Pretty much the whole philosophic community would beg to differ with you.

And you're figuring that I'm a follow-the-crowd-off-the-bridge type of guy?

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

I like Wittgenstein, myself, but asking for an "overrated" philosopher is more or less asking for someone who is well regarded, possibly by "pretty much the whole philosophic community." So I'm glad that Terrapin Station was honest, even if I think Wittgenstein is pretty great. I picked Heidegger, for instance, well aware that he's the "secret king of thought" for quite a few.

I can imagine Wittgenstein laughing at being called overrated. He may have sometimes felt that himself. "A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes." His therapy is not useful to everyone, since not everyone is trapped in the hocus-pocus of language-on-holiday as philosophy. He comes of like a man of integrity, albeit high-strung and difficult.

Heidegger, though, is another story. He's the grand wizard of the forgotten secret of being --which converts to a Nazi salute as the myst clears. "Thinking begins only when we have come to know that reason, glorified for centuries, is the stiff-necked adversary of thought." Sexy, right?

"Thinking begins only when we have come to know that reason, glorified for centuries, is the stiff-necked adversary of thought." — R-13

And yet, reason was applied liberally to derive that conclusion.

I can't tell whether you find Heidegger convincing or not. Are you pointing out his absurdity or defending him? I would personally give him grief over the implicit distinction between "thinking" and "reason." I'm somewhat aware of what he was getting at, but I still think this "sexy" line just begs for trouble. "Hey, guys. I just invented a stronger type of thinking than reason. Seriously."
We can certainly talk about the limitations of a style or a concept of reasoning, but that doesn't sound as exciting and revolutionary. I do really think the line quoted is "sexy." But I also associate critical thinking with an ability to resist seduction...

I can't tell whether you find Heidegger convincing or not. Are you pointing out his absurdity or defending him? I would personally give him grief over the implicit distinction between "thinking" and "reason." — R-13

Well, I am pretty much against most metaphysics by default. I always felt Heidegger played peek-a-boo with reason in most of his work. Thinking encompasses reason, not the other way according to Heidegger; but, then that leaves us to scratch our heads about what can be said about thinking without the use of reason...

Well, I am pretty much against most metaphysics by default. — Question

I am, too, depending on how the word is understood. I do like the grand conceptions of reality that vary from philosopher to philosopher. We can look through the eyes of Epicurus, Epictetus, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Hegel, Plato, etc. I think it enriches us and perhaps even ennobles us as individuals to do so. I don't like the idea of having to live my life over again without their help. And I'm just talking about the personal use of these thinkers. Obviously their historical impact has been massive. But speaking as a consumer of books, great philosophy is about as good as it gets...

I do like the grand conceptions of reality that vary from philosopher to philosopher. — R-13

Yes, variety is good. Kind of reminds me of that joke of people being held up by a philosopher, with the couple asking each other if they can reason with him.

G. E. Moore and his common-sense intuitionist philosophy.

"Here is one hand, and here is another, therefore there are at least two external objects, therefore an external world exists."

How the hell is this even an argument?!

"Here is one hand, and here is another, therefore there are at least two external objects, therefore an external world exists." — darthbarracuda

It's missing a premise :P

"a hand is an external object"

"Here is one hand, and here is another, therefore there are at least two external objects, therefore an external world exists."

How the hell is this even an argument?! — darthbarracuda

Perhaps we make a basic "existential" choice whether or not take radical skepticism seriously. It's like Samuel Johnson kicking the rock. It's kind of stupid from within the earnest metaphysical argument, yet there may be a wisdom nevertheless in this kind of "stupid" impatience. To bother debating the existence of an external world is a choice, maybe a silly choice.

How the hell is this even an argument?! — darthbarracuda

Even bad arguments are arguments.

It's missing a premise :P

"a hand is an external object" — Agustino

Yeah, I'm sure we had a discussion on this a few months ago but can't seem to find it. Maybe it was at the old place.

Berkeley was defeated by G. E. Moore. Many people hate idealism. — mosesquine

If waving one's hands was enough to defeat Berkeley's arguments, then surely kicking a rock would have been as well?

Both totally mischaracterize idealism.

Perhaps we make a basic "existential" choice whether or not take radical skepticism seriously. It's like Samuel Johnson kicking the rock. — R-13

Idealism isn't skepticism. It's a response to skepticism, in that an alternative metaphysics is being proposed such that one can't doubt that one is kicking a rock or waving hands in front of their face, because they are ideas in the mind.

