Yes! I'm glad there is someone familiar with Collingwood!

So far I have to agree, and I'm only through the introduction. Scarry has a powerful talent for writing. I'm excited for this one.

Will do!

The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World by Elaine Scarry.

That it is futile to try to arrive at any purely objective reality.

Agnosticism on steroids, kind of.

I have also heard it this way: postmodern theory, unlike what its critics would have you believe, is not epistemological relativism. It is, rather, a sociological recognition of the totalizing, repressive nature of modernist/Enlightenment principles and their implementation. — WISDOMfromPO-MO

Yeah, I agree. I think it's wrong to accuse postmodernism of rejecting analytic truth. That there is no truth cannot be analytically true on pain of logical contradiction. The postmodern view is rather, as you said, the recognition that we will never attain any substantial level of understanding and that attempting to will result in destruction.

But when I struggle to find strong rebukes from the majority, I fear for our intellectual lives. — WISDOMfromPO-MO

Partly because the majority do not fear a minority (they merely want them to shut up), and because they also recognize the truth of what the minority may speak of (which the obviously then want them to shut up about).

I can't speak for other people, but I can say that I gravitate to speakers/writers who are humble and who show that they recognize and respect views opposed to their own. — WISDOMfromPO-MO

Of course, I would say it speaks volumes about a person's character of whom they choose to discuss things with. But it's probably a lot to do with feelings of acceptance, and calm, quiet discussion does not seem to cause revolution by itself.

What makes them difficult for me to even begin to swallow without immediate nausea and indigestion, never mind accept, is their "us" vs. "them" posture. — WISDOMfromPO-MO

Mhm, that's one of my pet peeves. It's very single-minded.

Depends on how it is interpreted. — WISDOMfromPO-MO

How else can it be interpreted? Either the proposition that there are no truths is true, in which case it refutes itself, or it's false, in which case there are some propositions that are true.

I don't recall any direct interaction with a radical feminist. Only indirect interaction, such as reading a blog.

My experience has been that when discussing gender issues with those who have feminist attitudes my words get distorted by very volatile people who do not listen to what I am trying to say or make any effort to empathize with me and my concerns.

You can't get to truth/reality if people are not going to let your inquiry develop.

It is about being able to fully function intellectually. — WISDOMfromPO-MO

A vocal minority does not represent the whole movement. I typically have a low respect for bloggers, because in my experience they're typically just interested in shouting and making grandiose claims about themselves. The most obnoxious are the ones who "report the news", so-and-so said this, here's why they're wrong, so-and-so said that, here's why I'm right etc. I've learned to ignore these people because they're not worth my time.

But then they do not respect other people's right to speak their mind. — WISDOMfromPO-MO

I think a lot of this comes from a kind of "revenge" - for millennia women have been silenced, and now it's time to reverse this and silence the oppressors. Certainly there are some dogmatic people who do not let others speak but I will say it again that this is not the majority of feminists. When people say they hate "feminists", they hate the small, vocal minority, the "feminazis" or whatever, and not the actual feminists, whom I think most people would actually agree with if they took the time to listen.

This thread is not about feminism--I only brought it up as what made me conscious of what we might be looking at--but if we are going to talk about it let's remember that feminists regularly disrespect men's rights activists even though "MRAs" are simply voicing their concerns, venting their frustrations, etc. They regularly, as I understand it, do whatever they can to silence men's rights activists--pressuring places into not hosting men's rights events; removing "Men's Rights Are Human Rights" signs; etc.

Calling pro-choice people "baby killers" is bad enough. Then we get feminists calling men's rights activists "misogynists", among other things. — WISDOMfromPO-MO

The problem with the men's rights movement in respect to feminism is that it goes against the fundamental theory in second-wave feminism (radical feminism). MRAs are like liberal feminists, they are striving for "gender equality" through correcting social institutions relatively little. Liberal feminism and MRAs are going to agree that "feminism" is about "equality" of men and women, so that men and women's issues are important for feminism.

Radical feminism is about women's issues. No respectable radical feminist is going to deny that men have their own issues that they struggle with - what they will deny is that these issues ought to be mixed with women's issues. From a radical feminist perspective, pointing out men's issues when radfems point out women's is an attempt to downplay the severity of the woman's predicament. It's like telling the feminist to "suck it up" because men also have problems of their own. This is anti-progress and obscures the reality of the situation.

