It doesn't make sense to attribute mental states like my memory of my grandmother or my belief that 2 + 2 = 4 to the whole of my body or a function.

But that does sound like a rehash of behaviourism. — Andrew4Handel

It's not behaviourism but on re-reading your OP, I'm inclined to agree with it. You are indeed referring to the explanatory gap.

Manifest (verb) 'to make evident or certain by showing or displaying.' It is still reductionist, and if it's not, then what does it actually say?

To try and be clear, what I'm arguing is that such mental acts as reasoned inference comprise the relationship between ideas, between premisses and conclusions (and not only formal reason, but judgements of meaning, generally, as per this citation). The reductionist wants to say of such mental acts that they are actually neural processes, and that they are real via this grounding in their material constituents; that they exist as physical constituents in the brain, to which we assign meaning. But I'm arguing that it is the assigning of meaning that is fundamental. Even what we regard as a physical explanation has to be grounded in meaningful claims regarding what reasoning or thought is or is not.

It's not that *I* don't know what you mean, it's that I think *you* don't know what you mean. You say:

Meaning and thought can be seen as manifestations of mental processes, which can be seen as manifestations of biological, neurological processes. I don't see that as reductionism. — T Clark

But that is the textbook definition of reductionism, to wit:

Neuro-reductionism is the argument that the mind can be "reduced" (made equivalent) to the brain. This sees the brain as identical to its thoughts and feelings. In neuro-reductionism, as neuroscientists study the brain, they gain an understanding of the mind.

So I'm suggesting that if you don't see it as reductionism, then maybe that's because you don't understand what 'reductionism' means, or what the criticisms of it are.

Let me explain: an idea cannot be a cause already because an idea is a representation, an imagination or a fiction. — Jacques

That is not the kind of idea that is being discussed. Notice the example given was one of the laws of motion. We are able to discern constraints and causes that act on the physical level, such as laws of nature, but are those laws themselves physical in nature? There is a distinction made in Talbott's example between the because of reason and the because of physical causation. To equate the two kinds is to deny the efficacy of reason, as your argument is then already determined by the disposition of your neurons.

personal experience/consciousness is instrinsically dependent on judgement and the discernment of meaning
— Wayfarer

I'm not sure, but I don't think this is true. — T Clark

That itself is a judgement.

I don't see that as reductionism. — T Clark

And not seeing it, doesn't mean that it isn't so.

I was going to mention Talbott on another thread about teleology, but it wasn’t very well formed. Talbott is no crank but of course, to challenge the mainstream is to run the risk of being so categorised, as was seen with Thomas Nagel's Mind and Cosmos. There’s an implicit consensus surrounding these questions strongly endorsing physicalism. Talbot's orientation, he says, is inspired by Goethe and Owen Barfield, among others, but he has no allegiance to Christian philosophy or intelligent design.

Later in this essay, he makes this point:

this entire discussion of ideas and meaning in the world brings us face to face with a haunting specter we need to exorcise once for all: the specter of vitalism. The accusation of vitalism seems inevitably to arise whenever someone points to the being of the organism as a maker of meaning. This is owing to a legacy of dualism that makes it almost impossible for people today to imagine idea, meaning, and thought as anything other than ghostly epiphenomena within human skulls. So the suggestion that ideas and meaning are “out there” in the world of cells and organisms immediately provokes the assumption that one is really talking about some special sort of physical causation rather than about a content of thought intrinsic to organic phenomena. That is, ideas and meanings are taken to imply a vital force or energy or substance somehow distinct from the forces, energies, and substances referenced in our formulations of physical law. Such an entity or power would indeed be a spectral addition to the world — an addition for which no one has ever managed to identify a physical basis.

