Face it 180, life would hardly be worth living without Christians to bait. :rofl:

lower" organisms obviously respond to their environments, but I don't see how that equates to intentional behavior.
Just address that question or we will be unable to proceed. — Janus

Organisms not only react to stimuli but often do so in ways that are adaptive and goal-directed, suggesting a form of intentionality. This is seen in behaviors that enhance survival and reproduction, such as finding food, avoiding predators, and seeking mates. These behaviors imply a level of agency and purposiveness that goes beyond the deterministic nature of physical laws.

Furthermore, the internal regulatory mechanisms of organisms, such as homeostasis, also exhibit intentional-like behavior. These systems maintain stability through feedback loops, dynamically adjusting to changes in the environment to sustain life. This regulatory process involves a form of self-organization and information processing that seems distinct from non-living physical processes.

Such adaptive, purposive behavior cannot be entirely reduced to physical interactions because it involves a level of complexity and coordination that physical laws alone do not account for. That suggests that the principles governing biological systems include emergent properties and processes that arise from, but are not reducible to, their physical and chemical constituents.

Those are the kinds of considerations that are behind Terrence Deacon's 'Incomplete Nature', although they're also addressed in diverse ways by the theorists listed on the Third Way website.

I believe “supernatural” is a vacuous term because we do not yet know the limits of the natural world. — Art48

'Miracles are not against nature but against what we know of nature' ~ St Augustine.

First, what exactly do you mean by saying that intentionality is active at every level of organic life? — Janus

How is it not clear? That every organism acts intentionally (although not with the conscious self-awareness that characterises higher organisms.) And it re-introduces intentionality at a fundamental level, in contrast to the physicalist model, which posits that organic life is understandable in terms of the same laws which govern physical and chemical reactions. If there's anything 'transcendent' about it, it is simply that.

How to demonstrate that - it's more like a philosophical framework or metaphorical model, a way of thinking about life. We're all looking at the same data, but some frameworks or metaphors might be more consonant with the observations than others. The physicalist/materialist model is mechanistic, whereas this line of thinking recognises a basic distinction between the organic and the mechanistic.

Perhaps there was a good reason that Gotama refused to answer metaphysical questions; not just because he thought that such preoccupations would distract people from practice, but perhaps also because he realized that such question are inherently unanswerable. — Janus

But this question was probably never even considered by the Buddha. This is a question about science and scientific models. It is being actively explored by many scientists - the Third Way Evolution site has an index of scientists that are exploring these ideas.

I think the underlying philosophical rift is between the materialism pushed by the so-called 'ultra-darwinists', which sees everything as being explicable in terms of physical laws, and an emerging holistic model of life and mind. It's part of the overall decline of materialism as a model, which is occuring in many areas of science.

Is such a shift in models itself a scientific matter? Are the conflicts about the interpretations of physics scientific questions? I would say not - they're all concerned with questions of meaning and interpretation, and that definitely overflows the bounds of scientific observation. Philosophy of science (Kuhn et al) have been documenting that since the 1960's. Is that 'metaphysics'? In a way it is, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be considered.

The philosophical point lurking behind this is the question of 'randomness'. There's a lot of heat generated around the idea that evolution is a 'random process' - which of course it actually isn't, even under neo-Darwinism, because natural selection is a far from random process. But there still is an element of chance in two senses - that the existence of life itself is posited by naturalism to be a kind of fluke occurence, the fortuitous combination of elements that happened to give rise to organic life. And that the process by which mutations occur is also largely fortuitous, with unfavourable mutations being eliminated while those favourable to replication of the genotype being preserved. But the overall paradigm is still one of the 'blind watchmaker', to use Richard Dawkin's memorable simile: the process itself is not driven by any kind of intelligence, but is ultimately reducible to, and explainable in terms of, physical principles, albeit represented in unique forms by the complexities of organic chemistry.

Notice that the 'Third Way' approach mentioned above is not an attempt to re-introduce an 'intelligent designer' or presiding intelligence. It's strangely similar to one ancient form of the Logos, namely, the Logos Spermatikos, similar to that described in the Catholic (New Advent) Encylopedia:

God, according to them (the Stoics), "did not make the world as an artisan does his work, but it is by wholly penetrating all matter that He is the demiurge of the universe" (Galen, "De qual. incorp." in "Fr. Stoic.", ed. von Arnim, II, 6); He penetrates the world "as honey does the honeycomb" (Tertullian, "Adv. Hermogenem", 44), this God so intimately mingled with the world is fire or ignited air; inasmuch as He is the principle controlling the universe, He is called Logos; and inasmuch as He is the germ from which all else develops, He is called the seminal Logos (logos spermatikos). This Logos is at the same time a force and a law, an irresistible force which bears along the entire world and all creatures to a common end, an inevitable and holy law from which nothing can withdraw itself, and which every reasonable man should follow willingly (Cleanthus, "Hymn to Zeus" in "Fr. Stoic." I, 527-cf. 537).

which I find a compelling metaphor (although I hasten to add, nothing like that is proposed on the Third Way site that I'm aware of.)

Teleology is a way of studying things which looks at things in relation to purpose, reason for being. — Metaphysician Undercover

That's correct: teleological explanations explain phenomena in terms of their purpose, rather than in terms of their antecedent causes. It seems a minor difference but a lot hinges on it.

