Interesting. Although Hart identifies as a socialist, he mocks MAGA and openly disparages evangelicals which he calls a heretical. He writes amusingly about how much he dislikes all forms of conservative politics (even if he supports a form of Christian nostolgia). He can be quite a bitch — Tom Storm

Thanks for pointing that out. It’s fascinating how Hart’s and Milbank’s metaphysics are so close, yet Milbank is sympathetic to economic and social conservatism while Hart rejects both. I don’t know enough about non-Marxist versions of socialism to clearly understand his arguments, but perhaps he sees conservatism as relying on secular
Enlightenment notions removed from divine truths and moral directives.

Possibly. I think he takes the Gospels as a proto-radical Marxism.

↪Joshs Possibly. I think he takes the Gospels as a proto-radical Marxism. — Tom Storm

I found more on this. The middle ages offers plenty of examples of a pre-Marxist socialism. Benedictine, Cistercian, and later mendicant monasteries practiced common ownership, collective labor, and distribution by need. Thinkers like Aquinas affirmed private property only instrumentally, arguing that goods are privately administered for the sake of order but remain morally common. In cases of necessity, the poor have a right to the goods of the rich—a claim that directly contradicts Enlightenment property absolutism.

Also, guilds regulated production, wages, training, and pricing not to maximize efficiency but to preserve social cohesion, moral standards, and mutual obligation. Competition was restrained, not celebrated. Labor was dignified as participation in a common good, not commodified as an abstract input.

So it seems that Hart really is drawing from pre-Enlightenment models to produce his notion of socialism.

Can you see why Hart rejects naturalism? Kantians and post-Kantians look at the idea of a clockwork universe made up of little universal bits with assigned mathematical attributes interacting on the basis of a pre—assigned causal logic, and the say, sure, the universe looks that way becuase we set it up on the basis of these pre-suppositions. Hart says the same thing, but rather than arguing that we need to investigate how the subject imposes these schemes, or how they arise and change historically through subject-object interaction, he says we need to open our eyes to how the universe is put together, not as components of a giant, ethically neutral machine or clock (naturalism), but as a moral system whose very component has a vital moral role to play in its purposes.

I believe it is also about the problem of explaining reason from purely naturalistic terms. How can, for instance, logic necessity be explained in terms of physical causation, laws etc?

Indeed. :up:

Also: intelligibility is the property of being understandable, at least in principle, by an intellect. So, arguably, anything in order to be 'intelligible' should require the possibility of the existence of an intellect.

So if physical reality is intelligible, the potential existence of an intellect is requied from an essential feature of physical reality. This would be indeed an odd thing to say in naturalistic views.

Yes, I knew people like this in the late 1970s (I was a kid). They were Christian socialists who located their ideas in teh pre-enlightenment period. There are folk like these left in the Catholic Church in Melbourne where I live. They dislike Rome and find the conservative tradition of the church today to be anathema.

Do you call these sorts of position 'nostalgia projects' or is that too reductive?

Also: intelligibility is the property of being understandable, at least in principle, by an intellect. So, arguably, anything in order to be 'intelligible' should require the possibility of the existence of an intellect.

So if physical reality is intelligible, the potential existence of an intellect is requied from an essential feature of physical reality. This would be indeed an odd thing to say in naturalistic views. — boundless

Yes, that's my read too.

:up:

Joshs Yes, I knew people like this in the late 1970s (I was a kid). They were Christian socialists who located their ideas in teh pre-enlightenment period. There are folk like these left in the Catholic Church in Melbourne where I live. They dislike Rome and find the conservative tradition of the church today to be anathema.

Do you call these sorts of position 'nostalgia projects' or is that too reductive? — Tom Storm

I don’t know if you saw my edit. I wrote:


Can you see why Hart rejects naturalism? Kantians and post-Kantians look at the idea of a clockwork universe made up of little universal bits with assigned mathematical attributes interacting on the basis of a pre—assigned causal logic, and the say, sure, the universe looks that way becuase we set it up on the basis of these pre-suppositions. Hart says the same thing, but rather than arguing that we need to investigate how the subject imposes these schemes, or how they arise and change historically through subject-object interaction, he says we need to open our eyes to how the universe is put together, not as components of a giant, ethically neutral machine or clock (naturalism), but as a moral system whose every component has a vital moral role to play in its purposes.

