/lit/ - Literature

*crickets chirping*

Threadly reminder
>Women cannot do metaphysics
>Analytic "philosophy" is not real philosophy

>>22157183
Women are capable of education, but they are not made for activities which demand a universal faculty such as the more advanced sciences, philosophy, and certain forms of artistic production. Women may have happy ideas, taste, and elegance, but they cannot attain to the ideal. The difference between men and women is like that between animals and plants. Men correspond to animals, while women correspond to plants because their development is more placid and the principle that underlies it is the rather vague unity of feeling. When women hold the helm of government, the state is at once in jeopardy, because women regulate their actions not by the demands of universality but by arbitrary inclinations and opinions. Women are educated — who knows how? — as it were by breathing in ideas, by living rather than by acquiring knowledge. The status of manhood, on the other hand, is attained only by the stress of thought and much technical exertion.

Is the first philosophy approach to metaphysics and ontology obsolete? Naturalism may not be as intellectually appealing but it has proven to be more fruitful than its opponent.

>>22158004
source?

>>22156619
I read about Wolffs Semiology and it’s the one that makes the most sense

>>22158004
refuted by German Idealism

>>22158004
refuted by Hegel, sorry kid

the GOAT

Very interesting interview on non-reductionism in biology and evolution

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCLRKP9NW8I

how do analytic philosophers prove that their formalization of an ordinary language statement into a logical language accurately conveys the essential meaning of the ordinary language statement?

>>22162181
They don't. Like metaphysics, it's entirely arbitrary and made up by scholars too dumb to be scientists.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/analysis/s6.html

wtf? i love analytic philisophy now.

>>22162209
t. a woman

>>22162181
I think you would do well to look up the difference between logic and a meaning theory. This is a very elementary distinction made in many analytic texts which, upon being understood, would clear up this non-problem you’ve “discovered.” I would recommend reading the first few chapters of Dummett’s “Logical Basis of Metaphysics” or John Searle’s “Speech Acts.”

>The activity of dissolution is the power and work of the Understanding, the most astonishing and mightiest of powers, or rather the absolute power.
Hegel's scaring me again bros...

>>22162287
ok then

>>22162308
"so you like fiction, do you?"

boop

>>22162308
Instead of dissolution, think analysis. You still get that “mind cutting something into digestible pieces” action, but it isn’t scary as if you were releasing geists into the world. The mind then assembles it back together to form a representation.

bump

>>22156619
An applee is banana
What is banana you ask?
Well orange if you must know.
How about orange?
Well its [input X].

You know damn well what i am tallking about.

>>22156619
Where do metaphysics-anons stand on the mind-body debate? What are your thoughts on the hard problem of consciousness? I get that it's not a philosophy of mind thread, but I am very curious.

>>22166445
I don't really understand how anyone can be a materialist. To me, the first-personality of conscious experience has ontological status until proven otherwise, it's the biggest glaring explanandum in the path of any naturalist attempt to describe reality. We have direct access to it, we know that it "is" a "something." The only thing on the same level is the ideal laws/norms underlying the behavior of reality. Humean induction problems aside, the structuredness/regularity of reality clearly "is" something that needs to be explained. The primal facts of experience, and thus the three great explananda, could be boiled down to:
>I seem to be conscious, I seem to be subjectively experiencing, which includes the ability to will and feel as well as think
>The world seems to have a "there-ness" that isn't subject to my willing/thinking it - I can't make it go away or change in the way I can my own thoughts about it
>The world is also not just a "blank" there-ness, nor a chaotic there-ness, but a structured/regualr one - my mind has SOME purchase on it (but then the paradox arises of how I can ever be certain of this purchase; and the fact that, even though I can't articulate an answer to this question, I nevertheless AM certain and DO live reasonably well within this world)

Right away we can see that the "world's there-ness" point is phrased a lot more generally than, say, "the world's materiality" or "the world's being composed of a single unconscious 'stuff' or several kinds of unconscious stuff(s)." More abstractly and minimally, the external world's thereness is (at least initially) what Fichte said it is, simply an obstacle to me, a "something that doesn't yield," something over against me, etc.

The lawlike/structured/normative/regular aspect of the world's thereness (external reality) is, on the one hand, described in our everyday language in terms of human consciousness - laws, norms, and even structures are man-made things, made by a subject intending them and then carrying them out or seeing that they are carried out. So now we have three principles - (1) subjective consciousness, (2) the world's there-ness which can only be defined initially in terms of its being an obstacle for a subject, and (3) law-like norms that seem suspiciously like a subject's intending - which could all be given mental explanations, i.e., could all be seen as subsets of one super-mind or perhaps of many minds.

I think Hegel described nature as "fossilized" spirit, for this reason. It's thought, but hardened-up thought, unconscious thought, again, analogous to the lower functions of your mind that you don't even notice or control.

>>22166644
I don't think any of this is a perfect or satisfying explanation but I do think it's logically more consequent and a more promising avenue of inquiry than materialism, which has to posit all these bizarre things like distinct substances that EXIST, BECAUSE THEY JUST DO OKAY, or a single substrate-substance that exists because it just does. I think most people tend toward agreeing with this these days, as strict materialism is becoming rarer. But more importantly, I think panpsychism, which is increasingly favored by naturalists and analytics from what I've seen, is a massive red herring and is in fact just materialism re-branded. They couldn't explain consciousness or explain away its ontological status via dead material substrate-substance(s), so they say "okay the substrate has some 'mental-ness' to it!" This is just logically meaningless, it is effectively begging the question. They are tasked with explaining an EMERGENT, holistic property of assemblages of a substrate, so they say "okay, the substrate has property-X 'in' it potentially; but it doesn't manifest until the assemblage gets together."

What I am most afraid of right now is that some trendy version of panpsychism is going to spread through the zoomersphere because it ticks all the right boxes, it's anti-materialist, it's kooky, you can explain it to people at a party after hearing about it on a podcast and be the "in the know" guy for 5 minutes, etc., and most importantly, it's dumbed down and requires no actual contemplation to understand. It will become very popular with Joe Rogan and Weinstein types, AI and singularity theory morons, etc., who will use it to act like they're iconoclasts, part of the exciting new wave of philosophy, breaking with fuddyduddy 20th century naturalism and embracing something "weird" but "so weird it just might work." But again it will just be basic bitch materialism with meaningless psyche-spice added.

Even worse, it will be fused with actually interesting, already existing currents like process philosophy and Deleuze, as performative schizoposters and vloggers jump at the opportunity to get credit for doing some buzzword pyrotechnics fusing TRANSCENDENTAL EMPIRICISM and ACTUAL OCCASIONS with whatever the core of the new meme shit is (probably something similar to string theory's trajectory, with the press and the theorists mutually using one another for profit and self-aggrandizing respectively), and dilettantes and podcast hosts and twitter people will jump at the opportunity to repeat these buzzword fusions and break off into little camps and feel in the know and special. And again, to harp on this deliberately, it will all just be meaningless, shallow reductionism of a different variety, materialism with a fresh but cheap coat of paint.

>>22166648
And worst of all, all of this will be extremely conducive to the kinds of ahrimanic materialistic techno-fetishism that nihilistic, distracted zoomers already tend toward, like singularity hypotheses, transhumanism and techno-futurist anti-essentialism of all kinds, attributing sentience to AI (but also paradoxically showing no concern for possible abuses of sentient beings), and various other ugly, tinny, materialistic, reductionist pseudotheories like wormholes and so forth. It will be very easy to plaster over glaring conceptual problems in computing/AI philosophy by saying "turing test-passing AI + panpsychism = conscious." People will think they're being trendy and part of the cool new thing when you try to tell them that AIs are not sentient or they are sentient and that is even more horrific, because they will have heard the latest scoop on how "philosophy of mind" and "Cartesian dualism" were "solved" by Deleuzo-Weinsteinian podcast panpsychism.

Basically, most people are late hellenistic pagans who are just bored and want powerful demons to worship. If you start giving them things with just the right amount of "magic" to make them interesting, they will give in to them quickly. Then they will start saying nothing is real, everything is like Iain Banks novels, cyberpunk aesthetics mean you should cut your dick off and genetically modify your kid, etc. Imagine eugenics being run by microdosing silicon valley podcast joggers with tranvestite friends.

The only way to avoid all this is to reestablish contemplative traditions quickly enough that there is some kind of hard core of resistance against ahrimanic ideas.

>>22166644
>To me, the first-personality of conscious experience has ontological status until proven otherwise,

That is not questioned. The nature of it is anon. They are debating this whole time if ita a applee or banana. Even Chalmers admited that not a singlw ontological framework is sufficient yet we know one of them needs to be true (right...).

Even Dennett who is illusionist does not claim that conacioussnes is not real. He is just stating that it is product of brain with fancy words.

>>22166650
Thanks for the reply. I read it over and will have to do so again to properly absorb it.
>I don't really understand how anyone can be a materialist.
My sort of naive view is that, firstly (and obviously), people are weary of anything to do with God/gods, spirituality, mysticism, and anything that might be related to it, close and distant these days due to the stigma. So there's the "woo" factor. Secondly, I've been watching quite a few videos of various physicists and philosophers giving interviews and it seems that another part of it is that they keep mentioning how counter-intuitive some of the results of quantum mechanics are, like quantum superposition, that they seem to be appealing to its counter-intuitiveness to say consciousness sorta just works somehow because the world and matter are strange. Like David Wallace says he believes electrons can be responsible for sensations.
https://youtu.be/HQbjP5XjEnA?t=305 is a video where he gives his views.

Also, in this lecture Brand Blanshard says that he believes the older traditions of philosophy (which I think you may include yourself in) will come back one day. Do you believe it will?
https://youtu.be/xEddsmnY228 here's the video where he says that. It doesn't cover consciousness, instead he sort of laments the paths philosophy and criticism have taken.

>>22162181
Analytic philosophers frankly never claimed this. The early ones like Russell and Ayer and Carnap who supported what they called logical analysis were not making claims about synonymy, but about a kind of metaphysical translatability. Which is not very different from how everyone's done metaphysics of the world since forever. When Plato tells you that some fact before you is to be understood in terms of Platonic solid-shaped material particles made from triangles, and instantiating transcendent universals (forms), he's doing the same sort of thing. Same if Spinoza tells you you're looking at some modes of attributes of divine substance. Or if Leibniz tells you you're actually looking at images within yourself (as monad) that God has coordinated to correspond via pre-established harmony to arrangements of monads outside yourself, where every ordinary object is unified through central governing monads and each monad is an entelechy with immanent teleology. Or if Berkeley tells you you're looking at ideas in the mind of God. I could keep going. This is just the normal way metaphysics was done. Even if Ayer or Carnap, as logical positivists, saw themselves as anti-metaphysical in the sense that they rejected an external reality, they were still doing "metaphysics" insofar as they endorsed this metaphysical translation paradigm, they still talked about primitives and a base and how the rest of reality was constructed from these, they just saw those primitives as expressions that cut up synthetic reality and were conventionally chosen so it could have been otherwise. Think Kant's transcendental idealism, but no longer necessary. Actually Heidegger's doctrine of interpretation is exactly the same as Carnap's doctrine of explication, they were actually much closer than either of them wanted to accept, heirs of Dilthey after all. Anyway long story short, these early analytics were then character-assassinated by post-positivists like Quine. Quine misunderstood them completely even though he himself accepted paraphrasis too. In any case modern analytics explicitly avoid talking about "sameness of meaning" when they're doing metaphysics, so nobody can even accuse analytics anymore of trying to give the "meaning" of sentences. They're just doing metaphysics the way it's always been done.

How do you guys reconcile Strauss and Guenon on the esoteric?