The 'literal' question is as to whether evolution is directed and driven by an end goal or goals. If it would have this kind of purpose then the question becomes 'Whose purpose?" and of course the only intelligible answer would seem to be 'God's". — Janus

But this illustrates the very point I was making. The way we have to see it is that it must be either psychological - in the mind - or then it's theistic - as the agency of God. I'm attempting to deconstruct the worldview which makes it seem that these are the only choices. I think (and MU agrees in the above) that 'intentionality' is manifest at every level of organic life, and that it is purposeful.


The Forbes article:

Dennis Noble sees evidence of purposive and intentional evolution in our immune response to viruses. Detection of the invader triggers a flurry of rapid mutations in the genes of B cells, creating a legion of gene variants. These variants are antibodies, the most effective of which are deployed to combat the virus. In a defensive assault, the immune system self-modifies its own DNA. “It changes the genome. Not supposed to be possible,” says Noble. “Happens all the time.”

The conventional view is that this is still random natural selection—cranked up to warp speed inside the body during the lifetime of an individual organism. Noble agrees, but adds the observation that the organism’s immune system initiates and orchestrates the ramped up process, harnessing natural selection to fight off the invader. For Noble, this routine procedure offers clear evidence of the organism actively participating in its own evolution—it’s doing natural selection. This is an alternative theory of evolution where cognition is fundamental. In this theory, the smallest unit of life—cells—have some version of intelligence and intent that allows them to detect and respond to their environment. Noble clocks the immune response as a goal-directed pattern of behavior at the cellular level that scales to every level of organization within a living system. He believes we’re working ourselves into a sweat to exclude something so essential to evolution and to life as purpose and intention.

The article goes on:

Noble is part of The Third Way, a movement in evolutionary biology that views natural selection as part of a holistic, organism-centered process. He co-authored Evolution “on Purpose," published by MIT Press in 2023, which argues that organisms evolve with intention.

The Third Way site is here - I've been aware of it for a while, I read it from time to time. It's not aligned with any form of ID, but it's also sceptical of mainstream neo-darwinism. (I'm particularly drawn to the essays of Steve Talbott, which I encountered on The New Atlantis website.)

The historical background to the rejection of teleological explanations is tied to the advent of Galileo's physics which eliminated Aristotelian physics. But the idea of purpose and its absence is another matter.

What "naturalism" refers to is the loosest ball in this discussion. — Paine

What do you think is at stake in that passage you cited from The Sophist? Anything?

Of course he's no 'voice in the wilderness', he's a highly-respected scholar in his field. But don't you think that his declaration of the incompatibility of Platonism and naturalism might be considered 'dissident', or at least 'dissenting'? Banno often refers to surveys of academic philosophers who's views are overwhelmingly in favour of one or another form of naturalism. He's using his very well-earned seat at the table to question the mainstream.

I see what you’re saying, but I am inclined to think that the failure to think reflexively about what science does, and the methods a particular science uses, is not a limitation of a thing called science meant in some universal, ahistorical sense, but of a certain era of science which doesn’t recognize human becoming, including the wives we create, as open-ended, historical, and contextual. — Joshs

:100: That's where science, philosophy and culture are all going through massive changes. Science is becoming self aware! :party: The zenith of 'scientism' per se was probably around the end of the 19th to the middle of the last century. It still has considerable influence, but the times they are a'changin'.



wives...? :chin:

your view of what happened from then and now is more reliant upon recent scholarship than those who see no reason to question previous descriptions. — Paine

I've been upfront about my motivation and background, which is that I came to philosophy from a counter-cultural perspective, the quest for philosophical or spiritual illumination. My view is that some form of Platonism (specifically, realism about universals) is the real mainstream of Western philosophy, but that the tradition has been hijacked or subsumed by philosophical materialism. Hence my response when I saw the abstract of Gerson's Platonism and Naturalism (which I'm still only half-way finished):

Gerson contends that Platonism identifies philosophy with a distinct subject matter, namely, the intelligible world and seeks to show that the Naturalist rejection of Platonism entails the elimination of a distinct subject matter for philosophy. Thus, the possibility of philosophy depends on the truth of Platonism. From Aristotle to Plotinus to Proclus, Gerson clearly links the construction of the Platonic system well beyond simply Plato's dialogues, providing strong evidence of the vast impact of Platonism on philosophy throughout history. Platonism and Naturalism concludes that attempts to seek a rapprochement between Platonism and Naturalism are unstable and likely indefensible.

Consequently, I'm with 'the friends of the forms', whereas I think the predominant voice in modern philosophy is that of the 'earth-born ancestors'. As a result, much of what is taught in philosophy departments is in conflict with classical philosophy per se. (Which is why I said that Gerson is a 'dissident voice' in respect of many of his academic peers.)

Here's Gerson presenting the core of the ideas in that book, for those interested.

I took it to be implied by your earlier declaration that 'modernity is our cave'.
— Wayfarer

Fair point. I think we can be in the situation of the prisoner who becomes unshackled but has not escaped the cave. We can be aware of the sources that shape our understanding of things and also be aware that there are earlier sources that differ from these. — Fooloso4

:pray:

The idea that ancient texts were saying something other than established interpretations was through a recognition of their development through time. — Paine

That's getting close to the point that I've been pressing all along. And the reason for my interest in Gerson: he's a dissenting voice in the modern academy. (Thomas Nagel is another.)

Right. Scientism is the result of attempting to apply scientific methods to philosophical problems
— Wayfarer

I would argue that scientism involves the belief that the science-philosophy separation you’re suggesting is even possible. — Joshs

But don’t you see a distinction between legitimately empirical questions that are answerable in terms of data and measurement, and philosophical questions that can’t be addressed in those terms?

