But can you think of Socrates or Plato or any other great or important philosophers wondering whether the physical universe exists or not and that kind of silly questions or commonly accepted facts or truths? — Alkis Piskas

Wondering whether or in what way the Universe is physical is by no means ‘silly’. Physics itself is radically incomplete, both on the level of the basic constituents of matter, and in respect of the origin and scope of the Cosmos.

But if we say it is "something" that defies all categorization because it is "beyond" all our categories of judgement and modes of intuition then we would not be saying much, if anything. — Janus

Pinter's book, Mind and the Cosmic Order, again. This is the first paragraph in the introduction:

Let’s begin with a thought-experiment: Imagine that all life has vanished from the universe, but everything else is undisturbed. Matter is scattered about in space in the same way as it is now, there is sunlight, there are stars, planets and galaxies—but all of it is unseen. There is no human or animal eye to cast a glance at objects, hence nothing is discerned, recognized or even noticed. Objects in the unobserved universe have no shape, color or individual appearance, because shape and appearance are created by minds. Nor do they have features, because features correspond to categories of animal sensation. This is the way the early universe was before the emergence of life—and the way the present universe is outside the view of any observer.

— Pinter, Charles. Mind and the Cosmic Order (p. 1)

What the observer brings *is* the picture:

When we open our eyes and observe the world around us, we don’t see a smooth, evenly distributed continuum, but a scene that is sharply and unambiguously divided into separate objects. Each of these objects is familiar to us, we know their identities, and we are able to name them. To the animal [i.e. sensory] mind, the world is subdivided into separate, discrete things. Without a separation into independent parts, nothing would be comprehensible, there could be no understanding, and thought would not be possible.

...Common sense has us believe that the world really does consist of separate objects exactly as we see it, for we suppose that nature comes to us ready-carved. But in fact, the animal visual system does such a thorough job of partitioning the visual array into familiar objects, that it is impossible for us to look at a scene and not perceive it as composed of separate things.

— (p. 67)

Pinter makes the point that the scientific 'view from nowhere' comprises nothing more than, or apart from, the formal relationships of objects and forces, but without any features:

with no color, appearance, feel, weight or any other discernible features. In fact, every feature which might impact the senses—hence produce an impression of some kind—is absent because in this hypothetical universe there is no life and there are no senses. Everything material may be there, but not the senses. As Kant said about the noumenal world (which is the same as the mind-independent world), nothing can be said about its objects except that they exist.

— p.118

Thoughts are real, but in a different sense to the formal objects of scientific analysis:

Sensations, beliefs, imaginings and feelings are often referred to as figments, that is, creations of the mind. A mental image is taken to be something less than real: For one thing, it has no material substance and is impossible to detect except in the mind of the perceiver. It is true that sensations are caused by electrochemical events in a brain, but when experienced by a living mind, sensations are decisively different in kind from electrons in motion. They are indeed “figments” because they exist nowhere except in awareness. As a matter of fact, they exist only as claims made by sentient beings, with no material evidence to back up those claims. Indeed, brain scans reveal electrical activity, but do not display sensations or inner experience.

— (p. 52).

Which is, of course, the meaning of the hard problem.

Pinter advocates for a form of dualism but it's exceptionally clear and quite simple. It has really helped me to understand the sense in which the world is 'mind-generated' - not the world in its entirety, not the whole vast universe of space and time, but 'world' as, and insofar as it is, a meaningful whole - which is the meaning of 'cosmos' - and in which the mind plays a fundamental part. We see everything 'through' that projected, 'mind-created' world, which is, on the one hand, not objectively existent, but on the other, the very basis of our own experience of the world.

I assume that either yourself are not sure whether the external world actually exists or not, or you believe that there are strong reasons why someone else does. Is that so? — Alkis Piskas

I will refer you to my responses in the thread which this started from, rather than trying to re-state them again, in particular this one.

But in a more general sense, philosophy often consists of asking questions about matters which most people take for granted as being seemingly obvious or not worth questioning. 'Wisdom begins in wonder', according to the Socrates of Plato's dialogues (not, as the Bible says, with the fear of the Lord).