>>22167336
I kind of wish /lit/ Guenonists just move over to /x/ and stay there. It's really hard to have conversation about metaphysics as soon as Guenon's name drops, because his conception of metaphysics is by his declaration meant to be hostile to reason itself, and to sensation, while he accommodates past religions and traditions into his worldview only by introducing a tenuous esoteric/exoteric division into them which no orthodox member of those religions would accept. Might as well discuss magic and religion here then, oh well.

>>22167336
Simple. They talk past each other.

Strauss's interpretative method, for all its genius, is limited by the secular perspective of the user. Name ONE time that ANY Straussian bothered to explore the alchemical language used by Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, Newton, etc., despite it being relevant to the philosophical topics being discussed. The answer is never. Complete silence.

>>22167052
>Analytic philosophers frankly never claimed this.

It was logical analysis that was involved in Russell’s celebrated theory of descriptions, first presented in ‘On Denoting’ in 1905, which Ramsey called a ‘paradigm of philosophy’ and which played a major role in the establishment of analytic philosophy. In this theory, (Ka) is rephrased as (Kb), which can then be readily formalized in the new logic as (Kc):

(Ka) The present King of France is bald.
(Kb) There is one and only one King of France, and whatever is King of France is bald.

(Kc) ∃x[Kx & ∀y(Ky y = x) & Bx].

>>22168248
Yes I know what Russell says in "On Denoting." My point is that Russell's logical analysis is more like traditional metaphysics than people want to accept. Plato could come up to you and say that your ordinary sentences really MEAN something cashed out in terms of universals and so forth. Metaphysical translation is a sense of "giving the meaning" different and distinct from the more ordinary sense of synonymy. The chief difference is that synonymy is supposed to be substitutional for someone who "knows" the side being translated, while metaphysical translation isn't. People like Frege and Ayer make it very clear that the substitution is supposed to fail. If Aristotle comes up to you and tells you that sentences about water are really sentences about infinitely divisible hylomorphic substance instantiating the dyad of the wet and the cold, he's not saying competent language speakers who know about water will be able to introspect and figure that out. That's metaphysical translation.

>>22168248
>(Ka) is rephrased as (Kb)
how do analytics prove this "rephrasing" is equivalent in meaning, and how do they prove their particular rephrasing is the correct rephrasing as opposed to some other rephrasing?

>>22169006
They don't pretend this anymore. That ended after the 1940s or so. But even when that's how they were doing it, they weren't doing anything other than metaphysicians. How does Plato or Aristotle prove their metaphysical analyses? Well they try to by arguing for it and fitting everything into their bigger system. Same goes for someone like Russell. Though the logical positivists were actually more constructivist so Carnap would have said it comes down to choice and convention instead.

>>22169100
>They don't pretend this anymore.
good but how were they so blind not to realize that, as you say
>they weren't doing anything other than metaphysicians
?

I agree with you. It was still metaphysics. And I told my professor this and he agreed (hes a metaphysiks respektor), but why was Russell so smug about it? (did he recant later on?)

>>22167052
>Analytic philosophers frankly never claimed this
>>22169100
>They don't pretend this anymore
which one is it?

how do I be a metaphysics professor anons?

>>22169161
Russell always took himself to be doing metaphysics. People like Ayer and Carnap were not really doing metaphysics but metametaphysics if you want to be more precise. Anyway, the idea that people are "anti-metaphysics" and then proceed to do metaphysics is not an analytic-only issue. Hume did metaphysics, Kant did metaphysics, Marx (or Engels anyway) did metaphysics, Sartre did metaphysics, etc, but they all acted like they weren't. I don't know what's up with so many people acting like "metaphysics" just means "that wrong way of doing metaphysics" so that their metaphysics doesn't count as such. But this is just a global issue in a lot of philosophy.
>>22169528
Read >>22168998 the early analytics did use "meaning" language to speak of what is effectively metaphysical translation rather than synonymy, but they never claimed their notion of metaphysical translation ("meaning") was the same as the kind of synonymy that lets you make substitutions and preserve transparent understanding of the synonymy. On the contrary, the translation they were interested in was clearly opaque. I mentioned Ayer because he even points it out very explicitly in Language, Truth, and Logic. He contrasts his idea of analysis to Kant's where Kant's analyticity (where the predicate is "contained" in the subject) seems to require introspective transparency. Ayer points out that's not his own view, there's no such transparency required. So these guys were clear that their sense of "analysis" is more like metaphysical translation. What they stopped "pretending" is that this talk is properly called "meaning." They dropped the "meaning" talk and just embraced the metaphysics talk for what it is after the 1970s.

>>22169641
>metaphysical translation
>synonymy
>analyticity
>introspective transparency
Too. Much. Big. Words. Anon this is 4chan not The Review of Metaphysics

>>22169641
Ayer on Kant:
>Kant ... gives two distinct criteria, which are by no means quivalent. Thus his ground for holding that the proposition "7+5=12" is synthetic is, as we have seen, that the subjective intension of "7+5" does not comprise the subjective intension of "12"; whereas his ground for holding that "all bodies are extended" is an analytic proposition is that it rests on the principle of contradiction ... But, in fact, a proposition with is synthetic according to the former criterion may very well be analytic according to the latter. For, as we have already pointed out, it is possible for symbols to be synonymous without having the same intensional meaning for anyone: and accordingly from the fact that one can think the sum of seven and five without necessarily thinking of twelve, it by no means follows that the proposition "7+5=12" can be denied without self-contradiction
Here it's obvious that Ayer distinguishes a psychological criterion of synonymy from a non-psychological one.
>>22169536
Get a PhD at a good philosophy program, specialize in metaphysics, and then try your luck (it's really hard) and get a job somewhere.

>>22169676
Effortposts are for effortanons who want to follow. You're invited to follow, but not required to.

>>22169689
i get it now. youre just flexin on us. carry on.

>>22169712
Not trying to flex, I just mean if you don't want to tag along, hop off. If you're interested in understanding you can just ask a question for clarification. People are usually very willing to answer questions even on this funny website. I'm not trying to be obtuse to everyone it's impossible to tell who tracks and who doesn't, so it comes down to your interest in asking questions. It's your job to ask not mine to predict, but anyone will be glad to help you out if you just ask.

>>22169716

sweet. if your offering I love learning. ok. just so you know I'm mainly a kantfag and i understans things in his terms. so what do you mean by
>psychological criterion of synonymy

>>22156619
>metaphysics
>posts about 18th - 20th century germs

You have to go back

>>22169730
dude germs are the best what are you talking about?

>>22169725
Basically, Ayer suspects that Kant is relying on an introspective analysis when he conceives of analysis in some of his examples. Maybe when we think "Bachelor" we're able to analyze it mentally as "Unmarried male." What about "12"? Are we able to see that it means the same as "7+5"? Well maybe not. Kant takes this to show arithmetic isn't analytic, but rather synthetic. Most people don't really agree with Kant on that one. Here's a better example. The number 78319892 is the sum of 34859346 and 43460546. There's no way any of us can just intellectually conceptualize of the sum and figure that out by analysis, or of the two summands and figure out that they add up to said sum, unless we start doing step by step arithmetic (and then we can make mistakes and not even realize it). Examples like this could be strong support for Kant's conclusion that arithmetic is synthetic. That's why it helps to have a conception of analyticity (specifically, of equivalence or identity) that doesn't depend on psychological introspection. Water is H2O, for example. But we discovered that. Still, it seems to be an analytic truth if any is, or at least it's a necessary truth, it's just not graspable a priori as such. That's part of the issue with Kant, he seems to tie analyticity and necessity with aprioricity too strongly. Among analytic philosophers, Kripke argued by 1970 that these notions can come apart.

>>22169801
>Water is H2O, for example. But we discovered that.
yes. it would then be a synthetic a posteriori judgment since we arrived at it not by analysis of the concept of water, but through empirical examination.>>22169801
>Still, it seems to be an analytic truth if any is, or at least it's a necessary truth, it's just not graspable a priori as such.
i disagree with that. it only becomes analytic after the fact that it has been added to the concept of water by observation and experiment. it is not necessary that water is H2O, it just so happens that after investigation it turned out that that was its chemical composition.

>>22169827
>it is not necessary that water is H2O, it just so happens that after investigation it turned out that that was its chemical composition.
Well Kant's transcendental idealism makes this very plausible, but if you believe in a robust metaphysical realism, where water/H2O exists out in the world, and would even if we did not (even if there were no transcendental subjects Kant-style), then the fact water is H2O is just a fact. And as an identity, it's necessary. Identities can't be contingent. What might be contingent, is that a water-like substance fills our oceans and is transparent and so forth and so on, and happens to be H2O rather than some XYZ. But that doesn't mean XYZ is water, even if we called it water, even if images of it in our minds look the same as those images of water, etc.

>>22169734
Metaphysics reached an absolute highpoint in ancient Hellas and China. Germs are pseudo who jerk each other off while inventing incoherent jargon and saying "becoming" a lot. Just when one thought 4th century philosophy was the worst, along came the german savages.

>>22169896
By ancient Hellas I obviously mean prior to philosophy being raped and murdered by athenoids in the 4th century. The subsequent Dialecticians were able to add to the glory of the pre socratics and sophists, though. Metaphysics wasn't really grasped by the Chinese until the Han collapsed, but in the 3rd century they did yeoman work.

People who read germs and repeat their gibberish are utter midwits unworthy of my time.

>>22169905
What's Chinese metaphysics up to? I hear about Indian metaphysics (Jain, Hindu, Buddhist) but everytime I encounter Chinese philosophy, it's ethics or law or politics. The exception might be Zhuangzhi being epistemology. Is it the Taoists who did metaphysics? Or more Buddhists from India? What is authentically Chinese metaphysics like? I'd like to look into it

>>22169925
Basically, you have pre unification texts that are very interesting and cover w wide variety of topics and styles. Zhuangzi is among them. Then you have commentaries. If you want the best metaphysics China has to offer, you want to check out commentaries dating from the collapse of the Han Dynasty onwards. So you'll get Wang Bi commenting on the daodejing and book of changes, and writing the laozi weizhi lueli, you'll have guo xiang commenting on the zhuangzi, fragments of He Yan, etc. Basically late imperial rome/dark age era texts.

I have heard that the German language itself results in a stunted intellect due to certain grammatical structure and other practices. For example, the way they count and structure numbers, with the integer first, "funf und funfzehn". Like they are unwittingly confused because of their inherent structural failings, whereas the superior Anglo has an equivelant (or likely greater) horsepower while also appreciating vastly superior software/operating system.

>>22169965
Or funfzig or what have you. honestly that primitive language disgusts me and you will excuse me while I wash my tongue. England ascended to the Roman Empire and elevated Hellenic Wisdom thousands of years ago, while the germ raided across the Rhine and returned home to his fat yodeling bruenhilder

>>22169950
did Chinese ever advance philosophy into during the European Renaissance and beyond?

>>22169889
ok I will say this. we have the concept of water and it is an empirical concept composed of predicates we've obtained from the observation of water. assuming metaphysical realism, even though our concept of water may not yet include within it the concept of H2O, water itself is H2O and is so independent of our recognition of this fact. However, the fact itself that water is H2O is contingent. Even if we had never investigated the chemical composition of water, it is not necessary that its constituents had to be H2O. It is as a matter of fact, H2O, and has always been H2O, but there is nothing logically contradictory with some other configuration of atoms having had exhibited the exact same properties as those of what we call water, and with H2O having had exhibited properties which water does not have.

