'view from nowhere', the universe 'as it really is' were nobody to be observing it.”

This is vexed. Because the Positivist view would not, then, be vague. It’s exact. Reality, and, correspondingly scientific description, is given to the decimal point, it is what is quantifiable. The ordinary vague sense of the fact, by contrast, corresponds to the sense of fact established in the debate between Boyle and Hobbes, and promulgated through the Royal Society. It corresponds to testing, describing things as repeatable, Established facts. The pre-Royal Society meaning of fact was the legal term, “accessory after the fact”, it meant knowing or legally culpable act, the early 18th century still speaks of, e.g., “ignoble facts”, meaning depraved actions. The old fact meant the human action rather than natural occurrence. Blind nature and fact were opposed. Ergo, there is a deep cauldron of confusion corresponding to the general existentialism of the public. Whereas, in the university, there are hard or scientific facts that are not values or ideologies.

Ergo, science is done by existentialists, which, when doing science, are Positivists.

“Not so. We can talk about the unit triangle just like the unit one. The most individuated possible things are precisely those that are the most symmetrical versions imaginable.”

I was speaking about the Greek conception of mathematics, so “not so” is not an appropriate answer to be followed by a claim to propound the truth, in contradistinction to the Greek view, about the issue. I think, also, your truth doesn't make sense. Things, e.g., monads, can never be equal, how could they be considering equal means not different, but, rather, perfectly the same. A performative contradiction.


“Maths just takes that way of thinking and imagines it with all "material accidents" or "historical contingencies"

Sure, but this is applied maths. Like maths of approximations. It would be useless without the logical connection which depends on consistency across the terms, function means translatability of the terms. It doesn’t work with genuine idiosyncratic form, only with randomized pseudo-uniqueness. It’s true so far as one defines reality as what maths can treat in that manner. Than the question is, how far is this definition of reality justified?

“Construction allows that kind of freedom”

What is “construction”? That makes no sense, I’m speaking empirically. Maybe for a super-being.

“Your objection here is not clear so I can't answer.”

We have the idea that two right angles are equal to all the angles of a triangle. It never matches exactly with existing triangles. This is as true for the Greeks as that we have the idea of a triangle, but a real triangle is always qualified, it is, e.g., isosceles.

All this corresponds to the truth that math is a form, it needs form for its foundation. Math is a qualified form of the form of form. The form of form is the only perfect or unqualified form.

"But that is the mistake that leads to strong Platonism. So it would be the other deplorable fault that pervades this forum. "

Sure, but for readers of history of philosophy as readers of that history, it is surely not wanted. Since they want to see things the way the thinkers did, think in and through their ruts truly and properly.


I don't think one form has anything mathematical to do with one unit in the Greek sense. As idea it is the genus of "one". But what does one mean, a whole. A form is a whole, one man, cut an arm off, no longer whole. There is no mathematical equality between men. They are the same as they are under the same form or genus. They are both one is the everyday sense. That's not mathematical in the Greek sense. It's practical everyday vague, not exact, counting.

" It is immanent in reality that arithmetical operations like adding and multiplying will be present to the degree that individuation has been most fully realised."

In ordinary life we can't jump to five million. In maths we don't have to wait to count 1,2,,4, etc., we go right where we want. That's wholly unlike life. Infinity is intelligible, I count, 1,2,3, well, it goes on I say to myself tacitly, as it were, infinity. No such thing in the world as what one can point to.

"Units will emerge naturally"

Not sure how any natural things, if that means stuff one can point to, can be equal in the perfect sense things are equal in the mind. e.g., an angle of 90 degrees. never occurs for the senses by the Greek way of thinking. I don't think form is like number, in fact, number in the mathematical sense of unit is a form. I.e., it is something peculiar, unlike anything else.

“Afrikan Spir”

It’s the Laws of Thought/”logic” in Aristotle's Metaphysics. Law of identity. Human reality as speach, i.e., the human essence. Because otherwise there is radical individuality, even inexpressible under the generic term individual. Ousia as the ground for all change. It’s confusing because the medievals talk of substance and hypostasis (ousia) as the “object” of change.

Not sure this states anything unusual or particular to Spir. Beside for the emphasis on that principle over the others.


“ 'whatever works' - that really is another way of describing the so-called 'falsifiability principle'.”

I give that as corresponding to the vernacular or general public notion of Science. Science does stuff. It is not the same as Popper’s methodological idea, he says a thing tested can’t conform to all possible observable data. Something must falsify the claim. Science doesn’t mainly operate in Popper’s world, because scientists don’t largely care about proving things. They collect observations about how things happen. Anything that happens, whether or not it proves anything, is scientific as strict observation.



Augustine.