The fact is that many MRAs are misogynists. They point out the issues men deal with to make it seem like women are selfish, greedy, bitchy and should shut up and go back to the kitchen. Of course, it's veiled a lot of the time. But you'll notice that a lot of the time, MRAs are explicitly reacting to radical feminist theory. It's not really "about" men's issues - it's about obscuring women's issues.

I can empathize.

But making life difficult for those who honestly seek the truth is counterproductive. — WISDOMfromPO-MO

What if the truth is simply hard to accept? Is it not a possibility that "extreme" points of view may actually be true? Like I said before, having a tough skin is necessary if you are to trudge through the political arena. You have to be able to entertain notions without accepting them.

If people feel like they have been forced into silence and are not being heard they make their voices heard through, oh, voting Donald Trump into the most powerful position in the world and catching the polling industry, the experts, and the punditry completely off guard, the narrative goes. Sounds about right to me. — WISDOMfromPO-MO

Yeah, well I mean I personally think political efficacy is largely superstitious. I don't think "the people" en masse are to be blamed for Donald Trump being elected.

God Without Being by Jean-Luc Marion.

Everything, no matter if it is an idea, a worldview, a theory, a concept, a discipline, a tradition, etc. is understood to be just one of many possible ways of knowing and understanding.

I do not think that I just described a postmodern view. A postmodern view is more like "There are no truths. There are only truth claims". — WISDOMfromPO-MO

On the other hand, can this claim escape itself? Can the assertion that there are no truths but only truth claims, itself claim to be more than simply a truth claim?

Anyway, after spending the past two hours browsing the Web and reading about radical feminism I am beginning to think that there is a significant number, if not a majority, of people whose minds are made up about reality, are closed to anything more than a tweak here or there in that reality, and are solely in the business of making everything conform to that reality.

It is settled: in all of history (and probably pre-history) men have been oppressors and women have been the oppressed. This is the ultimate reality. Any inquiry--development of new technology, scientific exploration of the cosmos, further researching and writing history, etc--must be done according to that reality. Any failure to go along with this understanding and service to it is complicity to evil, continued suffering, etc.

And people think that religions are controlling and dominating?! — WISDOMfromPO-MO

Now I don't want to read into you too much, but the words "radical feminism" followed by a short rant and a comparison between the former and organized, dogmatic religion makes it seem like you had a rough encounter with some of the "vocal" radical feminists when you found that what you thought was innocent or a-moral turns out to make a lot of women very angry.

Fundamentally I think there is something deeply true about much of what radical feminists say, in the same way I think of the words of many socialists and anarchists. Historically, up to and including the present, women have been oppressed by men in many ways. Women as a class continue to struggle against the patriarchy. For many radfems, the issue is from biology, where women most often get the short end of the stick.

But I'll probably never be able to "identify" as a radfem, socialist, or anarchist. I don't have that right background nor the appropriate character to really understand the issues at a personal level (although this could change in the future, of course). I can't get "heated" about this, as I haven't ever been raped, I haven't ever lived in a slum, and I've never been totally fucked over by the state. I can support those who have and try to help then as I can, but I can't truly understand in the way that would be required to be dedicated to a cause. What that means is that I often have to tell myself to let people scream, vent, and mock, even if I don't agree with them (or even if I do). They have experiences I don't. They deserve the right to speak their mind. For many, ideology is all they have. Bread fills the stomach but ideology might fill the soul.

Maybe it has been extremely naive of me, but 99% of the time when I read or hear ideas I take them with the writer/speaker saying "I respect views opposed to my views, although I disagree with them. I am open to hearing alternative views. I know I could be wrong. If I am proven wrong, more power to me".

Apparently with some very influential and determined people in the world it is, rather, "This is the way things were in the past. This is the way things are. This is the way things are going to be. Period. Either accept that or get out of my way." — WISDOMfromPO-MO

Another thing I've noticed is that when people try to silence the noise of a dissatisfied group, it's usually because they don't like what they have to say. One way of doing this is by claiming you have the truth in an even louder voice and killing anyone who disagrees. Another way is to get rid of truth, which effectively pulls the rug right out under the opposition.