It seems to me that a matter of fact has been confused for a matter of logic. The fact is that water being H2O is contingent, but identity is not a matter of fact, but a matter of logic or thought, which alone is the domain of necessity. I think that this whole issue really just shows the incoherence of taking appearances (water and H2O) for things in themselves.

metabump

>>22169950
Thanks. Are there other names/books I should look into?
>>22169965
Let's be fair to the Germans, it sounds like you like English analytics but they owe much of their influence to Frege, Wittgenstein, and Carnap.
>>22170157
>it is not necessary that its constituents had to be H2O.
But wouldn't it be something else if its constituents were different? I mean what would a Kantian say? What's their mereology? The most I know is that he takes the category of totality to unify plurality. So it sounds relevant to this.

bump

>>22170746
>But wouldn't it be something else if its constituents were different? I mean what would a Kantian say?
Water is an empirical concept. H2O is also an empirical concept. Identity and difference however are not an empirical concepts and pertain only to the subject that recognizes these concepts. How can we speak of something being different or identical apart from the thinking subject for who alone this concept exists? My point is the absurdities and contradictions that metsphysical realism results in and which Kant had already pointed out in the critique.

Brief reminder that Severino ended philosophy.

>>22172338
I don't see any absurdity or contradiction with what you're saying is contradictory.
>How can we speak of something being different or identical apart from the thinking subject for who alone this concept exists?
This only feels contradictory if you presuppose its truth. It's why realists and anti-realists can never prove their side to the other side, unfortunately. For a realist there's nothing contradictory with there being things outside of a subject thinking them. Problem is that Kant in a sense has to admit that because of the thing in itself, which is why he was criticized so heavily by people like Jacobi and Schulze, and why Fichte did away with it altogether.

>>22172372
Yes, Kant does admit a thing in itself, but this thing in itself is not water or H2O, both of which he would have considered appearances, and the contradiction results from taking these appearances as things in themselves and then applying concepts to them that have legitimate use only when things like water and H2O are recognized as appearances only. Saying Water is H2O, without recognizing that they are not things in themselves, is what leads to the absurdity of saying Water is H2O is a necessary a posteriori judgment (since what is known a posteriori is never known necessarily, else it would be known a priori).

>>22172360
Is it wise to stop the appreciation of wisdom?

>>22172842
no

>>22172745
Everyone that isn't a Kantian agrees that it's already absurd that Kant asserts the reality of things in themselves in the first place, since he already rules out judgments about (using empirical concepts or transcendental categories alike) things in themselves, and then proceeds to tell us they exist and affect the sensibility in some way that produces empirical content. My real point is Kant should have just dropped the anti-realist view that we can only make judgments about appearances. But as it stands, he's in trouble. Only Kantians think otherwise but it's not very convincing.

>>22172849
Then what good is it to be unwise? Not that I've read a single line from Severino.

>>22172360
>>22172879
What's Severino about? I googled him and it says he's some Italian neo-Eleatic. If you guys like that you should check out F.H. Bradley.

>>22172870
the key to this is that because of the categories we have to think a cause of the phenomena, although in itself there may well be no cause. The thing-in-itself shows itself to be a necessary concept from the standpoint of the human mind. It is only a concept for us, but for us it is also a necessary concept to make sense of the phenomena as a whole.

>>22173111
I don't think it's even necessary, but if it was as the Kantians say, read that way threatens to idealize it. If it's just a regulative concept it's as ideal as the transcendental forms, categories, and ideas.

>>22173111
>>22173126
The things in themselves are just necessary limits of our own cognition. As the anon said, we can only cognize what is given through a priori conditions (space and time, categories). Things in themselves are things as they are not given through anything, no condition at all, but as they are in themselves. But this is something we cannot know. I don't know how this escapes the Cartesian skepticism, if this inference of there being a real thing in itself that is filtered through our own a priori forms of possible of experience is something natural to the way we operate and cognize things, not an apprehension of the reality that encompasses things in themselves and appearances. At the same time, what is this that is given to be shaped into appearance then?

>>22173111
>>22173157
Frankly Kant's big error as I see it, is in taking "intellectual intuition" unseriously. He conceives of it as the ability to think something not given in empirical intuition, being able to assign concepts to it even. That, in principle, is exactly how definite description works (per metaphysical realism) and other ways of referring in the absence of acquaintance. The problem is that Kant always thought of intellectual intuition as the intuition God has, where God is active rather than us being passive (our sensibility anyway), so God needs no mediation by appearance, but literally creates the objects he intellectually intuits. It's a very traditional Platonistic/Scholastic idea of God creating in the act of thinking things. And it's also why Fichte, once he put his trust into intellectual intuition, also retools it to idealist purposes. For Fichte the I posits itself: we intuit our self via intellectual intuition, and in the same process the I posits itself as well. It's just unfortunate Kant didn't just play around with the notion of intellectual intuition further, because it was very close to the realist's notion of reference without intuition like I said.

>>22173126
yes it is an Idea of Pure Reason, not constitutive, regulative as you say, but necessary for reason in the same way God is necessary because it seeks completion. Empirically speaking, it does not exist, obviously, and will never be confirmed, but rationally it is necessary, even purely from a theoretical standpoint, in order to provide scientific enquiry with a regulative idea toward which it can aspire, namely ultimate reality, the truth, etc.

>>22173182
My worry with seeing the thing in itself as a merely regulative idea is that, given that the only sense in which the other transcendental ideas can even make some possible reference to an outside world, for the purpose of having some possible truthfulness, whether we know it or not, depends on things in themselves being distinguished from appearances, if things and themselves stop being a second kind of thing distinct from appearances and just another transcendental idea, then we lose the intelligibility of even saying such things as "Maybe we can take ourselves as having freedom in the noumenal world even if we are ruled by causation in the phenomenal world." It just pulls the rug from under Kant. It's genuinely no surprise to me that the later post-Kantians like Fichte just went full idealist. I'm not an idealist but I find them more consistent than Kant. I've looked at a lot of Kantians trying to defend Kant and it just never manages to convince me, I'm sorry to say.

>>22173180
>Kant's big error as I see it, is in taking "intellectual intuition" unseriously
well that's where Hegel comes in ( probably schelling too and fichte but I havn't read enough of them). Hegel basically would take transcendental enquiry to be the intellect intuiting itself. Hegel takes Kant's famous dictum "Concepts without intuitions are empty; Intuitions without concepts are blind", and (whereas Kant only admitted empirical intuition) makes Logic the exception, since in Logic thought is thinking about itself, and since thinking is done with concepts the content of the concepts of Logic are concepts themselves.

>>22173222
Yeah and it traces back before Schelling and Hegel back to the very early reception of Kant. Jacobi and Schulze gave him a hard time over the thing in itself, and Fichte also felt it was an issue, but he turned to taking intellectual intuition more seriously than Kant and it gave him a nice way forward. I do feel Fichte is a more consistent way forward than Kant, and his generative dialectics aside, if we Fichteanize Kant at least a little bit to make him full-idealist, I think Kant becomes more consistent.

>>22170025
this wasn't answered

>>22173250
Not the anon you're posting to but I remember they had some funky emperors around the Renaissance era forbidding voyages of discovery to the east. So I wouldn't be surprised if there was just a general spirit of lack of innovation due to their centralized authoritarianism. It's true even now in current PRC. All the interesting Chinese philosophy emerged when China was broken up into small states.

>>22173233
>Fichteanize Kant
the way I see it Kant saying the Thing-in-itself is a regulative idea is the same as Fichte denying the existence of the Thing in itself, since the concept is the same for both, and denying it's existence is just saying it can never be an object of experience, which is what Kant said. Fichte himself even said he was just saying what Kant was saying,

>>22173263
That’s a shame

>>22173182
>but rationally it is necessary, even purely from a theoretical standpoint, in order to provide scientific enquiry with a regulative idea toward which it can aspire, namely ultimate reality, the truth, etc.
But isn't the point that this extension is played by reason and not the understanding, and hence not necessary at all? The distinction that the understanding combines in order to get a picture of the sensible, phenomenal world, whereas reason combines in order to get a picture of the intellectual, metaphysical world?

>>22173291
On another topic, is the idea that reality is illusory found in Kant or is that just a Berkeley thing?

>>22173286
>I have always said, and say again, that my system is the same as Kant’s.
-first introduction to wissenschaftlehre

>>22173294
reason is always running ahead of understanding. reason builds the road but understanding has to walk it. and it is a really long fucking road.

>>22173286
>>22173298
Kant denied he was saying what Fichte was saying he was saying, unfortunately. I do find Fichte's Kant to be a better Kant than historical Kant seems to have been.
>>22173296
Speaking of Fichte, he's even more subjective idealist than Berkeley. Berkeley reduces reality to ideas in minds (including the mind of God). But then he doesn't explain how we can talk about mental substances without having ideas of them. Fichte actually makes even the self rely on itself for its existence.

by the way bros, I know this seems totally out of left field, but read Eliphas Levi after reading Kant and the German Idealists. Things begin to click and it's uncanny. Assuming you like getting your mind blown.

>>22173330
What would be examples of mental substances?

>>22173307
This metaphor has nothing to do with Kant, though. The understanding does not progress on the same road.

>>22173339
I just mean "mind" as the thing that has the ideas. Berkeley kept that as a holdover from Locke and Descartes before him (the res cogitans). It's ironic because he criticized Lockean matter because we have no direct ideas of it, but then he admits we have no direct idea of Berkeleian mind either. Unsurprisingly Hume afterward gets rid of both because of this.

>>22173349
the road metaphor is mine but Kant says the same thing.

>Thus, pure reason, which at first seemed to promise us nothing less than the extension of our cognition beyond the limits of experience, is found, when thoroughly examined, to contain nothing but regulative principles, the virtue and function of which is to introduce into our cognition a higher degree of unity than the understanding could of itself. These principles, by PLACING THE GOAL of all our struggles at SO GREAT A DISTANCE, realize for us the most thorough connection between the different parts of our cognition, and the highest degree of systematic unity.

>>22166445
It has already been empirically solved by NDEs, that clearly show that all reality is in the mind, and ni de is a shared dream.

And NDEs are more real than this world, in every way. For example, they are more consistent experiences, illustrated well by this quote:

>"For me, life is sort of like the haunted house. When you come in, you know it's just an experience. It's small, it's just one night, right? So it's just this one life. You're eternal, you have billions of lives, so knowing that you're going to come in just for one to have an experience, though it may be judged as tough, or difficult, or scary, you actually chose it because you knew it was just going to be an experience, you know it's no big deal. You understand on the other side that this part, life, is actually the dream, and you just wake up after. It's no different than one dream you had last night, out of a lifetime of dreams. This life that you're having right now is just one, it's just a blip."

So just like life is more consistent than our dreams (dreams last a few moments, life has been the same for decades), so too is the NDE reality more consistent than life (life has been the same for decades, the NDE reality has been the same for forever, for way more than trillions of years). Here this point is elaborated more on:

https://youtu.be/U00ibBGZp7o

And it is instantly evident to NDErs that heaven is real too, even atheists:

>"It's real to us when we're in it, but once I was there in heaven I realized that's more real, that felt more real, and it made much more sense to me than anything here. This is kind of nonsensical at times. In heaven, it's so clear, so real, so rational, so logical, but yet emotional and loving at the same time. Immediately I knew that was real and this was not. Immediately."

From https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/mysteries-consciousness/202204/does-afterlife-obviously-exist

So heaven is undeniably real. And the brain is just an idea we have. Even neurologists atheists are convinced by their NDEs.

After contributing to this and past generals it's interesting how the analytics and the German Idealists tend to have the most thought-out stuff to say about metaphysics. I hear in Germany, there's a tendency to try to study both nowadays. They have a bit of pride in Frege, Wittgenstein, and Carnap being among their own, and they obviously love Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel.

>>22173397
>ni de
life*

>>22173397
This reminded me (since I mentioned Ayer earlier in this thread) that old Ayer (even though he didn't believe in an afterlife, being an atheist) had a NDE himself. He wasn't sure what to make of it.