A revised edition of The Embodied Mind was published in 2017, featuring substantive introductions by the surviving authors, as well as a preface by Jon Kabat-Zinn.” — Joshs

and a splendid book it is, I've learned a ton from it.

Popart and dadaism are two that come to mind. — Merkwurdichliebe

Agree. Andy Warhol makes me :vomit:

CNN compares Johnson and Trump

‘ Britain's Conservatives just did what America's Republicans never dared to do.’

https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/07/politics/donald-trump-boris-johnson-analysis/index.html

I didn't invent it. Apparently Cartwright is highly regarded in the subject.

And isn't equating the description of a fact with a fact the same as confusing map and territory?

Bohm2 - whatever happened to him? - provided a link to a good OP on this topic, No God, No Laws, Nancy Cartwright.

Two approaches of understanding laws are explained by the regularity theory as well as the necessitarian theory. The regularity theory states that laws describe the way certain things and objects behave. Whereas, the necessitarian approach describes laws as more than summaries of behaviors, but rather how such things and objects must behave. Do either of these approaches to the laws of nature allow for laws to be both true and explanatory? Nancy Cartwright believes this to be impossible.

Cartwright on Laws of Nature

Been here ten years, hasn't worked yet :yikes:

I just observed that the topic "Is there an external material world?" at the moment of writing this has reached 33 pages and is very close to 1000 responses! — Alkis Piskas

It's a perfectly valid philosophical concern, the fact that it strikes the man in the street as obvious or pointless notwithstanding. Besides, if talking about it is pointless, then talking about talking about it is even more so.

Johnson's lies were more matters of expedience, I feel, whereas Trump's lies are much more calculated. And also I think Trump is genuinely delusional, like, he can't differentiate what is a lie and what isn't, while Johnson's is a more common-or-garden variety of mendacity. And I don't know if the Tories ever really bought into that aspect of Johnson's character, more like they just turned a blind eye to it when he was winning - more fool them.

I was drawing a contrast with what's happening in the US. There, an entire section of the populace and large media groups are getting behind Trump's lies and actively supporting them. I think the fact that Johnson has been ejected from office testifies to the basic common sense of the British. Wish the yanks had more of it.

That SMH OP I posted makes some important points - Johnson was elected in a massive landslide and was hugely popular, especially among a lot of traditionally Labor seats. Obviously he's a pathological liar and fails the test of character, but I think those facts about him also need to be acknowledged.

at least the British had the common sense to forcibly eject a pathological liar from the highest office.

Valedictory from today’s Australian press

https://www.smh.com.au/world/europe/love-him-or-loathe-him-boris-johnson-was-britain-s-most-consequential-pm-since-thatcher-20220707-p5b00f.html

I read that he is tendering his resignation but will be hanging around for a couple of months until they sort out his replacement. That'll be kind of awkward, I imagine. He obviously and plainly had to go, but having the UK government in crisis can't be a good thing given the general stress, turmoil and instability in world affairs at this particular moment in history.

I attribute this sense of the division of the world into these contradictory opposites to be deeply embedded in Western cultural discourse and specifically with the emergence of liberal individualism.

Embodied Mind, at this point in the discussion, brings in the Buddhist philosophy of the 'middle way' - the Madhyamika of Nāgārjuna. They make the point that this has been influential in Asian cultures for millenia and that the West is only now catching on. Buddhism diagnoses the vacillation between what it calls 'eternalism and nihilism' from the early texts:

By and large, Kaccayana, this world is supported by a polarity, that of existence and non-existence. But when one sees the origination of the world as it actually is with right discernment, "non-existence" with reference to the world does not occur to one. When one sees the cessation of the world as it actually is with right discernment, "existence" with reference to the world does not occur to one. — Kaccayanagotta Sutta

There's a lot of convergence going on in that 'enactivist' domain between phenomenology and Buddhist philosophy, although it's actually quite tangential to the subject of this particular thread. (I'm one of the few on this forum who'll go into bat for the reality of universals, which is about as far from Buddhist philosophy as you can get.)

:100: This is also the exact topic of the chapter I mentioned in the Embodied Mind.