I'm in general agreement with you that modern society should be tolerant, and forget the notion of transcendental, absolute "Truth", with a capital-T, rah-rah-rah, alongside the usual fantasy moral duality between Righteous and Evil. But you have to see how this sounds to someone who has certain experiences that are more true and wrong than anything else in the world. To them, it is the truth-denier who is the enemy. The truth-denier is suppressing them. The truth-denier is privileged to be able to deny truth! How can they not see it? The truth-denier is preventing real progress, and we're getting impatient!

Hence why I'm increasingly attracted to the idea of a free and open society, where allegiance to some truth claims does not require everyone else's allegiance. One philosopher that I highly recommend on this topic is Paul Feyerabend, especially his judgment on the place of science in society.

In my opinion, we all need to have a bit more tough skin if we're going to open up and understand each other.

In Immanuel Kant’s 1784 essay, “What is Enlightenment,” he wrote that it is man’s “emergence from his self-incurred immaturity” through the “public use of reason at every point.” Only through free inquiry and disputation, according to Kant, could humans flee the darkness of ignorant conformity to the light of true knowledge and wisdom. Recently, several prominent intellectuals have argued that this vision, the vision of the Enlightenment, needs a vigorous defense from increasingly dangerous Counter-Enlightenment forces, including an apathetic public, a hostile academy, and a censorious intelligentsia that is too quick to replace rational dispute with accusations of moral treachery. Steven Pinker’s newly released Enlightenment Now represents perhaps the culmination of this movement: It is an unapologetic embrace of Enlightenment values and a persuasive rebuttal to those who assail them. Unsurprisingly, it has already attracted lavish praise (from Bill Gates!) and provoked furious debate.

Steven Pinker as a culmination of Immanuel Kant??!? WTF???

No more than an infant being potentially an adult or a 16 year old kid being a potential adult

So by that logic you are arguing for infanticide and overall genocide of anyone under 18. — LostThomist

But now you've shifted the goalposts from "personhood" to "adulthood".

The fact that he is such an extremely popular public intellectual in the US tends to contract your view of him as "jejune" and "uninteresting", Darth ? — Dachshund

The fact that he is a popular public intellectual in the United States already qualifies him as a suspect jejune, in my opinion. Popularity in a (failing) country that elected Donald Trump isn't a good standard.

Pinker is one of those intellectuals who feel it necessary to provide an opinion on everything outside his main area of work, which, as a result, are usually jejune, uninteresting, or just plain wrong. — Maw

:up:

Steven Pinker — Dachshund

...pass :vomit:

Fertilization may be a necessary condition for personhood, but it is not a sufficient condition. It's is potential, but not actual. An important, and necessary distinction. Your claim is essentially that a gamete, or a collection of cells, is isomorphic to a conscious, thinking, feeling, and viable being is ludicrous. Otherwise, there is little difference between a collection of cells that potentially form a human life, and a collection of cells that potentially form the life of, say, another mammal. — Maw

I think an Aristotelian natural law objection to this would be that as soon as an egg is fertilized, or perhaps even before then (such as when the sperm is travelling through the woman's vaginal tunnel), the person exists in the same way an apple tree exists in the form of a seed. Unless the telos of the apple tree seed is frustrated, the seed will nurture into a fully developed tree. The same with a fertilized egg, or a pre-CNS fetus. An abortion, then, prevents the fetus from developing into a mature human and fulfilling its telos.

With the marginalization of teleology in modern metaphysics, what we define to be a person ends up being, from a natural law perspective, a qualitative distinction rather than a substantial distinction. But from a modern perspective, I'd say the natural law theory ends up being an arbitrary distinction between intentional and accidental action - does the human come into being when the sperm penetrates the egg, or when the man ejaculates, or when one or both partners decide to have a baby? And from a modern sensibility - what does it truly matter if a telos is frustrated? Really, what's the big deal?

What does "activism in antinatalism" look like in practice? Do you just not get laid? — Maw

I'd imagine a lot of it has things in common with activism about any other social issue. Although certainly I think there's something "more" to the antinatalist point than any other moral problem, since all moral problems would seem to depend on there being people who are born.

That being said from my own experiences it's that people who are concerned about "activism" about antinatalism are not actually very serious and/or decent in what they do and who they are. As soon as someone tries selling antinatalist windshield stickers, I'm out :vomit:

From Nietzsche's On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense:

"In some remote corner of the universe, poured out and glittering in innumerable solar systems, there once was a star on which clever animals invented knowledge. That was the haughtiest and most mendacious minute of "world history" — yet only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths the star grew cold, and the clever animals had to die.

