If you read the complaints of professors, two common concerns are that today's students are variously unwilling to challenge their own dogmas and that students embrace a sort of all encompassing relativism. — Count Timothy von Icarus

This is embedded into the educational system itself.

People go to school both to change and yet to remain who they are.

The educational system is supposed to teach people criticial thinking, yet, for all practical intents and purposes, people in the system (both the teachers as well as the students), know that the argument from power is the strongest argument. And then we're all supposed to pretend that this ain't so ...

For Schindler, it's misology, the idea that reason and argument cannot be trusted.

What else can a student conclude, when he bears in mind that the point of taking courses is to pass the exams, and this means answering exam questions in such a way that will most likely bring good grades, criticial thinking be damned.

Does anyone practice liberalism from some manual? Isn't liberalism like most belief systems, something one partly assimilates from culture and partly anticipates by selecively applying various bits of social policy and theory?

Liberalism as we now understand it is the idea that no conception of the good life is to be imposed, and everyone is to be allowed to pursue their own notion of the good life. — Leontiskos

I think this is pluralism and it sounds pretty decent to me. But I don't know any cultures that allow this where it might get in the way of capitalism or the dominant power and ideology of a country. The safety of others is also a consideration for the most part.

Liberalism as we now understand it is the idea that no conception of the good life is to be imposed, and everyone is to be allowed to pursue their own notion of the good life. — Leontiskos

As expressed in the Declaration of Independence: the pursuit of happiness. But this does not mean, do whatever you think makes you happy. In his recent book constitutional scholar Jeffery Rosen argues that the term as used by the Founders traces back before the philosophers of Liberalism to the classical philosophers such as Aristotle and Cicero. The pursuit of happiness is deliberative and public minded. It is not self interested but a matter of the 'common good' and 'general welfare'.

Au contraire, metaphysics being onanistic is a central point of contention re misology. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I wasn't referring to metaphysics. I was referring to the human urge to anthropomorphise such things as nature, animals and objects. I think this tendency to project ourselves onto everything around us like this is not entirely healthy - but I thought this point was too trivial to debate in this thread.

We may dress up our individual egos in drag with Islam or liberalism or existentialism, but in the end we are emotionally driven creatures who make choices based on what (we think) pleases us and how we as individuals interpret ideas. — Tom Storm

Might that sentiment not be more accurate if expressed in the first-person singular? It's very much a projection of the liberal bourgouis consciousness, I think.

I recall when I encountered the teachings of Advaita Vedanta in my youth, much was made about the falsehood of egoic consciousness, and that this is what has to be seen through or overcome - 'cut off at the root', was the expression, which was distinguished from the effort to 'prune' it through some attempt at self-discipline. I was to realise later that the Chinese Communist Party, for example, also deprecates the individual, with generally malign consequences, and that individual freedom is in fact a vitally important principle of liberal culture, and something also often violated in theocratic cultures, such as Iran. (Accordingly, I continue to believe in the sovereignty of the individual, although I also recognise there's a fundamental difference between philosophical self-abnegation and such politically-coerced conformism.)

In any case, the principle of transcending egoic consciousness is fundamental to many faith traditions. It doesn't even have to be particularly religious - it characterises anyone who is selflessly devoted - but that is where it is generally spelled out. 'Not my will, but thine', is a characteristic expression. (Although I have a rather interesting philosophical text, Surviving Death, Mark Johnston, who claims to demonstrate a thoroughly naturalistic (as distinct from supernatural) account of the idea of a 'higher self'.)

- Interesting interpretation. :up:

The difference is that the person and their excellence, excellence in our eyes and theirs, is an end in itself. We want people to be free, and in being free they must understand why they act and accept it "with the rational part of the soul." A merely continent person is always unstable, and in a way, unfree. They want to act in vice and are at war with themselves (Romans 7). But education aims at the enhancement of freedom and harmonization of the person, giving them the tools to harmonize themselves. Training only focuses on the ends of behavior. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I think this is a very idealistic view of education. It doesn't accord at all with my experience of the education system, at least at the primary and secondary levels. The tertiary, as I have experiebced it, has some of the virtues your idealistic vision sees.

