Phenomena are objective, but Noumena are subjective. — Gnomon

Disagree. Going back to the pre-Kantian idea of noumena as ‘object of mind’, the noumenal might be understood as something nearer the original meaning of the idea, form or principle (bearing in mind that ‘form* *is nothing like* ‘shape’ :brow: ) The way that I interpret it (me, not Kant!) is in terms of principles that can only be grasped rationally, but which are independent of your or my particular mind. There’s a dialogue between Einstein and Tagore, in which Einstein insists that the Pythagorean theorem is true independently of what anyone thinks about it. Which I agree with, but I think the overlooked point is that it can only be grasped by a rational intelligence. So it’s mind-independent in the sense of being independent of your mind or mine, but mind-dependent in that it can only be grasped by a mind. That I take as the basis of objective idealism. That’s why such principles are taken as subjective, or ‘in the mind’ - but they’re not in any individual mind. Bertrand Russell describes it exactly: ‘they are not thoughts, but when they are known they are objects of thought’.

This says to me that the division between "sense perception," and "language," is overblown — Count Timothy von Icarus

Don’t know about that. Many animals have far superior sensory perception to h. sapiens but lack speech. It’s a separate faculty, though obviously deeply intertwined. (By the way, have you encountered anything by Andrew Brook, who contends that Kant was the main precursor to cognitive science? A contestable claim, but seriously considered, several articles on Kant in the SEP were authored by him e.g. this.)

I still think that the distinction between what can be grasped through reason, as distinct from through sensory experience (that is, the a priori/a posteriori distinction) is valid, notwithstanding the 20th c effort to derail it as part of the effort of ‘naturalising reason’. As has been observed elsewhere, we’re in the cultural predicament where reason itself is treated with suspicion due to the cultural impact of empiricism.

because the critical turn in thought has shown us that the only justifications we can find for propositional claims are either empirical or logical. — Janus

That is precisely the import of A J Ayer’s ‘Language, Truth and Logic’, the seminal text of logical positivism. It too is one of the expressions of the predicament of modern culture and society.

This leads to the criticism that Kant's analysis cuts us off from the world, entrapping us in our own subjectively-modulated reality.
— Quixodian

Do you consider that a legitimate criticism? — Mww

Still considering it. It was a remark made in an online lecture I was listening to, but in the context it seemed a bit of a lightbulb moment to me.

Those are the kinds of metaphysical possibilities we can imagine, but we have no way to test them, or even to know if they have any relevance at all to the actual nature of what is happening. We don't know anything at all, metaphysically speaking, it seems. — Janus

I think you’re expressing the predicament of modern culture. That’s exactly what it seems, and the modern philosophers, including Kant, are who made it that way.

Are you saying that the difficulty in picturing a chiiliagon is the same as that for picturing noumena? — T Clark

It’s given as an example of a concept that is easy to grasp in principle, but is almost impossible to form or recognise an image of. In its context it was provided to illustrate the difference between concepts and mental images. But it also serves to illustrate the idea of ‘an object of mind’ i.e. you can understand it rationally even despite the difficulty of grasping its phenomenal depiction.

Remember the original distinction in question was between ‘phenomenal’ (what appears) and noumenal (what is discerned by reason, therefore what ‘truly is’.) As noted Kant altered the meaning of ‘noumena’ in line with his philosophical requirements.

pretty much :meh:

From a current Washington Post OP on the hearings:

"The panel’s national security subcommittee brought in, as its star witness, one David Grusch, a former Defense Department intelligence official who now claims:

• That there are “quite a number” of “nonhuman” space vehicles in the possession of the U.S. government.
• That one “partially intact vehicle” was retrieved from Italian dictator Benito Mussolini in 1933 by the United States, acting on a tip from Pope Pius XII.
• That the aliens have engaged in “malevolent activity” and “malevolent events” on Earth that have harmed or killed humans.
• That the U.S. government is also in possession of “dead pilots” from the spaceships.
• That a private defense contractor is storing one of the alien ships, which have been as large as a football field.
• That the vehicles might be coming “from a higher dimensional physical space that might be co-located right here.”
• That the Roswell, N.M., alien landing was real, and the Air Force’s debunking of it was a “total hack job.”
• And that the United States has engaged in a nearly century-long “sophisticated disinformation campaign” (apparently including murders to silence people) to hide the truth.

