Could you elaborate a little on how you interpret 'by virtue of the absurd' in that quotation? Thanks.

I have written several posts on several forums in the last several months, and typically I got very few replies — Brendan Golledge

Well, this post is idiosyncratic, and contains a great many sweeping statements and value judgements. The use of the word 'thought' is not well-defined, save with reference to Schopenhauer (mispelled, by the way.) It's too long, and tries to cover too many topics - eight headings, and many different sub-threads. I'd suggest tightening your focus a bit, try to lead with one or two major points and then raise further points in the ensuing debate.

Have a look at the thread on how to write an OP.

I agree that posts about God generally get a lot of unjustified hostility, but there are worse forums than this in that respect. But nevertheless, point taken.

:up: Right, had missed that comment. Thank you.

Objects are what is unalterable and subsistent; their configuration is what is changing and unstable. (2.0271) — Fooloso4

I don't know if anyone has mentioned this, but the idea bears resemblance to the classical conception of substance (ouisia).

I do see some possible ways of addressing this, at least in their outline, primarily in Hegel and St. Aquinas. In Aquinas, there is the intuition that the things that are most truly discrete and self-determining are precisely those beings in whom a unity of phenomenal awareness emerges. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I'm reading a book I was alerted to in Vervaeke's online lectures, Thinking Being: Introduction to Metaphysics in the Classical Tradition, Eric D Perl. He traces the lineage of metaphysics from Parmenides to Aquinas - I'm up to the section on Aquinas 'existence and essence', which I'm finding rather difficult, but overall it's been a highly clarifying read. It really helped me understand the original intention of the Platonic forms.

Part of the implicit (but rarely stated) background to metaphysics is the 'unitive vision'. That is where the idea of 'the One' originates. In the chapter on Parmenides, we read:

(as) the poem is presented as the speech of the Goddess, this grasp of the whole is received as a gift, a revelation from the divine. The very first full-fledged metaphysician in the western tradition, then, experiences his understanding of being in religious terms, as an encounter with divinity. It is no surprise, therefore, that, according to the Goddess, the road Parmenides takes “is outside the tread of men” (B 1.27). Thus the Goddess draws a sharp distinction between “the untrembling heart of well-rounded truth” on the one hand, and “the opinions of mortals” on the other. The implication is that truth, as distinct from mere human seeming, is divine.

I think it's highly likely that modern culture, with its rejection of religious revelation, is grounded wholly in 'human seeming', hence its intractable metaphysical conundrums (although perhaps books like The One at least grapple with it.)

Natural numbers, essences, universals, the sorts of stabilities that can form in the world, these seems to exist, or at least subsist, in a sort of eternal frame. — Count Timothy von Icarus

:clap: Russell mentions in his useful chapter on universals, using that very term:

Consider such a proposition as 'Edinburgh is north of London'. Here we have a relation between two places, and it seems plain that the relation subsists (!) independently of our knowledge of it. When we come to know that Edinburgh is north of London, we come to know something which has to do only with Edinburgh and London: we do not cause the truth of the proposition by coming to know it, on the contrary we merely apprehend a fact which was there before we knew it. The part of the earth's surface where Edinburgh stands would be north of the part where London stands, even if there were no human being to know about north and south, and even if there were no minds at all in the universe. This is, of course, denied by many philosophers, either for Berkeley's reasons or for Kant's. But we have already considered these reasons, and decided that they are inadequate. We may therefore now assume it to be true that nothing mental is presupposed in the fact that Edinburgh is north of London. But this fact involves the relation 'north of', which is a universal; and it would be impossible for the whole fact to involve nothing mental if the relation 'north of', which is a constituent part of the fact, did involve anything mental. Hence we must admit that the relation, like the terms it relates, is not dependent upon thought, but belongs to the independent world which thought apprehends but does not create.

