So the conclusion is not “religion bad, secular good.” — Truth Seeker

I'm skeptical. After all, your thread is entitled "Comparing Religious and Scientific Worldviews". You literally spend the entirety of the OP showing how religions contradict each other and how secularism offers a way out. In contrast, you spent no time at all reviewing the ways in which secular ideologies contradict each other. In your reply to you even have a section entitled "Why not religion?" in which you list out the characteristics that are supposedly unique to all religions that make them unsuitable for adoption as worldviews, again, without any analysis of how similar dynamics play out in secular ideologies. I'm sorry, but despite what you now claim, it's very hard to take you seriously when you say that you never intended for the conclusion to be "religion bad, secular good."

That said, if you claim this was not your intention, then so be it. Thanks for the lively discussion.

So If i were to for instance attempt to stop someone harming my child, it's not because I think its right, its because I, personally, don't want that to happen because it'll make me feel bad. — AmadeusD

That strikes me as a mischaracterization of the situation. If I saw someone about to harm my child, my implicit response would not be "this will make me feel bad, and I prefer not to feel bad, therefore I'll intervene". Rather, feeling bad would be a response to the perceived worth of my child and the destructiveness of the harm. If my only motivation were only to avoid bad feelings then I would have to regard sedating myself as morally equivalent to protecting my child. But I don't because I judge the child's well-being to be objectively worthwhile and the harm to be truly wrong. That's why I might be willing to risk immense suffering or even death in order to protect them. You're taking a complex cognitive assessment and trying to reduce it to pure emotion.

Emotivism can't adjudicate between competing moral positions. No morality rightly can, because it cannot appeal to anything but itself (the theory, that is - and here, ignoring revelation-type morality as there's no mystery there). The only positions, as I see it, that can adjudicate between conflicting moral positions on a given case is are 'from without' positions such as the Law attempts to take. I still don't think there's a better backing than 'most will agree' for a moral proclamation. — AmadeusD

This proposal seems self-defeating. When you claim that no moral adjudication Is possible you are making a judgement, claiming it is more reasonable than alternatives, and implicitly inviting others to accept it. This already presupposes a commitment to the bindingness of certain norms of rationality, such as that we should consider all positions, understand them accurately and weigh the arguments for and against them. If you truly thought that normativity is reducible to emotion there'd be no point in coming to a philosophy forum to engage in complex arguments in support of anything at all.

Maybe you didn't add a category to the thread when you originally posted it? I'm not sure, I've never started a new thread on this site before. It is strange that it's not showing up on the forum's home page, though. At least, it isn't for me.

My claim is: orthodoxies grounded in authority and sacralization are systematically riskier than orthodoxies grounded in public reasons, fallibilism, and accountability to sentient welfare. — Truth Seeker

You've conceded quite a bit here. Notice that your claim has shifted significantly to being one about the comparative risks of orthodoxies grounded in authority, etc. vs. those grounded in public reasons, etc., whereas your original axis cut across the religious/secular divide. It should now be fairly straight-forward for you recognize that there are plenty of secular orthodoxies that can (and do) meet the former criteria (e.g. Stalinism, Maoism, etc.), and there are plenty religious orthodoxies that can (and do) meet the latter criteria (Quakerism, Universalist Unitarianism, etc.). Now you could respond by saying that former "are actually just religions" and the latter "are not real religions", but then you're just defining religion in a way that makes your critique true by definition.

If you think that’s wrong, the strongest move isn’t “secular groups do it too.” The strongest move is to show that revelation-anchored, sacralized authority is not more prone to harmful insulation than reason-anchored, publicly contestable frameworks. — Truth Seeker

Again, this wasn't really your original claim, which you seem to have now more-or-less abandoned.

Let's go ahead and put the nail in the coffin with regard to your original claim. While it's always difficult to quantify harm, I think you'll be hard pressed to say that religious institutions have caused more harm than dysfunctional secular orthodoxies such as Stalinism, Maoism or Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge regime.

The bottom line is that the true fault-line here is not between secular and religious orthodoxies, but between functional and dysfunctional orthodoxies, of which we have religious and secular examples of both.

By the way, what happened to your OP? Why doesn't it show up on the forum's main page?

Thank you for the thoughtful reply, but I feel like there are a few things that you're still not properly reckoning with.

First, I feel that you haven't come to terms with the fact that all institutions, both secular and religious, develop orthodoxies, protect core doctrines, and treat certain challenges as illegitimate. Universities have foundational commitments they don't put up for debate and scientific institutions operate within paradigms that resist revision until crisis forces its hand (per Kuhn). Secular political movements and societies have sacred values that function identically to religious dogma in terms of how heresy is treated (I.e. as moral failure). This is a rather obvious sociological/historical point that I think you'll find difficult to dispute.

Furthermore, I think you're under-appreciating the degree to which religious institutions evolve and revise their fundamental commitments over time. Even the Catholic Church, which is often held up as a paragon of rigid adherence to doctrine, has changed so much that it's ultra-conservative members feel that it has all but abandoned some of its fundamental commitments. You might argue that this evolution often results in the splintering of the community, but this is true of all institutions, not just religious. Inevitably there will always be some who are unwilling to compromise and move in a new direction. Again, this is not unique to religious communities.

Second, I'm guessing that if push-came-to-shove many of your own foundational commitments would prove themselves to be less open to revision and falsification than you pretend them to be. Consider your commitment to "openness to revision" itself - are you open to revising this principle? What kind of evidence could someone offer to change your mind on this point? What about the claim that all ethics should be "answerable to the lived welfare of sentient beings", or that "reduction of suffering" is a foundational good? These are not empirical claims that are subject to falsification. Furthermore, I highly suspect that if you were to found an institution rooted in these values that you'd not have much tolerance for those who substantially question or deviate from them. Most probably you would eject such people from the group rather quickly, or leave to start another group.

Overall it seems that you are just turning a blind-eye to the fact that much of what you criticize within religion is not, in fact, unique to religion but seems to be inherent to the human condition.

Very nice! I hadn't seen that paper, though I think I've run across parts of that quote before.

