/lit/ - Literature

Bugmanism, the philosophy.

>>18221205
the idea th-- oh well fuck I just refuted it

>>18221205
a fancy way to handwave the fact that there is no philosophically rigorous definition of matter

>>18221205
Rock against rock goes boom

>>18221205

Buddhism

>>18221205
Off topic

>>18221213
cope more

>>18221213
Cope, you're incompatible with reality

>>18221205
I guess a more interesting question would be "how does it differ from other types of materialism?"

>>18221213
FPBP

>>18221263
>>18221313
cope

>>18221483
>>18221263
>>18221313
Cope

>>18221477
wtf is that gif lol

>>18221205
All that exists is matter.

>>18221205
Basically just dealing with what's physical and "real."

>>18221216
kek

>>18221216
Materialism is an idea, that's not contradictory. Just like "we ought to be practical" is a statement and not practice itself, it doesn't defeat the message though.

>>18222497
>Materialism is an idea, that's not contradictory.

Show me a material idea in the world.

>>18222497
'Twas but a joke bruv

>>18221410
could you answer it?

>>18221216
Witty

>>18221205
Honestly, it surprises me how these guys managed to reach the conclusions they have reached. Like how do you manage to go against the current so hard that you reject all the effects of liberalism, precisely while starting from the same premises?

>>18221205
It's a type of homosexuality.

In Bueno's view, only when arts, religions, techniques (including politics), sciences and technologies –"first grade knowledges"– have been sufficiently developed can philosophy then appear as "second grade knowledge", transcendental in relation to "first grade knowledge" (in the sense that it permeates various kinds of knowledges).
Thus philosophy is far from being an absolute knowledge (metaphysics), a science (logic, epistemology) or the "mother of sciences" that would not have a specific role once sciences have become sufficiently mature.
Bueno offers an operational description of philosophy (as opposed to etymological or psychological definitions, such as "love of wisdom"): philosophy is the discipline that works with ideas.
Ideas, however, do not descend from heaven nor emerge spontaneously from the human soul; they are worldly and objective products of human reality. How, then, are they produced? Provided that the above-mentioned first grade knowledges produce concepts, ideas spring from contradictions and incommensurabilities among different concepts, or among different regions of concepts.

Therefore, since ideas depend on concepts, it is to be expected that the more developed the "first grade" concepts are (technologies, politics, sciences), the more developed ideas will be. As quotidian reality becomes more and more complex, instruments for a philosophical and systematic approach to ideas must be revised and completed. Any truly philosophical system has to be able to address and interpret both that increasingly complex reality and the various systems offered in the past. Philosophical reasoning, as Plato taught, is dialectic and never dogmatic, in that it cannot just "describe" reality as if it had a direct relation with it, but needs to refer controversially to interpretations of the concepts with which human beings re-organize the world.

With these methodological characteristics, philosophical materialism postulates itself as one of the most powerful systems currently at work. Even today, when scholars claim to have abandoned "grand narratives" and systematic views, ideas still need to be related to other ideas in order to be understood and, as such, each of us inevitably has an ontology and a theory of knowledge, no matter how basic and implicit. For example, people trying to make sense of their own religious feelings need to have ideas (no matter how simple) about humans, divine entities, and the relationships between the two. The same is true for someone in a pub or at work trying to justify a democratically elected law - they would probably need to mention free will, representation, nation, etc. All of these ideas are intertwined, thus forming systems, however weak or strong. A criterion for determining the power of a system of ideas is its capacity to relate to the phenomena it is trying to organize.

>>18222834
In any event, philosophical materialism maintains its coherence as a system. Its essential core was expressed in Bueno's book Ensayos materialistas: philosophical materialism means ontological determinism and pluralism. As the founder of academic philosophy, and from the viewpoint of his theory of knowledge, Plato defended in his Sophist the principle of symploke, the same principle that Bueno uses to support both determinism and pluralism: "nothing is isolated from everything else, but not everything is connected to everything else; otherwise, nothing could be known."