One might invent such a fable and still not have illustrated sufficiently how wretched, how shadowy and
flighty, how aimless and arbitrary, the human intellect appears in nature. There have been eternities when it did not exist; and when it is done for again, nothing will have happened. For this intellect has no further mission that would lead beyond human life. It is human, rather, and only its owner and producer gives it such importance, as if the world pivoted around it. But if we could communicate with the mosquito, then we would learn that it floats through the air with the same self-importance, feeling within itself the flying center of the world. There is nothing in nature so despicable or insignificant that it cannot immediately be blown up like a bag by a slight breath of this power of knowledge; and just as every porter wants an admirer, the proudest human being, the philosopher, thinks that he sees the eyes of the universe telescopically focused from all sides on his actions and thoughts. It is strange that this should be the effect of the intellect, for after all it was given only as an aid to the most unfortunate, most delicate, most evanescent beings in order to hold them for a minute in existence, from which otherwise, without this gift, they would have every reason to flee as quickly as Lessing's son. That haughtiness which goes with knowledge and feeling, which shrouds the eyes and senses of man in a blinding fog, therefore deceives him about the value of existence by carrying in itself the most flattering evaluation of knowledge itself. Its most universal effect is deception; but even its most particular effects have something of the same character.

[...]

What, indeed, does man know of himself! Can he even once perceive himself completely, laid out as if in
an illuminated glass case? Does not nature keep much the most from him, even about his body, to spellbind and confine him in a proud, deceptive consciousness, far from the coils of the intestines, the quick current of the blood stream, and the involved tremors of the fibers? She threw away the key; and woe to the calamitous curiosity which might peer just once through a crack in the chamber of consciousness and look down, and sense that man rests upon the merciless, the greedy, the insatiable, the murderous, in the indifference of his ignorance — hanging in dreams, as it were, upon the back of a tiger. In view of this, whence in all the world comes the urge for truth?"

This is one of my favorite philosophical pieces. It's profound.

What is a Philosopher? — René Descartes

They tend to be really pretentious assholes with over-inflated egos and an inferiority complex.

Things are pretty bad, but they could also be a whole lot worse. This makes me believe there is no God, or that he's incompetent / uncaring. If there was an patently evil God I would expect things to be even worse than they are.

Certain smaller religious sects have the dualistic belief that there are two Gods, one good, one evil, and that the latter created the material world and the road to salvation is to escape this and form a union with the transcendent, good God.

Although there is no such thing as a perfect system of government, I would quite like to know what form of government is the closest to being perfect? — Sigmund Freud

Government without a state. A decentralized network of independent, collaborative and consensual collections of democratically-elected individuals with term limits and limited powers.

Yeah, I was also surprised at how many virtue ethicists there are on here. Also nominalists.

I actually tried reading Being and Time many years ago and found it utterly impenetrable. My thought recently has been that some of his shorter essays might be more approachable. I have a Basic Works of Heidegger on my list as well as the Safranski biography, so I do hope to have at least a baseline knowledge of him. I know nothing about Levinas, but he's another continental figure, so I'm a little wary of him, too. If I get into a PhD program, I'll be focusing on Schopenhauer, so my planned reading list won't be tackled for some time. — Thorongil

If you thought Being and Time was impenetrable then I don't know what you'll think of Levinas, haha. Well, that's not entirely true, some of Levinas' texts are easier and digestible. Time and the Other as well as Otherwise Than Being are tough, but some of his shorter works are easier.

Two of my favorite texts by Heidegger are, The Question Concerning Technology and The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, the latter being where he mentions Scholasticism as the decline of philosophizing proper.

Then for Levinas, shorter texts are Useless Suffering, and On Escape. A longer text, but one of my favorites, is Time and the Other.

It seems to be how physicists currently treat dark matter, for example. And it seems to me that I can know that I exist without knowing what I am. With God, I think the Scholastics would say that we can make true statements about what God is (e.g. God is being-itself) without fully understanding what they mean. — Thorongil

It is interesting you bring up the point about knowing that I am without knowing who or what I am. But I have to wonder, how is it that I know that I am without knowing any essence of myself? What is knowledge without essence?