And don't worry, your secret is safe! :wink:

Your critique of religion seems a bit superficial. First, you seem to be treating religion as a monolith, but contemplative traditions within each religion and various process theologies don't seem to fit the characterization of "demanding assent before evidence" or "exempting themselves from scrutiny." Plenty of religious thinkers have engaged rigorously with exactly the challenges raised here.

Your claim that religion "grounds ethics in authority rather than consequences" simply assumes consequentialism is the correct metaethical framework—which is itself contested. Virtue ethics, deontology, and care ethics all have secular and religious variants.

You also seem be implying that secular worldviews don't involve unexamined assumptions or provide "mythological insulation." Not only does that seem to be contrary to fact, but also seems to overlook the reality that any moral/metaphysical framework, including secular ones, rests on foundational commitments that can't be justified from outside the system. The claim that "meaning does not need religion" is probably true, but the claim that "meaning doesn't require some unjustified foundational assumptions" is much harder to defend.

I think you're hitting on something important here. Aristotle's analysis of the soul can be confusing because it is multi-dimensional, and he's not always consistent in how he utilizes his terminology. My understanding is that his analysis is basically three-tiered, meaning that there are three ways in which the soul can be said to "actualize" the body, and they build on each other.

First we have the soul as a set of capacities or latent abilities (dunamis). An example might be that of a human child's capacity to learn a language. Next we have the soul as first-actuality (entelecheia). An example might be that of an adult who has actually learned a language, but is not currently using it. Finally we have the soul as second-actuality (energeia). An example might be that of an adult actually using the language that they have learned.

The connection you made between potentiality and the modern concept of energy is interesting and highlights a key difference between the Aristotelian definitions of matter and energy and the modern definitions. They are practically the inverse of each other. Whereas in modern physics matter (or mass) can be loosely understood as a localized "actualization" of energy in spacetime, for Aristotle energeia was understood to be actualization with respect to a material substrate. In fact, one could argue that the modern concept of energy maps fairly well onto the classical concept of prime matter (pure potentiality) insofar as energy is that which persists under any and all possible change. I don't know how far the analogy can be taken, but it is an interesting parallel to ponder.

I agree with you that there are modes of knowing that operate without explicit intellectual articulation and that nonetheless shape us, guide us and constitute genuine cognitive achievements. The infant knows its mother before any proposition could be formed; the person of practical wisdom knows how to act in complex situations without being able to articulate the principles guiding them; perhaps even the mystic knows God in a way that exceeds any theological formulation.

However, at some point we usually require something stronger than this. The issue isn’t so much whether implicit forms of knowing are real, but whether these are endeavoring to make a claim. Consider that people often have conflicting intuitions about the same matter. Their participatory knowing, their acquaintance with the situation yields contradictory orientations. At some point the question arises: who is correct? This is where insight and understanding must be tested by judgment - and not just one’s own judgment, but often the judgment of an entire community.

It seems to me that in the process of making our implicit knowledge more explicit we often learn more than we thought we knew before. That’s because making it explicit forces us to take responsibility for what we are claiming to know. It forces us to think through the strengths and weaknesses of our understanding, to find the gaps and try to fill them. This process doesn’t replace or eliminate implicit understanding. If done right, it iteratively perfects it.

As for Sellars, he was responding to something very specific - namely, the various foundationalist sense-datum theories of his day. He felt that there were several prominent philosophers who were failing to properly disambiguate between the act of sensation and the act of knowing. His use of the word “knowing” aligns with what we have called “judgment” above, the point where you have moved beyond the implicit to the explicit to making a claim, thereby electing to be held responsible by others for justifying that claim.

Awareness can be counted as a kind of knowledge―knowledge by acquaintance or participation, but it is not, on it's own "knowledge that", or propositional knowledge. — Janus

You are right to distinguish between awareness and propositional knowledge, and you're right that conscious awareness need not rise to level of self-reflection; consciousness is intrinsically self-present.

That said, I personally would not regard the body's response to an itch as "knowing". If we simply feel the itch and scratch it without advertence, then we haven't really risen above the level of stimulus-response. Intelligently adaptive, sure, but not cognitively engaged.

If the itch becomes focal in the sense that we attend to it and understand it as this kind of sensation in this location, and if we implicitly affirm yes, I have an itch, then I'd be willing to say we've achieved knowledge.

That said, Sellars's critique of the Myth of Given is specifically directed toward those who would conflate sensation with propositional knowledge. Sellars might argue that knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by participation are merely latent or implicit forms of propositional knowledge that have simply not yet been made explicit by being appropriated into understanding and judgement. In that sense they would be more appropriately classified as a type of experience or presence that, while real and important, does not rise to the level of what would normally be admissible as knowledge in a philosophical context.

Personally, I would tend to agree with Sellars, while also acknowledging that the word "knowledge" is used in many ways in both colloquial and philosophical speech. What are your thoughts?

Yes, perhaps I got lost somewhere along the way. I was originally responding to this:

Some would argue that awareness of things is knowledge that there are things. Plato, Russell, that I am familiar with. In juxtaposition to knowledge of things. — Mww

This seems to stating that awareness is knowledge. Depending on what "awareness" means here would, I think, determine whether the critique applies.

But I am happy to let it go. It sounds like we may be talking past one another.

Have a wonderful holiday!

I don’t need to know there is a sensation beyond having one. The given sensation makes the knowing of it superfluous. — Mww

This doesn't sound right to me. A sensation isn't a claim. It can't be true or false. It can't be a premise in an argument, or the result of an inference. A sensation just is.

One has no need of conceptual context for mere appearances to sensibility. One can have (the sensation of) a tickle on the back of his neck without the slightest clue as to its cause, antecedent experience not necessarily any help except to inform of what the cause is not, but not what it is.To know that there is a thing, some as yet undetermined something, is merely the impossibility of its denial that isn’t self-contradictory. — Mww

Sure, you can have a tickle without knowing its cause, but having a tickle and knowing that you're having a tickle are two different things. The occurrence of the tickle requires no concepts. Your knowing that you're having a tickle does.

