My understanding is that the use of the word 'will' can throw us off. Is it not the case that what S means by will is more like energy - a non-metacognitive, blind, instinctive force? — Tom Storm

It is a perennial philosophical reflection that if one looks deeply enough into oneself, one will discover not only one’s own essence, but also the essence of the universe. ...For that reason it is thought that one can come into contact with the nature of the universe if one comes into substantial contact with one’s ultimate inner being. — Schopenhauer, SEP

It is rather like what East Asian Buddhism calls 'realising the true nature'. (Many critics have noted the convergences of Schopenhauer and Buddhism in this respect.)

I don't agree with that paraphrase of Schopenhauer's analysis. I think the crucial point about Schopenhauer and Kant (and to some extent the other German idealists) is their grasp of the way in which the mind (or brain) constructs what we naively and instinctively take to be an independently-existing domain. That is why Schopenhauer says in his first sentence that realising this requires 'attaining to wisdom'.

My very high-level paraphrase of Schopenhauer and Kant is that the mind (nous, I think, in the traditional sense) brings together (synthesises) the elements of the understanding with the objects of perception to create a unified whole, which we designate as 'the world', but that we generally overlook or ignore this fact, because 'the mind does not see itself'. So we take for granted the independent reality of the world, while ignoring the role the mind plays in its construction. I think contintental philosophy, generally, is much more aware of this, than current English-speaking philosophy which is tied to scientific naturalism as a normative framework (although the times are a' changin.)

If there is no object without a subject, then the existence of a tree, a table, a chair, etc. etc., requires a perceiving subject, but how does then entail that representations/appearances like a tree, table, chair, etc. also has an inner, subjective side? — KantDane21

I don't know if I agree that this is entailed by Schopenhauer's argument. I haven't read Christopher Janaway's book on Schopenhauer, but I recently completed Bernardo Kastrup's Decoding Schopenhauer's Metaphysics and I do know he was pretty scornful of Janaway's book. But then, I'm also sceptical of what Kastrup and his followers call the 'mind-at-large', which plays a role suspiciously like that of God in Berkeley's philosophy. (I actually joined the Kastrup forum and had this out with them.) But the long and short is, it's not necessary to posit whether objects have an 'inner life'. That amounts to speculative metaphysics. I think this is where the Buddhist analysis has influenced me. I think considerable circumspection is required at this point, a clear awareness of what it is we don't know. That's the sense in which scepticism can counter-balance idealism.

Well, I thought it appropriate to bring Schopenhauer back into the discussion, as that is what it started with. I will also add I thought it an excellent original post and a good question for which I myself didn't have an answer.

And with that…….we’re off to 450-odd pages of persuasions. — Mww

Yes, I was going to add something along those lines.

That what we generally presume to be external to us is not, in fact, external to us, but only exists as an idea in relation to the consciousness which is in us.

How is that not an argument?

t was just about showing that you can't explain philosophy with physics — Wolfgang

I am in complete agreement with your conclusion, but you don't make any kind of argument for it. But I'll leave you to it, others here seem to see something in it.

Regarding 'emergence', I once attended lectures on Hindu philosophy by a lecturer who used to intone as a kind of principle of Vedanta, 'what is latent, becomes patent', referring to the evolution of the multitude of sentient beings who all actually originate in Brahman. I recall a similar passage in the writings of Swami Vivekenanda, saying that the acorn evolves into the oak because the oak is 'involved' into the acorn. However, I also note that in Hindu philosophy, the principle is that 'life comes from life', it doesn't recognise the possibility of a-biogenesis.

To me the key philosophical distinction is that there is an ontological distinction between the living and inorganic domains. There are also ontological distinctions between sentient and non-sentient life-forms. I believe these distinctions were recognised in Aristotelian philosophy, but that they're generally not recognised by physicalism, for obvious reasons.

