Comments

  • The passing of Vera Mont, dear friend.
    Very sad indeed, a patient and articulate contributor here for many years. :broken:
  • On Matter, Meaning, and the Elusiveness of the Real
    And now we’ve stumbled upon one of the central confusions of communication: we use words like “real,” “physical,” and “objective,” without having any rock-solid idea what they refer to. They work well enough for practical purposes—don’t touch the stove, it’s matter and it’s hot. But when we slow things down and look closely, the bedrock starts to look like smoke. There is no stable ground to land on. The closer we try to get to the thing itself, the more it unravels into interpretation, probability, model, rule.Kurt

    The Greek philosophers also entertained these arguments. They begin by questioning what appears indubitably obvious to all of us, namely, the reality of appearance. How do we know what amongst this flux of sensations is real? Bedrock real, indubitably so? Nowadays it's easy to sit at a computer and compose questions like these, but I sense the early philosophers asked these questions with a seriousness of intent and concentration that is not easily conveyed and that we don't appreciate. We only see more words - and then incorporate those words into our pragmatic fantasy.

    This fragile, approximate nature of language shapes the way we build our understanding of reality. Our use of language enables us to construct what might be called a pragmatic fantasy—a model of reality that works well enough to build societies, conduct science, and write books like this one.Kurt

    A comparable metaphor from another source might be the Māyā of Indian mythology. Māyā is a power that veils the true nature of reality, making the material world appear real and endowing it with a kind of intrinsic reality which it does not really possess. Why? Because reality includes the subject, which is not found amongst the panorama of phemomena, but is that to whom all of this appears and occurs. The nature of the subject - 'who am I?' - is understood to be the gordian knot, the unravelling of which dispels the power of māyā.

    And when I talk to you about matter, I don’t feel the need to explain what I mean. The word feels obvious. You know what matter is. You learned it in school. You’re made of it. You don’t need to look it up. You’ve seen pictures in science books, maybe even watched documentaries about how it's all just atoms and fields and particles buzzing about with some weird “emptiness” in between. Most of us, even those with only a vague interest in science, have picked up a mental image of matter—and this image feels good enough.Kurt

    That's because our culture has defined reality in such a way that materialism seems to the only viable attitude. Criticisms of materialism seem inexorably to point towards a metaphysic, often somehow religious, which is not compatible with the mainstream analysis, the 'pragmatic fantasy' you describe. But the times are changing, and many voices, not all of them religious in any obvious way, are beginning to call that into question.

    Including yours.
  • Where does logic come from? Some thoughts
    Eriugena has the distinction of nothing through privation and nothing on account of excellence. But then latter would in some sense be the fullness or all possibility, total actuality.Count Timothy von Icarus

    Just so.
  • Where does logic come from? Some thoughts
    What's your definition of counting? Is counting an act outside the phenomenal plane?Quk

    Phenomena are what appears. The act of counting is performed by the subject to whom phenomena appear.

    That question gets back to the issue that I have with this whole discussion thread: it's not clear what "aboutness" anyone is talking about. Are we talking about metaphysics? Language? Evolutionary origins of cognitive faculties? Developmental psychology? It all kind of gets mixed together.SophistiCat

    But that's just characteristic of the plight of modernity - the collision of all of these different and in some ways incommensurable perspectives. We've inherited all of that and are trying to make sense of it.

    In terms of philosophy, I think the disconnect between physical causation and logical relationships can be traced back to Hume.

    Hume famously argued that our idea of causation—that one event necessarily brings about another—is not grounded in either rational insight or logical necessity. Instead, it arises from habit or custom: we observe that event A is regularly followed by event B, and we come to expect B after A. But this expectation is psychological, not logical.

    There is no contradiction in imagining A occurring without B. This means causal connections are not logically necessary. They’re not like mathematical truths, where denying the conclusion entails contradiction.

    Hume distinguishes sharply between:

    • Relations of ideas (necessary truths, a priori, such as mathematics and logic), and
    • Matters of fact (empirical, contingent truths, such as causation in the natural world).

    The upshot: causation is observational, not rational. It’s a habit of mind, not a structure of reality. Combine that with the division of the world into the primary (measurable) and secondary (subjective) domains, and the Cartesian division of mind from world, and the rupture is complete.

    Hume’s Famous Verdict

    “If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.”
    — An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Section XII

    This isn’t just upstart empiricism. It’s a rejection of the entire Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysical tradition, where formal and final causes underpinned the intelligibility of the cosmos.

    (And never mind that Hume’s treatise falls by those same criteria!)

    Before and After Hume:

    In pre-modern thought—especially in Aristotelian and Scholastic realism —causation was metaphysically grounded. Causes had real powers or essences, and effects flowed from them necessarily. Causal necessity was built into the intelligibility of nature itself.

    After Hume, this conception collapses. Causation is no longer a rational structure but a pattern of observed regularities. This shift paves the way for positivism, empiricism, and the modern view that physical laws are descriptive, not prescriptive: they summarize what happens, but don’t explain why. This is the basis for the charge that modernism is in some sense irrational (despite its constant appeals to science).

    The Broader Consequences:

    Scientific laws come to be seen as contingent, not expressions of an intelligible order.

    The gap between rational necessity (in logic and mathematics) and physical causation (in nature) becomes unbridgeable. Hence Wittgenstein says in TLP "The whole modern conception of the world is founded on the illusion that the so-called laws of nature are the explanations of natural phenomena." Why an illusion? Because we mistake description for explanation. We observe regularities, formulate laws (e.g., Newton’s laws, or later, field equations), and then treat those laws as if they explain what they describe.

    Hume's message, in effect: you think causation is rational, but you're just projecting your expectations onto the world. And how often do we see this sentiment echoed in debates on the Forum?
  • Where does logic come from? Some thoughts
    . Substantial form doesn't exist outside substances or the intellect. There is the form "cat" 'in' cats themselves and 'in' the intellect of knowers. But the form has to be to be to be informing these things in the same way a table must exist for a book to rest on it. Yet it seems possible for there to be cats but not creatures with intellects. The existence of the form vis-á-vis cats is not dependent on the existence of the form in finite intellects.Count Timothy von Icarus

    I agree that from an empirical perspective we encounter particulars first, and then abstract the form. But I wonder whether that perspective risks treating the form as derivative —something we derive from the object. In the Platonic (and arguably Aristotelian) sense, form is not something posterior to the object, but that in virtue of which the object is what it is.

    That is, form isn’t just a feature we discover by experience—it’s the condition that makes experience possible. It's because of the reality of the form that we can identify the particular. It’s ontologically prior, even if not temporally so. This is where I’d place form in a “vertical” rather than horizontal order—closer to what Neoplatonism or even certain strains of phenomenology suggest.

    I wonder whether framing form as something abstracted from sensible experience is more of an empiricist perspective (e.g. J S Mill) than Aristotelian.

    I didn't think “undifferentiated givenness” meant to refer to anything eternal, but rather the immediacy of sense certainty without any mediation. So I was thinking in the order of experience. In the order of created, changing (physical) being, my thoughts would be that for anything to be anything at all, it has to have some sort of actuality.Count Timothy von Icarus

    When I speak of “undifferentiated givenness” or the in-itself, I don’t mean it as some kind of vague or latent actuality, waiting to be identified. To say it must have “some sort of actuality” is already to try to give it form—to insert it into the order of knowable, nameable things, to say what it is. But the point is: we can’t do that without distorting what we’re trying to indicate. Here is where 'apophatic silence' is precisely correct.

    That’s why I describe it as “neither existent nor non-existent.” It’s not an actualised thing, but it’s also not mere nothingness. This is something I’ve taken primarily from the Madhyamaka tradition in Buddhist philosophy, which insists on the middle way (hence the name) - between reification (it is something!) and nihilism (it doesn't exist). In that framework, we are dealing with what is empty of intrinsic existence, but not therefore non-existent. It’s not a substance, but nor is it nothing. It’s a kind of ontological openness. That is the meaning of śūnyatā.