>>22173397
I went down the NDE rabbit-hole on NDERF.org a long time ago, but became more skeptical with all the conflicting messages people brought back.
One person says Hell is real.
One says Hell isn't real, there's just Heaven.
Another says we all get reincarnated and what we do on Earth is very important.
Another person says that we do get reincarnated, but our actions are meaningless.
One will say that there is an existential fight between Good and Evil.
Another will say that Evil doesn't exist only Goodness exists.
One will say Jesus is King.
Another will say all the religions are equally wrong.
Some will say it's all about getting your vibrations to a high enough frequency to level up.
Another will say Earth is like an amusement park and it's all just for funsy.
Etc., etc., etc.

>>22173446
Good point anon. Reminds me of how there's also conflicting revelations people get. I am generally trusting of them, but it's clear even if they're authentic revelations, they can't all be true ones. Assuming they're not made up nor psychological, this means there are either a lot of lying spirits out there telling humans false things, or all the spirits are liars.

>>22166445
"Naive" dualism, soul bodies inside physical bodies with some intermediary force.
>>22173446
>>22173532
>all the religions are equally wrong
>a lot of lying spirits
These are correct.
Swedenborg minus the obvious Christian embellishments is the most accurate account of the spiritual world and afterlife.

>>22173626

>>22172879
>>22172888
Start from pic related, then learn Italian in two weeks and work your way up to the rest of his published books. He's the most important philosopher since Aristotle.

What is that pesky little feeling in my head that I exist? Why am I not a mute void inside, with a body and brain and clever electricity sophisticated enough to do everything it can to eat and reproduce simply because it was wired that why, like a coiled spring? But I'm actually in here thinking and feeling? How on earth could a materialist ever deny that we have souls, are they retarded.

>>22174082
>How on earth could a materialist ever deny that we have souls, are they retarded.
they have no soul

>>22174082
They don't deny it, except for the Churchlands. They reduce it, which is still dumb, but it's better than denying it.
>>22174071
Thanks anon this is interesting

>>22174659
>Thanks anon this is interesting
You're welcome anon

bump

>>22175762
Thoughts on >>22173398 ?

>>22175983
check out Lorenz Puntel. He checks all the boxes.

Analytic: check
German: check
Systematic: check

>>22176600
It's on my radar, I've got a pdf saved for later.

>>22173219
my response to you is that although the Thing-in-itself is an Idea of Reason and is therefore only an object of thought, as I said in a previous reply, being rational creatures we must necessarily, from a standpoint within the phenomena, think a thing-in-itself, as some unknown beyond the phenomena which we attribute causality to from the fact that thinking presupposes the categories. It remains only a thought, yes, but for us a necessary thought. As I said earlier, the reality of the thing-in-itself (as opposed to the mere thought) must necessarily remained undetermined since it is not phenomena- but this necessary indeterminacy is the key that opens the door, at least theoretically, to free will, if not as an actuality, then at least as a possibility, and saves free will from the determinist, or denier of free will, since Kant's conclusion is that, theoretically, reasons cannot be given for or against free will since freedom, is not a phenomena (since its essence transcends empirical necessity). This is where the first critique ends, clearing the ground for the critique of practical reason to prove rationally the necessity of free will.

>>22177336
hence Kant saying "I have found it necessary to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith"-- a rational faith, by the way, not a blind faith, grounded on practical reason.

>>22177587
>practical reason
i should also clarify that this rational faith (perhaps a better word is belief) is grounded on PURE practical reason, or put another way, demands belief (independently of all inclinations of pleasure and pain, which are empirical) in the Ideas in order to act rationally, or to act in accordance with pure reason, as a law unto itself in opposition to natural necessity.

>>22177587
>I have found it necessary to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith
I fucking hate him so much

>>22166445
Some kind of property dualism. I believe consciousness is non-localized, discrete, introspectively misleading, but still a meaningful entity to talk about divorced from the brain. I think it is clear that whenever we have to use different methods or vocabulary in a science or discipline, the matter of that science or discipline is different in some conceptual way. Even if you are a reductive physicalist, you cannot explain away the unexplainability of mental phenomena using pure external observation.

>>22166648
>They are tasked with explaining an EMERGENT, holistic property of assemblages of a substrate, so they say "okay, the substrate has property-X 'in' it potentially; but it doesn't manifest until the assemblage gets together."
This is spot on. Panpsychism cannot a priori establish the type distinction between mental and non-mental (in the most naive sense) even within its own “everything has mental properties” framework. Kastrup’s Analytic Idealism, which I actually think is a really interesting system, has so much trouble differentiating “internal” and “external” phenomenality to the extent where you get really ridiculous statements like “objects are the external phenomenal appearance of consciousness.”

>>22177601
>deny knowledge to make room for faith
>grounded on practical reason
trolling? if you can't see the contradiction here, you're beyond help

>>22177587
>>22177608
Kant was a troll

>>22177787
wise anon who is smarter than Kant, please, explain the contradiction.

>>22174082
Nigger, it is required that you consume material substances multiple times per day in order to live. You are a slave to matter.

>>22177336
Yeah but the way you put it, if accurate to Kant, feels like it's full of tension and inconsistency with itself. Like I said earlier, I prefer the Fichteanized version of Kant because at least that alternative Kant resolves those tensions, but in the direction of idealism. I wish Kant resolved the tensions himself, but in the direction of realism, since I believe that to be the right way.

>>22177336
Jacobi showed that the thing in itself completely spoils Kant’s philosophical defense against Cartesian skepticism and radical forms of idealism. I think just as Maimon criticized the incongruence of the understanding and sensibility and then the necessity of the application of the categories to phenomena, it is perfectly reasonable to be led by reason to the opposite way: it is as much necessary to withhold any inference from something unknown.

>>22178316
I feel the same way, anon. Have you read Hamann?

>>22178348
No not yet, where do you recommend starting with Hamann? I hear he has some linguistic constructivist kind of views.

>>22178348
>much necessary to withhold any inference from something unknown.
Kant says the same thing, as far as theoretical reason is concerned, he doesn't affirm or deny anything about the thing-in-itself, only that we as rational humans have to posit it as the cause of phenomena, not as an actually, just as a thought. Any attributes of supersensible reality are withheld until the critique of practical reason? does nobody read the second critique?

>>22178555
The point is that this does not differ much from a Berkeleyan idealism.

>>22178459
Yeah, he credits culture and language as sources of man’s rational development. I read Berlin’s essay on him and intend on reading Jean Blum’s book on him, but I think it is only available in French.

>>22178693
>Berkeleyan idealism.
dude what? he literally revised the first critique because of that accusation. He brand new section to refute those accusations literally titled "Refutation of Idealism" but he had already refuted in the aesthetic

>the dogmatical idealism of Berkeley, who maintains that space, together with all the objects of which it is the inseparable condition, is a thing which is in itself impossible, and that consequently the objects in space are mere products of the imagination. The dogmatical theory of idealism is unavoidable, if we regard space as a property of things in themselves; for in that case it is, with all to which it serves as condition, a nonentity. But the foundation for this kind of idealism we have already destroyed in the transcendental aesthetic.

>>22178761
I know that. But Kant’s space is just an ideal product that filters all objects of cognition. Positing the existence of things unfiltered as necessary for his realism does not differ from Berkeley’s God as the cause of sensory ideas.

>>22178761
Kant denied he was a Berkeleian but if the thing in itself is just a regulative ideal, he was a Berkeleian. And if he's able to make it something genuinely beyond phenomena, then he's facing tension because he speaks of it as if it has reality, as if it were substance capable of freedom, and as if it were the causal ground of empirical content affecting the faculty of sensibility. He should make no judgments about it, but he does. Everyone that's not a Kantian feels he's just got tensions in his work he never really fixed and like the anon you're replying to I agree that he's just unable to fix it. Only Kantians think he's somehow consistent. He can become consistent if he revises some of what he says. Fichte turns him consistent, but by making him a subjective idealist.

>>22160580
Who is him?

>>22178836
Yes, Kant must either fall under subjective idealism or ground the givenness of the matter of our sensibility on mere belief, but the latter violates his critical project, so he cannot do that. That’s why he insists with his own framework and thus approach subjective idealism.

>>22177587
>a rational faith, by the way, not a blind faith, grounded on practical reason.
I'd pick the rational faith of the True Church of Jesus Christ, based on the practical reason of Biblical revelation.

>>22156619
For me I ask ChatGPT to dumb down metaphysics for me

>>22178822
Except Kant is not affirming anything about the thing-in-itself as an actual thing, just as a pure concept our reason is forced to arrive at by it's nature. From, a theoretical standpoint Kant is agnostic about the thing-in-itself as actuality, unlike Berkeley.

>>22179248
Kant is far from being unambiguous about the thing in itself. While he may affirm agnosticism when directly referring to them, his whole system presupposes their existence in order to account for the role of sensibility and the understanding consequently.
Reason demands the unconditioned, yes. Berkeley is just more honest about it.

>>22179248
>>22179275
Something interesting also is the way Kant responds to Berkeley is still fundamentally very idealist. Kant's issue with Berkeley is not actually his idealism, but his reduction of the outer form of intuition, known via outer sense, to the inner form of intuition, known via inner sense. But both are transcendentally ideal for Kant anyway so this proves very little.

>>22179275
>his whole system presupposes their existence in order to account for the role of sensibility
all Kant said is we are affected. He takes this as an immediate fact; we have sensations, but as soon as we go beyond these sensations and suppose a cause of these sensations we are already engaged in thinking. Again, thinking demands and unconditioned, but it can only legitimately use the category of causality to find the proximate cause WITHIN the phenomena. To attribute causality to the thing-in-itself, as a noumena in the positive sense, as a subject-independent reality, is an illegitimate move, but a rationally necessary one, that we cannot stop from doing, and which he calls transcendental illusion. BUT, it is not Berkeleyan idealism, because he is not affirming or denying there is a positive noumena (subject-independent object) causing our sensations. All we know is we have sensations. period. This is the limit of human knowledge, for the sake of knowledge (theoretical). Whether we have other (practical) reasons for belief in positive noumena is left for the second critique, but as far as the critique of reason purely in its speculative use, or in it's use purely for the sake of gaining knowledge, Kants conclusion is agnostic with respect to the thing-in-itself; Kant is agnostic even with respect to a cause our sensations. But he does not deny there is a mind-independent cause of sensations like Berkeley-- which means he is not a subjective idealist, but neither does he affirm it, theoretically, speculatively. He DOES affirm it practically, but not as knowledge, only as rational belief, but, again that is another topic.

>>22179704
>To attribute causality to the thing-in-itself, as a noumena in the positive sense, as a subject-independent reality, is an illegitimate move, but a rationally necessary one
Yeah but that's only because Kant concluded that for synthetic a priori principles to work, they'd have to be transcendentally ideal. It was his big mistake. Once you give that up and allow that necessary synthetic connections can obtain outside experience and be known separately from experience, you start approaching modern realist views. In trying to save the sciences from Humean skepticism he just ended up idealizing everything, which isn't a great salvation.
>But he does not deny there is a mind-independent cause of sensations like Berkeley
Berkeley doesn't deny it either technically, because he posits God as the source of all mind-independent enduring or persisting sensations, just as the fleeting ones are produced by ourselves. To translate it into Kantian terms: Berkeley's God is responsible for outer sense and Berkeley's human minds are responsible for inner sense. Kant, in his Refutation of Idealism, accuses Berkeley of reducing outer sense to inner sense, and Kant's whole argument depends on there being permanence in outer sense as a way to refute Berkeley. In reality Berkeley accepted permanence, because God's permanence is a given. If anything it's Kant who could be said to be more idealist than Berkeley. Berkeley keeps outer sense grounded in God (outside us), much as it previously was grounded in matter. But Kant makes both outer and inner sense be grounded in one and the same transcendental subject (ourselves). From this perspective Kant was actually a bigger idealist than Berkeley.

