/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.15947314]

What are /lit/'s thoughts on pic related? I'm currently reading it, some parts are easy (book 4 and book 9, for example), some are hard (book 6, for example). I still don't get where Aristotle is going with this, and some of his remarks have been explained by science, but I still think there's food for thought here.
How many people today take metaphysics seriously? To me it looks like it has fallen out of favor at least a century ago.

[Anonymous No.15947406]

Aristotle isn't a metaphyisical thinker, at least not in the modern sense of the word. He has more in common with Descartes than with Kant.
A lot of people take metaphysics seriously, maybe not in the way of christian metaphyisics, but the errors of scientism, the failure of liberalism and it's intellectual dispositives and the distrust of positivist methods of understanding human life left an empty space to be filled with speculative thought and realist metaphyisics along with the very human desire to understand the chaos of it all

[Anonymous No.15947499]

>>15947314
Reading modern Aristotelians before jumping headfirst into Aristotle helped me greatly. Ed Feser is among the finest modern Aristotelians to be found, and his Scholastic Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction is just fantastic.
>some of his remarks have been explained by science
Significantly less than what people think, none of it was important.
>How many people today take metaphysics seriously? To me it looks like it has fallen out of favor at least a century ago.
Few people take it seriously. Metaphysical disagreements are still behind almost all of our disputes today, even if few people are really conscious of it. That esteemed thinkers and scholars today lack an adequate model to explain the simplest workings of the universe should illustrate the profound decline of intellectual life and, for you personally, indicate something worthwhile that the materialist, scientist masses are missing.
t. aristotelian

[Anonymous No.15947515]

>>15947499
A man of high culture.

[Anonymous No.15947552]

>>15947406
>A lot of people take metaphysics seriously
Where do you get this idea from? I never see it discussed much online and today's scientist masses don't take anything that isn't able to be examined empirically seriously.
>the errors of scientism
>the failure of liberalism and it's intellectual dispositives
>the distrust of positivist methods of understanding human
Can you elaborate on this?

>>15947499
>Significantly less than what people think, none of it was important.
Can you elaborate on this? With the advancing of neurosciences, can we really still say that the talk about underlying substances is valid? What stops us from just stopping at matter and claiming there's nothing beyond that?
>That esteemed thinkers and scholars today lack an adequate model to explain the simplest workings of the universe
Do they lack an adequate model? What's the problem with the big bang theory, quantum physics etc.?
>the profound decline of intellectual life
I do agree that there's been a decline of intellectual life, but more because of hedonism than anything.
>indicate something worthwhile that the materialist, scientist masses are missing
I'm trying to see it, but not everything clicked with me. I think that Aristotle's ideas about the four causes, his talk about actuality and potentiality, the principle of noncontradiction etc. are all valid and worthwhile to contemplate, but I still didn't buy into the whole substance thing. We'll see, I've currently finished book 10 and am starting book 11 soon.

[Anonymous No.15947631]

>>15947499
Seconding this, especially Feser.

[Anonymous No.15947725]

>>15947552
>With the advancing of neurosciences...
>What's the problem with the big bang theory, quantum physics etc.?
You MUST read Scholastic Metaphysics and Aristotle's Revenge, you are asking exactly the questions he addresses. I am too dim to explain the quantum angle to you, though Feser does touch on it, but I can talk about "stopping at matter and claiming there's nothing beyond that" as regards the mind.
A central problem with, let's call it cognitive materialism, is that it in the end is self-refuting. If the mind is reducible to matter, neurons, and chemicals, it seems intuitively implausible that it should be capable of grasping objective truth. Beyond intuition and into strict logic, if cognitive materialism were true, we would have no way of discriminating between two ideas on the basis of how true they are, as they are both in the end random neurons and chemicals, and so we would lack the ability to even talk about truth. This is just scratching the surface, I am but a novice.
A similar problem comes when talking about just reality in general. If matter is all there is to the universe, there is no reason to assume it has any particular order or, more to the point, has an underlying logic that allows it to be analyzed through logical means. Yet this is the assumption of all science and philosophy, that the universe has order sufficient for analysis by our minds.