In sum, Kantians and post-Kantians reject naive naturalism because it ignores the contribution of the subject. Hart rejects naive naturalism in favor of an even more naive divine naturalism.

For the mathematical plaronists, mathematics isnt merely a language science happens to use; it is the deep structure of reality itself. When science relies on logical implication or mathematical necessity, it is latching onto features that exist independently of human cognition, culture, or conceptual schemes. ...

Where Kant treats logic as a fixed formal framework and mathematics as grounded in space and time, Husserl insists that both emerge from pre-theoretical, intuitive practice such as counting, collecting, comparing and iterating, which are then progressively purified into exact, ideal structures. Logical and mathematical necessity is not imposed by an innate cognitive grid but arises from the eidetic invariants of these acts. — Joshs

I don’t think the break is as radical as you’re suggesting. The deeper difficulty, it seems to me, lies in how the reality of number—using “number” here as a stand-in for intelligibles generally—is being conceived. As soon as numbers or logical forms are described as objects, a fundamental error has already crept in: reification. That framing immediately generates the familiar but unproductive questions about what kind of objects they are, where they “exist,” and whether they inhabit some special realm.

This is why I’m drawn to Husserl’s way of handling the issue (even though much of him remains unread by me). But it seems to me that on his account, idealities are neither empirical entities nor mind-independent objects in a Platonist sense, but neither are they arbitrary constructions or merely subjective projections. hey are constituted in and through intentional acts, yet once constituted they possess a form of objectivity and necessity that is not reducible to any particular psychological episode. Their validity is not invented, even if their articulation is historically and conceptually mediated. This is where I think the crucial insight lies: intelligibles as being mind-independent in the sense of independent of your or my or anyone's mind, but at the same time, only being perceptible to reason. So they're mind-independent in one sense, but not in another, and more important, sense. (Have a look at this review of a text on phenomenology and mathematics, the highlighted passage makes this point.)

Seen this way, Husserl’s position doesn’t strike me as radically anti-Platonist so much as anti-reification. What is rejected is not intelligibility as a feature of reality, but the idea that intelligibility must take the form of quasi-things standing alongside empirical objects. The Kantian and post-Kantian insight that intelligibility is bound up with the conditions of experience need not be read as a denial of reality to intelligibles, only as a rejection of a certain ontological picture. I’m tempted to locate it earlier, in the shift toward univocity, where intelligibles begin to be treated as objects rather than acts. In Aquinas, intelligibility is participatory: knowing is an act in which form is shared, not a relation to an abstract item. Once intelligibles are reified, the debate inevitably becomes about where they are located—mind-independent realm or transcendental constitution. Husserl’s resistance to Platonism looks to me less like a denial of intelligibility than a rejection of that reification.

This is where the 'error of empiricism' (per Jacques Maritain) becomes evident: it insists on the idea of a mind-independent empirical object, that reality is what exists independently of any cognitive agent. That's the deep contradiction in modern thought.

As regards politics: I'm aware of the connection between these kinds of critiques and conservative or reactionary political movements. You see it also in the connection between the perennialist and their hostility to modernity. I'm dismayed by it, and certainly would not want to be identified with any of the conservative politicians you mention, whom I generally despise. But, you know, 'modernity' as a state of mind really does have some gaping holes in it. But it's the water in which we swim.

Premise 1: Naturalism explains everything in terms of physical causes and effects.
Premise 2: Physical causes and effects, by themselves, have no meaning or “aboutness.”
Premise 3: Human thoughts, beliefs, and concepts are intentional—they are about things and can be true or false.
Premise 4: Intentionality (aboutness, meaning, truth) cannot be reduced to or derived from purely physical processes.
Conclusion: Therefore, naturalism cannot fully explain intentionality; the intelligibility of thought points beyond purely naturalistic causes. — Tom Storm