    So yes, it’s a very difficult conceptual point—one that sits uneasily in the categories of Greek metaphysics, which are more comfortable with ousia and actuality. But I’d argue that the in-itself is precisely what resists actualisation, and that’s why we can’t approach it as “some kind of actuality” without losing what the idea was trying to preserve in the first place. This review of The Silence of the Buddha by Raimon Panikkar may be of interest. It’s a remarkably careful attempt to think through how the Buddhist idea of the Unconditioned—which is beyond being and non-being—can speak to theological and metaphysical questions in the West, including the issue of God and Being. It also addresses some of the points we’ve been discussing, particularly about ultimate ground, causation, and the intelligibility of existence.

    I would object to the idea that mathematical objects are "mind independent." If they have no intelligibility, no quiddity, no eidos, then they are nothing at all, but to possess these is to have intellectual content.Count Timothy von Icarus

    That seems right to me. I’d say mathematical and logical truths are independent of any particular mind—they aren’t invented by us or dependent on individual thought—but they’re also only accessible through mind. So in that sense, they’re not “mind-dependent” in the subjective or psychological sense, but they are only perceptible to the mind (the pre-Kantian meaning of 'noumenal').

    I think this is where Plato’s notion of metaxy is relevant—that humans occupy a kind of in-between status, as participants in both the sensible world of becoming and the intelligible world of being. We’re the bridge between the two, and it's in this role that we encounter things like numbers and forms: not as physical entities, but as realities that can only be grasped from within the horizon of intelligibility.

    This “in-between” condition—neither purely empirical nor purely intelligible—is what makes the Platonic view so compelling in discussions like this. It avoids collapsing ideas into mere mental projections, while also refusing to treat them as physical facts. They’re real, but their reality is of a different order—something we participate in rather than simply observe.
  • More Sophisticated, Philosophical Accounts of God
    Plantinga was mentioned in passing and I expressed the view that Relativist’s depiction of his argument was based on a misinterpretation. That’s all I have to say on Plantinga.
  • More Sophisticated, Philosophical Accounts of God
    Life seems anomolous to me, because it's a very rare, and miniscule part of the universe. What facts am I overlooking?Relativist

    The fact that you’re alive would be a good start. You’re demonstrating the very point at issue: the sense in which physicalism excludes the subject, for whom ‘the physical’ is real. As I said at the very beginning of this exchange: physicalism relies on an abstraction. It then becomes so embedded in that worldview that it can’t see anything outside it, which is precisely the blind spot of physicalism.

    The ultimate source of our cognitive faculties is natural selection, and natural selection is interested (so to speak) only in adaptive behavior, not in true belief. A given belief, therefore, will have a certain causal role to play in the production of adaptive behavior; but whether it is true or false is irrelevant from this perspective. So the naturalist who accepts evolutionary theory has a defeater for the proposition that our cognitive faculties are reliable. — Alvin Plantinga

    Which I paraphrased as follows:

    if all mental life—including reason—is understood solely in terms of material and efficient causes, then we’ve undermined the very basis on which we make rational inferences."Wayfarer

    On review, I agree it was not an accurate paraphrase. It would have been better expressed as follows: ‘If our cognitive faculties are ultimately the product of unguided natural selection, which only accounts for behaviors that promote survival and reproduction, then we have no good reason to trust that our beliefs, including the belief in naturalism itself, are actually true.’

    In either case, your original criticism of Plantinga’s argument, that it was ‘fatally flawed’ because it didn’t allow for how important adaptive behaviour is to survival, still missed the point. He is arguing that evolutionary biology may account for how animals adapt and survive, but that this in itself does not provide grounds for us to believe that an argument is true, when, according to those criteria, it might simply be adaptive.
  • Donald Trump (All Trump Conversations Here)
    Hard-hitting OP in the NY Times today (gift link), about how many impeachable offenses Trump 2.0 has already committed, and how blatantly corrupt and outright illegal many of his actions have been. A sample:

    Trump has repeatedly ignored due process of law, such as in sending people to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador and to the South Sudan without a semblance of due process. The cutoff of funds to universities and to grant recipients has been done without any due process. This is a very serious abuse of power.

    President Trump has used his power for retribution. His actions against law firms, which have been done without due process, have been expressly stated to be for personal retribution because they employed lawyers who investigated or prosecuted him. This is a very serious abuse of power.

    The impoundment of funds — cutting off funds appropriated by Congress in a myriad of programs, including for scientific research, for international aid, for colleges and universities, for agencies created by Congress — is unconstitutional and illegal. It is unconstitutional because it is usurping Congress’s spending power, and it is illegal because it violates the Impoundment Control Act. This is a very serious abuse of power causing great harm.

    President Trump is using the military for domestic law enforcement in Los Angeles in violation of the Posse Comitatus Act and a long tradition against such use of the military within the United States. This is a very frightening abuse of power.

    It is clear that he is personally profiting from being president, with his cryptocurrency profiteering and his accepting an airplane as a personal gift and his real estate deals. This violates the emoluments clauses of the Constitution.
    — Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the Berkeley law school

    It is obvious that Trump regards himself as above the law, and that his flunkies and sycophants all believe it. It's pathetic that the American political institutions have become so ineffective as to enable these blatantly illegal and immoral acts to be propogated from within the nation's highest office.

    Article notes that the supine and compliant Congress will never take Trump to task, but let's hope that justice is eventually done.
  • Where does logic come from? Some thoughts
    Right, so is this "undifferentiated giveness" first in the order of being or in the order of our experience? It seems obvious that it comes first in our particular experience, yet the ontological priority of something wholly undifferentiated would seem to cause problems in terms of what follows from what is truly undifferentiated as a cause (which would seem to be, nothing, or nothing in particular).Count Timothy von Icarus

    This might be a point where we’re crossing conceptual wires a bit—because I think there’s a distinction to be drawn between ontological and temporal priority.

    When you ask whether “undifferentiated givenness” is first in the order of being or in the order of experience, I wonder whether that’s still considering the question from a temporal perspective. The eternal is not temporally prior, because it’s outside of time—so it can be said to be ontologically prior, as the ground or condition of temporal existence. But treating it as temporally prior still risks a kind of reductionism.

    So perhaps we’re better off thinking in terms of dependence relations, rather than temporal or linear sequences. The structured world depends on this givenness to be disclosed; but the givenness itself depends on deeper conditions—what might traditionally be called the Logos or the Good—not as temporal precursors, but as metaphysical grounds. Which is why cognition is constrained by the forms through which the One manifests.

    This connects with something I’ve been reflecting on in terms of the distinction between the horizontal and vertical axes of being.

    The horizontal axis is what we ordinarily think of as “the order of experience”: time, causality, physical phenomena, the unfolding of events—everything science deals with. It’s the world as it appears, structured into before and after, subject and object. When we talk about whether something comes “first” in this order, we’re already inside a temporal sequence.

    But the vertical axis isn’t about temporal sequence—it’s about ontological dependence, or what grounds the very possibility of appearance. It’s what makes the horizontal axis intelligible at all. This includes not only the subject as knower, but also what precedes and grounds both subject and object: what Kant might call the noumenal, or the in-itself. It also includes the metaphysical principles that shape intelligibility—form, the Good, intelligible structure—not as things that happen within time, but as conditions for time and experience to arise at all. But we can't know that as object or in an objective sense (which is precisely why positivism rejects it as 'meaningless'.)

    I think this is where a reference to Plotinus is pertinent. For Plotinus, the One is not a being among beings—not even the highest or most perfect being. The one is beyond existence—not because it’s less real, but because it is more real than anything that can be said to exist (i.e. what is coming-to-be and passing away). The source of existence is not something that exists! That means it does not ‘exist’ in the same way anything else does—it's not simply a very special thing among other things. It’s beyond existence, not any thing (which is also what Eriugena says.)

    This is also what I take “beyond existence” to mean—not nothingness, not a void, but that which grounds existence without itself being an existent. It’s not non-existent, but it doesn’t exist the way things do. It’s “no thing,” but not nothing. Any statement that attributes existence to the One, as if it were a definable entity, risks collapsing that distinction. As Paul Tillich put it, “To say that God exists is to deny him”—because what is ultimate cannot be reduced to the category of an existent.

    Whose the knower? An individual man, or mankind? It seems to me that the natural numbers must be prior to individuals, since they are already around and known by others before we are born.

    Now, if mankind is the only species with the capacity for intellectual knowledge, I think there might be a sense in which the natural numbers could be said to be posterior to man, but they also seem obviously prior in another sense.