Alas, Grusch has no documents, photos or other evidence to corroborate any of his fantastic claims. It’s classified, you see. ...

Some of the House’s leading conspiracy theorists — Republicans Matt Gaetz, Paul Gosar, Virginia Foxx, James Comer — took seats on the dais... Many in the audience, who lined up for a seat in the room, applauded the beaming witnesses when they entered. And for more than two hours, Republicans on the subcommittee indulged in otherworldly accusations of a government coverup.

Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) proposed that the government is trying “to gaslight Americans into thinking that this is not happening.” Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) accused the government of “misdirection,” and Mace suggested the United States acted “unlawfully.” Complaints about overclassification even came from the Democratic side. ...

“The coverup goes a lot deeper” than politics, Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) argued, vowing “to uncover the coverup” perpetrated by the Pentagon and the intelligence community. “You can’t trust a government that does not trust its people.” Burchett said he would like to visit Area 51 or other locations purportedly housing alien spaceships, but “as soon as we announce it, I’m sure the moving vans pull up.”

Asked by Burchett whether he knew people who had been “harmed or injured in efforts to cover up or conceal these extraterrestrial technology,” Grusch said, “Yes, personally.”

“Anyone been murdered?” Burchett asked.

Grusch said he had to be “careful” about answering. ...

The truth is out there. Just don’t expect to learn it from the alien life forms currently running the People’s House."

It's depressingly political.

Here is the nub of the issue as I see it:

The key distinction (between the Aristotelian and Kantian) is that Aristotelian noumena are still connected to the world of phenomena and provide an explanatory role for the properties of things, whereas Kantian noumena are unknowable things-in-themselves that are entirely beyond our experience and understanding. Kant's noumena do not serve as explanatory principles for phenomena but rather as a limitation on the scope of human cognition.

This leads to the criticism that Kant's analysis cuts us off from the world, entrapping us in our own subjectively-modulated reality.

Contrast this with an account from a current neo-scholastic:

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 (modern) 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. — Joshua Hochschild, What's Wrong with Ockham?

So, do you think abstract reasoning is possible without language? — Janus

They seem very much of a piece don't they? That the evolution of language and reason would go hand in hand, would it not? That would not be a controversial claim would it?

I think this aspect of Kant's philosophy - his treatment of the noumenal - is a deficiency. I'm still working out why, but the outlines are becoming clearer.

They're plainly connected, in that abstraction is necessary in order to comprehend reference.

I've been consulting ChatGPT on Kant's conception of the phenomenal-noumenal distinction. Abstract follows:

Kant argues that dividing objects into phenomena and noumena and the world into sensibility and intelligibility in a positive sense is not permissible. This is because noumena lack a determinate object corresponding to them, and as a result, they cannot have objective validity. If we abandon sensory input altogether, the application of the categories (the fundamental concepts of understanding) to noumena becomes inconceivable. Categories, according to Kant, require a possible intuition to be applied to an object. As we lack any conceivable intuition beyond sensibility, the application of categories to noumena becomes problematic.

By postulating noumena, the understanding extends its reach in a negative sense. It does not encounter a limit imposed by sensibility but, instead, limits sensibility by recognizing things as noumena, not merely as phenomena. However, the understanding also acknowledges its own limitations in comprehending noumena, as it cannot cognize them through the categories and can only consider them as "unknown somethings."

Then:

So Kant's understanding of the phenomena-noumena distinction is very different from Aristotelian dualism, which maps 'phenomena' against 'sensible appearance' and 'noumena' against 'the form or idea' - would that be correct?


ChatGPT: Yes, you are correct. Kant's understanding of the phenomena-noumena distinction is indeed very different from the Aristotelian dualism that maps 'phenomena' against 'sensible appearance' and 'noumena' against 'the form or idea.'

In Aristotelian metaphysics, phenomena are associated with the sensory world, the empirical realm of our experience. Phenomena are the objects of perception and the material substances we encounter in the world. On the other hand, noumena (sometimes called "Forms" or "Ideas") are considered to be the abstract, intelligible essences or universal properties that ground and determine the characteristics of phenomena. They are the immutable, perfect forms that give things their identity and properties.