But ideas, meanings, and thoughts are not material things, and they are not forces. Nor need they be to have their place in the world. After all, when we discover ideal mathematical relationships “governing” phenomena, we do not worry about how mathematical concepts can knock billiard balls around. If we did, we would have made our equations into occult or vital causes. But instead we simply recognize that, whatever else we might say about them, physical processes exhibit a conceptual or thought-like character. And so, too: the meanings that give expression to the because of reason do not knock biomolecules around, but — like mathematical relations — are discovered in the patterns we see. The thought-relations we discover in the world, whether in the mathematical demonstrations of the physicist or the various living forms of the biologist, need to be genuinely and faithfully and reproducibly observed, but must not be turned into mystical forces.

My bolds. In a similar vein:

the mathematical relations we apprehend in the physical world are neither forces nor physical things; they are purely conceptual. Yet we can reasonably say that such relations — for example, those given by the equation F=Gm1m2/r2, representing Newton’s law of universal gravitation — in some sense govern material reality. The relations tell us, within the range of their practical applicability, something about the form of physical interactions. We do not try to make an additional, vital force out of the fact that a mathematical idea, as a principle of form, is “binding” upon an actual force.

Steve Talbott, whom I quoted, is a philosopher of biology. That section I quoted was extracted from a chapter called 'From Physical Causes to Organisms of Meaning'. Most of his writing is on the question of meaning, purpose and intentionality in the context of biology. He has a great series of essays on The New Atlantis which I recommend.

:lol:

I've never understood why people think there is any contradiction between believing that phenomenal consciousness is a mental, neurological, process that manifests itself as personal experience. — T Clark

I think it's because personal experience/consciousness is instrinsically dependent on judgement and the discernment of meaning, while the kinds of causal relationships posited by neurological sciences are physical, i.e. describable in terms of physical causes and effects.

This is from a chapter on the connection of physical causation and the discernment of meaning:

We commonly explain occurrences by saying one thing happened because of — due to the cause of — something else. But we can invoke very different sorts of causes in this way. For example, there is the because of physical law (The ball rolled down the hill because of gravity) and the because of reason (He laughed at me because I made a mistake). The former hinges upon the kind of necessity we commonly associate with physical causation; the latter has to do with what makes sense within a context of meaning.

Any nuance of meaning coming from any part of the larger context can ground the because of reason. “I blushed because I saw a hint of suspicion in his eyes”. But I might not have blushed if his left hand had slightly shifted in its characteristic, reassuring way, or if a rebellious line from a novel I read in college had flashed through my mind, or if a certain painful experience in my childhood had been different. In a meaningful context, there are infinite possible ways for any detail, however remote, to be connected to, colored by, or transformed by any other detail. There is no sure way to wall off any part of the context from all the rest.

The Canadian cognitive scientist and philosopher, Zenon Pylyshyn, once neatly captured the distinctiveness of the because of reason this way:

"Clearly, the objects of our fears and desires do not cause behavior in the same way that forces and energy cause behavior in the physical realm. When my desire for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow causes me to go on a search, the (nonexistent) pot of gold is not a causal property of the sort that is involved in natural laws."

The because of reason does not refer to mere “logic” or “rational intellectuality”. Nor need it imply conscious ratiocination. It is constellated from the entire realm of possible meaning, including such things as our desire for pots of gold or our subconscious urges toward violence. I will therefore refer interchangeably to the because of reason and the because of meaning, by both of which I refer to all the semantic relations and connotations, all the significances, that weave together and produce the coherent tapestry of a life, or of any other expression of meaning, such as a profound text — say, Aeschylus’ Agamemnon or Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, or, for that matter, the text of a biological description. — Stephen L. Talbott

This touches upon a point I've been debating ever since joining forums - of reason understood as 'the relations of ideas'. The tendency of reductionism is to conflate the two kinds of causation, physical and logical: which is what we do when we say that 'the brain' acts in a particular way, and so 'produces' thought, because of physical causation. The 'because' of reasons - the 'space of reasons', it has been called - can't be explained in those terms, because it belongs to a different level of explanation.