I don't disagree with your assessment at all. Perhaps I should have said "ideally" lol.

I don't disagree with your assessment at all. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I do. We don't educate children the way we train horses, and this is for more or less the reasons you gave. When a 4th grader is taught math, or is taught the golden rule, or is taught to think before they act, or is taught to recognize when they are angry and count to ten, they are being educated in the form you indicated. But in fact it is the parents who are primarily responsible for education in this deeper sense of civilizing the child and teaching them how to be human.

We don't educate children the way we train horses, and this is for more or less the reasons you gave. When a 4th grader is taught math, or is taught the golden rule, or is taught to think before they act, or is taught to recognize when they are angry and count to 10, they are being educated in the form you indicated. But in fact it is the parents who are primarily responsible for education in this deeper sense of civilizing the child and teaching them how to be human. — Leontiskos

We shouldn’t train horses the way we train horses either. Now that we understand that other animals are cognitive, emotive creatures that construct their worlds on the basis of goal-oriented norms, we can jettison mechanistic behaviorist ways of thinking about non-human animals, and perhaps also move beyond Aristotle’s animal rationale distinction between homo sapiens and other species. We are beginning to learn that moral thinking does not start with humans. For instance, the sense of justice has been studied in the wild.

In discussing the most basic interactions of non-human animals, Mark Bekoff and Jessica Peirce consider data from the study of animals in the wild and suggest that a basic sense of justice is interwoven with cooperative behavior (including a cluster of behaviors that reflect altruism, reciprocity, honesty, and trust) and empathy (including neighboring phenomena of sympathy, compassion, grief, and consolation). Although it still may be controversial to think that non-human animals engage in practices that can be considered moral or just, clearly some of these aspects of cooperation and empathy are to be found in the earliest intersubjective interactions among humans.

Play involves action and interaction and the ability or possibility of the participants to continue in play. It's defined by a set of interactive affordances. When one animal starts to dominate in playful interaction, closing off the other's affordance space (or eliminating the autonomy of the other), the interaction and the play stops. Self-handicapping (e.g., not biting as hard as the dog can) is a response to the other's vulnerability as the action develops, based on an immediate sense of, or an attunement to what would or would not cause pain rather than on a rule. Role-reversal (where the dominant animal makes itself more vulnerable) creates an immediate affordance for the continuance of play. If in a friendly playful interaction one player gets hurt, becomes uncomfortable, or is pushed beyond her affective limits, this can generate an immediate feeling of distrust for the other. That would constitute a disruption of the friendship, a break in this very basic sense that is prior to measures of fairness, exchange, or retribution. Robert Solomon captures this idea at the right scale: “Justice presumes a personal concern for others. It is first of all a sense, not a rational or social construction, and I want to argue that this sense is, in an important sense, natural.”

What separates civilizing, rationalizing education from indoctrination? Are we not teaching children as we teach horses, with one distinction being that in the case of the horse we assume there is no rational cognition mediating between the stimulus and the reinforcement?
In fact, if conceptions of the good and virtuous life are assumed to be non-relative, we bypass environmental contingencies and reinforcers in favor of innate, a priori givens. We teach the golden rule and how to count to ten when one is angry, not recognizing the contradiction between indoctrinating students with a recipe for blameful anger against violators of such a rule, and teaching techniques for moderating tempers which we train to be fired up in the face of transgressions against the golden rule.

In any case, the principle of transcending egoic consciousness is fundamental to many faith traditions — Wayfarer

Varela and Thompson, in their book The Embdied Mind, made their way from empirically demonstrating a groundless self to emphasizing the beneficial ethical implications of the decentering of the Cartesian subject. They assert that a thoroughgoing understanding of the groundlessness of personhood reveals the mutual co-determination of subject and world. This realization can in turn lead, through the use of contemplative practice of mindfulness, to the awareness of universal empathy, compassion and benevolence.

