Stevenson's compilation is the latest to have had no impact...why is this? — 180 Proof

universeness et al points out. — 180 Proof

why worry? — Jamal

Thomists and other critics of Ockham have tended to present traditional [i.e. 'scholastic'] 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. — Joshua Hochschild - What's Wrong with Ockham?

I agree that we can discursively break the world up and think about the category or concept of a dog as apart from any particular dog. We indeed have that sort of metacognition. — green flag

Neoplatonic mathematics is governed by a fundamental distiction which is indeed inherent in Greek science in general, but is here most strongly formulated. According to this distinction, one branch of mathematics participates in the contemplation of that which is in no way subject to change, or to becoming and passing away. This branch contemplates that which is always such as it is and which alone is capable of being known: for that which is known in the act of knowing, being a communicable and teachable possession, must be something that is once and for all fixed. — Jacob Klein, Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra.

I wouldn't even say they are so different. — green flag

It's also hard to make sense of the claim that only such objects exist, — green flag

There is, I mean, no aboriginal stuff or quality of being, contrasted with that of which material objects are made, out of which our thoughts of them are made; but there is a function in experience which thoughts perform, and for the performance of which this quality of being is invoked. That function is knowing. — William James

it's absurd to frame Wittgenstein as antispiritual — green flag

It seems you have studied the evidence Stevenson produced more than I. — universeness

What idealists 'want to say' (but don't manage to say) is roughly correct. That's my claim. — green flag

And do you accept his classification, wherein ideas do exist, and it's only universals that don't? — Jamal

But another way of paying attention to the differentiation is to say that something exists in a different way. — Jamal

We shall find it convenient only to speak of things existing when they are in time, that is to say, when we can point to some time at which they exist (not excluding the possibility of their existing at all times). Thus thoughts and feelings, minds and physical objects exist. But universals do not exist in this sense; we shall say that they subsist or have being, where 'being' is opposed to 'existence' as being timeless. — Bertrand Russell

In contrast to contemporary philosophers, most 17th century philosophers (i.e. Spinoza, Leibniz, Descartes) held that reality comes in degrees—that some things that exist are more or less real than other things that exist. At least part of what dictates a being’s reality, according to these philosophers, is the extent to which its existence is dependent on other things: the less dependent a thing is on other things for its existence, the more real it is.

What have you got against the use of “exist” for ideas, numbers, etc.? — Jamal

it looks like you’re downgrading numbers just because they’re not objects of physical science. — Jamal

So, in my view, I directly experience sensations: i.e., the five physical senses, emotions, and thoughts. Everything else is an idea that makes sense of my perceptions. — Art48

What is an "arithmetical fact"? That we use a human invented symbolism like "2+2=4" and that this has rules of use, and has application in our world. OK. Or, do you mean "2+2=4" is a fact because it corresponds to some eternal idea. — Richard B

What make "arithmetical facts" true? — Richard B

something in an occult sphere — green flag

(probably to no avail) — Wayfarer

'Everyone knows that the earth, and a fortiori the universe, existed for a long time before there were any living beings, and therefore any perceiving subjects. But according to Kant ... that is impossible.'

Schopenhauer's defence of Kant on this score was [that] the objector has not understood to the very bottom the Kantian demonstration that time is one of the forms of our sensibility. The earth, say, as it was before there was life, is a field of empirical enquiry in which we have come to know a great deal; its reality is no more being denied than is the reality of perceived objects in the same room.

The point is, the whole of the empirical world in space and time is the creation of our understanding, which apprehends all the objects of empirical knowledge within it as being in some part of that space and at some part of that time: and this is as true of the earth before there was life as it is of the pen I am now holding a few inches in front of my face and seeing slightly out of focus as it moves across the paper.

This, incidentally, illustrates a difficulty in the way of understanding which transcendental idealism has permanently to contend with: the assumptions of 'the inborn realism which arises from the original disposition of the intellect' enter unawares into the way in which the statements of transcendental idealism are understood.

Such realistic assumptions so pervade our normal use of concepts that the claims of transcendental idealism disclose their own non-absurdity only after difficult consideration, whereas criticisms of them at first appear cogent which on examination are seen to rest on confusion. We have to raise almost impossibly deep levels of presupposition in our own thinking and imagination to the level of self-consciousness before we are able to achieve a critical awareness of all our realistic assumptions, and thus achieve an understanding of transcendental idealism which is untainted by them. — Bryan Magee Schopenhauer's Philosophy, Pp 106-107

Are you, Wayfarer, serious in a defence of the arch-scientism offered by Hoffman, because it gives some small solace to idealism? You hussy, you! — Banno

Would it not be that humans see the world just fine for what we need to do in it. — Tom Storm

Now evolution and quantum mechanics and cosmology posit that events occur over time, and that they happen to discreet individuals. — Banno

Most, I'd guess, would be baffled to think that anything other than naive realism could be true. — Manuel

