When Aquinas says God is in all things as cause, as presence, and also in things in His essence, how is this different from panentheism? Also, if the Ideas are in the mind of God, this seems to be a mutiplicity unless there is one single Idea, one Concept, that includes all truth within it. Like the greatest number that B. Russell talked about in Logic and Mystcism. The infinity that can't be thought of except as complete and one with all reality.

I think this conversation needs to distinguish between God's will and reason. If we can only conceptualize this separation because of our present empirical condition, we have to say that the will causes a change in the intellect. To act free is to be unbounded but to know in that case is to do something *new*. If God is his thoughts and his thought is new in any way we then have a God who has always been changed! Or which comes first, simplicity orb thought?

In a way. We all have individualized empirical selfs. God has room for everything, and I think you are correct contra Thomism. Even the Trinity seems contrary to simplicity. There is more than a relationship to self involved. Christians claim 3 persons, 3 experiences as one experience

How can God be in everything if we are free?

God would have his normal thoughts with the addition of his knowledge that he choose something (such as to create). You're basically presenting Spinoza's critique

I think everything God does is free. Freedom is objective choice about ends in order to "be good". God is act and can't be any different from how we become good. If we are free and he is not, what is he to us? A hyperuranion? The core of simplicity is the ability to choose to think and act

First you have to consider how God loves himself. Is it necessary or free? If he has any freedom he has every freedom and his acts are necessary because of the will he applies himself with

Compare the Critique of Pure Reason with his Critique of Judgment. The first takes objective reality of immediate perception to be false. It's not the thing in itself. This I see as his Buddhist method. With faith in God and total admiration for the teleological argument he retain his Christian side but realizes he left the world *empty*. This is why inn paragraph 57 of COJ he mentons the "indeterminate concept of the supersensible substrate of the appearances" and of "purposiveness without purpose". And also the picture Kant paints in The Critique of Practical Reason is that of spontaneity of applying moral action to ourselves. Is his philosophy too man centered for you? The perennial philosophy of man has always been that thought and will are prior to matter, instead of the other way around (matter being the substrate of consciousness). Was Hermes an existentialist?

Kant's pure reason is attached to its practical reason, being the servant of it. So you can learn from Kant about life. His -Critique of Judgment- has us playing purpose into the world of experience. This is proto-existentialism. The thing in itself is him doing the Buddhist thing where you empty everything of mental constructions and try for a moment to see things as they are to themselves. But he places essence back into quanity, which for him has substance. The moon has substance for Kant. There is just something deeper going on

Are you a reductionalist? What Kant said is similar Malebranche, Rosmini, and many others. The world is yet is not. It's contingent. But the nous in our minds is in the structure of matter and how it interacts with itself. The source of reason is experienced in our knowledge of the world we live in. The world becomes necessary by our interactions with it. If I jump or fall from the Eiffel Tower, it's at that moment necessary that I fall and die if there is nothing to caught me. Yet it's contingent because the tower could have never been made and myself not there to die by it. Contingency and necessity are dualities that stand as thesis/antithesis. Experience is their sum. The universe is Nature and we are in its unity

For science the world is contingent while for philosophy the thing in itself is necessary, only by being in-itself can it make the contingent share in its necessity by application of universal laws. Fitche comes to mind

"To the things themselves" said the phenomenologists. For them experience was primary. Colors may be said to be in the mind but everything is. Color is "there" just as much as primary qualities. I think this is what they meant.

The turn from Kantianism to modern phenomenology was a turning toward realism. It was for the world. Which is not to say it's not spiritual in any way. Mystcism has been a big part of German philosophy since the Romantic period

Maybe the noumena is that which connecs the appearances to reason, not behind but within

My understanding of Kant on this point is that if the world is timeless and without space, objects are eternal and the becoming we see is like the motion of the experience of motion pictures. The vase is real but it's eternity acting as becoming, presence showing life. We don't really know what things are in eternity but we can speak of them while in time by observing them acting outside eternity. Try not asking first what noumena is and instead focus time and space being intuitions. Then maybe noumena come into focus

Kant's response to Hume was that we ARE time and space. Both held the world to be phenomena but Kant held that world to be inside us in a sense. If we are time and space than the world would appear to us falsely because we usually experience time and especially space as outside us. Hence the noumena is the world minus time and space

I was reading this today: https://iep.utm.edu/presocra/#SH6c

I found it so interesting. We assume that how we experience reality is the noumena in our practical lives. But according to Kant time itself is part of our mind, and space too at that! So objects (noumena) are hidden below the scheme we project on reality from the mind. Philosophy has a way of saying that same thing in different ways. Mellisus (and of course Kant) remind me of the block universe of Einstein, a man who stood on the shoulders of giants.