This conclusion, however, is met by the difficulty that the relation 'north of' does not seem to exist in the same sense in which Edinburgh and London exist. If we ask 'Where and when does this relation exist?' the answer must be 'Nowhere and nowhen'. There is no place or time where we can find the relation 'north of'. It does not exist in Edinburgh any more than in London, for it relates the two and is neutral as between them. Nor can we say that it exists at any particular time. Now everything that can be apprehended by the senses or by introspection exists at some particular time. Hence the relation 'north of' is radically different from such things. It is neither in space nor in time, neither material nor mental; yet it is something.

The way I parse it is that universals are real but not existent qua phenomena. I think, arguably, they provide the real meaning of 'noumenal objects' but, of course, in a very different way than Kant uses the term 'noumena', so it's a can of worms.

living and breathing IS a meditation. — Astrophel

'blessed are the pure of heart'

Abstract concepts like being, self, and consciousness are expressed using language, and most of the time, their terms don't have a unified meaning. — Abhiram

Something that could also be considered is the notion of 'communities of discourse' which were the context for almost all pre-modern philosophy. For instance the ancient Greek literature, which developed in a culture of shared meanings and a common cultural background. Likewise for Sanskrit in ancient India, and China in Chinese culture. Within those cultures, there was a shared underestanding, within which these kinds of very broad terms had meaning, and which referred back to many centuries of consensus.

It's a complete contrast with the modern world, which is multi-cultural and polyglot and which furthermore is always changing at an unprecedented rate. So, many diverse (not to mention conflicting) communities of discourse now rub up against each other every day. That's where a great deal of space for misunderstanding might lurk. What a scholar, with a Hindu background, might understand by 'mind' might have overtones very different from an American, coming from a different cultural heritage. That's certainly a factor.

But I don't know if a new language is needed, nor could it be practical to devise one. It's more a matter of cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary dialogue and discussion, whereby meanings and intentions can be gradually worked out. And this is actually happening. Anyone who spends time on YouTube nowadays, as I have come to do, will find there is an extraordinary amount of philosophical dialogue and cross-cultural, cross-disciplinary dialogue going on. English - well, it's the only language I speak and understand, and is the global lingua franca - but I don't know if inventing a new one would work. That, I think, was the noble, but not particularly successul, idea behind Esperanto, although if you wanted to launch a philosophy journal in Esperanto, you should probably borrow my avatar ;-)

:lol:

Besides 'Concept', Frege uses the word 'object' in a stipulative way as well — 013zen

Something more like 'an object of thought', or 'an intentional object'?

I wonder how common belief in the primacy of particles still is? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Maybe the belief in the primacy of particles, as such, has waned, but in some ways the assertion of the primacy of scientific method still evokes it. Recall that the original impetus behind atomism was to reconcile the relation of 'the One and the Many'. Atomism provided a way to do this, by attributing to the atom the attributes of the One - imperishability and changelessness. So while the atoms were changeless in themselves, by being combined in multifarious ways (and by their unpredictable 'swerving' which provides an element of spontaneity), they could be said to account for the Many. (I did an undergraduate essay on Lucretius, as part of a Philosophy of Matter unit.) In any case, I see the appeal of 'the atom' as being that of a kind of 'ultimate object', the indivisible core of material reality. Quarks are sometimes still referred to in that sense, although nowadays fields are usually assigned primacy, and their nature is considerably more elusive.

Knowledge of how things are "in themselves," as they "relate to nothing else," is not only unattainable, but useless, telling us nothing about the world. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Maybe the world is too much with us. Of those passages you link too - and boy, they're pretty dense! - I find the Thomist example most of interest.

The logical positivist doctrine that "objectivity approaches truth at the limit," ends up in the absurdity that things "really look the way they would be seen without eyes" — that the world "is the way it would be conceived of without a mind." — Count Timothy von Icarus

Agree. Also very much the point of my Mind Created World OP. Logical positivism is scientism par excellence.

And finally, I personally think there's an alternative term for what the paper calls 'lived experience', which helps to orientate the discussion more clearly in the context of the philosophical tradition. I wonder if there are any guesses as to what this word might be?
— Wayfarer

"Lived experience" sounds like a historical topic due to the word "Lived". What about "Having been lived"? — Corvus

The word I was thinking of was 'being'. Likewise, in David Chalmer's important paper, Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness, his rather awkward terminology of 'what it is like to be' could also be interpreted as a reference to being. It is a word which we use in almost every sentence, but it has many layers of meaning, and is especially relevant in relation to this topic.