‘In Buddhism, we have a case study showing that when groundlessness is embraced and followed through to its ultimate conclusions, the outcome is an unconditional sense of intrinsic goodness that manifests itself in the world as spontaneous compassion.”(Thompson)

But I never understood how assuming a groundless ego leads to spontaneous compassion and benevolence. The basis of our awareness of a world isn't simply relational co-determinacy, but the experience of motivated, desiring CHANGE in relational co-determinacy. For Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, every moment of return to the thinking of totality conjures a different affect and a slightly different motivated meaning of the whole. Feelings of compassion and benevolence belong to an infinite spectrum of always changing affectivities of positive and negative valence. Phenomenal awareness as transition from one kind of relational unity to another can just as well be malevolent as benevolent. Within the range of kinds of relationality, a particular phenomenal awareness may be a lessening of compassion or a strengthening of it. We can not say it is always benevolent, only that it is always a new sense of the correlational, that it is never without co-determinacy. Becoming is the restless anxiety of desire, striving, motivation, and the ground of all affect and valuation.

We shouldn’t train horses the way we train horses either. Now that we understand that other animals are cognitive, emotive creatures that construct their worlds on the basis of goal-oriented norms, we can jettison mechanistic behaviorist ways of thinking about non-human animals, and perhaps also move beyond Aristotle’s animal rationale distinction between homo sapiens and other species. We are beginning to learn that moral thinking does not start with humans. For instance, the sense of justice has been studied in the wild. — Joshs

This is simply confused. Horses are not humans, nor do they approximate humans. Sorry.

‘In Buddhism, we have a case study showing that when groundlessness is embraced and followed through to its ultimate conclusions, the outcome is an unconditional sense of intrinsic goodness that manifests itself in the world as spontaneous compassion.”(Thompson)

But I never understood how assuming a groundless ego leads to spontaneous compassion and benevolence. — Joshs

Buddha nature is inherently blissful. Part of enlightenment (bearing in mind, 'enlightenment' was coined by an English translator for the Buddhist term 'bodhi', which in many contexts is translated as 'wisdom') is realising that, which is why it's salvific. It is a fountainhead of ecstacy.

Phenomenal awareness as transition from one kind of relational unity to another can just as well be malevolent as benevolent. — Joshs

But Buddhism, along with the other sapiential traditions, is about breaking through to a different form of awareness altogether. I don't think you'll find it in phenomenology or existentialism although there may be hints of it at various places. There's some references to it amongst the German idealists (Schopenhauer's 'better consciousness', Fichte's 'higher consciousness'). But it will usually be categorised with religion by many, to their detriment. This is where the insights of non-dualism are especially relevant.

A footnote: in my view, modern Western culture tends to idolise 'the natural' as a symbol of purity. Accordingly, we want to situate humans on the continuum with other animals, as part of nature or a product of nature. Hence also the romanticizing of first-nations people and traditional culture. It is then seen as 'arrogance' to declare that humans are different from other species to which we are purportedly related by evolution. We long for a kind of re-union with nature, which might actually be a sublimated spiritual longing. But in this context, 'nature' has been substituted for 'the unconditioned', an insight into which has been generally lost to modern philosophical discourse.

:cool:

I do. We don't educate children the way we train horses, and this is for more or less the reasons you gave. — Leontiskos

We shouldn’t train horses the way we train horses either. — Joshs

There are both good and bad horse trainers, just as there are good and bad educators of humans.

However, in his "Plato's Critique of Impure Reason," D.C Schindler... — Count Timothy von Icarus

Awhile back I downloaded a video from Vervaeke to try to acquaint myself with him, and tonight I finally got around to watching the first hour. It turns out that the discussion is on this same book, although their conversation also relates to your thread on logic:



(At 52:00 he reads a footnote that addresses objection.)

But Buddhism, along with the other sapiential traditions, is about breaking through to a different form of awareness altogether. I don't think you'll find it in phenomenology or existentialism although there may be hints of it at various places. There's some references to it amongst the German idealists (Schopenhauer's 'better consciousness', Fichte's 'higher consciousness'). But it will usually be categorised with religion by many, to their detriment. This is where the insights of non-dualism are especially relevant. — Wayfarer

Interesting. So the idea is that the essential nature of being is beneficial towards all things?

This is simply confused. Horses are not humans, nor do they approximate humans. Sorry. — Leontiskos

Isn't this missing the point of the example? I think @joshs observation seems relevant. As humans develop our moral understanding and ethics, the sphere of concern widens. Which reflects the broader idea that moral agents should take into account the well-being and interests of all beings affected by their actions, not just humans. Which also underpins discussions on topics such as animal rights, environmental ethics, and bioethics - but that is moving on into new subjects.