It's a coincidence that Bernstien has just passed away. It seems like the end of a long and very intellectually rich life. From that article, I'm very drawn to a lot of what he says - a consciously non-dogmatic attitude, very Socratic in his approach, it seems to me.

I think there’s something to that, yes. I don’t know who Bernstein is, but I bet he read Heidegger. — Xtrix

Just now I was listening to the audio version of the well-known book The Embodied Mind. Chapter 7 is called The Cartesian Anxiety, and then they present Heidegger and Gadamer's philosophy as one of the antidotes to it. They note that this kind of perspective is more typical of Continental as distinct from analytic philosophy, which tends to cling to the kind of realist picture descended from Cartesian dualism. (When I read about that term I borrowed Bernstein's book from the library, but it's a pretty tedious academic text. However that phrase has become something of a meme.)

This is why "eternal", in the sense of Christian theology, has the meaning of outside of time, non-temporal, never changing, while "eternal" in the materialist or physicalist sense means endless time — Metaphysician Undercover

Yes an important distinction.

So the real world in the naive sense is not "out there independent of us" but whatever gives rise to our everyday world is. And to say this is to espouse a kind of realism. — Janus

Yes, the kind called ‘shifting the goal posts’.

:up:

A lot of Cartesian dualism here— mind/body, subject/object, mental/physical, inside/outside. — Xtrix

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 coined the term in his 1983 book Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis.

A geometry teacher is not trying to teach about what exists in his/her mind but the triangle "out there." Question: suppose I say triangles exist in my mind and they have four sides. How could anyone dispute what I say? Sure, triangles in another person's mind might have three sides but so what? Triangles in someone else's mind might have five sides. Clearly a definition of triangle is needed. Would you agree that definitions exist in the external world not only in our minds? — Art48

Here you're forced to accept the model of the world divided into the two domains - the mind 'in here', private and subjective, the world 'out there', public and objective. They're your only options.

But intelligible objects such as triangles do not exist in either sense. They're not the property of individual minds, but they're also not denizens of a purported external world. This is often regarded as baffling to modern thinking. While on the one hand Galileo claimed (and it is widely accepted) that 'the book of nature is written in mathematics', Einstein also said that 'the most incomprehensible thing about the world was that it was comprehensible.' His younger contemporary Eugene Wigner wondered about the 'unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences' which seems to defy explanation (the word 'miracle' occurs 12 times in his famous essay of that name.)

So what's going on here? I think the problem has to do with the conception of mind and nature that characterises modern Western culture, and the way it divides the world into subject and object. These are imagined as separate domains - but they're ultimately not that. So in that picture, you have ideas 'in here' that somehow represent objects 'out there'.

That is the Gordian knot that needs to be untied. Frege understood it in terms of a 'third realm', neither objective nor subjective, comprising the objects of mathematics and geometry, which are grasped by rational thought:

Frege held that both the thought contents that constitute the proof-structure of mathematics and the subject matter of these thought contents (extensions, functions) exist. He also thought that these entities are non-spatial, non-temporal, causally inert, and independent for their existence and natures from any person's thinking them or thinking about them. Frege proposed a picturesque metaphor of thought contents as existing in a "third realm". This "realm" counted as "third" because it was comparable to but different from the realm of physical objects and the realm of mental entities. I think that Frege held, in the main body of his career, that not only thought contents, but numbers and functions were members of this third realm. Entities in the other realms depended for determinate identities on functions (concepts) in the third realm. Since logic was committed to this realm, and since all sciences contained logic, all sciences were committed to and were partly about elements of this realm. Broadly speaking, Frege was a Platonist about logical objects (like numbers and truth values), functions, and thought contents. — Tyler Burge, Frege on Knowing the Third Realm

So in this view, universals and numbers are real, but they're not existent in the sense that phenomenal objects are. And that's a no-go for today's empiricism. There is simply no conceptual space for the notion of reals that exist in any way other than as (external) things or (internal) ideas. And all of that ultimately goes back to the medieval debates about (platonic) realism vs nominalism. Nominalism - the forerunners of the later empiricist philosophers - won the day, and history, as it is said, is written by the victors. As a consequence, nominalism and empiricism is so deeply embedded in our cultural discourse that we can mostly only look through it, not at it. And that's what you're seeing here.