Pick up any scientific piece of writing, and insofar it makes claims in the form of "we humans", as if the generalizations the writer makes apply to all people. — baker

Well, I can see what you're getting at there, but I can't go along with:

Science is based on someone's particular, ideologically driven idea of human experience (or how it should be). — baker

Let's step back a bit. Classical (Newtonian) physics, which, along with several other elements, provided the paradigm for modern science, operates context-free. The results of its predictions and calculations are indeed the same for anyone who performs the same experiments or makes the same observations. That is the sense in which they are universal - they apply anywhere, for any observer.

The problem of 'scientism' arises from trying to generalise that methodology to the whole of existence - to absolutize it, in other words. And in fact the limitations of this already became clear in what we could call the post-modern science that was initiated by quantum mechanics, in the form of the 'observer problem in physics'. Without wading into the troubled waters of interpretations of physics, at the very minimum, it became obvious that context was a factor in determining the experimental outcome, 'context' being the experimental set-up that produces an observation. From one point of view, it's a wave, and from another, it's a particle. There is nothing like that in classical physics (which is why in mid-20th century there was a fair amount of popular science literature on 'the new physics' by writers like Paul Davies.)

Add to this the emergence of phenomenology, which sought to return philosophy to the awareness of lived experience, rather than understanding it in terms of mathematically-precise objective measurement, and you several of the major ingredients for The Blind Spot. But the authors of that article stress that they're not anti-science. They acknowledge right up front that science is effective, that it delivers better ways of understanding things and getting things done:

some models and methods of investigation work much better than others, and we can test this. But these tests never give us nature as it is in itself, outside our ways of seeing and acting on things. Experience is just as fundamental to scientific knowledge as the physical reality it reveals.

What they're critiquing is science as an ideology, preached by public intellectuals like Dennett and Dawkins, who make 'scientific thinking' and 'the scientific method' a kind of quasi- or pseudo religion:

Objectivism and physicalism are philosophical ideas, not scientific ones – even if some scientists espouse them. They don’t logically follow from what science tells us about the physical world, or from the scientific method itself.

So, if that's what you're saying is 'ideologically-driven', then I agree, but I don't agree it is characteristic of science as such.

It seems like a lot of the Buddhism that makes it to the West comes from monastics, not necessarily reflecting the laity. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Most Asian Buddhists Don’t Meditate, Lewis Richmond.

One Zen monk from Japan who was visiting a Zen retreat center in America observed the enthusiasm and numbers of meditators with astonishment. "How do you get them to meditate without beating them?"

The Japanese Buddhists I most recently had contact with were Pure Land Buddhists who sermonised against any effort to meditate as being ‘own-effort’, and incapable of producing merit.

I go to a Cicstercian monestary near my house — Count Timothy von Icarus

You’d be one of very few with a Cistercian monastery near your house.

Where I’ve moved now, there is a Buddhist vihara, led by a friendly Sri Lankan expat, who has regular meditation sessions, but I’ve fallen out of the practice, at my age I can no longer assume the customary cross-legged posture that I persisted with for many years. I’m trying to find a way back into some kind of community of practice, but it’s not easy.

The rational response of anyone who is horrified by homelessness is to ensure that sufficient help is provided to prevent it occurring and sort it out when it does. — Ludwig V

And the conservative American response to that is that it’s communism.

You can see how the above was seized upon by the Vienna Circle as grounds for their verificationism, even if Wittgenstein himself disowned them.

it could be said that things were potentially intelligible even prior to the advent of intelligent beings. — Janus

I suppose. I was trying to articulate the idea that images only are intelligible, because they're made by artists and interpreted by subjects. They're not inherently intelligible in the way that beings themselves are, as they don't possess the attribute of intrinsic self-organisation, as do living things. Of course they're simulcra rather than beings per se and so can an evoke ideas of beings, but here we're discussing the distinction between simulation and reality.