[Anonymous No.15947733]

>>15947552
>Where do you get this idea from? I never see it discussed much online and today's scientist masses don't take anything that isn't able to be examined empirically seriously.
they do, they just don't call it metaphysics and have no interest of being taken seriously, they exist and have political participation.
>From positive philosophy and theory of history (comte, marx) refuted by historiography and antropology to intellectual honesty incompatible with logical positivism
>critical and decolonial theory ("rational, <<and sometimes irrational>>, critique of Reason"), Including post-structuralists
>the hegemonic anti-positivism present in academia and political discurse, distrust of statistical methods and their goals

[Anonymous No.15947754]

>I still don't get where Aristotle is going with this
thats Aristotle for you

[Anonymous No.15948007]

>>15947725
>The problem with "cognitive materialism"
Hm, very interesting. This caught my eye because I am smack in the middle of Birth of the Clinic and that very paradox is coming up. In order for the clinical 'gaze' to be pure, it must operate on precisely the same order as nature. Or, rather, nature must be its very origin, and vice versa...it's difficult for me to articulate exactly. Of course Foucault speaks of all this in terms of linguistics, and I do his work a horrible disservice here, but it's funny how I've just now been struggling with the thing you're speaking of.

[Anonymous No.15949085]

bump. This is the one good thread on the board right now

[Anonymous No.15949216]

>>15947725
Thanks for the response. Those are some fair points, I'll read the books you mentioned.

>>15947733
Why do you think that intellectual honesty is incompatible with logical positivism? Also why do you think that historiography and antropology refuted positive philosphy and theory of history?

[Anonymous No.15949224]

>>15947754
What do you mean?

[Anonymous No.15949509]

>>15949216
>Why do you think that intellectual honesty is incompatible with logical positivism?
Because they chose to be intellectually honest and drop verificationism as the core of logical positivism because it could not be verified. I tink that this is a common trait of the logic oriented philosophers.
Pic is about a flaw Russell found on Frege's work (The Foundations of Arithmetic) and will later be called as Russell's Paradox.
>Also why do you think that historiography and antropology refuted positive philosphy and theory of history?
Well this is pretty much self explanatory:
Positive philosophy (somewhat prevalent in the works of Hegel, Marx and Morgan), elaborated by Comte, argues that there are stages in history and that history is lineal, an does it based on metaphysical grounds and broad generalizations, sometimes called Laws of History. Antropology and historiography rejected this approach, focusing on the particularities of certain societies to explain them from the inside and avoid bias, while at the same time preferring a more descriptive method of presenting the results instead of prescriptive one

[Anonymous No.15949578]

>>15949509
Interesting that you mention Russell. Didn't he support science and also dislike metaphysics, seeing as he was an analytical philosophers?

[Anonymous No.15949608]

>>15949578
there is a different between supporting science and supporting scientism.
He also disliked metaphysics but there is a difference between understanding something and disliking something.
I don't mention Russell to prove a point, i mention him in reference to Frege's integrity.
I really suggest you read the SEP entry on Logical empiricism, as it explains what verificationism is, there are some dry parts but the overall explanation is much better than one i could provide.

[Anonymous No.15949615]

>>15949608
Thanks anon, I'll read it. By the way, what are your favorite books? If you could name a few, in no particular order.

[Anonymous No.15949640]

>>15949615
fiction: New York Trilogy and Les Mis
Non-fiction: Phenomenology of Spirit and Tractatus Logico Philosophicus, but Fichte and Merleau Ponty are my favourite philosophers

[Anonymous No.15949657]

>>15949640
Thanks for the answer. I'm weak when it comes to non-fiction but I started with the greeks this year so at least I'm working on it.

[Anonymous No.15949701]

>>15949657
starting with the greeks is pretty based, they are the most rewarding group of thinkers

[Anonymous No.15949721]

>>15949701
>starting with the greeks is pretty based, they are the most rewarding group of thinkers
Yeah, you really get humbled when you read them. I thought the "start with the greeks" thing was at least partially a meme but I think I was wrong.