‘Hiding behind Wittgenstein’s skirts’, as one of our illustrious contributors once quipped.

Make the case, then.

Logic gives us a variety of ways in which we might talk about how things are. It does not commit us to this or that ontology. — Banno

Logic was codified by Aristotle and his successors in the context of an assumed ontology and metaphysics which was to become an integral part of the Christian worldview. According to The Theological Origins of Modernity, M A Gillespie, the advent of modernity is characterised by the decline of scholastic realism and the ascendancy of nominalism:

For Gillespie, the epochal question that gave birth to modernity arose out of a metaphysical and theological crisis within late medieval Christianity and became manifested in the nominalist revolution. Prior to nominalism, Christianity was defined by scholastic philosophy, which posited the real existence of universals: reality was ultimately not composed of particulars but of universal categories of divine reason. The experience of the world as universal categories became articulated in syllogistic logic that corresponded to divine reason, and man was believed to be created as a rational animal in the image of God and guided by a natural goal and divinely revealed supernatural one.

Contrary to the scholastics, the nominalists believed reality was composed not of universal categories but of particulars. Language did not point to universal categories but was merely signs useful for human understanding; creation was particular and therefore not teleological; and God could not be understood by human reason but only through Biblical revelation or mystical experience. Nominalism challenged and eventually destroyed the great synthesis that started with the Church Fathers that combined the reason of Greek philosophy with the Christian revelation. — Religious Modernity

This is the disconnect or disjunction which I keep going back to, because I believe it has a real ontological or metaphysical basis (although it goes almost without saying that I don't expect any agreement with it.) Current philosophical debate takes place against this background which renders metaphysics moot and undecideable and is reflected in questions such as:

Will we say that the world consists of objects, and we just give them names? Or will we say that the names are arbitrary, we just invent them? — Banno

A question which has deep roots.

*

I don't think an emotion or rather passion, which was once called apathia, which is nowadays called 'apathy', really could have changed all that much. The only thing that changed was our perception of such a passion... In my opinion, reification happened to the term in the context of socioeconomic systems and tidbits of rationalizations about psychologizing the term away. — Shawn

What has really changed between ancient philosophy and our own day is due to the advent of modernity and the ascendancy of individualism. It is, in philosophical parlance, egological (not egocentric) - assuming the prerogatives of ego at the centre. It’s essential on the political level as it allows pluralism, but here the topic is self-governing, not political government. I think compared to our inherited bourgous and egological way of life, stocism and other such doctrines were very austere. And indeed Schopenhaur praises asceticism as the solution to the problem of human willfulness. Easy to say, but very hard to do, unless it's inculcated during your formative years. (I speak from experience.)

Generally speaking, the classical/scholastic view would be that God is both "inside" and "outside" the system — Count Timothy von Icarus

Transcendent yet immanent. Something the 'new atheists' could never comprehend.

This is why Calvin would go on to have such a problem digesting Augustine. How can a person have any sort of freedom without constraining divine sovereignty if God sits over here and man over there? Here, Augustine's "God is closer to me than my most inmost self," degenerates into a mere metaphor, rather than being a sort of metaphysical statement. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Have a look at The Theological Origins of Modernity, Michael Allen Gillespie, which explicitly addresses this issue. Gillespie shows how a kind of dialectic developed between the scholastic realism of Aquinas and the nominalistic fideism and voluntarism initiated by the Franciscan order. He traces this development through the subsequent centuries through the debates between Luther and Erasmus, and Hobbes and Descartes, among others. (There's a useful synopsis here.)

It may not be an exact quote but the book I mentioned says

Niels Bohr would soon argue that until an observation or measurement is made, a microphysical object like an electron does not exist anywhere. Between one measurement and the next it has no existence outside the abstract possibilities of the wave function. It is only when an observation or measurement is made that the ‘wave function collapses’ as one of the ‘possible’ states of the electron becomes the ‘actual’ state and the probability of all the other possibilities becomes zero. — Kumar, Manjit. Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality (pp. 219-220). Icon Books. Kindle Edition.

which is pretty well exactly what I said. There's another account of the same idea on the third page of the John Wheeler article, Law without Law (.pdf).