>>22178896
>t. doesn't know Christ is the Logos and the Logos is Pure Reason

*ahem

Negative determinations of intellect: A Hegelian critique of Slayer's phenomenology

>Abstract:
>This article sketches Slayer's phenomenology in close connection with Hegel's philosophy. It argues that, while the conceptual and teleological distance between the two parts is definitively a very large one, there are also important and rather unusual points of convergence on several topics, religion and war being the most prominent of them. Taking into account other seminal themes existent both in Slayer's lyrics and, to a certain extent, in Hegel's philosophy--like evil, criminality, scepticism and nihilism, besides the already mentioned religion and war, the article tries to introduce possible common grounds between these two radically different continents, arguing that Hegel's dialectical method can be successfully extended also to apparently 'exotic' themes, as Slayer's phenomenology, among many others.

>>22179766
>Once you give that up and allow that necessary synthetic connections can obtain outside experience and be known separately from experience, you start approaching modern realist views.
wtf are you talking about? we started this conversation because you were asserting a posteriori necessity (which as a posteriori would derive from experience, and as necessary Hume already showed to not exist) which I said was contradictory and resulted from confusing empirical objects with objects as they are independent of sense experience. Now you're saying necessary synthetic connections (which is just another way of saying synthetic a priori judgements, since necessity is only obtained apriori) can obtain outside experience and be known separately from experience, which is to apply categories transcendently and to affirm predicates to things which we can never experience directly, since they are outside experience. And this is literally what have just spent a whole thread discussing. If you just assert the legitimacy of necessary connection outside experience, then you just beg the question which has been at issue this whole thread: does mind-independent reality exist? At least Kant takes this question seriously, whereas modern realism just takes its existence for granted.

>>22179766
>Kant makes both outer and inner sense be grounded in one and the same transcendental subject (ourselves)
are you serious? I just explained this. The transcendental subject is synomymous with the thing-in-itself since it lies beyond experience (we do not know ourselves as we are, but only as we appear to ourselves) and my remarks regarding Kants thoughts on the thing-in-itself also apply to the transcendental subject.

Do we all agree that space and time do not refer to the same phenomenon?

>>22179945
no obviously

>>22179949
Do you?

>>22179952
space and time could be one thing: spacetime. but idk I don't have the eyes to see.

>>22173354
This sounds super-nihilistic

>>22179955
>spacetime
Could be matter too.

>>22179943
How does this change what I said? Kant grounds the two in one (you saying the thing in itself is synonymous with the transcendental subject would just make that even more true), while Berkeley keeps them grounded in two (our minds for inner sense, vs. God's mind for outer sense). You actually just made it even more clearly monistic and subjective idealist than Kant himself would have done, i.e. shown that Kant should be read as Fichte does, but Kant himself insisted otherwise. Oh well, I agree with Fichte that's a more consistent reading of Kant. Either way, still more idealist than Berkeley.
>>22179932
> If you just assert the legitimacy of necessary connection outside experience, then you just beg the question which has been at issue this whole thread: does mind-independent reality exist?
Look, here's what I said about this here: >>22172372
>This only feels contradictory if you presuppose its truth. It's why realists and anti-realists can never prove their side to the other side, unfortunately. For a realist there's nothing contradictory with there being things outside of a subject thinking them.
It's not that realists beg the question, so much as that both sides beg the question because for both sides something is obvious to them that the other doesn't grant. Kant isn't immune from it himself. He's ruling out what the realists accept in principle? Why? No argument is given: he just asserts it. You can say we beg the question and we say you beg the question back. To us it seems too obvious a datum to ignore, that thought can reach beyond experience. When we say "Something I've never experienced nor any human will ever experience," that manages to refer whether or not any of us humans manage to experience it. That seems obvious to us, as obvious as 2+2=4,~(p&~p), or the redness of red color when we see it. Of course we can't deduce it from what your side accepts if you reject it. So don't fault us for not providing it to your side. But this idea that the side with the smaller number of starting bases is less responsible for proving their side to the other, is absurd. At that point, the most austere reductionists will be able to act like both you and I are "begging the question" because we include more primitives in our base than them. There's a point at which impoverishing one's base crosses the line into greater, not lesser, absurdity, and relying solely on Occamist arguments of simplicity fails rather than works.

>>22173626
I have Heaven and Hell opened up somewhere

>>22179704
DAH, what is the manifold?

>>22179955
>>22179972
Forgot to mention causality. Spacetime, matter, and causality all imply space and time.

>>22179995
>Kant grounds the two in one
no. "thing-in-itself" and "transcendental subject" are just place-holders for some unknown x, the concept of the transcendent, which really just the concept of nothing. Categories, including those of quantity, cannot even be applied to it. The "two" are not "one", not even this can be attributed to it. And, again for the millionth time, Kant does not affirm it as ground of the empirical self nor of the world of sense-experience, he is absolutely agnostic about it as a reality, let alone as a real ground of self and world. Only by the necessity of the nature of thought, not in reality, is any of this attributed to it, at least until we are concerned with questions of determing the will by pure reason. And now I have to ask, have you have you even read the second critique?

>He's ruling out what the realists accept in principle? Why? No argument is given: he just asserts it.
Are you fucking kidding me? no argument is given? he just asserts it? Did you even read the first critique? The whole book is the argument. Transcendental Idealism is the conclusion. He begins with exactly the same thing the realist begins with, his immediately present experience, and shows the contradictions that worldview leads to. The Realists cannot refute Kant, all they do is dismiss him right at the start and more or less presuppose common sense reality, and when they inevitably run into contradictions (like necessary a posteriori judgments) they stubbornly refuse to take the Kantian way out because "he just can't be right ok?!"

>>22180011
the manifold is just the totality of unordered/uncategorized sensations you have at any given time or place. Like onefold, twofold, threefold, ..., many-fold.

Does this count as a schizo thread?

>>22180064
Wait, not like instantaneous immediate formless sensations? Because since you said at any time or place, they already would be filtered by the a priori form of space. But then how are they different from the subject if the subject is already filtering them through an a priori form of sensation?

>>22180046
>The Realists cannot refute Kant, all they do is dismiss him right at the start and more or less presuppose common sense reality
But one of the main arguments of the Realists, the problem which the thing-in-itself presents to Kant's system, was reaffirmed by other idealists like Maimon, Hegel. So this has nothing to do with an assumption of principles by the Realists, but with what is inherent to Kant himself (like his agnosticism but also his terms like affection, receptivity when referring to sources of objects).

>>22180096
you cannot have sensations apart from space and time bc they are the form of sensibility itself. All your sensations must be presented in space and time for you to even have sensations. However, there is no concept of difference until thinking begins, when the categories synthesize the manifold. Prior to that synthesis there is no difference, but there is also no "you" to know it either.

>>22180046
>He begins with exactly the same thing the realist begins with, his immediately present experience
That's literally the problem. He's leaving out the data realists take seriously: that thought DOES reach beyond experience. Every time we make a definite description we reach its referent whether we've experienced it or not. Every time we give an indefinite description we reach multiple possible referents, and have no way of picking one out among their number, but we're capable of thinking them anyway. When I think the most general concept ("Everything") my thought reaches everything. It doesn't reach them individually and reveal what they are like to me, that's what experience is for. This is a starting datum for realists that you, as a Kantian, aren't even accepting. So no, we don't "begin with exactly the same thing." You begin with less and stubbornly refuse to accept what you leave out, or at least that's the realist perspective. Which comes back to what I already said TWICE, i.e. the issue is that the two sides disagree about what to accept and reject as the starting base, and so can't prove anything to the other side that way.
>The Realists cannot refute Kant, all they do is dismiss him right at the start
Yes, and so they should. Having a robustly realist notion of the referential extent of thought is as crucial as accepting the laws of logic and the experience of the senses and anything that Kant thinks is synthetic a priori. It's not a conclusion to be derived from something else, it's a starting point.
>and when they inevitably run into contradictions (like necessary a posteriori judgments
There is no contradiction in it UNLESS you already accept Kant's more impoverished starting base. Unsurprisingly if you start from Kant's base you end right back at his base, who would have thought. The point the realist grants is you can't DERIVE the realist conclusion, it's part of the starting base. The realist just feels Kant did wrong to leave it out. Might as well leave out synthetic a priori crap (like arithmetic and geometric truths for Kant, or laws of physics, apparently) or hell, even synthetic a posteriori (sense experience) and/or analytic a priori (logic). Why don't you? Right, because we need to start somewhere.

talk more lads.

>>22180440
We've been derailed into Kant talk, and it would be nice to discuss some other metaphysics and metametaphysics. What do you guys want to discuss next?
>Presocratics
>Plato/Neoplatonism
>Aristotle/Scholasticism
>Early moderns
>German Idealism
>Other 19th century stuff
>Existentialism/phenomenology
>Analytic philosophy pre-1970
>Structuralism/Postmodernism
>Contemporary continental
>Contemporary analytic
I can say some things about each of these if someone else wants to tango with me.

>>22177742
>get so smart it becomes advantageous to reflect on your own surroundings
>you're smart because it's advantageous to being dumb
>As a byproduct of reflecting on your own surroundings, you can now deconstruct the world and understand it as you live in it
It's really that simple + has yet to been refuted aside from a vague sense of "it's too special to be simply natural"

>>22180083
is there any thread that doesn't

>>22180518
are you a history of philosophy phd?

>>22180594
Bad post. Gb2>>>/sci/

You did not solve the problem but merely explained it away evolutionarily with a just so answer. The question remains, what *is* consciousness? Your post unfortunately offers no insight whatsoever. Nor does it even attempt a legitimate answer.

>>22181075
No but I am a PhD student specializing in metaphysics.

>>22180518
Pre-Socratics. The rest of the stuff you listed is pretty much a failure. Wouldn't mind more about the sophists, the dialecticians, and daoism.

I posted about xuanxue above and I think someone wanted to know about modern stuff. The thread then ballooned and I didn't check it. sorry I don't read anything from post-unification, beyond these early xuanxue commentators, so I can't give a good answer. Maybe some cringe neoconfucianist or daoism-as-a-religion sort can help you.

>>22180285
>He's leaving out the data realists take seriously: that thought DOES reach beyond experience.
>>22180285
>There is no contradiction in it UNLESS you already accept Kant's more impoverished starting base.
and you are wrong here, again. Kant does not presuppose that thought does not reach beyond experience. He grants the realist this and shows that it leads to unsolvable contradictions. They are not contradictions only if you presuppose the correctness of transcendental idealism, you have it backwards, it is the contradictions that result from the realist view (similar to this necessary a posteriori nonsense) that forced Kant into transcendental idealism. All you are saying amounts to is the stubborn refusal to either recognize the contradictions, or if you do recognize them, to refuse-- God knows why-- to take the transcendental idealism pill even though it resolves the contradictions. Both sides do NOT disagree as to the starting base as you affirm, instead the idealists already took that base and extrapolated its absurd consequences while the realists plugged their fingers in their ears and closed their eyes going "lalalalala I'm not hearing this" went on playing pretend philosophy as if Kant had never happened.

>The point the realist grants is you can't DERIVE the realist conclusion, it's part of the starting base. The realist just feels Kant did wrong to leave it out. Might as well leave out synthetic a priori crap (like arithmetic and geometric truths for Kant, or laws of physics, apparently) or hell, even synthetic a posteriori (sense experience) and/or analytic a priori (logic). Why don't you? Right, because we need to start somewhere.
Again, Kant ran through the absurd consequences of this starting base, and rejected it. He did not just start by "leaving it out", and the distinctions he developed he ARRIVED AT (NOT BEGAN WITH) at different points throughout the arguments of the critique. Read the Critique again.