Now consider Robert Nozick's "Experience Machine" thought experiment. A person placed in the machine enters a realistic simulation. The machine is precisely calibrated so that the circumstances of the person's simulated life are such that it will maximize their happiness. — Count Timothy von Icarus

There's a report in The Guardian about the deleterious effects of social media ( which can be considered in some degree as 'experience machines').

Dr Vivek Murthy (America’s Surgeon General) went to places including Duke, University of Texas and Arizona State, but so many youngsters were plugged into earphones and gazing into laptops and phones that it was incredibly quiet in the communal areas. Where was the loud chatter Murthy remembered from his college days? ….

Figures published on Wednesday reveal one possible impact of that screen obsession: for the first time since the data was first collected in 2012, 15- to 24-year-olds in North America say they are less happy than older generations. The gap is closing in western European nations and in March Murthy flew to London to further his campaign against falling levels of happiness, particularly among the young. He is also worried about youth wellbeing in Japan, South Korea and India.

The replacement of person-to-person social connection, whether through clubs, sports teams, volunteering or faith groups, is a particular concern to the Yorkshire-born medic. ….

Murthy said that between 2000 and 2020 there has been a 70% decrease in the amount of in-person time young people in the US spent with their friends. Meanwhile, “our recent data is telling us that adolescents are spending on average 4.8 hours a day on social media … a third of adolescents are staying up till midnight or later on weeknights on their devices”. — The Guardian

I was working as a consultant at Apple in the early 90's during the halcyon years of multimedia. Apple had a big investment in educational technology and I attended many conferences with enthusiastic presenters (who were often teachers) extolling the limitless possibilities of educational media. Now, and aside from all of the social isolation issues noted above, there also seems to be a very strong correlation between the advent of smartphones and declining literacy and numeracy and also student's capacity to pay attention (ref).

The point of these examples being that the Utopian dreams of 'simulated reality' may not work out as we would like to imagine.

Well, the intelligibility of things seems to be accessible through images of them. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Only because beings such as yourself are able to interpret them. Insofar as they're rendered by an artist, and interpreted by subjects, they are imbued with meaning - their intelligibility is extrinsic to them.

I even accepted it since it was a reasonable statement in the absence of modern physics. — noAxioms

At risk of opening a can of worms, how does 'modern physics' come into it?

As for it being indubitable, well, I dubit it, as I do everything — noAxioms

If you dubit it, you must exist, in order to dubit it. If you don't exist, then your opponent has no argument to defend.

Persistence of self-identity over time is not discussed in Descartes, but I don't believe it has much bearing on the argument. Again, any statement along the lines of 'I (the speaker) do not exist' is self-contradicting.

all said states are states of the same thing — noAxioms

Beings are not objects or things (except for from the perspective of other beings - I see you as 'an object', in a way, although to treat you as an object would be, at the very least, discourteous). The nature of the identity of a being is quite a different matter to the nature of the identity of a thing.

In fact, this is where I criticize Descartes - he designates the subject as 'res cogitans', which is translated as 'thinking thing'. And I think there's a deep, implicit contradiction in that designation, as it obfuscates a real distinction between 'things' (as objects) and 'beings' (as subjects of experience.)

(In Crisis of the European Sciences, Husserl concurs that describing the subject (res cogitans) as a "thing" does not do justice to the nature of the subject of experience. His phenomenological method emphasizes the intentionality of consciousness—consciousness is always consciousness of something—and the embodied and situated character of human existence. This perspective seeks to bridge the gap between the subject as a mere "thing" and the subject as an experiencing, intentional "being." Descartes' formulation overlooks the role of consciousness and the subjective, experiential dimension of being in constituting the world of objects (and hence reality) as it is experienced by living beings. Descartes, in removing that situated and intentional nature of the subject, and seeking certainty in mathematical abstractions, in fact gave rise to the worldview which makes the 'brain-in-a-vat' scenario conceivable in the first place - as the IEP article indicates.)