Does this mean that ideal entangled electrons wait patiently for a physicist to poke his nose into their business before they reveal themselves as real independent particles? — Gnomon

My take is - and this is another digression, but what the heck - there is no electron until it is measured. Until it is measured, what exists is a distribution of probabilities that it might be measured at a given place - that probability distribution (or super-position) is what 'collapses' when the measurement is made (the notorious 'wave-function collapse'). That is in line with Bohr's 'no phenomenon is a real phenomenon until it is a measured phenomenon'. It is characteristic of the so-called Copenhagen interpretation of physics (which is not a theory, but a collection of aphorisms and essays by Bohr, Heisenberg and others on the implications of quantum theory.)

The reason this is controversial is that it would normally be presumed that 'fundamental particles' would have some objective or determinate reality. In classical discourse the atom - the indivisible or uncuttable particle - was supposed to be enduring and what everything else is 'made of'. So the discovery of the shadowy nature of these so-called fundamental particles was a huge shock not to mention all their other counter-intuitive attributes such as entanglement and unpredictability. Quantum by Manjit Kumar is one of the better popular science books on the subject. Not too hard to read. Also https://chat.openai.com/share/04d0d8cc-9e95-4230-bc00-2ded5d341f9d

When it comes to reasoning, explaining, elaborating, understanding, etc., especially when the topic has any level of complexity, GPT-4 is almost immeasurably better than GPT 3.5! — Pierre-Normand

Good to know. I started with 3.5 but upgraded to the paid version a few months later. I don’t really have a justification for the subscription - it’s AU $33.00 monthly and I’m more or less retired - but I’ve become quite attached to it for bouncing ideas off. It also informed me the other day that it now has memory of my sessions, and I’m pursuing various philosophical themes through it. I’ve also used it for other purposes - financial planning, recipes, creative writing. It’s very much part of my day-to-day now. (Interestingly I had some paid work up until about mid 2022 doing blog posts and sundry articles through a broker for tech companies on various technical subjects - that agency has disappeared, I bet they have been displaced by AI, it’s just the kind of material it excels at.)

Don’t confuse apathy Stoic ‘apathia’ with mere indifference or ennui. It’s more like the ability to rise above personal emotions and pettiness. I think a better word would be detachment.

There’s been a great recent addition to the corpus, Schopenhauer’s Compass by Urs App. It has a lot of original scholarship and reference to primary materials (diaries, letters, margin notes etc). Shows in superb detail the intellectual ambiance of Schopenhauer’s formative years, going right into the provenance of the particular, Persian translation of the Upaniṣad that he read (in Latin), and his relationships and interactions with his peers, including Fichte, Schelling and others.

as you probably know Bernardo Kastrup has published a book on him, Decoding Schopenhauer's Metaphysics, which compares his ideas favourably which those Kastrup has been developing over the last 20 years or so. Me, I think the argument can be made that he was 'the last great philosopher' (although I'll leave it to someone else to actually write it ;-) )

I still think the opening few sentences of WWR are among the immortal utterances of philosophy:

“The world is my idea:”—this is a truth which holds good for everything that lives and knows, though man alone can bring it into reflective and abstract consciousness. If he really does this, he has attained to philosophical wisdom. It then becomes clear and certain to him that what he knows is not a sun and an earth, but only an eye that sees a sun, a hand that feels an earth; that the world which surrounds him is there only as idea, i.e., only in relation to something else, the consciousness, which is himself. If any truth can be asserted a priori, it is this...

There are quite a few other passages I could quote, but I'll resist the urge, although I will add that compared to his nemesis GWF Hegel, Schopenhauer's prose was succinct and direct. I've also read that he had a much bigger impact on playwrights and artists than on the profession of philosophy overall, and that this filtered through to popular culture in the early 20th C. And that he was Bryan Magee's favourite of the great philosophers.

