/mg/ metaphysics general

[Anonymous No.20771590]

Discuss metaphysics ITT.

[Anonymous No.20771625]

Schopenhauer is on the same level as Kant.

[Anonymous No.20771753]

I never understood metaphysics. Why wouldn't I just learn science?

[Anonymous No.20771773]

[Anonymous No.20771790]

>>20771753
>>20771773
philosophy isn't real.

[Anonymous No.20771810]

>>20771790
According to your philosophy...

[Anonymous No.20771828]

>>20771753
Metaphysics is a science.

[Anonymous No.20771836]

>>20771828
How so? Science's ability of prediction is pretty good. Which metaphysics can compete with it?

[Anonymous No.20771842]

>>20771836
How are you such a nigger?

[Anonymous No.20771844]

>>20771842
Not an argument

[Anonymous No.20771857]

>>20771590
>physician
A qualified doctor.
>metaphysician
Some guy who writes a bunch of made up shit that can't be proved.

[Anonymous No.20771858]

>>20771810
The irony is /lit/ "philosophers" unironically love circular non-arguments like this one.
Take >>20771836 for example. How many seconds till someone responds with "le hurr durr science can't predict its own validty hurr durr"

[Anonymous No.20771887]

>>20771836
Kantian metaphysics is a description of reality but has no predictive power.

[Anonymous No.20771894]

>>20771844
Yes it is. Nigger.

[Anonymous No.20771906]

>>20771590
what happens when you combine Schopenhauer's ethics with Leibniz's monadology?

[Anonymous No.20771926]

>>20771906
>Leibniz's monadology
Not compatible with Schop at all.

[Anonymous No.20771960]

>>20771625
plz explain.

I know not much about either, but I am currently reading The Decline of the West by O. Spengler and he frequently references both (and Goethe).

[Anonymous No.20771967]

>>20771926
how? I wasn't talking about his Schop's metaphysics just his ethical theories without his metaphysical background. like open individualism + best possible worlds?

[Anonymous No.20772009]

>>20771858
I'm confused who you are saying has the circular non-argument? The first person who you were responding to was calling out the circularity in the first argument, so I don't know what you mean to call his argument circular or a non-argument.

And for your second comment, are you trying to say science can predict it's own validity? It seems like you are just throwing out empty insults and trying to argue against damning arguments with internet speak...

[Anonymous No.20772026]

>>20771828
Metaphysics is not and has never been a science. Every metaphysical system has crashed down and failed. Were you actually convinced when some german idealist said they had finally started metaphysics as a science? Anon, every german idealist said that, and every german idealist denied every other german idealist's metaphysics was a science. Please don't trust what random philosophers claim about the success of their own philosophy, it is extremely unreliable.

[Anonymous No.20772029]

>>20771753
Because no matter how much scientists try to deny it science is ultimately informed by metaphysics and has a metaphysics. Causality, the relation between observer, observation, and the observed, objectivity, problems of materialism, realism, the ground of being (is it physical?), the limits of science, the existence and nature of natural law---these and more fall under the domain of metaphysics.

[Anonymous No.20772043]

>>20771887
Kantian metaphysics does have predicative power. He intended to provide a justification of certain statements by proving them to be synthetic a priori via transcendental arguments. This included not only geometric principles about the structure of the universe, and temporal principles, but also certain principles of natural science, too. The problem is, not only were Kant's proofs wrong, but these various principles were actually falsified in the 20th century.

[Anonymous No.20772048]

>>20771967
>>20771906
Leibniz philosophy necessarily holds that we live in the best of all possible worlds, which is in complete contradiction to Schopenhauer's belief that life is hell.

[Anonymous No.20772059]

>>20771894
Concession accepted.

[Anonymous No.20772063]

>>20771753
Whitehead tackles this in his main work. He writes clearly at the start so that basically anyone can understand him, from which this selection of quotes is taken:

"The position taken by this objection is that we ought to describe detailed matter of fact, and elicit the laws with a generality strictly limited to the systematization of these described details. General interpretation, it is held, has no bearing upon this procedure; and thus any system of general interpretation, be it true or false, remains intrinsically barren. Un~ fortunately for this objection, there are no brute, self-contained matters of fact, capable of being understood apart from interpretation as an element in a system"

"Thus [22] the understanding of the immediate brute fact requires its metaphysical interpretation as an item in a world with some systematic relation to it."

"The methodology of rational interpretation is the product of the fitful vagueness of consciousness. Elements which shine with immediate distinctness, in some circumstances, retire into penumbral shadow in other circumstances, and into black darkness on other occasions. And yet all occasions proclaim themselves as actualities within the flux of a solid world, demanding a unity of interpretation."

"The useful function of philosophy is to promote the [26] most general systematization of civilized thought."

[Anonymous No.20772078]

>>20772029
Also:
What are natural kinds? Is a species something that actually exists or just a classificatory label?
Determinism versus indeterminism: Are genetic mutations truly random? They are presumed to be (until very recently) but does objective randomness actually exist or is this just an expression of ignorance of the true causes?

The "why": science can explain the how but not the why of being

Quantum mechanics and its acausal principles. Most of science, like everyday activities, depend on a classical Newtonian understanding of the world. How do we square this with the quantum fuckery going on down there? How do we account for the fact that QM breaks logic?

The existence of possibilities, counterfactuals. If the deterministic, mechanical view of the universe is false, what does this mean for science?

[Anonymous No.20772652]

>>20771858
you thought you wrote something clever here, didn't you?

[Anonymous No.20772658]

>>20772026
>Every metaphysical system has crashed down and failed.
so did every scientific so far

[Anonymous No.20772700]

What if God is pure existence itself? The Divine Ground of Being. (As Hindu mystics describe)
Then God is necessary for anything to exist and anything that exists depends on God.