Aristotle's noumena are still linked to the realm of sensible appearances because they are seen as the essence or form behind the changing and imperfect phenomena. The phenomena we perceive are said to derive their existence and nature from these ideal forms, which exist independently of human cognition.

On the contrary, Kant's noumena are quite different in nature. For Kant, noumena are things-in-themselves that exist independently of human experience and cognition. They are not intelligible forms that underlie sensible appearances, but rather they are entirely beyond our capacity to experience or comprehend through the usual faculties of sensibility and understanding. Kant argues that while we can think about noumena conceptually as a necessary limitation of our sensibility, we cannot know anything positive about them, nor can we apply our categories (conceptual tools) to them without intuition.

The key distinction here is that Aristotelian noumena are still connected to the world of phenomena and provide an explanatory role for the properties of things, whereas Kantian noumena are unknowable things-in-themselves that are entirely beyond our experience and understanding. Kant's noumena do not serve as explanatory principles for phenomena but rather as a limitation on the scope of human cognition.

ref

t just comes down to language competency. — Janus

and the ability to reason.

I can create a more or less accurate mental image of a chilliagon — T Clark

A mental image of a chiliagon cannot be clearly distinguished from a mental image of a 1,002-sided figure, or even from a mental image of a circle.The concept of a chiliagon is clearly distinct from the concept of a 1,002-sided figure or the concept of a circle. Likewise I cannot clearly differentiate a mental image of a crowd of one million people from a mental image of a crowd of 900,000 people. But reason easily grasps the difference between the concept of a crowd of one million people and the concept of a crowd of 900,000 people (from Ed Feser).

Many critics have observed that Kant's equivocation of 'noumena' with 'things as they are in themselves' is confusing. That's why the example I gave above is more in line with the pre-Kantian idea of noumenon as 'objects of reason'.

The difference between abstract and intuitive cognition, which Kant entirely overlooks, was the very one that ancient philosophers indicated as φαινόμενα [phainomena] and νοούμενα [nooumena]; the opposition and incommensurability between these terms proved very productive in the philosophemes of the Eleatics, in Plato's doctrine of Ideas, in the dialectic of the Megarics, and later in the scholastics, in the conflict between nominalism and realism. This latter conflict was the late development of a seed already present in the opposed tendencies of Plato and Aristotle. But Kant, who completely and irresponsibly neglected the issue for which the terms φαινομένα and νοούμενα were already in use, then took possession of the terms as if they were stray and ownerless, and used them as designations of things in themselves and their appearances. — Schopenhauer

Here’s a good example from Descartes. If I tell you a chilliagon is a thousand-sided polygon you will be able to grasp the idea easily. But you could neither create an accurate mental image of one, nor visually identify an example of one, at least without counting the sides. The idea of a chilliagon is thus something which can be grasped by reason - an ‘object of mind’ - even though as a phenomenal object they may be extremely difficult to discern.

@RussellA’s first response seems :up: to me. But I still say that understanding the meaning before Kant is helpful. I’m going to study it some more.

I would have thought that saying there is something we can’t know would not be the same as saying there’s nothing.

Future books don't exist yet. You can write them. — Quk

Working on it. I asked for a citation because of the import of the specific question at hand. I mean 'not even the One is uncompounded' *sounds like* something from classical philosophy, but on the other hand, you might have just made it up on the spur of the moment, for argument's sake. In any case, I stand by my original contention regarding the symbolic import of purity.

Yes but Hegel writes "Spirit is activity in the sense in which the Scoolmen already said of God that he is absolute actuosity. — Gregory

that really has no bearing on anything in that quote, which is essentially Aristotelian in orientation. And Aristotle never spoke of 'spirit'. What caused me to quote that passage was your 'thought being composed of matter and form', which is what that passage is about. But I don't know if it's relevant beyond that.

Can't believe that an OP of just two phrases is not put in The Lounge. — javi2541997

Good call. I was going to flag this thread on that basis, but I have done that. It is saved somewhat by the inclusion of the second of the two phrases, which at least provides a starting-point for debate, but still, it's very skimpy considering the gravitas of the question.