The fact that the claim "I'm having a tickle sensation" is, perhaps, impossible to deny does not imply that the claim is not conceptually mediated. The recognition that it can't be denied is itself a reasoned judgment, not an immediate content of sensory experience.

Your points are well-articulated and the parallels you draw between modern cognitive science and Kant are certainly apt (as they were in your original essay). Of course, you could have probably guessed that I would resist taking on too strong a notion of "construction". In my opinion, there is a real difference between saying (1) that cognitive content is underdetermined by sensory input and structured by unconscious operations and (2) saying that the mind-independent world is itself a construct in its entirety.

To put a finer point on it, when you say things like "there's an unconscious synthesis occurring" and "there is no agreed neural mechanism" you are presumably making a claim about the way things really are - not just about the way that they appear to you - and that you've actually grasped and confirmed something true about how the mind actually works. Would you agree with this, or do you see things differently?

Kant made an effort to address this in the Paralogisms in the Critique of Pure Reason. Perhaps you could set your thesis against that since his view is sharply different from yours. — Paine

I don't think I can do this justice in a single post, so I am going to start with some general observations and we can dive deeper if needed.

At a high level, I would say that I don’t necessarily disagree with Kant’s critique of the paralogisms, but rather with the underlying epistemology that he uses to justify his critique. In my opinion, Kant basically reduces knowledge to something like “direct empirical access”. I think we can reasonably argue that, in doing this, Kant is running afoul of the Myth of the Given and concluding from it that genuine knowledge is impossible. The general shape of his reasoning goes something like this: “genuine knowledge is immediate; all human knowledge is mediated; therefore no human knowledge is genuine knowledge”. I would say that this is precisely why he is more-or-less forced to posit the noumena and the transcendental subject (among other things) as strictly unknowable. However, if we reject the claim that all genuine knowledge is immediate (and I would), then we don’t have to follow him down that path.

As for the paralogisms themselves, the common assumption undergirding all of them is that the soul can be known a priori. My general strategy for approaching Kant’s analysis of each paralogism would be to more-or-less accept that these a priori arguments fail while also rejecting the reasons Kant provides for why they fail, which are rooted in his errant epistemological commitments as detailed in the paragraph above. The upshot is that I can accept that the paralogisms are faulty without accepting Kant’s conclusion that genuine knowledge of the self is impossible.

Some would argue that awareness of things is knowledge that there are things. Plato, Russell, that I am familiar with. In juxtaposition to knowledge of things. — Mww

I would say that this probably runs afoul of the Myth of the Given. In order to know that there are things one must have grasped concepts such as "thing" and "existence" and made a judgment on the basis of those concepts. Wilfrid Sellars provides a pretty thorough critique of the notion of immediate knowledge.

Doesn’t Freud’s discovery of the unconscious (if indeed a discovery it was, as it had been anticipated previously) have some bearing on the question of self-knowledge? — Wayfarer

Yeah, I'd say so, but I personally don't think it undermines the possibility of self-knowledge. Unconscious mental processes are not present in experience the way empirical objects are, but their effects are. Thus, I'd say that they can be investigated, understood and known. What are your thoughts?

The word I used was "appropriating" not "approximating". In order to know myself I must first be aware of myself. This self-awareness is intrinsic to every conscious act. But awareness is not knowledge. In order to know, I must understand. In order to understand I must inquire.

Even if it be allowed to consciousness that it uses, say, understanding, it cannot do so in the approximation of itself as an understander, for it is the understander which stands in consciousness of its thinking, from which follows consciousness, in approximating itself as a thinker, is conscious of itself being conscious of its thoughts, which is absurd. — Mww

Experiencing, understanding and reasoning are acts of subjectivity. They are not something over and above the subject but constitutive of the subject itself. So when I engage in these activities I am intrinsically conscious of them as constitutive of me. Or so I would argue...

I acknowledge that there is no definitive interpretation on these matters and that commentators have disagreed substantially over the last two millennia over the meanings of terms such as substance (ousia), substratum/subject (hypokeimenon), matter (hyle) and form (morphe/eidos).

In the Categories, Aristotle distinguished between "primary" and "secondary" substance, the former denoting concrete individuals such as Socrates, the latter denoting abstractions such as "man". In the Metaphysics and De Anima the account of substance is not as straightforward, but I think a reasonable case can be made for interpreting substance as denoting the concrete individual. Aristotle seems consistent in defining substance as a composite of matter and form (as in your quotation from De Anima 412.a6). As you suggest, the word "matter" is not to be understood as denoting any particular physical "stuff", but rather a principal of potentiality operative within every substance. While this principal is always realized in some concrete substratum, it's not equivalent to any given substratum. Substratum refers to that which persists under change, whereas matter seems to refer to something more like a constraint on what forms can or can't be "received" by any given substratum as determined by the nature of the substratum itself.

Form seems to variably refer to the principles of unity, actuality and "what-ness" of a substance. Basically, it accounts for everything that makes something what it is, aside from the substratum.

One way of interpreting these terms "form", "matter" and "substratum" is to understand them as "roles" that things can play with respect to each other. The bronze plays the role of both substratum and matter with respect to the bronze statue, whereas the shape of the statue plays the role of form with respect to the bronze.

On this interpretation a form (such as a shape) is constitutive of the substance (bronze statue). It is immanent to the substance in the sense that it is not something over-and-above the substance, yet it's not equivalent to the substance which also includes some additional constituent(s) playing the roles of matter and/or substratum. This approach potentially enables a "hierarchical" ontology. For example, atoms have form with respect to subatomic particles and are matter with respect to basic chemical compounds. Basic chemical compounds have form with respect to atoms and are matter with respect to complex chemical compounds, etc., etc.

Now whether this is the correct interpretation of Aristotle, I can't claim to know for sure as I'm not an expert in the interpretation of ancient Greek manuscripts. That said, scholars like Anscombe, Gill, Jaworski and Kosman seem to lean in this direction, as did (arguably) Thomas Aquinas and some of his followers.