[Anonymous No.20772705]

>>20772700
>god is le something! since something exists, god must also!
woah

[Anonymous No.20773335]

>>20771590
what the prerequisites for soapnshower? Working my way through the greeks now but I have a long way to go if I stick to my plan to go in order.

[Anonymous No.20773416]

>>20771590
do I need to read anything before starting Aristotle's Metaphysics?

[Anonymous No.20773568]

>>20773335
He says to read Kant and his book "the fourfold root of the principle of sufficient reason" before reading his big book, The World as Will and Representation.

[Anonymous No.20774308]

>>20771753
Metaphysics involves how we interpret the knowledge sciences bring us. It is inescapable.

[Anonymous No.20774334]

>>20773416
Plato you dill brain.

[Anonymous No.20774345]

>>20773335
From my experience Schopenhauer is relatively self-contained. He's so good at explaining the most arcane of subjects and belaboring every point to exhaustion that he'll tell you what he gets out of Kant or Plato or whoever else he draws from. Not only does he explain it once, but repeatedly, often ad nauseam.

[Anonymous No.20774349]

>>20773416
You need to read Aristotle's works in order. You won't understand the Metaphysics with reading the Physics, but also you should read the Organon and De Anima.

[Anonymous No.20774364]

>>20771857
>physician/man of skill
cave dweller who's eyes have accustomed to the darkness and is skilled only at discerning the truths of a transitory shadow world
>metaphysician
man who has broken free from the bondage of this world and has ascended past the darkness and into the light of reality, sees the meaninglessness of virtues in the cave, such as action as meaningless agitation, ambition as silly pride, and wisdom as myopic and fragmentary.

[Anonymous No.20774375]

>>20773335
You don't necessarily have to read Kant provided you have a general understanding of what idealism is. Schop sums up Kant's major points in the second section of the appendix and even through out the book - that should be enough.

[Anonymous No.20774452]

There's something fundamentally wrong about the concept of Platonic Ideas . I'd like to put the idea to rest for once and for all. It's so obviously wrong I don't know how anyone could believe it.

Call it the Dictionary problem. Plato says the objects of appearance are merely differentiated copies of a universal prototype. These Ideas are the ultimate basis of reality, the thing in itself. They are outside space and time, abstract, and imperceptible, but nevertheless constitute the substratum of all phenomena.

Suppose there are such Ideas. In which case, it should be possible to compile a "dictionary" of all the Forms. Presumably, since the objects of the senses and mental contents are finite, there ought to be a finite number of Forms. Here's the problem: enumerating the list of forms using the objects of appearance as a guide is impossible. The senses perceptually categorize objects in a way that suits our animal natures, not in terms of natural kinds.

In other words there is no determinable representational hierarchy with a set of primitive objects of appearance that can be mapped to a Form that is free from a frame of reference.

To illustrate the point. Geometry is probably the most vivid way to visualize the idea that the world of appearance is composed of Platonic Ideas. Simply because every object has a shape. Everything round has the Idea of Roundness in it which we might map to the Idea of Sphericity. Surely geometric concepts can be good candidates for the Platonic Dictionary.

But does this mean that eyeballs and baseballs both belong to the same Idea? Or is there an Idea for Eyeballs (visual sensors)? And an idea for Sports Balls (baseballs, golfballs, basketballs)? There is no solid ground by which to categorize these objects according to distinct Ideas.
Therefore there is no first-order vocabulary for the Dictionary.

[Anonymous No.20774456]

>>20774452
What about mathematics? Plenty people say that math is the foundation for the Ideas. But this is naive . Math concepts are inter-defined. So this would have to mean that the Ideas are not self-contained, independent Singletons, but they themselves draw their properties from other Ideas. Is there an idea just for Number or an Idea for Natural Numbers and Integers? Is there an idea for Prime Numbers? If so, it is a dependency on the idea of Number. The Ideas must compose a representational hierarchy, but again, this hierarchy is unspecifiable because there are no definite primitives with which to construct it (no first-order words for the dictionary). Because even these first-order words depend on other Ideas for their definition. Similarly if we speak of the Idea for Triangularity or Squareness. Do they not depend on and nest in a greater Idea, Shape? If the Ideas themselves embed within other ideas in a nested hierarchy, is there then a rood idea, the Ur-Idea, which templates all other Ideas? Where else does Ideality come from? Should there not be a small, compact set of primary Forms, with derivative , secondary Forms? At which point the universality of the Forms collapses since, like the grades of appearance , are ranked in terms of degrees of particularity . So the theory of Platonic Ideas suffers from foundationalist issues.

To generate the rich world of appearance, the Forms have to be nested and overlap like Venn diagrams. Different objects grab different properties from different Forms, just like how an apple and eyeball both grab Roundness but the apple grabs Redness and the eyeball grabs "Organness" . Organness therefore shares some connection with Roundness , though Roundness is not essential to the definition of Organness. If the Idea only contains what is essential to its class of objects, then the Forms overlap and interpenetrate in appearance , making it impossible to unscramble. If this means that the Ideas cannot be known via extrapolation from the senses , but the only way of perceiving the action of the Ideas is through the senses, then we are just as justified as saying there are no Ideas.

[Anonymous No.20774551]

>>20774452
Platonic Ideas, if there had to be many, would be the forms of space and time themselves. If there had to be only one, it would be the Idea of the Good.

[Anonymous No.20774851]

>>20771625
Is that good or bad?

[Anonymous No.20775760]

Metaphysics will not progress until there are advances in epistemological research

[Anonymous No.20775783]

>>20772009
>damning arguments

No they aren't lmao. They are stupid and miss the point but /lit/ philosophers have their heads too far up their assess to see it.