Kant:
>But I fear that the execution of Hume's problem in its widest extent (viz., my Critique of the Pure Reason) will fare as the problem itself fared, when first proposed. It will be misjudged because it is misunderstood, and misunderstood because men choose to skim through the book, and not to think through it

And Fichte:
>No one can and shall understand my writings, without having studied them; for they do not contain a lesson heretofore taught, but something—since Kant has not been understood—altogether new to the age.

>>22182823
and as to the question as to why Kant disassociated himself from Fichte's reading of his works, I speculate he had practical (kek) reasons (like not getting accused of atheism by midwits who'd misunderstand him, and getting his professorship taken away, as happened to Wolff before him, and to Fichte himself afterwards) rather than theoretical reasons.

>>22182823
>>22182875
No you really don't have the same starting base. Kant doesn't even once consider the notion of a definite description. The very idea was not logically formulated as such til the early 1900s owing to logical developments from the late 1800s. As such, there was definitely a risk that someone like Kant wouldn't latch on to the notion, and this is exactly what happened.

>>22181099
There is no such thing as consciousness though.
The only real thing is experience

>>22182823
Do you not think that Kantian practical reason is close to the role Hume assigns to nature when he says that the theoretical framework of the skeptical does not lead to action and is forced by nature to obviate these meditations, weak when faced with practice? I agree that we should be able to justify it rationally, hence the rational character of the Kantian praxis, but I think that it is obvious that this justification is meaningless to the actual practice. I know you won't agree but I'm curious about whether you concede or not that proximity with Hume's conclusions against skepticism.

>>22183052
Why is experience experienced by an entity that seems to by myself? Usually people only claim to have no self when on psychedelics or experiencing psychotic breaks. Does not seem very convincing evidence. Nor does "meditation" if people could even agree what that means...

nump

>>22183077
read picrel for your answer

>>22183052
stupidest shit Ive read this whole thread. Experience presupposes consciousness. You cannot have an unconscious experience, which would just be not to have an experience at all.

>>22181606
face wall

Do metaphysicians study and deal with quantum interpretations along with their other topics? I'm thinking of things like realism in quantum mechanics. Or do they mainly leave it to physicists and philosophers of physics?

>>22184008
Sure, you could search on Philipapers has a lot of these kinds of papers indexed.
For example:
https://philpapers.org/rec/CHERAT-5

https://philpapers.org/rec/PRIANR

https://philpapers.org/rec/SAUAQP-2

https://philpapers.org/rec/EPPQMA-5

>>22183908
?

What do metaphysicians think about things like ghosts, demons, aliens, ESP, and the consequences of post-human evollution on the capacities of the mind, and consequently of suprahuman capacities to obtain metaphysical knowledge? Any books or papers on this topic? I asked my metaphysics prof but he just said he was "unsympathetic" to such concerns.

>>22184337
Pretty common to believe in things like that in ages prior. Most German Idealists were sympathetic to idea. Many pragmatists were as well. I dislike way you phrased it as posthuman evolution but is portrayed that way in like gundam newtypes and x men and whatnot. You may enjoy Kripal's book The Superhumanities. Colin Wilson's Occult series perhaps too. I find Wilson a bit shallow however. Also, I believe Litwa (Hermetica II compiler/translator) has a book on ancient techniques of posthumanism as well tho forget title and have not read (prefer this ancient idea over evolutionary take tho mayhaps not in disagreement?).

>obtain metaphysical knowledge
As Plato says, philosophy is the search and not the destination (the destination never arrives... or as Nietzsche says "even the Gods philosophize...")

>>22184498
>Kripal
>Wilson
>Litwa
good recs. thanks anon.

>>22184498
>Pretty common to believe in things like that in ages prior.
what happened to change that?

>>22184337
The evidence you need to believe in the paranormal is empirical, just like what the sciences and history and revealed religion do. Metaphysics largely works a priori, so I'm not sure that this stuff counts as metaphysics, frankly. Science, history, and revealed religion aren't metaphysics either. You can settle the question of the paranormal however you want but it doesn't feel like a topic for metaphysicians to settle.

>>22184646
There's a couple of reason. Blame the enlightenment mostly (the endarkenment more like). Protestantism (heresy). Doctrine of Cessation of Miracles (blasphemy). Concept of Pura Natura (incoherent but beloved of bugmen). Hume (lol, lmao even). Problem of Disenchantment by Asprem is good on subject. Deals with downfall of esoteric/hermetic hermeneutic which is part and parcel. Myth of Disenchantment by Storm would also be relevant as a sort of counterpoint. Talks about the goalpost shitt mentioned here >>22184740 wherein philosophers attempted to view it (supernatural) empirically rather than rationally (as if they are opposed, another incoherence of contemporaneity...)

>>22184837
My dude I believe in miracles. Saying paranormal stuff isn't metaphysics is just like saying it's not mathematics. Calm down.

>>22184860
Metaphysics is the study of the fundamental nature of reality. If miracles are real they are part of metaphysics. Idk what numbers have to do with shit. I find supernatural discourse a bit confused because of linguistic shifts in general (how is supernatural different than natural? One must presuppose that scientific reductive naturalism is correct and opposed and so on etc) but ya sorry I take on a weird tone when posting sometimes. Amuses me but may make my posts seem beligerent sorry but that's show bidness I sppose :^)

>>22184865
>Metaphysics is the study of the fundamental nature of reality
Yes, and you can spell out the metaphysics of miracles and of stuff like faith, or immaterial substances, etc. But the original post asked specifically about ghosts, demons, aliens, and psychic powers. Those are particulars for which one looks to the world to determine if it exists or not. Calling it "empirical" doesn't mean a scientist has to study in a lab. Testimony-collection is empirical, for example. So it could be ghosts exists if you trust the testimonies, or if you've seen one and trust your senses. But that's not giving the metaphysics of what's fundamental, anymore than counting the species of animals and plants is, or tracing the history of Roman emperors.

bump

>>22184837
Boehme was a precursor to Lutheranism and I don't think he was necessarily opposed to the existence of such things

>>22184337
Very normal to take them seriously. Probably like half of philosophers around 1890 were curious about paranormal phenomena, especially since mediumship and mesmerism were extremely common claims and big movements in the 19th century, same with faith healing like Christian Science. "Mind over matter" was very plausible, and people were interested in things like psychic powers, mind over matter, ESP, etc. They set up learned societies to discuss these things and investigate concrete claims, like the Society for Paranormal Research. Lots of major thinkers were involved in these sorts of things. William James is one of the greatest examples probably. In his textbook on philosophy of mind (Principles of Psychology) he openly posits things like the brain being a receiver for higher aspects of the soul, and not a machine that produces consciousness.

Keep in mind all these guys are also reading multiple decades of oriental philosophy, including Vedanta and Buddhism, and see it as an entire culture tradition expressing basically the same truths as Platonism and Neoplatonism.

The dominant tendency of the age was definitely materialistic and sceptical but it was nothing like as dominant as it is now, where the "default" view is extremely materialistic and people only feel free to speculate after apologizing for it ten times and saying they know they're weirdos. For example basically all the great writers of the English ghost story, a genre as popular as detective novels and as true crime is today (the fact that these eclipsed the classic ghost story is revealing), were members of major occult societies and totally believed in ghosts. There was a general mood around, I'd say 1880-1920 of extremely high hopes for paranormal phenomena to be studied empirically. Things like reincarnation, ghosts, ESP, everything. The Theosophical movement claimed to explain these things, and Steiner's Anthroposophy really captured the zeitgeist by saying that the modern scientific spirit shouldn't be retreated from but fused with esoteric philosophy and mysticism.

The tenor of the age is captured well in the framing narrative of Benson's "Mirror of Shallott," where the Catholic priests talk about their views on the paranormal, and one says that God's world is much much bigger than what we actually see of it at any one time. Basically all the literature of that time comes out of this milieu, what we know appreciate in fiction and fantasy comes out of Theosophical and neo-gnostic and neo-idealist speculations and anticipations about how we would soon be exploring higher worlds. Lovecraft and his friends had all of this in their minds when they wrote. People thought that non-Euclidean geometry had revealed that there are higher dimensions of spatio-temporal perception and that we are destined to break free of the confines of Kant's architectonic and cultivate faculties like the ones described by Schelling and Goethe.

>>22185876
(2/3)
Anything seemed possible. The closest thing I can think to describe it with is when Kepler started using new mathematical methods to discern the orbits of the planets but he thought they were revealing Pythagorean and Platonic mathematical mysteries to him. Imagine the excitement he felt in that moment. That's what a lot of these people thought. They write as if a new scientific revolution is dawning and we're going to really enter some new golden age of humanity.

You might like CD Broad's essay on paranormal questions still unanswered by modern science and philosophy. I'll try to find the exact title and post it. If you are interested in just exploring these things, especially the suprahuman capacities thing, try reading Steiner's How to Know Higher Worlds, Theosophy, and Christianity as Mystical Fact. Also Dion Fortune. Ouspensky's In Search of the Miraculous and Tertium Organum. I highly recommend reading the short essay "Glimpses of Truth," in Views from the Real World by Gurdjieff, for just a taste of how people saw things then.

If you want something fun to read right away that touches on all of these, I cannot recommend enough reading The Mind Parasites by Colin Wilson. If you like it, also read The Philosopher's Stone. As any of the authors I've cited in this post would agree, I think, a lot of the "work" is just loosening your mind up and feeling a "right" to think of these other possibilities. Things like "the great philosopher William James thought it was equally plausible that the brain was a receiver and limiter of the soul? James took faith-healing and mysticism seriously? He didn't default to the materialistic view, and he's not even a crank?" percolate through your consciousness and restore its natural fluid condition over time. That's why it's good to expose yourself to as many things as possible. And conversely, to use a phrase of James again, the fact that we are "almost born hard-headed" materialists these days is why everybody is so depressed compared to the optimism of this earlier period, and probably why nobody sees paranormal phenomena anymore too.

>>22185883
(3/3)
>Lo! I show you the Last Man. "What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?" -- so asks the Last Man, and blinks.
>The earth has become small, and on it hops the Last Man, who makes everything small. His species is ineradicable as the flea; the Last Man lives longest. "We have discovered happiness" -- say the Last Men, and they blink.
>They have left the regions where it is hard to live; for they need warmth. One still loves one's neighbor and rubs against him; for one needs warmth.
>Turning ill and being distrustful, they consider sinful: they walk warily.
>One still works, for work is a pastime. But one is careful lest the pastime should hurt one.
>No shepherd, and one herd! Everyone wants the same; everyone is the same: he who feels differently goes voluntarily into the madhouse.
>"Formerly all the world was insane," -- say the subtlest of them, and they blink.
>They are clever and know all that has happened: so there is no end to their derision.
>They have their little pleasures for the day, and their little pleasures for the night, but they have a regard for health.
>"We have discovered happiness," -- say the Last Men, and they blink.
Wilson's Outsider Cycle is about this, about how the romantics with their attempt to fuse poetry and metaphysics were the last ones who really saw beyond the veil regularly, but they could only do it in extreme fits that then left them exhausted and demoralized, which then rippled through their physical constitutions and made them weak and prone to suicide. Now we have become very "robust" in our hard-headedness.

But more specifically, empirical proofs just weren't forthcoming. The age of technology really dawned in the 20th century and all of humankind's efforts were poured into the ideological conflict between English sceptic/materialist individualism and German Idealism, and after that ended, a demoralized and confused humanity was left over, which the powers that be then pushed into workplaces, breaking up families. Steiner talks about this a lot, about how the very nature of modern life kills the soul's capacity to sense higher worlds. The technical and clever side of us, the side that makes machines and likes to have ready answers for everything and so reduces the world to a flat surface that can be measured and cut to size (similar to Heidegger's Gestell concept), is trying to take over and to make us see ourselves as purely materialistic beings, and the world as a dead container filled with meaningless matter. Again Steiner doesn't want to flee from this tendency but to maintain it in balance with the opposite tendency (which tends toward unsystematic dreaming and fantasia among other things), in order to achieve a dialectical synthesis. It's fairly similar to Ian McGilchrist's thesis about balancing the two hemispheres, and that when cultures have a balance between the two hemispheres as their default they inevitably have a golden age.