I think you’re rather over-dramatising my view. My argument isn’t against realism as such, nor against inquiry into it. It’s against the presumption that reality is exhausted by the objective domain. — Wayfarer

I apologize if I've read too much into your critique. Hopefully the discussion has proved interesting nonetheless.

Not an impasse but a misunderstanding. — Wayfarer

Perhaps.

The point is categorical, not psychological. There is a difference between reflexive awareness and object-awareness. By way of analogy: just as the eye is present in every act of seeing without ever appearing as a seen thing, subjective consciousness is present in every experience without itself appearing as an object of experience. — Wayfarer

Fair enough. I acknowledge that there is a difference between reflexive awareness and object awareness. You are right that the subject is not an object in the sense of being something standing “over-against” the subject.

But I don’t think that this is enough to establish your conclusion that realism is incoherent. After all, you don’t deny that the subject can be experienced, understood or known. Your claim that there is a categorical distinction between the subject qua object and the subject qua subject doesn’t strictly follow from the fact that the subject is not an empirical object. All that follows is that the subject can epistemically appropriate itself in different ways - as experienced, as understood, as known.

You could argue that understanding and judgement cannot fully appropriate the subject. There’s always “something more” that hasn’t yet been appropriated. This has already been granted in the transcendental distinction between the in-itself and the for-consciousness as outlined in previous posts. This only implies the unknown, not the unknowable.

So the realist deals with the “noumenal ground” of subjectivity by understanding it as unknown, not unknowable; indeterminate, not indeterminable; intelligible in potentia, not unintelligible in actu. Inquiry is the process of excavating this intelligibility, not manufacturing it.

I have argued that this attitude is a normative precondition of inquiry itself. Inquiry would be incoherent if consciousness presupposed that Being was unknowable, indeterminable and unintelligible. To deny this, I would argue, is not mystical profundity, but a retreat from the task and responsibilities of honest inquiry.

Forms are real in Aristotle’s sense, but their reality is not the reality of an object of perception. Their mode of being is inseparable from intelligibility itself. And if that is the case, how could they 'exist in the world in a mind-independent way'? — Wayfarer

For Aristotle forms exist in substances. Their existence is, in some sense, constitutive of substance. This is what I meant when I said he considered form to be immanent to material substances. For him form is literally inseparable from matter. When form enters the mind it is still bound to the matter of the organism, but in a different mode of existence. In that case the form exists in a way that determines “what” the organism is thinking about or perceiving, rather than in a way that determines “what” the organism is.

I didn't say that. I said, the subject is not an object, except to another subject. When i look at you, I see another subject as object, although the fact that we use personal pronouns acknowledges the fact that you are another subject, and not an object. First-person subjectivity is real, but it is not something that can appear to itself as an object. That’s a categorical point, not a skeptical one.

We can obviously think about our own thinking, but it remains the fact that although we can see our eye in the mirror, we cannot see our own act of seeing. Also a categorical distinction — Wayfarer

It sounds like we may be at an impasse here. It seems fairly self-evident to me that the subject can become its own object, otherwise self-knowledge would be impossible. However, you seem particularly concerned here, not with self-knowledge, but with self-experience. From my perspective it seems equally self-evident that I am aware of my acts of seeing. This isn’t because I can “see my own seeing”, but because conscious awareness is intrinsic to the act of seeing something. I am intrinsically conscious of my conscious acts - otherwise they wouldn’t be conscious acts.

But, do forms exist in the world? If they are only grasped by intellect, in what sense do they exist? — Wayfarer

Recall that in the Aristotelian tradition material substance is a compound of matter, form and existence. Form is what actualizes matter and doesn’t exist independently of matter. So yes, in that tradition, forms exist in the world in a mind-independent way as immanent to material substance - not in the mind of God, nor in a Platonic “third-realm”. Whether this account (or something like it) is correct is another question, but this is my understanding of how Aristotle would have answered your question, and I would tend to agree with the general approach, if not with all of the fine details.

I’d agree Kant’s account is epistemic, but not sure about “prior to the empirical”. And I don’t know in what sense any of Kant’s account is ontological, re: “… The proud name of ontology, which presumes to offer synthetic a priori cognition of things in general in a systematic doctrine must give way to the modest one of a mere analytic of pure understanding…” (A247/B303). — Mww

What I mean by “epistemically prior to the empirical” is that a proper understanding of the empirical depends on a proper understanding of the transcendental. By “ontologically prior” I mean that the existence of the empirical world depends on the existence of the operations of the transcendental subject. I would argue Kant’s system entails both, though I recognize there are other interpretations.

Actually, I was going for the opposite. The system in operation is just that; the talk of the system is over and above, or in addition to, the operation itself. I mean…the system never talks to itself, isn’t trying to understand itself; it is just that which understands, and is necessarily presupposed by the talk of it. — Mww

I would disagree with this. As mentioned in my reply to Wayfarer, I see consciousness as inherently reflexive. It can (and manifestly does) use experience, understanding and reason to appropriate itself as experiencer, understander and reasoner.

But surely this construction is made from a perspective outside all three of them! Look, you say, on the one side, the proverbial chair, on the other, the subject, and between them, the act of cognition. But that observation can only be made from third person perspective. Which is fine, as far as it goes, but it is, again, an abstraction. The subject whom you are here designating an object, is only object from a third-person or external perspective. So the entire construction still remains 'vorstellung', representation, in Schopenhauer's terms. — Wayfarer

I don’t agree with the idea that the subject is forever hidden behind a veil of representation, firstly because I don’t believe that knowledge is essentially representational in nature. Furthermore, I would argue that consciousness is intrinsically reflexive such that we can experience our experiencing, understand our understanding, reason about our reasoning, etc. This doesn’t require an impossible “exit” from subjectivity, but is built into how consciousness works. The subject isn’t something hiding behind its acts, but is constituted by those acts and is accessible through them. This isn’t just theoretical artifice - it’s a part of how I plainly experience, understand and know myself on a day-to-day basis.

