Crikey pointes out that Dutton now has two ministers responsible for reducing government waste... — Banno

that'd be right. Some other imaginary bogeyman for him to winge about. Everyone knows that whenever the Tories cut the public service, they then open the purse to thousands of overpaid consultants from the big end of town, who report to their shareholders, not to the electorate.

Yes, science is metaphysics - in large part, not entirely - because they try to tell us what that nature is. — Manuel

Not necessarily what it is but how it appears - and it's an important distinction.

Neils Bohr: “Physics is not about how the world is, it is about what we can say about the world”.

Werner Heisenberg: “What we observe is not nature herself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.”

In any case, we do not - and cannot - go beyond appearance. — Manuel

I'd be careful there, it's a big statement!

:pray:

I’ve been thinking about a way to express Berkeley’s esse est percipi without the theological commitment to an all-seeing God or even the (Brahman-like) cosmic intelligence of Kastrup’s Mind at Large. A philosophically neutral alternative is simply to say that what is real, is real for a mind—or even just for 'the observer'. For those who are able to hold to a theistic interpretation, then the Divine Intellect will fulfill that role, but that isn’t strictly necessary for the paradigm to make sense.

If we then ask how to define this mind, the answer is that it cannot be defined in objective terms—because it is not an object. Mind does not appear to us as a phenomenon, but appears as the observer. It is the first-person to whom all experience occurs, meaning that it is never something we can stand outside of and conceptualize as we do with other objects (on any scale). As the old Hindu saying has it, to do so is like the hand trying to grasp itself, or the eye trying to see itself. This is why materialists like Dennett, recognizing that mind cannot be an objective entity, attempt to eliminate it altogether rather than acknowledge its unique status, which undermines their core tenet of the supremacy of objectivity.

This brings us back to Berkeley’s critique of materialism, the assumption that only observed phenomena—the measurable and quantifiable—is real. Because mind itself is never an observed phenomenon, the materialist concludes that mind must be either an illusion or an emergent property of physical processes. This, however, is an assumption, not a conclusion¹. If anything, the inverse is true: the very concept of an objective, external reality depends on the presence of an observer for whom reality appears in the first place.

This position doesn’t entail a theistic framework—it’s simply the recognition that experience always occurs for a mind, hence the indispensability of the subject. Whether one frames this in terms of Berkeley’s God, Kastrup’s ‘Mind at Large,’ or Husserl’s transcendental subject, or even contemporary enactivist approaches to cognition, the underlying point remains the same: the world appears only as structured within awareness or consciousness, within which which the subject of experience is an ineliminable pole.

----

1. 'The world is not conclusion/a species stands beyond/invisible as music/but positive as sound' ~ Emily Dickinson.

existence simpliciter — Count Timothy von Icarus

An oxymoron.

One of the outlinks in the Post story:

A Milwaukee TV weather forecaster has been dropped by her station one day after she criticized Elon Musk on social media for his straight-arm gesture that many have likened to a Nazi salute.

Staffers at WDJT-TV (Channel 58) were alerted by email on Wednesday that meteorologist Sam Kuffel had left the station. Her biography and picture had been removed from Channel 58 website by Wednesday afternoon.

"Meteorologist Sam Kuffel is no longer employed at CBS58," said the staff memo from news director Jessie Garcia that was obtained by the Journal Sentinel. "A search for a replacement is underway." — Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Don’t forget the Supreme Court ruling giving Presidents absolute immunity for official acts. And that he’s had two major felony charges tossed by getting elected. That he thinks Justice is out to get him. You think that’s the profile of someone afraid of the law? (There's a venerable American colloquialism, 'scofflaw', which describes Trump perfectly.)

Meanwhile, must-read WaPo article on MAGA censorship of free expression under the banner of 'protecting free speech' (perfect Orwellian doublespeak).

On Day 1, President Donald Trump signed an executive order titled “Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship.” This might have sounded like banal lip service, reaffirming commitment to the First Amendment. In reality, it was the start of an Orwellian effort to root out wrongthink from government ranks and the private sector.

The first kind of speech to be shushed was scientific speech.

Last week, the administration ordered a blackout on public communications from government health agencies — in the middle of flu season and a global zoonotic outbreak. For the first time since 1952, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention withheld its weekly report on morbidity and mortality data updates.

The blocked issue was slated to contain two important new studies about bird flu transmission, KFF reports. The move echoed Trump’s data-suppression approach to covid-19. (“If we stopped testing right now,” he said in June 2020, “we’d have very few cases, if any.”)