Integers are outside the naturals... — fdrake

Thanks. My question was about the sense in which a domain, such as the domain of natural numbers, is real, but not phenomenally existent. I notice that nowadays it is commonplace to say of anything considered real that it must be 'out there somewhere' - but even though such a domain is not anywhere, it is nevertheless real. See this passage.

t. It is neurons A (physics) plus/ multiplied neurons B = consciousness (philosophy). — Wolfgang

Unfortunately for your OP, this is a nonsense expression. It not actually an equation or even a meaningful sentence. The equations which govern the motion of bodies are quite well known, but there is nothing corresponding to that which explains the nature of thought. End of story.

the "clockwork" conception of the universe that first starts with Aquinas — frank

I've never read that the mechanistic model of the Universe started with Aquinas. I had thought it started around the time of Descartes, who firmly believed in it.

There being no lawgiver, the universe must follow its own will. It dances wildly to its own song, and the will of physicists is to learn the tune. — unenlightened

Alfred North Whitehead said that the laws of physics nowadays play the role assigned to the inexorable decrees of fate in Greek drama.

All meaning must lie – we’ve come to assume – somewhere without and never within. — Bernardo Kastrup

And yet

The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless. — Steven Weinberg

from what I've heard the soul of Buddhism, like that of a cornered government official, is to neither affirm nor deny neither the existence nor the nonexistence of souls. — Agent Smith

'Soul' is very much a term from the lexicon of Greek and Hebrew religions. There's no direct equivalent in Buddhism. Buddhism denies that anything exists 'sui generis' in and of itself, but always as a consequence of causes and conditions. Nevertheless, there is, says the Buddha, an unconditioned, an unmade, an unfabricated - were there not, there would be no escape from the conditioned, the made, the fabricated. But crucially the unconditioned is never subordinated to conceptual classification in Buddhism.

As for 'what will become of me?' the Buddha describes such concerns as self-seeking or self-centred. In a way, you can say the very concern with oneself is what propogates itself through saṃsāra.

These are all extremes which Buddhism attempts to avoid. — Agent Smith

The 'two extreme views' - the first being 'eternalism', i.e. affirms that the world-and-self have a real non-perishing existence. Bear in mind, this was taught in the context of a culture which believed in re-birth, so that the aim of spiritual practice was conceived in terms of 'seeking a propitious re-birth' - that through correct conduct and ritual, one could be re-born in perpetuity, as it were. The opposite view was nihilism i.e. there are no moral consequences for actions in this life beyond death. This is what most modern people believe. Death is seen as a kind of 'global reset'.

Generally speaking, acceptance of the idea of the reality of re-birth or continued existence is the dividing line between traditional and secular western Buddhism. See Facing the Great Divide Bhikkhu Bodhi.

I say: There are toothbrushes! — Banno

Not to mention coffee cups, although if we went on, this would become rather a large list.

Anyway, to hark back to Schopenhauer, as the thread was about him, I will quote verbatim two paragraphs that I regard as key to his magnum opus, namely the first:

§ 1. “The world is my idea:”—this is a truth which holds good for everything that lives and knows, though man alone can bring it into reflective and abstract consciousness. If he really does this, he has attained to philosophical wisdom. It then becomes clear and certain to him that what he knows is not a sun and an earth, but only an eye that sees a sun, a hand that feels an earth; that the world which surrounds him is there only as idea, i.e., only in relation to something else, the consciousness, which is himself. If any truth can be asserted a priori, it is this: for it is the expression of the most general form of all possible and thinkable experience: a form which is more general than time, or space, or causality, for they all presuppose it; and each of these, which we have seen to be just so many modes of the principle of sufficient reason, is valid only for a particular class of ideas; whereas the antithesis of object and subject is the common form of all these classes, is that form under which alone any idea of whatever kind it may be, abstract or intuitive, pure or empirical, is possible and thinkable. No truth therefore is more certain, more independent of all others, and less in need of proof than this, that all that exists for knowledge, and therefore this whole world, is only object in relation to subject, perception of a perceiver, in a word, idea. This is obviously true of the past and the future, as well as of the present, of what is farthest off, as of what is near; for it is true of time and space themselves, in which alone these distinctions arise. All that in any way belongs or can belong to the world is inevitably thus conditioned through the subject, and exists only for the subject. The world is idea. — WWR