For my sake....what is scientific idealism? Single sentence kinda thing? — Mww

Scientists who don't accept that matter (matter/energy) is the fundamental substance. e.g. Richard Conn Henry The Mental Universe, Bernard D'Espagnat What we call Reality is a State of Mind. But, hey, I was one of the first to enroll in Science and Nonduality and went to the first conference in 2009.

By realism I mean simply the idea that there is something "out there" which has a casual role in perceptions. — Count Timothy von Icarus

The distinction I see is between scientific/philosophical materialism/physicalism, and idealism. Idealism is a realist philosophy, but it has a different conception of what constitutes reality, one which seems unreal from the materialist point of view.

Well there is such a thing as'scientific idealism'. We're seeing it emerge.

https://www.philosophy-of-education.org/consciousness-scientific-materialism-and-the-new-idealism/

https://blog.apaonline.org/2018/12/03/dusting-off-dualism/

In the wiki reference, there’s a citation, #9. — Mww

No, didn't notice that one.

How would you separate the aspects of human thought which are innate and eternal, as platonic realism dictates, from the aspects which are constructed by the human mind, and are "evolving"? — Metaphysician Undercover

There's an entire essay in this question, but to answer very briefly - I think 'eternal' is oversold for Platonic ideas and the like. It's more that they're non-temporal - that they don't come into or go out of existence - they're not temporally delimited or composed of parts.

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

The evolution of h. sapiens is fairly well understood. But I share with Alfred Russel Wallace scepticism that the intellectual, artistic and creative faculties can be understood solely through the lens of evolutionary biology. That we evolved, just as the science says, but we 'passed a threshhold' when we learned reason and speech. I think the Greek philosophers literally discovered and articulated the power of reason, the Logos. And I think Western culture, on the whole, has since forgotten it again.

you also allow features which are constructions of the mind when you want to discredit naive realism. — Metaphysician Undercover

Insightful observation. Naive realism and empiricist philosophy, as you know, rejects 'innate ideas'. That is what practically defines them. So I believe that the intelligence has some innate capacities. (Heaven knows, the mind might even have memories or insights from previous lives, as Plato seemed to accept. Perhaps that is passed on through something like morphic resonance.) In any case, there are universal ideas, and they're bigger than any individual or any specific culture. Even many of the principles discovered by science can be included in that.

From this perspective, would we as human beings, have a vantage point, toward understanding the nature of true, pure, separate, independent, and immaterial Forms? If this form of dualism which you seem to be proposing places the innate, eternal Ideas, of platonic realism, as the subject matter, being the material content of the intelligible object, how can we turn this around to give true separate, existence to the independent Forms, as immaterial? — Metaphysician Undercover

Dualism - partially physical and partially intellectual (noetic in the traditional sense). One foot in each world. Look at what humans have been capable of. I don't think physical evolution alone accounts for that. The pre-modern intuition was that 'nous', the power of reason, provided insight into the causal realm. That has also largely been lost (as per Max Horkheimer, The Eclipse of Reason, amongst other sources.)

And the idea of eternal, unchanging intelligible objects, as platonic forms, must be dismissed as incoherent. — Metaphysician Undercover

That's because it's not what I mean, you continually misconstrue it whenever it's discussed, from my point of view.

Hoffman is coming from this from a materialist scientific frame of mind instead of with philosophy. — Gregory

Hoffman rejects physicalism/materialism. In his view consciousness is fundamental. His wiki entry is here https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_D._Hoffman

It's an intriguing idea. Do you believe that ideas like 'goodness' and 'beauty' are part of our cognitive heritage and how would this differ to them being instantiations of Platonic forms? — Tom Storm

Again, Pinter's book is not a philosophy book as such. So he himself doesn't go into that. But I have a strong interest in Platonic idealism, and I think you can map it against his model. I see h. sapiens rational and linguistic abilities as developing out of, or evolving from, the simpler cognitive forms present in earlier species. H. Sapiens crossed a developmental threshold with the development of reason, story-telling, speech and self-awareness. Within that model, such notions Plato's universal ideas are like consistent structures within a rational intelligence. (That's more the subject of Kelly Ross' article Meaning and the Problem of Universals.)