>>22185887
This post was meant to be responding to the question by >>22184646

Also recommend reading Yeats' Autobiographies.

>>22185876
good post. also schopenhauer wrote on it.

>>22185876
>>22185883
>>22185887
thanks anon.

>>22185876
>Lovecraft and his friends had all of this in their minds when they wrote.
on this topic, does anyone know how well read in metaphysics Lovecraft was?

>>22185887
>The age of technology really dawned in the 20th century and all of humankind's efforts were poured into the ideological conflict between English sceptic/materialist individualism and German Idealism, and after that ended, a demoralized and confused humanity was left over,
were the world wars influenced by this conflict?

>>22185876
>Lots of major thinkers were involved in these sorts of things. William James is one of the greatest examples probably.
what about picrel? did Russell, Moore, Wittgenstein write on these topics? or did they dismiss them? seeing as how they set precedent for the folliwing century in Anglo realms.

Crowley was pretty well read in Metaphysics

Interestingly he was at Trinity College around the same time Russell was. I wonder if they ever bumped into each other.

>Having adopted the name of Aleister over Edward, in October 1895 Crowley began a three-year course at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was entered for the Moral Science Tripos studying philosophy.

>In 1890 Russell went into residence at Trinity College, Cambridge, and after being a very high Wrangler and obtaining a First Class with distinction in philosophy he was elected a fellow of his college in 1895.

>>22186164
There once was a time when English universities were attended by .... English people.

>>22185979
Read Dark Lord by Levenda

>>22186164
He dropped out. Which is why his work is highly pseud. He decided being a scat esting druggie cult leader was more fun than being an intellectually honest philosopher professor.

>>22185806
The exception proves the rule

>>22186235
>He dropped out
why?

>>22186235
>In July 1898, he left Cambridge, not having taken any degree at all despite a "first class" showing in his 1897 exams and consistent "second class honours" results before that.

he even obtained a first class like Russell yet still dropped out. doesn't make sense.

>>22186253
>First Class Honours, referred to as a 'first', is the highest honours classification and indicates high academic achievement. Historically, First Class Honours were uncommon, but as of 2019 are awarded to nearly thirty percent of graduates from British universities.

at the time it would've been a big deal

>>22186227
good rec

>>22186227
Not him but thank you anon

>>22186244
He was bored. He'd hooked up with George Cecil Jones and got a window into the hard sciences and got interested in that alongside the Golden Dawn via Waite and just sorta floated off his literature studies.

>intellectually honest philosopher professor
What's your actual critique of, say, Soldier and Hunchback? Have you looked through his unpublished notes where he puzzles on still unsolved issues in formal logic? Do you take exception with him trying to capture experiences evocative of his spiritual work, i.e. Liber Cordis Cincti Serpente?

>>22186253
>doesn't make sense.
Why doesn't it? Man figured out what he wanted to do. He could write poetry on dad's dime, take it up the ass from HCJP, and quickly rise through the GD grades without the prestigious degree.

Lucky for him everything turned out just fine and there wouldn't be any snags in any of those plans over the next 4-7 years.

>>22186470
>take it up the ass from HCJP
>From November 1920 to Autumn 1921, Russell lived at Crowley's abbey in Cefalu, Sicily. Crowley's diary records:

Now I'll shave and make up my face like the lowest kind of whore and rub on perfume and go after Genesthai [Russell] like a drunken two-bit prick-pit in old New Orleans. He disgusts me sexually, as I him, as I suspect…[T]he dirtier my deed, the dearer my darling will hold me; the grosser the act the greedier my arse to engulph him!

wut in the living fuck was wrong with this faggot...

>>22186548
>why is the bi dude bi
I think you answered your own question, mate.

>>22186559

>>22186568
People have been screaming "fag" w/r/t Crowley for 120 years.
We get it.
He fucked guys.
He wrote some cheeky fart poems.

This is the opposite of news.

Were the pagan Gods an example of metaphysical beings?

>>22186470
>everything turned out just fine
Did it though? Perdurabo makes his life seem like a disaster triage.
>soldier and hunchback
idk. never read it. heart of master is bretty good imo. so is energized enthusiasm. mostly only read liber aba however. more a spare guy. ian edwards was able to extract a nice philosophy out of book of the law i suppose but was less impressed with text itself myself however.
>formal logic
I'm a continental and don't believe in those things ;P
>>22186548
Check out Leah Sublime !

>>22186755
>I'm a continental and don't believe in those things ;P
Can you explain this to me like I'm an idiot (I probably am)

>>22186755
>>22186470
Ya. I got my magical start with Crowley. Never went super deep tho. Tend to go straight to sources these days. Have bad habit of posting hot takes here. Didn't mean it too much. Good to see ya by the by apester. Quit golden chain / dragon's brood a while back cause taking internet sabbatical (har har) but picked up green mysteries and been thinking of y'all folx. No. I was never anyone important in server however. Bless.

>>22186773
It's a joke about how continental european philosophy is less concerned with formal logic.

>>22186779
This has connections to the Romantic movement?

>>22186782
Some of it perhaps. Novalis for example

Apparently Voltaire wrote a treatise on metaphysics in1734 he never published. TIL.

metaphysics phd student anon, what textbook on metaphysics would you recommend that is the most comprehensive and also most rigourous and scholarly (even to autisticly precise levels)? I'm looking for a book that is intended for people who intend to go on and become professional metaphysicians as a opposed to a textbook geared towards an audience just curious about the subject or just taking a few university electives in philosophy. Also it should get me up to speed with contemporary terminology so I can read contemporary journals and treatises.

>>22186755
>Leah Sublime
>In 1919, after seeking out Aleister Crowley due to her interest in the occult, she was consecrated as his Babalon or, "Scarlet Woman", taking the name Alostrael, "the womb (or grail) of God." Leah Hirsig wrote in her 1921 diary: "I dedicate myself wholly to The Great Work. I will work for wickedness, I will kill my heart, I will be shameless before all men, I will freely prostitute my body to all creatures".

>The Great Work
>work for wickedness
hol up. Georgina lied to me?

>>22186888
Georgina is like regardie level babby tier simplifications. What can you expect from youtubers doe?
>wickedness
To be fair, we might try to evaluate this positively as part of a nietzschean style transvaluation.

PS: read the poem, tis hilarious

>>22186875
Read Koon's book for the analytic side

>>22186954
>egardie level babby tier
Regardie is baby tier? Then wtf is grownup tier?

>>22186986
This one?

>>22187011
Putting aside childish things

>>22186875
I frankly don't have a specific rec for this. There's lots and I would imagine they're not all too different. It would probably be good to get a more contemporary work so that it covers more recent stuff like metametaphysics.

>>22187043
>childish things
such as?

betty boomp

>Reading Essence & The Existence in the Ennead chapter of Cambridge Companion to Plotinus
I'm filtered.

>>22186755
>Did it though? Perdurabo makes his life seem like a disaster triage.
That was sarcasm, mate.
The blow up between Paris/London and the incidents in Mexico and China and Cairo and the mountain climbing disaster, etc.

>>22186777
>777
That's good but one thing Crowley is excellent at, if you're paying attention, is figuring out how to strip things from traditional source materials that are relevant and applicable to the modern practitioner and tweak it just enough for daily use. Crowley did this with, for example, Coming Forth by Day and Liber Israfel.

>>22187011
Regardie is fine if you're learning GD.

>>22187043
Instead of pulling out the Lewis quote, I'll just say that its super fine to advance beyond Regardie but he's the reason we have Westcott's and others' papers all in one handy softback and while I often deeply disagree with the man, he did a variety of good, useful, solid work that still benefits practitioners today.

>>22186750
This kind of question always puzzled me. A regular here recommended we/I stop in from /omg/. I think most people have developed an overbroad definition of "metaphysics". People call all spiritual anything "metaphysics" when usually it super isn't. At its core, metaphysics is a method of thought experimentation and only really holds valid insomuch as the validity of your priors is instantiated, yeah? This is, in part, why large hunks of Aristotle give me the howling fantods and I find respite to the east bank of the Indus. So, in the sense of "objects of theoretical discourse" I'd say "yeah" but in the sense of beings that dwell in the Platonic realm of Ideal Form I'd say "probably not". There are few pure Platonists these days and I just see little justification for that kind of thing and my own experience grounds me closer to animism, wherein these entities are immanent objective Others and differ from "us" only insofar as they lack a temporal body to trundle around with. Neoplatonic transcendentalism never sat well with me in the face of phenomena like Genius Loci and spirit interactions mediated by simple inanimate objects.

>>22187864
Here's the link to my library if anyone's interested.

Rare, out of print, unpublished, academic material is prioritized.

We have the Yorke Microfilms, Crowley's unpublished papers, diaries, notes, commentaries, letters, etc. We have the most complete Sabbatic Craft archive on the internet. We have a bunch of the Sloane MSS, the source text for a lot of the grimoire tradition, we have a huge array of tantra related material. Huge amounts of stuff from publishers like Brill.

Anyway, have fun:
https://mega.nz/folder/jlEwhYyJ#iK4mVC4y5iwk_cr3eIpX4g

>>22187864
>platonism and gods as metaphysical principles
It is not so unheard of in Neoplatonism. Tho some ofc view that as degen form of greco paganism. Not a pure platonist myself by any means but I reconcile this view of Gods with more theistic notions by some sort of Jungian move. Lots of forms. Forms are archetypes. But archetypes are Gods. And not impersonal and static but personal and living, evolving, changing, meeting you halfway, communicating, congressing. I think some sort of Klagesianism fits in too. I was a Hegel freak for a long time but then I realized psyche>nous/soma. The hidden third is the key. Also became some sort of weird christian at some point in esoteric studies. But that is story for another day. I think there is a comparison to be made between assumption of godforms and the dance of masks of personae between Crowley and Jung. Eliade is also in my beliefs somewhere too. Shamanism as ur occult/esoteric/religion. I have a Benjaminian notion of history, but I respect my occult warfare enemies of Klagesian/Jungian/Eliadeans. Much to learn from such folx. And Culianu. What a dudeski the last one! Absolutely adoring reading him lately.
>animism
Have you read Viveiros de Castro? Student of Clastres, of War Machine chapter of C&S fame. Has this funny idea of an anthropological turn. Or an ontological turn in anthro and phil. Still a bit fuzzy. Some fun guy on twitter introduced me to him. He's some sort of heretical Laruellean which he ties in to some weird formulation of generic man plus man as generic being. Also Descola is semi-related. Between Nature and Culture. And Sahlins. New Science of Enchanted Universe. Yup. Interesting stuff...

>ape of thoth
You're still doin anthro grad school? Or workin in field? Bless sir. I think I may apply for esoterica phd at rice. Study under Fanger perhaps. Am phil/his/latin/medievalist/renaissance guy. So would fit well.

>who am I?
"Perhaps I am the mummy-like jackal who has come from the four corners of Nun and wishes to bark amongst the dogs of Seshat." /jk


*blame theion for my klages flirtation, blame rubedo press for my uzdavinys quotation

>>22187999
>Viveiros de Castro
No I'm a Dr. Neil Whitehead kind of guy. Folks like de Castro never, ever, went near far enough in their explorations. Most ethnographers don't. You can't just, like, write about what frameworks you think are at play without embodying the praxes.