Furthermore, to claim that “the subject is unknowable” amounts to a performative contradiction since it is itself a claim made by the subject about the subject. If true, how do you know it’s true? Either the claim is known to be true, in which case knowledge of the subject is possible, or else it is false, in which case knowledge of the subject is possible.

I will happily concede that some readings of Kant seem to leave us completely separated from an unknowable reality. But on the other hand, a sense of the 'unknowability of existence' is a fundamental philosophical virtue in my book. — Wayfarer

I think this sounds more romantic than it really is. If Being is unknowable then inquiry is pointless. I’d rather say that the intelligibility of Being is inexhaustible. No matter how much we already know, there’s always more to be known.

It is nevertheless the case that the form can only be grasped by nous. That is what rationality enables, it is the faculty that makes us 'the rational animal'. The philosophical question is, in what sense do forms exist? Again, they're not phenomenal existents (unless you accept the D M Armstrong definition which equates forms with attributes of particulars, which I don't.) They are, as per the classical tradition, intelligibles - not dependent on the mind, but only perceptible to the intellect. — Wayfarer

Yes, form can only be grasped by nous - the very same forms that also exist in the world independently of nous. This is just how mind and world connect. I would argue that the reason that this is hard for you to see is that you’ve chosen an epistemology (based on an ontology) that makes it impossible for mind and world to connect in this manner.

The structure of subjectivity goes beyond the purview of Kantian transcendental philosophy, in that the structure of subjectivity must include pure practical reason, re: moral philosophy, which transcendental philosophy does not address. Ref: A15/B29

Transcendental philosophy has for its object the structure and bounds of pure speculative reason, all its content already having been abstracted, and the critique of it is that by which understanding obtains the rules for its proper concerns, re: the possibility for and validity of pure a priori synthetic cognitions in relation to empirical conditions. — Mww

Yes, this is Kant’s definition of transcendental philosophy, but I am approaching it differently. Kant excludes the analysis of practical reason because it deals with desire, which is an empirical matter. For Kant the transcendental is not only epistemically “prior” to the empirical, but also “ontologically” prior (in some sense) as well, whereas the account I’ve been elaborating sees it as only epistemically prior.

Might this be separating the system in the talk of it, from the system in the operation of it? The system in and of itself, regardless of the talk about it, is both participatory and knowing. The system doesn’t have subjects and objects; the talk of it merely reifies some speculative content into comprehensible expressions, of which the modus operandi doesn’t have and therefore of which it makes no use. — Mww

I think what you are describing here is the idea that the system in operation is, in some sense, “overabundant” with respect to the system in the talk of it which, if you think about it, is already implied within the idea that the object in-itself is in excess of the object for-consciousness as laid out previously. The system in operation is trying to understand itself. This just means that the system itself plays the role of “object” in its conceptualization of itself. This implies that the system as it is in-itself is always epistemically in excess of the system as it is for-consciousness. There is always more to know about the system than is already known.The system knows it doesn’t know everything about itself. This is the known-unknown. Unknown, but not unknowable, otherwise inquiry would cease (or, more accurately, never get started in the first place).

Otherwise you'd have the absurd situation of differentiating objects from 'things which aren't objects' independently of any act of identification or synthesis. The whole point of the argument is to protest the notion that we're passive recipients of an already-existing world. In reality we are cognitive agents who's mind is always actively constructing our experienced world - the lebenswelt, the world of lived meanings. — Wayfarer

I don’t deny that the mind has an active role to play in the construction of the lebenswelt, what I am skeptical of is the notion that the entirety of the contents of the lebenswelt exists only in the mind. This was the whole reason for introducing the notion of form, because forms can exist simultaneously both in a mind-dependent way and in a mind-independent way.

I agree that for Aristotle the intellect grasps form, not representations. But for Aristotle, that is precisely why the form is not mind-independent in the empiricist sense. In knowing, the intellect becomes the form; the form exists as intelligible only in being apprehended. So while the thing may exist independently as a composite of matter and form, objecthood and intelligibility are not properties it has apart from cognition. That is why Aristotle does not treat knowledge as the passive reception of a ready-made object, but as the actualisation of form in νοῦς. — Wayfarer

I don’t think this is quite right. A form existing in a mind-independent way (esse naturale) is always potentially intelligible. When the intellect grasps the form it becomes actually intelligible (esse intentionale). However, it is still one-and-the-same form now instantiated in two different ways.

Of course, not every form that comes to be instantiated in the intellect is also instantiated in nature. In that case the form is said to be purely a being of reason (ens rationis). The existential duality of form is what accounts for the fact that some of the contents of the lebenswelt are purely constructs of the mind. Some, but not all.

The point of the 'idealism in context' argument, is that idealism arose because of the loss of the sense of 'participatory knowing' that is found in Aristotelian Thomism, which preserved the sense of the 'union of knower and known' that later empiricism replaces with a spectator theory of knowledge, the sense of being apart from or outside of reality. And that is more than just an epistemological difference, it's a profound existential re-orientation. — Wayfarer

I totally agree, which is why I find it somewhat surprising that you look to Kant in order to re-establish the sense of participatory knowing given that his approach renders the world as it is in-itself (noumenal world) unknowable. Kant gives you the “participatory” part, but it’s at the expense of the “knowing” part.

One last thing I wanted to say with regard to the meaning of the word "object" in the above. The word "object" here is not being restricted to any kind of object. It is intended to range over any possible object the subject could be intentionally related to, including both concrete/empirical and inferential/abstract objects.

I’m not claiming that objects are mind-dependent entities. I’m claiming that objecthood is not a property that pre-existing things have independently of cognition. The object is the result of apperceptive synthesis. Your objection presupposes that objects are already there as objects prior to that synthesis, which is exactly the assumption I’m questioning. — Wayfarer

It seems like we may be getting hung up in terminology. My proposed starting point is to ask “what is presupposed in the act of asking a question?” Well, there must be a mind/subject that asks the question and there must be something that the question is asked about. I am labeling this something with the word “object”. This is a pretty standard account of intentionality. The mind is intrinsically directed toward an “other”. This “other” is typically called an “object” in the literature going back at least to the middle ages. The object is what is known by the subject in the act of knowledge. So we have three things:

• A subject
• An object
• A relation between subject and object

This is an extremely simplified account of the structure of intentionality (or subjectivity). Perhaps it is the very minimum that can be said about it - I don’t know for sure.