and from page 35

Of all systems of philosophy which start from the object, the most consistent, and that which may be carried furthest, is simple materialism. It regards matter, and with it time and space, as existing absolutely, and ignores the relation to the subject in which alone all this really exists. It then lays hold of the law of causality as a guiding principle or clue, regarding it as a self-existent order (or arrangement) of things,veritas aeterna, and so fails to take account of the understanding, in which and for which alone causality is. It seeks the primary and most simple state of matter, and then tries to develop all the others from it; ascending from mere mechanism, to chemism, to polarity, to the vegetable and to the animal kingdom. And if we suppose this to have been done, the last link in the chain would be animal sensibility—that is knowledge—which would consequently now appear as a mere modification or state of matter produced by causality.

Now if we had followed materialism thus far with clear ideas, when we reached its highest point we would suddenly be seized with a fit of the inextinguishable laughter of the Olympians. As if waking from a dream, we would all at once become aware that its final result—knowledge, which it reached so laboriously, was presupposed as the indispensable condition of its very starting-point, mere matter; and when we imagined that we thought matter, we really thought only the subject that perceives matter; the eye that sees it, the hand that feels it, the understanding that knows it.

Thus the tremendous petitio principii reveals itself unexpectedly; for suddenly the last link is seen to be the starting-point, the chain a circle, and the materialist is like Baron Münchausen who, when swimming in water on horseback, drew the horse into the air with his legs, and himself also by his cue. The fundamental absurdity of materialism is that it starts from the objective, and takes as the ultimate ground of explanation something objective, whether it be matter in the abstract, simply as it is thought, or after it has taken form, is empirically given—that is to say, is substance, the chemical element with its primary relations. Some such thing it takes, as existing absolutely and in itself, in order that it may evolve organic nature and finally the knowing subject from it, and explain them adequately by means of it; whereas in truth all that is objective is already determined as such in manifold ways by the knowing subject through its forms of knowing, and presupposes them; and consequently it entirely disappears if we think the subject away.

Thus materialism is the attempt to explain what is immediately given us by what is given us indirectly. All that is objective, extended, active—that is to say, all that is material—is regarded by materialism as affording so solid a basis for its explanation, that a reduction of everything to this can leave nothing to be desired (especially if in ultimate analysis this reduction should resolve itself into action and reaction). But we have shown that all this is given indirectly and in the highest degree determined, and is therefore merely a relatively present object, for it has passed through the machinery and manufactory of the brain, and has thus come under the forms of space, time and causality, by means of which it is first presented to us as extended in space and ever active in time. From such an indirectly given object, materialism seeks to explain what is immediately given, the idea (in which alone the object that materialism starts with exists), and finally even the will from which all those fundamental forces, that manifest themselves, under the guidance of causes, and therefore according to law, are in truth to be explained. — WWR

(added paragraph breaks)

That filthy slot!

And yet we do understand how things are. — Banno

said Ptolemy

If you understand it, it undercuts idealism. — 180 Proof

It undercuts Berkeley's form of idealism, but Kant still maintains transcendental idealism.

I understand by the transcendental idealism of all appearances the doctrine that they are all together to be regarded as mere representations and not things in themselves, and accordingly that space and time are only sensible forms of our intuition, but not determinations given for themselves or conditions of objects as things in themselves. To this idealism is opposed transcendental realism, which regards space and time as something given in themselves (independent of our sensiblity). The transcendental realist therefore represents outer appearances (if their reality is conceded) as things in themselves, which would exist independently of us and our sensibility and thus would also be outside us according to pure concepts of the understanding. (CPR, A369)

The transcendental idealist, on the contrary, can be an empirical realist, hence, as he is called, a dualist, i.e., he can concede the existence of matter without going beyond mere self-consciousness and assuming something more than the certainty of representations in me, hence the cogito ergo sum. For because he allows this matter and even its inner possibility to be valid only for appearance– which, separated from our sensibility, is nothing –matter for him is only a species of representations (intuition), which are call external, not as if they related to objects that are external in themselves but because they relate perceptions to space, where all things are external to one another, but that space itself is in us. (A370)

presuming a split between object and subject leads to an irreparable fissure. — Banno