>He's some sort of heretical Laruellean which he ties in to some weird formulation of generic man plus man as generic being. Also Descola is semi-related. Between Nature and Culture.
That's not a knock on either you or him but all that sounds cripplingly boring and non-relevant for my purposes. It might be AMAZING rock solid scholarship its just oblique to my specific set of bullshit.

>You're still doin anthro grad school
I completed my school a hot minute ago. I wasn't anthro either. I was anthro adjacent.

>workin in field
Uh, mostly.

>esoterica phd at rice
The barrier for that one for me is the two languages thing. I can barely function in the ones I'm interested in. At my heart I'm a theoretical linguist/semiotics tard more than a polyglot.

>>22188012
>>22187999
I will say Cannibal Metaphysics was good from a sort of analytical perspective, I'm PRETTY sure I thumbed through it following up on Whitehead, particularly on Hans Staden and Of Cannibals and Kings, but at this point the auxiliary reading I did around Tupi cannibalism was fairly light and I've always in what, for example, the Yano have to say directly than various second through fifth order interpretations we can glean from it.

>>22157262
It is people like you who will drag through the streets those women who aspire to indulge with us men the queen of sciences. You are the same men who will then laugh at women for being of 'pitiful intelligence'. Who chose the woman not out of intelligence but apperance? You. May death knock on your door and take you in the night!

>>22187956
sweet. thanks ape.

>>22188023
>tfw no 450 CE calculus

>>22188022
Word word word. Will have to check out this Whitehead feller. Ya. Have a bad habit of over-theorizing myself. Appreciate ya turning me on to Chumbley. As well as Ginzburg and Wilby. Very much identify with dual faith. Both hand path. Zig zag crooked lightning bolts and so on

>>22188040
Yeah the two big tentposts for Whitehead are:
>Dark Shamans: Kanaima and the Poetics of a Violent Death
and
>In Darkness and Secrecy: The Anthropology of Assault Sorcery and Witchcraft in Amazonia

Both of which are in the library here: >>22187956

>>22188022
>I've always ~been more interested~ in what, for example,

>>22188053
Thankee sai

bump

what are the metaphysical ramifications of the soul phone becoming fully operational?

>>22188761
Fake and gay

>>22188774
idk it's a literal resaerch project at university of arizona

>>22188837
You can call a computer a brain as well but that doesn't make it true

>>22186470
>he puzzles on still unsolved issues in formal logic?
Here he is referencing Hamilton's Qualification of the Predicate.

This is from the unpublished annotations of his commentary on Liber 333.

>>22188868
it technically is an electronic brain

Bros do you think it's harder to become a professional judge or professional metaphysician?

>>22189137
Technics is a lie. Ready at hand > present at hand

>>22189144
Same amount of college more or less. More judge positions than professor positions however

>>22189149
i dont know what you just said

>>22189144
sometimes I stiil can't believe there is such a thing as a professional metaphysician and that people actually get paid to research metaphysics all day.

>>22189161
>image of pipe
This is not a pipe
>image of computer
This is not a brain

>>22189158
anybody know what happens to metahysicians that don't make it? do they really end up like the husserlanon meme?

>>22189177
...ok? but an actual computer is an electronic brain.

>>22189178
I'm one. I am a neet who shitposts on 4chan. Haven't even written a book like husserlanon. Published some papers tho. Hopin to do PHD and become professor one day...

>>22189180
False comparison
Begging the question
Tl;dr: yr a brainlet, bitch

>>22189186
>bitch
do you want me to say mean things back you? ok then don't mean things back to me.

also the brain is a organic thinking machine and computers in principle do the same thing electronically although not as advanced yet.

>>22189181
>am a neet who shitposts on 4chan.
why are you neet? and how you cann affird it?

>>22156619
Justify the principle of sufficient reason

>>22189186
>t.

>>22189202
pro tip: you can't

>>22189202
>Wolff saw ontology as a deductive science, knowable a priori and based on two fundamental principles: the principle of non-contradiction ("it cannot happen that the same thing is and is not") and the principle of sufficient reason ("nothing exists without a sufficient reason for why it exists rather than does not exist").

>fundamental principle
>fundamental

>>22189299
Explain by what reason an atom decays at time T and not T+1.

>>22189475
i don't fuccing know. i don't know everything.

>>22189523
So how can you assert the PSR is a fundamental principle if you can't justify it?

>>22189552
... are you serious? that's why it's a fundamental principle. it's literally the embodiment of the "BECAUSE IT JUST IS OK" meme.

>>22189615
I gave an example above of something that does not seem to have a reason, why an atom randomly decays at time T and not T+1. So empirically we should doubt the PSR. What *reason* do you have to believe the PSR is a fundamental principle?

>>22189661
>why an atom randomly decays at time T and not T+1.
presupposing PSR that atom did not randomly decay at that time, we just are unable at this time to give the reason why. To say anything has happened randomly to already have presupposed the opposite of the PSR

>>22189661
>seem
and key word here is seem

Sweet tea or sweet coffee,
that, is the question.

>>22189738
When we say random, we mean that even when we control every single causally-relevant variable, atoms will still decay at unpredictably different times. "Randomness" is simply a description of what we empirically observe, that certain physical events happen without cause.

>>22189935
>every single causally-relevant variable
kek. and you are God who knows all things right? you could never, ever, possibly have overlooked a "causally-relevant variable", right?

>>22189935
>"Randomness" is simply the superimposition of a metaphysical principle upon what we empirically observe, that certain physical events happen without cause.
ftfy

>>22189945
You then need to posit some "hidden variable" theory of a cause that we somehow can't observe. But we have no reason to assume there is an undetectable cause to an atom decaying at time T unless we beg the question by assuming everything must have a cause. That reduces the justification of PSR to circular logic.

>>22189960
>we beg the question by assuming everything must have a cause. That reduces the justification of PSR to circular logic.
no. shit. That's why it's A FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLE. how many times do have to tell you this? The PSR is the ground of proof itself. To ask me to give you a reason to accept the PSR is to already have presupposed the PSR. PSR is rock bottom, and you either accept and continue your inquiry into the reason for something, or you deny it and your enquiry stops. simple as.

>>22189975
>The PSR is the ground of proof itself
You're confusing logical and metaphysical proof. To say that X is caused by Y requires a metaphysical reason. To argue the PSR is true requires a logical reason. It can be true that some physical events lack a metaphysical reason, but that no true beliefs lack a logical reason.

>>22190013
>It can be true that some physical events lack a metaphysical reason,
not if you presuppose the PSR

>>22190029
Which as I said is begging the question. I can presuppose the moon is made of cheese, doesn't make it true.

>>22190013
>To argue the PSR is true requires a logical reason.
what part fundamental principle is so hard for you to understand? There is no arguing for the truth of PSR. You can either be a midwit and deny or high iq and accept. it's that fucking simple.

>>22190039
>the moon is made of cheese
is not a fundamental principle. your analogy is retarded.

>>22190048
TIL the vast majority of contemporary philosophers are midwits. I guess they can't be as high IQ as a guy on 4chan who doesn't understand the difference between logical and metaphysical proof.

>>22190055
What does it mean to be a "fundamental principle"?

>>22190060
>TIL the vast majority of contemporary philosophers are midwits
unironically yes

>>22190060
>What does it mean to be a "fundamental principle"?
holy. shit.

>>22190069
Can you not answer the simple question? What does it mean to say "every physical event has a cause" is a "fundamental principle"?

>>22190091
>every physical event has a cause
that is not the PSR. PSR is more general. and I already told you
>it's literally the embodiment of the "BECAUSE IT JUST IS OK" meme.
you cannot investigate anything, including physical events without presupposing PSR, since you to have already believed there is a cause of the physical event to even begin rational explanation of how that cause produces the effect.

>>22190091
Nta but randomness is probability if not determinist making yr argument obselete

>>22190153
>that is not the PSR. PSR is more general. and I already told you
Whether or not PSR is more general, if a physical event does not have a cause then the PSR is invalidated. So if PSR is a fundamental principle then "every physical event has a cause" must be a fundamental principle.
>you cannot investigate anything, including physical events without presupposing PSR, since you to have already believed there is a cause of the physical event to even begin rational explanation of how that cause produces the effect.
In physics we begin with a hypothesis that a cause of physical event X may exist. If we examine event X and find no observable cause, then we say there is no cause to X. I don't understand what you mean by "presupposing PSR" in this example. That there *may* be a cause to a physical event does not mean we presuppose there *must* be one.

>>22190210
>So if PSR is a fundamental principle then "every physical event has a cause" must be a fundamental principle.
have you not taken philosophy 101? no. it would be a special application of the fundamental more general principle.

>In physics we begin with a hypothesis that a cause of physical event X may exist.
and when you choose the affirmative of the two possibilities (may or may not exist) you commit to PSR. And so long as you continue inquiring you presuppose PSR. And as soon as you stop inquiring and decide you've reached the bottom of the inquiry you break up with PSR. But PSR doesn't go away; you just ignore her till you need her again because you thought you reached fundamental properties of nature but actually you didn't, you just reached the limit of your present human comprehension.

>>22190296
>have you not taken philosophy 101? no. it would be a special application of the fundamental more general principle.
Have you not taken philosophy 101? If PSR entails that every physical event has a cause, and it is false that every physical event has a cause, then PSR is false.
>and when you choose the affirmative of the two possibilities (may or may not exist) you commit to PSR.
Again, no. Simply investigating whether event X has a cause does not presuppose that a cause for event X exists. Your claim is analogous to the claim that if we investigate smoke coming out of a building to see if there's a fire, we are presupposing that the building is necessarily on fire.

>>22190349
can you even metaphysics bro? Got dam. Some people literally cannot see I guess. I'm done tho. here is a book for you to read.

>>22190355
>repeatedly begs the question
>gets called out
>uhhh read this 200 year old book

>>22190369
>repeatedly begs the question
metaphysicsanons I've done what I can for this anon. I summon one of you greater than I that can help the physicsfag understand the apparently incredibly difficult concept of a fundamental principle of metaphysics.

>>22190369
>>repeatedly begs the question

>>22190349
i feel bad for actual metaphysics professors that have to deal with people like this in class. my metaphysics prof would always have this blank stare with slow blinking and flat grin when people kept asking him questions he just answered but which apparently flew over his students heads no matter how hard he tried to clarify and simplify. some people literally just cannot grasp metaphysics.

and of course Herr Kant:
>not every one is bound to study Metaphysics, that many minds will succeed very well, in the exact and even in deep sciences, more closely allied to intuition [what can be sensed], while they cannot succeed in investigations dealing exclusively with abstract concepts. In such cases men should apply their talents to other subjects.

>>22183735
I might not be communicating this effectively to you. I did some more research and I get the phenomenological perspective better but I still fail to see how it's irreducible. Being aware of something is still just another part of experience the way i see it.

>>22174071
I've started reading this and I want to say thank you, anon. It's mind-blowing.

>>22184324
you heard me. go play in the killing fields.

>>22190512
Dude, Kant agreed with me that the classical formulation of the principle of sufficient reason a la Wolff/Leibniz is untenable. He argued PSR cannot be a "fundamental principle" because causation is only an attribute of human cognition/experience . You're quoting an authority who literally thinks the PSR you're defending is bullshit and made his career dismantling it. Read the Critique of Pure Reason.

Bros I found the empirical proof for empiricism. It was actually behind my couch the whole time.
You can pack it up now. Metaphysics are over.

>>22193659
>Metaphysics are over.
please God. I'm so tired.

>>22193673
I was joking. You can't have empirical proof for empiricism. It's begging the question.
Metaphysics are cool and fun.

>>22193680
>I was joking.
noooooooooooooooooooo

What's a good philosophy starting point for a brainlet

>>22194249
Reddit