Just based on my own thinking on things, I have to agree with something along the lines of the Schopenhauerian Will. I know I exist, because I am striving. I suffer. This is the primal apodicticity - I suffer, therefore I am.

Another angle to approach this by would be to go a Thomistic / Wittgensteinian route and argue that not everything can be articulated with words. That we may understand without being able to communicate means that at least some knowledge is esoteric and cannot be communicated to a population with an increasingly narrow attention span.

Well, they are presented as deductive, not inductive, arguments, so if the conclusion follows from the premises and the premises are true, then they would be indubitable in the way, 1) all men are mortal, 2) Socrates is a man, 3) Therefore, Socrates is mortal is indubitable. — Thorongil

Sure, but I would say that the premises of these arguments are inductive. That change happens is an empirical observation, for instance. That things depend on each other for their mode of existence is not an a priori deduction. That there may seem to be some kind of design to the world is certainly an empirical observation. Theological arguments like this start from everyday, common experiences and abstract from there.

The point I suppose I was trying to make was that it is not only implausible (in my opinion), but also not preferable, to hold the existence of God as "just another fact", alongside the truth of evolutionary theory, or the orbital trajectory of Saturn. God should not be an entity to be "studied". If we were to "prove" that God exists beyond any reason of doubt, would we need any faith? Would there be any difference between science and religion?

In my mind, the fact is that theological arguments will never reach the level of sophistication and universal acceptance as the more ordinary scientific theories. And that may just be well. Part of the seduction of religious belief is the mystery behind it, and the breathtaking risk associated with believing in something that is not the product of reason (but is not contradictory to reason, of course). As soon as we think these arguments are perfect, I think that might be the end of religion. God would become ordinary. I don't think I want to actively pursue God like this.

Thank you, Erik.

Thank you, Wayfarer.

I'm not too familiar with Heidegger, but what you attribute to him here accords well with my position. Leibniz lurks in the background of my thoughts on the question you're responding to, as I've come to sense that his version of the principle of sufficient reason might be superior to Schopenhauer's, and Leibniz's version, of course, leads pretty straight forwardly to theism. — Thorongil

Definitely read Heidegger, but I also recommend Levinas. Both are critical of historical philosophy. Heidegger critiques what he sees to be a diminution of Being to beings, especially in light of the modern technological-industrial revolution. I think he even identifies Scholastic "metaphysics" christened as a science in itself as the beginning of the decline of philosophy proper. Levinas critiques what he sees to be an "egology" behind most metaphysical systems, where everything Other is attempted to be assimilated into one grand totality that the mind can understand. There are things we encounter without understanding, and the dominant tradition has been to either ignore or reduce away these things. Though he points out certain times in which philosophers have recognized the Other, such as Descartes' attempt to use our knowledge of infinity as an argument for God. Anyway.

I concur. But recall that the pre-modern philosophers you speak of made a distinction between knowing what and knowing that something is. We cannot know God's essence but we can know that he exists, they would say. — Thorongil

Yeah, I agree. Though it's sort of difficult for me to wrap my head around the notion that we can know that something exists without knowing hardly anything (if anything) about that which is said to exist. Seems to me that we need at least some basic understanding of what it is we are talking about if we are to say that something "exists".

But this could also be a modern influence to equivocate God's existence with the existence of ordinary objects. I'm not sure what exactly it means when we say God exists if we are not talking about something in space-time with definite qualities, but this is just what Heidegger means when he says the question of Being is not a question of beings, and seems to also be what Levinas tries to get at when he says the Other is beyond the totality. The encounter before understanding. The mind cannot grasp God, because God is beyond the totality.

I'm not sure I agree here. Another Scholastic distinction is between the preambles of the faith and the articles of the faith. The existence of God was thought to be a preamble of the faith, and so capable of rational demonstration. The articles of faith, however, do require faith, for they are revealed truths, that is, truths that do not contradict reason but cannot be arrived at by reason, such as the Trinity. — Thorongil

I was not aware of this distinction, thanks. I thought it was that demonstrations only led the path to God for non-believers and did not establish his existence as some kind of indubitable fact, only as possible and perhaps even likely. I thought Aquinas did not think reason alone could establish that the universe did not extend temporally ad infinitum, for example, and that it's creation by a necessary being was a metaphysically coherent notion that was nevertheless taken on by faith.