'Reflecting on the general nature of experience' is an empiricist argument, but it is something that already requires the capacity for judgement. John Stuart Mill, for instance, asserted that all knowledge comes to us from observation through the senses. This applies not only to matters of fact, but also to "relations of ideas", the structures of logic which interpret, organize and abstract observations - which is pretty well what you argue. But Kant said that on the contrary the faculties which organize, interpret and abstract from observations were innate to the intellect and were valid a priori. Mill said that we believe them to be true because we have enough individual instances of their truth to generalize: in his words, "From instances we have observed, we feel warranted in concluding that what we found true in those instances holds in all similar ones, past, present and future, however numerous they may be." But his explanation still nonetheless manages to demonstrate that there is no way around Kant’s a priori logic. To recant Mill's original idea in an empiricist twist: “Indeed, the very principles of logical deduction are true because we observe that using them leads to true conclusion” - which is itself an a priori pressuposition. Why? Because in order to judge conclusions as true we must already be able to recognise their truth. (cribbed from an entry on philosophy of mathematics.)

Anyway, the main thrust I see in the idea of 'synthesis' is how it connects to cognitive science and the discovery of the way 'the brain creates reality', which is the subject of the video Is Reality Real? (which apparently drove almost everyone else away.) Can you see the convergence between Kant and cognitive science in this respect?

From this it does not follow that animals are not rational. — Janus

I don't agree, although I also don't think it's of particular relevance. I agree that some experiments and observations demonstrate a kind of 'proto-rationality' amongst animals, but I don't agree that it amounts to reason in the sense that h.sapiens demonstrates it.

you appeal to Plato as someone who thought as you do. But there is no argument to support that way of thinking — Janus

I refer to it as historical background. I'm simply making the point that Plato's epistemology differentiated between different levels or kinds of knowledge in a way that modern philosophy does not. I agree that to elaborate that would require a much larger argument but I still think that it is germane. You might be aware that Lloyd Gerson's most recent book Platonism and Naturalism: The Space for Philosophy, argues that the history of Western philosophy proper is essentially Platonist, and that Platonism and naturalism are essentially incompatible.

The last paragraph is a reference to Kant's idea of synthesis and synthetic a priori judgements. I think there's an important point here, which you've gone from objecting to, to seeing nothing significant about (although I'm hesitant to explain why I think it's important). But, thanks for the feedback, appreciated.

I should say that while debates about universals—mathematical or otherwise—are interesting, I don’t want to enter that fray given my time constraints. — Leontiskos

By the way, here's a relevant essay on scholastic realism and nominalism, WHAT’S WRONG WITH OCKHAM? Reassessing the Role of Nominalism in the Dissolution of the West, Joshua P. Hochschild.

Thomists and other critics of Ockham have tended to present traditional realism, with its forms or natures, as the solution to the modern problem of knowledge. It seems to me that it does not quite get to the heart of the matter. A genuine realist should see “forms” not merely as a solution to a distinctly modern problem of knowledge, but as part of an alternative conception of knowledge, a conception that is not so much desired and awaiting defense, as forgotten and so no longer desired. Characterized by forms, reality had an intrinsic intelligibility, not just in each of its parts but as a whole. With forms as causes, there are interconnections between different parts of an intelligible world, indeed there are overlapping matrices of intelligibility in the world, making possible an ascent from the more particular, posterior, and mundane to the more universal, primary, and noble.

In short, the appeal to forms or natures does not just help account for the possibility of trustworthy access to facts, it makes possible a notion of wisdom, traditionally conceived as an ordering grasp of reality. Preoccupied with overcoming Cartesian skepticism, it often seems as if philosophy’s highest aspiration is merely to secure some veridical cognitive events. Rarely sought is a more robust goal: an authoritative and life-altering wisdom.

If you don't want to try, then I'll conclude that you don't have such an argument. — Janus

Tell me, then, exactly where this goes wrong:

By 'existent' I refer to manifest or phenomenal existence. Broadly speaking, this refers to sensable objects (I prefer that spelling as it avoids the equivocation with the other meaning of 'sensible') - tables and chairs, stars and planets, oceans and continents. They're phenomenal in the sense of appearing to subjects as sensable objects or conglomerates.