Descartes starts with all this skepticism, and builds up from this simple state that, lacking any knowledge of modern physics, leaves him with something he decides can be known with certainty. I'm fine with that, and I'm admittedly not very familiar with his work, but he goes from there to conclude, surprise, surprise, the exact mythological teachings of his own culture and not any of the other thousand choices of other cultures. That's a great example of rationalization. — noAxioms

The logic of cogito ergo sum is neither rationalisation nor myth, it is the indubitable fact that, in order to be subject to an illusion, there must be a subject. And this whole line of argument was anticipated by Augustine centuries prior:

But who will doubt that he lives, remembers, understands, wills, thinks, knows, and judges? For even if he doubts, he lives. If he doubts where his doubs come from, he remembers. If he doubts, he understands that he doubts. If he doubts, he wants to be certain. If he doubts, he thinks. If he doubts, he knows that he does not know. If he doubts, he judges that he ougth not rashly to give assent. So whoever acquires a doubt from any source ought not to doubt any of these things whose non-existence would mean that he could not entertain doubt about anything." (Augustine, On the Trinity 10.10.14 quoted in Richard Sorabji, Self, 2006, p.219).

I have my doubts about Descartes, in that I believe his dualistic separation of the physical and mental as separate substances is profoundly problematical and has had hugely deleterious consequences for Western culture, but as for the essential veracity of his ‘cogito’ argument, I have no doubts.

real pain and not zombie pain — Ludwig V

I had the idea that zombies don’t feel pain, at least they never do in zombie flicks. You have to literally dismember or disintegrate them to overcome them, merely inflicting blows or wounds does nothing.

I listened to a dialogue today between John Vervaeke and Jules Evans about exactly this point, with reference to Pierre Hadot’s ‘Philosophy as a Way of Life’. Vervaeke said that book ‘changed his life’ because previously he had been looking to Buddhist and Taoist practices. He said Pierre Hadot helped him see there really is a ‘wisdom tradition’ in philosophy proper.

Actually, you're right, I have no interest in pursuing the argument further. However if it helps, there's an encyclopedia entry on the 'brain in a vat' thought experiment here.

Don't hold any beliefs that are beyond questioning — noAxioms

Per Descartes, I hold that the fact of one's own existence, that one is a subject of experience, is apodictic, it cannot plausibly denied. That is not a belief.

Would a simulation of agonising pain be actually painful? If it was, it can't really be a simulation, but as the primary attribute of pain is the feeling of pain, there's nothing else to simulate.

But the question asked is how we might know (and not just suspect) that we are not the product of a simulation. — noAxioms

So, you don't think there's any criterion by which we can discern the difference between simulation and reality. You admit the possibility that you're not actually a real being. Is that what you're saying?

you don't really know what a simulation does. — noAxioms

I think it's pretty clear. This is the definition:

Simulation: imitation of a situation or process.
"simulation of blood flowing through arteries and veins"
the action of pretending; deception.
"clever simulation that's good enough to trick you"
the production of a computer model of something, especially for the purpose of study.
"the method was tested by computer simulation"

I've read quite bit of Kastrup. I definitely don't think he's any kind of cult figure, that is just ad hominem, but you expect that kind of hostility because he questions the mainstream consensus. Overall I think he's an effective and articulate advocate for idealism.

It would be a piss-poor kidney simulation (pun very intended) if it didn't. — noAxioms

I’m sure simulations of kidney functions, like other organic functions, may be extremely useful for medical research and pharmacology, without literally producing urine. I’m sure you could model the effects of cardiac arrest without actually having a heart attack. They don’t need to do that to be effective as simulations. That’s the point - simulations may be useful and accurate, but they’re still simulations, not real things.

Kastrup has nothing good to say about Harris on his blog.

It's a graphic way of making a sound point.

Bernardo Kastrup says you can get a computer to run an exquisitely-detailed simulation of kidney function, but you wouldn't expect it to urinate.