The more interesting and pressing question is whether the phantasmagoria of experience exhausts the category of the real. In other words, the more important question is not what objects are, but why they are. If this question has no answer, nihilism results. If this question has an answer, but we can't know it, skepticism results. If this question has an answer, and we can know it, then something like theism results. — Thorongil

Eloquently stated, although perhaps too poetic for my tastes. I believe this to be a prevalent theme in Heidegger's obsession with Being, one of the drama kings of 20th century philosophy. Heidegger thought metaphysics begins with the question of why anything exists at all - or the question of Being. That there is a distinction between that which is, and Being as such, is what I feel is what makes it so powerful to me when Leibniz wrote:

"...[concerning knowledge] of the necessary and eternal truths, above all those which are the most comprehensive and which have the most relation to the sovereign being ... this knowledge alone is good in itself ... all the rest is mercenary."

This comprehensive understanding of everything is the aim of metaphysics. And I think it to be true that Heidegger and many of his contemporaries represented a movement in philosophy that attempted to deflate the importance of metaphysics - at least a certain kind of metaphysics. No more should we approach metaphysics with the confidence that we know what Being is. No more should we consider existence as a substance.

"Metaphysics is a dualism," Heidegger once wrote, and his and others' work reflect a desire to mitigate this reoccurring split. The mind is not separate from the world, it is in the world. Theoretical knowledge is not the primary form of understanding. That something like eliminative materialism is seen as even remotely plausible speaks volumes about what I see to be a deficiency and prejudice in the epistemology and metaphysics of many today.

When you say:

If this question has an answer, and we can know it, then something like theism results. — Thorongil

I agree in some sense but not entirely. I reject the notion that the divine, if it exists, would be something that we can come to "know" in such a way that we can express it using the vocabulary of the everyday. Aquinas' insistence on the analogical nature of theological language is important here. And Levinas takes this to a whole new level. We encounter without understanding the Other, grasping its trace (its existence confirmed by its non-existence) without its essence. The modern notion of theism (and one in which atheism is almost overwhelmingly dependent on) that God is a being-amongst-beings, differing only by quantitative magnitudes and suspiciously anthropomorphic characteristics, stands opposite to both Scholastic and post-modern conceptions of God which explicitly resist describing God as if describing an ordinary object.

And this is what I see to be the seductive aspect of metaphysics: the drive for the extraordinary. All around us are the mundane, the repetitive, the ordinary. If only there could be some better dimension, perfect, stable and transcendent to this boring and violent place! Obviously this is a Nietzschean view of things.

In my opinion, I think metaphysical theorizing is primarily motivated by a strong desire to find reasons to believe in what is not experienced. Yet a religious belief based on rationalist proofs is hardly religious at all, because it lacks the risk of faith. Before the modern era, demonstrations of God's existence were meant to get people on the path of faith, not establish without a doubt that God exists, because that would jeopardize faith and ran contrary to the epistemology of the time which held that only God, and not reason, could establish a connection between the object (man) and the subject (God), which was later reversed in the modern Enlightenment as man became the subject and God became the object which was to be known.

But even Aquinas' analogical language and his insistence on the limitations of human reason make me queesy. I prefer the idea that we must lose God in order to come closer to him. I have lost God, I cannot find him but have not stopped trying to listen. These attempted proofs strike me as ways humans try to accelerate their relationship with God, and put God under the totality.

Anyway, I'm rambling. Point being, I agree that if there is a reason for the world being, then this engenders some form of theism, but I think if this is indeed the case then we can never know much more than pale imitations and metaphors. We may know but only so much, to perhaps such a minimal degree that we might even wonder if it is even knowledge and not simply an encounter with something which exceeds ourselves.

A Short History of Atheism by Gavin Hyman. Fascinating read.

Rationality is light, supposedly. It is associated with enlightement, wisdom, philosophy, science, blah blah blah. To find fault in rationality is simply impossible. You would have to be either mad or a fool or both to even think of painting rationality in a negative light.

However, there's this small thing that's been nagging me for some time. Every evil deed that has ever been committed has been done under the aegis of rationality. There's always a perfectly good ''reason'' to insult someone or hit someone ir even to kill him/her. — TheMadFool

It's interesting you say this, because this is something Levinas spends a lot of time discussing. Levinas interprets the history of western philosophy as being "egology", where the desire is to know things, for things to reveal themselves (similarly to what you said: knowledge is light). Ultimately everything is put under the totality of Same-ness, me-ness, for-me, etc. It is directed outwards, but comes from inside. This totality is hostile to anything not of itself. Violence, murder, genocide, all of these are enabled by a lack of recognition of the Other, or the decision to destroy it.

