Jung would say you have a Heidegger complex.

If you look at a sculpture and notice the negative space around it, it may occur to you that this negative space makes the statue possible.

The statue is your virtue. The negative space is your monstrousness.

The statue is the self-righteous spirit of the ego. The negative space is the evil within you that you refuse to recognize as your own, so you project it across the world out to the horizon.

The statue is Heidegger's Nazi sympathy. The negative space is that he was Plato reincarnated.

One of the interesting questions is how much of this decline and low economic growth is simply due to the demographic transition of countries. Decreasing populations don't create a reason for economic growth. — ssu

Yes. Declining population is a looming problem for China, South Korea, and Japan. Europe and the US attract immigrants to offset the decline, but that ignites racial turmoil as those countries become darker in complexion. :)

:up: :up: :up:

Some men may downplay concerns about climate change because it's perceived to be feminine.

Previous studies have shown that women are more concerned about climate change than men, but this is the first research looking to answer why that is.

:up:

Wasn't the Holocaust also a product of scientisitc thinking and misapplied rationalism with a technocratic final solution? Zygmunt Bauman ( a philosopher and death camp surviver) argues that the Holocaust was a product of modernity, made possible by bureaucratic rationality, which allowed ordinary people to participate in genocide without personal hatred or direct violence. I have always thought of the Holocaust as what happens when rational calculation overrides people’s emotions and moral instincts. — Tom Storm

I suggested that previously in this thread. I'm reading a book called Another Country which covers the intellectual scene in Germany after the war and into reunification. People who lived through it said the German tendency toward irrationality was the real problem. What occurred to me was that eugenics, which Hitler loved about the USA, was a product of scientism, not irrational nationalism and what not.

Habermas was a long way from Heidegger philosophically. His longing for a metaphysical and moral foundation causes him not only reject Heidegger and poststructuralism, but Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Sartre, Gadamer, Freud and the many philosophical movements they were connected to which questioned foundationalism and recognized the need to reconcile
the rational and the irrational. — Joshs

I get that. But whatever you and I may love, you have to respect the attitude of people who are trying to find the way for their culture to come out of shock and take a step into the future. I'd leave it to them to figure it out, even if that means burying something had potential.

Heidegger initially called his approach philosophy but then called it ‘thinking’ in order to distance it from the association between philosophy and abstraction. — Joshs

According to this essay, it's rationality itself he wants people to learn to get past.

This is the kind of thing that Habermas wouldn't have been able to accept because he and others perceived that the Holocaust was a manifestation of the indulgence of irrationality. In fact, the Nazis in general were thought of as such a manifestation. For Habermas, it was imperative to bolster rationality in every way possible to return to psycho-social stability.

If that meant giving up what Heidegger thought of as the special destiny of the Germans, it wouldn't have even been a consideration. Redemption wasn't on the table after WW2. There was nothing but silence. I never realized what the intellectual climate of post-WW2 Germany was like. It was a like a dark, empty cave. Just pure desolation.

70% of Heidegger’s published work is lectures or seminars. — Joshs

Okay?

Although placeholder symbols for absence were used in earlier systems, the modern zero—as a numeral with its own value and arithmetic rules—originated in ancient India before spreading to the Islamic world and Europe. https://www.britannica.com/science/zero-mathematics

The placeholder symbol they're talking about came from the Babylonian practice of recording abacus results onto clay. Where there was no bead on the abacus, they would put the symbol for zero.

It sounds like Being and Time didn’t make sense for Steiner. — Joshs

Steiner wasn't saying that Being and Time doesn't make sense. He was explaining that it's incomplete and that people who heard him speak said his lectures went beyond what he wrote. I guess the same was said of Plato. Apparently there is a recording of him somewhere, and Steiner says it reveals a magnetic personality.

I'm thinking of how mesmerizing I found What is Metaphysics. Maybe that gives me a hint as to what Arendt and the others are talking about.

Dialectics? You mean Hegelian dialectics? — Joshs

Or Neoplatonic, yea.

The irony is that reductive naturalism is the product of Enlightenment philosophy, and is often aligned with rationalist theology and deism, where humanism is more closely aligned with atheistic existentialists like Sartre. — Joshs

Theists can definitely be a-humanistic to the extent that sinners are tossed away like garbage into a fire.

The modern concept of zero began in India. — Athena

No it didn't.

Not at all worried about losing your Superpower -status? — ssu

The US is widely considered by political scientists to be in decline. That's not a result of Trump. It's just that the world changes.