You’re right, it’s object of the intellect, not of the senses. not sure how far the Greeks bring that out. They speak of the intellect as reaching the true world and the true field and the true sky, the eternal things, as being the thing that may be immortal, the intellect is a angel in the theological modification. For us the objective is for the senses. Independent external reality as mathematically certain was the idea from Galileo & especially brought forth in Descartes and questioned in Newton, but gradually it becomes “fact” as thing testable, as in the discussion between Hobbes and Boyle and the Royal Society.

When we say objective we mean independent of humans in the sense that people say the stuff happening billions of years ago didn’t require humans. If one closes one’s eyes, the world is still there. Not dependant on humans, objective. This is rather vague in current discussions. Ordinary sense, not math, is objectified as “facts”. Newton said he made no hypothesis because he held his view of gravity to be based on the senses. Not an envisaging of these internal objects. The maths he could understand as external rules imposed on the heavens, which were no longer the realm of mathematical circular motion differing from earthly motion. The word hypothesis lost its meaning. newton claimed to have a “doctrine”, but those used to using the word hypothesis thrust it back at him and he eventually gave way.

This is taking me out of my depth, as you see; I need to study these things more deeply.

Mainly, I presume, on the part of myself. — Wayfarer

Certainly, congratulations, but I think it is, also, more perfectly general, almost a universal disease.

I am prolix, due to some clarity, ergo, I try to see this all more clearly through the survey which does not yet acquire the full masterly pinnacle of vantage over the material in question.

“that we concur on is a number of objects, but the number cannot be said to exist independent of its apprehension, at least, not in the same way objects apparently do.”

This is not the same issue. That is the current way of using numbers. What the Greeks say is: there is no thing that corresponds to the number. Counting numbers are not units. Units are only in the mind. There is not one apple, since it is a different object in the region of change, than another thing that is the same. Same doesn’t mean the same thing as equal. Even if the atoms of the whole apple were of the same counting number. Same can mean, belongs together, and it can mean somehow an “identity”, though, strictly speaking, the only identity is with an apple and itself. Another shares in the same form or idea, or genus.

The unclarity here lies in the radical difference the ancients gave to heavenly motion, and earthly. And its transitional phase in Galileo, with half a foot in the medieval, "astronomy is math in time and place". And another moving towards the modern view.

“So numbers are not 'objective' in the same way that 'things' are.”

The Greeks don’t have a notion of objective as what is not dependant on the human being. What they mean is that the intellect is literally a manner of perception. It is ontological. Speaks of the substance. Modern physicists, apart from a few like Penrose, don’t regard maths that way.


“I can't understand how this could be true, as so much of Galileo's fame rests on precise measurement. How can measurement of celestial objects or mass not depend on applied mathematics?”

Because they regard it as a claim about what the appearances are. The truth about the phenomena. Hypothesis used to mean throwing something under, into the substance. Notice the prefix, hypo. A putting under in the supposatium or foundation. The word hypothesis has changed meaning, now it means a working methodological consideration that wants to bring forward a result. It works! Success! that’s why I used the Rutherford example above, to point to this change. There was no, from a doctrinal point of view, I don’t speak de facto, applied mathematics in former times.

Measurements are tools in our (modern) usage, which is why we have maths of approximation. It’s simply a gauge of the rigour of the science so far as it can bring out precice results. It’s linked to practice, not to ontological knowledge. Remember the word of Feynman, rigour in the sciences is the number of decimal points. He says, also, of concepts in physics, it must do something, only then do we know it exists.

"The most coherent proponent of the view in the OP is Feyerabend, in whom I am well-pleased."

Feyerabend is a terrible uneducated epigone. And not to be taken seriously.

" But I do agree in the main with his analysis of the sort of intellectual wank that pretends values are relative."

Is the pro-life vs. pro-choice an issue of values? I deliberately use an example which is admitted at the lowest level, which is to say, by the American legal profession. It's a piratical issue of tangible importance.

You're quite mistaken, and the issue of the existence of "values" as such is also very difficult (that concept is derived from Nietzsche, through Simmel and came into general usage by way of Weber, it is itself relative to our age, and a value). It corresponds to Positivism, especially social science positivism where ideologies are produced by people like Pinker (which is true even if he is not strictly speaking a social scientist, he still produces ideology or irrational value claims, i.e., unscientifically verifiable claims), the belief that science deals in facts (rather than values).

It's of some moment to grasp this: relativism corresponds to the situation in the universities, it goes along with positivism, even when, and more so, when it is not called by that name, but there is something else, the general attitude of the public is existentialist or historial, which means that one speaks all the time of subjectivity. Of mere subjective views of individuals, and of the radical claim to "pursuit of happiness", each one in their own way.