But there's trickles of alterity in the history as well. Descartes' argument for the existence of God by appealing to the concept of the infinite, philosophical discussions of death (the impossibility of possibility) and the erotic are not of the Same. More chiefly is the Other, and its trace, in which we encounter without understanding and which forms the primordial basis for ethics.

When it comes to ethics, then, I think something could be said about how we approach other people and the world at large plays a large part in how we fare as human beings in general. Do we see people as instruments to be used, abused and discarded after their utility is exhausted, or do we respect them, give them distance, yet be prepared to help them when necessary? Do we take more than we give? Do we spit words at people, or do we let our language be one of many ways of gift-giving?

What do you think? Is this the only flaw in rationality? Does rationality have other shortcomings? — TheMadFool

I don't know if rationality itself is responsible for moral corruption. Surely Kant thought morality was grounded in rationality, and that someone not acting morally was not acting fully rationally, even if they are capable of rational thought. In other words, the means may be rational but the ends are not. It is not until an action is done from a sense of duty out of a rational understanding of human dignity that it becomes truly a morally praiseworthy action. At least, so Kant thought.

If there is a flaw to rationality I would have to say that it has destroyed illusions and has retroactively attempted and systematically failed to construct suitable replacements.

Hilarious video XD

This seems like a loaded question. What movement are you referring to that is seeking to establish such a "right"?

Minor to moderate anxiety seems to be the natural state. If you're completely relaxed, there's probably something wrong that you're not aware of, and being aware of this possibility will end your state of relaxation.

Quite literally we have to "take our minds off things" to relax. Our awareness has to be limited. We "shut down" a bit.

No, but I'm trying my best.

...just kidding, I could do a lot better.

Determinism cannot be proven synthetically, as we could never hope to perceive and understand every happening. It also cannot be proven analytically, because it's not obvious a priori that an event always has to have a cause. For instance,
when you said:

At the most basic level, things happen because they are caused by other things.

If you roll a pair of dice, the result is not random, but determined by the laws of physics. If you knew all relevant information (e.g. force of throw, distance of throw, angle of throw, nature of surface, etc.), you could figure out what the result would be.

Take that simple example and apply it to everything. The fact is that you couldn't have all the information to determine what could happen, for example, with human behaviour. But hypothetically if you did, then you would be able to predict it with ease. — RepThatMerch22

You have not really argued for this, but merely asserted that determinism must be true, with its associated consequences.

The question of determinism, as you seem to understand, is whether we would be able to accurately predict what would happen in the future given we know everything that is currently present.

All of this being said, however, I do agree with you that determinism, or something very close to it, is likely true. Most of our scientific advances are that of universal law-like tendencies. Science itself has been successful in part because it assumes things do have causes, or explanations, for why they are the way they are. So although empirical evidence can never fully prove that determinism is true, neither can it fully prove that indeterminism is true (as it is with most metaphysical debates). Given the success science has had operating under a deterministic perspective, it seems reasonable to assume that the world operates deterministically, or at the very least under tendencies that do not radically differ whenever.

The problem with your OP is that you assert that determinism must be true. How are you getting necessity out of empirical observation?

I think regardless of the truth of his statement, Trump calling countries "shitholes" is going to make it difficult to have amiable foreign relations with these countries. Nobody likes their country being called a shithole, especially if it's not primarily your fault that it's a shithole and even moreso if you are trying very hard to make things less of a shithole.

Why do we call these countries "third-world" or "developing" countries instead of "shithole" countries? Because it's disrespectful, ahistorical and imperialistic to call them shitholes when the white man was instrumental in making many of these places the shitholes they are.

I think it's true that there are biases in philosophical debates, and also that this has always been the case and will likely always continue to be the case. A lot of our beliefs depend on how we interpret the perceptual data given to us. It is not the case that we can just open our eyes more and the world will give each and every one of us the exact same thing. So when people disagree about things in philosophy, a lot of the time it has to do with simply a difference in assumed principles and axioms. If you don't agree with my position, you can always just assume different principles and therefore hold a different position, and there's nothing I can really do about that unless your principles are logically incoherent.