I am differentiating this from what used to be called 'intelligible objects' - logical principles, numbers, conventions, qualifiers and so on. For example, if I were to say to you, 'show me the law of the excluded middle', you would have to explain it to me. It's not really an 'object' at all in the same sense as the proverbial chair or apple. You might point to a glossary entry, but that too comprises the explanation of a concept. The same with all kinds of arithmetical proofs and principles. Even natural laws - the laws of motion, for example. All of these can only be grasped by a rational intelligence. I could not demonstrate or explain them to a cow or a dog. They are what could be described as 'noumenal' in the general (not Kantian) sense, being 'objects of intellect' (nous) - only graspable by a rational mind.

As I said at the outset, in regular speech it is quite clear to say 'the number 7 exists'. But when you ask what it is, then you are not pointing to a sensable object - that is the symbol - but a rational act. (That's the sense in which I mean that 'counting is an act', but it doesn't mean that the demonstrations of rudimentary reasoning in higher animals amounts to reason per se.)

In Plato these levels or kinds of knowledge were distinguished per the Analogy of the Divided Line . Those distinctions are what have been forgotten, abandoned or lost in the intervening millenia due to the dominance of nominalism and empiricism. But In reality, thought itself, the rational mind, operates through a process of synthesis which blends and binds the phenomenal and noumenal into synthetic judgements (per Kant). — Wayfarer

What is it precisely you think I don't understand about your position? — Janus

The fact that you think all the sources I cite are mistaken, would be a major one.

I can tolerate disagreement, but not pointless arguments, of which this is one.

I've noticed that if anyone disagrees with you or questions your ideas you fall back on the claim that they don't understand. — Janus

I have provided references to many other sources, including, in this instance, Frege, Russell, Nagel, and Advaita Vendanta. I believe that I make a coherent philosophical case, but that you haven't demonstrated a grasp of what that is. I'm not saying that to 'anyone', I deal with every interaction on its merits, or lack thereof. I'm saying it to you.

That we strive in the first place, is where I like to start. The hope of redemption is the part that is speculation. — schopenhauer1

Yes I think I'd go along with that. I think Plato would recognise it as the initial stirrings of anamnesis.

Yes. There's also the passage which I've quoted to you and elsewhere on this forum:

In order to always have a secure compass in hand so as to find one's way in life, and to see life always in the correct light without going astray, nothing is more suitable than getting used to seeing the world as something like a penal colony. This view finds its...justification not only in my philosophy, but also in the wisdom of all times, namely, in Brahmanism, Buddhism, Empedocles, Pythagoras [...] Even in genuine and correctly understood Christianity, our existence is regarded as the result of a liability or a misstep. ... We will thus always keep our position in mind and regard every human, first and foremost, as a being that exists only on account of sinfulness, and who is life is an expiation of the offence committed through birth. Exactly this constitutes what Christianity calls the sinful nature of man. — Schopenhauer's Compass,Urs App

Notice from the SEP entry on Schopenhauer:

When the ascetic transcends human nature, the ascetic resolves the problem of evil: by removing the individuated and individuating human consciousness from the scene, the entire spatio-temporal situation within which daily violence occurs is removed.

In a way, then, the ascetic consciousness can be said symbolically to return Adam and Eve to Paradise, for it is the very quest for knowledge (i.e., the will to apply the principle of individuation to experience) that the ascetic overcomes. This amounts to a self-overcoming at the universal level, where not only physical desires are overcome, but where humanly-inherent epistemological dispositions are overcome as well.

So, important to register that while Schopenhauer recognises 'to live is to suffer', he also sees 'the end to suffering', albeit perhaps 'through a glass, darkly'.

Likewise for the perfect form of the turd or the pile of vomit — Janus

Unfortunately I don't have the rhetorical skills to fend of such exalted polemics. And, as always, you declare what you yourself don't understand as the limits to what anyone else might consider.

Wayfarer is talking about some supposed ontological role, the E, not quantification — Banno

I am interested in discussing ontology. By the way I checked in with ChatGPT about the relevance of quantifier variability, which produced some useful summaries and sources which can be reviewed here.