The basic takeway from Pinter's book, is that ideas, and indeed all qualia (qualitative mental states) are not objectively real i.e. they don't exist in a way which is discernable to objective measurement (which of course is the hard problem, which he mentions). But they're real, in that they comprise the foundational elements of our own experience of the world. You can see how that fits into a kind of dualist theory but he supports it with many references from cognitive science.

As far as the science goes he’s pretty mainstream evolutionary theory. But I do note in the final chapter, he makes the point that all living processes are interpretive - he seems to allude to biosemiosis although he doesn’t use that term. But the basic idea is that even the simplest creatures recognise objects in their environment even if in very basic forms compared to those of higher animals. This is the basis of all evolved cognitive systems including h. Sapiens. You could say that our cognitive systems designate what ‘things’ are.

And it is one book well worth reading. It's quite brief, very direct and to the point. Phenomenology of Spirit, it ain't. :-) (Here's the amazon page. You will note the positive review - they're all 5 star - by yours truly.)

In Wheeler's participatory universe and later iterations by other physicists there are not definite "objects" or "space" before observation/interaction, but observation also doesn't generate what it finds wholly on its own. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Neither does it do so in Kant's philosophy.

So that "something" is very strange in comparison to naive realism, but it is also still quite far from a model where the self wholly generates that which it finds around it. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Which is referred to as 'subjective idealism', and usually associated with Berkeley, which Kant took pains to differentiate himself from.

If realism understands sensory perception to be a veridical representation of mind-independent objects then it certainly is ruled out by these considerations. Hoffman calls his position 'conscious realism':

Conscious Realism is described as a non-physicalist monism which holds that consciousness is the primary reality and the physical world emerges from that. The objective world consists of conscious agents and their experiences. "What exists in the objective world, independent of my perceptions, is a world of conscious agents, not a world of unconscious particles and fields. Those particles and fields are icons in the MUIs of conscious agents but are not themselves fundamental denizens of the objective world. Consciousness is fundamental.

Plainly an idealist philosophy in my reckoning.

Science is hamstrung by these persistent illusions and our tendency to project models that work with our perceptual system into reality. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Q: If snakes aren’t snakes and trains aren’t trains, what are they?

Hoffman: 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. Evolution shapes acceptable solutions, not optimal ones. A snake is an acceptable solution to the problem of telling me how to act in a situation. My snakes and trains are my mental representations; your snakes and trains are your mental representations.

Realist, eh? ;-)

I agree that how humans use language is a state of affairs, but is there an ultimate arbiter of the truth of certain statements about the world, for example about the truth of empirical propositions? Are there objective truths about physical nature, or are these truths relative to contingent and conventional linguistic states of affairs?

Is the claim that dinosaurs existed before anybody talked about them incoherent? What if we instead say that SOMETHING existed before language-using communities named and defined them, but we can’t say that they were dinosaurs , since that is a conceptual convention? — Joshs

I've often used a passage from Bryan Magee's book on Schopenhauer to argue this very point, based on Kant's claim 'if I were to take away the thinking subject, the whole corporeal world would have to disappear.' That leads to the interminable wrangle about trees in forests, railway cars with no wheels, and so on - the apparently preposterous idea that should I stop observing something, that it vanishes or ceases to exist.

After many debates about it, I express it like this: that the word 'exist' or anything that we designated as 'an existing thing' carries a concealed premise. The mind - not your or my mind in particular, but the mind - provides the setting, the stage, the point-of-view, within which anything we designate as 'existing' is meaningful. The sense in which anything exists 'outside' or 'apart from' that is a meaningless question.

It doesn't literally mean that nothing exists outside of the mind, but that the manner or sense in which it exists is unintelligible as a matter of definition. It's easy to imagine a world without any observer. But there's still a point of view implicit in that image, because it is ordered. There's an image of the planets, stars, the earth, sun, and so on. It might be a scientifically-precise image, informed by recent cosmology. But if you completely remove any point of view or perspective then there can be no image at all, nor any discrete objects or relationships - or even space and time, which depend on a sense of scale in order to be meaningful. All discussion of any subject - what happened just now, or at the beginning of the cosmos - is set against that implicit understanding, which is (as you say) the ineliminable 'subjective pole' of existence. The mistake of naturalism (articulated in Husserl's criticism) is to forget that (and isn't this the 'forgetfulness of being', of later phenomenology?)

