Yeah, but it's not only other inmates of the zoo that matter, not by a long shot, especially if it's more like your

fundamental metaphor for reality
— plaque flag

that matters most. — Srap Tasmaner

What I didn't get into was the necessary construction of the self from pieces of other selves. A person who reads philosophy (and literature) (and watches good movies/TV) has more to work with, though too much plurality can be dangerous and maybe paralyzing. As Kojeve might put it, a person who is already into philosophy has already at least chosen the path of the hero of self-consciousness (of the species as much as the little self). This metaphor can be fleshed out in many ways. Am I a hazy slippery profound type or a sharp dry and clear type, contemptuous of anything that doesn't smell like math ? To me it seems like the struggle (anxiety of influence) is to somehow evade easy categorization, which means inventing new categories, enlarging the game for the players that follow. That's part of the charm of the history, seeing how this trick is managed again and again.

I'm also partial to Hegel-and-the-gang's idea that it's really just one thinker leaping from mortal body to mortal body, sometimes splitting into adversaries, but eventually recombining, only to split again. The software runs on the crowd, enough of us always alive to not lose our progress in the game's attempt to understand itself.

Yeah, that's not bad. I've figured out what philosophy really is dozens of times, but I'm starting to think you can just not do that. — Srap Tasmaner

:up:

It's beautiful, really. We can't help trying to find what philosophy is, because it's like finding our truest human nature or something. But fortunately we're inexhaustible in some sense.

you could embrace the ephemeral nature of philosophical struggles and shortlived victories and take giddy pleasure in it -- after all, you needn't worry about having any lasting influence! — Srap Tasmaner

I think there's a lesson to be learned. It's probably the most important in philosophy and the one that causes the most arguments and misunderstandings. Most of the issues that raise a ruckus in philosophy are metaphysics. They are matters of point of view, not fact. I've made this argument many times before. Differences in philosophical fashion are more cultural, historical, sociological, or psychological than they are factual.

At any rate, if we can only deal with ideas as elements of some narrative, we might as well face up to that up front, even if there's no decisively privileged way to do that. — Srap Tasmaner

I think that is what Plato was trying to get beyond with the acceptance of dialectic as a necessity of combined ignorance. That spirit of dialectic can also be seen in the way Aristotle commented upon the views of others before arguing his own case.

Those views of dialectic are sharply different from the view that history went one way rather than another. And are those changes accidents of some uninvolved fate or the sequence of some kind of logic such as Hegel wrote?

Yeah, that's not bad. I've figured out what philosophy really is dozens of times, but I'm starting to think you can just not do that. — Srap Tasmaner

Aye. I think if you found philosophy's essence, there would still remain a distinction between the found essence and the essence finding thought process. And in that regard the relation between those two would essentially remain unspecified. You end up equating philosophy with (inquiry+critical thought+reflective writing) in search of specifying its method, while simultaneously emptying its concept of content due to the variety of auspices it becomes equated to.

Always a view, never of anything. But that perspective comes from fetishising its essence, rather than the essence of philosophy (screw you Wittgenstein).

Less abstractly, I don't think there's any reason to believe philosophy behaves differently to sport. Which has no essence or method.

That’s up to you. — Wayfarer

It's not though. That goes against the norms of reason we usually follow in argument. If you are making a counterclaim or counterargument, you should be able to explain how it undermines your opponent's point. In that regard, what specific claim does your appeal to the history of ideas undermine? What force makes your claim need to be addressed on pain of being unreasonable?

The only guess I have is that you seek to portray an opponent's conclusion as a contingent event of thought; which it is, their thought just happened as part of the history of ideas. Nevertheless a claim can be a necessary consequence of another through rules of reasoning. In essence, "that's just your opinion man" vs "that's an opinion".

It's not though. That goes against the norms of reason we usually follow in argument — fdrake

But he asked the question! Srap Tasmaner asked me, quoting from one of my posts, 'why should we bother with history of ideas' and said it was a 'genuine question'. To which I did my best to provide a genuine answer. And the response was:

All very interesting I'm sure, but what effect was the history of the history of ideas supposed to have on me? — Srap Tasmaner

So - how can I answer that? Can I guess 'what effect it is supposed to have'? All I can do is try and explain why I think history of ideas is important. The impression I got was that either I failed to make the case that the history of ideas was important, or that the questioner wasn't really interested in eliciting an answer in the first place.