The first part of the principle of symploke justifies determinism and can be sustained nowadays by acknowledging how the different sciences need to refer to causal relations in their respective operational fields. Even random theories or theories of chaos do not destroy causal relations, but put them into a complex frame. In any event, the theory of causality employed by materialism differs from the classical theory of cause (employed by both Aristotle and Hume) in that it is triadic, since the material substratum is considered as a necessary part of any causal relation. The dyadic (or formalistic) theory of cause can be represented by the function y = f(x), while the triadic theory of cause defines the effect as the deviation of a given material scheme of identity, H. Thus, the effect Y results from the composition of H with the causal determinant, X. That is: Y = f (H, X).

>>18222869
In this scheme, the idea of a cause that causes itself, a causa sui, an idea often used to describe God (and, nowadays, some so-called "emergent" properties) is a philosophical absurdity (since the effect would need to be prior to the cause). Rather, determination always means co-determination among parts of reality. Therefore, from the point of view of philosophical materialism, the idea of form, as opposed to matter, must be re-interpreted as relations between material parts of a whole (philosophical materialism has developed a strong theory of wholes and parts). Finally, regarding non-corporeal materialities (see below), the idea of determination is a functional one (since causal relations only take place among bodies), useful to deny the possibility of self-determination and emergence. It is important to note that defending determinism is coherent with defending human freedom (as in Spinoza, Marx, and others), although it does imply a refutation of free will. In the same way, ontological determinism does not imply gnoseological determinism as sciences do not exhaust reality.

The second part of the principle of symploke justifies pluralism, which goes beyond just heterogeneity or multiplicity since it defends the disconnection among different areas, regions, or categories of reality. For instance, the different sciences appear as non-reducible to one another and often in conflict (given this backdrop, philosophy appears almost spontaneously to treat those areas affected by conflicts among sciences: history vs anthropology, neurology vs psychology, etc.), although they might share elements of their respective fields (it is possible, however, to know the list of American presidents without knowing how to decompose an atom).

>>18222880
Pluralism, as opposed to monism (both substance monism: "everything comes from one single thing" and order monism: "everything follows one single plan"), turns the very idea of God into a contradiction, and prevents its modern substitution by the idea of Nature, which has been carried out in systems such as organicism, dialectical materialism, etc. Philosophical materialism, according to this and other arguments, claims to be able to prove the inexistence of God by the inexistence of its very idea: according to the ontological argument to prove God's inexistence ("if the idea of God is possible, God has to exist, since the idea of God implies God's existence") proving that the idea of God is impossible would be tantamount to saying that God cannot exist. But the idea of God is impossible, in that it is contradictory (for instance, the contradictions between an infinite being and a finite world, or the absurdity of an infinite consciousness). Thus, philosophical materialism sustains essential atheism, and not just existential atheism.

>>18222894
From this point of view, materialism is not understood as corporeal mechanism since the existence of non-corporeal materialities –such as undulatory energy, the distance between two bodies (which, in itself, is not a body), or kinship in a human society– has to be acknowledged. In special ontology, the idea of matter is divided into three genera, or kinds, that cannot survive alone but which nevertheless do not emanate from one another: physical matter, psychological matter and ideal matter. Spiritualism is impossible since a "separated consciousness" cannot exist or evolve without a body: perception, will, projects, and rationality are impossible to imagine without space, time and a biological body with a brain. Thus the different genera are necessarily connected, though not reducible to one another. In order to avoid metaphysical substantiation of these related genera of matter (as occurs in traditional scholastics –World, Soul, God– or as seen in Popper's ontology), Bueno labeled them M1, M2, and M3, three different genera of Matter that together conform the world.

The world, such as we perceive it and operate with parts of it, needs human and animal subjects to preserve its morphology (the anthropic principle becomes a zootropic principle, against idealism) and it is through them that it is conformed. The idea of a transcendental ego (irreducible to an absolute spirit or to the sum of the different individual psychological selves) is thus necessary to the unity of the different genera that conform the universe. Since human subjects apply logical functors to their activities, such as logical addition, we can express their way of conforming the world through logical functors: E (ego) = Mi (World) = (M1 ∪ M2 ∪ M3).