Contrast this with materialism, where an experience of thing can be mistaken. I could be a BIV thinking I'm kicking a material rock, or material rocks might be just a how we humans perceive clumpy hard things, or what have you. The reality could be entirely different, once you propose that reality is different from experience. Metaphysical realism brings with it the specter of skepticism.

As I see it, the "isms" really don't accomplish much. They don't seem to influence our decisions, but only whether we like to call experience "mind" or "matter"--- or "experience." The pattern that I see is the removal of a useful but imperfect distinction from the language of the tribe, a necessary background for any metaphysical foreground, and the attempt to reduce one side of this distinction to the other. The "work" that's being accomplished seems to be on the level of value. So maybe the idealist wants to assert human freedom against the threat of the old deterministic view of Nature, or to preserve the notion of an immortal soul. Maybe the materialism wants this same determinism, to make a science of the human possible, or because there's a dark beauty in determinism and godlessness.

I have to disagree on Plotinus. He's easily one of the most underrated philosophers around, not one of the most overrated.

The problem with Plotinus is that modern scholarship on Plotinus is terrible, for a number of reasons.

1. Most Plotinus scholars are continentals and analytics...neither of whom have any business doing the history of classical or medieval philosophy. Or, more often than not, philosophy at all. But I digress.

Case in point: Anyone here familiar with Lloyd P. Gerson? In his book "Plotinus: Arguments of the Philosophers," he actually makes the claim that there is an argument for hypostatic Intellect from the existence of eternal truth.

I am almost certain that he pulled this out of thin air.

An analytic historian of philosophy is someone who thinks that if he plays linguistic and logic games with a text, and failing that, tries to "reduce it" to common sense and common language, he'll end up with a correct or plausible reading.

Anyone familiar with Peter Geach? Analytical philosopher who wrote books on Aquinas? No? Good. Don't bother. Not worth it.

Fact is, if you're not someone who's knee deep in the Aristotelian and Platonic traditions, you're just not going to understand Plotinus. If you don't have, not only a good knowledge of the Posterior Analytics, the Metaphysics and at least some of the Physics...well...let's just say that's the bare minimum, and if that's all that you're bringing to the table, you still won't understand him.

Lloyd P. Gerson is famous for his exposition of the "two acts" theory in Plotinus' thought.

He's famous for that. That's a "big discovery" in modern scholarship.

Oy vae.

2. We only have access to fragments of Plotinus' recent predecessors among the middle Platonists, and we have absolutely no writings from his teacher, Ammonias Saccas.

3. The commentary that Proclus, a later Neoplatonist, wrote on the Enneads has since been lost. And as far as I'm aware, we don't have any other ancient commentaries on the Enneads.

From 2 and 3, note carefully: Just because we are alive at a later date doesn't mean that our understanding of an historical period, of an historical figure, of a philosophy, etc. is somehow better than those people of an age gone by. Texts get lost. Ideas fall out of the contemporary zeitgeist. Things get forgotten.

4.I think that Armstrong is just right on this point: the Enneads are an unsystematic presentation of a systematic philosophy. In addition to the problem of the difficulty and obscurity of Plotinus' thought, which is DEEPLY and COMPLEXLY scholastic, in addition to the fact that we have him, so to speak, "ripped out" of his historical context, that he appears in the midst of a veritable sea of forgotten and lost personalities...

...in addition to all of that, he's just downright obscure, and more on some occassions than on others. To quote Kevin Corrigan: "Plotinus never says the same thing twice." He's not like other thinkers where he will copy/paste and expand basically the exact same thing in different contexts when he's talking about the same thing. He's not like Kant where he will basically repeat himself ad nauseam so that you basically know exactly what he's going to say next.

The dude's writing is both dialectical and obscure. He'll entertain 12 different positions at once (a bit of an exaggeration, but not by much), argue through them all, and you'll be left scratching your head wondering what he actually thinks. And then just wait until he takes up the same topic a few treatises down the line!

He simply lacks the expositional clarity of a figure like Proclus.

But...

...