For instance:

Newtonian mechanics , like all scientific theories, also rests on a philosophical perspective. As a theory, its predictions are ‘good’ and ‘accurate’ according to a particular metaphysical way of thinking about things. The predictions of quantum physics are also good and accurate, but in relation to a changed metaphysical perspective. Both the old and the new physics use terms like mass and energy, but their qualitative meaning has shifted in subtle ways that, as you and Collinwood say, can’t be subsumed under the categories of true and false. The new physics isn’t simply ‘more true’ than the old, it is qualitatively different in its concepts, but in subtle ways that are easy to miss. — Joshs

Both Newtonian and quantum mechanics can be utilised successfully to achieve various goals - his development of calculus was later used to improve the accuracy of artillery fire. And as is well-known quantum mechanics plays an indispensable role in the technology we’re all using to conduct this conversation. Hence the well-known advice for those working in physics not to pursue the puzzling questions it seems to imply, but to ‘shut up and calculate’.

But what physics means is not itself a question for physics. ‘Scientism’ comprises not recognising that, or ignoring the fact that the meaning of scientific theories is not itself a scientific theory, or believing that science will “one day” explain the meaning.

Beauty, like love, is a very unfortunate word in our culture. Think ‘beauty queens’, the Hollywood icon, the poster girl or boy. I’m sure in times past, and older tongues, there were words that described kinds of beauty, like the beauty of an art or an aesthetic that our modern beauty fashions could never grasp or emulate. An example: that crusty old codger, Bertrand Russell, once said that mathematics has beauty, cold and austere. Mathematicians and physicists and engineers would get that, but nobody generally would say that math is beautiful. So maybe in the classical sense, there can be an association with the good and the beautiful, but it’s far from what those words convey in our modern cultural context.

The reality of human and animal purpose is not in question. The question as to whether nature itself exists to fulfill an overarching purpose ("overarching" because such a purpose would necessarily be beyond nature itself) seems to be an impossible question to frame coherently outside the context of the assumption of theism. — Janus

That’s the question I was exploring above:

as our culture is individualist, we tend to conceive of purpose and intentionality in terms of something an agent does. Purposes are enacted by agents. This is why, if the idea of purpose as being something inherent in nature is posited, it tends to be seen in terms of God or gods, which is then associated with an outmoded religious or animistic way of thought. I think something like that is at the nub of many of the arguments about evolution, design and intentionality, and the arguments over whether the Universe is or is not animated by purpose. — Wayfarer

As for the purpose of ‘nature as a whole’, I think that indeed frames the question in such a way that we could never discern an answer. We don’t know ‘the whole’, but only participate in and enact our roles and purposes within that larger context. But as Victor Frankl observed, those with the conviction that there is meaning and purpose in life generally do better than those without it. Call it faith, if you will, but I resist the facile claim that this amounts to ‘belief without evidence’.

Science doesn't deal in anything which is either unobservable or has no observable effects, so I don't find it surprising that it is not a scientific question — Janus

But this is why the question has assumed urgency in biology, in particular, as all living organisms obviously act purposefully. Of course, in physics, there is no question of purpose - it’s all action and reaction, describable according to mathematical laws. As that became a paradigm for knowledge generally, namely ‘physicalism’, then it was simply assumed that life itself was also purposeless, as physicalism assumes that physics is the master paradigm, of which organisms are but one instantiation. But this is just what is being challenged in this debate over whether and how organisms and evolutionary processes are purposeful.

The other question I would ask is how such an unanswerable (if not coherently unaskable) question could have any bearing on the philosophical issues around the human situation and human potential. — Janus

But this is exactly an instance of the kind of positivism that I keep saying you seem to advocate. Remember the exchange yesterday, about Wittgenstein’s complaint that modern culture seems to say that something either has a scientific solution, or no solution at all? Isn’t this what you’re implying? That if science can’t adjudicate the question, then there can’t be an answer to it?

I'd prefer if you would speak for yourself rather than asking me to read linked articles. Otherwise, I'll be left guessing as to what your own thoughts are, and I really don't have the time for that. — Janus

I did compose a lengthy response. I pinned the Forbes article because of its particular focus on the subject of the OP, and also to indicate that the question is a live issue and subject of debate, especially in biology.

I don't see any reason to think that is the case with nature, although the question is one of those imponderables which cannot be definitively answered. — Janus

In fact, the question of purpose, whether it is real or whether it is just imputed, seems to me a philosophical question par excellence. The fact that it’s *not* a scientific question, and why it’s not, is also a very interesting question.

So, you think it would be better if everyone thought the same and all find the same meaning in, and purpose for, life? — Janus

Not for a minute.

Why should we project thinking in terms of formal and final causes beyond the human context? — Janus

The ‘nature of purpose’ is the question posed in the original post. I feel that article I linked at least addresses it. The Aristotelian dimension places it in historical context.

Hey Art - now I see your name on that Youtube preso (which I haven't got around to viewing yet) I realise we corresponded in the 1990's.

which makes the point that materialism is a good (even indispensable) theory for making sense of the world but may not be true, just as Newtonian Physics is a good (even indispensable) theory for making sense of the world but is not true. — Art48

Right. Scientism is the result of attempting to apply scientific methods to philosophical problems.

From here:

I don't see why a lack of overarching purpose and meaning should diminish the importance of general human and particular individual purpose and meaning. — Janus

But doesn't it reduce it to a matter of opinion? The assumption of Greek philosophy, generally, was that reason, logos, animated the universe but was also the animating principle of the individual soul/psyche. Not that there's anything wrong with what you're saying - it's not meant as a personal criticism, but insofar as this is typically how us moderns view the world, in terms of our individual search for meaning.