That OP I drafted recently, 'the predicament of modernity', is basically about this. It says, there's a clearly discernable historical geneaology behind this problem. It is the 'Cartesian division', elaborated from and by the primary/secondary qualities, Galileo's quantification of nature, the split between mind and matter. All of which are fundamental to what Vervaeke calls 'the grammar of modernity', that is, they're sown into the way we think about 'everything', consciously or not (and most of us aren't.) Some of the best lectures in the Awakening from the Meaning Crisis are about exactly this point (the ones around 'Death of the Universe', Descartes, Luther etc.) So it gives us a world in which 'the universe' is vast, blind and indifferent, in which we, the sovereign individual, who is responsible for defining 'freedom' and 'happiness' on our own terms, are cast adrift like accidental tourists.

Speaking of D B Hart, an extended passage from his review of Daniel Dennett's last book:

In the pre-modern vision of things, the cosmos had been seen as an inherently purposive structure of diverse but integrally inseparable rational relations — for instance, the Aristotelian aitia, which are conventionally translated as “causes,” but which are nothing like the uniform material “causes” of the mechanistic philosophy. And so the natural order was seen as a reality already akin to intellect. Hence the mind, rather than an anomalous tenant of an alien universe, was instead the most concentrated and luminous expression of nature’s deepest essence. This is why it could pass with such wanton liberty through the “veil of Isis” and ever deeper into nature’s inner mysteries.

The Cartesian picture, by contrast, was a chimera, an ungainly and extrinsic alliance of antinomies. And reason abhors a dualism. Moreover, the sciences in their modern form aspire to universal explanation, ideally by way of the most comprehensive and parsimonious principles possible. So it was inevitable that what began as an imperfect method for studying concrete particulars would soon metastasize into a metaphysics of the whole of reality. The manifest image was soon demoted to sheer illusion, and the mind that perceived it to an emergent product of the real (which is to say, mindless) causal order. — D B Hart, The Illusionist

That pretty well nails it.

Aboutness is a feature of mind, but the object is not. Obviously the object cannot be derived from the physical processes that give the mind its ability to identify objects.

Therefore, P4 is false! :nerd:

This requires a pretty high level of expertise to get fully across, doesn't it?

Aboutness is a feature of mind, but the object is not. Obviously the object cannot be derived from the physical processes that give the mind its ability to identify objects.

Therefore, P4 is false! :nerd: — jkop

I'll let you comment on this one, since I'm trying to understand Hart not criticise the argument.

Can you see why Hart rejects naturalism? Kantians and post-Kantians look at the idea of a clockwork universe made up of little universal bits with assigned mathematical attributes interacting on the basis of a pre—assigned causal logic, and the say, sure, the universe looks that way becuase we set it up on the basis of these pre-suppositions. — Joshs

Yep, I understand this part of his argument. I've even heard Chomsky talk about the idea of materialism as being incoherent for similar reasons, sans the theistic solutions.

Hart says the same thing, but rather than arguing that we need to investigate how the subject imposes these schemes, or how they arise and change historically through subject-object interaction, he says we need to open our eyes to how the universe is put together, not as components of a giant, ethically neutral machine or clock (naturalism), but as a moral system whose every component has a vital moral role to play in its purposes. — Joshs

Yes, well, Hart argues that mind, language, and life share attributes and are aspects of the Great Mind (God), who makes all of this meaningful. A Neoplatonist would say that, right? It seems to me that he touches upon a lot of post-modern ideas aroudn language and meaning but resolves them instead with classical foundationalism.

Not expertise, just reading.

Aboutness is a feature of mind, but the object is not. — jkop

But this is basically naive realism. It assumes that we can differentiate 'the object' from 'what we know of the object', as if we were assuming a perspective outside both 'our knowledge of the object' and 'the object'. But that is precisely what we can't do, for the reasons given by Kant.

Not expertise, just reading. — Wayfarer

Hmmm, well, isn’t expertise largely built from wide reading and remembering the right bits? For an average person like me, who often struggles to get through a paragraph, the amount of reading and comprehension required to actually make use of that knowledge is prodigious. I mean, I'd like to make use of Lloyd Gerson, but it's impossible.