What do you guys think of the statement that Kant forced the limits of reason on us so that we would discover faith in the Designer? I believe Nietsche thought Kant to be Christian apologist

A "judge who compels the witnesses to reply to those questions which he himself thinks fit to propose". He takes this further in the Critique of Judgment where we fill the world with purpose that is not in the phenomena and which we do not know exists in the noumena. Plato thought the world was a reflection of the forms. Kant said we can know nothing at all about noumena. I see that now. He divorced the shadows from the forms such that we cannot know what a form even is. Agree?

I believe Kant and Hegel both were against this "intuitive, direct knowledge of the Forms". What -immediate awareness of oneness with God in the present moment- meant to mystics was different than philosophers. The latter desire to reach the ultimate by thought's guidance. Thoughts are fun

I am not sure even Kant says you have a 2nd frame where your sense contents get transferred into for further organisation. — Corvus

My mental image of the Kantian frame-image is that it is not fully dimensional. That is, whatever dimension it has, the phenomena (not the noumena mind you) has more. Even other galaxies exist as phenomena when nobody is there to see it. Kant knew he lived in a real world, but he tried to reduce it to a philosophical formula. We don't want to be depersonalized (a classified disorder in the West) just because we like philosophy. As for phenomenology, it's father is Husserl but who is the great grandfather? "To the things themselves" they said but those things were "phenomena", hence the name of the movement. This dualism was enabled by the influence of Kant on latter philosophy. Phenomena is not understood by the immediate sensations anyway, hence the mere fact that I know the moon is there when everybody closes their eyes

Anyway, like you, some people seem to interpret Kant as a naive idealist who claims that you have objects in your mind, and that they are the real objects.  There are objects in the external world, which cause the senses to perceive the objects, but you don't know if they are the real, and there is the world of Thing-in-Themselves independent of your perception. — Corvus

This sounds like Plato. Kant has a different "feel" to his work but that may be from the historical distance between them. Is it possible Kant was just a Platonist?

To say that the our fields of perception alone give us phenomena i think is contrary to phenomenology, which Kant may have have been the first author of. Mentally we have, or for now have, a "frame" and we put all our sensations on this 2d frame in order to organize it. The phenomena of the window behind me is behind me, and the noumena could be anywhere. I even think sounds exist objectively. A reality outside of us

It's strange to think of the phenomena/noumena distiction in relation to one's own body parts. Is there a nose-in-itself vs the phenomena of it?

Romans ch. 11 has Paul comparing the equality of all before God in terms of salvation with the special adoption of the Jews by God. Christians must believe this adoption or setting apart is real. Jews have been considered special since the whole Bible thing started.

Maybe historically he bought their anathema upon himself. John chapter 6 has Jesus telling people to eat him, and according to many scholars this was considered an insulting use of language. It seems like he was prodding them to do something. If he was just a man this could be forgotten way long ago. But many believe what he said..

Ye but the Romans tortured him to death. They didn't have to. It was their choice

John 14

"Trust in God; trust also in me... my Father's house... I AM the way and the truth and the life... If you really knew me, you would know my Father as well. From now on, you do know him and have SEEN him... Anyone who has seen me has SEEN the Father... Don't you believe that I am in the Father, and that the Father is in me?... The world cannot accept him, because it neither sees him nor knows him... On that day you will realize that I am in MY Father, and you are in me, and I in you." Jesus (my emphasis)

Judaism fractured because of this renegade's life. It's never been the same

Could it be said that all systems of philosophy try to be as exact as mathematics, but fail?

To my understanding Kant became a dualist because of the arguments by Hume that physical "laws" cant be known and that the world is a-mechnical. Kant thought this was a strong position if the world is just as we experience. But if there is phenomena between the thing-in-itself and us, then laws do apply to everything we do. Now someone can argue against him and ask "why shouldn't phenomena be capable of any change? Why can't a monkey suddenly appear next to you if its all mental." The concept of laws, physical laws, mean that instantaneous change in that sense is not possible. It seems to me Kant was protecting his sanity by he insistance on a noumena.

Also i'd like to say that if a positivist says he is not an idealist, why won't he just call himself a materialist then?

When you say you dont consider yourself to BE something "necessarily", are you speaking of anatman?



Do you know of Nishida Kitaro?

If you try to understand what your cup of coffee is, you will find that you always bring up uses and situations of cups of coffee, and also what others told you about it from when you experienced being young. What the cup is "to itself" is another question (Kant's question). So maybe people who are telling you the representation is all that's practically needed are the true idealist. All they need is what their thoughts "see" around them. This can come apart even further though when analyzing our own thoughts, the very structure of them, as we think of the parts of objects. What does it mean to say atoms exist? The word atom is said in the mind and images are brought up and combined with pure thoughts one has about research into atoms. The thoughts don't stand alone without the images. But if the images are wrong, completely not applicable to reality, how much reality is left when it's asserted atoms "exist". Hence Bohr as already been quoted in this thread. Some founders of QM were into idealism as well. To say we only know what we say about the world and not the world in itself is idealism. So who is the real idealist?