Other federal departments, such as the Energy Department, were also ordered to cease public communications unless they had explicit approval of the acting secretary, according to memos shared with the Post. Some agencies have been blocked from sharing data even within the government. Others have canceled previously approved data access or other exchanges with outside researchers.

In one case, a University of North Carolina legal scholar was told his scheduled talk at a U.S. attorney’s office was canceled. The topic of the event: complicity of German lawyers in the creation of the Nazi state. You can’t make these things up. — A new era of government censorship has dawned

No need to make it up. You can watch it happening.

Don't scientists subscribe to a massive metaphysical commitment, that reality can be understood? — Tom Storm

The scientific method relies heavily on limiting the kinds of questions it tackles to those that can be meaningfully addressed within a defined scope. Consider for example the laws of motion and Galileo's definitions of physics in terms of the measurable attributes of bodies. Galileo made revolutionary discoveries in the understanding of motion, including the concept of inertia (that objects in motion tend to stay in motion unless acted upon by a force).  Galileo emphasized observation and experimentation, laying the groundwork for the scientific method. Newton took these ideas further and formalized them into his three laws of motion, which are fundamental to classical mechanics, meticulously following Galileo's method in collecting data and formulating theories based on evidence. This is why they are considered two foundational figures in modern science. But note that this already relies on some fundamental assumptions and axioms, notably idealisation and abstraction. The practice of physics assume ideal forms, frictionless planes, dimensionless points, and bodies with precisely measurable attributes and behaviours. On the one hand, this proves incredibly powerful in control and prediction within its domain, which is universal in principle, but on the other, it is limited in practice by the fact that the real world does not actually comprise ideal forms and measurable forces, although this method also enables fantastically high levels of approximation. And of course there's no question of its power - you're literally looking at its results!

But notice that among what this excludes is - the subject! There is no conceptual space in all of this for the actual scientist. Which in some sense is what Bishop Berkeley is attempting to restore. He's saying something like, look, unless this is real for someone, then what kind of reality does it have? Phenomenology was to bring all of this out and make it explicit, but the germ of the idea is there in Berkeley (and Descartes for that matter, who is often credited as the forefather of phenomenology.)

The desire to know the answers to ultimate metaphysical questions like “Who am I?”, “What is reality?”, and “What is the mind?” has been haunting me throughout my life. To me, it surpasses other common aspects of a utility function. I cannot say much about the reason for that, as the curiosity seems natural and inherent to me, and precise attribution does not seem possible. I do feel bored and even disgusted by the fact that many human behaviors, including mine, are often driven by flawed/trivial motives, such as selfishness, the sense of superiority, and so on, from a very early age.

From my understanding, current philosophy and science cannot adequately explain these questions. — LaymanThinker

Might that be because of the materialist underpinnings of current philosophy and science? After all, according to its populist advocates, h.sapiens is simply another species, albeit a very clever one, but driven by the same basic instincts as everything else in the natural world, to survive and reproduce. The origin of life is a kind of biochemical fluke, maybe even a one-off, happening in a vast, indifferent universe which neither knows nor cares about humanity. Any conception of reason is a human invention and //apart from its instrumental value// a mere vanity.

If one’s life goal is to understand these ultimate questions and their solutions, should they first focus on longevity in order to wait for humanity to develop the necessary technology, philosophy, or language? — LaymanThinker

Like waiting for Godot. If we don't understand the question, then how what kind of answer can we expect? How can artificial intelligence be expected to answer a question which real intelligence can only dimly pose?

This also means that the most dire fears about Trump aren't realistic. — ssu

Hope you're right. But he could do a lot less than the most dire, and still be dire. Consider what is within his power, a misjudgement in an international economic or military crisis could be *extremely* dire.

I guess that is called self-loathing then. — ssu

He hates Government for many reasons, but one is definitely because of the prosecutions that were launched against him between his terms. He just sacked a whole bunch of prosecutors from DoJ because of their association with those cases, plus he's just offered redundancies to practically the entire Federal workforce. His loathing of the deep state is well-documented, but it turns out that the deep state turns out to be much of the federal beauracracy. He wants to turn the Government into a subsidiary of Trump Inc, and at the moment, he's not getting a lot of pushback. Congress is completely supine. They're terrified of crossing him.

:rofl: :up:

I think Schop was a major influence wasn’t he? (Although I generally shy away from discussion of Neitszche.)

Very interesting question!

Again I'm impressed with Schopenhauer's attitude (although recognizing the thread is about Berkeley).