Aren't beings simulations themselves? — Lionino

No, on Cartesian grounds - even if everything I experience is illusory, there can be no doubt that I experience it. A simulation is rather like an illusion, but both simulations and illusions occur to an observing mind. The mind itself is not part of the simulation, but what the simulation appears to.

Yes, but there is also the idea that understanding requires training the mind - or maybe even reconstructing it. (I mean, by meditation, of course). — Ludwig V

:100: That was known, at one point in history, as 'metanoia', although that is now usually translated simply as 'repentance', thereby blurring the distinction between insight and belief. Originally it meant 'mental transformation' or something like a cognitive shift.

An online edition of the text with side-by-side translations can be found here.

:clap: Thanks for those, happy to have someone here that recognises the issue. I find the details very difficult due to my lack of background in formal logic and mathematics. But I'm familiar with the SEP articles and have refered to Platonism in mathematics article.

Mathematical platonism has considerable philosophical significance. If the view is true, it will put great pressure on the physicalist idea that reality is exhausted by the physical. For platonism entails that reality extends far beyond the physical world and includes objects that aren’t part of the causal and spatiotemporal order studied by the physical sciences. Mathematical platonism, if true, will also put great pressure on many naturalistic theories of knowledge.

--

As the epiphany comes to the mathematician or the scientist, it seems to come from nowhere, the discursivity of thought in the underpinnings of realization unnoticed. — Astrophel

:100: Great post! One of my early favourite books of popular philosophy was Arthur Koestler 'The Sleepwalkers' which contains many accounts these kinds of serendipitous discoveries in the history of science.

consider Robert Nozick's "Experience Machine" thought experiment. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Isn't the problem with that is that it is entirely artificial? And does a simulcrum of 'true happiness' or 'true virtue' possess either happiness or virtue? Isn't a convincing fake still fake?

And if the real things of interest are Forms, it's not immediately clear why being in a simulation should hurt our ability to discover truth. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Because forms are attributes of beings, not of simulations.

//your subject will be, as a matter of definition, 'a dweller in the cave'.//

I will say, apropos of the thread title, something that is becoming clear to me is the consequence of the rejection of the idea of there being final causes. As I understand it, this was one of the casualties of Galileo's science - as it should have been, in the case of physics, with the obsolete notions of bodies having their 'natural places'. But there's another sense of final causality, the end to which things are directed, and that applies to biology in a way that it does not for physics.

//probably another thread//

Well I guess the answer to that is 'read the book'. It's a follow on from Braver's A Thing of this World, which @Joshs has recommended, but I'm struggling to get around to it, being in a perpetual backlog of things I ought to read.

Oh, and as to how to delimit 'the transcendent' - very good question, I would say. 'Ethics are transcendental' does appear at the very end of TLP, in fact that and the sorrounding aphorisms are about the only ones which appeal to me.

Are we talking about truths, or a method that is self-confirming by its very nature as method? — Joshs

What drew me to the question, was 'what is the nature of number?' Without going into all the background, the idea that struck me was that numbers are real, in that they're the same for anyone who can count, but they're not material in nature. They exist in a different way than do objects, they're only perceptible to an intelligence capable of counting. And mathematics is also fundamental to the success of modern science. But it turns out to be a contentious debate. Naturalists generally disparage the 'romance of maths'. Another article I have on my links list is about the 'Indispensability Argument' for mathematics.

Mathematical objects are in many ways unlike ordinary physical objects such as trees and cars. We learn about ordinary objects, at least in part, by using our senses. It is not obvious that we learn about mathematical objects this way. Indeed, it is difficult to see how we could use our senses to learn about mathematical objects. We do not see integers, or hold sets.....

....Mathematical objects are not the kinds of things that we can see or touch, or smell, taste or hear. If we can not learn about mathematical objects by using our senses, a serious worry arises about how we can justify our mathematical beliefs.

For some reason, this strikes me as faintly comical. But it also says something about the stranglehold of empiricism on philosophy.

To me, this all ties into realism about universals, questions about the nature of reason, the Greek and medieval philosophy of the rational soul, and questions about the nature of meaning, and how it is grasped. They are themes I like to explore.

