ditto with the classics. But with this qualification: they are all long dead and long gone. — tim wood

According to Schopenhauer, corresponding to the level of the universal subject-object distinction, Will is immediately objectified into a set of universal objects or Platonic Ideas. These constitute the timeless patterns for each of the individual things that we experience in space and time. There are different Platonic Ideas, and although this multiplicity of Ideas implies that some measure of individuation is present within this realm, each Idea nonetheless contains no plurality within itself and is said to be “one.” Since the Platonic Ideas are in neither space nor time, they lack the qualities of individuation that would follow from the introduction of spatial and temporal qualifications. In these respects, the Platonic Ideas are independent of the specific fourfold root of the principle of sufficient reason, even though it would be misleading to say that there is no individuation whatsoever at this universal level, for there are many different Platonic Ideas. Schopenhauer refers to the Platonic Ideas as the direct objectifications of Will and as the immediate objectivity of Will.

If we deny-the-will to the point of getting beyond our own subject-object nature, we can perhaps escape. — schopenhauer1

Greek and Roman classics are not part of anybody's culture except the people who speak their languages — that doesn't apply to most here —, and the reason for that is exactly Scholastics — Lionino

LLMs are not conscious or intelligent, they're just "stochastic parrots." — fishfry

First, apologies to both of you. — ENOAH

It simply cannot be that that cat over there is independent and localized as normal perception tells us. — Constance

"Sariputta, do you take it on conviction that the faculty of conviction, when developed & pursued, gains a footing in the Deathless, has the Deathless as its goal & consummation? Do you take it on conviction that the faculty of persistence... mindfulness... concentration... discernment, when developed & pursued, gains a footing in the Deathless, has the Deathless as its goal & consummation?"

"Lord, it's not that I take it on conviction in the Blessed One that the faculty of conviction... persistence... mindfulness... concentration... discernment, when developed & pursued, gains a footing in the Deathless, has the Deathless as its goal & consummation. Those who have not known, seen, penetrated, realized, or attained it by means of discernment would have to take it on conviction in others that the faculty of conviction... persistence... mindfulness... concentration... discernment, when developed & pursued, gains a footing in the Deathless, has the Deathless as its goal & consummation; whereas those who have known, seen, penetrated, realized, & attained it by means of discernment would have no doubt or uncertainty that the faculty of conviction... persistence... mindfulness... concentration... discernment, when developed & pursued, gains a footing in the Deathless, has the Deathless as its goal & consummation.....

For Hadot...the means for the philosophical student to achieve the “complete reversal of our usual ways of looking at things” epitomized by the Sage were a series of spiritual exercises. These exercises encompassed all of those practices still associated with philosophical teaching and study: reading, listening, dialogue, inquiry, and research. However, they also included practices deliberately aimed at addressing the student’s larger way of life, and demanding daily or continuous repetition: practices of attention (prosoche), meditations (meletai), memorizations of dogmata, self-mastery (enkrateia), the therapy of the passions, the remembrance of good things, the accomplishment of duties, and the cultivation of indifference towards indifferent things (Philosophy as a Way of Life 84). Hadot acknowledges his use of the term “spiritual exercises” may create anxieties, by associating philosophical practices more closely with religious devotion than typically done. Hadot’s use of the adjective “spiritual” (or sometimes “existential”) indeed aims to capture how these practices, like devotional practices in the religious traditions are aimed at generating and reactivating a constant way of living and perceiving in prokopta, despite the distractions, temptations, and difficulties of life. For this reason, they call upon far more than “reason alone.” — Pierre Hadot, IEP

I have never been able to get on board with his Debbie Downer*1 "wanh, wanh, wah" Pessimism and Roseanne Rosannadana "it's always something" — Gnomon

But it shows that concepts are not empty things. They are palpable errors. As I see it, when we talk about the world, we are using categories of understanding. These are concepts, so when I see a dog, the particular dog in front of me is known because I have this schematic in my head about dogs in general, the universal that subsumes the particular. — Constance

It is the same world, but all along there has been this fundamental mistake at the perceptual level. — Constance