I saw an account recently of the meaning of a teleological explanation: it is an explanation in terms of what something is for, rather than what conditions caused it. It doesn't sound like much, but really a lot hinges on that distinction.

For instance in Aristotle's fourfold causation, the final cause of a particular thing is its end goal or purpose. A mundane example is that the final cause of a match is fire, as the lighting of fires is the purpose of a match. But notice that in this case, the final cause comes after the striking of the match, being the reason for the existence of the match.

The efficient and material causes are the composition of the matchhead and the act of striking it. That is very much how science since the scientific revolution has tended to view causality: what causes something to happen, in terms of the antecedent combination of causes giving rise to an effect. Cause in the Aristotelian sense has largely been dropped. That's where a lot of the controversy about the so-called meaninglessness of the scientific worldview originates. It's also what is addressed in the Forbes Magazine article I linked above - and it's a bitter controversy, indeed, with a lot of heavyweights slugging it out. So trivial, it isn't.

The result is that now we have created a separation between the intentional acts of conscious agents, and the "purposeful" acts of other living creatures. But in truth, to understand biology and all the various activities of the multitude of living beings, along with the process of evolution, we need that continuity, between the purposeful acts of other living creatures, and the intentional acts of human agents. In reality, the intentional acts of human agents are just an extension, another specific incidence, of a purposeful act of a living creature. — Metaphysician Undercover

Agree. (I think this opens out into a discussion of Terrence Deacon's book Incomplete Nature, where he develops the idea of 'ententional processes' in nature although I've only read the first half of it.)

Our bodies and our minds are made of the matter in the universe, and the only change is the complexity of the structures that 'life' "creates". — Caerulea-Lawrence

But it's a difference that makes a significant difference. Look at the following nonsensensical words:

Blimp wozel finty glorm, cradd zifter lorny daple. Splexh voond zater flink, draff kipto glenty. Wexal dramp yoter blisk, quist nober frinty wald. Blorp kinfa jexty mavel, tind skrop lexin gader. Vekil drorn wopsy glent, kelfy blishd toren valk. Plunty miglo fenst joder, krelf zent flompy wexal.

They're all "just letters", right? What distinguishes that paragraph from the rest of the text on this page is that, absent the organisation imposed by language-using agents, it conveys no meaning.

isn't it more reasonable to say it is Atoms and matter having a living experience — Caerulea-Lawrence

But there's nothing in the theory of 'atoms and matter' which account for the nature of experience. That is the subject of the well-known David Chalmer's paper Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness, a perennial topic on this forum, and which spawned an entire academic industry of 'consciousness studies'.

I've responded to your post in a thread about purpose

I find being told to read something in lieu of a response is patronizing — Paine

I'm sorry if it came across that way. It's more that, 'this is a deep and multi-faceted topic, which is extensively treated in this book.' As the thread is about the work of Lloyd Gerson, then I referred to another of his books, Platonism and Naturalism. And I did then proceed to provide a direct response.

If by naturalism you mean the problems that have arise in the wake of European Enlightenment, then my answer is no, my interpretation is not influenced by the problems of European Enlightenment. — Fooloso4

I took it to be implied by your earlier declaration that 'modernity is our cave'.

To the extent that the claims of the earth-born line up with naturalism it is already present in Plato long before the European Enlightenment. — Fooloso4

Of course. Materialism is as ancient as philosophy itself. The Cārvāka of ancient India were materialists. Enlightenment materialism was represented by scholars such as Baron D'Holbach, who 'sees nothing but bodies in motion'. Like its opposite, it's a perennial theme in philosophy.

It isn’t robust relativism that leads to skepticism, but Idealism and empiricism, by not realizing that the practices of meaning we find ourselves enmeshed within are already real and true, already of the world, absent of any need to valid them on the basis of conformity to anything outside of these already world-enmeshed practices , ‘beyond the contingent’. — Joshs

Well, I don't want to enter into a long dissertation on Buddhist philosophy, other than to point out that the early Buddhist texts insist that:

There is, monks, an unborn — unbecome — unmade — unfabricated. If there were not that unborn — unbecome — unmade — unfabricated, there would not be the case that escape from the born — become — made — fabricated would be discerned. But precisely because there is an unborn — unbecome — unmade — unfabricated, escape from the born — become — made — fabricated is discerned. — Nibbāna Sutta

But this ought not to be thought of as a 'philosophical absolute', in the way of Western philosophical idealism. The principle in Buddhist philosophy is that it is something the individual has to know and see for him or herself by the path of insight.

It would have been helpful if you had mention Hadot in the first place. — Ludwig V

Only came to mind as I composed my reply to your earlier post.

I think what we call reality (human thought and perspectives) are contingent artefacts (products of social construction and language) which more or less work pragmatically, and none of our experiences are 'true' in any transcendent sense. Truth is not about accurately representing reality but rather about what works within a particular context or discourse. — Tom Storm

I agree that everything is contingent. The Buddha’s dying words were supposed to have been something like ‘all compound things are subject to decay’. But your sentiment is ultimately a form of relativism or scepticism, I would think. The difficulty is, that to even attempt to name or indicate something beyond the contingent or constructed, brings it within the scope of a ‘community of discourse’ which is once again one of social construction and language. But I think there’s been an awareness of that for as long as religion itself has existed. I believe that this was why the origin of the now-tired name Yahweh was a string of unpronounceable consonants - a name so sacred that to say it, brought it into the profane realm.