Well, yes, what's real is dependent on the task in hand, so the Possibilism-Actualism Debate is pretty superfluous. — Banno

That's exactly what I think. Where ontology leaves practical matters behind, it's a wild goose chase.

Why are European countries really trying to get to that 5% defense expenditure so eagerly? Because the US has transformed to be a very untrustworthy ally. — ssu

One of these days you're going to finally get that this a concern for you, not Americans.

There's absolutely no other real reason for other countries somehow deciding that the US dollar should be a reserve currency. The logical solution would have a basket of currencies, where the US dollar is the biggest currency (but not the sole currency). — ssu

There's nothing stopping the world from doing this. The trick will be to do it without causing a run on the dollar. :grin:

Do you want to go on to the other SEP article, or have we treated it sufficiently? — Banno

The second article is about ontology. I think you and I will probably land in the same place regarding that topic. I think we can hold off unless you're charged up to read it.

haven't gone into the detail of the section on Combinatorialism as much as we might . — Banno

Again, it's up to you.

That rings true to me, even though I can't claim to really understand it. — Wayfarer

Plato would say you're remembering the wisdom of the Anima Mundi.

The US is an oddity in that most countries in its position would demand tribute.

Not sure I understand this but is the point that, at an ordinary level of thinking, dualities appear to us? — Tom Storm

Dualities necessarily appear to us. We think in pairs, up/down, left/right, male/female, etc. In every case, the meaning of any word contains it's opposite. So if we deleted 'down' from your mind, "up" would also disappear for lack of anything to compare it to.

But in saying that, was he say that, of all the things that there are, none of them exist in every possible world? Or was he saying of nothing, that it exists in every possible world?

That's the trouble with continentals... so vague... — Banno

Good question. The ancient Greeks couldn't accept the idea of nothing. As a result, they didn't have the idea of zero and their math was limited because if it.

Zero was invented by the Babylonians.

So I think it's true that Heidegger's philosophy amounts to a-humanism, which in the wrong hands becomes in-humanism. But why were there so many wrong hands?

The provocative answer is: the rise of naturalism. Eugenics, which reduces people to something like genotype started in Britain and spread like wildfire to the US. During its height, women were being sterilized by state governments with the assent of the Scotus, for no other reason that they had checkered pasts.

Eventually it was discovered that this was all based on deplorable pseudo science, but lurking in the background was the real a-humanism of the naturalist perspective.

That's what caused the Holocaust. Heidegger's himself later blamed it on technology. I'd say that was close, but missing the bullseye.

Heidegger would agree that nothing exists necessarily. One happy moment of agreement between continental and analytic philosophy.

thought Hegel was a monist idealist, like Kastrup? — Tom Storm

He would say the ultimate truth is the Absolute, which is a state of unity in which there is no thought because there are no divisions. Thought is the realm of partial truths. In that realm, you can't really escape dualism.

Are you a dualist? — Tom Storm

Thought is necessarily dualistic. Implied is some unified world beyond thought. This is Hegelian. He's an example of the way I think.

Could well be. My question doesn’t change, however: what is the reason, in idealism, for the division between apparently dead matter and conscious beings? If all that exists is mental in nature, why does some of it present as "lifeless" structure while other portions present as subjects with inner experience? — Tom Storm

The question goes back a long way, at least to Plotinus, who was an idealist monist. Monism of either variety has this problem, and seems to require eliminativism, in other words, we identify the thing we don't want as an illusion. That was Plotinus' answer: that matter is maximal privation of the Good (which he thought is identical to God and intelligence), and according to his interpreters, he was saying that matter in its fullest extent is an illusion. I went looking in his writings for where exactly he explained it and was disappointed that he didn't address it in a very full bodied way. He just sort of trailed off. Btw, Kastrup's view is vaguely Neoplatonic like Plotinus' view.

That compares to the present moment, when consciousness is the thing some would like to eliminate in favor of monistic materialism (like Daniel Dennett). The same thing happens. If you go to where Dennett is supposed to be tucking this problem away, he resorts to open-ended questions designed to help us doubt that consciousness is what we think it is. Monists can't seem to nail down how we're all enjoying a big fat illusion, but they're sure we are.

I’m comfortable with my understanding. — T Clark

Ok. It's odd that you're not even willing to look into it.

I wrote a bunch of stuff about different principles in the OP. This particular one is just a small portion of what I’m interested in here and not a central one. I don’t expect everyone to agree with me on all the presuppositions I identified. — T Clark

I just thought maybe you'd want to get a correct understanding of the scientific views you're discussing.