Dear person who forgets that Mies van der Rohe’s design of Alois Riehl’s house in Neubabelsberg was simple, though, rather charming. Quite unlike yourself! while, likely, you have conceived a perpetual endowment within your body, in the form of hate for Sophie Jung, because she looks like a junger Chus Martinez (at least in one roaring photo), this is only due to your neighing essence, which, according to Pascal, is la pensée. However, this essence is useless, though everything in the world is useful in its own way.

"What is this "law of thought" that you refer to, is it a law of your own making?"

Sometimes this is called a part of prima philosophia. Or, the basic rules of classical logic as the fundamental ground of classical philosophic discussion. However, it is a raising to awareness of the ordinary claim that if someone at one time says, the earth stands still, and in the next breath, it moves!, they say the-thing-that-is-not, i.e., they lie according to the view that contradiction and lie are the same.


“No: As I see it, you lack the freedom to do anything other than that which you do.”

I call something freedom. For instance, sending this post.


“What does any of this mean? Are you drunk? Speak or write in plain english and make your point if you have one.”

The genius of lazy logos is leaden in the depths of your body and soul.

“That is not a philosophical statement it is perhaps a 'spiritual' one.”

Sophia means as much wisdom as knowledge for the Greeks, dear simple one. There is no “spiritual” in ancient Greece. Or, what would it be? Surely not cultic practices and muthos? Neither is there belief nor religion. Remember, Socrates, who most take to be a philosopher, defined the human essence as investigation, saying, whoever does not investigate lives no human life. Ergo, we would have to ask, is investigation questioning?

"When it comes to your own open heart surgery, do you choose a shaman or a surgeon?"

This assumes or takes for granted the value of health. Health may be an evil. In Plato there is a sensible opinion expressed, perhaps only in passing, I don't say convincing view, but sensible, i.e., more than merely apprhendeble by the intellect, in some way persuasive, that health is an evil since the healthy are more likely to have inflated opinions about themselves.

It is a secondary matter, but many may rightly prefer a shaman. That is why there is a large and deep polemic against so-called western medicine. What does "rightly" mean here? Who is the higher judge of it? What is "health"? Feeling good, or does it require somehow some investigation to clarify that? It's not immediately obvious once one raises the question.

"Matter does not think, yet water does not flow into arbitrary directions.
If opting for something you do not deem reasonable you're not acting rationally."

Reason may not be reasonable. Supposing, by analogy, that our psychological grounds for holding an opinion are inescapable. One makes defective judgments constantly, however, only against the measure of new judgments, supposed to be more true, or true simpliciter.

This is an error. Judging what is by the standard of the law of thought, called consistency, or non-contradiction. A performative contradiction results! As you see, I freely will to controvert this topic.

Now, there is something one calls freedom. What is it? Or, shall we say, free will?

Schopenhauer wills that we call into question the human being, is there a human being? Yes, Ronell says, when will the overman come, the getting over? Ergo, she wills to make a ramshackle house of this inquiry.

There is something we call free will, what is it? I don't see what "getting over it" could mean beside from no longer freely willing to question what is. However, that is unlikely, for humans are, by their essence, questioning, ergo, free, beings.

I don't agree with this notion of regress. In truth, one looks into the future, say, looking at what will happen when I send the post, and one wills out of this vision. So there is no regress, it is the living going beyond of past and future, of the ground of what has been as it now stands here, and what will be, as it guides what is to be willed that is willed in the willing of will. Although, true, Nietzsche did not see it this way. For, he was, I fear, far too into that genuine Rausch!

When the man is defective... OK, I shall try to "have fun".

In numbers.

That seems upside down. Since, if one asks about free will from experience, it means choices we make all day long, freely. Ergo, it names an undeniable feature of daily life.

Not sure how anything involving a decision tree, based on blind causal outcomes, could be other than arbitrary. Unless the knowing was extended to mean wisdom, i.e., knowing that some state of affairs was wholly choice-worthy for its own sake, the knowing is fundamentally arbitrary.

The speed.

I know Pinker's work. He's like a a guy who wanted to be a porn star, but, instead, we get cheap and meaningless ideology. I like statistics! Wow... Irrational and boring.

I doesn't seem to make sense to say freedom and deliberation are the same, as your notion of freedom implies. If I know, then I am certain of the outcome, and therefor not free.

This doesn't persuade me at all. I'm with what I've already stated.

Math is not usually about motion. So, one must say mechanics. This prepares for the calculus. Galileo made a thought experiment, about the vacuum where things meeting no resistance will keep going. This is like in Plato where one thinks of the genus, say of a tree. They simply say, it's not in the senses, cant be. Mathimatikos doesn't mean the same thing in ancient Greek as math does in current usage. It includes the ideas, reliable for-knowledge. What Galileo did is superimpose it on the world totality. The ancients never did that.

Your authority is incompetent.

When people dance, do they make "decisions"?, not when they are free. Or, the less the more they are free. To know every "factor" sounds the the privation of freedom.