Hegel's notion that thought, like organic nature, was composed of matter and form has been revelatory for me. — Gregory

That's similar to hylomorphism - 'matter-form' ism. In hylomorphism the 'form' (which is NOT the shape of something, but more like its principle or essence, that which makes it what it is) is grasped ('seen') by the intellect ('nous') while the material substance is received by the senses.

“EVERYTHING in the cosmic universe is composed of matter and form. Everything is concrete and individual. Hence the forms of cosmic entities must also be concrete and individual. Now, the process of knowledge is immediately concerned with the separation of form from matter, since a thing is known precisely because its form is received in the knower. But, whatever is received is in the recipient according to the mode of being that the recipient possesses. If, then, the senses are material powers, they receive the forms of objects in a material manner; and if the intellect is an immaterial power, it receives the forms of objects in an immaterial manner. This means that in the case of sense knowledge, the form is still encompassed with the concrete characters which make it particular; and that, in the case of intellectual knowledge, the form is disengaged from all such characters. To understand is to free form completely from matter.

“Moreover, if the proper knowledge of the senses is of accidents, through forms that are individualized, the proper knowledge of intellect is of essences, through forms that are universalized. Intellectual knowledge is analogous to sense knowledge inasmuch as it demands the reception of the form of the thing which is known. But it differs from sense knowledge so far forth as it consists in the apprehension of things, not in their individuality, but in their universality. — From Thomistic Psychology: A Philosophical Analysis of the Nature of Man, by Robert E. Brennan, O.P.

... the main tendency of twentieth- and early twenty-first-century AngloAmerican commentary on the Critique of Pure Reason has been to downplay Kant’s metaphysical commitments, particularly his conception of the noumena (‘things in themselves’) as objects of a divine ‘intellectual intuition’ whose unavailability to human beings defines the limits of human understanding. For the most part, AngloAmerican commentary has viewed the Critique as a critique of metaphysics written in defence of empirical knowledge, rather than as a renovation of metaphysics designed to tether the empirical sciences to transcendental principles of intelligibility and morality. Such commentary has typically sought to confine Kant’s own philosophy within the limits of empirical experience, treating the transcendental intelligences or noumena as an abyss from which the eyes of philosophical understanding must be averted at all costs. From this winnowing reception has emerged a Kant for whom there are not two worlds — the sensible and the intelligible — only ‘two viewpoints’ on a single spatio-temporal world, as if the noumenon were simply a particular kind of conceptual abstraction applied to empirical things. This is a Kant for whom the last vestige of the noumenal — the power of empirically unconditioned moral choice — is viewed not as testimony to a self-acting intelligible or rational being within us, but only as a viewpoint that ordinary phenomenal agents should adopt for the purposes of acting autonomously. — Ian Hunter, Spirituality and Philosophy in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason

Certainly how Kant tends to be viewed around here in my opinion.

Not even the One, i.e. the absolute singularity, is non-compounded. The One needs the Zero in order to differ itself from the Zero. — Quk

Can you find a citation from philosophical literature for that? From Greek or Indian philosophy?

A counter-example I would cite is the 'Nibbana Sutta' of the early Buddhist texts: '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'

Secondly, these synonymous things still don't explain why these persons wish to be "non-compounded". — Quk

I don't think 'persons' have such a wish at all. The term 'person' is derived from the mask representing 'dramatis personae' in Greek drama.

The intent to disentangle from the 'conditioned' is at the root of many philosophical traditions, but it might be better described as being 'transpersonal'.

I'd like to dive deeper into the brains themselves rather than into the books that these brains developped — Quk

Perhaps you might study neuroscience, then.

I would like to nominate Jules Evans for inclusion. His website says 'I research wisdom practices from different eras and cultures, explore them in my life, and interview others to see how they helped or harmed them'. Other contemporaries might include Mark Vernon, writer and columnist, Alain Du Bouton, and Karen Armstrong all of whom write on philosophy as a way of life to some extent.

