I disagree with all that. If two people see a third thing and one sees it as beautiful and the other doesn't, keep in mind that they look with different eyes, are possibly in a different stage of life, and could be at different energy levels (to talk in modern terms). The beauty is there but only one is seeing it (if he is truly having beautiful experience)

If a machine can, if unhampered, do great feats this shows it's material perfection/beauty and usefulness but the question of beauty is usually about arts. Aesthetics ponders on the timeless. I like seeing a perfect score too, but not everything is beautiful. Many things are interesting but not beautiful. Many things in science are interesting but not beautiful. So I do think there is something objective about it

Common agreement doesn't make something objective. Objectivity is the experience in act of truth. I can look at something and know that it is perfectly beautiful, but others may disagree. We do not always experience the same mental qualia as others, even if words are the same

I understand and appreciate your point although i have not read enough Wittgenstein to make a judgment about what he thought. Hume talks about impressions as opposed to ideas. For me grammer is the bridge between impressions and thought. But we can still have thoughts that language cannot capture because thought, in Hegel's language, has form and also content. Form is how thinking relates to language and perception. But philosophy tries to give rise in the individual student to ideas eternal, beyond words and world. Yet you seem to think that philosophy is just a game (but one that needs to be played properly), as when you said Hegel arguments are is reality just rhetoric

Grammar is the one thing that Platonism has nothing to do with. There is science, philosophy as applied to science (which can never be finally solved), and pure philosophy. Plato dealt with ideas which have no relation to words except when they are communicated by grunts

So if it were up to you people would be banned for promoting Platonism, neo-Platonism, or continental philosophy because it is not philosophy? We are on opposite ends because i don't consider logical positivism to be philosophy but my philosophy is what has traditionally been called philosophy for thousands of years. For me modern positivism attempts to numb the parts of the soul that want to do philosophy and they try to examine what is left as this doubt reveals the truth as reduced to perfection. But basically they are just become materialists. I heard recently Richard Dawking saying "we dont know how consciousness arises but we are working on it". Isn't the brain enough? *What kind of answer is he looking for?* Is a part of the brain or QM any more explanitory? What material explanation will ever satisfy him. Science is like "we found the meaning of life: it's helium!" Or whatever. Obviously its just about matter yet they think if they focus on matter long enough the answers to life will emerge. And that's nonsense. Science is good at making life comfortable if it's done by good people. Yet science is simply pointless because it can't say what "good" is.

How is my position objectionable?

Science and math are not about philosophy except when one (Hume for example) make philosophical comments on it. Scientists usually miss the point about that stuff and this is why there is division of disciplines. But this is after all a philosophy forum right?

Let me state that no one here is denying that he has parents and drives a car, ect. That is practical truth. Philosophy addresses something more subtle. Scientists must think philosophers are crazy for speaking of the "real Reality" but we think they are crazy for talking about a theory of everything. Such a theory can't address philosophy even though much of its thinking gets mired in philosophy. If it's not the true reality, how can you have a full theory of it? Hume already shows with the induction problem that the world is radically contingent and we can't truly know what is causing what. Science is fine but it doesn't go anywhere

Well if Plato is right then science is opinion. His system stands as a certain way of looking at reality and should be addressed. Too few people are even interested in philosophy, not knowing what it's really about. Hume showed that science can't make definite statements the way mathematics can, and as philosophy can after much mulling. Science works sometimes but it fails all the time as well. It can't say what reality is and it's results are open to investigation.

To be upfront, I am a Hegelian perennialist non-dualist, so clearly I may see these matters differently than many in Western modern society. The German idealists contrasted "understanding" from speculative thinking. Practical truth is clearly differentiated from philosophical truth. The latter is without time.

Hume on causation obviously, and in Plato's system the world is the realm of opinion, while the Ideas alone have true actuality. Some turn modern science into a religion by calling Dark Matter "God" or speculating of something coming from nothing, which is fine but science can't avoid philosophy while at the same time its methods don't lead to the Ideas

I objected to jgill's apparent claim that mathematics is superior to philosophy. Both give truth but different kinds of truths. They are two peas in a pod. Science on the other hand was refuted by Hume and Plato long before this forum started. It has lots of practical truths but it's still in the Cave as far as philosophy is concerned. So I agree with you that philosophy has something to say about pretty much everything

So if nothing, either thought or matter, ever existed, how can we cognize that state of affairs? Absolute nothing is that. We do have thoughts and bodies now and there are now necessarily only limited nothings. Only the whole has it all. There is limited nothingness especially in consciousness. Why this interest in absolute nothing unless it is connected to the human concern over death? What relevance does it have for students of philosophy?