Further to that, I thought my initial response raised some pretty fundamental points about the question, the answer to which was basically 'so what'? So what flaming hoops did I fail to jump through?

So what flaming hoops did I fail to jump through? — Wayfarer

Maybe none! I think I saw you construe @apokrisis as being an idealist through that remark? Or was it just that the thinkers they reference might be construed as such? There could be an inherent idealism in construing the fundamental units of reality as sign-systems, but it isn't clear to me that you demonstrate that. Or that you sought to demonstrate it. Just kinda left hanging! Hard to tell whether what you said is intended as a counterpoint, an attempt to contextualise apo's remarks as part of the history of idealism or a claim that apo's an idealist for an unspecified reason.

The original context was the suggestion on my part that Apokrisis has adopted those aspects of C S Peirce which are relevant to biology (namely, semiotics) in support of an overall naturalist philosophy. To which I pointed out that Peirce is often categorised as an idealist or even as a metaphysical philosopher - according to the SEP entry, one in the 'grand tradition' of Aristotle, Spinoza, et al. This historical point is that at the time Peirce was active, metaphysical idealism was predominant in philosophy generally, both in the US and Britain, but that with the emergence of the 'ordinary language' philosophy, Russell and Moore's rejection of idealism, etc - all of which is or should be common knowledge - that the idealist or metaphysical aspects of Peirce have become deprecated in favour of a broadly scientific (dare I say scientistic) attitude to philosophy.

The key philosophical point I wanted to make centred the quote by Edward Conze, referring to the characteristics of what is described as perennial philosophy, and also on the loss of the sense of their being a qualitative dimension and 'degrees of reality'. I feel these are important philosophical questions although nobody seemed to take issue with them.

Overall, another illustration of 'folks talking past on another'.

Overall, another illustration of 'folks talking past on another'. — Wayfarer

Fair enough. :up:

To which I pointed out that Peirce is often categorised as an idealist ... the idealist or metaphysical aspects of Peirce have become deprecated in favour of a broadly scientific (dare I say scientistic) attitude to philosophy. — Wayfarer

I agree the historical context is important to showing how philosophy follows fashions. It could be said hemlines rise, hemlines fall, thus philosophy reveals its essential cultural arbitrariness. It isn't a progressive enterprise building elaboration from solid foundations.

But that broad flip-flopping should be easy to recognise as the natural dialectic of lurching between extremes, as polar opposition makes ideas crisp in terms of all that they can "other". So for good metaphysical reason, we can see why there should be this kind of Hegelian history unfolding in philosophy as a discipline.

Furthermore, we should be expecting the triadic balancing act of a resolution that does build the solid foundations for the next level of elaboration.

And this brings me to the problem I have with your historical approach to contextualising Peirce.

You understand the historical development in terms of a simple realist vs idealist ontology. And you have picked a side that ought to be monistically the winner in the end. So you seek to assimilate Peirce to that reading of the necessary answer to final philosophy. But you don't really appreciate Peirce as in fact the step that finally helps resolve the realism vs idealism dichotomy in Western metaphysics. Your history telling is wishful rather than factual.

So a close historical reading is the way to go. There was the big set-piece debate of realism vs idealism dominating Western philosophy. And its resolution in the triadic systems relation of pragmatism/semiotics was very important – and still unfolding in radical fashion, now spilling openly into scientific thought.

To seize on Peirce as a scientist who was a closet idealist is just shutting your eyes to the historically significant event taking place within philosophy at that time. You will never appreciate his place in the history of ideas.

Relating this to the OP, @Srap Tasmaner sounds to want philosophy to be an open and unstructured kind of thing. A pastime with no real purpose or stakes. It is talk that is free and not to be constrained by grand ends.

I instead can see why a historically-rooted approach is correct. We are dealing with a grasping after something that defines the limits of our being, and have been doing that with surprising success since Ancient Greece woke up to the idea of living in a Cosmos that must express some universalised cause.

The greeks worked their way to a dialectical method of inquiry that helped produce ever sharper focus. It was the logical machine that generates integration and differentiation, generality and specificity, in equal dichotomous measure.

Philosophy as a discipline emerges out of that self-structuring dynamic. It is properly Hegelian and has a historic destiny in reaching its ultimate limits. So a sense of how the debate has progressed is a crucial to placing yourself in the "now" of philosophy as part of this arc from its past to its future.