The idea would require a lot of thought, pulling nuggets of wisdom from several sources from both antiquity and modernity: Plato, Aristotle, the Cynics, the Stoics, Plotinus and the Neoplatonists, Confucius and the Neoconfucians, Buddha, Lao Tzu, Mencius, Aquinas, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Kant, Locke, Scheler, amongst others. — Dermot Griffin

We might contemplate the question: who or which amongst these individuals and schools share the convictions of contemporary naturalism? Perhaps the stoics - hence the resurgent interest in stoicism - and Nietzsche. But, according to Lloyd Gerson's most recent book, Platonism vs Naturalism: The Possibility of Philosophy, there are fundamental incompatibilities between philosophy (qua 'footnotes to Plato') and naturalism (qua 'natural science'). Accordingly the judgement of what 'living well' comprises might be subject to divergent criteria amongst these various sources.

Footnote: Who were the 'therapeutae'?

Back to Trump - I think it's pretty clear there are going to be both Jan 6th (Federal) and Georgia (State) indictments issued in the next month, by which time Trump will be under an enormous number of indictments many of which carry long jail terms. I'm hoping that it will simply become obvious by end this year/early 2024 that it is completely impractical, apart from anything else, for him to actually be the Republican presidential candidate. Heck, one of the Republican speakers at Iowa said that Trump is only running to keep himself out of prison - he was booed for it, but he still said it!

True. It is really unfortunate that this matter is bubbling away, although I'm personally convinced on the basis of material to date that Joe Biden is completely unimpeachable, and that he hasn't been induced into anything improper by his son. I also would like to see an alternative democratic candidate but I don't at this time, and I'm still reasonably confident that Biden can both win and govern for a second term.

This constant drip drip of shady activities is making it harder for Democrats to draw a contrast to Trump's rampant corruption. — RogueAI

Hunter Biden's activities are an embarrasment for Biden, no question about that. The right-wing activitists in the Republican Party are spending millions of dollars trying to rake up muck on Hunter Biden, purely and simply as revenge and whataboutism. Many of their alleged witnesses can't be located, and at least one is under international arrest warrant. Meanwhile let's not forget (even though everyone constantly appears to forget) the Jan 6th insurrection and commission, the attempts to pester election officials and workers into actually overthrowing election results, the stealing and mistreatment of highly classified nuclear warfare secrets, and the other litany of lies and cheating, as opposed to the possibly nefarious activities of a wayward and troublesome son. Mountains and molehills.

how can there be any referent for "noumenon"? — jancanc

The word itself is the neuter middle-passive present participle of noeîn, 'to think, to mean', which in turn originates from the word noûs, an Attic contracted form of nóos, 'perception, understanding, mind', often translated as 'intellect' (wikipedia). So originally the word meant 'a mental object' or 'an object of mind' -- something which could be grasped by the intellect, as distinct from by the senses. And that is the origin of the distinction between 'phenomena' (what appears) and 'noumena' (what truly is) or, put more simply, reality and appearance. Arguably, that is the fundamental dualism of Western philosophy (now there's an OP idea.)

In Kant's philosophy the use is more complicated, because of the equating of noumena with the 'thing in itself' (ding an sich) which may or may not be the same concept. A key phrase:

The doctrine of sensibility is also the doctrine of noumena in the negative sense, that is, of things which the understanding is obliged to cogitate apart from any relation to our mode of intuition, consequently not as mere phenomena, but as things in themselves. But the understanding at the same time comprehends that it cannot employ its categories for the consideration of things in themselves, because these possess significance only in relation to the unity of intuitions in space and time, and that they are competent to determine this unity by means of general à priori connecting conceptions only on account of the pure ideality of space and time. — CPR, Of the Ground of the Division of all Objects into Phenomena and Noumena

Schopenhauer criticizes Kant for adopting the term 'noumenal' for his own purposes without proper regard for the way it was used in earlier philosophy.

In most modern philosophy, with its implicit commitment to empiricism, 'phenomenon' is tacitly used to indicate 'everything that is', without regard to its origin as one of a contrasting pair of terms, resulting in a serious dilution of its original meaning.