Incidentally, looking around for more info on Lee Braver, I found his book Groundless Grounds, from the abstract of which:

Ludwig Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger are two of the most important—and two of the most difficult—philosophers of the twentieth century, indelibly influencing the course of continental and analytic philosophy, respectively. In Groundless Grounds, Lee Braver argues that the views of both thinkers emerge from a fundamental attempt to create a philosophy that has dispensed with everything transcendent so that we may be satisfied with the human.

As you might guess, given the content of my posts, I tend to recoil from the very idea.

As you can see, I am no expert. — Astrophel

Maybe, but your posts are quite interesting, and, like mine, eclectic.

Consider that non dualism only makes sense when played off of dualism — Astrophel

It takes some doing to get a feel for non-dualism. I first discovered Advaita (Hindu) before delving into Buddhism. I will say that non-dualism is a very subtle idea - once you get a grasp of it, elements of it can be found in the Western philosophical tradition, but the origins are very different. It's very much tied to meditative awareness as a different mode of being.

There is a strange threshold one gets to reading phenomenology, where the "nothing" get a lot of attention. — Astrophel

That's where there is some convergence with the Buddhist principle of emptiness, śūnyatā. Very deep topic, but I will say that 'no-thing' is not quite the same as mere absence or lack. In any case, there are scholars who work on the crossover between phenomenology and Buddhist philosophy. It was a theme in The Embodied Mind, Varela, Thompson, et al.

There have been quite a few essays written on convergences between Heidegger and Zen Buddhism although I don't know of any to recommend.

Heidegger's dialogue with a Buddhist monk is here.

If the concept of number emerged at some point in cultural history , was this a necessary or contingent event. — Joshs

Well, the qualifications of necessary/contingent generally apply to facts, don't they, rather than events? And the discovery of arithmetic, mathematics and geometry was not a single event, it occured over thousands of years, and is still on-going. But the basic point is, I take it, that basic arithmetical principles are true in all possible worlds, as the saying has it.

(One of the posts I often point to is What is Math? Smithsonian Institute Magazine. It explores the ideas I find interesting about this question, in particular the pro's and cons of mathematical platonism. The representative Platonist is one James Robert Brown, an emeritus professor, who's book I subsequently sought out. But alas, many of the arguments are really too difficult to understand for someone without a background in maths. But there's one gem of a quote in that essay, which I think unintentionally exposes the source of much current hostility towards platonist ideas: '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?")

Please notice that further research revealed that this was not true. I'll put a note on the OP.

I think Buddhists, Hindus (not everyday Hindus praying to Ganesh) are the most advanced people in the world. — Astrophel

I believe the important philosophical perspective they bring is that of non-dualism. The modern world, cosmopolitan as it is, is then able to consider these perspectives through dialogue with its representatives. (Heidegger seemed aware of this, there's a televised discussion between him and a Buddhist monk on the Internet, and quite a bit of literature on Heidegger and Eastern thought.) I'm also aware of the well-grounded criticisms of Buddhist modernism but nevertheless the Eastern tradition can help cast light on many deep philosophical conundrums of the West.

(Also I will acknowledge that whereas your approach seems defined in terms of the curriculum of philosophy, mine has been eclectic, as I encountered philosophy in pursuit of the idea of spiritual enlightenment. Consequently I am not as well-read in the later 20th C continental philosophers as others here, including yourself, although I'm always open to learn.)

Without language, where is the "I" of an experience, mundane, profound or otherwise? — Astrophel

Well, sure! But teasing out the implications of that, actually treating it as a discussion in analytic philosophy, may also cast some light. There is that which is beyond words, ineffable, 'of which we cannot speak', but we can nevertheless can try and develop a feeling for what it is, and where the boundary lies (rather than just 'shuddup already'.)

nature only becomes exact, only becomes number, when we turn our attention away from what we actually experience in order to count. — Joshs

Sure. My contention about number is a simple one: they are real as constituents of reason but not materially existent, and I think that says something important.