I don't consider myself expert. An expert has considerable training in a discipline or subject area. I'm very much aware of gaps in my knowledge and training. I like to think I had an epiphanic moment that disclosed something all at once — not in detail, but in outline, 'aperçu' as it is said— and I’ve been orienting myself by it ever since. The image that comes to mind is being lost in a dense forest during a storm, when a flash of lightning briefly illuminates a magnificent structure on a distant hill. You can no longer see it, but you can’t forget that you did see it, and everything since has been an attempt to find a way toward it.

I'm with you on Lloyd Gerson - I wonder if there would be a gap in the market for a book about Gerson for non-academic readers (although you'd have to be an expert to write it.) Have a read of Joining the Ur-Platonist Alliance (Edward Feser).

The image that comes to mind is being lost in a dense forest during a storm, when a flash of lightning briefly illuminates a magnificent structure on a distant hill. You can no longer see it, but you can’t forget that you did see it, and everything since has been an attempt to find a way toward it. — Wayfarer

I like this and it resonates.

As soon as numbers or logical forms are described as objects, a fundamental error has already crept in: reification. That framing immediately generates the familiar but unproductive questions about what kind of objects they are, where they “exist,” and whether they inhabit some special realm.

This is why I’m drawn to Husserl’s way of handling the issue (even though much of him remains unread by me). But it seems to me that on his account, idealities are neither empirical entities nor mind-independent objects in a Platonist sense, but neither are they arbitrary constructions or merely subjective projections. hey are constituted in and through intentional acts, yet once constituted they possess a form of objectivity and necessity that is not reducible to any particular psychological episode. Their validity is not invented, even if their articulation is historically and conceptually mediated. This is where I think the crucial insight lies: intelligibles as being mind-independent in the sense of independent of your or my or anyone's mind, but at the same time, only being perceptible to reason. So they're mind-independent in one sense, but not in another, and more important, sense. (Have a look at this review of a text on phenomenology and mathematics, the highlighted passage makes this point.) — Wayfarer

The specter of platonism isn’t vanquished simply by denying number the status of object. The question is whether mathematical truths are true independently of any constituting act whatsoever. The question isnt whether idealities are “independent of your or my mind”, its whether they are independent of intentionality as such. Husserl’s answer is no. They are an effect of the projective noetic gesture of intentional synthesis.

“The "object" of consciousness, the object as having identity "with itself" during the flowing subjective process, does not come into the process from outside; on the contrary, it is included as a sense in the subjective process itself and thus as an "intentional effect" produced by the synthesis of consciousness.

For Aquinas, intelligibility is participatory because forms are grounded in esse, ultimately in divine intellect. Participation presupposes a metaphysics of being in which intelligibility is ontologically prior to cognition, even if not objectified as a “thing.” Husserl, by contrast, explicitly suspends any such metaphysical grounding. His idealities are constituted within intentional life without appeal to being-as-such. One cannot simply slide from Husserl to Aquinas by appealing to “anti-reification” without confronting that Husserl rejects exactly the metaphysical realism Aquinas presupposes.

For both Husserl and Kant, the point is not just that intelligibles are not objects, but that their necessity is grounded in structures of cognition or intentionality, not in being itself. Intelligibility is not intrinsic to reality independently of those conditions.

For both Husserl and Kant, the point is not just that intelligibles are not objects, but that their necessity is grounded in structures of cognition or intentionality, not in being itself. — Joshs

Of course, Husserl is in no way re-stating classical metaphysics, and I’m not trying to equate the two. But I do think his analysis recovers—within a radically different methodological framework—an earlier insight that was obscured once intelligibles came to be treated as existents. The decisive error is not realism as such, but reification: the assumption that universals must be objects of some kind—typically “abstract objects”—prompting questions like do they exist? and what sort of things are they?

Read differently, intelligibility does not concern objects at all, but a necessary structure of reason—necessary, objective, and invariant, yet accessible only in and through acts of understanding. In this sense, its being is inseparable from its givenness to reason, without collapsing into subjectivity or projection. Put that way, the position seems very close to Husserl’s own, once the misleading connotations of “constitution” as fabrication or projection are set aside.