Peirce's triadic systems logic is an obvious milestone of thought in this regard and shouldn't be trivialised by claims he was "really a closet idealist all along". He was the first proper semiotician and not the last prominent idealist before the dark tide of scientistic logical atomism swept through Oxbridge and outlawed metaphysics for a generation or two.

Relating this to the OP, Srap Tasmaner sounds to want philosophy to be an open and unstructured kind of thing. A pastime with no real purpose or stakes. It is talk that is free and not to be constrained by grand ends. — apokrisis

Interesting, but if anyone cares, no.

you could embrace the ephemeral nature of philosophical struggles and shortlived victories and take giddy pleasure in it -- after all, you needn't worry about having any lasting influence! — Srap Tasmaner

Absolutely. But why? Because we don't have any certainty to convey... — Srap Tasmaner

Certainly. When I was young, I read philosophy in a believing frame of mind, acquiring ideas I could endorse or not. Got older and for a long time have read philosophy with little interest in the 'doctrine' at stake. I enjoy Wittgenstein primarily because we have such an extraordinary record of an interesting mind at work. I just like watching him go, and I think I've learned from how he thinks. I've enjoyed watching Dummett at work because his command of logic is formidable and he sees things I have to work through slowly. Sellars also has an unusual mind. I even like the tortuous way he writes. He's every bit as intricate as Derrida, but not for the same reasons at all. — Srap Tasmaner

What I haven't heard yet from anybody is some sort of full-throated defense of, I don't know, 'decentering' philosophy in philosophical discussion, not taking its self-image seriously, and treating it instead as only a part of Something Bigger, something like the history of ideas, the Great Story of Culture, whatever. — Srap Tasmaner

Still no.

First quote was me offering a couple of riffs on Clarky's response, drawing out ways of reading his response or extending it, not expressing my position. The word right before your quote begins was "Or".

Second was a response to you, and same deal. You suggested intro science classes exude an air of authority in presenting the results of settled science, but into philosophy ought not. I took that as likely meaning that there's no equivalent set of results, nothing to be certain about. (In fairness I never went back and finished that paragraph. I mentioned how even what you learn in intro science classes might not be permanently true, but I never got around to finishing the point that it's still a reasonable pedagogical approach: teach them the not-really-certainties and let them find out how messy things are later...)

Quote three describes various ways I have read philosophy, which I distinguish pretty sharply from the doing of philosophy, as I would have thought was pretty obvious by now.

I don't know why quote four is there. How does that make the case I consider philosophy just a pleasant pastime? Anyway, that again was not a statement of my view, but of a view I expected someone to take.

Besides -- it sounded like you'd be disappointed if I thought what you said I did. Take my assurance that I don't and be happy!

There's plenty of reasons to go into the history of ideas. Off the top of my head:

It's a good way to rebut appeals to contemporary authority or appeals to popular opinion. Granted, such appeals generally appear on lists of common fallacies, but that doesn't negate the fact that they still carry weight in many contexts.

It's also a good way to argue against dogmatic view points in some contexts. If I'm arguing for x, and my interlocutor's response is that x cannot be true because of y, where y is some widespread, dogmatically enforced belief that I think is false, then it makes perfect sense to explain how y came to be dogmatically enforced. For one, it takes the wind out of appeals to authority and appeals to popular opinion if you can show that the success of an idea was largely contingent on some historical phenomena that had nothing to do with valid reasons for embracing that idea.

There might be valid reasons for supporting x. But said evidence for x might also not be particularly strong. Perhaps in our opinion, the evidence for x is far weaker than y,z, or even q. Yet if x has somehow contingently won approval from relevant authorities and/or popularity for some historical reason this is necessarily going to tend to influence how people judge x versus other competing positions.

That's just how people are, and not without reason. If 99 doctors out of a 100 tell you x is absolutely true, you should look twice at your reasons for buying into y before you eat the horse dewormer or whatever. But sometimes dumb ideas also get very popular.

The book Bernoulli's Fallacy is an excellent example of this sort of argument. It demonstrates some core issues with frequentism, but it also spends a lot of time showing how frequentism became dominant, and in many cases dogmatically enforced, for reasons that have nothing to do with the arguments for or against it re: statistical analysis.

The history of an idea can also show where a tradition when wrong in ways that simply looking at where the current tradition is today can't.

Besides -- it sounded like you'd be disappointed if I thought what you said I did. — Srap Tasmaner

Yeah, that's not bad. I've figured out what philosophy really is dozens of times, but I'm starting to think you can just not do that. — Srap Tasmaner

If one were to reject a "history of ideas" narrative structure for philosophy, what could one replace it with, and why?