All in all, he's definitely a Platonist, and one of the most important ones. Proclus and Plotinus are probably two of the most influential Platonists in the middle ages and decidedly helped shape the course of Arabic and Western scholastic thought. Avicenna and Al-Farabi both knew a version of Plotinus and Proclus, albeit through arabic paraphrases, integrated them into their own systems, and passed that on to the Christian scholastic west.

On the Berkeley discussion:

I actually think that Berkeley is underrated. He had probably the greatest insight of the modern period, and I rarely hear this quoted:

In the Three Dialogues, he tells us plainly that he is simply combining two assumptions:

1. The common sense assumption is that reality is what we perceive.
2. The assumption of the modern philosophers that what we perceive are ideas.

And he's right.

Had he only abandoned the second premise...

...but then, to abandon the second premise is to abandon modernity.

At any rate, Berkeley (and the whole modern period) was already refuted by Aristotle. Check out De Anima II.6.

Yeah, Berkeley's great. When reading him versus his critics, I get the impression he's smarter than them. Now impressions are just impressions, but the argument some to nil in the end, so what else is there?

As for Aristotle defeating modernity, idk. Aristotle always seemed like a weird amateur polymath to me. I had to read him a lot in college, but nothing he ever said really struck me or made me think that hard. I never looked forward to reading him.

Moore claims that Berkeley did not distinguish perceptions of objects from objects. See 'The Refutation of Idealism'.
Berkeley is confused between 'a cup on the table' and 'an idea of a cup on the table'. Berkeley is confused between 'outside of mind' and 'inside of mind'.
Okay???

I can't tell whether you find Heidegger convincing or not. Are you pointing out his absurdity or defending him? I would personally give him grief over the implicit distinction between "thinking" and "reason." I'm somewhat aware of what he was getting at, but I still think this "sexy" line just begs for trouble. "Hey, guys. I just invented a stronger type of thinking than reason. Seriously."
We can certainly talk about the limitations of a style or a concept of reasoning, but that doesn't sound as exciting and revolutionary. I do really think the line quoted is "sexy." But I also associate critical thinking with an ability to resist seduction... — R-13

I think the quote you brought up is a good example of the type of hyperbole Heidegger was unfortunately prone to use for dramatic effect. There are many other examples in his corpus, but this is one of the most widely quoted ones that makes it seem as if he has no regard for a philosophical tradition based upon rigorous thought. And because of this he should not be taken seriously as a thinker. These types of provocations do lend themselves to that interpretation, and they're pretty much impossible to make sense of without understanding the wider context of his work in which a statement like this becomes less mystifying.

Now as I understand Heidegger (an important qualification), he wasn't against 'reason' per se, but only the elevation of a specific type of theoretical/representational thinking, which has largely come to dominate modern thought and life, over other forms of thought. It's become the only game in town so to speak. He felt there was a more 'primordial' and pre-theoretical openness to the world that 'reason' - in the restrictive sense just referred to - is parasitic of. The first type of thinking deals with specific beings, while the second focuses on Being--or, more properly, the Being of beings. And since the Being of beings is not an extant being, a form of thinking predicated upon representation and calculation cannot, ipso facto, address the very 'thing' which makes us who we are. And who we are is the question Heidegger seems fixated upon: We are beings who have an understanding of Being.

That's not to suggest that reason doesn't have a valid and extremely important role to play, especially in the theoretical sciences, or even in practical human activity, but there are other modes of thinking that are perhaps more appropriate for understanding human existence, and specifically the relation of this existence to Being, which is the sine qua non of Heidegger's thinking from beginning to end.

At the very least, tacit assumptions about what it means to be human, and its corollary, our understanding of Being, are brought back from their perceived obviousness and thrown into a renewed questionability. I think that's an important development. But if you feel these questions have been answered conclusively, then, at best, Heidegger will seem a complete waste of time. At worst, his apparent obfuscations, combined with his politics, make him an evil and self-serving charlatan. Again, I don't think this is the case (he's definitely not an exceptional man in an ethical sense, like I feel, for instance, Wittgenstein was), but I can understand why people would think this.

That's my take on the matter. Oh, and I do think there's a clear anti-intellectual, anti-democratic and anti-modern element to his thought, in both the early and the later stuff. The fact that he was a Nazi is not all that surprising, but it should also be noted that his 'brand' of Nazism was highly idiosyncratic and not based upon the biological racism and anti-Semitism that ultimately came to define it. But to be perfectly honest, as I get older--and hopefully a little less concerned with how others perceive me--I've become more inclined to think that these sacred cows should not be beyond criticism.