It’s important to distinguish between the structure of intentionality and what is sometimes called the content of intentionality. We are not saying anything here about the content, only the structure. As such, we have not yet made any claim regarding the nature of any particular object other than that it must exist in some sense and must be distinguishable from the subject in some sense. This in no way implies that any particular object exists independently of the subject. It might turn out that all the possible particular things/contents that can play the role of “object” happen to be mind-dependent things.

There are some additional things that seem to be presupposed in the act of asking a question, including:

• The subject knows enough about the object to ask a question about it
• The subject does not know everything about the object

The first statement defines the scope of what is “for-consciousness”. The second statement defines the scope of the “in-itself”. Again, we are not here making a claim about the nature of any particular object in-itself (this follows from the fact that we’ve made no claim about the nature of the object). All we’re saying is that the act of asking a question presupposes a commitment to the knowability of the in-itself.

There is a lot more than can be said here, but this was as far as I had gotten. My point in presenting this was to show how one might define the “in-itself” in a way that makes knowledge of the in-itself possible without presupposing anything about the nature of the object. In my opinion, this is what an account of transcendental subjectivity ought to aim for. The purpose of transcendental philosophy should be to give an account of the structure of subjectivity, not the content, whereas the question of mind-dependence is a question that should be asked at the level of content, not structure. That is, it is a question that should be asked of particular objects (e.g. spoons, tables, ideas, etc.), not of objects in general. In other words, transcendental philosophy should not be in the business of determining what exists in the world, or how it exists, beyond what is minimally presupposed by the acts of subjectivity themselves.

The irony is that, whereas the account of subjectivity provided above so far does not make any upfront assumptions about the nature of the object, Kant’s account of subjectivity certainly does and, as a result, makes knowledge of the in-itself impossible. This is why building an argument against realism while presupposing Kant’s account of transcendental subjectivity amounts to begging the question against realism.

I will address your other comments in a separate post once I get some time.

It was intended as an alternative account, not a representation of Kant's account.

Given the above, it is clear this is not the case, under the assumption the object the mind knows of, is the same object the mind may not know all of. It is absurd to suppose the dark side of the moon, at those times in which there was no experience of it, there was only the dark-side-of-the-moon-in-itself. — Mww

The purpose of defining the in-itself in the way that I did was to avoid smuggling any ontological commitments into the definition at the outset. This is an epistemological/normative account of the in-itself, not an ontological account. Much of your response to my post amounts to a re-assertion of the dependence of the object upon the mind. You are free to set up the presuppositions of your philosophy in any way you wish, but doing so does not amount to making an argument.

That which is inferred is a strictly logical construct. Existence is a category, and all categories and their subsumed conceptions have reference only to things of experience, and never to merely logical inferences. An existence is empirically given, an inference is only logically valid. Under these conditions, it cannot be said noumena exist, but it can be said it is impossible to know they do not. — Mww

As I wrote in my recent response to Wayfarer, in classical realism form was understood to have two modes of existence - esse natruale and esse intentionale - such that the one-and-the-same form can be instantiated simultaneously both in the intellect and in the world, thereby bridging the gap between them. On this view there is no reason to presuppose that an inferred object exists only within the intellect.

But to view ourselves against that background is implicitly to view ourselves from outside of our lives, to loose sight of the significance of the fact that as intelligent subjects, we are in some vital sense the way that whole process has come to begin to understand itself. And that is not a thought that is novel to me. To view ourselves simply as a species, or as phenomena, is really an artifice. It is not actually a philosophy. — Wayfarer

Yeah, I get it, and I can relate. And while I personally don't subscribe to scientism by any means, I am sympathetic to metaphysical realism, which is why I am trying to explore your critique. I get that I'm probably not your primary target here, but the scope of the argument you presented does seem to include any position that claims we can have knowledge of mind-independent objects.

I don’t think I’m assigning an ontological status to objects. I’m not saying that objects depend for their existence on minds. I’m saying that objecthood — identity, determinacy, intelligibility — is a cognitive status, not an ontological primitive. — Wayfarer

But this is itself an ontological claim.

What do the characteristics of objecthood apply to if not to an object? I think we can (probably) both agree that objecthood must apply to an object, but notice that so far we have said nothing about whether the object is or is not dependent on the mind. In my opinion, this is as it should be. The question of whether a given object is mind-independent is a question that should be asked about specific objects, it’s not something to be settled ahead of time when inquiring into the nature of objects in general. If we stipulate that the characteristics of objecthood apply only to mind-dependent objects from the outset, then we’ve simply ruled out realism by fiat. This is fine - there’s nothing wrong with building one’s philosophy on top of such assumptions, but it doesn’t constitute an argument against realism.

But what kind of existence do they have? You can't show them to me, only explain them to me. Anything that has to be explained is conceptual, not phenomenal. — Wayfarer

Yes, I agree, but it is not uncommon for us to grant existence to things that can only be explained and not seen, like quarks or gravity.

Now you may argue that things like gravity and quarks aren’t the same because you can toss a bowling ball off a bridge to demonstrate gravity, or take me to the LHC at CERN to show how the mass of quarks is measured. In both cases I will see many things, but gravity and quarks will not be among them. Quarks and gravity are theoretical constructs that are posited in order to explain what we see, not unlike how the structure and functions of the transcendental subject are posited in order to explain phenomenal experience.

From a classical realist perspective this makes sense because in all cases the mind is grasping form. You’ll recall that in the Aristotelian tradition substance is interpreted as a metaphysical compound of matter, form (and later also existence). Form is subdivided into substantial and accidental. To understand what something is, the intellect must grasp the forms associated with it. Not copies of the forms, or representations of the forms, but the very same forms. Once understood, reason can then inquire into whether the thing exists independently of the mind. In the case of theoretical science, it is specifically the relations between things that are being tracked. Relations are a perfect example of something that can't be seen but only understood.