Kant's phenomenal/ noumenal distinction as I understand it is not between sense objects and abstracta, but between what we can know and what we cannot. — Janus

As I also noted somewhere in this thread, I am using the term slightly differently to Kant. Some points from the wiki article on noumenon:

The Greek word νοούμενoν, nooúmenon (plural νοούμενα, nooúmena) is the neuter middle-passive present participle of νοεῖν, noeîn, 'to think, to mean', which in turn originates from the word νοῦς, noûs, an Attic contracted form of νόος, nóos, 'perception, understanding, mind'. A rough equivalent in English would be "that which is thought", or "the object of an act of thought".

However, the article also notes that noumenon is customarily taken to denote 'an object that exists independently of human sense.' Elsewhere I quoted Russell saying that 'universals are not thoughts, but when known they appear as thoughts.' And this causes confusion, because we confuse them with 'the act of thinking' even though (and here's the clincher) they're independent of any particular act of thought. As Frege says (previously cited):

"in the same way", Frege says "that a pencil exists independently of grasping it. Thought contents (e.g. numerical value) are true and bear their relations to one another (and presumably to what they are about) independently of anyone's thinking these thought contents - "just as a planet, even before anyone saw it, was in interaction with other planets." — Frege on Knowing the Third Realm, Tyler Burge

So, here's the intriguing thing. Empirical objects *cannot* be truly 'mind-independent' because information about them is received by the senses, which is invariably interpreted by the mind (through apperception). But as far as universals and other abstract objects are concerned, the mind must conform to them. I think this is the sense in which empiricist naturalism gets it backwards when it come to the metaphysics of cognition (putting descartes before dehorse, as Hofstadter said.)

That same Wikipedia entry also observes in respect of noumenon:

Vedānta (specifically Advaita)... talks of the ātman (self) in similar terms as the noumenon.

and

Regarding the equivalent concepts in Plato, Ted Honderich writes: "Platonic Ideas and Forms are noumena, and phenomena are things displaying themselves to the senses... This dichotomy is the most characteristic feature of Plato's dualism; that noumena and the noumenal world are objects of the highest knowledge, truths, and values is Plato's principal legacy to philosophy."

What I'm trying to understand and articulate is along these lines - more Platonist than Cartesian, but also drawing on non-dualism.

//

Kant -- damn his eyes -- was right: we only understand of the world what we put into it.

We distinguish one bit from another, sort those bits and classify them, even paint them different colors to make it easier to keep track of them.

Mathematics is, first of all, our analysis of what we're doing when we do all that. More than that, it's a simplification and idealization of the process, to make it faster and more efficient.

It's all signal processing. The brain is not fundamentally interested in the world, but in the maintenance of the body it's responsible for, and the signals the brain deals with are about that body: they have an origin and and a type and a strength, and so on. Some of this is instrumented, so there's a reflective capacity to see how all these signals come together, and that's the beginning of mathematics. — Srap Tasmaner

I agree with you about Kant, but the later analysis is reductionist. I think it's a mistake to try and explain mathematics in terms of signal processing. Why? Because to explain it reductively requires that we are able to stand outside, apart from or above it - to treat it objectively. But, from Thomas Nagel's recent book (and in comments that are also germane to the overall subject):

In ...Engagement and Metaphysical dissatisfaction, Barry Stroud argues that the project (of metaphysics) cannot be carried out, because we are too immersed in the system of concepts that we hope to subject to metaphysical assessment. This "prevents us from finding enought distance between our conception of the world and the world it is meant to be a conception of to allow for an appropriately impartial metaphysical verdict on the relation between the two."

Stroud believes that we cannot succeed in reaching either a positive (often called realist), or a negative (anti-realist) metaphysical verdict about a number of basic conceptions – that we cannot show either that they succeed in describing the way the world is independent of our responses, or that they fail to do so. He argues for this claim in detail with respect to three of the most fundamental and philosophically contested concepts: causality, essentially, and value. The argument has a general and powerful form. Stroud contends that the use of the very concepts being assessed, and judgements of the very kind being questioned play an indispensable part in the metaphysical reasoning that is supposed to lead to our conclusions about these concepts and beliefs. — Analytical Philosophy and Human Life, Thomas Nagel, p 218

He's saying, in effect, that such constructs are 'too near for us to grasp'. And any account of signal processing, indeed neurological and evolutionary accounts of cognition, like all science, already assume the efficacy of numerical and logical analysis. We can't 'stand outside' those elements of our own cognition and observe how they arise from primitive constituents, as we must already be utilising these very elements to detemine what those constituents are.