    The sense in which the natural numbers are prior lies in the fact that there were discrete organisms, organic wholes with a principle of unity, long before man existed.
    Count Timothy von Icarus

    Again, the question is the sense in which numbers are prior. Numbers do not exist at all on the phenomenal plane - you won't find them anywhere, except in the act of counting. So they are not temporally prior, even though there were obviously numbers of things that existed before anyone was around to count them.

    We can evidently say, for example, that mathematical objects are mind-independent and unchanging, but now we always add that they are constituted in consciousness in this manner, or that they are constituted by consciousness as having this sense … . They are constituted in consciousness, nonarbitrarily, in such a way that it is unnecessary to their existence that there be expressions for them or that there ever be awareness of them. — Richard Tieszen, Phenomenology, Logic and Philosophy of Mathematics, p13

    So, what consciousness are they constituted in, if it is unnecessary to their existence that there be expressions of them or awareness of them? I'd be wary about entering an answer to that question. Suffice to say they are real possiblities that can only be apprehended by a rational intelligence - not neccessarily yours or mine (definitely not mine, as I'm bad at math.)

    But bad at it or not, maths deals in necessary truths. And it’s precisely this sense of necessity that makes the question “where does logic come from?” so important. We’re not just talking about how humans happen to reason, or how nature happens to behave, but about the conditions that make truth, structure, and intelligibility possible at all - how reason is imposed upon us.
  • Where does logic come from? Some thoughts
    This would be the idea that there is no squirrel or owl prior to our knowing it as such, that our knowing makes it what it isCount Timothy von Icarus

    What about the natural numbers and the law of the excluded middle. Do they exist before our knowing them as such?
  • Where does logic come from? Some thoughts
    This is very different from how Wallace understands Plato and Hegel, because there intelligibility always refers outside itself, ultimately to the Good/One/True Infinite/Absolute.Count Timothy von Icarus

    Thanks for these pressing questions, it's really making me think it through. I want to clarify: I’m not saying there is nothing at all prior to interpretation—certainly not “nothing” in a nihilistic sense. What I’m pointing to is something more like undifferentiated givenness—not sheer formless flux, but not determinately articulated being either. It’s not a thing or set of things waiting to be picked out, but a field of potential meaning that only becomes structured in relation to a subject (something like Peirce's 'firstness'). That's why I said 'neither existent nor non-existent', which is what I take the expression 'beyond being' to mean - beyond the flux of coming-to-be and passing away.

    Which leads to the question of the sense in which the purported Good/One/True Infinite exists. Existence is precisely what 'the transcendent' is transcendent in relation to. To make of 'the One' something that exists is a hypostatisation (perhaps akin to Heidegger's critique of onto-theology).

    I think, and you will know this subject better than I, that Eriugena's Periphysion articulates this far better than I could. From the SEP entry:

    Eriugena proceeds to list “five ways of interpreting” the manner in which things may be said to be or not to be (I would prefer 'exist or not to exist'). According to the first mode, things accessible to the senses and the intellect are said to be ('exist') , whereas anything which, “through the excellence of its nature” transcends our faculties are said not to be (i.e. 'exist'). According to this classification, God, because of his transcendence is said not to be (i.e. exist). He is “nothingness through excellence” (nihil per excellentiam).

    Quite literally beyond existence, sheer out of this world. Not in the heavenly firmament above but beyond (or is it before?) any spatial or conceptual projection (see God does not Exist by Bishop(!) Pierre Whalon.) Whereas when you speak of the One as 'something that exists' prior to or outside any act of intellect, I think perhaps this is also an hypostatisation. You have something in mind when you say it, perhaps as a kind of placeholder.

    As far as the forms are concerned - I don’t mean the Forms as existing objects pre-existing in metaphysical space. This touches on a deeper point I've been trying to work out—namely, the metaphysical necessity of forms. I agree with the concern that if cognition had no grounding at all—if it operated in a total void—it would be arbitrary, even solipsistic. But I don't think that's the case.

    Universals—or forms—exist, or rather, are real, not as actual entities, but as structured possibilities. As Kelley Ross puts it, they "exist where possibilities exist," and we encounter them not only in the future, but also in what he calls the "imperfect aspect"—that is, in things that are still unfolding, in process, not yet completed. This is key: the world we engage with is not made of finished essences, but of meaningful potentials that become actualised or manifested through living beings.

    So cognition isn’t either imposing form or simply making things up. It’s realising a potential that is already there in the world—not as a determinate object, but as an intelligible field of possibility. That, I think, is what makes form metaphysically necessary without requiring it to “exist” in the way physical objects do. It’s also why cognition can be both grounded and open-ended

    The concluding point I'd llike to make is that all this really does have some bearing on 'where logic comes from' but I think I'll leave that open for now.

    You're making an appeal to determinant causes prior to the first finite mind. If the two (experiencer and experienced) are rather wholly co-constituting, as a self-moving cause, this doesn't work.Count Timothy von Icarus

    Hence that passage I quoted:
    These two contradictory points of view, to each of which we are led with the same necessity, we might again call an antinomy in our faculty of knowledge… The necessary contradiction which at last presents itself to us here, finds its solution in the fact that, to use Kant’s phraseology, time, space, and causality do not belong to the thing-in-itself, but only to its phenomena, of which they are the form; which in my language means this: The objective world, the world as idea, is not the only side of the world, but merely its outward side; and it has an entirely different side—the side of its inmost nature—its kernel—the thing-in-itself… But the world as idea… only appears with the opening of the first eye. — Schopenhauer, WWI
  • More Sophisticated, Philosophical Accounts of God
    Even if this 'claim' is true – of course there's no evidence for it180 Proof

    What, pray tell, would constitute evidence for this argument?
  • More Sophisticated, Philosophical Accounts of God
    . Why do you persist on blaming physics for not doing something that physicists don't use it for? Re: materialism – You're (still) shadowboxing with a burning strawman180 Proof

    Are you familiar with D M Armstrong? His book Materialist Philosophy of Mind presents the kind of philosophical materialism that I’m criticizing. And Relativist cites Armstrong as an exemplary philosopher. Armstrong was Head of Dept where I studied philosophy. So no straw man arguments here.
  • Two ways to philosophise.
    One of my reference works might be of interest to you in this regard Evolutionary Naturalism and the Fear of Religion. Thomas Nagel is an analytical philosopher who is also a critic of reductionism.
  • Two ways to philosophise.
    I’m with you. I meant that quotation from the Sutta as a support for what you were saying as I thought it very relevant. But then, the reason I brought in that academic paper on ‘the unconditioned’ was to try and build a bridge between that discourse and analytical philosophy.

    The problem is that discourse about 'the unconditioned' is inextricably bound up with theology in Western culture. That is because so much of neo-platonism, which had a framework for that discourse, became absorbed into theology by the Greek-speaking theologians. As a consequence, in secular culture, there is a taboo against this framework of discourse, on the grounds of its association with religion. I think that is the dynamic behind a lot of this debate.
  • Two ways to philosophise.
    And that is literally true for some of us.Fire Ologist

    No doubt, but the point I was labouring, was the concept of 'the unconditioned' and its place in philosophical discourse.
  • Where does logic come from? Some thoughts
    No, but I said "determinant actuality prior to the senses." And this is a denial of that, right?…. Whereas , if the process isn't wholly self moving (i.e. randomly generating) then something is prior and determining the process, and so there is some "prior actuality."Count Timothy von Icarus

    There is something prior to or outside of any cognition of it, but it is not really ‘something’ until it is (re)cognised by a subject. (This is what I take the in-itself to mean - something is, but as it has no determinate form or features, then it can’t be understood as any kind of existent or ‘thing’).

    In Charles Pinter’s terms, cognition lights upon the features and form of objects and synthesises them as gestalts, meaningful wholes, in accordance with the sensory and cognitive faculties that the subject has (and not only human subjects, he demonstrates a similar faculty in the fairy fly, an insect so small as to be imperceptible to the naked eye.)

    So there is ‘prior’ but it has not been ‘actualised’. It is ‘actualised by cognition’, so to speak.

    So the Earth becomes what it is because we experience it, not because form is itself intellectual. Yet if nothing is prior to man (or life), if we rule out any distinctions in being that are actual prior to finite consciousness, why would consciousness be one way and not any other? Why would we be men and not centaurs? The sky blue and not purple?Count Timothy von Icarus

    The word ‘world’ is derived from the old Dutch ‘werold’ meaning ‘time of man’. It implies that man is already intrinsic to the nature of world.