Are you claiming to have no horse in the race? You seem to have gone through dozens and now deciding "whereof one cannot speak...", or something.

It's your thread. I was just expecting more clarity to justify historicism as a target here. You seemed right in fingering the problem of using it to close down debate. And I replied that it is what also keeps debate open by being the bookmark which tells where the great adventure has now got to.

Does it boil down to whether you view philosophy as a progressive project or just one damn cultural trope after another?

I agree with a whole lot of that.

But there is some tension here I don't think I've mentioned before, which makes it particularly odd in the cases that caught my attention: to explain why you hold the opinion you do by pointing to the history of the idea and its cultural uptake, is to discount your stated reasons for holding that opinion and substitute an historical explanation -- or at least supplement the given reasons with historical circumstances, forces, trends, what have you.

As it happens, @Wayfarer is hostile to explanations of an agent holding a belief in terms of causes of any kind; beliefs are explained solely in terms of reasons, from which they are rationally inferred, or in terms of causes in which case those beliefs do not count as rational. That's an exclusive "or". We had a whole thread about this, and he made his position quite clear.

There is, of course, an out -- which I know I've mentioned somewhere -- namely: other people's beliefs have causes; mine have reasons. Example: "I don't believe in God because I've considered the arguments and evidence; you believe in God just because your parents raised you to, all your friends do, and you've never questioned it." I think this is in fact a view people quite often take when someone disagrees with them. It might be so common as to be the default response.

On this forum, however, it would indicate a belief that only the position advocated is even rationally arrived at, and everyone who disagrees is just caught up in the zeitgeist, not making up their own minds at all but parroting the received view.

Now I'm even more confused, because surely @Wayfarer does not intend to claim that those who disagree him are behaving irrationally, but if their beliefs are rationally inferred then no historical explanation for their holding those beliefs is even possible.

Now I'm even more confused, because surely Wayfarer does not intend to claim that those who disagree him are behaving irrationally, but if their beliefs are rationally inferred then no historical explanation for their holding those beliefs is even possible. — Srap Tasmaner

This is right on the mark...it is not uncommon for people to be unable to conceive that someone could rationally disagree with the ideas that they think they have arrived at by pure reasoning. You don't agree? Then you must have a scotoma, or you must have failed to understand the argument or, as you say, be caught up in the growing tide of superficiality the culture is being driven by.

As it happens, Wayfarer is hostile to explanations of an agent holding a belief in terms of causes of any kind; beliefs are explained solely in terms of reasons — Srap Tasmaner

If someone frequently responded to my posts with sarcasm, hostility and pointless emojis then that would cause me to believe that their posts were not worth the bother of responding to. I would think of that as an example of a rational cause. If my thinking was however influenced by an underlying neurological disorder or by intoxication, then I would not regard that as a rational act, but the consequence of a physical influence. This is based on the distinction between logical necessity and physical causation, which I think is perfectly defensible. Do you think that is a valid distinction? Furthermore, that the only empirical examples we can observe of such rational causation must be exhibited by rational agents.

As for historical and social causes - it is of course true that we are to some degree influenced by all of those as well, but I would dispute that we're wholly determined by them.

The history of an idea can also show where a tradition when wrong in ways that simply looking at where the current tradition is today can't. — Count Timothy von Icarus

As it happens, that is very much my reason for invoking it.

You understand the historical development in terms of a simple realist vs idealist ontology. And you have picked a side that ought to be monistically the winner in the end. So you seek to assimilate Peirce to that reading of the necessary answer to final philosophy. But you don't really appreciate Peirce as in fact the step that finally helps resolve the realism vs idealism dichotomy in Western metaphysics. Your history telling is wishful rather than factual. — apokrisis

I see 19th century idealism as representative of the maintream in Western philosophy. But then, idealism has re-appeared in cultural discourse in part due to the discoveries of early 20th c science, although as Banno points out, it is still very much a minority view in academic philosophy.

The history of an idea can also show where a tradition when [ went ? ] wrong in ways that simply looking at where the current tradition is today can't. — Count Timothy von Icarus

As it happens, that is very much my reason for invoking it. — Wayfarer

I'll address this.

Let's say I believe we ought never to have given up belief in and worship of the Greek gods. That's my position. I believe, and I want you to believe.

Someone asks me why I hold this belief.