However, from the materialist point of view something would have to exist even if humans and animals were to disappear. This goes against the idealist or nihilist consequences that Fichte and other philosophers deduced from the discovery that an ego is necessary for the world to exist. Thus, as a negative idea defined by radical pluralism, Bueno reinterprets Wolff's general ontology as General Ontological Matter, or "M". "M" works against attempts to reduce reality to the world (M1, M2, M3; even for Wolff, general ontology was devoted to common aspects of special ontology). The dangers of that common reduction can be seen not only in Fichte's idealism (and the nihilist consequences that some authors deduced from it), but also in the fact that it would be a return to monism: only by postulating M can M1, M2, and M3 be conceived as necessarily linked but not reducible to one another. The different systems of philosophy that have existed since ancient Greece can be organized historically according to the importance given in them to these different aspects of ontology (M, E, Mi).

>>18222898
Throughout history, many other philosophers have seen the necessity of introducing something beyond the world: Anaximander's apeiron, the Neoplatonic One, Kant's thing-in-itself, Schopenhauer's Will, etc. By reinterpreting this tradition, philosophical materialism opposes formalism, which would give priority to one genera of matter over the other two: physical reductionism (as in some versions of historical materialism), psychological reductionism (or spiritualism or idealism), and essentialism (as in some interpretations of Platonism).
Some of the most important aspects of philosophical materialism can be briefly –and in a very simplified manner– presented following the three axes that, in Bueno's theory, organize anthropological space. The concept of anthropological space is useful to refer to an area of reality that contains heterogeneous material which, from a materialist perspective, must contain more than just human beings (unlike Fichte's or Gehlen's one-dimensional anthropological space). As the idea of God started to decline, and the concepts that had been developed to think about God started to be applied to humans and human societies, anthropological space was reduced to the dichotomy between nature and culture, a dichotomy so common to 19th and 20th century philosophy and anthropology. However, in Bueno's philosophy, the reduction of anthropological space to only two axes cannot be deduced from atheism. A third axis is operationally necessary to connect the other two axes and to establish a critique of any sort of idealism. This critique therefore assumes the possibility of intelligent and willing beings different from human beings. These ideas can be represented by the diagrams in pic related.

>>18222911
To avoid interpretations that prioritize one of the axes over the others, figure I shows the axis integrating relations between men (H) surrounding the rest and figure II represents the axis (H) surrounded by the other two. Once again in order to avoid substantiation, Bueno named each of the axes according to their role in the diagram (instead of using the traditional ideas of world, soul and God): the circular axis contains human subjects and those instruments through which those subjects act upon one another (H); the radial axis gathers any non-personal entity conceptualized by human techniques (N); the angular axis (A) integrates subjects equipped with will and knowledge, which are alive in our real world but which nevertheless are not humans. This triadic conception opposes itself to the dualism that appears in some interpretations of Plato, Augustine, Descartes, Hegel, Marx or Husserl.

1. Considered from the radial axis, philosophical materialism presents itself as cosmological materialism since it criticizes the view that describes the world as a contingent effect of a creating God who is the owner of the world's destiny. Cosmological materialism also includes a materialist understanding of the categorial sciences, that is, gnoseological materialism (a theory on how scientific categories become closed, or produce a circle of immanence around scientific truths understood as synthetic identities between parts of a given scientific field).

2. From the circular axis perspective, philosophical materialism resembles historical materialism in the critique of historical idealism and its project of explaining human history as a product of an "autonomous consciousness" in which the future of humanity is planned. Despite this resemblance, philosophical materialism rejects any teleology of human history and re-interprets the history of humanity as the history of universal empires. In this sense, it turns Marx upside down (as Marx claimed to be doing with Hegel’s philosophical system).

3. From the point of view of the angular axis, philosophical materialism acquires the form of a religious materialism critically opposed to spiritualism (that conceives of gods, spirits and souls as incorporeal entities). Philosophical materialism argues that those entities are neither spiritual nor products of a hallucinated imagination or social alienation; on the contrary, they are interpreted as real, corporeal entities able to act as numen and which have coexisted with human beings for millennia. Historically, and following ethological sciences, animals equipped with will and knowledge seem to be a good incarnation of real numina. When considered as numina, animals are part of the angular axis, possessing will and knowledge without being human beings and having been represented in prehistoric caves, thus making possible the following materialist principle: "Man made God in the image and likeness of animals."

>>18221483
>>18221493
Seethe