    Planet Earth has a different meaning, that is as an object of study for the earth sciences, etc. And one is perfectly free to pursue that avenue of understanding, nothing said here contradicts that.

    What ‘the world’ means, however, is not exactly the same as planet Earth. 'The world' means 'the totality of existence including the subject:

    The world is given to me only once, not one existing and one perceived. Subject and object are only one. The barrier between them cannot be said to have broken down as a result of recent experience in the physical sciences, for this barrier does not exist. — Erwin Schrodinger

    As for why we perceive colours the same way, all of us belong to a common species, and also share a common language and culture. If we were a different species with a completely different cognitive system everything might appear completely differently to what it does to h.sapiens . The evolutionary pathway gave rise to h,sapiens, not centaurs, and as a species, we share a common world (to an extent).

    I should add, the passages I referred to are part of the book I mentioned, The Blind Spot of Science, by Adam Frank, Marcello Gleiser and Evan Thompson. The chapter those passages come from is on the topic of Consciousness, largely from Thompson’s perspective of phenomenology and embodied cognition. It introduces ‘the strange loop’ in the preceeding discussion, which is the sense in which our consciousness of the world provides the horizon of experience within which everything occurs, and yet we also know that the world which appears in experience, precedes any experience.

    There is no way to step outside consciousness and measure it against something else. Everything we investigate, including consciousness and its relation to the brain, resides within the horizon of consciousness. — The Blind Spot

    It is not practical to try and summarise all of the preceeding argument but there's a blog post which elaborates a similar point in Schopenhauer's words:

    ...the existence of the whole world necessarily dependent upon the first conscious being (due to its being Idea), however undeveloped it may be; on the other hand, this conscious being just as necessarily entirely dependent upon a long chain of causes and effects which have preceded it, and in which it itself appears as a small link. These two contradictory points of view, to each of which we are led with the same necessity, we might again call an antinomy in our faculty of knowledge… The necessary contradiction which at last presents itself to us here, finds its solution in the fact that, to use Kant’s phraseology, time, space, and causality do not belong to the thing-in-itself, but only to its phenomena, of which they are the form; which in my language means this: The objective world, the world as idea, is not the only side of the world, but merely its outward side; and it has an entirely different side—the side of its inmost nature—its kernel—the thing-in-itself… But the world as idea… only appears with the opening of the first eye. Without this medium of knowledge it cannot be, and therefore it was not before it. But without that eye, that is to say, outside of knowledge, there was also no before, no time. Thus time has no beginning, but all beginning is in time.

    Reading that against your quotations from Robert Wallace, I don't see any inherent conflict.
  • More Sophisticated, Philosophical Accounts of God
    From the paper:

    The ultimate source of our cognitive faculties is natural selection, and natural selection is interested (so to speak) only in adaptive behavior, not in true belief. A given belief, therefore, will have a certain causal role to play in the production of adaptive behavior; but whether it is true or false is irrelevant from this perspective. So the naturalist who accepts evolutionary theory has a defeater for the proposition that our cognitive faculties are reliable.

    which is as I said.

    Although I will add,. I'm not arguing in support of Plantinga's religious conclusions, only the more general point about the non-physical basis for rational inference.

    Why are you so reluctant to state what you actually believe?Relativist

    I've spelled it out in depth and detail. To recap: physics is based on a useful abstraction, which has yielded enormous physical powers, but at the expense of excluding fundamental aspects of human existence.
  • Two ways to philosophise.
    Speaking of the determinate is where the speaking corresponds directly with the spoken about. It is also like the apriori, the axiom. Or for believers in myth, it is the truth, the absolute. The fixed. The permanent and unchanging. The eternal. The ground.

    The indeterminate is the unknowable-in-itself. It’s psuedo-determinate when known as ‘nothing’ or the ‘vacuous’, but then, that may just be a language trick where we have ‘determined nothing’. It is unformed. It can’t exist and is all around us, and in us, allowing for mystical/mythical (maybe meaningless) statements like this one.
    Fire Ologist

    I feel I can mention a verse from the early Buddhist texts in this context. Partially because it is so succinct, and also because Buddhism, especially of the type represented in these (Pali) texts is resolutely non-theistic in its outlook, so this is not an attempt to smuggle God into the picture.

    There is, monks, an unborn — unbecome — unmade — unfabricated. If there were not that unborn — unbecome — unmade — unfabricated, there would not be the case that escape from the born — become — made — fabricated would be discerned. But precisely because there is an unborn — unbecome — unmade — unfabricated, escape from the born — become — made — fabricated is discerned.Nibbāna Sutta

    So this 'unborn, unmade, unfabricated' is a fortiori also 'the unconditioned'. And I think there's an abyss in the current philosophical lexicon, where something corresponding to 'the unconditioned' used to dwell. I think in the Western cultural context, this is associated with God, so post death-of-God, the unconditioned has been banished from respectable philosophical discourse, except by way of hints and aphorisms. Perhaps also it is subject to what Alan Watts decscribed as a taboo (in his last work The Book: On the Taboo against Knowing Who you Are.) There's a kind of gentleman's agreement as to what is considered a suitable topic for philosophical discourse, and of this, 'we must be silent' (or else :brow: )

    I have found a relevant (and open access) academic paper on this topic -that is The unconditioned in philosophy of religion Steven Shakespeare,. where he argues that 'the unconditioned' badly needs to be rehabilitated and re-situated. I have still not fully assimilated this paper, but as he engages with and situates his discussion in relation to the broader analytical tradition, others might find it a useful resource.
  • [TPF Essay] Cognitive Experiences are a Part of Material Reality
    Do you think that within the domain of possibility, there is a social reality such that P1 (possibility one) holds a conversation with P2 (possibility two)?ucarr

    I can't really make sense of that question. There are no discrete domains in that sense. The textbook example I referred to is the role of observation in quantum physics and the fact that the act of observation or registration precipitates a particular outcome from an indeterminate range of possibilities.

    In a more general sense, we are able to consider possibilities and find ways to realise them - make them real, in other words.

    You seem to acknowledge mind cannot be uncoupled from brain.ucarr

    And you seem always determined to argue that 'the physical is fundamental.' So far, I'm not persuaded, but then again I've never accepted physicalism as a philosophy.
  • Where does logic come from? Some thoughts
    The world Merleau-Ponty is talking about is the life-world, the world we’re able to perceive, investigate, and act in. The subject projects the world because it brings forth the world as a space of meaning and relevance. But the subject can project the world only because the subject inheres in a body already oriented to and engaged with a world that surpasses it. The bodily subject is not just in the world but also of the world. The bodily subject is a project of the world, a way the world locally self-organizes and self-individuates to constitute a living being.

    You may want to say that the universe—the whole cosmos or all of nature—subsumes the life-world, so the strange loop pertains only to us and our life-world, not to us and the universe altogether. But quarantining the strange loop this way won’t work. It’s true that our life-world is a minuscule part of an immensely vaster cosmos. The cosmos contains our life-world. But it’s also true that the life-world contains the universe. What we mean is that the universe is always disclosed to us from within life

    Excerpt from
    The Blind Spot
    Adam Frank;Marcelo Gleiser;Evan Thompson; Chapter 8: Consciousness.
  • Where does logic come from? Some thoughts
    Right, but if there is no logos, no determinant actuality prior to the senses or intellection, then why is experience and intellection one way and not any other? If the relationship between appearances and reality were arbitrary, then there is effectively only appearances (we have no grounds to posit reality, and it makes no difference to us). But if there is only appearances, appearances just are reality.Count Timothy von Icarus

    I didn't say, nor imply, that there isn't a determinant, that there is no external world. The relationship between world and mind is not arbitrary. The term that I believe is common to both phenomenology and Buddhism is that the world is 'co-arising'. This tends to subvert the whole question of whether logic or order are 'in the mind' or 'in the world'. Answer is: neither, or both.