Shall I say that people used to believe in the Greek gods? Does that look like an argument to you? It might do as a demonstration that such belief is possible, but no such demonstration is necessary; I am already all the proof you need; I'm a believer. What other point could I be making? That there was a time, unlike now, when quite a few people would have agreed with me? Still not an argument, but maybe a demonstration that my belief is not entirely idiosyncratic. So that's a little defense, but still not an argument in favor.

Shall I say that Western Civilization took a wrong turn when it abandoned the old religions and Christianity became ascendant? Does that look like an argument to you? Of course I think that's where things went wrong; that's when people stopped believing what I believe; that's when people started believing something else; that's when people started disagreeing with me. It's not an argument, but a restatement of what you already know, namely that I believe in the Greek gods, which perforce means Western Civilization went wrong when people stopped doing that -- unless I want to be the onliest special believer all by myself, and that's not on the table, because I am trying to convince you to join me.

Suppose I say that people only stopped believing in the old gods because Christians bullied them and tricked them into it. Is that an argument? Not quite. The claim is that people did not stop believing because they had good reasons to -- realized it was all bullshit, for instance -- but stopped believing for bad reasons or because they were forced. But it fails to give any good reason for their original belief! See how that works? You can have a stupid belief arrived at for stupid reasons and give it up for equally stupid reasons. Discovering that your reasons for giving up a belief aren't any good might make you rethink giving it up, might present a prima facie case for suspending your rejection of the belief, but that's still not in itself a positive case for holding the belief.

What if I say this: as a matter of fact the reasons the ancient Greeks gave for why they believed were pretty strong, and those reasons were never refuted, it's just that times changed, Christianity came along, a lot of the reasons behind the old beliefs were forgotten, but here I can explain them to you...

Now we're talking! I could just present the positive case by itself, but people would be suspicious: if the old religion was so great, why did everyone abandon it? At some point I'll need to offer some explanation for why people stopped believing in the old Greek gods, and that explanation will have to show that people did not have damned good reasons for jumping ship, but there are non-inferential reasons they did, historical reasons. That's not strictly necessary from a logical point of view, but the demand for such an explanation is reasonable.

Do I need to go on?

There's plenty of reasons to go into the history of ideas. Off the top of my head:

It's a good way to rebut appeals to contemporary authority or appeals to popular opinion. — Count Timothy von Icarus

How is it not just another appeal to authority in that case? If a person claims idea X has merit because it is held by such-and-such a contemporary thinker, then pointing out that it arose from (or used to be opposed by) some other thinker of merit, tells us nothing about its qualities unless we are to take {believed by important thinker} as a property which speaks to the merits of an idea.

If I'm arguing for x, and my interlocutor's response is that x cannot be true because of y, where y is some widespread, dogmatically enforced belief that I think is false, then it makes perfect sense to explain how y came to be dogmatically enforced. For one, it takes the wind out of appeals to authority and appeals to popular opinion if you can show that the success of an idea was largely contingent on some historical phenomena that had nothing to do with valid reasons for embracing that idea. — Count Timothy von Icarus

True, but nothing about historicism does this (unless we've all forgotten our lessons separating correlation from causation). All your historicism here would show is that idea y's dogmatic enforcement coincided with an historical phenomena. It leaves completely untouched the question of whether that phenomena became popular because of the vagaries of fashion or because more and more people saw how compelling the idea was.

The notion I take @Srap Tasmaner's OP to be gently poking a stick at is exactly that missing step. Simply saying that idea y arose alongside, for example, an enlightenment rejection of the supernatural, says absolutely nothing about whether such coincidence was reasoned, accidental, or peer-pressured. That case is left entirely unmade.

The book Bernoulli's Fallacy is an excellent example of this sort of argument. It demonstrates some core issues with frequentism, but it also spends a lot of time showing how frequentism became dominant, and in many cases dogmatically enforced, for reasons that have nothing to do with the arguments for or against it re: statistical analysis. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Exactly. If frequentism is flawed, then those flaws are the reasons to dismiss the notion, not the history of its adoption. It's perfectly possible that a right idea is adopted for the wrong reasons, so the reasons for an idea's popularity are not in themselves, arguments against it.

The only exception is perhaps identification of bias in experts whose work one cannot otherwise assess directly. If I think a scientific idea is 'fashionable' I might have reason to be sceptical of weak experiments purporting to prove it, but that reason is there as a poor substitute for actually replicating the work (maybe it's in a field I have no access to labs or data for). In philosophy, no such limitations exist, we can all 'replicate' the workings of any of the previous thinkers.