The interactions between the humans and the aliens are very interesting. — T Clark

But only to the humans, one presumes ;-)

Late to this thread. I'm a boomer, sixties guy, became emamoured of the popular books on Eastern philosophy in my youth. At uni pursued a mainly self-defined curriculum on the theme of spiritual enlightenment comprising comparative religion, two years of philosophy, psychology, anthropology and history. Became interested in the theme of the perennial philosophies (and was in grad tutorials with an author who was to publish extensively in that area.) I formed the view that philosophy in Western culture had become disconnected from the mainstream, which I subsequently identified as platonism (in the broader sense). I did an MA in Buddhist Studies much later, around ten years ago, and more or less on impulse. I have been criticized, probably rightly, for tilting at windmills. Some of the main themes I explore on the forum is realism about universals, 'constructivism' in philosophy (which overlaps with idealism but draws more on cognitive science), and general criticism of materialism, scientism and naturalism, which I see as the implicit mainstream philosophy of popular culture.

Well let’s see what the OP has to say about that.

That’s the whole question isn’t it?

Can you identify an example of a revealed truth so I can understand what you are thinking of? — Tom Storm

General term - applies to the Bible, Koran, Bhaghavad Gita, for example

True, that, Hadn’t paid much attention to it but Smartmatic is very bullish.

https://wapo.st/41mwKXC

The only way for the legal system to be fair and righteous would be to get rid of the jury system and have the people at the top consist of a balanced group of judges who are ONLY working by the law and have absolute legal power. — Christoffer

That’s more the French model, isn’t it? A tribunal. But I can’t see it. They won’t even adopt metric, they’re amazingly conservative in some ways.

Greetings Epicero and welcome to the forum.

I think your point makes sense on paper, so to speak. The problems arise when we ask what we refer to as evidence for the claims of religion.

To take a step back, what are religions claiming? Obviously a vast question and not one to answer in a throw-away sentence or two. But I think we can agree that basic to it, is the relief from or ending of fear of death and suffering in all its forms. The Semitic religions speak in terms of salvation and Heaven, Eastern religions more in terms of liberation (mokṣa or Nirvāṇa). In both cases the promised good is beyond all suffering and the vicissitudes of life. In all of those religions, there are accounts of the miraculous, such as the resurrection, or of the Buddha's attainment of Nirvāṇa, which personify or depict the end to which the aspirant is to strive, and also the accounts of the sayings and doings of prophets, anecdotes and histories of prophetic visions and doings. They comprise the sacred texts of those religions.

And now comes the problem. It's establishing the truth of those claims where evidence is in short supply. Secular culture will generally begin by assuming that revealed truth and sacred lore are not to be believed as a matter of principle. They will put such accounts to one side as mythological or traditional. So the question is if you were to try and meet the standards demanded by secular culture for the truth of those claims, without recourse to any of that body of sacred lore, then how would you do that? You can't conduct peer-reviewed laboratory studies of the central claims of Christianity, for example. You can conduct such studies of, for instance, the purported health and well-being benefits of meditation, but then are we still operating in the domain of religion at all?

As you say, one can reasonably establish some moral tenets, such as, it is wrong to harm others, steal, or kill, and other such truisms. But such tenets don't by any means comprise the totality of any faith. At the end of all of it, the religions are making a claim - 'life eternal through faith in the Lord' or liberation from all the vicissitudes of existence. And without the case studies, so to speak, of the founders and examplars of those traditions, then I'm afraid you're grasping at straws.

Disappointing ending to the Fox News trial. Yes, Murdoch has to shell out $700 million and eat a certain amount of crow, but the cast of clowns that spew lies and pollute the electorate don’t have to own up to their bullshit on their own stations or in the witness box. Still, it’s something.

Talk of ‘what brains do’ was called ‘the mereological fallacy’ in a well-known book on neuroscience and philosophy. The mereological fallacy is to ascribe to parts of the body what only agents or actors are capable of doing. ‘The brain’ becomes a kind of explanatory unit, an idealised black box which ‘does’ this or ‘produces’ that and so on. But ascribing thoughts to ‘the brain’ is like saying your computer writes your entries in this thread. Humans think, humans write. They need normal brain function to do so, but it’s not ‘the brain’ which is doing that. Brains are always situated as part of a whole, which is precisely what ‘mereology’ refers to.