    Merleau-Ponty ...writes in Phenomenology of Perception: “The world is inseparable from the subject, but from a subject who is nothing but a project of the world; and the subject is inseparable from the world, but from a world that it itself projects.” This statement is meant to clear a path between two extremes. One is the idea that there is a world only for or in consciousness (idealism). The other is the idea that the world exists ready-made and comes presorted into kinds or categories apart from experience (realism). Instead of these two extremes, Merleau-Ponty proposes that each one of the two terms, the conscious subject and the world, makes the other one what it is, and thus they inseparably form a larger whole. In philosophical terms, their relationship is dialectical. — The Blind Spot - Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser, Evan Thompson.
  • More Sophisticated, Philosophical Accounts of God
    reason might be derived from experience through a particularly structured cognitive apparatus which has limitations. Isn’t that a point Kant makes? I’m no Kantian, but doesn’t Kant discuss transcendental illusions (systematic errors built into our reasoning) and emphasise that humans face clear limits in how reason can be used?Tom Storm

    You’re right to bring up Kant’s emphasis on the limits of reason—and his account of transcendental illusion is precisely where he acknowledges that reason has a built-in tendency to overreach. It poses questions—about God, freedom, the soul—that it can’t answer with the tools of empirical or discursive knowledge. But, as you say, these are not silly questions. They arise from the very structure of rationality itself.

    Kant’s famous dictum is that "percepts without concepts are blind, concepts without percepts are empty"—meaning that experience needs conceptual form, and concepts need experiential grounding. But what this leaves out—or perhaps leaves implicit—is whether there are other forms of knowing that don't fit neatly into that structure.

    Some of Kant’s critics (like Hegel, Schleiermacher, and later thinkers like Maritain or even Vervaeke today) have argued that Kant’s model closes off the possibility of what you might call “higher insight” or participatory knowledge—knowledge that arises not from external observation or deduction, but from engagement, transformation, or direct acquaintance. (See this reference on John Vervaeke’s distinction between propositional, procedural, perspectival, and participatory knowing.)

    So when Kant says that God is “beyond all possible experience,” that’s true within the bounds of his system. But that’s also the crux of the critique: what if those bounds are too narrow? What if there are legitimate forms of insight that don’t conform to his propositional model? Mystical traditions, contemplative practices, and certain strands of idealist or existentialist philosophy have all tried to develop alternatives to that constraint. Which is not to reject Kant but to broaden the context in which his questions are considered.

    In that sense, the question isn’t just “what can we know?” but “what counts as knowing?” And that’s still very much a live question.

    I wasn't trying show that evolution necessarily accounts for rationality, I was identifying the glaring flaw in Plantinga's Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism (EAAN). ,Relativist

    What you identified as the 'fatal flaw' was this:

    In order to survive, every organism needs a functionally accurate perception of its environment to successfully interact with it. Primitive rationality is exhibited when animals adapt there hunting behavior when necessary, doing things that work instead of those that don't. The evolution of abstract reasoning would have been an evolutionary dead end leading to extinction, if it worsened our ability to interact with the environment.Relativist

    My criticism of this is that it misconstrues the nature of reason in a typically reductionist way. It treats reason as on a par with adaptive behavior—the ability to respond flexibly to environmental cues. But as I pointed out, many organisms manage this just fine without any capacity for abstract reasoning. Cockroaches and crocodiles are paradigms of evolutionary success, they've survived for hundreds of milions of years, and yet we don’t credit them with logic, mathematics, or philosophical reflection.

    What Plantinga argues is not that evolution couldn’t produce minds, but that if all mental life—including reason—is understood solely in terms of material and efficient causes, then we’ve undermined the very basis on which we make rational inferences. Logical relations are not physical events; they are intelligible structures, the relations between ideas. If belief is just the result of brain chemistry shaped by fitness, not by the ability to grasp truth, then the rational basis of naturalism loses its warrant. This is how physicalism is self-undermining (which is a consequence of having excluded the subject who brings reason to the picture, in the first place.)

    This is what I see as an enormous problem in your position. It depends on uncritically accepting the existence of magic (or "something even greater")Relativist

    You realize this was a reference to reason? I'm saying that ability to reason resides in the capacity to see the relationships between ideas which is basic to language and rationality. And considering what h.sapiens has been able to achieve by virtue of reason and language - that is something that I am saying is even greater than magic.

    And I will always reference what previous philosophers have said. This is a philosophy forum, and such citations are perfectly appropriate in the context.
  • More Sophisticated, Philosophical Accounts of God
    The argument made by Nagel seems to treat reason as something almost magical, something that exists outside of nature and therefore can't be a product of the natural world and its processesTom Storm

    I have previously started threads on this very topic. There's a constellation of arguments referred to as the argument from reason. There are several versions. One is associated with C S Lewis, elaborated by Victor Reppert. Another is Alvin Plantinga's evolutionary argument against naturalism. The passage from Nagel is from his essay Evolutionary Naturalism and the Fear of Religion which we've discussed previously.

    Very briefly, the argument from reason states that reason is the capacity to grasp ground and consequent relations - because of this, then that must be the case. The argument is that the nature of causation in this context is different from the material causation upon which naturalism is grounded.

    So, yes, I think there's a good argument that reason is not a product of the kinds of naturalistic causation that science generally assumes. Indeed, Darwin himself hinted at perplexity over this fact, writing 'With me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man's mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy.' My view is that when h.sapiens gained the capacity to perceive causal relationships, which was bound up with the evolution of language, abstract thought, and the understanding of symbols, our intelligence realised horizons of being that were not perceptible to our simian forbears. It is only that capacity which can be properly said to perceive truly.

    So - magical? Well, I think not, but something even greater in some respects. I think when the ancients discovered the power of reason they discovered an intoxicating power which we have since begun to take for granted. This is very much the topic of the excellent TPF essay Dante and the Deflation of Reason.

    Isn't it the view of phenomenology that reasoning is grounded in the structures of experience, in how the world appears to us through perception, intention, and context?Tom Storm

    Phenomenology is not empiricism. While it begins with lived experience, it doesn’t reduce reason to perceptual inputs or behavioral adaptations. Especially in Husserl’s later work, phenomenology becomes explicitly transcendental, concerned with the a priori structures of subjectivity—those conditions that make intentionality, perception, and reasoning possible in the first place.

    So yes, perception, intention, and context are crucial—but they don’t explain the faculty of reason. They are, rather, the field in which reason operates, and which reason must itself interrogate. What phenomenology uncovers is that reason is not merely derived from experience; it's already operative in how experience is constituted (which is what 'transcendental' meant for both Kant and Husserl.)

    I thought it was your thesis that meaning can only exist if there is some form of guarantee for all meaning - a transcendent source. You often seem to maintain that there needs to be a higher-order purpose for any kind of purpose at all to be possible?Tom Storm

    I wouldn’t say meaning requires a “guarantee” in the strong sense—that seems too ambitious. But if reason genuinely grants insight into truths that hold necessarily, or in all possible worlds (as traditional logic and metaphysics have claimed), then that would seem to indicate a level of cognition that is categorically distinct from the reflexive or instrumental intelligence of non-rational animals (or technicians ;-) ).

    Isn’t this precisely why the classical tradition held reason to be the distinguishing feature of human nature? Not because humans are “smarter” in an evolutionary sense, but because we’re capable of grasping truth as such, not just what works.

    I realize this sounds unfashionable to modern ears—perhaps even reactionary. As John Vervaeke wryly observed, "what unites all of postmodernism is hatred of Plato.” But Plato’s point still stands: if we can know what is true, just, or good in itself, then our rational capacities open onto something more than contingent adaptation—they reveal a dimension of meaning that is not merely made, but discovered.

    Could it be that humans are unrealistically impressed by reason, treating it as the highest or even only valid form of understanding?Tom Storm

    Far be it from a philosopher to defend the soveriegnty of reason :yikes:
  • ICE Raids & Riots
    Mostly agree. And remember how much of this is just political theatre. Trump made huge mileage out of the claim that undocumented immigrants are criminals and rapists - typical demagogue tactics. So now, making good on all that means casting the dragnet wide and getting the numbers up. Never mind that the whole world is going to hell in a hand basket - looks matter!
  • Two ways to philosophise.
    As to Chalmers and Dennett―the latter seems to me by far the more imaginative philosopher.Janus

    I’m a robot, and you’re a robot, but that doesn’t make us any less dignified or wonderful or lovable or responsible for our actions. Why does our dignity depend on our being scientifically inexplicable?” — Daniel Dennett
  • More Sophisticated, Philosophical Accounts of God
    In order to survive, every organism needs a functionally accurate perception of its environment to successfully interact with it. Primitive rationality is exhibited when animals adapt there hunting behavior when necessary, doing things that work instead of those that don't. The evolution of abstract reasoning would have been an evolutionary dead end leading to extinction, if it worsened our ability to interact with the environment.Relativist

    That criticism betrays a misunderstanding of the argument from reason. Obviously organisms must respond adaptively to their environment in order to survive. But that’s a long way from showing that evolution accounts for rationality of the kind required for abstract thought and language or theoretical science. Evolution selects for adaptive advantage, and plenty of species have been successfully adapted for millions of years without any ability to reason.