EDIT - apologies@Srap Tasmaner, I see you've said almost exactly this already whilst I was typing. I didn't mean to tread on your toes (here on your own thread and all)

Fair enough. — fdrake

Not really. It's something that's let slide far too often in my view. Were it an up front insult, it would be moderated, but this is not less insulting. The only argument in...

Apokrisis has adopted those aspects of C S Peirce which are relevant to biology (namely, semiotics) in support of an overall naturalist philosophy. To which I pointed out that Peirce is often categorised as an idealist or even as a metaphysical philosopher - according to the SEP entry, one in the 'grand tradition' of Aristotle, Spinoza, et al. This historical point is that at the time Peirce was active, metaphysical idealism was predominant in philosophy generally, both in the US and Britain, but that with the emergence of the 'ordinary language' philosophy, Russell and Moore's rejection of idealism, etc - all of which is or should be common knowledge - that the idealist or metaphysical aspects of Peirce have become deprecated in favour of a broadly scientific (dare I say scientistic) attitude to philosophy. — Wayfarer

... is that @apokrisis has adopted this notion, not as a result of reasoned consideration, but as a result of merely blindly following the fashion started by Russell and Moore.

It's poor form.

The notion I take Srap Tasmaner's OP to be gently poking a stick at is exactly that missing step. Simply saying that idea y arose alongside, for example, an enlightenment rejection of the supernatural, says absolutely nothing about whether such coincidence was reasoned, accidental, or peer-pressured. That case is left entirely unmade. — Isaac

If you are making a counterclaim or counterargument, you should be able to explain how it undermines your opponent's point. In that regard, what specific claim does your appeal to the history of ideas undermine? What force makes your claim need to be addressed on pain of being unreasonable? — fdrake

Thank you both for at least understanding what the hell I was talking about. (And you too, @180 Proof -- I saw that, but I'm trying to be polite for god knows what reason.) Also thank you . As a matter of fact I've presented the general case against disagreement before.

The only guess I have is that you seek to portray an opponent's conclusion as a contingent event of thought; which it is, their thought just happened as part of the history of ideas. Nevertheless a claim can be a necessary consequence of another through rules of reasoning. — fdrake

I did this all over again above, I hope you don't mind.

Fair enough. — fdrake

Not really. — Isaac

Puzzled me too, but I won't tell @fdrake which battles to fight.

While I've enjoyed the responses to the wider interest I expressed in starting this thread, it has been frustrating watching the narrow point of the OP be so thoroughly missed. That's on me, I expect, but I'm glad a few of you understood.

While I've enjoyed the responses to the wider interest I expressed in starting this thread, it has been frustrating watching the narrow point of the OP be so thoroughly missed. That's on me, I expect, but I'm glad a few of you understood. — Srap Tasmaner

I've probably told this story a hundred times now, but sod it, I'm doing it again... We used to have a saying marking papers (derived I think from a comedy sketch, but not sure the origin) of labelling most as "writing everything they know about Napoleon". It refers to the common trend to see the name Napoleon in the question and think 'I know lots about Napoleon - here I go", instead of reading the actual question and answering that. It appears no less common in real life than in undergraduate essays.

Let's say I believe we ought never to have given up belief in and worship of the Greek gods. — Srap Tasmaner

Why did you choose that as a hypothetical example? Is it because you have me pegged as a religious-or-spiritual type, therefore this must be typical of the way that I think? Because otherwise, I'm completely failing to see your point, although I suspect that finally your actual motivation is coming out.

So, to go back to your original post:

So here's the question: what sort of point are you making when you post something like this? Is it only sociological? — Srap Tasmaner

No - it's soteriological. My claim is that, from the outset in Plato, down to the end of the 19th century, there was a soteriological element in Western philosophy. (Of course, that is a rather obscure and academic word, so I should define it: concerned with doctrines of salvation. So the response might be, what is that, if not an outmoded religious myth? Hence the comparison with belief in the Greek gods, right?)