I don't believe that the transcendental subject is a being in a sense other than the indexical. We can't single out the transcendental subject and say what it is. I don't think that Kant thought that the transcendental subject was something we could know. — Wayfarer

True, the transcendental subject is not itself an empirical object in Kant's system, but the structure and the function of the transcendental subject is nonetheless knowable via an inference to the conditions for the possibility empirical experience. My interpretation of what Kant is arguing in CPR is that 'something' must exist that has this structure and these functions otherwise empirical experience would be impossible. This is an ontology. Noumena exist. The transcendental subject exists. However, their existence is inferred rather than experienced. If they didn't exist, then empirical experience itself would not be possible.

The “excess” disclosed in inquiry is not an object standing outside cognition, but the open-endedness of meaning itself. And notice I'm not saying there is nothing outside of or apart from the cognized object - that would be to assert its non-existence - but that, whatever we make of the object, is through that process of assimilation, whereby it becomes incorporated into the network that comprises the world of lived meanings (the 'lebenswelt'). Were it totally outside that, then we couldn't even cognize it. — Wayfarer

You are right that the 'excess' is not to be understood in ontological terms.That's the whole point, we can't start by assuming our conclusion. The question of whether any given object exists independently of the mind should be answered at the end of inquiry into the nature of that object, not assumed at the beginning. After we've inquired into the nature of the object and have judged that the object exists independently of the mind, that's it. That is just what it means to make an ontological commitment. Whereas what you are doing is defining 'object' as 'mind-dependent' from the outset, so that no matter what we learn about the object through the process of inquiry this knowledge always only applies to a mind-dependent object by definition. You are deciding the ontological status of the object in advance of the inquiry, which just begs the question.

Now, I'm not saying that the world is ontologically dependent on our cognitive acts, but that outside cognition, it means nothing to us. That is what I take the 'in-itself' to mean: that the object (or world) as it is, outside of or prior to our assimilation of it, has no identity. By identifying it as a meaningful whole, we can say it exists, or doesn't exist. — Wayfarer

But again I think you are still "smuggling" an ontology into your premises - namely, the ontology of the Kantian transcendental subject. In this ontology the content of the phenomenal world is entirely "for-consciousness" because it is the product of the operations of the mind operating on the in-itself (noumenal world). The conclusion that the in-itself is unknowable is completely predetermined by the selected ontology.

Instead of starting with ontology we could start with an analysis of acts of consciousness (such as questioning or claiming) and see what is presupposed by these acts. For instance, we can take for granted that the mind asks questions about the object without making any ontological assumptions about the relationship between the mind and the object. The act of questioning presupposes that the mind already knows enough about the object to formulate a question about it. What the mind already knows about the object is the object as it is for-consciousness. The act of questioning also implies that the mind doesn’t know everything about the object, otherwise it wouldn’t ask the question. What the mind doesn't know about the object is the object as it is in-itself. Therefore, the object as it is in-itself is in excess of the object as it is for-consciousness. Furthermore, the act of asking a question presupposes that what the mind doesn't yet know about the object (the in-itself) is knowable because, again, otherwise it wouldn't ask the question. Therefore, the act of asking a question about an object presupposes that the object as it is in-itself is knowable.

Don't get me wrong, I don't want to idolize reason and rationality. It's more that I think the decline of the classical understanding of the faculty of reason has had hugely deleterious consequences. The decline of scholastic realism has had huge consequences for culture, but they're very hard to discern because nominalism is so 'baked in'.

But you and I have been through that, and this is not our fate (to quote the bard). — Wayfarer

Sorry for being so slow to reply. Part of the reason I don't post here often is because I don't always have time to keep up with the pace of these discussions.

I did want to circle back to the original issue for a moment, which was the claim that metaphysical realism is incoherent. The line of reasoning goes something like this: when the mind posits the existence of a mind-independent object (the in-itself) it is actually just generating yet another idea. Since ideas are mind-dependent, any knowledge of mind-independent objects just reduces to knowledge of mind-dependent ideas. Ergo, knowledge of the in-itself is a contradiction in terms.

But this argument already assumes an ontology in which the direct objects of the mind are ideas. In other words, it simply assumes idealism and then proceeds to deduce that realism is self-contradictory. This is illicit. Ontology cannot be the starting point for an argument against realism without begging the question.

But here is where my preferred heuristic distinguishes between what is real and what exists. I maintain that universals, numbers and logical laws are real even if they are not phenomenally existent. They are real as the 'invariant content of reason': — Wayfarer

It sounds like we would generally agree here, though I'm perhaps more hesitant to posit reason as a transcendental invariant, because if we do so then it seems like it becomes more difficult to explain the fact that we (apparently) have to learn how to reason, or that standards of reason have evolved over time, or that traumatic brain injury can impair the use of reason, etc.

Regrettably, I haven't had a chance to dig that deeply into the work of Plotinus, though I'd like to at some point. I know that there are some figures on the contemporary scene who are heavily steeped in that tradition (John Verveake comes to mind).

Quite right—though it’s worth bearing in mind that Aristotelian (and Thomist) realism is a far cry from empiricism or modern scientific realism. It is built on the metaphysical reality of universals, which is precisely what nominalism has since done away with. — Wayfarer

Generally speaking, yes, though it’s worth noting that some contemporary philosophers interpret the Aristotelian tradition in a broadly materialist way (William Jaworski is the only name coming to mind, but I know there are others). While recognizing the reality of form, they maintain that only material substances exist. Form is always yoked to matter and is understood as the principle of structure/pattern within nature. Such an approach denies the existence of Platonic heavens, separable/immortal souls, angelic/spiritual beings, etc.

Although Berkeley was largely indifferent or even hostile to the Schoolmen, his idealism nevertheless arose as a reaction against the nominalist–empiricist schools that had already severed the older participatory epistemology characteristic of A-T philosophy. That broader historical context is the focus of another OP Idealism in Context. — Wayfarer

Looks like an interesting thread. I will take a look.