    The behavior of crocodiles, cockroaches, and even mammals reflect functional intelligence—what works pragmatically—but that’s not the same as rational insight, which is the ability to perceive and evaluate logical relations among ideas.

    More to the point, if we reduce reason to adaptive success—if it’s “just what works” in evolutionary terms—then we undermine the normative authority of reason itself. After all, reason doesn’t just describe what we do—it tells us what we ought to believe, based on validity, coherence, and evidence. But if reason is just a tool of survival, why trust it in matters beyond basic survival? Why trust it to tell us the truth about consciousness, the universe, or even evolution itself?

    As far as ethics is concerned:

    I have no beef with entomology or evolution, but I refuse to admit that they teach me much about ethics. Consider the fact that human action ranges to the extremes. People can perform extraordinary acts of altruism, including kindness toward other species — or they can utterly fail to be altruistic, even toward their own children. So whatever tendencies we may have inherited leave ample room for variation; our choices will determine which end of the spectrum we approach. This is where ethical discourse comes in — not in explaining how we’re “built,” but in deliberating on our own future acts. Should I cheat on this test? Should I give this stranger a ride? Knowing how my selfish and altruistic feelings evolved doesn’t help me decide at all. Most, though not all, moral codes advise me to cultivate altruism. But since the human race has evolved to be capable of a wide range of both selfish and altruistic behavior, there is no reason to say that altruism is superior to selfishness in any biological sense. — Richard Polt, Anything but Human

    And as for reason:

    The only form that genuine reasoning can take consists in seeing the validity of the arguments, in virtue of what they say. As soon as one tries to step outside of such thoughts, one loses contact with their true content. And one cannot be outside and inside them at the same time: If one thinks in logic, one cannot simultaneously regard those thoughts as mere psychological dispositions, however caused or however biologically grounded. If one decides that some of one's psychological dispositions are, as a contingent matter of fact, reliable methods of reaching the truth (as one may with perception, for example), then in doing so one must rely on other thoughts that one actually thinks, without regarding them as mere dispositions. One cannot embed all one's reasoning in a psychological theory, including the reasonings that have led to that psychological theory. The epistemological buck must stop somewhere. By this I mean not that there must be some premises that are forever unrevisable but, rather, that in any process of reasoning or argument there must be some thoughts that one simply thinks from the inside--rather than thinking of them as biologically programmed dispositions. — Thomas Nagel, Evolutionary Naturalism and the Fear of Religion

    That is why the veracity of reason presupposes a deeper concordance between mind and world than can be understood solely in terms of adaptive fitness. Neo-darwinian biology is many things, but an epistemology, it ain't.
  • Where does logic come from? Some thoughts
    Don't these at least hint that logic may be something we do rather than something we find?Banno

    Could it not be something we do in response to something we find? Counting is something we do, but the rules governing it are imposed on us by necessity.
  • More Sophisticated, Philosophical Accounts of God
    Dividing the world into primary qualities (supposedly real) and secondary qualities (supposedly mere physic imaginative additions to reality) is the "artificial bifurcation of nature" a fundamental flaw in both scientific and philosophical thought.prothero

    I am very astonished that the scientific picture of the real world around me is deficient. It gives a lot of factual information, puts all our experience in a magnificently consistent order, but it is ghastly silent about all and sundry that is really near to our heart, that really matters to us. It cannot tell us a word about red and blue, bitter and sweet, physical pain and physical delight; it knows nothing of beautiful and ugly, good or bad, God and eternity. Science sometimes pretends to answer questions in these domains, but the answers are very often so silly that we are not inclined to take them seriously. — Erwin Schrodinger, Nature and the Greeks

    Although there are those who take them deadly seriously.
  • Where does logic come from? Some thoughts
    If charge and mass exist, for instance, as two separate properties, then we can draw the conclusion that charge, C, does not equal mass, M, that C=C, M=M, C != not C, and so forth. The only required feature is some amount of difference within reality. Again, even if minds do not exist, reality is still implicitly following the laws of logic through the fact that there are differentiated properties and things such as the gravitational force, electromagnetism, protons, higgs bosons, etc.tom111

    I would question the assumption in this passage. They are genuine distinctions as discerned through empirical inquiry, and they form the backbone of modern physics. But whether those distinctions entail that reality “follows the laws of logic” independently of any interpreting subject is far from settled.

    As @Joshs quoted from Merleau-Ponty:

    “...the identity of the thing with itself... is already a second interpretation of the experience... we arrive at the thing-object... only by imposing upon experience an abstract dilemma which experience ignores” (The Visible and the Invisible).

    That is, logic doesn't arise from being as such, but from how we encounter and articulate being. To cite another source that might resonate with the OP's concerns, Charles Pinter (Mind and the Cosmic Order) argues that logic is not something inherent in the world itself, but relies on the cognitive and conceptual framework through which we interpret experience. Even mathematical objects, Pinter says, are not discovered are constituted through acts of mental abstraction. They are real, but their reality is not the same as physical existence. Pinter suggests that logical laws emerge when we attempt to refer—that is, when we try to single something out and hold it steady in thought. But this act is interpretive - we impose identity, distinguish boundaries, and construct exclusions in order to make sense of the flux. Logic is thereby a function of cognition, not a pre-existent feature of a mind-independent reality.
  • More Sophisticated, Philosophical Accounts of God
    Because we are the phenomenon.
    — Wayfarer
    We are one phenomenon.
    Relativist

    The discussion is about the phenomenon of life, and about how physicalism omits some of its fundamental characteristics. Reductionism may be effective and useful in many scientific disciplines, but that doesn’t ameloriate its shortcomings when applied to philosophy. The ‘explanatory gap’ and the ‘problem of consciousness’ both refer to that shortcoming.

    I believe materialism is justified on the basis that it provides the best explation for all the uncontroversial facts of the world.Relativist

    It is justifiable in respect of material phenomena over which science demonstrates considerable mastery. But this discussion has been what it leaves out - what happens when the methods of science are applied to questions of philosophy.
  • More Sophisticated, Philosophical Accounts of God
    My question is: why assume an ontological basis for the epistemological paradigm?Relativist

    Because we are the phenomenon. We're not observing from a point outside life—we are living, embodied beings whose actions, thoughts, and values are suffused with purpose and normativity. That’s not just how we talk about life; it’s how we live it.

    As already argued, physicalism arises from a methodological abstraction, intended for modeling inert matter (something it does very well!) It achieves explanatory power by systematically bracketing out qualities like meaning, value, and purpose. But this comes at a cost: these are not incidental features of life—they are constitutive of it. So when physicalism tries to "explain" life, it ends up trying to reconstruct the very things it had to exclude to get started. That’s the core of Jonas' argument: life and consciousness are not anomalies to be explained away—they’re clues to what physicalist ontology has left out.

    How do you imbed this into an ontological theory of what actually exists?Relativist

    Start with the modest but radical move of taking the phenomena of life seriously, not as illusions or surface features, but as real indications of the nature of reality. The burden of proof doesn't rest solely with those who insist that life exhibits intrinsic purposiveness. The burden also falls on those who deny it—especially when their models can’t account for meaning, agency, or value except by explaining them away.

    Should intelligibility be assumed?Relativist

    Science—and philosophy—both presuppose that the world is intelligible. Even raising the question of whether it should be assumes a rational order that allows the question to be posed in the first place. So rather than doubting intelligibility, the more pressing issue is: what kind of ontology can account for the fact that intelligibility is possible at all?

    If physicalism treats intelligibility as an accidental byproduct of blind processes, then it risks undermining the rational basis of its own claims. This concern is related to what some have called the argument from reason (C.S. Lewis) or the evolutionary argument against naturalism (Alvin Plantinga): namely, that if our minds are solely the product of non-rational forces, we have little reason to trust their capacity for reason—including our belief in physicalism itself.