Schopenhauer sees the body as the one phenomenon we know from both the first-person (inside) and third-person (external) perspectives. Unlike other objects, which are only known to us as representations, our body is directly felt as Will. Accordingly, bodily actions are not caused by will in a mechanistic sense; rather, they manifest the will. When I move my arm, it is not that my will causes the movement—it is the movement. In this respect the body provides an analogy for understanding the nature of a larger reality: things appear as representations, but in their essence, they are Will.

That is similar to how analytical idealist Bernardo Kastrup puts it:

If you are sad – very sad inside, to the point of despair – and you look at yourself in the mirror, you may be crying. So you will see tears flowing down your face and contorted muscles, but not for a moment would you think that those tears and contorted muscles are the whole story. You know that behind those tears, there is the thing in itself – the real thing – which is your sadness. So the tears and the muscles are the extrinsic appearance, the representation of an inner reality. — Mind over Matter

(A general point to note: within the premodern metaphysical vision, particularly in Neoplatonism and Christian theology, being was understood as a form of plenitude—what the ancients called the Pleroma, the 'fullness of being'. From this perspective, being is not a neutral or arbitrary descriptor, but an expression of fullness, goodness, and actuality, compared to which non-existence or non-being is a privation or deficiency. The ontological argument, then, is not simply about correct use of language but is grounded in this intuition of the inherent meaning of Being.

Also worth noting that for the medievals, arguments for God’s existence were devotional as much as polemical —they were edifying ideas intended to elevate the mind toward the Divine. The ontological argument, in this context, is not merely a logical proof but an intellectual prayer, grounded in the awareness of the fullness of being (Pleroma) as identical with the absolute Good.)

The first of the Trump Internment Camps for undesireables is on the drawing board.

President Trump said he is signing an executive order on Wednesday to prepare a massive facility at Guantánamo Bay to be used to house deported migrants. The order will direct the Department of Defense and Department of Homeland Security to prepare a 30,000-person migrant facility at Guantánamo Bay, a facility in Cuba that has been used to house military prisoners, including several involved in the 9/11 attacks.

Meanwhile, the 'funding freeze fiasco' is an example of the always spectacular Trumpian ham-fistedness. After practically paralyzing the entire Federal Government, Trump says, ooops, better not do that. But no doubt he'll keep trying. He hates Government, and he's in an ideal place to disable it.

I’m sorry, but “opening of the first eye” is absurd, if such is meant even remotely literal. To reconcile the absurdity, we are forced to admit the metaphor merely represents some arbitrary initial impact on a fully developed rational intelligence. — Mww

It is common knowledge that in the cosmic scheme, h.sapiens has only existed for the merest sliver of time, and mammals and higher animals generally relatively recent arrivals. That is a matter of temporal sequence, but again the observing mind provides the framework within which that is intelligible. And as I've brought Schopenhauer in, I'll double down:

Since all imaginable characteristics of objects depend on the modes in which they are apprehended by perceiving subjects, then without at least tacitly assumed presuppositions relating to the former (subject) no sense can be given to terms purporting to denote the latter (object). In short, it is impossible to talk about material objects at all, and therefore even so much as to assert their existence, without the use of words the conditions of whose intelligibility derive from the experience of perceiving subjects. — Bryan Magee, Schopenhauer's Philosophy

So, while it is an empirical fact that universe pre-existed conscious beings, the way in which it exists outside of, or before, conscious beings is unknowable as a matter of principle, as the knowledge we have of it, which is considerable, is still held within that intellectual framework. That is why the great Kant could say that one could be both an empirical realist AND transcendental idealist and see no contradiction between them.

Isn't this where the colloquial "go kick rocks" comes from? — DifferentiatingEgg

No, it comes from the Samuel Johnson anecdote, which is described in the OP.

I believe the shift away from Aristotelianism, in the way that "matter" is conceived, is derived from the physicists. — Metaphysician Undercover

Plainly, the death knell for Aristotelianism was the advent of Galilean science and the collapse of the 'medieval synthesis.' And Descartes and all the early moderns took great pains to differentiate themselves from 'the schoolmen', on the not unreasonable grounds that it had become stultifyingly dogmatic. (Actually I still remember an anecdote from the very first lecture in philosophy I attended, by Alan Chalmers, author of What is this Thing called Science? He related the story of group of monks who fell into an argument about how many teeth horses had. They all scurried off to the library, but alas, when they reconvened, they reported that as this fact wasn't in Aristotle, then it couldn't be known. When one fellow suggested going and actually looking in a horses mouth, he was ridiculed.)