We live in the spiritual wasteland that Nietzsche predicted, and this is the predicament that Heidegger was responding to. If you don't feel that alienation and dehumanization are becoming more widespread, then once again Heidegger will not resonate with you.

Moore claims that Berkeley did not distinguish perceptions of objects from objects. See 'The Refutation of Idealism'.
Berkeley is confused between 'a cup on the table' and 'an idea of a cup on the table'.
Okay??? — mosesquine

I hardly think it appropriate to say that he confuses them when he's trying to argue that they are the same thing. Such a response just begs the question.

But to address this, although I might agree that there's a semantic distinction between the idea of a thing and the thing, it doesn't then follow that there's an ontological distinction. There's a semantic distinction between paint and Dali's melting clocks, but that doesn't mean that it isn't correct to say of Dali's melting clocks that they're just paint. There's a semantic distinction between Frodo travelling to Mordor and words written on a page, but it would be a mistake to think that the events of the Lord of the Rings are ontologically independent of the books in which they're written about.

Even though The Persistence of Memory is a painting of melting clocks, not a painting of paint, those melting clocks are just paint. There's a distinction between intentionality and ontology, but many realist/materialist responses to anti-realism/idealism conflate the two.

Didn't Berkeley say "esse est percipi"? Your version of Berkeley is weird. Whom do you defend?

Didn't Berkeley say "esse est percipi"? — mosesquine

Well, he actually said "esse is percipi" (mixing Latin and English). ;)

Your version of Berkeley is weird.

The second and third paragraphs weren't supposed to be an explanation of Berkeley's view but my own. Regarding Berkeley, I only meant to say that his argument is that a cup and an idea of a cup are the same thing, so to respond by saying that he confuses them is to beg the question and assume that they're distinct.

Whom do you defend?

Putnam, mostly (r.e. internal realism).

It's silly. I'm criticizing Berkeley, and you are defending Putnam. It's like I'm doing kick boxing, and you're doing figure skating.

It's silly. I'm criticizing Berkeley, and you are defending Putnam. It's like I'm doing kick boxing, and you're doing figure skating. — mosesquine

Sorry, I misunderstood you. I'm not defending Putnam here, just in general when it comes to these matters. Here, I'm criticising the criticism "Berkeley confuses the thing with the idea of the thing". Given that his argument is that they're the same thing, such a criticism begs the question.

The other two paragraphs were to explain that even if one can show that the thing and the idea of the thing are distinct in terms of intentionality, as one can in the case of paint and Dali's melting clocks, it doesn't then follow that one has shown that they are distinct in terms of ontology, and the latter is needed to refute Berkeley. It seems to me that materialist/realist "refutations" only tend to do the former.

Suppose that your mother put some gift on your bed in Christmas eve night. You found the gift in Christmas morning. You might respond like either:
(1) The mother put some gift last night.
(2) The non-existent Santa Claus put it last night.
(1) is a rational choice, (2) is not so.
Now Berkeley found that things exist without perceiving them. The options are:
(3) This is evidence of the existence of external objects.
(4) This is because god still perceives them.
(3) is rational, (4) is absurd, and Berkeley chooses (4).
Berkeley is the same as children like believing Santa Claus.

Suppose that your mother put some gift on your bed in Christmas eve night. You found the gift in Christmas morning. You might respond like either:
(1) The mother put some gift last night.
(2) The non-existent Santa Claus put it last night.
(1) is a rational choice, (2) is not so.
Now Berkeley found that things exist without perceiving them. The options are:
(3) This is evidence of the existence of external objects.
(4) This is because god still perceives them.
(3) is rational, (4) is absurd, and Berkeley chooses (4).
Berkeley is the same as children like believing Santa Claus. — mosesquine

The analogy doesn't work. 4) would have to be "The non-existent God still perceives them". But then that isn't what Berkeley believed. He believed "the existent God still perceives them".

Whether Berkeley's God hypothesis is plausible or not isn't tied to the plausibility of his arguments against matter. He believes he's showed the case independently that there's no such thing. So it's not like it's a choice between one or the other.

Also, he didn't deny there were external objects, in the sense of sensible objects in space outside of the body – he just thought they were bundles of ideas.