Science represent a widely shared niche within which we can come to agreement on practices of behavior. The essence of truth is in the relative stability and pragmatic usefulness of agreed upon conventions of practice, rather than in conformity of our representations with ‘intrinsic’ objective features of a world. — Joshs

:up: I agree, but it's worth noting that in Greek philosophy, it was still held that true knowledge - knowledge of what truly is - is the ultimate end. In Buddhist philosophy it is the quality of sagacity (possessed by the Buddha) of yathābhūtaṃ, 'seeing it like it is', or of vidya 'true knowledge', or in Latin 'veritas' - there are various terms in different traditions. But that is not something contemplated by modern philosophy on the whole, due to the fragmentation of the various fields of knowledge.

Incidentally you may be interested in this article about the convergenges between Buddhism and phenomenology.

The more unique idea is that discrete objects, three dimensional space, etc. is simply a more deeply engrained illusion. Science is hamstrung by these persistent illusions and our tendency to project models that work with our perceptual system into reality. — Count Timothy von Icarus

That's where Charles Pinter's book Mind and the Cosmic Order has some interesting things to say. He says that all sentient creatures up to and including humans negotiate their environment by seeing in 'gestalts' which are ordered wholes. But these gestalts don't exist in the physical world, they're wholly and solely the creation of the animal mind. He doesn't say that the external world doesn't exist, only that the way in which it exists is devoid of features, structure and form, which are imputed to it by the mind.

However what appears missing in both Hoffman and Pinter's ideas is an account of reason. Humans are distinct from other creatures in having meta-cognition - they are able to examine their own cognition and ask questions about it through deductive reasoning. This suggests it is possible to arrive at a kind of understanding which is not simply given by way of sensory data (which is the ancient conception of rationalist philosophy).

But it is interesting how both support the model of the mind as a constructive process that creates, generates or builds our world-picture, which seems to me to irrevocably disrupt the view of naive realism.

(Also might be of interest that Hoffman is one of the academic advisors to Kastup's Essentia Foundation.)

Hoffman is a realist — Count Timothy von Icarus

How does that square with this statement from his interview:

The central lesson of quantum physics is clear: There are no public objects sitting out there in some preexisting space. As the physicist John Wheeler put it, “Useful as it is under ordinary circumstances to say that the world exists ‘out there’ independent of us, that view can no longer be upheld.”

thanks, hadn't noticed that second usage. Careless on my part. Hope it doesn't detract from the main point.

OK, if we require “exist” to apply to only things in space/time, then universals don’t exist but they subsist. But if we make this requirement of "exist", then it seems “is” and “was” are fundamentally different. — Art48

I wouldn't bring time into it. I think Russell is reaching for a word to describe something which is very difficult to articulate in common language. The literal meaning of 'subsist' is nothing like what he's trying to convey here. He wants to say that although universals are real, they're not existents, so he coins the term 'subsist' to try and convey the sense in which they are real.

Consider the meaning of 'to exist'. It is a compound of 'ex-' meaning outside (compare external, exile) and 'ist', to stand. So 'to exist' is to be differentiated, to have an identity, to be this as distinct from that.

But then, the question is in what sense universals exist. Russell says:

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.

But, just to add a bit more depth to that concept - what of real numbers? They too are real in the sense that they are the same for all who can count, but they too do not exist as phenomenal objects. They too are in that sense 'outside' time or space (although that can be a misleading metaphor if it connotes some real location, some ethereal realm.)

So on that account I think a distinction can be made between what is real, and what exists - whereas it is generally assumed, I think, in modern philosophy, that these are synonymous terms.

There's a passage I have often quoted on this forum (and the earlier forum) on Augustine on Intelligible Objects. It conveys very clearly, in my mind, the nature of intelligible objects, which include things like numbers, geometrical principles, and much else besides. It's a link to a Google Books passage, I trust it will display alright, click here (scroll up, the list starts on the previous page.)