Announcing it publicly served no public interest, — Relativist

:rofl: Since when are Trump’s activities ever in response to ‘the public interest’? He’s driven wholly and solely by what Buddhists call ‘the three poisons’: hatred, greed and delusion.

physicists have not been deterred from subtitling their books things like: "the quest for the ultimate nature of reality," or "what is real?" etc. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I have a number of such books, although they're by science writers rather than physicists (Manjit Kumar, David Lindley, Adam Becker.) But the fact that it's still a question is rather in Berkeley's favour, don't you think?

The quote you provided seems to agree with me. Berkeley was criticizing the 'new' conception of matter. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yes, I'll concede that, but there's nothing in Berkeley's philosophy that corresponds with the 'morphe' of Aristotle's hylomorphism. But you're correct in saying that he is targetting the conception of matter held by the other early modern philosophers.

While it's true that for Aristotle "matter is what stays the same," when there is change, the "matter" and "substance" of Berkeley's era had changed dramatically from their ancient or medieval usages.
— Count Timothy von Icarus

I do not agree. Berkeley takes "matter" in very much the way of Aristotle. That's how he manages to conceive of substance without matter. — Metaphysician Undercover

I agree with @Count Timothy von Icarus. As I put it in an earlier post:

In essence, Berkeley’s rejection of material substance is a critique of the early modern philosophers (specifically Descartes and Locke) who inherited and transformed Aristotelian metaphysics into the notion of a "material substratum." For Locke, material substance was posited as the "unknown support" underlying sensible qualities, but something inherently beyond perception, and of which we only receive impressions (the basis of Locke's representative realism). For Descartes, matter was res extensa, entirely lacking in intelligence and possessing only spatial extension, all of the functions of intelligence residing in res cogitans, the so-called 'thinking substance'. — Wayfarer

Note the 'and transformed'. Berkeley was very much at odds with Aristotelian universals, which he rejected as 'abstract ideas'.

What I'm trying to say here is that the "appearance of solidity", and the sensation of weight, and the visual image of a rock, are all mental functions. If you see a gray mass, and you believe it to be solid & massive, you will refrain from kicking it. Unless, of course, you are trying to demonstrate that something is there "that is not solely mental". You know from personal experience that your mind/body requires a door in order to "pass through a wall". — Gnomon

Eddington's Two Tables

3.3 Second Order Judgements.

Rödl starts this section by examining the idea that when we judge "things are so," additional reflection on the judgment’s validity (e.g., "it is right to judge that things are so") is a second-order act—a separate judgment added to the first-order judgment. But this again relies on the force-content distinction: that the act of affirming a judgment (its "force") is separable from the content of the judgment.

If accept that the thought of validity is a separate, second-order judgment, then the first-order judgment ("things are so") becomes unmoored from any inherent awareness of its own validity. In this case, nothing within the act of first-order judgment prevents it from being conjoined with its contrary (e.g., simultaneously judging "things are so" and "things are not so").

Suppose we add a second-order judgment, such as "it is wrong to judge that things are not so." Rödl argues that this second-order judgment itself would require its own validity judgment (a third-order judgment) to avoid contradiction.

The problem cascades: each judgment would require a higher-order judgment to affirm its validity, creating an infinite regress or an endless chain of 'second guessing'.

Rödl shows that treating the validity of a judgement as a separate, reflective act is basically incoherent. If the recognition of validity isn’t assumed in the original judgment, there’s no way to prevent judgments from contradicting each other. ('I thought I thought that, but did I'?)

….on the one hand, the existence of the whole world necessarily dependent upon the first conscious being….

Each conscious being indeed maintains the form, the condition, of its world in accordance with its effects, but each conscious being isn’t his own world’s existential causality. — Mww

Isn't it interesting, though, that with David Hume and the advent of modern philosophy, the whole concept of natural causation is thrown into question. I recall Bertrand Russell saying in the History of Western Philosophy that Hume's scepticism would even cast science itself into doubt, had not Kant 'slipped a plank' under it. He was referring to Kant's 'answer to Hume', whereby Kant resurrected causal relations by showing that they are among the necessary conditions of reason.

I recall an exchange some years ago between Richard Dawkins and the now deceased Bishop George Pell about evolution and creation, the transcript of which was kept online by the Australian Broadcasting Commission:

GEORGE PELL: Well, what is the reason that science gives why we're here? Science tells us how things happen, science tells us nothing about why there was the big bang. Why there is a transition from inanimate matter to living matter. Science is silent on we could solve most of the questions in science and it would leave all the problems of life almost completely untouched. Why be good?