And, memories are not ‘phenomena’. Phenomena means, strictly speaking, ‘what appears’. The northern lights are a fascinating and colourful phenomena, caused by radiation from the sun reacting with the Earth’s ionosphere. But the explanation is not ‘a phenomenon’. What appears as a consequence of those reactions is the phenomenon.

I agree with 180 Proof to the extent that science, philosophy, and religion aren't clearly defined in the OP. — Hanover

Those distinctions really only become visible in relatively recent times. I suppose there was an implicit distinction between dialectic and peity in Plato, but science as a separate mode of knowing as distinct from philosophy only came into being in the 1830's.

I've noticed a book, Philosophical Religions from Plato to Spinoza, Carlos Fraenkel, which addresses this question (introductory chapter preview provided). Part of the jacket blurb says 'Many pagan, Jewish, Christian and Muslim philosophers from Antiquity to the Enlightenment made no meaningful distinction between philosophy and religion. Instead they advocated a philosophical religion, arguing that God is Reason and that the historical forms of a religious tradition serve as philosophy’s handmaid to promote the life of reason among non-philosophers.' You see the continuity of reason and revelation in Aquinas' philosophy but the antagonism between them is very much assumed in the Enlightenment philosophers (and still a dominant approach).

I've found that in the early Buddhist texts, there is, on the one hand, a recognition of the value of reason (or dialectic) in that the dialogues themself are often scrupulously rational. But there's also a recognition of a sphere 'beyond mere logic', namely, the actual content of the Buddha's teaching (the 'sasana' or dispensation). Buddhism, more so than other religions, says that the Buddhist aspirant can validate the principles of the teaching by realizing them for him/herself (albeit this is understood as a rare occurence).

But the problem with declaring the sovereignty of human reason (or science) is that it essentially reverts to the Protagoras 'man as the measure of all things' type of attitude. I also notice that in much modern philosophy, generally, any notion of purpose or intentionality (other than those entertained by individuals) has been ruled out, so the scope of 'reason' becomes narrowed to 'instrumental reason' i.e. what works for particular purposes.

I am exploring the notion that Plato's ideas or forms are instead an intuitive grasp of what we now understand as principles and laws. The 'fallacious reification' only enters the picture when we think of them as being objectively existent - which they're not. Maybe they are constraints - they delimit what is possible for something in order that it exists and performs a function, i.e. a wing must be flat and light if it is to provide lift. 'Flatness' and 'lightness' are not objectively existent things separable from their instantiation in wings, but nevertheless all wings must 'participate' in the forms of flatness and lightness if they are going to achieve flight.

Yes, I think he's on to something - I've been aware of that book a long time but only just reading it now. Find myself nodding along with the text a lot of the time.

That George Harrison song had a big impact on my teenage self.

You might be interested in reading up on Terrence Deacon, Incomplete Nature.

As for the avoidance of rational insight altogether, Quine 1981, “…abandonment of the goal of a first philosophy…”, re: naturalism writ large, relegates all rational insight to the back burner, when the goal of a first philosophy is the deduction of principles by which natural science itself is possible, which seems a perfect way to shoot yourself in the foot. — Mww

That's pretty much what I thought. Glad there's someone else who sees the point.

Surely some scientist or philosopher has investigated the roots of a priori and a posteriori knowledge. :smile: — Gnomon

That would be Immanuel Kant, it was the subject of the Critique of Pure Reason.

Plato believed that we had mathematical knowledge because the soul acquired it before birth. I sometimes wonder if that is poetic analogy for the existence of faculties which had actually been acquired during the course of evolution. (I'm sure someone has thought of that.) Notice also that Noam Chomsky is a proponent of innatism via his (contested) theory of universal grammar.