I'm not aware of any specific arguments that everybody needs a radical transformation of character in order to know anything. — Ludwig V

On the contrary, I think classical philosophy has always demanded something of that approach. I’m thinking for example of Pierre Hadot’s ‘Philosophy as a Way of Life’. Look at the origin of philosophy with Socrates - his constant search for the real meaning of justice, of virtue, of piety. The way the classical tradition developed. There’s a term I learned of - actually, it was in an interview between Jacob Needleman and Krishnamurti - which is ‘metanoia’. It doesn’t take a lot of knowledge of Greek word roots to guess what that connotes.

As for Hadot,

According to Hadot’s position as developed in What is Ancient Philosophy?, philosophical discourse must in particular be situated within a wider conception of philosophy that sees philosophy as necessarily involving a kind of existential choice or commitment to a specific way of living one’s entire life. According to Hadot, one became an ancient Platonist, Aristotelian, or Stoic in a manner more comparable to the twenty-first century understanding of religious conversion, rather than the way an undergraduate or graduate student chooses to accept and promote, for example, the theoretical perspectives of Nietzsche, Badiou, Davidson, or Quine. …

For Hadot…the means for the philosophical student to achieve the “complete reversal of our usual ways of looking at things” epitomized by the Sage were a series of spiritual exercises. These exercises encompassed all of those practices still associated with philosophical teaching and study: reading, listening, dialogue, inquiry, and research. However, they also included practices deliberately aimed at addressing the student’s larger way of life, and demanding daily or continuous repetition: practices of attention (prosoche), meditations (meletai), memorizations of dogmata, self-mastery (enkrateia), the therapy of the passions, the remembrance of good things, the accomplishment of duties, and the cultivation of indifference towards indifferent things (PWL 84). …Hadot’s use of the adjective “spiritual” (or sometimes “existential”) indeed aims to capture how these practices, like devotional practices in the religious traditions are aimed at generating and reactivating a constant way of living and perceiving in prokopta, despite the distractions, temptations, and difficulties of life. For this reason, they call upon far more than “reason alone.” — IEP

As regards the empirical claims of religious traditions - of course it is true that these are made, but ‘reproducibility’ is another matter (especially in respect of the resurrection!) But I recall an instruction I read once, that the student (‘prokopta’, or ‘preceptor’) can become aware of certain kinds of evidential experience in their quality of life as a consequence of right realisation, although for obvious reasons that is not necessarily something ascertainable in the third person.

I would say that a belief must be capable of being true and most people think that religious doctrines are true or false. — Ludwig V

I haven't been contributing to this thread, but I'd like to pitch in here. The question is the criterion by which one decides what is true?

Plainly if the question is an empirical one, then the criteria can be provided accordingly - if I believe that 'ice melts at 0 degrees celsius' then it's not hard to validate or falsify such a claim. And there is a massive network of interlocking facts which can be validated according to those criteria, or according to valid inferences based on them. That is, of course, the nowadays massive body of facts established by the empirical sciences.

Religious doctrines are not empirical as a matter of definition (even though many religious texts contain purportedly first-person accounts of real experiences.) So the question becomes, how to ascertain their likely truth or falsity? The fallback for a lot of people is, if they're not empirically verifiable, then they are a matter of opinion, or perhaps of individual conviction. But both are in some important sense subjective, or, one is tempted to say, merely subjective. As distinct from the vast domain of facts which are verifiable 'in the public square', so to speak. Objective facts, in other words.

You may not be able to apply a certain framework to the claim, but I "believe" there's a Yule log in my fridge, it's because I have sufficient reason to believe so. That is, on the personal level, knowledge. — AmadeusD

The difficult point about religious doctrines, in particular, is that they generally demand certainly qualities of character. There are things that 'only the wise can see'. And why? because you have to be wise to see them! One can be worldly-wise - 'Oh, they're all like that when they start out. Just wait a while and see what they think after a couple of years!' And that comes in many varieties. But religious insight, and also philosophical understanding, which are related, if not quite the same, requires something else - a quality of character.

Here is a statement from a highly-regarded Catholic philosopher, Joseph Pieper, with whom I have only passing familiarity:

Our minds do not—contrary to many views currently popular—create truth. Rather, they conform to the truth of things given in creation. And such conformity is possible only as the moral virtues become deeply embedded in our character, a slow and halting process. We have "lost the awareness of the close bond that links the knowing of truth to the condition of purity.” That is, in order to know the truth we must become persons of a certain sort. The full transformation of character that we need will, in fact, finally require the virtues of faith, hope, and love. And this transformation will not necessarily—perhaps not often—be experienced by us as easy or painless. Hence the transformation of self that we must—by God’s grace—undergo “perhaps resembles passing through something akin to dying.”

Myself, I'm not Catholic, but this nevertheless rings true , at least to me (source).

Yes, I thought it a good article. Ray Monk wrote a highly-regarded biography of Wittgenstein, which is on my 'I really must get around to reading' list.

You’ll notice I deleted my remark before you replied. I thought better of it. But do peruse the article from which it came to see more context.

(on second thoughts.....)

he did not oppose the practice of science, only the claim it replaced everything else. — Paine

My view also.