RICHARD DAWKINS: Why be good is a separate question, which I also came to. Why we exist, you're playing with the word "why" there. Science is working on the problem of the antecedent factors that lead to our existence. Now, "why" in any further sense than that, why in the sense of purpose is, in my opinion, not a meaningful question. You cannot ask a question like "Why down mountains exist?" as though mountains have some kind of purpose. What you can say is what are the causal factors that lead to the existence of mountains and the same with life and the same with the universe. Now, science, over the centuries, has gradually pieced together answers to those questions: "why" in that sense.

Dawkins unwittingly expresses the way in which his type of scientific materialism is irrational, as it has no concept of causation beyond the material. There is no reason for anything existing, only a kind of forensic reconstruction of prior temporal events.

In that passage Schopenhauer makes explicit what is implicit in Kant: causation is not an inherent property of the objective domain, but a necessary condition of how the mind structures experience. The logical relations and causal connections we discern in the world are only possible because the world is idea—a representation shaped by the mind. For the empiricists, this connection between causation and logic is severed, leaving causation as little more than a psychological habit without grounding. Schopenhauer restores this connection by showing that causation exists because the world exists as idea.

Modern thought generally assumes that temporal priority subsumes causal or explanatory priority, but this is far from self-evident. As Schopenhauer argues, time and causality are structures in consciousness, not independent realities. To conflate what comes first in time with what is most fundamental in being is to mistake the descriptive for the ontological. For instance, while the Big Bang may precede the universe temporally, it does not answer the ontological question of why there is something rather than nothing. Similarly, while neural activity may precede consciousness in time, it does not explain the existence of consciousness, which is the very framework through which we understand causation.

This is exactly what Schopenhauer is saying: 'The objective world, the world as idea, is not the only side of the world, but merely its outward side; and it has an entirely different side—the side of its inmost nature—its kernel—the thing-in-itself… But the world as idea… only appears with the opening of the first eye.'

The ever-astonishing guitar artistry of Kent Nishimura

So it seems to me this paper missed it's target by fifty years or so — Banno

The relentless grind of progress, eh. Philosophical ideas certainly have short use-by dates in our day and age.

So am I right in thinking that for you idealism consists more of our cognitive apparatus making order our of a type of chaos (but there is some sort of "noumena" to begin with)? — Tom Storm

I think I'll defer again to Schopenhauer. While he came along much later than Berkeley, his insight ‘no object without a subject’ encapsulates a key idealist critique of materialism. Schopenhauer’s analysis deepens Berkeley’s argument by revealing how materialism presupposes the subject’s forms of knowledge—time, space, and causality—without acknowledging their dependence on the subject. This convergence between their critiques underscores the enduring relevance of idealism in challenging naive realism and materialism, which is, as Schopenhauer often insists, 'the philosophy of the subject who forgets herself'.

"I answer, if by Nature is meant only the visible series of effects or sensations imprinted on our minds, according to certain fixed and general laws, then it is plain that Nature, taken in this sense, cannot produce anything at all" ~ Berkeley — Mww

I can't help be reminded of:

At the basis of the whole modern view of the world lies the illusion that the so-called laws of nature are the explanations of natural phenomena. — TLP 6.371

Science let it be known humans could have things, could do things, entirely on their own, or at least enough on their own to call into question isolated external causality of the Berkeley-ian “un-constructed” spirit type. — Mww

Of course. But I'm of the view that it was this emerging modern view of the universe that the good Bishop wished to oppose. That the reason idealism as school of thought begins to appear in this time, is because of the rejection of scholastic realism, which held that particulars did not posses their own inherent or intrinsic reality, as scholastic realism held that the being of particulars was grounded in their intelligible form. Whereas the emerging forms of nominalism held that particulars are real 'in their own right', so to speak. This has had many consequences, most of which we're not aware of, as they are formative in modern culture.

Did Berkeley in the 18th century have any empirical evidence upon which to base his foresight of the "modern subatomic physics" view of Matter? Or was his Idealism a> just intuition or b> expansion on Plato's metaphysics? — Gnomon

It's important to get what Berkeley is saying. Many people, even many philosophers, take him to be saying that solid objects are all 'in the mind', which is why Samuel Johnson believed that kicking a rock refuted his arguments. As I've been saying, that is based on a misunderstanding of Berkeley's contention, which was that there is no material substance apart from all of the perceived attributes of objects (size, shape, weight, solidity among them.) So he's not saying the rock doesn't exist, or is a 'mere' idea, but that what we know of it, is the sensible impressions it causes in us. As per the paragraph above on the meaning of 'substance' in Berkeley - the meaning of substance is crucial in this context. It doesn't mean 'a material with uniform properties' (a sticky substance, a waxy substance, a very hard substance.) It means something like 'a particular of of which attributes can be predicated, or in which attributes inhere'.