This way of reading the terrain is also suggested by John Vervaeke, who has pointed to Thinking Being by Eric Perl as a model of participatory knowing (which is where I encountered it). Perl’s account makes explicit what is often missed in these debates: intelligibility is neither an object standing over against the mind nor a mere effect of cognition, but something disclosed in the act of knowing itself—where thinking and what is thought, knower and known, are formally united.

The only spectre that has to be slain here is the 'ghost in the machine'.

Read differently, intelligibility does not concern objects at all, but a necessary structure of reason—necessary, objective, and invariant, yet accessible only in and through acts of understanding. In this sense, its being is inseparable from its givenness to reason, without collapsing into subjectivity or projection. Put that way, the position seems very close to Husserl’s own, once the misleading connotations of “constitution” as fabrication or projection are set aside. — Wayfarer

Yes, what is structurally necessary can only be revealed
though acts, because this ground is itself the temporality of action. It is what returns to itself again and again identically through repetition; namely, the horizontal structure of time consciousness.

:ok:

To try and summarise what I've attempted to spell out.

Formal ideas such as logic, mathematics, and natural laws can be understood as structures of consciousness—not in a psychological sense, but as necessary structures of rational insight. They are what Gottlob Frege meant by “the laws of thought.” After all, if someone asks you for a mathematical proof, you have no choice as to what answer to give.

But these “structures” are not objects, not inventions, and not projections. They are invariant relations disclosed through acts of understanding.

In deference to pre-modern philosophy, I don’t see the pre-modern intuition of an intelligible world as simply archaic or superseded. Rather, it reflects a genuine insight articulated without the later conceptual distinction between intelligibility as inherent and intelligibility as disclosed. For the Greeks and medievals, nous was not sharply separated from world; knowing was a kind of participation, not representation or “justified true belief”; form was something shared, not “in the mind”; and the order of the world was already meaningful, already articulate.

In that context, it was entirely natural to say that intelligibility inheres in nature. There was no felt pressure to ask whether intelligibility was “in the mind” or “in the world”—that bifurcation simply had not yet hardened. The emergence of that sense of separateness from nature is a distinctly modern development, and arguably a defining feature of the post-modern condition.

It assumes that we can differentiate 'the object' from 'what we know of the object', — Wayfarer

If you see the object directly, then you don't differentiate your visual experience from the visible part of the object. Your experience is about the object, it literally is the object. But ontologically, they're separate (experience in mind, object in the world). This matters below.

The claim in P4 is that naturalism can't explain aboutness, because aboutness is not caused by physical processes.

In other words, it expects naturalism to causally explain aboutness yet denies the possibility and blames naturalism for failing.
:yawn: .

Aboutness has a couple of closely related but different senses.

(1) It's a property of the experience, the property to be about an object. It arises with the experience from physical processes in the brain.

(2) the relation between the experience and the object.
Arises by virtue of seeing the object. Doesn't call for other physical processes than (1) and the object.

.

.

In my book for the environment to count as intelligible all that is required is that percipients can successfully orient themselves in it such as to act in accordance with what is actually going on. A percipient that could not do this would not survive for long. Creatures of all kinds have eyes, ears, noses, mouths and parts sensitive to touch.

It seems unarguable that those sensory organs developed in response to the possibilities afforded by environments. Eyes would not for example have developed in the absence of light. To say that the environment is intelligible is only to say that creatures with the right sensory organs and nervous systems can navigate successfully enough to survive. As an analogy to say that something is visible does not require that it be seen, but merely that it reflects light.

As I understand it, intelligibility is an attribute of events, not of objects. Objects are perceptible. Cognition and re-cognition of objects happens for humans and animals on account of gestalting and memory. We can say that animals "see things as", see things in terms of affordances, and we might say this is a kind of judgement, but it is not judgement in the conceptually reflective sense made possible by symbolic language.

It seems to me that aboutness is possible only on account of symbolic language. Chomsky says that words do not directly possess referents in the world and I take this to mean that words, being generalizations, do not strictly refer to particular objects, but rather to kinds of objects, which reference is a linguistic, not a worldly states of affairs. It is humans that use or take words to refer to particular objects in particular situations.

Aboutness has a couple of closely related but different senses.