(This is something well known to non-dualist philosophies mentioned above. There is a well-known and often-cited passage from the Upaniṣad, 'the eye can see another, but cannot see itself, the hand can grasp another but not itself' (source)).

This video review is also worth the time. Neuroscience, it seems, is coming to terms with the way in which the mind 'constructs reality'. Names mentioned in these discussions include Beau Lotto, Donald Hoffman, Anil Seth, Bernardo Kastrup, David Chalmers, and Christoff Koch among others. There's a plethora of video presentations and panel discussions about it on social media. There are, of course, a huge range of views about what it all means (you'll notice a rather panicked cameo from Richard Dawkins at the end lamenting the 'whispering campaign' against objectivity :yikes: )

That science can indeed give us an objective account of the world - an account of the world `as it is in itself’ -is possible only because, and not in spite, of our being already `given over’ to the world in our ordinary practice. — Joshs

Obviously a very meaty paper, I have found it and will peruse it later. My initial response is simply that I never deny the fact of objectivity or facts disclosed by the objective sciences (the kind of denial I describe as 'arguing with rocks' as an allusion to young-earth creationism.) But I insist that whatever facts are discovered, are discovered by someone, integrated with or challenging some existing theory, etc - that knowledge always has a subjective pole, and that accordingly objectivity is not absolute. But perhaps that discussion ought to be appended to the Mind Created World thread rather than this one.

What do you think of the claim that discrete entities only exist as a product of minds? That is, "physics shows us a world that is just a single continuous process, with no truly isolated systems, where everything interacts with everything else, and so discrete things like apples, cars, etc. would exist solely as 'products of the mind/social practices.'" — Count Timothy von Icarus

That it’s the kind of thing a Parmenides would say?

Are you not arguing for two kinds of reality—the reality of the body and the different reality of the mind? — Janus

Not two kinds but two levels, phenomenal and noumenal - and the role of the mind in synthesizing them to produce a unity.

:up: Alan Watts is well worth reading. He has had new generations of readers since his death.

There are simple algorithms for determining whether a number is prime; it's a mechanical process that doesn't require what you call "rational insight — Srap Tasmaner

Machines are artefacts, are they not?

I'd be interested in your take on this paper I often cite, Frege on Knowing the Third Realm, Tyler Burge - about Frege's implicit Platonism concerning number.

Frege accepted the traditional rationalist account of knowledge of the relevant primitive truths, truths of logic. This account, which he associated with the Euclidean tradition, maintained that basic truths of geometry and logic are self-evident. Frege says on several occasions that such primitive truths - as well as basic rules of inference and certain relevant definitions- are self-evident. He did not develop these remarks because he thought they admitted little development. The interesting problems for him were finding and understanding the primitive truths, and showing how they, together with infer- ence rules and definitions, could be used to derive the truths of arithmetic.

It's about the extent of my knowledge of Frege, but I've always found it an interesting paper.

You always argue from an unquestioned empiricism and can’t see how anything that challenges that can ‘make sense’ in your terms.

There are things you can't 'learn from experience'. All the math experts on this forum know things that I know I'll never understand, even if sat in the same room and looked at the same symbolic forms. They have an intellectual skill that I and others lack. Nothing to do with experience, although it can be shaped and augmented through experience. But the innate skill has to exist first. You'll never teach the concept of prime to a Caledonian crow ;-)

that you are saying there are two realities—the physical ("sensable") and the mental (abstract) which is basically dualism. — Janus

I would like to believe that this position is nearer to Kant’s transcendental idealism. There’s no way I posit anything like Descartes ‘res cogitans’ or the seperatness of mind and body.

fortunately Theodore Sider is trying to help us out . . . see his Writing the Book of the World. — J

A sample

I have asked him to explain what could be meant by saying that numbers are real — Janus

I presented the argument here https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/902998

which was somehow misconstrued as Cartesian dualism, although with an acknowledgment that I had at least distinguished real from existent.