You seem to be saying that mathematics is a greater source of truth than philosophy's pursuit of the ineffable. The later can't be put into words but it can be pointed at and knowledge of this wordless truth can grow

Why ould anybody act/will themselves to be a tiny piece of dust before an almighty and all happy God? Isn't the normal response to ask why you yourself are not that being

"If therefore we begin with the contingent, we must not set out from it as something that remains fixed in such a way that in the progression it continues to have being. This is only one side of its determinateness; rather it is to be posited in its full determinate character, which means that non-being may just as well be attributed to it and that consequently it enters into the result as a passing away. Not because the contingent is, but rather because it is non-being, only appearance, because its being is not genuine actuality- it is because of this that absolute necessity is. The latter is its being and truth." Hegel, Lectures on the proofs of the existencebof God, Oxford University Press, pg. 114

Does the opposite of this world exist?

Are these rules of the mind that we are examining or rule of the universe? The SEP articles on Hegel speak of those who interpret the philosopher normatively and those who are ontologist interpreters. Just like with the debates that Jordan Peterson has ignited, there are those for whom the world is simply and soley scientific but who believe philosophy to straighten out their souls. It's not so much whether being or nothing is "out there" in a Platonic sense. It's that these discussions can quell the insistent desire to know. Then you can find being or nothing or anything you like. Hegel's "pure being" is neither actual nor potential but instead completely conceptual because we can't hold it in our minds without losing it to pure (absolute) nothingness. They dialect themselves back and forth further and further into the horizon until they are sublated back *to your* moment of contemplation abd you see what is empirically before as true reality

When Aquinas says God is in all things as cause, as presence, and also in things in His essence, how is this different from panentheism? Also, if the Ideas are in the mind of God, this seems to be a mutiplicity unless there is one single Idea, one Concept, that includes all truth within it. Like the greatest number that B. Russell talked about in Logic and Mystcism. The infinity that can't be thought of except as complete and one with all reality.

I think this conversation needs to distinguish between God's will and reason. If we can only conceptualize this separation because of our present empirical condition, we have to say that the will causes a change in the intellect. To act free is to be unbounded but to know in that case is to do something *new*. If God is his thoughts and his thought is new in any way we then have a God who has always been changed! Or which comes first, simplicity orb thought?

In a way. We all have individualized empirical selfs. God has room for everything, and I think you are correct contra Thomism. Even the Trinity seems contrary to simplicity. There is more than a relationship to self involved. Christians claim 3 persons, 3 experiences as one experience

How can God be in everything if we are free?

God would have his normal thoughts with the addition of his knowledge that he choose something (such as to create). You're basically presenting Spinoza's critique

I think everything God does is free. Freedom is objective choice about ends in order to "be good". God is act and can't be any different from how we become good. If we are free and he is not, what is he to us? A hyperuranion? The core of simplicity is the ability to choose to think and act

First you have to consider how God loves himself. Is it necessary or free? If he has any freedom he has every freedom and his acts are necessary because of the will he applies himself with

Compare the Critique of Pure Reason with his Critique of Judgment. The first takes objective reality of immediate perception to be false. It's not the thing in itself. This I see as his Buddhist method. With faith in God and total admiration for the teleological argument he retain his Christian side but realizes he left the world *empty*. This is why inn paragraph 57 of COJ he mentons the "indeterminate concept of the supersensible substrate of the appearances" and of "purposiveness without purpose". And also the picture Kant paints in The Critique of Practical Reason is that of spontaneity of applying moral action to ourselves. Is his philosophy too man centered for you? The perennial philosophy of man has always been that thought and will are prior to matter, instead of the other way around (matter being the substrate of consciousness). Was Hermes an existentialist?