I had not considered it as difference in motivation, only as a statement about what "science" does or does not provide. — Paine

(Wittgenstein's) work is opposed, as he once put it, to "the spirit which informs the vast stream of European and American civilisation in which all of us stand." Nearly 50 years after his death, we can see, more clearly than ever, that the feeling that he was swimming against the tide was justified. If we wanted a label to describe this tide, we might call it "scientism," the view that every intelligible question has either a scientific solution or no solution at all. It is against this view that Wittgenstein set his face. — Ray Monk, Wittgenstein's Forgotten Lesson

The biggest problem with this fixed meaning of form and anamnesis is that it becomes a kind of form itself that exists separately from those who speak of it. — Paine

I quite agree that the the 'fixing of doctrine' becomes a problem with many interpretations of Platonism - that is the source of dogma, I would have thought, which amounts to the formulaic representations of principles, as distinct from the living insight that they were supposed to convey. The ossification of insight into dogma has happened many times over history.

Thanks indeed for that quote from The Sophist, I can see how important that argument is in the overall scheme. Treating the form of a particular as 'a separate thing' is the crux of the problem. That is what the sections in Eric Perl address, in The Meaning of Separation, the Levels of Being, and the Ascent of the Soul.

We had a discussion about it a few months back and I'll refer to a very long post which summarises the relevant points from those chapters.

"I think naturalism is right, but I also think science forces upon us a very disillusioned “take” on reality. It forces us to say ‘No’ in response to many questions to which most everyone hopes the answers are ‘Yes.’ These are the questions about purpose in nature, the meaning of life, the grounds of morality, the significance of consciousness, the character of thought, the freedom of the will, the limits of human self-understanding, and the trajectory of human history." ~ Alex Rosenberg.

This could be Wittgenstein saying: "We feel that even when all possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life remain completely untouched." Tractatus 6.52 — Paine

I don't agree at all, I think they're motivation is completely different. It is something which Rosenberg celebrates and Wittgenstein mourns. Alex Rosenberg is a militant atheist which Wittgenstein, despite his reticence, never was. Remember he used to carry around Tolstoy's edition of the Gospels during his war service. The 'mystical aphorisms' in section 6 of the Tractatus, about the transcendent nature of ethics, would never be found in anything Rosenberg writes.

In part what needs to be addressed is the relationship between your understanding of naturalism and thinking and culture. — Fooloso4

That is a very big question. I'll try and tackle it without turning it into a dissertation.

As I've said many times, I first came to philosophy through my autodidactic attempt to understand the meaning of spiritual enlightenment. That's what drew me to Buddhism, as they're explicit about it. But I also found references to enlightenment are in the Western cultural tradition (see SEP Divine Illumination). Examples appear prominently in Christian mysticism, but then, Aquinas has some connection with that, and he was also a conduit for the grand tradition of Greek philosophy which represents (in Plotinus) a school of the philosophia perennis*.

I will choose a passage from a Buddhist scholar to illustrate what I see as the problem of naturalism and culture that have arisen in the wake of the European Enlightenment (from a conference keynote speech, 1994.)

The early founders of the Scientific Revolution in the seventeenth century — such as Galileo, Boyle, Descartes and Newton — were deeply religious men, for whom the belief in the wise and benign Creator was the premise behind their investigations into lawfulness of nature. However, while they remained loyal to the theistic premises of Christian faith, the drift of their thought severely attenuated the organic connection between the divine and the natural order, a connection so central to the premodern world view. They retained God only as the remote Creator and law-giver of Nature and sanctioned moral values as the expression of the Divine Will, the laws decreed for man by his Maker. In their thought a sharp dualism emerged between the transcendent sphere and the empirical world. The realm of "hard facts" ultimately consisted of units of senseless matter governed by mechanical laws, while ethics, values and ideals were removed from the realm of facts and assigned to the sphere of an interior subjectivity.

It was only a matter of time until, in the trail of the so-called Enlightenment, a wave of thinkers appeared who overturned the dualistic thesis central to this world view in favor of the straightforward materialism. This development was a following through of the reductionistic methodology to its final logical consequences. Once sense perception was hailed as the key to knowledge and quantification came to be regarded as the criterion of actuality, the logical next step was to suspend entirely the belief in a supernatural order and all it implied. Hence finally an uncompromising version of mechanistic materialism prevailed, whose axioms became the pillars of the new world view. Matter is now the only ultimate reality, and divine principle of any sort dismissed as sheer imagination. (@Paine - this is represented by Rosenberg.)

The triumph of materialism in the sphere of cosmology and metaphysics had the profoundest impact on human self-understanding. The message it conveyed was that the inward dimensions of our existence, with its vast profusion of spiritual and ethical concerns, is mere adventitious superstructure. The inward is reducible to the external, the invisible to the visible, the personal to the impersonal. Mind becomes a higher order function of the brain, the individual a node in a social order governed by statistical laws. All humankind's ideals and values are relegated to the status of illusions: they are projections of biological drives, sublimated wish-fulfillment. Even ethics, the philosophy of moral conduct, comes to be explained away as a flowery way of expressing personal preferences. Its claim to any objective foundation is untenable, and all ethical judgments become equally valid. The ascendancy of relativism is complete. — Bhikkhu Bodhi, A Buddhist Response to the Contemporary Dilemmas of Human Existence

Of course, many qualifications and caveats could be made, but I chose this passage because of it's straightforwardness.

However over many years, I've turned back towards the Christian Platonism which is actually our shared cultural background, and sought to understand enlightenment in those terms. I think Western culture has resources which Buddhism lacks, and besides, the 'crisis of the European sciences', as Husserl called it, was a European malady, and so the remedy needs to be sought in those terms.

And in any case, the times are well and truly a'changing. The kind of hardline materialism that this passage describes still exists, but science itself is dynamic and always changing, and the 'systems science' and new approaches in biology and physics are challenging that kind of dogmatic materialism. Nevertheless, naturalism is the assumed consensus of a secular age with a kind of unspoken convention about what kinds of ideas will or will not be admitted into consideration.