:up: I've been getting a lot from Vervaeke's lectures. (Mind you, there’s a lot of ‘em.)

So the idea is that the essential nature of being is beneficial towards all things? — Tom Storm

Deep idea: It is the pleroma, the ‘divine fullness’, or the ‘principle of plenitude’. That is the intuitive wonder at the amazing fecundity of nature, the ever-abundant ‘horn of plenty’ which gives rise to ‘endless forms most wondrous’, such that ‘everything that can be, must be’. It is contrasted with the intuition that existence is a bane or intrinsically distressing due to the transience of all phenomena - ‘all that is born will perish’, But I think the ‘middle way’ is that being (not necessarily the same as existence) is an overall good - where suffering arises is the attachment to the transitory, to the products of that beneficence, whereas ‘the sage’ seeks to return to its source, that which gives rise to the All, but is not itself the all (per Plotinus).

:up:

↪Leontiskos :up: I've been getting a lot from Vervaeke's lectures. (Mind you, there’s a lot of ‘em.) — Wayfarer

Yeah, it's good stuff. Truth always limps without beauty, poise, and form, and Vervaeke manifests a remarkable beauty and poise when he engages his topics. I think Jordan Peterson does a relatively good job at this popular level, but his temptation is falling into polemics and pugilism (and, in my opinion, too much Jung and too little Plato). Vervaeke has a remarkable balance, and refuses to get pulled in too many different practical directions. In my opinion Plato is the summit of human reason, and Vervaeke actually tries to expound the depths of Plato at a popular level, which is admirable and profound while also being a bit naive. I will definitely keep an eye on him. He seems to be an important voice.

It's actually pretty interesting how these psychologists are making waves. Peterson takes a first-order approach to the Bible and Vervaeke takes a first-order approach to Plato. Formal scholars of the Bible and Plato are not doing this, and I think there is a general hunger for it.

At 52:00 he reads a footnote that addresses ↪Joshs objection. — Leontiskos

I am reminded of Richard Rorty’s remark about relativism:

Relativism certainly is self-refuting, but there is a difference between saying that every community is as good as every other and saying that we have to work out from the networks that we are, from the communities with which we presently identify. Postmodernism is no more relativistic than Hilary Putnam’s suggestion that we drop trying for a ‘God’s-eye view’ and realize that ‘We can only hope to produce a more rational conception of rationality or a better conception of morality if we operate from within our tradition.’ The view that every tradition is as rational or as moral as every other could be held only by a god, someone who had no need to inquire or deliberate. Such a being would have escaped from history and conversation into contemplation and metanarrative. To accuse postmodernism of relativism is to try to put a metanarrative in the postmodernist’s mouth. One will do this if one identifies ‘holding a philosophical position’ with having a metanarrative available. If we insist on such a definition of ‘philosophy’, then postmodernism is postphilosophical. But it would be better to change the definition.

I don't think everything that might be labeled "relativism," would fall prey to the problems of misology. Schindler is talking about a particular sort of relativism that denies the ability of reason to make judgements vis-á-vis what is declared relative. It is in this that it becomes absolutizing. Relational explanations, those where perspective is essential, notions of concepts as unfolding historically (e.g. Hegel) might be called "relativistic" in some sense, but they are not blocking off their subject matter from the purview of reason.

So to, eliminitivist and reductive paths to some varieties of relativism don't deny the purview of reason. Rather, they claim that reason reveals that some phenomena fall fully on the appearance side of the reality/appearance distinction, and are explained/have their reasons in something else. This variety of relativism isn't even a true relativism IMO.

I don't think Rorty generally falls into this trap, although he might come close in the ways he sometimes describes Wittgenstein's PI as seemingly absolutely decisive re questions of how "language can hitch to the world." In sections of Philosophy as Cultural Politics, he sometimes seems to get dangerously close to absolutizing clefts in being, fully excising parts from the whole, in a way I don't think is helpful or warranted, even by his own standards. But from this one cleft, a lot seems to follow, like the arguments for eliminitivism and against "objective reality." I think Brandom has a decent critique of these, but it misses the main point IMO, which is the rush to dispense with fairly essential elements of human experience because some prior, absolutized cleft in being appears to make them impossible to account for.