There is a 'compromise' to this problem with "rational insight" which allows for both of these positions, it's called dualism. — Metaphysician Undercover

I think I subscribe to a from of dualism, with the caveat that I reject any idea of a 'spiritual substance' or objectively-existing mind, or of mind and body as separate substances. Mind is the capacity to grasp meaning and is present in very rudimentary form even in the simplest organisms. In rational sentient beings it attains the capacity for reason and self-knowledge.

We live in or as 'spirit' (deeply and essentially in a socially constructed and preserved symbolic layer of the lifeworld). — plaque flag

Yes, the meaning world. I quite agree. Thanks for the discussion.

How typical is such crudity among serious philosophers though? — plaque flag

What is behind the requirement to 'avoid any appeal to rational insight?' Why is it that mathematical insight is said to call into question our nature as 'physical beings'? Isn't that the very point at issue?

Not at all.

We 'know' what rationality and being are, but we aren't done knowing what they are. — plaque flag

To put that another way, although science relies on the efficacy of scientific law, the nature of scientific law is not itself an empirical question. As soon as you wonder whether the laws we know - like Newton's laws - could be different to what they are, then you're straying into metaphysics, knowingly or not. I've noticed articles come up in my news feed by physicists calling the idea of scientific or natural laws into question (e.g. this one). They seem motivated by a similar impulse to that which prompts scepticism about mathematical knowledge.

I think, maybe, it's because reason is the faculty which explains, not something to be explained. And that this sits uneasily with naturalist philosophy.

What's needed is a detailed case for rational insight (some kind of platonic organ) and not accusations of bias. — plaque flag

It's not an 'accusation of bias', I'm trying to understand the rationale behind the article, and why the faculty of reason was called into question in the first place. And, pray tell, how could one make a 'detailed case' for reason, without relying on reason to make the case?

Still feel as though the point I was labouring has somewhat slipped the net here
— Wayfarer

How so ? — plaque flag

The question I was asking, is how come esteemed philosophers, such as W V O Quine, sought to 'avoid any appeal to rational insight?' Why does the paper that this article was based on deny that there could be knowledge of mathematical objects? What is behind those denials?

Hey just saw your reply now.

I assume in the article that the ultimate ground of existence is an objective reality. At this point, I believe I’m still doing philosophy, not theology. — Art48

I think it must transcend the subject-object distinction, because it includes both the cognizing subject and the object of cognition. Hence frequent references in the literature to the union of knower and known. Objectivity, as a criterion for what really exists, is very much an artefact of the modern mindset with its emphasis on individuality and empirical validation.

But accepting the testimony of the mystics implies that a human being can have a direct experience of the ultimate ground. How can this be possible? How can a human being have a direct experience of something below quarks? — Art48

I think the idea of union with the supreme, whether that is cast in Christian or Advaita terminology, is not necessarily a similar kind of cognitive understanding to that divulged by experimental physics. There might be poetic or symbolic resonances between them, but they arise from a very different kind of stance or understanding. But,like that passage you quoted from the Schop. essay, there is a sense in which the being of the world also comprises your being (something made obvious in Vedanta.)

How to relate to the ultimate ground? — Art48

There are some pitfalls with the comparative approach, in trying to equate the often divergent images and metaphors of different traditions with each other. There are those who do, typically the 'perennial philosophers' and the 'traditionalists' e.g. Frithjoj Schuon, Ananda Coomaraswamy, and Huston Smith, to name a few. Buddhists, for instance, would not use the term 'ultimate ground' at all, in fact their philosophy is built around the absence of it. Taoism is very much interwoven with many other aspects of specifically Chinese culture. But on the whole, I do agree that what the perennial traditions have in common is more important than what divides them - provided one doesn't fall into a kind of a la carte syncretism. The real paths are very specific and definitely have boundaries, I think.

As regards 'which path', that's something I'm still wrestling with, and may never solve. I had a long interest in Buddhism, but I've also come to realise that I owe a lot to my own Western heritage. All deep and difficult questions.

That 'existence' is not univocal is stressed in the intro of Being and Time. — plaque flag

Take your point. Obviously different kinds of existence are considered in philosophy, but on the whole, naturalism and popular philosophy tends towards a flat ontological structure, rejecting the kind of Aristotelian distinctions between different kinds of being, doesn't it?