The amount of energy is a number, but so is the amount of matter. Energy and matter are just two phases of the same substance like ice, steam, and water. — T Clark

I think if you look into it further, you'll discover that I'm right. Energy is a scalar number that measures the capacity of a system to do work. There's an awesome Spacetime video in which Dr O'Dowd explains it really well. I've posted that video three times so far on this forum. But you can also discover the information elsewhere. :grin:

What I struggle to understand is how this framework accounts for the apparent distinction within the world between living entities (animals, plants, bacteria) and non-living ones (chairs, rocks, bottles). — Tom Storm

I don't know Kastrup's answer, but there is no scientific definition of life (according to Robert Rosen). What we're referring to by "life" requires the concept of purpose, or final cause. That's not something we detect, per se. It's an idea we use to organize our experience, so it may be like a Kantian category.

Energy is a number, not a substance.

yep

[2] The universe consists entirely of physical substances - matter and energy. — T Clark

Energy isn't a substance. It's a physical construct, which means it comes from the analysis of an event.

Not that any of them endorse him wholesale but this passage in particular is highly relevant. — Wayfarer

Schopoenhauer believed subject and object are two sides of the same coin. That insight goes back to Plato. You're in danger of calling all of philosophy phenomenology.

But that can be no more than fiction. Surely, there is a place for rationalism, but rationalism has got a worse record than empiricism, starting with Thales saying everything is sourced from water. — Questioner

It's a model you use to make sense of what you're experiencing. If you find the model is wrong, you update it. Davidson said it's like a web of inter-related beliefs, and possessing such a web is the hallmark of rationality.

Empiricism only gets you so far. You run into the problem of induction.

If you're describing the way the world is, you're giving an objective account.
— frank

This sentence is contradictory. If it's your account, it's not objective. — Questioner

If you precede your statement with "from my point of view" then your statement is 1st person.

A physics book expresses a 3rd person account. That doesn't mean it's not derived from 1st person data, or that it's necessarily true. We're just talking about what kind of voice the account is in.

We have no access to it. Everything constructed in the mind of the subject is by definition subjective. We have no choice but to believe our senses. — Questioner

An objective account is in 3rd person. It's like a novel written in 3rd person, a God's eye view.

I think the answer to Josh's question is that a state of affairs looks different depending on where you're standing. And 180's point resists sophism. If you're describing the way the world is, you're giving an objective account.

But how can I know states of affairs in the world if my knowledge of the world is limited by my language. Does this infer that states of affairs only really exist in my language. — RussellA

This is why I suggested we leave out the word "reality" because it connotes mind-independence. Russell was a neutral monist, and the Tractatus has the same character.

But TLP 2.01 A state of affairs (a state of things) is a combination of objects (things) — RussellA

He sort of mystically says that in a state of affairs, things are like links in a chain. Since the Tractatus is dense and enigmatic, I prefer to just use a logic textbook for determining what state of affairs is.

A very high percentage of the stuff you post is completely wrong, like maximally bonkers.

The next few years will be interesting. Vance commented that he's fascinated by Bernie Sanders. I hope that's a good sign, because Sanders is a fundamentally decent human being, whatever one thinks of his politics.

For Wittgenstein, States of Affairs (SOA) are the fundamental building blocks of reality in the world, and are about how objects can be arranged. — RussellA

I would say leave out the word "reality." Wittgenstein (in the Tractatus) is saying that the boundaries of what we call the world are precisely the same as the boundaries of thought.

When we talk or think about the world, we don't usually think of it as a collection of objects, but rather as a complex of relationships and events. We'll call these complexes states of affairs. They're closely kin to propositions.

The basic point of the Tractatus is that since language and the world are meshed together, language can't be used to talk about what's beyond the world (that's the interpretation I favor anyway.)

States of Affairs exist in a mind-independent world. — RussellA

A realist would say an obtaining state of affairs is mind-independent. Realism is tacked on to the basic idea of a state of affairs. The idea itself is compatible with any ontological outlook.

that is the case, then the enquiry is not about the State of Affairs in the world (Caesar was a General) but more about the State of Affairs in the mind “Caesar was a General”. — RussellA

It's one state of affairs that either obtains or doesn't.

And yet", he goes on, "the existence of this whole world remains ever dependent upon the first eye that opened, even if it were that of an insect. For such an eye is a necessary condition of the possibility of knowledge, and the whole world exists only in and for knowledge, and without it is not even thinkable. The world is entirely idea, and as such demands the knowing subject as the supporter of its existence." — Wayfarer

Just note that this not any kind of phenomenology. It makes the thread a little confusing if you smash up differing philosophical approaches.