I think the term "purity" is just an abstract curtain of something that is psychologically much more complex. — Quk

'Purity' represents 'the Unconditioned' or 'the One'. Everything 'worldly' is conditioned, compounded, subject to death and decay, whereas 'the One' is not compounded, unconditioned, and eternal. Hence the symbolism of the Virgin Birth. In Buddhist mythology, Siddartha Gautama was said to have emerged fully formed 'from the side' of his mother, able to take steps and speak straight away, also symbolising his pure origins, distinguished from the physical pain and corruption of ordinary birth.

I observe information existing as brain state.. — Mark Nyquist

It’s what interprets any array that is at issue. The same information can be represented by many different states and in many different media. If the same information can be represented in many physical forms, how can it be physical?

We’ll if you rake up a thousand tons of muck it’s bound to contain a few turds. Far more important than, you know, governing.

And furthermore….

It’s not true that DoJ is soft-peddling Hunter Biden. There’ve been numerous OPs in the US media to the contrary, that were Hunter Biden NOT the President’s son, none of the investigations would have happened at all. And furthermore that the DA that handled the investigation was a Trump appointee and stated unequivocally that there was no political interference in the case.

Trump fired Barr — praxis

Barr resigned before he was fired (although he might well have been fired had he not resigned).

I'd define reality as "The sum of everything that is objectively true right now." — Cidat

But it must be considered that objects only exist in relation to, or for, subjects. What is ‘objectively true’ is always a matter of judgement. That doesn’t mean that anything goes or that total relativism reigns supreme, as there are many matters of fact which we are obliged to acknowledge are objectively the case, in the sense of being the same for all observers.

What you’re saying is close to that expression, ‘the world is the totality of facts not of things’, but even that will elude any precise definition, as facts constantly change.

That is, there seems to be something fundamentally subjective about what we decide to call an information source, a signal, a channel, a receiver, etc. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Right - it’s a matter of judgement, which is always internal to thought, not something given in the data itself. A Kantian insight.

Just a rough idea, but to me, expresses the an essential part of what it would take to make AI a kind of consciousness. Consciousness being an interior "space" where thought and its symbols and rules gather to produce a "world". — Constance

It seems to me that what you’re asking is the sense in which AI systems can or can’t be considered beings. After all dasein is the form of being or existence of humans, so you’re asking if AI systems can be considered to have a simulated kind of being specific to computers. I’m inclined to say no, on the grounds that those systems are absent a fundamental attribute of being, but in saying that I also recognise that it’s very difficult to say exactly what that attribute is. I mean, ‘life’ and ‘mind’, both of which are invariably associated with being in the conventional sense, are notoriously difficult to define. And if you can’t define them, then it’s impossible to say that AI systems do or don’t possess them, on any grounds other than intuition. I would agree with the idea that AI systems are able to simulate life, mind and being, whilst not themselves actually possessing or comprising them. That of course leaves open the question of ‘what is being’, but then, that is arguably the deepest or ultimate question of philosophy.

I would also say that the willingness of people to believe that AI systems are sentient or are beings, is very much to be expected in a technological culture such as ours. I myself am a tech worker and often spend 8-10 hours a day behind screens. Plus I use ChatGPT on a daily basis, although more for philosophy than for professional services at the moment. So I really get the appeal.

Gods cannot be separated from human narratives, since gods exist inter-subjectively, not objectively. — LuckyR

Philosophically, a deity may be said to transcend the subject-object distinction.

(Birth control pills greatly facilitated sexual liberation.) — BC

You think? :yikes:

It can be hard to get into the minds of people who lived just a few centuries ago, never mind 2 or 3 millennia. — BC

'The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there' ~ L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between

However, the shunning of sexuality seems to me to be largely confined to Abrahamic religions, which have by now more or less spread their influence worldwide. — javra

Well, yes it was a generalisation. But the early Buddhist texts were unequivocal in their rejection of any form of sexual activities with other persons, which comprised parijika offenses, meriting explusion from the order. Likewise Hindu yogis were always encouraged to be celibate (brahmacharya). When I said 'old school', I mean the original, now archaic, forms of those cultures. Of course as those cultures developed, sexual mores changed considerably - Tantrism has sexual rituals, as you point out, and there is graphically sexual iconography in some Hindu temples although they came along many centuries later (see The Red Thread). But I still don't think it's easy for us to appreciate, from a modern perspective, how different sexual mores were in traditional cultures, to what we take for granted. After all in those ancient cultures, slavery was also taken for granted. I'm not saying they were any better for it (obviously not, in the case of slavery) but that the cultural gaps need to be appreciated.