In the twinkling of an eye a scientism addict will take one forever off subject. I’m not talking about creation of resistance, but killing good bacteria. It’s from Steve Stearns. You can probably email him. Soviets concluded phage therapy was the right way in the 20’s but in the US a study run by the people producing antibiotics set the tone. However, the more general issue is patently obvious, the close grand collaboration of non-human and human cells was not thematized until recently. The general view of what’s going on in the body is almost wholly wrong, and the vast diversity of its microconstituents are unknown to this day. That’s been concealed to undergrads and the public dude!

The more pressing philosophic issue is that Science isn't anything, it's: what those people are doing, & you point...

Don't you think Kant considers non-estrangement as more free? The true and proper shoemaker is free only because he works according to the laws of shoemaking spontaneously. Kant calls spontaneous knowledge of the good freedom.

It’s true still now. For instance, the negative view of bacteria, only recently coming to light, which means that antibiotics have caused more deaths than the top five diseases in the last century through in-hospital overuse (of course, the antibiotic industry had something to do with holding back phage-therapy research). However, there is little meaning to a separation between “Science” as grand modern conception, i.e., the winning out of a part of philosophy, the corresponding invention/creation of “scientists” rather than natural philosophers, and so forth, and everything else left over. That is really what I want to say. Still at the turn of the twentieth century philosophy was the name for all the sciences inclusive, as is still seen in vestigial form in the term PhD (perminant head damage!). Too much faith is put in a determination of tiny importance in the long run, e.g., Geisteswissenschaft as over and against Naturwissenschaft, these are short-term notions thoughtlessly superimposed on history as though they were eternal verities.

“ in the 18th and 19th century novel weren't "discoveries" the way that the various elements were discovered.”

This is wrong. Anyone who knows such work knows that if things are to come clear, the piercing power to see the forms must come, the reader must know what they are reading otherwise it doesn’t mean what the author meant. Think of the universal rejection of the late 19th century avant garde painters by the public, not ready to see their work. In the same way, one must know what one is looking for in chemistry, have a trained acumen, otherwise the material is not seen as what it is to be for the science. One must awaken colleagues, produce them. The elements aren't simply there, no more than are books for apes.

The question of discovery or creation is difficult. Remember, Franklin was still called an inventor, creativity in his time was a power reserved to god. What is it one is long used to calling creativity? One says it without the deep and large consternation of thinking these days. Surely, we are told, scientists are creative. And most of all mathematicians are artists! The theological military complex gave way to our commercial military complex, which makes maths "useful" in the creation of weapons required by the global commercial networks. The mathematicians go on naively claiming to do something that is worth while for its own sake, because as humans they want to, like musicians. And yet, is that the reason for math's resistless rise, math which was the core of the inner philosophic elite since Pythagoras' day, in the popular opinion! Certainly not. State propaganda and "education".

"Wouldn't it be wrong to claim that we do know?"

Science in the modern interpretation doesn't explain at all, it observes how things happen. That's a specific European conception of knowledge which has come to world power in recent generations. Horizon of knowledge is different. One learns things that never go away so long as humans continue, changes in human knowing, civilization or culture. Penetrating to common sense and daily life.

Consider: A remote tribe, some European anthropologists or ethnologists come in and start asking questions. they understand neighbors coming to fight, or to trade, or for some local exchange of local knowledge, etc.. But simply to know about other groups, to study humans as such, this is unknown to them. After this experience they can never go back. They are transformed by knowing human beings seek that kind of knowledge.

Not sure what this has to do with philosophy. Sounds like naive personal reflections...

Maybe it is verbatim, but the meaning is lost. He's not speaking of maths as such, but about maths of motion: mechanics. His whole philosophy (physics) was based on the inertial frame of reference thought experiment. Based on projecting it onto the book of the universe. Newton follows this protective style, leading to the claim that there is nothing beyond the senses in question in the foundation of the new, thereby assumed to be non-metaphysical, physics.

Not quite. For the first time we do know. And this is all the difference. Huge bulk and consequence of change!

Who is the "we" here? Perhaps only the very few called and chosen to approach thought.

Yes, in Kant's sense, unconstrained choice-worthiness is freedom. I.e., human bliss. The beautiful, therefor, is the free. For beauty is as such desirable and nothing more is to be known of it, but that it is what one favors as such. It is practical glamour par excellence. Exalt and rejoice, dwelling place of the internet, great is freedom in your midst! For I speak with genuinely comely felicity. On the other hand, perhaps intelligence is most choice-worthy, or strength? Or, was it rather health? Is to be healthy, to be free, since one would always choose health? Or, is being in bliss true knowledge?

And yet, knowledge of blind nature, and its freedoms, do not care for bliss at all. Liberty is then power to effect what is.