I don't think everything that might be labeled "relativism," would fall prey to the problems of misology. Schindler is talking about a particular sort of relativism that denies the ability of reason to make judgements vis-á-vis what is declared relative. It is in this that it becomes absolutizing. Relational explanations, those where perspective is essential, notions of concepts as unfolding historically (e.g. Hegel) might be called "relativistic" in some sense, but they are not blocking off their subject matter from the purview of reason — Count Timothy von Icarus

How would universal reason, or even Rorty’s conversation of mankind, adjudicate the following ‘differends’ (to use Lyotard’s term for the inability of the established terms of discourse to recognize a claim made by the victim)?

… a conception of conversation that retains an aspect of universality is sometimes put forward in postmodern discussions -- namely, the notion of the "conversation of mankind." Of course it does seem odd that Richard Rorty, the pragmatic liberal, whether or not we would assign him the title of postmodern, retrieves this conception of conversation from the politically conservative Michael Oakeshott.

In terms of the conversation of mankind, incommensurability is defined only within the conversation, in the vocabulary of the metadiscourse, and if a group refuses to take up, or is incapable of taking up that vocabulary they are not agreeing to disagree. One can find numerous examples of such groups. The Sinn Fein (the political wing of the IRA) in Northern Ireland had at one time refused to take their seats in the British parliament when elected. They attempted to remain within their own conversation and did not accept the vocabulary of the other official one; an overarching conversation was refused. A group of aborigine coal miners in New Zealand refused to take up the terms of collective bargaining because in their view the vocabulary and legal processes of the industrialists -- which in the West would represent civility (agreeing not to disagree) and participation in conversation -- was immoral. This group, to join in the conversation, would have to adopt a vocabulary and procedure to which they object and find abhorrent. So also, native American tribes who did not have within their vocabulary the conceptions of property, legal ownership, purchase or sale, were not genuine participants in the negotiations which resulted in the white man's ownership of the forests and rivers.

For persons of African-American or Native-American descent who feel that their needs for freedom and dignity do not find adequate expression in the dominant language of formal rights, for women and gays who feel that their needs for self-identity do not find adequate expression in traditional gender roles, and for workers who feel that their needs for justice do not find adequate expression in the contractual language of a wage agreement, refusal to enter into the established discourse may well represent a principled moral stance against oppression and injustice.

The conversation of mankind would be a universal conversation based on a presupposed (meta)consensus -- a contract, expressible in prescriptive terms, an agreement to disagree. In contrast, the universality claimed for the hermeneutical model of conversation involves neither a metaconsensus nor a method of adjudication. This model does not entail a metanarrative. Although it lays claim to universality, it does not claim adjudicative power. It is not prescribed as a solution to problems; it is not that we ought to converse. The claim is rather that we cannot avoid conversing. It is not a matter of agreeing to participate in a particular conversation, but rather a matter of finding ourselves already cast (sometimes as unwilling participants) in one or many conversations which are organized (or disorganized) in paralogical fashion. This means that wherever we find ourselves we are always in a hermeneutical situation, in a conversation, and more precisely, in one conversation among others. This universality has nothing to do with a universal conversation. As Gadamer indicates, the universality of hermeneutics is in no way inconsistent with the fact that a particular conversation contains its own limits within itself, but "fits perfectly well with the factual limitedness of all human experience and with the limits governing our linguistic communication and possibility for expression" (DD 95).

The postmodern idea is not that there is one overarching conversation, but that there is a plurality of conversations, some constituting relative differends in relation to others. It is still possible that fusions can happen between conversations, not in the sense of unifying or reducing different conversations, but in the sense of creating new and different conversations by linking one to another; or again, not in the sense of a fusion of horizons, but in the sense of a creation of new horizons.
(Shaun Gallagher)

Presumably, if some group rejects the terms of their labor contract, or a peace treaty, they have reasons for doing so. E.g., China doesn't maintain that it has claims on Russian-controlled land in the Far-East because they have their own incommensurate "Chinese way of declaring national boundaries." They claim they are the legitimate owners of those lands for various reasons: because they were ceded under duress, because the native inhabitants of those lands are culturally closer to China than Russia, and because they have a historical-traditional role as governors of that land, etc.