The concept of a vertical distinction between living and non-living things, and among living things themselves, conflicts with contemporary cultural and philosophical perspectives, particularly those grounded in natural science. Naturalism, with its emphasis on physical processes as the fundamental reality, will usually reject such metaphysical distinctions. It tends to flatten the Aristotelian hierarchy into a horizontal plane where differences among entities are seen in terms of varying arrangements of matter rather than different degrees or kinds of being. — Wayfarer

*Re the Philosophia Perennis - I am wary of the so-called 'traditionalists', René Guenon, Frithjoff Schuon, et al - I think it's something of a cult movement, notwithstanding some convergent interests.

How is this a different sense of "purpose" from when I said the purpose of the heart is to circulate blood? To circulate blood is "a thing to be done", by the heart, it is "the reason" for the heart. If the heart's effort is successful, it achieves its purpose. It's the very same sense of "purpose". — Metaphysician Undercover

Isn't the difference that one is consciously intended, and the other isn't? Isn't there a valid distinction to be drawn between conscious purpose and the autonomic system? One does not have conscious control over how fast your hair grows or your peristalsis.


Anyway, here's the 'meta-philosophical' point. That as our culture is individualist, we tend to conceive of purpose and intentionality in terms of something an agent does. Purposes are enacted by agents. This is why, if the idea of purpose as being something inherent in nature is posited, it tends to be seen in terms of God or gods, which is then associated with an outmoded religious or animistic way of thought. I think something like that is at the nub of many of the arguments about evolution, design and intentionality, and the arguments over whether the Universe is or is not animated by purpose.

This Forbes Magazine article just came up, on Dennis Noble’s quest to have purpose admitted back into biology

Evolution May Be Purposeful And It’s Freaking Scientists Out (wasn’t paywalled for me).

I have in the past (asked) if these are things that you know and you admitted that you do not. — Fooloso4

On second thoughts - I do try to defend a form of platonic realism, which is that numbers, logical principles, and many other constituents of rational thought, are real independently of any individual act of thought even if not materially existent. I also show that platonic realism is generally deprecated in current philosophy, for the reasons given. So - is this something I know? I might believe it to be true but then how is that claim to be adjudicated?

I have in the past (asked) if these are things that you know and you admitted that you do not. — Fooloso4

Of course, the least wise thing one can claim is to be wise. But it's another thing to claim that the only form of wisdom is the knowledge that one does not have it, and which appears to be your claim.

I am disposed, but not innately, to not attempting to understand Plato in terms of 'naturalism'. The term does not have a clear agreed upon meaning. — Fooloso4

Well, Lloyd Gerson's book Platonism and Naturalism: The Possibility of Philosophy gives it in painstaking detail.

Socrates' assertion in the Apology that he knows that he knows nothing can be seen as a statement about human, as distinct from from divine, insight. Socrates often distinguishes between the wisdom of the gods and human wisdom, and his claim to ignorance can be understood as humility in the face of divine truths but note at 23 d he says 'Therefore I am still even now going about and searching and investigating at the god's behest anyone, whether citizen or foreigner, who I think is wise'

As noted above somewhere, Parmenides' prose-poem is said to be 'given by the Goddess', i.e. divinely inspired. Heraclitus said “Human character does not have insights, divine has” (quoted in Perl, p 18). While Socrates often professes ignorance, this is often part of his dialectical method, aimed at exposing the ignorance of others and guiding them towards a deeper understanding - in this case, by not 'putting on airs' or pretence at wisdom.

I think your frequently-repeated claim that Plato regards the forms as aspirational or mythological or something that nobody including himself has ever seen, really doesn't hold up, even if passages can always be found that seem to suggest it. I've noticed in the past you've suggested that various contributors have been influenced by Christian platonism; would it fair to suggest that your interpretation is influenced by an innate disposition towards naturalism?

I read a few chapters but it's been a long time. But I was very impressed by the author's grasp of the idea of the self as a real 'space' and the novel way in which Augustine realised that idea. And no, I don't think it has much relevance to the issue I was discussing which could broadly be described as 'empiricist attiutudes towards scholastic realism'.

A bit early to say that, on the basis of a jacket cover, don't you think?

It seems to me that people who tend to think of the forms as existing in a magical "spirit realm" are generally hostile to Plato. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Actually it's a consequence of what Maritain diagnoses as the cultural impact of empiricism, in an essay of that name. An example I've often given is from a Smithsonian Institute essay What is Math? which considers attitudes towards Platonic realism in mathematics from an empiricist point of view:

Scientists tend to be empiricists; they imagine the universe to be made up of things we can touch and taste and so on; things we can learn about through observation and experiment. The idea of something existing “outside of space and time” makes empiricists nervous: It sounds embarrassingly like the way religious believers talk about God, and God was banished from respectable scientific discourse a long time ago.

Platonism, as mathematician Brian Davies has put it, “has more in common with mystical religions than it does with modern science.” The fear is that if mathematicians give Plato an inch, he’ll take a mile. If the truth of mathematical statements can be confirmed just by thinking about them, then why not ethical problems, or even religious questions? Why bother with empiricism at all?