Yes—Edward Feser makes a strong contemporary case for that in Aristotle’s Revenge, arguing that modern science is quietly rediscovering exactly the kinds of formal and teleological principles that mechanistic metaphysics tried to exclude. And I've noticed neo-Aristotelian (and Platonist!) strands appearing in many discussions of contemporary biology. — Wayfarer

Yes, it seems that classical ideas have been making a bit of a comeback in the last 20 - 30 years, both within science and philosophy, though still very far from being anything like the dominant paradigm. Personally, I welcome the change.

Here, the word 'substance' is being used in the philosophical sense i.e. 'bearer of predicates', So he's arguing that while the proverbial apple, tree or chair really do exist, they don't comprise some 'corporeal substance' which is real wholly apart from their phenomenal appearance. So, yes, apples, trees and chairs really do exist, but they lack the inherent reality that naive realism tends to impute to them. Whilst I have differences with Berkeley's philosophy on other grounds, here I'm in agreement . — Wayfarer

I would agree that Berkeley made a cogent critique of Cartesian and Lockean metaphysics, but I’m not sure that those critiques apply to all forms of metaphysical realism. In the more traditional Aristotelian formulation, matter was construed not as res extensa, nor as a bare substrate, but rather as the principle of individuation and potentiality in the world. In this view, a material object is not mere matter (which cannot not exist on its own), but a compound of matter and form. The mind gains knowledge of material objects via the processes of perception and understanding (intentional acts), through which it comes to grasp the very same forms inherent in the material object itself. This approach would seem to dodge Berkeley’s critique by eliminating the gulf between matter and mind that was opened up by Cartesian dualism and Lockean representationalism because the mind comes to grasp the intelligible forms inherent in the object itself.

Well, yes, but notice something - mathematical models are essentially intellectual in nature. Myself, I am sympathetic to Aristotelian realism, which declares that 'intelligible objects' (including numbers) are real - but they're not corporeal (or material). So they're 'mind-independent' in the sense that they are in no way dependent on your mind or mine - but then, they are only perceptible to the rational intellect, so in that second sense, not mind-independent at all. — Wayfarer

Yes, I think we agree on this for the most part. Aristotelian realism does indeed declare that mathematical models are incorporeal intelligible objects (i.e. mathematical forms), but it also allows these forms to ‘inhere” in material objects (which, as discussed above, are compounds of matter and form). So on the Aristotelian account the mind would come to grasp basic mathematical forms (quantity, relation, etc) via abstraction from sense perception. Aristotle’s approach to mathematics was rather “down to earth” in comparison with his mentor’s, and I don’t believe that he would have been in agreement with Augustine on this matter, who seemed to favor a more Platonic theory of mathematical objects.

The genius of modern physics, and scientific method generaly, was to find ways to harness physical causation to mathematical necessity. And this is actually further grounds for a scientifically-informed objective idealism. But this came at a cost - the elimination or bracketing out of the subject in who's mind these facts obtain, with the consequence that they came to be seen as true independently of any mind whatever. Especially when taken to be true of empirical objects, this introduces a deep contradiction, because empirical objects cannot, pace Kant, be understood as truly 'mind-independent'. That is responsible for many of the controversies in these matters. — Wayfarer

I agree that sciences such as physics succeed by abstracting away the subjective aspect of experience, but I think this can be interpreted in many ways. The representationalism of the early moderns created an epistemological chasm between subject and object - namely, the mind can only know representations of empirical objects, which are purely constructions of the mind and which contain nothing of the objects themselves. But again, perhaps the Aristotelian tradition could offer a way out of this impasse. Perhaps what the mind grasps through the physical sciences are the intelligible forms of material objects themselves, abstracted from sense perception. This doesn’t have to lead us back to naive realism, because we can distinguish between knowledge of material objects as they are in relation to our sense faculties (e.g. knowledge of how objects look, feel, taste, etc.) and knowledge of material objects as they are in relation to each other (e.g. quantitative relations of mass, velocity, etc.). While the former is truly relative to our sense faculties (and therefore, does not constitute knowledge of objects “in-themselves”), the latter is not. Perhaps this could be one way for a realist to evade the charge of incoherence.

But, as said, my sympathies are with some form of Platonic realism. And this is consistent with the views expressed in the mind-created world. (It is perhaps best expressed in Husserl's mature philosophy but that is a subject I'm still studying.) — Wayfarer

Ah, I see. I think in one of the comments above you had mentioned you were partial to “Aristotelian” realism, but probably had meant to write “Platonic” realism. I've decided to leave my response as originally written. Apologies for any confusion in my above comments.

This is precisely the 'objection of David Hume'. It was Hume who pointed out that the conjunction of events such as the effects of collisions leads us to believe that these are necessary facts, when in reality, there is no logical basis for such a belief, other than the repeated observation. That is central to the whole 'induction/deduction' split which begins with Hume. But, recall, it was precisely this which awoke Kant from his 'dogmatic slumber' and inspired him to show that these kinds of physical reactions are intelligible precisely because of the categories of the understanding which the mind must bring to them. Again, this calls into question the natural presumption that these kinds of causal relations must be real independently of any mind, as Kant demonstrates that the whole idea of 'causal relations' is not really grounded in observation as such, but in the fact that causal relations are native to the intellect. — Wayfarer

Certainly, Kant’s solution to Hume’s skepticism is ingenious, but I don’t believe it is the only path forward. Hume is reacting to the metaphysical and epistemological choices made by his predecessors and drawing out the somewhat absurd logical conclusions. Kant represents a major advance in modern philosophy, but he is ultimately solving problems that only arise out of choices made by the likes of Descartes and Locke. If we see Descartes and Locke as having taken a wrong turn, then we aren’t obliged to look to Kant for solutions, but can (perhaps) evade those problems at the outset by hearkening back to the classical realism of Aristotle and his successors instead.

That’s not to say that one can’t or shouldn’t ground their own philosophical outlook in the incredibly rich and subtle synthesis that Kant created, only that it isn’t the only way that one might proceed.