The luminiferous aether is an abstract object that the universe fails to instantiate. — Art48

I don't see it like that. I think the aether is a failed hypothetical posit. It's not abstract in the sense that numbers or universals are.

I don't think many people are thinking about it, although I'd be glad to be proven wrong. Aristotelian or scholastic realism, represented by Aquinas, does have its contemporary defenders in the form of 'analytical Thomism'. They're not generally identified as idealist, although they're surely no friends of materialism either. But it should be recalled that the very term 'idealism' only came into use in the 17th century, it was never used by the ancients or medieval philosophers.

Incidentally I thought I'd mention the Essentia Foundation https://www.essentiafoundation.org/ which is associated with Bernardo Kastrup and also Donald Hoffman, among many others. It's a think-tank of sorts, dedicated to current idealist philosophy and science.

Berkeley is known as one of the three principle British empiricists - he himself was Irish - along with John Locke and David Hume. And the reason why he is classified as such, is because, with Locke and Hume, he believed that knowledge is acquired solely through experience, rejecting the ‘innate ideas’ of Platonism and the Aristotelian idea of universals. He was of course famously opposed to materialism, but he was still regarded as an empiricist philosopher due to that emphasis on the primacy of sensations. He said ‘I do not argue against the existence of any one thing that we can apprehend, either by sense or reflection. That the things I see with my eyes and touch with my hands do exist, really exist, I make not the least question. The only thing whose existence we deny, is that which philosophers call matter or corporeal substance.’ Of course it’s also true that his philosophy depends entirely on belief in God, without whom there would be no foundation or support for anything whatever, so the sceptic will claim that he appeals to a fictitious deity in support of a fanciful philosophy.

As I mentioned previously, Berkeley’s dialogues are a model of ingenious philosophical prose, although I don’t regard his system as a satisfactory form of idealism, mainly because of his nominalism. But I don’t reject it outright, either.

He's known as one of the great British empiricists. — Bartricks

Berkeley is most decidedly not an empiricist. — Bartricks

He is known as an empiricist due to his emphasis on the primacy of sensations. I don’t think the rest of your interpretation stands but as you invariably begin to insult and belittle anyone who dares disagree with you I have no desire to engage.

Do you have an explanation why there are philosophers who disagreed with Berkeley's arguments to this day? — Marchesk

Berkeley's major problem is that he's a strict empiricist, meaning that his nominalism won't admit the reality of universals. So he has no coherent account of the function of reason. When Kant's first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason was published, some of his reviewers thought he was simply re-stating Berkeley's philosophy, which infuriated him, so in the second edition he included his Refutation of Idealism

Kant intends to refute what he calls problematic idealism, according to which the existence of objects outside us in space is “doubtful and indemonstrable” (B274). His strategy is to derive the claim that such objects exist from my awareness that my representations have a specific temporal order. At the present time I am aware of the specific temporal order of many of my past experiences, an awareness produced by memory. But what is it about what I remember that allows me to determine the temporal order of my experiences? There must be something by reference to which I can correlate the remembered experiences that allows me to determine their temporal order.

But it's also important to say that Berkeley' arguments and rhetoric are ingenious and persuasive, and remain a challenge to this day. There are some excellent editions of Berkeley's dialogues on Early Modern Texts and if you take time to peruse them you will see that he anticipates and disposes of many seemingly obvious objections to his philosophy.

I will say that it is perfectly true that universals do not exist, but Russell adds this tantilising qualification to his discussion:

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. The world of universals, therefore, may also be described as the world of being. — Russell, World of Universals

In that sense, universals don't exist, but are the structures within reason that enable the mind to discern general truths about the world. I like to think of them as the ligatures of reason.

Brief defense of universals, bolds added.

As a matter of fact, if any one were anxious to deny altogether that there are such things as universals, we should find that we cannot strictly prove that there are such entities as qualities, i.e. the universals represented by adjectives and substantives, whereas we can prove that there must be relations, i.e. the sort of universals generally represented by verbs and prepositions.