His work is opposed, as he once put it, to "the spirit which informs the vast stream of European and American civilisation in which all of us stand." Nearly 50 years after his death, we can see, more clearly than ever, that the feeling that he was swimming against the tide was justified. If we wanted a label to describe this tide, we might call it "scientism," the view that every intelligible question has either a scientific solution or no solution at all. It is against this view that Wittgenstein set his face. …

There are many questions to which we do not have scientific answers, not because they are deep, impenetrable mysteries, but simply because they are not scientific questions. These include questions about love, art, history, culture, music-all questions, in fact, that relate to the attempt to understand ourselves better. There is a widespread feeling today that the great scandal of our times is that we lack a scientific theory of consciousness. And so there is a great interdisciplinary effort, involving physicists, computer scientists, cognitive psychologists and philosophers, to come up with tenable scientific answers to the questions: what is consciousness? What is the self? One of the leading competitors in this crowded field is the theory advanced by the mathematician Roger Penrose, that a stream of consciousness is an orchestrated sequence of quantum physical events taking place in the brain. Penrose's theory is that a moment of consciousness is produced by a sub-protein in the brain called a tubulin. The theory is, on Penrose's own admission, speculative, and it strikes many as being bizarrely implausible. But suppose we discovered that Penrose's theory was correct, would we, as a result, understand ourselves any better? Is a scientific theory the only kind of understanding?

Well, you might ask, what other kind is there? Wittgenstein's answer to that, I think, is his greatest, and most neglected, achievement. Although Wittgenstein's thought underwent changes between his early and his later work, his opposition to scientism was constant. Philosophy, he writes, "is not a theory but an activity." It strives, not after scientific truth, but after conceptual clarity.

And yet when I tell you I think it all comes down to faith and feeling and that nothing discursive can be known via meditation, intuition or enlightenment you disagree and label me a positivist — Janus

I am wondering why I should care. It's just that we always seem to come back to quesions about what is true and how do we know it. — Tom Storm

When you consider the transcendental, what frame do you find helpful? It strikes me that your form of idealism (as articulated in your article) has some commonalities with Husserl and phenomenology. — Tom Storm

With apologists it always comes down to "you must not understand" if you disagree with them and/or present arguments they can't cope with — Janus

Dirac's derivation is no more than that. — Banno

The religious temperament is not common among analytic philosophers, but it is not absent. A number of prominent analytic philosophers are protestant, catholic, or jewish, and others, such as Wittgenstein and Rawls, clearly had a religious attitude to life without adhering to a particular religion. But I believe nothing of the kind is present in the makeup of Russell, Moore, Ryle, Austin, Carnap, Quine, Davidson, Strawson, or most of the current professoriate.

The Theological Origins of Modernity, Michael Gillespie — tim wood

Our issue was, what sort of things are numbers? And one answer is that they are real, like trees, sticks and rocks, but that they are in a special world that makes them unavailable for examination in the way that trees and sticks are available. Roughly, Plato's world of forms. — Banno

Forms...are radically distinct, and in that sense ‘apart,’ in that they are not themselves sensible things. With our eyes we can see large things, but not largeness itself; healthy things, but not health itself. The latter, in each case, is an idea, an intelligible content, something to be apprehended by thought rather than sense, a ‘look’ not for the eyes but for the mind. This is precisely the point Plato is making when he characterizes forms as the reality of all things. “Have you ever seen any of these with your eyes?—In no way … Or by any other sense, through the body, have you grasped them? I am speaking about all things such as largeness, health, strength, and, in one word, the reality [οὐσίας] of all other things, what each thing is” (Phd. 65d4–e1). Is there such a thing as health? Of course there is. Can you see it? Of course not. This does not mean that the forms are occult entities floating ‘somewhere else’ in ‘another world,’ a ‘Platonic heaven.’ It simply says that the intelligible identities which are the reality, the whatness, of things are not themselves physical things to be perceived by the senses, but must be grasped by thought. If, taking any of these examples—say, justice, health, or strength—we ask, “How big is it? What color is it? How much does it weigh?” we are obviously asking the wrong kind of question. Forms are ideas, not in the sense of concepts or abstractions, but in that they are realities apprehended by thought rather than by sense. They are thus ‘separate’ in that they are not additional members of the world of sensible things, but are known by a different mode of awareness. But this does not mean that they are ‘located elsewhere,’ or that they are not, as Plato says, the very intelligible contents, the truth and reality of sensible things. — Thinking Being - An Introduction to Metaphysics in the Classical Tradition, Eric D. Perl, p28

And we build on this. "7" counts as seven, and with a few extras we can write "3+4=7". These count as numbers. — Banno

Ask Wittgenstein how it is with value experiences. — Constance

6.41The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is and happens as it does happen. In it there is no value—and if there were, it would be of no value.