(Still feel as though the point I was labouring has somewhat slipped the net here.)

The issue becomes clarifying how they exist. — plaque flag

That's right. But the problem is, in the current lexicon, 'existence' is a univocal term - something either exists or it doesn't. There is no scope for different kinds of existence, or I don't think so, anyway. But don't you think the requirement for there to be an argument for the indispensability mathematics says something? What makes it necessary to defend mathematical insight? Don't you think this is an ideological argument?

Platonism sometimes seem to merely assume its own conclusion. — plaque flag

Have I ever discussed this article with you - The Indispensability Argument in Mathematics? It makes reference to a 1963 paper by Paul Benacerraf which is apparently canonical. The maths experts on this forum generally know it and judge it accordingly. But some of the statements made illustrate what I see as the basic philosophical point, to wit:

Standard readings of mathematical claims entail the existence of mathematical objects. But, our best epistemic theories seem to deny that knowledge of mathematical objects is possible.

Why is this? Because apparently our 'best epistemic theories' include the assumption that

human beings [are] physical creatures whose capacities for learning are exhausted by our physical bodies.

Whereas,

Some philosophers, called rationalists, claim that we have a special, non-sensory capacity for understanding mathematical truths, a rational insight arising from pure thought.

The basic drift of the remainder of the article is this:

The indispensability argument in the philosophy of mathematics is an attempt to justify our mathematical beliefs about abstract objects, while avoiding any appeal to rational insight. Its most significant proponent was Willard van Orman Quine.

What am I not seeing here? Why would it be that one of the purportedly major 20th c philosophers wants to 'avoid any appeal to rational insight?'

knowledge of the divine? — Tom Storm

Why 'divine'? Everyone does that when this idea comes up. Why is it associated with religious philosophy? That's the really interesting meta-question. ('Divine' is related to the Sanskrit (proto-European) 'deva' or god.)

I've explained numerous times that my particular epiphany about Platonic mathematics was a very simple one: the objects of mathematics are not compounded and are not subject to change. For the ancients, this signified that intelligible objects have qualities and attributes which were not found in the corruptible objects of sense, all of which are conversely composed ot parts and subject to decay. But I don't think that in itself is a specifically religious idea. More a philosophical insight, or 'quasi-religious' in the sense that Spinoza was. I suppose it is associated with rationalism in philosophy, and Western, specifically anglo-american, philosophy is overwhelmingly empiricist in outlook - all knowledge from experience, rejection of innate ideas. That's what is behind a lot of the animus in respect of platonic realism.

Just now watched a CTT interview with Paul Davies on the 'unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics'. Davies is much more open to the 'mysterious convergence' kind of view (as opposed to the 'happenstance' or 'brute fact' kind of view). He acknowledges he's in the minority but I think he's on the mark.

I also idly speculate that the realm of necessary facts is somehow connected to an intuitive understanding of what must always be the case, in order for the world to be as it is.
— Wayfarer

Interesting, can you say some more to clarify this point? Are you saying, for instance, that space/time is part of human's innate cognitive apparatus - it constructs our understanding of reality? — Tom Storm

This is the kind of topic which no respectable professional philosopher would touch with a barge pole. They concentrate more on minutae. . But the intuitive view I am developing is that the rational order of the mind, and the rational order we perceive in the universe, is the same order, basically. That somehow, the relationship of ideas and causal relationships are connected. That's because the order we perceive is imposed by the mind - this is once again Charles Pinter, Mind and the Cosmic Order. But because of our sense of separation of observer from observed, we can't perceive that, and then wonder where the order comes from, or why it exists.(Schopenhauer: 'materialism is the philosophy of the subject who forgets himself'.)