To which my reply is that it is the way that religion developed in Western history that makes it susceptible to that criticism. My view is that, regardless, there is something real and important in the religious consciousness, and that includes the religious aspects of philosophy, which for many reasons has been forgotten, misunderstood or abandoned in the transition to modernity (hence my criticism of 'scientism'.) In the most abstract form, stripped as far as possible of the accretions of religous dogma, that is what I referred to as 'the vertical dimension' of existence. There is a qualitatively real good, if you like. If you recall the Robert M. Pirsig book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, a lot of it concerned re-discovering a metaphysic of quality. I will go further and say that encoded in the traditions of philosophical spirituality, there is a vision, or an intuition, of a different domain of reality, or a different way of seeing reality, which reveals that qualitative realm. I suppose it is that which puts me on the religious side of the ledger, although I would describe it more in terms of philosophical spirituality. The point of the history of ideas is to trace the geneology of that understanding, which has considerable provenance.

My view is that, regardless, there is something real and important in in religious consciousness — Wayfarer

Great. So an argument for 'real' and 'important' would be really interesting. The fact that other people have previously agreed, but now don't, is not such an argument. Not even close.

Why did you choose that as a hypothetical example? — Wayfarer

It was an arbitrary choice. Good reasons: it is a position with no known current adherents; it is widely known to have no known current adherents; it is widely known to be a position that once had a great many adherents, to enjoy a position of prestige now long past. Biographical reason, why it came to mind: my computability textbook used Zeus as an explanatory aid -- Zeus can list all the integers even though there are infinitely many but not even Zeus can list all the reals. Stuck in my memory. It's also just damned interesting that something once so important that the founder of our vocation was put to death for ever so obliquely challenging it, is now just a bunch of old stories.

** Added: I looked back at the post you ignored all but a sentence of and remembered the other reason. Since it's no secret my sympathies are with science and naturalism, and I believe you generally have me pegged as a materialist or physicalist or some such, I found it amusing to make myself an advocate for an unlikely religion -- I ever so briefly considered going with Zoroastrianism -- and I thought it might be amusing to you as well, since it's so obviously out of character for me. **

Is it because you have me pegged as a religious-or-spiritual type, therefore this must be typical of the way that I think? — Wayfarer

No. Really. If I wanted to do that, I would have put the argument in your mouth instead of mine. Stop psychoanalyzing me and just read what I write.

My claim is that, from the outset in Plato, down to the end of the 19th century, there was a soteriological element in Western philosophy. — Wayfarer

Here's the problem. For purposes of this thread, I don't care what you think. In the argument from reason thread, yes. There we argued about what you think. This thread was not an attack on your worldview or your philosophy or your understanding of history or anything. None of that is relevant.

Maybe someday, maybe soon, I'll change my mind about this, but for now I still have enough invested in the ideas of logic and inference and argument that I am only raising in this thread an issue about your method of argumentation. That's all. The content of the argument is of no interest to me, not in this thread. In other threads, yes. Not here.

Here, I have only been concerned to understand how what I assume you must think is an argument is put together, because these posts I have described do not look like arguments to me. They have no logical connective tissue that I can see. Giving you the benefit of the doubt, and recognizing my past prejudice against historical reasoning, I asked for an explanation.

But you keep making substantive posts about your worldview, like this one. I don't care. I don't care what you're saying, I'm only asking about how what you're saying is put together so as to make an actual argument.

Am I being clear enough? It has nothing to do with my attitude toward your views, whether I agree or disagree. It's entirely about the logical form of the arguments you present, because I cannot work out that form for myself.

And it is not some modern prejudice of mine. You can thank Aristotle for noticing that how arguments are assembled is indifferent to the contents.

The software runs on the crowd, enough of us always alive to not lose our progress in the game's attempt to understand itself. — plaque flag

I like it.

I do find that many are too quick to pigeonhole someone as like x or y, or too ready to argue about what some philosopher said or meant … that is a scholarly side of philosophy.

I much prefer when people use their own words as often as possible rather than relying on philosophers as a crutch.

You posed a question, then you said (presumably to me):

I'll leave you to address the question in your own way — Srap Tasmaner

So I went ahead and did that. Your response was:

what effect was the history of the history of ideas supposed to have on me? — Srap Tasmaner

So, no response to anything I actually said, but then,

For purposes of this thread, I don't care what you think — Srap Tasmaner

The content of the argument is of no interest to me — Srap Tasmaner

So in response to:

Am I being clear enough? — Srap Tasmaner

Answer: definitely not, but don't go to any further trouble.

They don't have to focus on the human element because you are the human element and if everything goes right, you'll be thrilled to head to campus or to the lab or to the site everyday because you get to do science all day! — Srap Tasmaner

:up: