Nice.

I wonder what qualifies as a moderate leftist. Here in Australia someone like Biden would be seen as a centrist or possibly a conservative.

I have conservative (not right wing) friends who are certainly more forgiving of people's foibles and differences than some of my left friends, who seem to reach for morality every time they disagree with someone.

Tolerance is a terrible word. To be 'tolerated' sounds judgemental.

Quentin Crisp said something I have often agreed with. Tolerance does not create acceptance. Boredom does. When people experience and are exposed to certain lifestyles or people again and again, the fear or resentment often lifts and what was formerly perceived as divergent just becomes another shade of grey in our lives. I suspect this will happen with trans issues over time.

If I had to guess, philosophers who really took the content they were writing very seriously (like Plato) are the ones who have lasting fame. I'm thinking about how to tell the difference between the sophistic BS and the "deeper truth" philosophers, I'd appreciate if you elaborated because I don't know what you mean entirely. I think some deeper truths tend to get brushed aside either because people don't want to hear them or don't understand their importance. What makes a truth more important than another truth? — ProtagoranSocratist

If people find concepts difficult to understand, and if the content seems to contradict their core beliefs, they tend to dismiss it as "bullshit." We see this on the forum: if someone's worldview seems strange to another person, they are often accused of being a troll or lying. Incomprehension and a lack of values alignment seem to promote antipathy.

Why are some philosophers more prominent than others? Sometimes it's the result of a dominant culture that for generations has tirelessly promoted figures like Plato. Not that anyone today cares much about classical philosophy, except for those few with quirky hobbies.

Is philosophy about truth, or is it about generating elegant and satisfying fantasies that provide consolation? Do we actually look for views different from our own, or is philosophy mostly about us acquiring more and more sophisticated justifications for views we hold emotionally?

Sounds like usual 'alpha male' rhetoric. — unimportant

Except that it is not uttered by so called "alpha males'. So perhaps this is a deflection? Curious.

There’s a plethora of “ways out,” but I’m not confident in any myth-building that borrows from quantum mechanics. I have no expertise in the area. Based on the OP, it’s Jack who seems to be looking at ways to address or overcome the residual subject–object split that structures contemporary thinking.

In the last few years I feel like the only guarantee is life will get worse and worse so what is the point?

"Just because" is usually the reply or some prettied up version of it.

My parents are elderly and either they or their peers are talking of an ever growing list of health issues. You can do very little of what you used to enjoy so why wait to reach that stage? "Just because".

The live fast die young adage seems better. Also from an evolutionary perspective we weren't 'meant' to live past our 30s anyway so pretty much fighting against the tide. You can say it is part of our nature to fight against our nature, but, as above, why? if the only reward is worsening health. — unimportant

I've come to think that almost everything in life depends upon how you decide to look upon it. Old age can be a shipwreck or it can be rewarding. I've known plenty of old people (and worked with many), and how it plays out is almost entirely dependent upon attitude. It's easy to focus on losses, negatives and infirmities. My father, who lived until he was 98, considered his last 10 years amongst the best in his life. And even when his mobility was gone, he enjoyed reading and talking to people and was never bitter. He used to say that the old folk who complained most about old age were likely the same folk who began whinging in their teens and never stopped.

Maybe you need to go broader. Try phenomenology which understands the subjective and objective not as two separate realms but as mutually intertwined aspects of lived experience. It begins from the subjective, meaning our embodied and felt first-person encounter with the world, yet it stresses that this subjectivity is always already directed toward things that appear as objective. What we call objective arises when appearances become stable, repeatable, and shareable across different subjects. At the same time, our subjective experience is shaped by the structures, norms, and possibilities of the world we inhabit. In this way, phenomenology treats the subjective and the objective as co-constituting rather than opposed, each making the other possible.

At least that seems to be the framing. What does this add? For me it just reminds me that we get stuck in conventional dualistic thinking and there may be other ways out.

However, as writers of contemporary history, we have the opportunity to find out the answer to this question: can a person live peacefully with a private understanding of truth, instead of global narratives? — Astorre

Yes. Isn't one of the present problems that people have private understandings of truth instead of global narratives? Isn't it individualism versus community? Isn't it the atomistic nature of society and the small bubbles of intersubjective agreements and communities of truth that have replaced shared visions? At least that's what we often hear.

And they came to similar conclusions:
Outside of this, my education left me with a view that certainty is there to be overthrown and the world is chaotic.
— Tom Storm
and
Now, Order is perceived as a short-lived, fragile, localized accident amidst universal, fundamental Chaos.
— Astorre — Astorre

Well I’d say the conclusion is a reasonable one. But it isn’t the new order it’s been the consistent one.

You may be on to something. It is sobering to consider that I’m one of the first males in my family not to be affected by war or drafted to fight. So for me in my prosperous patch of the West it’s actually been nothing but prosperity and peace.


Fair.

Perhaps I received an outdated education, but it taught me that gender is an objective biological fac — Astorre

I was never taught anything about gender. Nothing I remember. There’s a bunch of threads on the more recent understanding here already.

I might add that we were also taught that if you want a higher chance of certainty and predictability in your world, you need to be rich. Predictably is a by product of power and wealth is how you obtain control. I think that has a certain logic to it, though it never left me with a motivation to make money.

Outside of this, my education left me with a view that certainty is there to be overthrown and the world is chaotic. And our flawed democracy was hard won and fragile.

The picture of the world that is still being taught today (I can see this from my children’s textbooks) looks roughly like this:

1. A problem has one correct answer.
2. Facts are objective.
3. The world is linear, comprehensible and obeys rules. — Astorre

Maybe this varies. The education I had (1970’s-80’s) was borderline relativism. We were taught that things appear different depending on who you are in society and that often there is no wrong answer. In history we were told that facts were interpretations and that history evolves over time, only the dates tend to stay fixed. I paid no attention in maths or science class as those subjects didn’t interest me, but I am assuming from the little I heard that established facts were more critical there. The overarching message of my schooling was “find out for yourself” - read diverse views and come to your own conclusions.

I don’t think we live in capitalism as such, more a capitalist inspired clusterfuck of earth raping corporate barbarism. In theory it is possible to have more compassionate capitalist systems that avoid destructive oligopolies. But in practice I think we’ll need a nuclear holocaust before there’s change. But I’m a pessimist, a defeatist and an indolent former wannabe Marxist who is too tired to spend time on such grandiose themes as world economic reform.

Nice. I’m not sure anyone can escape meaning or purpose. What we may not encounter is a transcendent purpose - a purpose above and beyond anything human. But I would suspect most theists don’t find this either.

We’re not all post-modern mercurial geniuses down here, I can tell you.

It is the distribution of evil - the child born into a short lifetime of extreme pain, for example - that is 'unfair', and thus God is rejected by many atheists, myself included.

And, of course, an omnipotent God who creates a human who will never be exposed to God's word, therefore never saved, therefore condemned to eternal hellfire, is potentially evil himself. — Jeremy Murray

Yes, I think those are fairly reasonable and conventional views. I tend to think about the problem of suffering (evil is such a limiting word). I think the more cartoon like and fundamentalist your God, the more the problem resonates. Surely a personal god (the magic sky wizard) with whom one has a relationship can do better?

But the more mystical or apophatic your theology is, the less things need to be explained and God remains unknowable. My favourite explanation for the existence of suffering is that because an apophatic God is beyond all attributes, we have no basis to expect the world to lack suffering.

He was banned 3 years ago.

The story that says we all evolved from a common origin is a realist story. — Janus

From most perspectives, certainly. But Bernardo Kastrup, who is not a realist, believes in evolution and seems to address the apparent irreconcilability. Not that I hold his view, I’m just saying… (Don't ask me to summarise it, very tedious).

I am not concerned about the final, unknowable metaphysical explanation for why and how those things fundamentally exist. They might be material existents or ideas in the mind of God. How could we know for certain? The question is: which explanation seems the more plausible to me or to you. — Janus

Fair. I’m just interested in the role human cognitive apparatus and values play in the construction of our world. How far it goes, I don’t know, but many philosophers think it goes pretty far. I'd like to entertain this notion for a while before I reject it (if that's what I end up doing).

I think we mostly agree.

Hello. I don’t think it is unusual at your age to feel chronic feelings of emptiness and nihilism, regardless of one’s background or fortunes.

I had a similar experience in my late teens and also found that being of use to others and doing things to support the community took my attention off my own experience and broadened my perspective. It took a year or two, but I gradually stopped feeling empty.

While I don’t believe there is any “meaning of life” style answer to human yearnings and existential dread, I do think we are surrounded by multiple meanings, and it becomes hard to avoid finding purpose and sense of solidarity if you engage with others. It’s easy for many of us to become obsessed with our own thought processes, judgements and reflections in a way that is unhealthy, and often having some strategies for getting out of your own head is helpful.

Thanks, I enjoyed the conversation.

I agree. There is a yin of conservative permanence (boundaries and limits) needed for the yang of liberal progression (marked by new boundaries and new limits). And vice versa. Breathing is both in and out.

It’s never been either/or despite what campaigning politicians tell us.

The myopia of liberalism is really the recent (enlightenment) moment of the ancient myopia of prideful human beings; liberalism just made this pride more available to more of the masses. So many today feel entitled to know better than others, to know better than history, so much so we can talk of imposing our enlightened wills through force. We allow ourselves willingly to stay blind (myopic) to any challenges to the holier than thou perches we’ve built for ourselves. Because this used to be the role of the king and the pope and the high classes, we think we are being progressing behaving as tyrannically as only kings used to.

Liberalism taught us that there is no essential difference between a “king” and a commoner, so there is no such thing as an actual “king”, and we are all just citizens. We the people alone consent to our government. This is a good political starting point, so liberalism is a force for good, certainly in politics.

But the west is hollowing its own good ideas of meaning and political application. — Fire Ologist

No substantive comment from me, except to say I found this post of yours especially interesting and it resonated with me.

Isn't that a level of agnosticism? I myself have been since my childhood an agnostic and feel quite happy about it. — ssu

The category is usually called agnostic atheist, since atheism refers to what you believe and agnosticism to what you know. It’s a popular category in the atheist realm. I have never been able to believe in any version of God I have been presented with, so I would say there is no God. But I would never claim to know this. This, of course, can lead to very tedious discussions about what counts as knowledge, the role of certainty, and so on.

But we usually tend to go with the stereotypes or the worst possible examples of some ideology or viewpoint and not accept the fact that a lot of intelligent, knowledgeable and informed people can have totally opposite world views from us. — ssu

Perhaps when it comes to different ideas, we should steelman them; present them in the strongest, most charitable form, before evaluating them. The fundamentalist Christian view of the world is a bit cartoonish and is mostly a variety of American Protestantism, which some consider a heresy.

Or then it's simply these times where the discourse is dominated by the algorithms, — ssu

Probably: the same bifurcated views circle around us ceaselessly. Perhaps our job is to get off the merry-go-round.

I think it's even more general than that. It's basic human nature, — ssu

Many students of religion, including Karen Armstrong, chart the development of modern biblical literalism, particularly the fundamentalist kind, as largely in reaction to modern science and historical-critical approaches to scripture. But no doubt there are additional dimensions to this.

those who don't swerve of from the teachings of their great philosopher, be it the Karl Marx or someone else, will put themselves on the pedestal and proclaim to be better than others. If it happens even in philosophy, you bet it will happen in other human endeavors also. — ssu

You may disagree, but I think that may be something related to, but different from, fundamentalism. Fundamentalism seems to be about how a text is interpreted and the reading that is presented as ‘correct’. What you’re raising, however, seems like an adjacent and perhaps more interesting element: zealotry.

Do you see much fundamentalism where you live? Here in Australia, it flickers in marginal spaces, largely due to the influence of American Protestant culture via social media and online communities. But it’s still a minor force. The default setting here seems to be a general lack of interest in God or religion.

Does it follow that what we perceive reveals nothing about what is "out there"? — Janus

Whether it follows or not may not be the issue. Also, what is meant by “reveals nothing”? And what is meant by “out there”? I’m willing to entertain a constructivist view, though I haven’t spent much time thinking about it.

So, it seems most reasonable to think that we and the other animals perceive both what is possible given our various perceptual systems, and also selectively perceive what is of most significance. — Janus

I don’t think this makes much difference. Animals respond to shapes, movement, shadows, and food sources, patterns trigger responses. But what does this really say about reality itself? We all evolved from a common origin and "materials", so we likely share similar hard wiring, even if it has been organized radically differently over time. I really don't know how much animal comparisons give us.

But I don’t want to pollute this thread with yet another round of the realism debate in philosophy. :wink:

The typical atheist argument is that for example all the creation stories are, to put it mildly, quite far from our scientific understanding, hence everything in religion is quite dubious. The problem then comes when the same question is asked, what then is good and what is bad? The vague reference to humanity or something hides that the problem isn't solved. It still is a subjective issue. — ssu

Atheism is a pretty broad area. Most people are only familiar with the Dawkins/Hitchens approach, which is polemical, mostly non-philosophical, and often childish and petulant.

I am a freethinker and atheist, but my form of atheism is simply that I lack a belief in God. I don’t claim that God doesn’t exist, because I don’t have that knowledge. While some philosophers don’t like this formulation because it differs from the conservative tradition of atheism, which asserts all gods to be false, I think it is a common view among organised atheists these days.

If we can simply say that atheists have a position on the existence of God, we can also say that they are diverse in the other beliefs they hold. As someone who used to have connections to humanist and atheist organisations, I know that many atheists also believe in clairvoyance, UFO abductions, and ghosts. They don’t necessarily rule out all eccentric or supernatural claims.

The idea that God doesn’t exist simply because the stories in holy books are myths is not very strong reasoning. The problem with most obvious forms of atheism is that they only critique the low-hanging fruit of fundamentalism and literalism, which is equally disparaged by many believers, including theologians like David Bentley Hart and Bishop John Shelby Spong. I grew up in the Baptist tradition. I was taught that the Old Testament stories are myths and allegories. I believe this is a well-established tradition in Christianity. Literalism seems to be a reaction to modernity and a retreat into concrete thinking as a bulwark against changing culture.

One area I’m interested in is the idea that certain philosophical approaches (like enactivism and constructivism) argue that the regularities we find in science are not pre-given structures in nature, but patterns that emerge through our investigative practices. On this view, order is not merely discovered but enacted or co-created through the interaction between human observers, their conceptual frameworks, and the world they study.

The reason I find this interesting is that it flips the usual picture of science, so often used as the foundational justification for physicalist and narrowly atheistic accounts and offers a more interesting way to think about scientific knowledge and truth than the idea that they simply exist ‘out there' for us to discover.

You say "fair enough", but I would like to know whether you agree or disagree or are uncertain and why. — Janus

Not sure. I wanted to say something more interesting...

Fair enough. Richard Rorty once said in an interview, something like, “We can talk all about justification, but about truth we can say very little. “ No doubt a contestable and controversial claim.

I may not have done much of a job of articulating this and have tried to be more precise as I go, But philosophy is @Leontiskos interest and so he has more tools at his disposal . He’s probably pretty good at it. I wasn’t trying to offer a conventional relativist position but maybe that’s what I did earlier.

Thanks for your forensic analysis of my summary of anti-foundationalism. I’ll mull over what you wrote. Maybe someone else will chime in with a view on it.

I’m arguing that in anti-foundationalism all justification occurs within our own systems, even for statements about justification itself. You seem to be saying that this implies that truth itself is context-dependent, which is not what I am claiming. Your point is valid but misdirected, my focus is on justification, not the nature of truth.

My wording may well have been sloppy, given this is not an area of expertise, only a matter I’m interested in and trying to articulate. As you said before, I’m also short on style and rhetoric.

The word 'meta' originally meant 'after', but I think it has subsequently come to mean the above. — Clarendon

I thought “meta” referred to self-referential discourse.

I had a reality crisis when I was young where I realized I have no way to determine if what I'm experiencing is real. — frank

Interesting. I had a similar experience when I was 15 or 16.

My current position is that I have no choice but to accept the reality I’m in and that humans are sense-making creatures who use language (and other tools) to manage their environment. It's likely we don’t have the capacity to access a Capital-T Truth, and philosophy is perhaps best avoided, as it tends only to lead to 1) convoluted attempts to justify seemingly impossible beliefs or 2) endless confusion and self-reflexivity. :wink:

Isn't almost everything founded on metaphysics? Science presupposes that there is access to reality and truth about it. Knowledge. Science is founded on metaphysical axioms; realism, causality, rational intelligibility, etc. First principles would generally be the axioms or foundations of your thinking. So realism might be one of these.

A naturalist is just as committed to an unjustifiable metaphysical scheme. — frank

Yes, that's true. Have you come to any metaphysical conclusions yourself?

He was like "meh." Or something like that. — frank

Funny.

You can understand why people find theism attractive in all this, since it seems to effectively provide a grounding that resolves the confusions and tautologies created by anti-foundationalist views.

Thanks. I thought the argument and above statement avoided the relativist fallacy because it doesn’t say “all opinions are equally true” or that truth is random. Instead, it’s saying that whenever we justify something, we do it using the tools and standards we already have: and that’s true even for this statement itself. This makes it self-aware and not self-contradictory. It also leaves room for debate within those frameworks, rather than claiming there’s no way to judge anything. That’s why I thought it was anti-foundationalist, not relativist.

But yes, the issue of self-reflexivity seems to be a real problem. Hilary Lawson, a minor British philosopher, argues that we can’t avoid the problem of self-reflexivity in modern philosophy, our theories and claims inevitably turn back on themselves. His reponse is to say, so what!

Your response is to try to tidy up Y, but the nature of Y is irrelevant to the objection. Again, it is the word "always" that causes you to contradict yourself. If "always" involves "every context" then you are contradicting yourself, regardless of what X and Y are.

(You are attempting to exempt yourself from your own rule, hence the self-contradiction. In effect you are saying, "No one can make claims of this sort, except for me.")

Another way to put it:

1. X is always Y
2. Therefore, every X, in every context, is Y
3. Therefore, the truth of (1) is not context dependent

The person who utters (1) is committed to at least one truth which is not context dependent. — Leontiskos

Here I am assuming I have avoided stating the relativist fallacy. Either I suck at expressing this or I failed to properly “tidy up” Y.

@Joshs is the account of antifoundationalism I sketched earlier too simplistic?

Nothing we justify ever rises above our own ways of justifying and that includes this statement.

Nicely put, I’m not sure what this means for me, however. How do you see this sitting with phenomenology and Thompson’s descriptions of us enacting reality?

Much of philosophy seems to be a desperate scramble for foundational justifications that will 'beat' the other guy’s argument. The best one, of course, being God. If we can say a position we hold is part of God’s nature or the natural order of a designed universe, then we ‘win’ the argument (assuming winning means anything).

Many people would say there’s a difference between holding some axioms as pragmatic foundations and having access to facts or truths which transcend our quotidian lives. I guess for them the difference is between foundations which are provisional and tentative and ultimately evanescent, versus those which are eternal and True. You and I have doubts about the latter.

Yes but the point is that Platonists appeal to a mind-independent order/realm to ground values like goodness, while antifoundationalists hold that we have no access to anything outside our historically situated human practices.

No, they are merely noting that no one has ever produced a context-independent truth claim. And that noting is itself not context-independent because it is made in relation to and within the context of human experience, language and judgement. — Janus

Philosophy is divided into camps - some of which believe humans have access to facts or truths outside of human experience (eg, Platonism) and those who think we don't. How do we ground our knowledge? I don't think we can except though communities of intersubjective agreement.

Thanks. Jesus, it's bloody complicated.

Well, what do you mean by "anti-foundationalism"? Is it just something like, "Truth claims are always context dependent"? If so, then we're right back to the original argument. — Leontiskos

That there is no final or ultimate ground for our knowledge, meaning, or justification. I think that's how philosophers like Rorty, Lawson, or Brandom might have it. And I appreciate that anti-foundationalism is disparaged by many.

Let's not lose sight of the central argument which is this:

But if you are speaking from a single context, and that single context does not encompass all contexts, then you are not permitted to make claims about all contexts. And yet you did.

You contradict yourself because you say something like, "Truth claims are always context dependent." This means, "Every truth claim, in every context, is context dependent." It is a claim that is supposed to be true in every context, and therefore it is not context dependent. If you want to avoid self-contradiction you would have to say something like, "Truth claims are sometimes context dependent." But that's obviously less than what you want to say.
— Leontiskos — Leontiskos

As I understand it, this objection misunderstands the claim. Saying "truth claims are always context-dependent" is a way of describing how claims function within particular social, historical, and conceptual contexts. This description is itself situated and arises from those contexts. I'm, nto sure there's a contradiction in making this statement because it does not claim to exist outside or above context. The objection only seems persuasive if one assumes that all claims must be judged from a perspective beyond any context, but anti-foundationalism does not make that assumption.

From our observations of animal behavior it is undeniable that animals perceive all the same things in the environment as we do, but we can safely infer in (sometimes very) different ways according to the different structures of their sense modalities. — Janus

Indeed although they clearly don’t understand them the way we do, so while they might recognize the same shapes and perhaps risks as us, I’m not sure what that tells us about shared meaning. Thompson is not an idealist as I udnertand him.

But saying “everything comes from social practices and chance factors” doesn’t mean we’reclaiming to stand outside of all that.
— Tom Storm

It would be a bit like the fish saying, "Everything is water." If the fish knew that everything was water then he would not be bound by water. The metaphor about fish and water has to do with the idea that what is literally ubiquitous is unknowable. — Leontiskos

This is getting very meta. :wink:

Doesn't your fish and water objection assume that being immersed in something makes it unknowable? Doesn't Thompson’s view suggest the opposite? That our immersion is what makes understanding possible. We are always situated within social practices and contingent factors, but this situatedness doesn’t block insight, it creates or enables it. (I assume this is basic to phenomenology?) Recognizing that “everything comes from social practices and chance factors” is a reflective awareness that arises through our engagement with world, not from standing outside it. Being “bound by water” does not make the water invisible; it is the medium through which we come to know it. Or something like that?

I'm now getting dizzy with the curlicues of argument.

The broader question to me seems to be, is anti-foundationalism a foundation? Is it a performative contradiction? I suspect it isn’t on the basis that anti-foundationalism is more a lens or a stance toward foundations than a foundation itself. It discourages the search for an ultimate grounding, but offers no ultimate principle to stand on.

I'd be interested to hear your take on this particularly.