The other idea that is converging with this one, is that the domain of a priori truths is the domain of logical necessity. Would it be possible for a world to exist where, say, the law of identity did not obtain? Or basic ratios and constants didn't hold? :chin:

Chilling. The thought does cross my mind, however, that in the event of such a global emergency, could humanity not cut off electrical power from all of the servers? You know, pull the plug? Sure, it would probably cause massive outages and blackouts, but it would seem preferable to the alternative.

The question of the nature of the a priori is a major topic in philosophy. I believe it was Quine who called the whole notion into question, saying that there is no clear boundary between what we can know a priori and what we can know based on experience. Rather, all of our knowledge is interconnected, and any belief can potentially be revised in light of new evidence. My problem with that is, well, pure maths, for starters. And all the many discoveries that have been made through reasoning from evidence. Sure, those discoveries need to be tested against empirical fact, but many of them were made well in advance of such validation. Empiricism and naturalism have an innate bias against the idea of innate knowledge (irony alert!) Whereas, I believe that the a priori reflects innate structures within the mind that are operative in the exercise of reason. I also idly speculate that the realm of necessary facts is somehow connected to an intuitive understanding of what must always be the case, in order for the world to be as it is.

I really like the start of that lecture, I'll find the time for it later.

There was no place in the cosmos staked out by Plato or Aristotle. — Fooloso4

There was at least a conception of 'the cosmos'

Trying to explain how reasonable creatures emerged in the first place from simpler conditions is perhaps the most spectacular use of reason so far. Reason is honored in the use of it. — plaque flag

Evolutionary biology is an account of how species evolve, but I don't see it as an account of the nature of reason. Should be a different thread, though.

Naturalism as construed in neodarwinian terms, which seems to dictate that whatever faculties we possess are the product of adaptive necessity. Interesting how it’s a similar argument to both Donald Hoffman’s and Alvin Plantinga’s, albeit each of them draw very different conclusions from the same basic premises (although I suppose Plantinga and Nagel are closer then either are to Hoffman, even if Plantinga is theistic, and Nagel claims not to be). Nagel is defending the sovereignty of reason. That is the thrust of that whole book of his The Last Word, which was published about 1996 as an argument against cultural relativism from which that essay is extracted.

I think self-evident truths are supposed to be the fingerprints of the Divine. — plaque flag

In ancient and medieval philosophy, the order of nature was seen as ‘God’s handiwork’. But that was especially true in respect of Aquinas and that strain of scholastic philosophy that incorporated Aristotelianism - scholastic realism, in short. But the countervailing historical strain was Ockham’s nominalism and Bacon’s early empiricism, and that was the strain that prevailed. (This was the theme of a fantastic book, The Theological Origins of Modernity, M A Gillespie, which I read when I first joined forums. It links nominalism with the rise of theological voluntarism, which says that the soveriegnty of God is not constrained by reason. Very deep and lengthy argument however.)

But look at the current debates around Platonism in mathematics. These revolve around the argument as to whether and in what sense number (and by implication universals generally) can be said to be real. In scholastic realism, universals are understood to be real, and this is what underwrote scholastic metaphysics. The mainstream view today is very much that numbers are discovered not invented, they’re human artifacts. And that is in part because if the reality of such things as number can’t be accommodated in the presumptive materialism of modern philosophy.

Mathematical platonism has considerable philosophical significance. If the view is true, it will put great pressure on the physicalist idea that reality is exhausted by the physical. For platonism entails that reality extends far beyond the physical world and includes objects that aren’t part of the causal and spatiotemporal order studied by the physical sciences.[1] Mathematical platonism, if true, will also put great pressure on many naturalistic theories of knowledge. For there is little doubt that we possess mathematical knowledge. The truth of mathematical platonism would therefore establish that we have knowledge of abstract (and thus causally inefficacious) objects. This would be an important discovery, which many naturalistic theories of knowledge would struggle to accommodate. Mathematical platonism has considerable philosophical significance. If the view is true, it will put great pressure on the physicalist idea that reality is exhausted by the physical. For platonism entails that reality extends far beyond the physical world and includes objects that aren’t part of the causal and spatiotemporal order studied by the physical sciences.[1] Mathematical platonism, if true, will also put great pressure on many naturalistic theories of knowledge. For there is little doubt that we possess mathematical knowledge. The truth of mathematical platonism would therefore establish that we have knowledge of abstract (and thus causally inefficacious) objects. This would be an important discovery, which many naturalistic theories of knowledge would struggle to accommodate. — SEP, Platonism in Philosophy of Mathematics

(I’m pursuing an idea that they are real in the sense of Terrence Deacon’s ‘absentials’, i.e. acting as logical constraints within the domain of possibility.)