(The point I'm interested in, is that 'substance' was derived from the Latin translations of Aristotle's 'ousia' in his Metaphysics, and that is a form of the verb 'to be'. So it is at least arguable that what philosophers often refer to a substances, might be better rendered as 'beings' or 'subjects'. It's not entirely correct, but it conveys something important. For instance, in translations of Spinoza, we read 'God is the infinite, necessarily existing, unique substance.' What if that was given as 'subject' or 'being'? Again, not quite right, but conveying something that has been lost in translation, and which leads to the idea, mistaken in my view, that 'substance' is objectively existent as a kind of thing, no matter how ethereal. But at any rate, it is the philosophical notion of 'substance' and in particular 'corporeal substance' which is at issue.

Of course it is true that Berkeley had no conception of modern physics, although he might well have known of ancient atomism. But it is arguable that modern physics has also undermined the conception of 'corporeal substances'. It has certainly cast doubt on the conception of the mind-independence of fundamental particles, at issue in the 'Bohr-Einstein debates'.)

Berkeley held to Platonism in some ways, with the emphasis on ideas, but contra in others, as he opposed universals. Many say that is the real shortcoming of his philosophy.

The textbook account of Kant on Berkeley is that, after the first edition of Critique of Pure Reason, Kant was angry that many critics took him to be affirming Berkeley's basic thesis. Accordingly in the B edition, he included a section on the Refutation of Idealism, directed at Descartes and Berkeley. You can find an account here.

Like 'substance', I think 'idea' in philosophy means something other than the parade of thoughts, words and images that pass the mind's eye. Objects are recognised by us as kinds and types - this is where Kant comes in - and without that recognition, which is part of the process of apperception, then they would be nothing to us. Experience presents itself to us in the form of ideas. It is much more clearly enunciated by Schopenhauer, in the opening paragraph of WWI, where he recognised Berkeley's 'permanent service to philosophy', although then immediately saying 'even though the rest of his teaching should not endure'. (Talk about a back-handed compliment.)

+1 :100:

Similar territory traversed by Nagel's What is it Like to be a Bat, isn't it? Although I think I can imagine that bats, being warm-blooded mammals, have a rudimentary form of self-awareness, which I can't help but think completely absent in arachnids. But even bats aren't going to wonder about what it would be like to be .... That is an idea that to our knowledge only humans can entertain.

Davidson would say that by the time I've verified that spiders actually have experiences different from my own, I will have destroyed scheme-content duality. — frank

Ever seen The Fly?

IMO, the more appropriate criticism of Berkeley is that his philosophy is shallow — Count Timothy von Icarus

Agree. That's why I described him as a naive idealist, although a bit tongue-in-cheek. But his commitment to nominalism and rejection of universals undermines many other aspects of his philosophy. (I read somewhere that C S Peirce wrote a review of Berkeley which agreed with him in some respects but criticized his nominalism.)

Now granted, the critique of subsistent "matter" taken alone is stronger, but I feel like there are a lot of people who do this better. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Specifically, those who came along later!

reasonable. I'll try and find the time for it.

Surely Kastrup’s overall aim is to advocate what he says is the truth of idealism as opposed to the ‘baloney’ of materialism. I can’t see how that doesn’t have ethical implications, if only because of his conviction that the mainstream and influential philosophy of materialism is fallacious. Hence his expressed, if qualified, admiration for Bishop Berkeley.

Berkeley is in some ways a ‘naive idealist’, but then, he was also the first in the Western world to consciously articulate such a philosophy. I’ve argued before that there’s an historical reason for that: the whole notion of material bodies as being ‘independently real’ was never really considered before the modern period. ‘Creatures’ (meaning anything created) ‘are mere nothings’, said Meister Eckhardt. And that was because they don’t contain their own formative principle, which is bestowed by the Creator. So I’m of the view that the reason idealism starts to appear in this period, was precisely because of the trend towards naturalism, and the idea that the material world possesses its own, independent reality, whereas for the pre-moderns, the world was an expression of the divine will. I'm not *advocating* that view or saying it can be restored, but recognising it as 'meta-philosophical' factor in the discussion.

You'll need to explicate that for those without knowledge of Davidson.

If you’re disputing Rödl, how do you see the distinction of force and content playing out in Quentin’s belief about what Pat thinks? Specifically, where do you locate the force of Quentin’s judgment, and how do you see it as separable from the content of his belief? I’m curious to understand how this applies.