Further, people have "their reasons" for their views as they understand them, but there are also metaphysical reasons for these reasons if they are not to be simply "uncaused."

All this seems fathomable. Different cultural views do not spring forth into the world uncaused and undetermined.

Nor is it impossible for a Marxist worker to become a conservative libertarian or vice versa, or for chauvinists to embrace third wave feminist eventually. But if this is the case, it is not impossible for reason to transcend these boundaries. Someone raised as a Lutheran is not locked inside a box, forever unable to fathom Catholicism, let alone Zen Buddhism. The Doctrine of Transcendentals itself could pass from its embryonic form in the mind of pagan, Greek Aristotle through Islamic thought, to medieval Latin Christianity precisely because it could transcend Greek, Islamic, or Latin terms of discourse. This is reasons transcendence at work.

. The Doctrine of Transcendentals itself could pass from its embryonic form in the mind of pagan, Greek Aristotle through Islamic thought, to medieval Latin Christianity precisely because it could transcend Greek, Islamic, or Latin terms of discourse. This is reasons transcendence at work. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I would argue that the Doctrine of Transcendentals was transmitted up to the current philosophical milieu , as were Plato’s forms , Descartes’ Cogito and Kant’s transcendental subjectivity, along the way having their sense transformed continually. I think if Aristotle were re-animated and brought to the present time, he would disappoint many of his modern followers by siding with the most traditionalistic ethical elements of our culture. His thinking was a bit ahead of his time, and well behind our time. His thinking is separated from ours by all of the philosophies that followed one another in the intervening historical development, each critiquing the previous era’s limitations and pointing to new possibilities. There is no idea of Aristotle’s , or anyone else, that is simply carried through from one historical period to the next in its protected, pristine identity. Ideas are always repurposed and redefined via their transmission through history. Development of ideas is a contingent movement, not a logical one.

Further, people have "their reasons" for their views as they understand them, but there are also metaphysical reasons for these reasons if they are not to be simply "uncaused. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Reasons are caused within an interplay of reciprocal causality and reciprocal interaffecting, in the way the structure and function of an organism is caused by the selective pressures of a reciprocally causal ecological system. The function and aim of reason ( and metaphysics), just as the function of a hand or an eye, is not settled in advance, but arises alongside the emerging phenomenon. This is a non-linear rather than linear notion of causality. The rules are changed by the feedback from their consequences. One cannot attain an alien culture’s reasons without first understanding the worldview within which these reasons are intelligible. In order to understand their worldview, we cannot simply draw from some already established metaphysics, since a metaphysics amounts to a worldview There is no way to align multiple, incommensurable worldviews on the basis of a universal notion of reason grounded in a universal metaphysics. One has to be willing to alter one’s own worldview and metaphysical basis of reason in order to achieve dialogue with another perspective.

… the origin of the emergence of a thing and its ultimate usefulness, its practical application and incorporation into a system of ends, are toto coelo separate; that anything in existence, having somehow come about, is continually interpreted anew, requisitioned anew, transformed and redirected to a new purpose by a power superior to it; that everything that occurs in the organic world consists of overpowering, dominating, and in their turn, overpowering and dominating consist of re-interpretation, adjustment, in the process of which their former ‘meaning' [Sinn] and ‘purpose' must necessarily be obscured or completely obliterated. No matter how perfectly you have understood the usefulness of any physiological organ (or legal institution, social custom, political usage, art form or religious rite), you have not yet thereby grasped how it emerged: uncomfortable and unpleasant as this may sound to more elderly ears,– for people down the ages have believed that the obvious purpose of a thing, its utility, form and shape, are its reason for existence, the eye is made to see, the hand to grasp.