All of which is completely besides the point of this thread so I will end it there.

I think Hegel may have been trying to update Spinoza. The World is God — plaque flag

I think that is a notoriously difficult point in Spinoza's philosophy, whether it amounts to a flat out declaration that Nature is God tout courte. I've found an interesting recent title on Spinoza, Spinoza's Religion by Claire Carlisle, although probably that ought to be subject of another thread.

As for Hegel, I don't know for sure, but I don't think he was at all inclined towards atheism or even Pantheism. I am kind of interested in Robert Wallace's interpretation but, you know, too many books......

The problem for me is that reason by itself tells us nothing, it is really just a good practice of consistent thinking — Janus

Which has among other things resulted in the scientific revolution.

a critical mind will ask the question as to how we know this most attractive thought is actually true.

And I can't see any possible answer other than that it might "feel right". It isn't empirically verifiable, and it isn't logically necessary, so what other ground do we have? — Janus

My tentative answer is that the world is the experience-of-the-world, and so the order we find in reason, is also the order we find in the world, because they're not ultimately separable (a lot rides on 'ultimately' in that sentence.)

Logical necessity is nowadays often deemed to be a separate issue to physical causation (something I explored in this offsite post.) But that doesn't seem to me to address the 'unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences' which time and again has produced predictions for which at the time there wasn't even the empirical means to test (e.g. relativity, Dirac's discovery of anti-matter.) I think these are all examples of Kant's synthetic a priori and a testimony to the power of reason.

Nagel's point is that if we are to be considered rational beings, then this is because we accept the testimony of reason, not because we are compelled to do so by the requirements of adaptation, but because we can see the truth of its statements. I think it is that power to discern apodictic truths which caused the ancients to grant it a kind of quasi-religious status, and conversely the tendency to deprecate reason as simply an evolved capacity is an indicator of a kind of deep irrationality.

I think a big part of the problem is that philosophy is no longer connected with culture. After all, Greek philosophy, which you yourself are very well versed in, prizes virtues and qualities of character that are quite out of keeping with today's materialist and technologically-driven society. The nihilism you speak of was foretold by Neitszche and also by Heidegger. We no longer have a place in the cosmos - science tells us (or at least so it is thought) that life originated by a fluke combination of chemicals clustered around geo-thermal vents and then evolved by chance rather than design (and no, I'm not promoting ID theory, but the sense of life as essentially a product of chance, with no purpose other than survival and procreation, is one of the characteristics of nihilism.)

In Eastern culture, whilst it too is also becoming overwhelmed with modern consumerism, there is still a connection between philosophy and culture preserved in (for example) Buddhism in China and Japan (notwithstanding the official atheism of the Chinese Communist party) and the various forms of indigenous spirituality which continue to animate culture in India.

There are however some really interesting counter-cultural currents bubbling up in the West. I've been watching the odd panel discussion by a UK organisation called the IAI, Institute of Art and Ideas, which regularly hosts debates between leading public intellectuals, scientists, and philosophers. Bernardo Kastrup, Raymond Tallis, and Sabine Hossenfelder regularly appear in them, along with many others. There is a ferment of philosophically-oriented channels on YouTube, of varying quality, but some are very good (John Vervaeke is an interesting example). People are searching, asking deep questions, and the interconnected nature of today's world facilitates that. Notably absent from many of those debates are academic philosophers, for the reasons I noted above. But philosophy, as I think Etienne Gilson observed, has previously been declared dead, only to 'bury its undertakers'.