:ok:


From an essay on the issue:

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 (i.e. number) 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?

Actually I think there’s a sensible answer to that question, which is that empiricism is tremendously effective at finding things out and getting things done. But ‘the nature of mathematical objects’ is not itself an empirical question. That’s the nub of the issue.

Can you state just why you think that incompatibility obtains? — Janus

That's not my claim. It is in the article that I referred to, The Indispensability Argument in the Philosophy of Mathematics. That article says that mathematical knowledge and rationalist philosophy is incompatible with 'our best epistemic theories' which as @Banno pointed out is a reference to naturalism. Make of that what you will.

As for the unfathomable subtlety of living organisms, I'm all for it. I think many things we describe as 'instinct' are impossible to fathom, but that's a completely separate issue.

There is a longstanding dispute over the univocity of being (and predication) between the Thomists and the Scotists beginning in the Medieval period. The Scotists held to univocity (and Heidegger's first dissertation was on this topic, on a text then believed to be Duns Scotus'). — Leontiskos

I've learned that the dissident theological movement, Radical Orthodoxy, sees Duns Scotus' univocity (in combination with Ockham's nominalism) as the source of the decline of modern culture.

Like Macbeth, Western man made an evil decision, which has become the efficient and final cause of other evil decisions. Have we forgotten our encounter with the witches on the heath? It occurred in the late fourteenth century, and what the witches said to the protagonist of this drama was that man could realize himself more fully if he would only abandon his belief in the reality of transcendentals. The powers of darkness were working subtly, as always, and they couched this proposition in the seemingly innocent form of an attack upon universals. The defeat of logical realism in the great medieval debate was the crucial event in the history of Western culture; from this flowed those acts which issue now in modern decadence. — Richard Weaver, Ideas have Consequences

Many thanks for your perspective.

The conjecture of 'Fine Tuning" raises the spectre of Intelligent Design — Gnomon

What I see is only that the causal sequence that gave rise to life and mind didn’t commence with the formation of earth, or the formation of stars. But the point I was making was simply that the very idea of a ‘vast univere’ in which we are a ‘mere blip’ is something that only rational sentient beings understand. Again the objective view relegates us to blip-hood in our own minds.

I've been reading The Huxleys, Alison Bashford. There are many ideas like this in their writings. I think I quoted Julian Huxley already in this thread, along the lines that in h. sapiens, evolution has become self-aware. His brother Alduous, with whom he had a life-long intellectual companionship, was the more spiritually-inclined of the two. Interestingly, the book shows that throughout the generations beginning with T.H.H. ('Darwin's Bulldog') they all pursued themes of the intersection of religion, philosophy and science. It also shows that T H H was scrupulously agnostic, as distinct from atheist, and that he disdained the Dawkin's style of scorched-earth scientific atheism.

Only in your misreading of them. A perceptive reader would notice a much closer resemblance to form-matter dualism which is quite a different thing to Decartes’.

//there’s nothing in the post you’re responding to which suggests mind-matter duality. The contrast, rather than the dualism, was between sensable and intelligible. But in reality, mind synthesises both elements in arriving at judgement.//

Nothing whatever to do with Cartesian dualism, which never made any such distinction.

//but thank you all the same//

Does life have any potential to be anything beyond suffering, or is that too much of a pessimistic stance? — Arnie

It is well known that the 'four noble truths' of Buddhism begin with the observation or axiom that life is suffering - the Buddhist term is 'dukkha' which is difficult to translate, but which is usually represented as suffering or sorrowful (the word actually comes from a badly-fitted axle hole). In a forum post such as this it would probably be unwise to try and spell out all the remaining 'noble truths' in detail, save that they say that suffering has a cause and so also a solution or ending, which is the purpose of the Buddhist eightfold path.