Kant's pure reason is attached to its practical reason, being the servant of it. So you can learn from Kant about life. His -Critique of Judgment- has us playing purpose into the world of experience. This is proto-existentialism. The thing in itself is him doing the Buddhist thing where you empty everything of mental constructions and try for a moment to see things as they are to themselves. But he places essence back into quanity, which for him has substance. The moon has substance for Kant. There is just something deeper going on

Are you a reductionalist? What Kant said is similar Malebranche, Rosmini, and many others. The world is yet is not. It's contingent. But the nous in our minds is in the structure of matter and how it interacts with itself. The source of reason is experienced in our knowledge of the world we live in. The world becomes necessary by our interactions with it. If I jump or fall from the Eiffel Tower, it's at that moment necessary that I fall and die if there is nothing to caught me. Yet it's contingent because the tower could have never been made and myself not there to die by it. Contingency and necessity are dualities that stand as thesis/antithesis. Experience is their sum. The universe is Nature and we are in its unity

For science the world is contingent while for philosophy the thing in itself is necessary, only by being in-itself can it make the contingent share in its necessity by application of universal laws. Fitche comes to mind

"To the things themselves" said the phenomenologists. For them experience was primary. Colors may be said to be in the mind but everything is. Color is "there" just as much as primary qualities. I think this is what they meant.

The turn from Kantianism to modern phenomenology was a turning toward realism. It was for the world. Which is not to say it's not spiritual in any way. Mystcism has been a big part of German philosophy since the Romantic period

Maybe the noumena is that which connecs the appearances to reason, not behind but within

My understanding of Kant on this point is that if the world is timeless and without space, objects are eternal and the becoming we see is like the motion of the experience of motion pictures. The vase is real but it's eternity acting as becoming, presence showing life. We don't really know what things are in eternity but we can speak of them while in time by observing them acting outside eternity. Try not asking first what noumena is and instead focus time and space being intuitions. Then maybe noumena come into focus

Kant's response to Hume was that we ARE time and space. Both held the world to be phenomena but Kant held that world to be inside us in a sense. If we are time and space than the world would appear to us falsely because we usually experience time and especially space as outside us. Hence the noumena is the world minus time and space

I was reading this today: https://iep.utm.edu/presocra/#SH6c

I found it so interesting. We assume that how we experience reality is the noumena in our practical lives. But according to Kant time itself is part of our mind, and space too at that! So objects (noumena) are hidden below the scheme we project on reality from the mind. Philosophy has a way of saying that same thing in different ways. Mellisus (and of course Kant) remind me of the block universe of Einstein, a man who stood on the shoulders of giants.

What do you guys think of the statement that Kant forced the limits of reason on us so that we would discover faith in the Designer? I believe Nietsche thought Kant to be Christian apologist

A "judge who compels the witnesses to reply to those questions which he himself thinks fit to propose". He takes this further in the Critique of Judgment where we fill the world with purpose that is not in the phenomena and which we do not know exists in the noumena. Plato thought the world was a reflection of the forms. Kant said we can know nothing at all about noumena. I see that now. He divorced the shadows from the forms such that we cannot know what a form even is. Agree?

I believe Kant and Hegel both were against this "intuitive, direct knowledge of the Forms". What -immediate awareness of oneness with God in the present moment- meant to mystics was different than philosophers. The latter desire to reach the ultimate by thought's guidance. Thoughts are fun

I am not sure even Kant says you have a 2nd frame where your sense contents get transferred into for further organisation. — Corvus

My mental image of the Kantian frame-image is that it is not fully dimensional. That is, whatever dimension it has, the phenomena (not the noumena mind you) has more. Even other galaxies exist as phenomena when nobody is there to see it. Kant knew he lived in a real world, but he tried to reduce it to a philosophical formula. We don't want to be depersonalized (a classified disorder in the West) just because we like philosophy. As for phenomenology, it's father is Husserl but who is the great grandfather? "To the things themselves" they said but those things were "phenomena", hence the name of the movement. This dualism was enabled by the influence of Kant on latter philosophy. Phenomena is not understood by the immediate sensations anyway, hence the mere fact that I know the moon is there when everybody closes their eyes

Anyway, like you, some people seem to interpret Kant as a naive idealist who claims that you have objects in your mind, and that they are the real objects.  There are objects in the external world, which cause the senses to perceive the objects, but you don't know if they are the real, and there is the world of Thing-in-Themselves independent of your perception. — Corvus

This sounds like Plato. Kant has a different "feel" to his work but that may be from the historical distance between them. Is it possible Kant was just a Platonist?

To say that the our fields of perception alone give us phenomena i think is contrary to phenomenology, which Kant may have have been the first author of. Mentally we have, or for now have, a "frame" and we put all our sensations on this 2d frame in order to organize it. The phenomena of the window behind me is behind me, and the noumena could be anywhere. I even think sounds exist objectively. A reality outside of us

It's strange to think of the phenomena/noumena distiction in relation to one's own body parts. Is there a nose-in-itself vs the phenomena of it?