My point was to learn from the discussion and your aggression is unwanted. Why dont you provide your philosophy here on AI right now? Not factodes, but philosophical thought. I'll comment

I didn't say i knew anything about the topic. It's interesting to see others views on the subject while on the forum. Again this was posted over a year ago.

I think that consciousness is awareness and we dont know how that reaches in nature. The ability to do calculations which AI has is divorced from the heart and intuition. Not everything can be analyzed by science.

Eternity if not before time temporally because it is the absence of time. Although, philosophy can posit a Tao that acts without being acted upon, science is more positivist and speaks of what is in time. How the first moments of time arose is subject to debate by Hawking and others.

The original singularity of our universe would be considered uncaused and self caused at the same time, according to how science approaches it. Nothing is posited before it yet it acts (expands) according to the laws of its matter, spacetime, ect. To visualize this you need to keep both in mind. There can be no separation between a god and the universe

Is nothing one or many? Can there be several nothings? The mind can see similarities between objects and make categories of them (such as species and genus). If Spinoza's principle that “all determination is negation” is true, then the further we abstract from things of the world, the more we reach a single concept of being. For Spinoza this ground is one and the concept should accord to one. Being and nothingness have aspects in common such that a painting paint brush has to the canvas; it takes what is potential and makes it something. The potential is limitless. And all nothing knows how to do is determine as time rolls on and the world operates according to it's basic laws

"Although the mind’s status as a substantial form may seem at risk because of its meager explicit textual support, Descartes suggests that the mind a “substantial form” twice in a draft of open letter to his enemy Voetius:

Yet, if the soul is recognized as merely a substantial form, while other such forms consist in the configuration and motion of parts, this very privileged status it has compared with other forms shows that its nature is quite different from theirs (AT III 503: CSMK 207-208).

Descartes then remarks “this is confirmed by the example of the soul, which is the true substantial form of man” (AT III 508: CSMK 208). Although other passages do not make this claim explicitly, they do imply (in some sense) that the mind is a substantial form. For instance, Descartes claims in a letter to Mesland dated 9 February 1645, that the soul is “substantially united” with the human body (AT IV 166: CSMK 243). This “substantial union” was a technical term amongst the scholastics denoting the union between a substantial form and matter to form a complete substance.

Surely Descartes maintains that mind and body are two substances but in what sense, if any, can they be considered incomplete? Descartes answers this question in the Fourth Replies. He argues that a substance may be complete insofar as it is a substance but incomplete insofar as it is referred to some other substance together with which it forms yet some third substance. This can be applied to mind and body as follows: the mind insofar as it is a thinking thing is a complete substance, while the body insofar as it is an extended thing is a complete substance, but each taken individually is only an incomplete human being...

This account is repeated in the following excerpt from a letter to Regius dated December 1641:

For there you said that the body and the soul, in relation to the whole human being, are incomplete substances; and it follows from their being incomplete that what they constitute is a being through itself (that is, an ens per se; AT III 460: CSMK 200).

The technical sense of the term “being through itself” was intended to capture the fact that human beings do not require any other creature but only God’s concurrence to exist. Accordingly, a being through itself, or ens per se, is a substance. Also notice that the claim in the letter to Regius that two incomplete substances together constitute a being through itself is reminiscent of Descartes’ remarks in the Fourth Replies. This affinity between the two texts indicates that the union of mind and body results in one complete substance or being through itself. This just means that mind and body are the metaphysical parts (mind and body are incomplete substances in this respect) that constitute one, whole human being, which is a complete substance in its own right. Hence, a human being is not the result of two substances causally interacting by means of contact and motion, as Gassendi and Elizabeth supposed, but rather they bear a relation of act and potency that results in one, whole and complete substantial human being."
https://iep.utm.edu/rene-descartes-mind-body-distinction-dualism/

No, the issue was what you and i mean by ego. Is it the soul, body, or both. And as i said the article gives the general opinion but goes on to cite all the other interpretation. Descartes believed we own a body and soul. Animal spirits are truly ours. But alas ive repeated myself over again. I dont know how you became a moderator

. And I don't believe any of that supports this contention: — Wayfarer

Well we have the body on one side with the animal spirits and imagination, and then soul on the other. Soul has ethical obligations with how it uses it's body. So this ethical duty to use soul, animal spirits, and imagination in moral coordination. would amount to a personality. Which is why I provided the SEP link on his ethics on passions and such. This is what I meant by "ego". What did you mean by it?