They placed some dogmas outside the realm of reason, and in doing so ruined reason and faith. — Count Timothy von Icarus

In Theological Origins of Modernity, Gillespie places the origin of this tendency with the Franscisan order who insisted that God was was not bound by reason, an attitude was anathema to the Scholastics, who tended to see in the workings of reason a mirror of the divine intellect. He says this tendency makes God capricious and wholly unpredictable and unknowable and that this 'theological voluntarism' is also characteristic of Islam.

I was particularly exercised by what appeared to be Heidegger's nostalgia for scholastic philosophy and by doubts about how far it is reasonable to apply modern philosophical ideas to what are much more like religious texts rather than what we would think of as philosophy. — Ludwig V

Something I'm often grappling with due to my preoccupation with ideas arising from spiritual traditions. I think there is something of an implicit barrier in modern philosophy against ideas and indeed ways of thought that are deemed too close to being religious, and that also is a barrier against a considerable amount of pre-modern philosophy in the West.

This excerpt for me comes off as strangely confusing. — Lionino

May well be! After opening the thread, based on the quote in the OP, I then went searching for further sources, confirmations and disconfirmations, and that is one that I found. The broader point, of the frequency of inhumane treatment of animals by scientists, I'm sure remains intact.

Animals are machines.
Humans are animals.
Therefore, humans are machines. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I think the problematic legacy of Descartes is the depiction of res cogitans as a 'thinking substance', which is an oxymoronic conception. By objectifying the mind, he renders it susceptible to the image of 'the ghost in the machine' which, of course, was a popular criticism. Descartes' dualism in some ways like an economic model or an allegory which has tended to be misinterpreted as an actual hypothesis, leading to the absurd notion of 'thinking things'. Deeply problematical idea in my view, and has become one of the deep foundational problems of modern culture.

Agree with your analysis. Note: I too had corrected the record in this thread by doing some further reading culminating in a post a page or so back:

A little further reading reveals the suggestion that the previously-mentioned acts of 'hammering dogs to boards' was actually carried out not by Descartes but by pupils at a college influenced by Cartesian ideas. However the same source also notes that Descartes was interested in vivisection and anatomical examination of animals alive and dead. Another source says that the report about maltreatment of dogs was written long after the events and may not be trustworthy.

It seems to me that on further reading, the story about Descartes appalling treatment of dogs is apocryphal at best, but that he certainly was interested in vivisection, not least because of his theory that the mind and the body interacted via the pituitary gland.

But, as far as the story that opened this thread is concerned, unless someone has better information, I'm somewhat relieved to report that it probably is not true. — Wayfarer

And also the blog entry reproduced in this post.

Truth is made, not discovered. — Astrophel

Can’t let that go by. I’ll refer back to that quote I mentioned the other day

Frege believed that number is real in the sense that it is quite independent of thought: 'thought content exists independently of thinking "in the same way", he says "that a pencil exists independently of grasping it.” — Frege on Knowing the Third Realm,Tyler Burge

I see no reason to doubt it. The basic facts of arithmetic and logic are not made up but discerned. I think confusion arises from treating objects as mind-independent, when all our judgements about objects are contingent on sense-experience. But then, metaphysics proper never understood objects as being mind-independent in that sense. Yes, we construct the object from experience, but there are real objects, or at least objects which are the same for all observers - ideas, in other words. And as for basic arithmetical facts, they are not objects at all, but the operations of mind, and also invariant from one mind to another. Whereas it seems to me that you have adopted an attitude of unmitigated relativism.

In respect of intelligibility, what it meant in pre-modern philosophy was precisely the identity of thought and being. I’ve started to understand this through a text I’ve gotten hold of, the title of which says exactly that, Thinking Being, Eric Perl. I had previously been familiar with the Platonist expression ‘to be, is to be intelligible’, but couldn’t understand what it meant. This book has helped with that.

In any case, I don’t agree, truth is not made, or simply made. Truth includes and so transcends both object and subject. I’m totally on board with Kant’s Copernican Revolution in philosophy, but I also don’t believe it implies that kind of relativism.

Never let the truth get in the way of a good story, eh? And, on that note.....