If there is a value which is of value, it must lie outside all happening and being-so. For all happening and being-so is accidental.

What makes it non-accidental cannot lie in the world, for otherwise this would again be accidental.

It must lie outside the world.


6.42 Hence also there can be no ethical propositions.

Propositions cannot express anything higher.


6.421It is clear that ethics cannot be expressed.

Ethics is transcendental.

(Ethics and aesthetics are one.) — Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

It's an interesting area because it ties in with the radical transformation of views on freedom. Freedom goes from primarily being defined in terms of actuality (the ability to do the Good) to bring primarily defined in terms of potency (the ability to choose anything). This has ramifications throughout philosophy. — Count Timothy von Icarus

If a god created us did it have this chatter in mind? If we are organic beings formed by the evolution of cells, is the chatter a formation of cells? — ENOAH

So I agree that humans have a running narrative of reasons and explanations and goals and emotional responses, etc. etc. that come from having a linguistic-based mind, and the dynamics of our brain. This indeed does make us distinct from other animals. However, I don't see how it could ever be different for the human animal. — schopenhauer1

By contrast, the classical/scholastic tradition hadnt yet arrived at a notion of subjective consciousness, and as a result, had nothing like the modern concept of the object — Joshs

It reminds me of the positivists, who responded to Wittgenstein's Tractatus in a way he never intended. — Constance

This actually goes back to Schopenhauer's notion that subject and object are always intertwined. Your thought of a dead, lifeless universe, is still a thought. And even if it is a representation of some "reality", that reality will never be YOUR reality, which is NOT simply "lifeless universe" but a psychologically embodied being THINKING of the lifeless universe, and projecting it, Signifying it, as you might say. — schopenhauer1

He failed to take the Vedanta/Mahayana wisdom far enough. (In that regard, a victim of his age. Bless him for how far he got!) — ENOAH

There is nothing controversial in saying that of the major figures in Western philosophy Schopenhauer is the one who has most in common with Eastern thought. Less adequately pondered is the fact that much of what it is that the two have in common was taken by Schopenhauer from Kant. To suppose that Schopenhauer's philosophy was formed to any decisive degree under the influence of Eastern thought is not only a mistake, but misses the crucial point that in Kant and Schopenhauer the mainstream of Western philosophy threw up conclusions about the nature of reality* which are strikingly similar to some of those propounded by the more mystically oriented religions or philosophies of the East, yet arrived at by an entirely different path.

It would be an error, though one characteristic of Western intellectual provincialism, to suppose that the Oriental doctrines in question were not supported by rational argument: in the case of Buddhist philosophy, in particular, they conspicuously are. But the Kantian-Schopenhauerian conclusions were reached by processes internal to a tradition of thought which is fundamentally rooted in the development of mathematical physics, and this is something with which Buddhist philosophy has been little concerned until the twentieth century. Incidentally, both the Kantian and Schopenhauerian philosophy and the more sophisticated of the mysticisms of the East have received, and continue to receive, extensive corroboration from the revolutionary developments of the twentieth century in the natural sciences. (There is a growing literature on this in the case of Eastern mysticism - a good introduction is The Tao of Physics by Fritjof Capra, which also contains a useful bibliography.) The Eastern religion most congruent with contemporary science is Buddhism. — Bryan Magee, Schopenhauer's Philosophy

My thinking is this: Religion rises out of the radical ethical indeterminacy of our existence. This simply means that we are thrown into a world of ethical issues that, in the most basic analysis, are not resolvable. Yet they insist on resolution with the same apodicticity as logical coercivity. Meaning, just as one cannot but agree with something like modus ponens or the principle of identity in terms of the pure logicality of their intuitive insistence, so one cannot resist the moral insistence of moral redemption. — Constance