Husserl's critical and polemical point is that the activity of science has, since Galileo, resulted in what he calls a "mathematization of nature," that overlooks the necessary dependence of science upon the everyday practices of the life- world. There is a gap between knowledge and wisdom, between science and everyday life.

This is the situation that Husserl calls "crisis," which occurs when the theoretical attitude of the sciences comes to define the way in which all entities are viewed.

Compare:

Cartesian anxiety refers to the notion that, since René Descartes posited his influential form of body-mind dualism, Western civilization has suffered from a longing for ontological certainty, or feeling that scientific methods, and especially the study of the world as a thing separate from ourselves, should be able to lead us to a firm and unchanging knowledge of ourselves and the world around us. The term is named after Descartes because of his well-known emphasis on "mind" as different from "body", "self" as different from "other". — Richard J. Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis, 1983

Beyond Belief was the first (actually I think only) book of Pagels that I read. At the time I had the view that the gnostic sects were trying to convey a kind of experiential spirituality which was much nearer to the kind of popular Eastern 'consciousness-raising' philosophies that we see today, than to mainstream 'Churchianity'. Indeed at the time I found a book by a Christian evangalist, 'Against the Modern Gnostics', which said that the upsurge of interest in consciousness philosophies was a kind of resurgent gnosticism (which I think is true although I was inclined to be more for it than against it.)

Although I should add that further reading on gnosticism - particularly Hans Jonas - dissolves the idea that they are kind of soft-edged new aged types. Ancient gnostic sects were fiercely ascetic and forbidding from our point of view.

It's not that all Republicans are crazy. It's that the crazy ones have all the power right now. — frank

I agree, but I hope and believe that they are going to end up loosing. They are alienating millions of mainstream voters with their extremist ideology and conspiracy theories. They did poorly in Nov 22 and I think they’re going to do even worse next year.

Gift article from the Washington Post about how the continued GOP defense of Trump is going to cost the party.

even without the legal baggage, Trump would face an uphill climb to match his 2016 results. Democratic pollster Celinda Lake and documentary filmmaker Mac Heller recently wrote for The Post that “between Trump’s election in 2016 and the 2024 election, the number of Gen Z (born between the late 1990s and early 2010s) voters will have advanced by a net 52 million against older people.” Put differently, the 2024 electorate will be younger and more Democratic — by a lot — than the electorate that chose Trump in 2016. The GOP will be pleading with a less Trump-friendly electorate to ignore his alleged crime spree and re-elect the Jan. 6 instigator.

If it seems fantastical, even unimaginable, that a party would put itself in such a position, remember this is a party that obsesses over Hunter Biden, elevates to prominence Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and still won’t admit that Joe Biden won the White House in 2020. Maybe it’s time to acknowledge that, barring an epiphany, the GOP’s self-delusion is risking a political wipeout that will take out more than its disastrous nominee. And it won’t be able to claim it wasn’t warned. — A Republican nightmare seems about to become real

Face it - old school religions hate sex, and they were mostly patriarchal. We look at it nowadays through our comfy rose-tinted modern spectacles but that's how it was. The Buddha was an exception to the patriarchal trend, in that he allowed female monks during his own lifetime (with many extra rules!), but even Buddhists would pray for rebirth as a male (maybe so as to avoid the burdens of menstruation, which was deemed a gross impurity by pre-modern cultures, and childbirth.)

How does the dialogue between science, religion and spirituality impact on thinking about areas of controversy, including gay and transgender issues, and underlying cultural wars and agendas? — Jack Cummins

How easily we forget that Western culture has been through the sexual revolution (that's a link to the Wikipedia page for reference). Because we've mainly been brought up after it, we don't understand how profound a change it was from pre-modern attitudes. Vastly different. (One area where this comes up, is in Muslim attitudes towards LGBTQ - I read recently about the dismay in a US town which elected a majority Muslim council, which then promptly set about banning Gay Pride flags.)

Your faith is touching, but I'm not falling for the schtick.