(1) It's a property of the experience, the property to be about an object. It arises with the experience from physical processes in the brain.

(2) the relation between the experience and the object.
Arises by virtue of seeing the object. Doesn't call for other physical processes than (1) and the object.

. — jkop

This might be merely a terminological issue (so much in philosophy is) but I think it makes more sense to say that experience is of objects and sensations and judgements are about attributes and relations.

Of course, Husserl is in no way re-stating classical metaphysics, and I’m not trying to equate the two. But I do think his analysis recovers—within a radically different methodological framework—an earlier insight that was obscured once intelligibles came to be treated as existents. The decisive error is not realism as such, but reification: the assumption that universals must be objects of some kind—typically “abstract objects”—prompting questions like do they exist? and what sort of things are they?

Read differently, intelligibility does not concern objects at all, but a necessary structure of reason—necessary, objective, and invariant, yet accessible only in and through acts of understanding. In this sense, its being is inseparable from its givenness to reason, without collapsing into subjectivity or projection. Put that way, the position seems very close to Husserl’s own, once the misleading connotations of “constitution” as fabrication or projection are set aside.

This way of reading the terrain is also suggested by John Vervaeke, who has pointed to Thinking Being by Eric Perl as a model of participatory knowing (which is where I encountered it). Perl’s account makes explicit what is often missed in these debates: intelligibility is neither an object standing over against the mind nor a mere effect of cognition, but something disclosed in the act of knowing itself—where thinking and what is thought, knower and known, are formally united.

The only spectre that has to be slain here is the 'ghost in the machine'. — Wayfarer

I found this particularly interesting and your account of a necessary structure of reason makes sense.

But these “structures” are not objects, not inventions, and not projections. They are invariant relations disclosed through acts of understanding. — Wayfarer

That’s good, and it’s a useful refinement of what I’ve usually read.

For the Greeks and medievals, nous was not sharply separated from world; knowing was a kind of participation, not representation or “justified true belief”; form was something shared, not “in the mind”; and the order of the world was already meaningful, already articulate. — Wayfarer

Another useful breakdown.

I need a table that contrasts modern conceptions with classical or Neoplatonist ones, and maybe a third column for phenomenology, though there are various descriptions.

Do you think morality (at its best) could also be understood as a form of participation?

Well, sure, because always we have a situation to deal with. We live in a context. So we're participants, not simply spectators. As a primer on Kant says, 'Kant never lost sight of the fact that while modern science is one of humanity's most impressive achievements, we are not just knowers: we are also agents who make choices and hold ourselves responsible for our actions.'

From philosophical biologist Steve Talbott:

The physicist wants laws that are as universal as possible, true of all situations and therefore unable to tell us much about any particular situation — laws, in other words, that are true regardless of meaning and context… Such abstraction shows up in the strong urge toward the mathematization of physical laws. [But] In biology a changing context does not interfere with some causal truth we are trying to see; contextual transformation is itself the truth we are after… Every creature lives by virtue of the dynamic, pattern-shifting play of a governing context, which extends into an open-ended environment. The organism gives expression, at every level of its being, to the unbounded because of reason — the tapestry of meaning. — Steve Talbott, What do Organisms Mean?

Did you have Schelling in mind here, or is there another group of philosophers you can point us to who expound this post-critical position? — Joshs

I wasn't thinking primarily of Schelling. The position I'm gesturing at is a bit of an eclectic synthesis across a number of thinkers and traditions, focally centered on American (neo-)pragmatism (Peirce, Sellars, McDowell, Brandom), but drawing heavily on transcendental Thomism, phenomenology, contemporary Aristotelianism, and certain strands of post-Kantian realism.

The unifying thought, for me, is that intelligibility belongs to reality insofar as inquiry is normatively answerable to being, rather than being either metaphysically guaranteed in advance or constructed by historically contingent sense-making practices.

Hart is a theological Platonist retrieving classical participation, Schelling is a speculative post-Kantian rethinking intelligibility as dynamic and self-grounding. — Joshs

Agreed. And while I have sympathies with many of Hart's arguments against naturalism, I ultimately approach things from a different angle.