Here's something I've summarised from Chapter 3, in simple terms. Judgment, as self-conscious, is universal and foundational. To make a judgement is implicitly to state 'I think that <p>' or 'I believe that <p>' In this sense, judgement is itself not one perspective among many but the condition for the possibility any perspective.

To deny that judgment is self-conscious would involve making a judgment—and thus reaffirming what you are trying to deny. This makes the self-consciousness of judgment something that cannot be opposed or rejected. To put it another way, to say judgement is not self-conscious, would be to agree, when challenged, ‘no, I really don’t believe that judgement’. So it’s self-refuting. To claim that judgment is not self-conscious would involve a self-conscious act of judgment, thereby refuting the claim itself. This is because the very act of making such a claim requires one to be aware of the validity of their judgment, which is a form of self-consciousness.

Below, a recapitulation of the summary of Frege's essay The Thought, for those interested.

Quentin said that Pat thought the Oak was shedding, but it was actually the Elm next to it that was dropping leaves. But if the thought cannot be isolated from the act of thinking, then in thinking that Pat thought the Oak was shedding Quentin would be thinking that the Oak was shedding. But here Quentin thinks the elm is shedding, not the oak.

It might be supposed that one can object that what Quentin thought was not that the oak was shedding, but that Pat thought the oak was shedding. But if we cannot isolate the thought from the act of thinking it, then in thinking that pat thought the oak was shading, Quentin thought the oak was shedding. — Banno

When Quentin judges that "Pat thinks the oak is shedding its leaves," the content of Quentin’s judgment is not the tree’s state (e.g., "the oak is shedding its leaves") but rather the fact that Pat believes this to be true. Quentin does not need to believe "the oak is shedding its leaves" to make this judgment, because his act of judgment is about Pat’s thought, not about the tree.

This makes it unnecessary to isolate the act of judgment (force) from its content. In Rödl’s framework, judgment is unified: the act of judging and the content judged are inseparable. When Quentin judges that "Pat thinks the oak is shedding its leaves," his act of judgment includes the "I think"—his self-conscious affirmation of the validity of his own judgment about Pat’s belief. There is no division between the act of judgment and the content; they form a single, self-conscious whole.

For Pat, the object of judgment is the tree shedding its leaves: Pat believes "the oak is shedding its leaves." For Quentin, however, the object of judgment is Pat’s belief: Quentin judges "Pat thinks the oak is shedding its leaves." By recognizing this shift, it becomes clear that there is no need to posit a force-content distinction. Each judgment is self-conscious and unified, with its own distinct object.

Even if Pat is wrong about the oak, and Quentin is right about the elm, the form of their judgments remains the same: each involves the self-conscious affirmation of a proposition directed toward its specific object. The truth or falsity of the content doesn’t alter the fact that judgment is always a unified, self-conscious act. The point at issue is not the truth or falsehood of the judgement but the self-conscious nature of judgement.

The firing of the Inspectors General by summary email is blatantly illegal. The law states that Inspectors General must be given 30 days notice of dismissal, on grounds that have been approved by Congress. Here is one of many tests wherein Trump will sign an executive order which is illegal, challenging Congress to act, but knowing full well that Congress is likely to kowtow. There will be many such instances as Trump methodically undermines the rule of law from within the Oval Office.

It's called the principle of sufficient reason — Leontiskos

Completely different to the principle of falsifiability, you’re shifting the goal posts.

Berkeley's claim that matter does not exist — Leontiskos

But you're misinterpreting Berkeley in exactly the same way Johnson did, which is why Johnson's response was a fallacy. Berkeley does not deny the existence of objects - that has already been shown. Kick a rock, and it hurts your foot. Picked up and thrown, a stone will break a window. No contest! What Berkeley is denying is the reality of a material substance, of 'matter' as an abstraction that is separate from the experiential qualities of objects.

For Berkeley, the reality of objects consists entirely in their experiential qualities—what is seen, touched, or otherwise perceived. The notion of 'matter' as an abstraction existing independently of those qualities adds nothing to our understanding and, in his view, is incoherent.

When we perceive an object what is it for us? Berkeley suggests that it a collection of all the ideas (perceptions) conveyed to us by our senses. Take an apple: “a certain colour, taste, smell, figure and consistence having been observed to go together, are accounted one distinct thing, signified by the name 'apple'”. If you take away those ideas given by the senses, there is nothing left of the apple, not even its solidity nor the space it takes up.