There is actually a sensible answer to that rhetorical question, which is that empiricism is indispensable for all practical purposes. But in effect it has displaced metaphysics, or is mistakenly taken to be a metaphysic when it is really an heuristic or a method. That's why the yardstick for what is real is often said to be what is 'out there somewhere' - in fact, even that essay says 'Some scholars feel very strongly that mathematical truths are “out there,” waiting to be discovered.' Notice the use of 'out there' as shorthand for 'what is real' - if it exists, it can only exist as phenomena, as something that can be discerned by sense or instruments of sense. That is where the mistake of the 'ethereal realm' or 'spirit realm' originates, as there is no conceptual space for different kinds or levels of being. As you say, it's a complete failure of the imagination, bred into us by centuries of empiricist conditioning.

The Cary approach seems to consider the dynamic I proposed. — Paine

Hence why I recommended it!

As far as the relationship between Plotinus, levels of being, and psychology - let's not forget the Greek name for the soul is translated as 'psyche'. Psychology is then 'the science of soul', except that 'soul' has fallen into disfavour because of the supernatural overtones. But then a lot of these conversations have the rejection of the supernatural lurking underneath them, like a shoal just beneath the waterline.

Anyway a couple of books I have noticed about these subjects (and there really are multitudes of books) are:

Augustine's Invention of the Inner Self: The Legacy of a Christian Platonist, Philip Cary

Self: Ancient and Modern Insights about Individuality, Life, and Death, Richard Sorabji

Also worth noting in passing that Schopenhauer's appropriation of the eidos in his World as Will and Idea was one of the primary philosophical sources for Freud's theory of the unconscious. Books include works like "Freud and Philosophy" by Paul Ricœur and "Schopenhauer and Freud" by David Cartwright. And then, of course, Jung's archetypes are not at all hard to integrate with Platonic forms. So really the 'levels of self/levels of being' is a perennial theme in philosophy East and West.

There is a kind of anthropomorphism at work here. — Fooloso4

Eric Perl's book, that @Count Timothy von Icarus mentioned, analyses this in detail in Chapter 2, Plato. He says the levels of being ought not to be reified as levels of externally-existing realities, but levels of understanding:

If the levels of reality are levels of presentation and apprehension, then the many ‘ascents’ in the dialogues, the images of ‘going to’ the forms or true being, express not a passage from one ‘world,’ one set of objects, to another, but rather, as Plato repeatedly indicates, the ascent of the soul, a psychic, cognitive ascent, from one mode of apprehension to another, and hence not from one reality to a different reality, but from appearance to reality. This, above all, is why Plato’s metaphysics is no mere ‘theory,’ a postulation of abstract entities called ‘forms,’ but is rather an account of the existential condition of human beings. As Socrates says, the prisoners in the cave, seeing shadows of puppets and taking them for reality, are “like us” (Rep. 515a5).

In the Phaedrus, Socrates likens the soul to a pair of winged horses and their charioteer, and describes its ‘journey,’ following the Gods, to “the place above the sky” (Phdr. 247c3).

What occupies this place … is colorless and shapeless and intangible, really real reality [οὐσία ὄντως οὖσα], visible [θεατὴ] to intellect alone, the soul’s steersman,about which is the kind of knowledge that is true.Now the thought of a God is nourished by intellect and undefiled knowledge, as is that of every soul which cares to take in what is appropriate; seeing [ἰδοῦσα] at last that which is (τὸ ὄν) it rejoices, and beholding the true [θεωροῦσα τἀληθῆ] it is nourished and delights … In its circuit [the soul] looks upon [καθορᾷ] justice itself, it looks upon moderation, it looks upon knowledge, not that which pertains to becoming … but the real [οὖσαν] knowledge concerning that which is really being [τῷ ὅ ἐστιν ὂν ὄντως]. And having beheld and feasted on the other things likewise that really are [τὰ ὄντα ὄντως], going back inside the sky, it comes home. (Phdr. 247c3–e4)

The strongly visual imagery and the references to a “place” may incline us to read this as a voyage to ‘another world.’ But Socrates has already warned us that he is telling not “what the soul actually is” but rather “what it is like” (246a5) and later expressly refers to this story as a “mythic hymn” (265c1). The “place above the sky” is not in fact a place, since what is ‘there’ has no shape or color, is not bodily at all. Rather, the flight is a mythic representation of the psychic,cognitive attainment of an intellectual apprehension of the intelligible identities, ‘themselves by themselves,’ that inform and are displayed by, or appear in, sensible things. — Perl, Thinking Being, Chap 2, Plato, Pp 38-39

So the reason that these are described in mythical terms, does not mean, as you seem insist, dismissing them as 'merely mythical' or aspirational:

The story of the Forms remains just that, a story, not something he knows. — Fooloso4

Could it be that this is because you yourself don't understand what is intended by the 'eidos' and you're then reading this absence into the texts? That Socrates is not telling us 'what the soul actually is' because it can't be told, it has to be discerned - and that will always be a first-person insight, not something that can be subject to re-telling.

I learned much at college but almost nothing of any use from the courses — unenlightened

My uni attendance was delayed, following a terrible senior-school performance. As noted, late 60’s, there was a lot of social turmoil, I escaped a stuffy private boy’s school for an alternative-culture experimental school, at which I spend considerably more time socialising than working. A consequence of which being that I got into uni about five years later as an ‘adult entrant’ on the basis of a comprehension test. And the major part of that text was a large slab of Bertrand Russell’s Mysticism and Logic, which was right up my street, and pretty well set the parameters of my subsequent course of study. It eventually culminated in a BA with Honours in Comparative Religion (emphatically not “divinity”!) Not that it has yielded much of use professionally, although on returning to complete my belated Honours year in 1989, I wound up working in the Uni computer shop, which turned out to be the basis of the modest career I’ve enjoyed in the tech industry since then.

But I’ve been studying more or less the same curriculum since, and still pursue it here.