The value of a single human life? — Gingethinkerrr

You might be pleased to learn that the inestimable value of each human life was a foundational principle of the great philosopher Immanuel Kant. He argued that human beings possess intrinsic worth, which he calls "dignity," because of their capacity for rationality and autonomy. This dignity makes each person deserving of respect and moral consideration. Kant insists that we must never treat others merely as means to an end but always as ends in themselves. This means recognizing and valuing the inherent worth of every individual, thus ensuring that our actions support their ability to make autonomous decisions and pursue their own goals. This principle is intended to guide all human interactions and forms a foundational aspect of Kant's ethics, emphasizing duty and the universality of moral law.

And welcome to thephilosophyforum.

I've tried to have you fill this out explicitly. If what you say here were so we would have a neat case of quantification variance to work with - the difference between real and existent. But i do nto think you have been able to proved a coherent account. — Banno

Thanks for that, we have some agreement. Maybe to you the issue I'm commenting on 'goes without saying' but I think there's something that needs to be spelled out:

I don't agree with the premise of the argument - that naturalism is our "best" epistemic theory. — Banno

So you wouldn't endorse

Quine’s belief that we should defer all questions about what exists to natural science is really an expression of what he calls, and has come to be known as, naturalism

//

I will try and re-state what I see the difference between real and existent at a high level.

By 'existent' I refer to manifest or phenomenal existence. Broadly speaking, this refers to sensable objects (I prefer that spelling as it avoids the equivocation with the other meaning of 'sensible') - tables and chairs, stars and planets, oceans and continents. They're phenomenal in the sense of appearing to subjects as sensable objects or conglomerates.

I am differentiating this from what used to be called 'intelligible objects' - logical principles, numbers, conventions, qualifiers and so on. For example, if I were to say to you, 'show me the law of the excluded middle', you would have to explain it to me. It's not really an 'object' at all in the same sense as the proverbial chair or apple. You might point to a glossary entry, but that too comprises the explanation of a concept. The same with all kinds of arithmetical proofs and principles. Even natural laws - the laws of motion, for example. All of these can only be grasped by a rational intelligence. I could not demonstrate or explain them to a cow or a dog. They are what could be described as 'noumenal' in the general (not Kantian) sense, being 'objects of intellect' (nous) - only graspable by a rational mind. (Significant that the Collins Dictionary definition of ‘noumenal’ is ‘real’ as distinct from ‘phenomenal appearance’, echoing scholastic realism.)

As I said at the outset, in regular speech it is quite clear to say 'the number 7 exists'. But when you ask what it is, then you are not pointing to a sensable object - that is the symbol - but a rational act. (That's the sense in which I mean that 'counting is an act', but it doesn't mean that the demonstrations of rudimentary reasoning in higher animals amounts to reason per se.)

In Plato these levels or kinds of knowledge were distinguished per the Analogy of the Divided Line . Those distinctions are what have been forgotten, abandoned or lost in the intervening millenia due to the dominance of nominalism and empiricism. But In reality, thought itself, the rational mind, operates through a process of synthesis which blends and binds the phenomenal and noumenal into synthetic judgements (per Kant).

That is the back-story of why the need is felt for 'the indispensability argument for mathematics', and the difficulties of accomodating mathematical knowledge into the procrustean bed of empiricist naturalism.

I believe in evolution but the Theory Of Evolution is woefully incomplete. I don't believe mutations can create a person, the works of Shakespeare, a Mozart symphony... — EnPassant

It was never intended to, but it’s occupied the space left by the collapse of creation mythologies.

you want to deploy the indispensability argument, no? — Banno

I’m not arguing in favor of it. I’m asking why it’s even necessary. I’m questioning the claim that ‘according to our best epistemic theories, mathematical knowledge ought not to be possible.’ It obviously is possible, so what does that say about the shortcomings of ‘our best epistemic theories’?

I quoted the paragraph which says 'rationalists claim that we have a special, non-sensory capacity for understanding mathematical truths, a rational insight arising from pure thought. But, the rationalist’s claims appear incompatible with an understanding of human beings as physical creatures whose capacities for learning are exhausted by our physical bodies.' And I think the 'rational insight arising from pure thought' is, in fact, reason. But according to this article, this appears to contradict naturalism. So I'm saying, so much the worse for naturalism.

@Srap Tasmaner may recall the debate over the 'argument from reason'.

Here it is again, but as I'm yelling into a gale, I'll desist.