Let us take in illustration the universal whiteness. If we believe that there is such a universal, we shall say that things are white because they have the quality of whiteness. This view, however, was strenuously denied by Berkeley and Hume, who have been followed in this by later empiricists. The form which their denial took was to deny that there are such things as 'abstract ideas '. When we want to think of whiteness, they said, we form an image of some particular white thing, and reason concerning this particular, taking care not to deduce anything concerning it which we cannot see to be equally true of any other white thing. As an account of our actual mental processes, this is no doubt largely true. In geometry, for example, when we wish to prove something about all triangles, we draw a particular triangle and reason about it, taking care not to use any characteristic which it does not share with other triangles. The beginner, in order to avoid error, often finds it useful to draw several triangles, as unlike each other as possible, in order to make sure that his reasoning is equally applicable to all of them.

But a difficulty emerges as soon as we ask ourselves how we know that a thing is white or a triangle. If we wish to avoid the universals whiteness and triangularity, we shall choose some particular patch of white or some particular triangle, and say that anything is white or a triangle if it has the right sort of resemblance to our chosen particular. But then the resemblance required will have to be a universal. Since there are many white things, the resemblance must hold between many pairs of particular white things; and this is the characteristic of a universal. It will be useless to say that there is a different resemblance for each pair, for then we shall have to say that these resemblances resemble each other, and thus at last we shall be forced to admit resemblance as a universal. The relation of resemblance, therefore, must be a true universal. And having been forced to admit this universal, we find that it is no longer worth while to invent difficult and unplausible theories to avoid the admission of such universals as whiteness and triangularity. ...

It is largely the very peculiar kind of being that belongs to universals which has led many people to suppose that they are really mental. We can think of a universal, and our thinking then exists in a perfectly ordinary sense, like any other mental act. Suppose, for example, that we are thinking of whiteness. Then in one sense it may be said that whiteness is 'in our mind'. ... In the strict sense, it is not whiteness that is in our mind, but the act of thinking of whiteness. The connected ambiguity in the word 'idea', which we noted at the same time, also causes confusion here. In one sense of this word, namely the sense in which it denotes the object of an act of thought, whiteness is an 'idea'.

Hence, if the ambiguity is not guarded against, we may come to think that whiteness is an 'idea' in the other sense, i.e. an act of thought; and thus we come to think that whiteness is mental. But in so thinking, we rob it of its essential quality of universality. One man's act of thought is necessarily a different thing from another man's; one man's act of thought at one time is necessarily a different thing from the same man's act of thought at another time. Hence, if whiteness were the thought as opposed to its object, no two different men could think of it, and no one man could think of it twice. That which many different thoughts of whiteness have in common is their object, and this object is different from all of them. Thus universals are not thoughts, though when known they are the objects of thoughts. — Bertrand Russell, World of Universals

Consider that when you think about triangularity, as you might when proving a geometrical theorem, it is necessarily perfect triangularity that you are contemplating, not some mere approximation of it. Triangularity as your intellect grasps it is entirely determinate or exact; for example, what you grasp is the notion of a closed plane figure with three perfectly straight sides, rather than that of something which may or may not have straight sides or which may or may not be closed. Of course, your mental image of a triangle might not be exact, but rather indeterminate and fuzzy. But to grasp something with the intellect is not the same as to form a mental image of it. For any mental image of a triangle is necessarily going to be of an isosceles triangle specifically, or of a scalene one, or an equilateral one; but the concept of triangularity that your intellect grasps applies to all triangles alike. Any mental image of a triangle is going to have certain features, such as a particular color, that are no part of the concept of triangularity in general. A mental image is something private and subjective, while the concept of triangularity is objective and grasped by many minds at once. — Edward Feser

The things which are responsible for your mind having something to assimilate. — Marchesk

Yes - concepts without percepts (=mind with nothing to perceive) are empty, but percepts without concepts (=perception with no mind to organise them) is blind.

If you take 'the universe' and remove from it all structures, all features, all relative distances, and the framework of time - what do you see?

Should we bring Meillassoux and fossils into the discussion? Evolution has already been mentioned. — Marchesk

Reminds me to dig up a critique of Mellasioux I noticed recently - Here, but it's pretty dense.