The religious person perceives our present life, or our natural life, as radically deficient, deficient from the root (radix) up, as fundamentally unsatisfactory; he feels it to be, not a mere condition, but a predicament; it strikes him as vain or empty if taken as an end in itself; he sees himself as homo viator, as a wayfarer or pilgrim treading a via dolorosa (way of suffering) through a vale that cannot possibly be a final and fitting resting place; he senses or glimpses from time to time the possibility of a Higher Life; he feels himself in danger of missing out on this Higher Life of true happiness. If this doesn't strike a chord in you, then I suggest you do not have a religious disposition. Some people don't, and it cannot be helped. One cannot discuss religion with them, for it cannot be real to them. It is not, for them, what William James in "The Will to Believe" calls a "living option," let alone a "forced" or "momentous" one.

OpenAI released their new GPT-4o model today. — Pierre-Normand

I think disposition has much to do with it. I'm not a fan of owning too many things. I feel better with less. Just sold my car. — Tom Storm

Of all systems of philosophy which start from the object, the most consistent, and that which may be carried furthest, is simple materialism. It regards matter, and with it time and space, as existing absolutely, and ignores the relation to the subject in which alone all this really exists. It then lays hold of the law of causality as a guiding principle or clue, regarding it as a self-existent order (or arrangement) of things,veritas aeterna, and so fails to take account of the understanding, in which and for which alone causality is. It seeks the primary and most simple state of matter, and then tries to develop all the others from it; ascending from mere mechanism, to chemistry, to polarity (i.e. electricity), to the vegetable and to the animal kingdom.

And if we suppose this to have been done, the last link in the chain would be animal sensibility—that is knowledge—which would consequently now appear as a mere modification or state of matter produced by causality. Now if we had followed materialism thus far with clear ideas, when we reached its highest point we would suddenly be seized with a fit of the inextinguishable laughter of the Olympians. As if waking from a dream, we would all at once become aware that its final result—knowledge, which it reached so laboriously, was presupposed as the indispensable condition of its very starting-point, mere matter; and when we imagined that we thought matter, we really thought only the subject that perceives matter; the eye that sees it, the hand that feels it, the understanding that knows it.

Thus the tremendous petitio principii (begged question) reveals itself unexpectedly; for suddenly the last link is seen to be the starting-point, the chain a circle, and the materialist is like Baron Münchausen who, when swimming in water on horseback, drew the horse into the air with his legs, and himself also by his cue. The fundamental absurdity of materialism is that it starts from the objective, and takes as the ultimate ground of explanation something objective, whether it be matter in the abstract, simply as it is thought, or, after it has taken form, as empirically given—that is to say, as substance, the chemical elements with their primary relations. Some such thing it takes as existing absolutely and in itself, in order that it may evolve organic nature and finally the knowing subject from it, and explain them adequately by means of it; whereas in truth all that is objective is already determined as such in manifold ways by the knowing subject through its forms of knowing, and presupposes them; and consequently it entirely disappears if we think the subject away.

Thus materialism is the attempt to explain what is immediately given us by what is given us indirectly. All that is objective, extended, active—that is to say, all that is material—is regarded by materialism as affording so solid a basis for its explanation, that a reduction of everything to this can leave nothing to be desired (especially if in ultimate analysis this reduction should resolve itself into action and reaction (i.e. physics)).

But we have shown that all this is given indirectly and in the highest degree determined, and is therefore merely a relatively present object, for it has passed through the machinery and manufactory of the brain, and has thus come under the forms of space, time and causality, by means of which it is first presented to us as extended in space and ever active in time. From such an indirectly given object, materialism seeks to explain what is immediately given, the idea (in which alone the object that materialism starts with exists), and finally even the will from which all those fundamental forces, that manifest themselves, under the guidance of causes, and therefore according to law, are in truth to be explained. To the assertion that thought is a modification of matter we may always, with equal right, oppose the contrary assertion that all matter is merely the modification of the knowing subject, as its idea. Yet the aim and ideal of all natural science is at bottom a consistent materialism. — WWR page 35

God could not be understood by human reason but only through Biblical revelation or mystical experience — Religious Modernity

6.5.2.1 The solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of this problem.

(Is not this the reason why men to whom after long doubting the sense of life became clear, could not then say wherein this sense consisted?)


6.522 There is indeed the inexpressible. This shows itself; it is the mystical. — TLP