    How do you account for it without a "God" (a being who acts with intent)?Relativist


    Understanding the nature of intent—or “God’s will,” if you like—is one of the most vexed questions in both theology and philosophy. Literalist religious frameworks often interpret history as a kind of script written in advance, culminating in divine intervention and final judgment. That’s not what I’m suggesting.

    But it’s also not the only way to approach the idea of cosmic purpose or intelligence.

    I lean toward what might be called a naturalistic philosophy of religion—if that isn’t too paradoxical. A good example is Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos (and Nagel, notably, doesn't write as a theist). He speculates that “each of our lives is a part of the cosmic process of the universe gradually waking up and becoming self-aware.” That’s not a doctrine, but a philosophical gesture toward an alternative vision—one in which mind and value are not intrusions into a meaningless cosmos, but intrinsic to its unfolding.

    Yes, it’s vague when stated like that—but vagueness here may be appropriate considering the scale and subtlety of the question. What matters is that it opens a conceptual space between mechanistic materialism and supernatural intervention. It suggests that intentionality and consciousness may be expressions of something deeper in the fabric of reality, not inexplicable anomalies.
  • More Sophisticated, Philosophical Accounts of God
    . Rather, you and Talbot seem to be arguing for using "teleology" as an epistemological paradigm for describing living things and their interactions. Sure, I see the utility for better understanding biological systems. But this wouldn't negate what I said, in terms of a metaphysical teleology.Relativist

    I appreciate your thoughtful response. You're right to say that there's a distinction between using teleology as an epistemological paradigm—i.e., as a way of understanding living systems—and asserting it as a metaphysical principle embedded in the structure of reality. But I think that very distinction deserves closer scrutiny.

    The heart of the issue is this: Can we adequately account for living systems—and by extension, consciousness and agency—without appeal to any notion of purpose, directionality, or normativity? Or put differently: Is it plausible to treat teleological concepts as mere heuristics or metaphors, while denying their ontological basis?

    When Talbott (and others like Thompson, Varela, Deacon, and Jonas) emphasize the meaningfulness, normativity, and goal-directedness inherent in organisms, they're not merely saying "this is a useful model." They're pointing out that organisms actually behave in ways that cannot be made intelligible in purely mechanistic terms. As soon as you describe a cell as regulating its internal state, or an animal as foraging, you're already invoking purpose-laden language—language that tracks something real in the nature of life.

    So when you say my post didn't show your dichotomy to be false, I would say: the dichotomy between materialism and creationism is false precisely because there is a third option: namely, that telos is a real feature of life, but not in the anthropomorphic sense of an external designer with a blueprint. Instead, it emerges as a kind of immanent normativity—a principle of self-organization and purposiveness intrinsic to living systems themselves.

    I've been reading Hans Jonas 'Phenomenology of Biology'. Jonas argues that life is the phenomenon that gives rise to value and meaning—not because it was pre-ordained by a deity, but because the very act of being alive entails a concern for continued existence, a directedness toward goals (however basic), and an interpretive relationship with the environment. That's not "epistemological teleology" in the narrow sense—it’s a recognition that teleological structures are built into the logic of life itself.

    And once we admit that—even provisionally—then perhaps the modern exclusion of telos (and with it, qualities like value, intention, or meaning) from our ontology is not just a simplifying abstraction, but a serious (even catastrophic) omission.

    And as Hans Jonas powerfully argues, since the ascent of mechanistic materialism, life and consciousness have become anomalies—features of reality that no longer fit within the explanatory framework that modern science inherited from Galileo and Newton. The success of mechanistic models in physics came at the cost of excluding precisely those qualities that constitute living, experiencing beings: purposiveness, value, and meaning. Materialism has to treat these as secondary effects or emergent illusions, but never as basic features of reality.

    To return to your point: I agree that "intent" in the conscious human sense requires a subject capable of forming and acting on reasons. But perhaps that's an evolved expression of something more basic: the kind of intrinsic normativity that characterizes even the simplest organisms. That doesn’t entail an uncaused divine being—it entails rethinking what kind of ontology is required to make sense of life itself.
  • Two ways to philosophise.
    Trouble is of course that if something is beyond discursive thought then it cannot be said. We could not have an argument that reached such a conclusion. And indeed the ending of elenchus is often aporia - the method of dissection ends without resolution.Banno

    Aporia can be seen as precisely the points where dialectic ends and noetic insight is required. The fact that language and symbolic thought is inherently limited, is something that can and has been a subject of philosophical discourse. Wittgenstein’s aphorism at the end of the Tractatus ('that of which...') is often treated as a full stop — a way to shut down discussion of anything that can’t be stated in propositional terms (especially by you!) . But it can also be read as a threshold: an acknowledgment that there is something beyond what can be said — something that may be shown, enacted, or lived. Anyway, the idea that wisdom might transcend discursive articulation isn’t foreign to philosophy — it runs through Plato, Plotinus, and arguably into Wittgenstein himself. It’s also central to Eastern philosophy, where sometimes silence becomes the highest form of answer, akin to 'see for yourself!'

    Mysticism is often a pejorative term, shorthand for vagueness or woolly-headedness. And, to be fair, it often is that. Theosophical Bookstore shelves are full of ‘mystical aphorisms,’ and it’s not hard to generate vague-sounding phrases that mimic profundity (we've had more than a few here, I remember 'Brother James'). But the actual mystics — whether Buddhist, Christian, or other — are people of of great discipline, clear insight, and spiritual rigor. What they describe is often not fuzzy at all, but the result of a highly refined insights. Easier to say than to enact.

    There neither is nor ever will be a treatise of mine on the subject [of metaphysics]. For it does not admit of exposition like other branches of knowledge; but after much converse about the matter itself and a life lived together, suddenly a light, as it were, is kindled in one soul by a flame that leaps to it from another, and thereafter sustains itself...~ Plato, Seventh LetterCount Timothy von Icarus

    Interesting that the root of the word 'Upaniṣad' is 'sitting closely' - the relationship of chela to guru.

    Philosophical type activity moves from naive common sense, to the analytic dissection Banno enjoys, to the metaphyisical more constructive type (building more things to be dissected), then to more mystical transcending type...Fire Ologist

    There's a stream that might be called 'analytical mysticism' in Catholic philosophy. At least, it has its mystical elements, from its inhereted neoplatonism and the presence of mystics in the Church (You've mentioned that you're Catholic). Jacques Maritain, Bernard Lonergan, William Desmond - all great philosophers in that tradition. There are many more.

    "Something in particular," not "some particular thing." Which is just to say, the term wisdom has to have some determinant content or else philosophy, the love of wisdom, would be the "love of nothing in particular."Count Timothy von Icarus

    Let's recall Lloyd Gerson's most recent book Platonism and Naturalism: the Possibility of Philosophy.

    Gerson contends that Platonism identifies philosophy with a distinct subject matter, namely, the intelligible world and seeks to show that the Naturalist rejection of Platonism entails the elimination of a distinct subject matter for philosophy.
  • More Sophisticated, Philosophical Accounts of God
    Let's step back a bit. The question I was responding to was, 'is there good reason to believe teleology'? So to address that we need to clarify exactly what that means. (This could easily become a 5000 word essay, but I'll try to keep it brief as possible.)

    The way I addressed the question of teleology was in the context of the emergence of the Galilean-Newtonian-Cartesian worldview (a.k.a. 'the scientific revolution'). It is here that the notion of telos or purpose was rejected in favour of mechanistic model, the understanding that the totality of the universe can be understood solely in terms of matter (since Einstein 'matter-energy') acting in accordance with natural laws over aeons of time. This is what gives rise to all phenomena, undirected by anything like a higher intelligence or divine intellect.

    Background - teleology at the time of the scientific revolution had been intertwined with concepts from Aristotelian physics, such as 'natural place', and, in turn, with the Ptolmaic geocentric cosmology. This was superseded by Galileo and Newton's modern understanding of physics in terms of mass, velocity, intertia etc. So teleology was rejected, along with Aristotelian notions of final and formal causation (which also has major implications.) And that medieval conception of causation was bound up with the early modern conception of a 'divine architect' and 'ideas in the mind of God'.

    Whereas, the way you phrase the question falls into what I see as a false dichotomy: either accepting the naturalist, mechanistic account or holding to a creationist or 'intelligent design' cosmology. This is precisely the predicament that the cultural dynamics of Western culture engineered for itself. (Karen Armstrong's 2009 book The Case for God lays this out very clearly.)

    Whether we call this a "God", a trascendental oversoul, or anything else, it strikes me as a rather extreme assumption to think that such a being just happens to exist uncaused. By contrast, the gradual development of beings, somewhere in an old. vast universe, with the capacity for intentional behavior, but considerably more limited powers to act, seems considerably more plausible.Relativist

    I would suggest looking at telos differently, rather than in terms of a Grand Design presided over by a cosmic architect/engineer (which seems to me like God created in the image of man).

    Recall that I said that physics begins with abstraction: this is the key point. Galileo's physics starts with the division of primary and secondary qualities, the primary qualities being those that can be both expressed and measured in mathematical terms, the fundamental ground of mathematical physics, which has grown so astoundingly since Galileo's day. How things appear to us, by contrast, is relegated to the 'secondary qualities' which are intrinsically subjective in nature. (Notice this is a re-statement of the ancient philosophical quandry of 'reality and appearance'.)

    But what does that leave out? Already, intentionality and purpose have been excluded from the reckoning, as one of the grounding assumptions of the model. Physicalism' insists that in reality there are no purposes or intentionality - these are relegated to the personal or subjective domain. Whereas, in actuality, all of us, as human beings, and every single organism, are animated or driven by purposeful and intentional actions. The idea that the universe is 'devoid of meaning' is, therefore, a judgement: even the scientist studying the motions of planets has some aim in mind, if only just to understand. So this is the false dichotomy I'm refering to.

    Consider the following, from philosopher of biology, Steve Talbott:

    The physicist wants laws that are as universal as possible, true of all situations and therefore unable to tell us much about any particular situation — laws, in other words, that are true regardless of meaning and context. So far as a physical law is concerned, once we know it, every subsequent observation merely demonstrates something we already knew: the law will yet again be obeyed. This requires a severe abstraction from the presentational richness of the phenomenal world, which presents us at every moment with something new. Such abstraction shows up in the strong urge toward the mathematization of physical laws.

    Nothing ever goes wrong with the physical laws that were operative in the system, but any given causal relation can always be sabotaged by a contextual change.

    In biology a changing context does not interfere with some causal truth we are trying to see; contextual transformation is itself the truth we are after. Or, you could say: in the organism as a maker of meaning, interfering is the whole point! The ongoing construction and evolution of a context, with its continually modulated causal relationships, is what the biologist is trying to recognize and do justice to. Every creature lives by virtue of the dynamic, pattern-shifting play of a governing context, which extends into an open-ended environment. The organism gives expression, at every level of its being, to the unbounded because of reason, the tapestry of meaning...
    Steve Talbott, What Do Organisms Mean?

    So that is at least the direction in which an answer should be sought. Notice that it doesn't deny the efficacy of physical laws and physical causation, but recognises the inherent limitations of those principles when applied to a broader context, that being actual existence.
  • Question About Hylomorphism
    Yes, but then there isn’t some other substance which can receive potentiality. ‘Matter’ is not a substrate which receives form. The ‘material’ out of which something is created is the already existed stuff (objects) which can be made into a whole (by way of it receiving the form of the whole); so each object is both comprised of form and matter only insofar as its parts are the matter and its form is the actualizing principle of the structure that makes those parts its parts. There is no substrate of ‘matter’.Bob Ross

    The substrate is what is translated as 'prime matter'. In this, I will defer to the others here with greater knowledge of Aristotle, but based on encyclopedia entries: Aristotle's Prime Matter (prōtē hulē) is conceived as pure potentiality. Imagine the most basic "stuff" of the universe, utterly undifferentiated and without any inherent qualities, forms, or properties of its own. It's not actually anything specific, but has the potential to become anything (to 'take form', so to speak).

    This idea of prime matter is crucial for Aristotle's explanation of change, especially what he called substantial change – when one thing completely transforms into another (like a plant decaying into earth). For change to occur, there must be something underlying that persists throughout the transformation. Prime matter serves as this ultimate, enduring substratum. Without it, Aristotle argued, things would have to come into being from absolute nothingness, which he rejected as impossible ('nothing comes from nothing').

    But because prime matter possesses no form or qualities, it cannot be directly observed or even understood in isolation (like I said, 'not a thing'). It is only possible to encounter things that are already a combination of matter and form – actual objects with specific characteristics. Hence Prime Matter is often described by what it isn't, rather than what it is.

    For Aristotle, prime matter was generally considered ungenerated and indestructible. It was an eternal principle underpinning all creation and destruction in the observable world.

    Speculatively, there are parallels to this concept (if it is a concept) and the mysterious 'fields' of today's cosmological physics. Nowadays particles are said to be 'excitations of fields' rather than self-existent point-particles. It is at least analogically suggestive. (There are modern interpretations of hylomorphism in quantum physics but that would take us too far afield.)
  • Two ways to philosophise.
    The closest one can get to being consumed in doing philosophy, the way a master is consumed while practicing his trade, is the moment when philosophizing becomes mystical contemplation. Words and self-awareness dissipate at that point, so you are not really doing philosophy anymore, though you may be thinking about being, or self, or language qua language, or the thought of nothingness.Fire Ologist

    Plotinus wishes to speak of a thinking that is not discursive but intuitive, i.e. that it is knowing and what it is knowing are immediately evident to it. There is no gap then between thinking and what is thought--they come together in the same moment, which is no longer a moment among other consecutive moments, one following upon the other. Rather, the moment in which such a thinking takes place is immediately present and without difference from any other moment, i.e. its thought is no longer chronological but eternal. To even use names, words, to think about such a thinking is already to implicate oneself in a time of separated and consecutive moments (i.e. chronological) and to have already forgotten what it is one wishes to think, namely thinking and what is thought intuitively together.

    ‘Thought’ is a deficient term, though, as it seems so quotidian; we all think incessantly, often to not much effect. I don’t know if there’s a proper English term for the kind of insight being referred to but it seems more a reference to a visionary insight, noesis, perhaps, or gnosis, or something of the kind.

    And these may be ‘beyond discursive thought’ and so ‘philosophizing’ in the sense of verbal formulation. But it is still part of the broader territory of philosophy (or at least used to be.)

    In any case, Plotinus, the fountainhead of much of ancient philosophy, and even of much since, dwelt between those two worlds of mystical insight and philosophical exegesis. So too did many a classic philosopher. So the boundary is more a border, and a porous one at that.

    If we are to focus on praxis, then what does the Grand Theory Of All provide? Why do we need an analysis of being in order to say that the flower is pretty?Banno

    I think a ‘grand theory of everything’ is a mischaracterization. It's insight into the nature of things. It may show itself in a gesture or an artwork.
  • Two ways to philosophise.
    And the guitarist practices outside of the performance.Banno

    Right - hence the distinction in ancient philosophy between praxis and theoria.

    Might I suggest (pace Hadot) that in modern philosophy, the former is generally neglected.

    (Incidentally, from what very little I know, Richard Bernstein was not one of those who neglected it.)
  • Two ways to philosophise.
    Supose that there is an actual good. Now supose that we are in a position to pass a judgement on some act - kicking a puppy or stealing a loaf of bread to feed one's children or what ever - is that act Good? We look to the circumstances, to the consequences, to the intent of the participants. How would what we do in making that assessment differ, if there is no "actual good"?

    Do we really need to understand the nature of being, to have the whole and complete truth before us, before we decide that the sunset is beautiful, or that kicking a pup is wrong, or that stealing to feed one's children is forgivable?
    Banno

    All the examples are artificial. It's like those endless discussions of the trolley problem. God knows what you would *actually* do in that circumstance. Useful for stimulating classroom discussion, but still artificial, because it's not a real trolley, and no actual lives are at stake.

    Unlike our actual existence.

    Even 'understanding the nature of being' sounds artificial, when expressed in such bald terms, but to see a real master at work, in whatever capacity or occupation they are engaged in, is to see what that understanding means.

    I can't help but post this, the mods will probably remove it, but it's only 2:25 and there are actual philosophers (some since deceased) discussing this very point.