… the whole history of a ‘thing', an organ, a tradition can to this extent be a continuous chain of signs, continually revealing new interpretations and adaptations, the causes of which need not be connected even amongst themselves, but rather sometimes just follow and replace one another at random. The ‘development' of a thing, a tradition, an organ is therefore certainly not its progressus towards a goal, still less is it a logical progressus.(Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals)

- :up:

One cannot attain an alien culture’s reasons without first understanding the worldview within which these reasons are intelligible.

Right, and this would be the work of reason, transcending current beliefs and horizons. But we need not stop at Gadamer's "fusion of horizons." Since we "cannot forget ourselves," it seems to follow that we should remember ourselves in our understanding (essentially, Hegel's point re Spirit knowing itself in the shape of Spirit).

There is no idea of Aristotle’s , or anyone else, that is simply carried through from one historical period to the next in its protected, pristine identity. Ideas are always repurposed and redefined via their transmission through history.

Sure, but they're still the same core ideas being transmitted. If each formulation is sui generis and unconnected to the last, then philosophy is impossible. Perspectivism need not entail relativism.

Development of ideas is a contingent movement, not a logical one.

I'd argue it's at least both. Clearly, Plato identified problems in his own work, as did Kant. In both cases, successors took up these seeming contradictions, carrying them forward in an attempt to resolve them. The directions they chose to go with them weren't fully contingent, they were shaped by contradictions inherit in the source material. When Fichte picks up on a tension in Kant, he is picking up on a problem Kant himself recognized as not fully resolved. When Calvin picks up Augustine, he is dealing with contradictions inherit in Augustine's ideas of divine sovereignty and the freedom of the will.

Would I go as far as Hegel and say the move is only a logical one? I think it depends on your frame of reference. Because Hegel certainly allows for what might be considered contingency, it's just that the essence of the evolution of notions is grounded in logic.

There is no idea of Aristotle’s , or anyone else, that is simply carried through from one historical period to the next in its protected, pristine identity. Ideas are always repurposed and redefined via their transmission through history.

Sure, but they're still the same core ideas being transmitted. If each formulation is sui generis and unconnected to the last, then philosophy is impossible. Perspectivism need not entail relativism — Count Timothy von Icarus

You only see the relative as the unconnected because you oppose it to self-presence, as if nihilist meaninglessness were the only alternative to the thinking of presence-in-itself. What grounds meaning is neither the identical nor the unconnected, neither causality nor chaos, but the motivated, the relevant, the consistent. History, change, negation, difference; none of these can be understood if they are subordinated to a platonism of the absolute, the total, the identical.

Interesting. So the idea is that the essential nature of being is beneficial towards all things? — Tom Storm

But I never understood how assuming a groundless ego leads to spontaneous compassion and benevolence. — Joshs

It doesn't; it's a doctrinal claim in those schools of Buddhism that contain the concept of "Buddha nature" (or the modernized equivalent of it).

(I've replied to you about this before, but it looks like you've ignored it.)

That said, compassion and benevolence have a very specific meaning in Buddhist discourse, insofar they are understood in terms of the Four Brahmaviharas, the Four Sublime Abidings. As such, they aren't simply thought of as the emotions or attitudes that people generally think they are. Further, their definitions vary, depending on the Buddhist school.

You only see the relative as the unconnected because you oppose it to self-presence, as if nihilist meaninglessness were the only alternative to the thinking of presence-in-itself.

No, I don't think so. I thought you were saying they were unconnected because your response to "people can learn to communicate ideas across cultures and transcend current boundaries" seemed to be negative - that the ideas changing would imply there was no real communication.

But if we're in agreement that there is meaningful communication there, then I don't see how different cultures are a barrier that reason can't transcend, or an area where reason fails to apply.

But I never understood how assuming a groundless ego leads to spontaneous compassion and benevolence.

The truly groundless is not defined by anything else. To hate something else is to stand in a relation to it where you are defined by what you hate. To be merely indifferent to something is still to be defined by something, for its boundaries are the limit of your being and interest. Only an attitude of love, the identification of the self in the other, avoids this limitation, allowing for what is truly unconditioned.

I've generally seen this explanation more in reference to Christian, Platonist, and Hindu thinkers, but I am fairly sure some Buddhists were mentioned as well. For example, indifference runs counter to henosis because it still acknowledges multiplicity in the objects of indifference that lie "over there," as it were.