The separateness of subject and object is undeniable. I experience myself as a subject in a domain of objects. You can't wish it out of existence.

the argument invents a thing-in-itself about which nothing can be said, then proceeds to tell us all about it. — Banno

I don't agree. I understand the assertion of the 'thing in itself' as only an observation about the limits of the understanding, i.e. we don't understand how or what things truly are, but are limited to knowing how they appear to be.

If everybody agrees the nature of human intelligence is representational, what would be used to examine the “inner nature” of representations? — Mww

Wouldn't that correspond to the real nature of the knowing subject? If the domain of representations corresponds to 'the phenomenal realm', then the nature of the knowing subject corresponds to 'being in itself' (to coin a phrase. This is the subject of an interesting blog post.)

Nice of you to say so, but I consider myself more 'casual reader' than 'expert' :yikes:

The aspect of this argument that most perplexes me is the suggestion that all objects possess subjectivity - for that is panpsychicm, which to my knowledge is not associated with Schopenhauer (where it can plausibly be with Spinoza and Liebniz). I think the passage quoted by @Jamal really nails it - that the sole real existent is will: 'Besides the will and the representation, there is absolutely nothing known or conceivable for us.' But, as he then mentions, and several others agree, it's hard to see how the argument from the principle of sufficient reason supports this contention.

Exactly right, I completely mangled it. :yikes:

Thanks for that very painstaking response to my question about 'akrasia'. Again, my inner voice can only say - 'do more reading'. :sad:

The soul itself is the fundamental principle of actuality of the living body. But I ask now, how can that fundamental actuality (what we're calling the will here) direct itself as to which potentials to actualize, to create activity? Acting as a force, from within a body, with some sort of choice as to which parts of the body it acts on and when, means that it must be itself, not behaving according to the law of inertia. This is why we can understand the soul, or the will, as immaterial, it is a cause which does not act according to the laws which apply to material bodies. — Metaphysician Undercover

I have just viewed an interview with the philosopher Richard Swinburne about this very point. See here.

...the problem of "being overcome by pleasure"... — Metaphysician Undercover

Isn't this something to do with the parable of the three horses, being the various appetites? That the appetitive part of the soul overwhelms the rational part? Would seem like 'plato 101' to me, but then what do I know....

As soon as you get into the actual physics, then it's really better suited to Physics Forum. The question is not one about physics, it's one about meaning.

:up:

__

I wonder if the following rings a bell?

Pitirim Alexandrovich Sorokin (4 February [O.S. 23 January] 1889 – 10 February 1968) was a Russian American sociologist and political activist, who contributed to the social cycle theory.

Sensate (Materialistic) Culture

Sensate/Materialist culture has these features:

The defining cultural principle is that true reality is sensory – only the material world is real. There is no other reality or source of values. This becomes the organizing principle of society. It permeates every aspect of culture and defines the basic mentality. People are unable to think in any other terms.
Sensate culture pursues science and technology, but dedicates little creative thought to spirituality or religion.

Dominant values are wealth, health, bodily comfort, sensual pleasures, power and fame.
Ethics, politics, and economics are utilitarian and hedonistic. All ethical and legal precepts are considered mere man-made conventions, relative and changeable.

Art and entertainment emphasize sensory stimulation. In the decadent stages of Sensate culture there is a frenzied emphasis on the new and the shocking (literally, sensationalism).

Religious institutions are mere relics of previous epochs, stripped of their original substance, and tending to fundamentalism and exaggerated fideism (the view that faith is not compatible with reason). — The Visionary Theories of Pitirim Sorokin

I really mean to get at, that in our daily lives, there seems to be lack of "meaningfulness in the mundane", whereby the meaningful informs the mundane — schopenhauer1

During my hiatus from the forum last year I discovered John Vervaeke, a Canadian lecturer in cognitive science and psychology, who's channel is called 'Awakening from the Meaning Crisis.' This is precisely what he's talking about. You can find an introduction here.

...the very connection of one's actions with the cosmos.... — schopenhauer1

This has always been the focus of my interest in philosophy, although it's certainly not the focus of academic philosophy.

Wasn't the "Protestant work ethic" an effort to make the mundane meaningful? — BC

I think not. It was specifically Protestant in having been shaped by Calvinism in particular, with its emphasis on 'the elect' and the impossibility of knowing whether you were among the saved. 'Protestants, beginning with Martin Luther, conceptualized worldly work as a duty which benefits both the individual and society as a whole. Thus, the Catholic idea of good works was transformed into an obligation to consistently work diligently as a sign of grace. Whereas Catholicism teaches that good works are required of Catholics as a necessary manifestation of the faith they received, and that faith apart from works is dead and barren, the Calvinist theologians taught that only those who were predestined to be saved would be saved.' This was just as much a source of a kind of deep existential anxiety as it was of meaning.

Western secularity, including its capitalist economy, originated as the result of an unlikely concatenation of circumstances. To survive within the Roman Empire, early Christianity had to render unto Caesar what was Caesar’s, and keep a low profile that did not challenge the state; spiritual concerns were necessarily distinguished from political issues. Later struggles between the Emperor and the Papacy tended to reinforce that distinction. By making private and regular confession compulsory, the late medieval Church also promoted the development of a subjective interiority that encouraged more personal religiosity. New technologies such as the printing press made widespread literacy and hence more individualistic religion possible.

All that made the Reformation possible. By privatizing an unmediated relationship between more individualized Christians and a more transcendent God, Luther’s emphasis on salvation-by-faith-alone eliminated the intricate web of mediation – priests, sacraments, canon law, pilgrimages, public penances, etc. – that in effect had constituted the sacred dimension of this world. The religiously-saturated medieval continuity between the natural and the supernatural was sundered by internalizing faith and projecting the spiritual realm far above our struggles in this world.

The newly-liberated space between them generated something new: the secular (from the Latin saeculum, “generation, age,” thus the temporal world of birth and death). The inner freedom of conscience was distinguished from our outer bondage to secular authorities. “These realms, which contained respectively religion and the world, were hermetically sealed from each other as though constituting separate universes” (Nelson 1981, 74-75). The sharp distinction between them was a radical break with the past, and it led to a new kind of person. The medieval understanding of our life as a cycle of sin and repentance was replaced by the more disciplined character-structure required in the modern world, sustained by a more internalized conscience that did not accept the need for external mediation or the validation of priests.

As God slowly disappeared above the clouds, the secular became increasingly dynamic, accelerating into the creative destruction that today we must keep readjusting to. What we tend to forget in the process is that the distinction between sacred and secular was originally a religious distinction, devised to empower a new type of Protestant spirituality. — David Loy, Terror in the God-Shaped Hole

All of this has the effect of 'subjectivising' or 'privatizing' the notion of meaning, so that it becomes an attribute of the individual's search for truth, in an otherwise mechanical and inherently meaningless universe knowledge of which is mediated solely by science.

We can only hope.

Nevertheless, let's not fall into the woke hysteria of judging every historical character against the standards of modern liberalism.

He’s not entirely off the hook, his attitude towards and treatment of animals was far from exemplary, but wanton torture, it wasn’t.

started the my-hero-is-a-jerk trend (vide his thread on Descartes & Animal Cruelty) on this forum. — Agent Smith

As an aside, I found during the course of that thread that Descartes likely DID NOT commit the terrible acts of cruelty that had been ascribed to him on various Internet sites, but that these acts MIGHT have been carried out by students at a notorious French college purportedly influenced by Cartesian ideas about animals as automatons.

am kind of sympathetic to Schopenhauer's take — schopenhauer1

Indeed! as am I, clearly.

What makes you think it's heading in a good direction? — schopenhauer1

I meant I thought you were heading in a good direction in respect of this OP.

Religion, while perhaps no longer a productive avenue for speculation, at least offered a framework for considering the world in a more imaginative way — schopenhauer1

'Religion' is not and has never been a monolithic entity, a single thing. When it's used in this context, it denotes the Enlightenment schema of philosophy, religion and science, each with their own magisteria, and with religion the waning voice of premodernity. But in pre-modern and archaic times there was no separately-defined sphere known as 'religion' - it was simply 'the law' which encompassed every aspect of life, governing social relations, the rythm of the days, months and years, and providing the cosmic backdrop against which the affairs of humans played out. But within these vast and ancient cultural lifeforms, there are still encoded many of the dramas and mysteries of the psyche, and of birth life and death. Think the Greek Myths and the Bhagavad Gita and other epics.

The second thing is, what is often called 'speculative metaphysics' was birthed out of the visionary experiences of prophets, sages, shamans and seers. These often shattering and epoch-making visionary episodes were then conveyed, often aurally, for millenia, to become crystalised in the 'axial age' where they began to be preserved in writing. What we see now as 'religions' are almost lke the fossilised remnants of those ancient codexes, although still with a pulse.

The reason i make that point is because speculative metaphysics is (or at least might be) informed by an insight or intuition into the nature of being - not simply a 'I wonder if there's a teapot in orbit between Mars and Venus.'

I think the very oldest strata of what was to become Greek philosophy contains, or maybe conceals, the remnants of such visionary states. (Here's a review of maverick scholar Peter Kingsley's exegesis of what he sees as the mystical visionary Pythagoras. I'm not saying I agree with it, but I think it's a perspective to be aware of.)

So - I sense what you sense is lacking, and I think it's heading in a good direction, but I thnk it will involve a long journey.

Yes - is 'the domain of natural numbers' a meaningful term?

One of the ideas I've picked up on this forum is Wittgenstein's 'meaning is use' - that you see what a word really means in the way it is used, not it's supposed dictionary definition.

As for focussing, I'm very much like you, I tend to think about big ideas and topics while often falling short in detailed knowledge of specifics. Careful scholars are generally much more circumspect and will focus on an area of speciality. It's practically unavoidable nowadays, with such vast amounts of information at your fingertips. Nevertheless, I try and maintain an approach which is thematic and synoptic. It suits this kind of subject particularly well.

Regarding Spinoza, check out this title. Oh, and another current author in the area of comparative religion and philosophical spirituality that you ought to know if you don't already is Mark Vernon.

I am interested more in how such definitions and concepts inform the understanding of consciousness on a philosophical level. What do you think about the various concepts in the understanding of consciousness? Which of these concepts are more helpful or unhelpful in the twentieth first century climate of philosophical thought, especially in relation to the mind-body problem? — Jack Cummins

They're deep and difficult topics. To discuss them requires awareness of the cultural and historical context within which they evolved and how they were used in that context, in other words, a hermeneutic approach. A major part of that involves understanding modern thought since the European Enlightenment. One difficulty is, most people are involved in that without reflective awareness of it. They defend positions that they don't understand themselves.

Comparative religion is a particularly useful discipline in this context as it is very much concerned with understanding what is now called the 'history of ideas' - an interdisciplinary subject in the humanities which can be located between philosophy and history, not only about reality as viewed through the perspective of concepts and theories, but also viewed from the perspective of mythology, religion and traditional culture. Joseph Campbell's books on comparative mythology are a well-known example. There's an enormous amount of material that could be included under that heading, but looking at it in terms of the origin and historical development of major cultural forms provides a useful analytic framework.

I'd conclude by mentioning hermenuetics again - one of its aims and methods is re-interpreting mythological or historical ideas in the context of modern culture. Mankind has outgrown its childhood myths but many of the underlying themes re-surface in different forms in our day (as can be seen time and again in the flood of special-effects blockbusters appearing in cinemas all over the world.) Again that is where careful interpretation is required.

So to invoke such broad terms as mind, body, spirit, soul, needs awareness of the context from which they've been derived and also the way that they're being used. Not an easy thing to do, but possible, and worthwhile.

Coming to think of it, here's a legitimate question within your area of expertise: there is a 'domain of natural numbers', is there not?

And there are numbers outside that domain, like the imaginary number $\sqrt -1$ which is used in renormalisation procedures in physics.

Can philosophy bring any clarity to something that exists only within its practice? — jgill

Have you ever happened across Wigner's essay The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences? It's atrocious prose, but I found the gist of it compelling when first introduced to it via the previous Forum.

Also Mario Livio Why Maths Works, and Jim Franklin The Mathematical World. (The latter explicitly addresses the question of what maths is about.)

...being a Mysterian myself, I can't help but like him.... — Manuel

"although I can't say exactly why" :lol:

I wonder what would happen if this were posted on a math forum. — jgill

I would never visit a math forum. My school maths was terrible. My interest in the philosophy of math came later in life. I have enough interest in and knowledge of physics to visit physics forum very occasionally.

I think it's muddled. But then I was never impressed by 'mysterianism' either.

I am very mindful of some parallels with Buddhist philosophy in this regard. One of the attributes of the Buddha is described in the Sanskrit term, yathābhūtaṃ, generally translated as 'to see things as they truly are' (dictionary entry.) The principle is the Buddha sees things clearly because his cognition is unclouded by ignorance (clinging, hatred, passion.) But the point I wanted to make in particular is that Buddhas doesn't posit 'another world'. Rather, seeing 'this realm' for what it is, is itself liberation (although paradoxically from the perspective of the ordinary person there is indeed a higher truth and a path by which to seek it.)

In contrast, it is often said that Platonism posits a higher, real world and deprecates what we nowadays take to be the real world i.e. the sensory domain. (But then, it shouldn't be forgotten that the original Platonic Academy included a very rounded curriculum with a lot of emphasis on athletics and physical training.)

All that aside, I, for one, fully accept that there is a such a thing as the 'philosophical ascent', although whether I personally will ever succeed in getting to the first base is well and truly moot.

:up:

false judgement is shown to be impossible. — Metaphysician Undercover

There's another thing which this brings to mind. It occurs with respect to 'akrasia', a term used by Socrates to describe the state of acting against one's better judgement, or weakness of will. It refers to a lack of self-control or discipline, where an individual acts on their desires or emotions rather than following their rational beliefs. Akrasia is often considered a form of moral failing or lack of virtue. Famously, in Protagoras, Socrates attests that akrasia does not exist, claiming "No one goes willingly toward the bad" (358d). If a person examines a situation and decides to act in the way he determines to be best, he will pursue this action, as the best course is also the good course, i.e. man's natural goal.

I think this has clear parallels with the argument about 'false judgement'. Just as real knowledge is only possible with respect to what truly is, Socrates denies that it is possible to act against your better judgement. Of course, Socrates' account is often questioned or even rejected, because we all know that humans do, in fact, have moments of 'akrasia' (sure as hell I do, and lots of 'em). And Aristotle considerably modifies it (and makes it far more realistic) in the Nichomachean ethics. But what I'm trying to get at is the resonance between the impossibility of having knowledge of what is not truly existent, with the impossibility of acting against one's better judgement. Both of these ideas strike us today, I think, as highly implausible, as I'm sure we would normally say that judgements can be mistaken and actions conflict with our better judgement. But I think both these ideas, which perhaps are two different facets of the one overall principle, says something about the character and attributes of Plato's Socrates.

We have had a few actual physicists active here, but they seem to have at least momentarily fled the environment. — jgill

I've posted maybe a dozen times on Physics Forum, which is a fantastically well-run and professional forum, but they give very short shrift to anything deemed 'too philosophical' which covers a very wide range of topics. I posted a question about philosophy of maths and the ontological status of number, which was frozen because, the moderator said, there was no-one there qualified to address it.

And they do!

I know, right? And it’s what Trump thinks he really looks like….