Given this, why presume there is some external substance that is causing perceptions? If we lose this concept, how does that affect what really exists? It doesn’t affect it at all, says Berkeley: “The philosophers lose their abstract or unperceived Matter…Pray what do the rest of mankind lose? As for bodies, etc, we have them still”

Instead, Berkeley argues that our talk of existence is purely talk of ideas, or potential ideas: “The table I write on I say exists; that is, I see and feel it: and if I were out of my study I should say it existed; meaning thereby that if I was in my study I might perceive it, or that some other spirit (or mind) actually does perceive it”. And from this Berkeley argues that the idea of an sensible object that cannot be perceived is incoherent – it is essential to it that it must be possible to perceive it. Thus, all sensible objects are necessarily dependant on minds. — I Refute Him Thus! Misunderstanding Berkeley

The Meaning of 'Substance' in Berkeley

As mentioned in the original post, here we're dealing with claims about substance in the philosophical, not everyday, sense. This is derived from Aristotle's metaphysics, via the Latin translation of the Greek 'ousia'. But Aristotle doesn’t treat matter (hyle) as a substance in its own right. For Aristotle, matter is pure potentiality (dynamis)— a potential something that is not yet actualized. On its own, matter is indeterminate and without form. Form (eidos) is what actualizes matter, giving it structure, purpose, and identity. It is through form that matter becomes a substance—a unified entity that can exist and be identified. So the idea of a 'material substance' would be equally incompatible with Aristotelian metaphysics (and this is so, even while acknowledging that Berkeley, with his rejection of universals, was far from Aristotelian.)

In essence, Berkeley’s rejection of material substance is a critique of the early modern philosophers (specifically Descartes and Locke) who inherited and transformed Aristotelian metaphysics into the notion of a "material substratum." For Locke, material substance was posited as the "unknown support" underlying sensible qualities, but something inherently beyond perception, and of which we only receive impressions (the basis of Locke's representative realism). For Descartes, matter was res extensa, entirely lacking in intelligence and possessing only spatial extension, all of the functions of intelligence residing in res cogitans, the so-called 'thinking substance'.

Berkeley attacks these ideas, arguing that a material substance, as conceived by the early moderns, is a metaphysical fiction. We never perceive it directly, nor do we have any coherent idea of what it is. Instead of positing a mysterious "substratum," Berkeley simplifies the metaphysics: reality consists of ideas in minds, and there is no need for an independent material "substance." This is what Berkeley sees as incoherent. And I believe it is!

Which of course runs into major problems when you ask, "So uh...how does God exist?" A common fallacy of, "Everything must follow the rule except this one exception that I need to make the rule work" — Philosophim

I think it's extremely hard to fathom the sense in which God exists. I don't want to drag the thread into the direction of theology, except to say that God does not exist in the same sense that objects do.

if Berkeley says that God constantly perceives Tallis' lymphatic system, Tallis might ask whether that sort of reliance on God constitutes a falsifiable claim. — Leontiskos

You should know better than to confuse the metaphysical with the empirical. The point of the principle of falsifiability was to be able to distinguish metaphysical from empirical claims, but it does not aim to falsify metaphysics. In other words, a metaphysical posit is not challenged by its not being falsifiable.

Most of this seems to depend on just what definition of 'matter' we place in Berkeley's mouth. — Leontiskos

Berkeley's definition is material substance, but 'substance' here in the philosophical sense of 'the bearer of attributes', not a 'particular kind of matter with uniform properties' (which is the usual meaning). Berkeley rejected the commonsense notion of matter as an independently existing substance with intrinsic properties, instead saying that what we consider to be matter is in reality a collection or an aggregate of sensory experiences and perceptions. Objects are aggregates of sensible qualities like color, shape, hardness, and texture, which only exist when they are being perceived by an observer. His system fills in the obvious lacuna in that account by positing the Divine Intellect as a universal observer.

You’re right that much of our own minds and bodies remains unperceived from our subjective perspective. But when we turn our attention to these unperceived attributes—whether mental or physical—they are thereby brought into the realm of perception and cognition. I think this points to a broader idealist insight (perhaps more up-to-date than Berkeley himself articulated): that what we know of the world is always mediated by mind, whether it’s directly or only potentially perceived. While Berkeley’s account may not fully address these layers of cognition, his core claim—that existence is tied to being perceived or perceivable—remains cogent.

(That's all for today I'm afd till tomorrow, but thank you for your comments.)

Sure I understand your concerns. I tried to register but it’s not available in my territory (and besides I don’t really need anything more than what’s already on offer for my own purposes.) But I thought it’s a significant AI story.