Scienticism isn't taken seriously by most scientists. — Manuel

As long as the dark foundation of our nature, grim in its all-encompassing egoism, mad in its drive to make that egoism into reality, to devour everything and to define everything by itself, as long as that foundation is visible, as long as this truly original sin exists within us, we have no business here and there is no logical answer to our existence. Imagine a group of people who are all blind, deaf and slightly demented and suddenly someone in the crowd asks, "What are we to do?"... The only possible answer is "Look for a cure". Until you are cured, there is nothing you can do. And since you don't believe you are sick, there can be no cure. — Vladimir Solovyov (19th c philosopher, not current Russian TV propagandist of same name)

the mental experiences, which these directly symbolize, are the same for all — green flag

one is tempted to imagine that which gives the sentence life as something in an occult sphere — Wittgenstein

Would you say that he has more data than the astrologers... — universeness

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

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

It goes against what he is saying, if he is giving evidence that our senses mislead us, why trust the evidence? It too is misleading. — Manuel

Unless it is coupled with an independent basis for confidence in reason, the evolutionary hypothesis is threatening rather than reassuring. It is consistent with continued confidence only if it amounts to the hypothesis that evolution has led to the existence of creatures, namely us, with a capacity for reasoning in whose validity we can have much stronger confidence than would be warranted merely from its having come into existence in that way. I have to be able to believe that the evolutionary explanation is consistent with the proposition that I follow the rules of logic because they are correct--not merely because I am biologically programmed to do so. But to believe that, I have to be justified independently in believing that they are correct. And this cannot be merely on the basis of my contingent psychological disposition, together with the hypothesis that it is the product of natural selection. I can have no justification for trusting a reasoning capacity I have as a consequence of natural selection, unless I am justified in trusting it simply in itself -- that is, believing what it tells me, in virtue of the content of the arguments it delivers.

If reason is in this way self-justifying, then it is open to us also to speculate that natural selection played a role in the evolution and survival of a species that is capable of understanding and engaging in it. But the recognition of logical arguments as independently valid is a precondition of the acceptability of an evolutionary story about the source of that recognition. This means that the evolutionary hypothesis is acceptable only if reason does not need its support. At most it may show why the existence of reason need not be biologically mysterious.
— Thomas Nagel

Are you unfamiliar with the late David M. Armstrong? — Relativist

Why evil, and not mental sickness? — Tzeentch

2. What makes these symbolisms the same is how they are used by humans. It is not that they refer to the same eternal objects. — Richard B

I'm asking how exactly does an idea like 2+2=4 cease to exist. — Art48

Do you think it might be a possible that just as Kant argued that space and time were essentially part of the human cognitive apparatus which help us make sense of our world, that perhaps reason - e.g., identity, non-contradiction and excluded middle, might not have similar source? In which case, reason is not true as such - or located outside of the human domain - it is rather a condition of human experience and an unavoidable product of our perspective. — Tom Storm

What exactly makes snakes and trains not real? — Banno

The constructions we invent may not be literally true, but still, he says of his own, “I’ve evolved these symbols to keep me alive, so I have to take them seriously. But it’s a logical flaw to think that if we have to take it seriously, we also have to take it literally.” Of what he identifies as a snake or a train, he says, “Snakes and trains, like the particles of physics, have no objective, observer-independent features. The snake I see is a description created by my sensory system to inform me of the fitness consequences of my actions.”

It’s worth pointing out that if there can be no “public” objects that aren’t personal constructions, science has a problem: “The idea that what we’re doing is measuring publicly accessible objects, the idea that objectivity results from the fact that you and I can measure the same object in the exact same situation and get the same results — it’s very clear from quantum mechanics that that idea has to go. Physics tells us that there are no public physical objects.” After all, “My snakes and trains are my mental representations; your snakes and trains are your mental representations.”

It’s not that Hoffman considers our constructed personal realities therefore worthless. In fact, they’re all we’ve got, and being real to us is a way of being true, after all. “I’m claiming that experiences are the real coin of the realm. The experiences of everyday life—my real feeling of a headache, my real taste of chocolate—that really is the ultimate nature of reality.” — Donald Hoffman

QBism would say, it’s not that the world is built up from stuff on “the outside” as the Greeks would have had it. Nor is it built up from stuff on “the inside” as the idealists...would have it. Rather, the stuff of the world is in the character of what each of us encounters every living moment — stuff that is neither inside nor outside, but prior to the very notion of a cut between the two at all. — Chris Fuchs

A self-help book or marginal scripture is marketed as lost or repressed wisdom. I claim that this frame itself is already picture enough, as those who market the book must know. — green flag

The novice sits at the knee of the sage. If the novice could truly evaluate the sage, he would already be the sage — green flag

A person can believe in Enlightenment (or Quality or some ineffable and unverifiable X) and defend its existence without claiming to possess it or to have experienced it directly. — green flag