Take the skepticism debate. Most people seem to want to preserve or validate scientific knowledge of the world. Why? It's not a rational reason but a desire to see scientific knowledge vindicated. And while later on we might come to a pragmatic conclusion that seems to validate this knowledge, it's fundamentally the values and desires we have that seem to constitute our orientation to philosophical positions. Someone who doesn't care about science as much, or likes to go against the status quo, or whatever, is more likely to adopt a skeptical position about science or epistemology in general.

Someone may object that this may be the case for some people, but others (coincidentally themselves) have the psychological type or drive to pursue truth without any desire for what the truth ends up being. How convenient and question-begging. The idea that philosophers and scientists are somehow pursuing pure and untainted knowledge is a form of magical thinking. Objective knowledge isn't derived from the pure pursuit of it. It comes as a side-effect of a battlegrounds of competing wills-to-power. Positions are held because people like them, and they only let go (if ever!) when there is an overwhelming amount of evidence and reasons against it. Hence why people we disagree with seem to not let go of positions even when we think we have conclusively shown it to be false (and they think the same of ours'). A good example of this, I think, is the continual interest in the ontological argument for God. It's been disproven so many times in the past and it still keep cropping up. Some people just don't want to let go of it. They hope one day there will be a form of the ontological argument that actually does work. And maybe they're right, who knows.

This is the question of altruism. I think it's probably the case that most or no actions are entirely either selfish or altruistic. But I think it's wrong to call selfish what we otherwise normally would call altruistic just because you derive pleasure from it. If the ancient Greeks are to be believed, then a good person does the right thing, or lives virtuously, because they want to do the right thing.

This is, of course, relevant to Kantian ethics as well. A common misconception is that Kant thought only actions motivated by the purely rational Categorical Imperative were morally praiseworthy. As is commonly thought, Kant held that most actions are motivated by desires and that these desires corrupt the moral "perfection" of a good will. Hence the picture a lot of people have of Kant's ethics as involving a person who genuinely hates doing the right thing as the most morally pure person. This is a misconstrual of Kant's moral philosophy, but whatever.

Anyway, ethical intuitionism seems pretty bust on most accounts. — apokrisis

This is a huge misunderstanding these days, unfortunately. Intuitionism fell out of favor because the major defenders died, and the idea was subsequently misinterpreted horribly later on. It's getting a good revival nowadays though. Michael Huemer's Ethical Intuitionism was one of the books that helped launch it back to the forefront of moral realism. But this is a detour from the OP, I'll make a different post later when I have more time.

Intuitionism....

In the philosophy of mathematics, intuitionism, or neointuitionism (opposed to preintuitionism), is an approach where mathematics is considered to be purely the result of the constructive mental activity of humans rather than the discovery of fundamental principles claimed to exist in an objective reality. — apokrisis

"Intuition", as I'm sure you are aware, is a term used in philosophy that has lots of different meanings depending on the context. I most definitely am not using intuition in the sense of some magical "sixth sense", nor am I affirming what is quoted here. I am coming from the perspective of philosophers like Moore, Ross, Prichard and Sidgwick, i.e. the British Intuitionists, as well as contemporary moral intuitionists like Audi and Huemer. Ethics is a separate branch of inquiry, and cannot be reduced to a descriptive science. We come to know moral truths in a very similar way to how we come to know mathematical or logical truths - we "see" something as good or evil, right or wrong, just as we come to "see" the validity of a logical proof, or "see" how a mathematical theorem makes sense.

But the Good is of course then a warm, fuzzy, human concept of essential cosmic value. So what we now look for in nature is just a straightforward optimisation principle - like least action. A structure is good (it can endure and thus exist) as it expresses an equilibrium balance. — apokrisis

See this is where I find an issue with naturalistic ethics, including natural law theory. The "goodness" of a working piece of equipment, the "perfection" of a functional object or system, is NOT equivalent to "goodness" in the moral sense. I think, as Moore does, that moral goodness is undefinable analytically. And so while we may come to see what grounds moral goodness, say pleasure or virtue, the analytic definition of goodness will always be transcendent upon this ground.

The Good is not a warm, fuzzy feeling in the non-cognitive sense. Perhaps we respond to the Good by feeling warm and fuzzy but it certainly is not the case that this feeling itself is what is the Good.

Can you elaborate?