But the real reason why he has been probably the most hated and criticized philosopher in the last 400 years is because envy: he was a superb writer. I think that most other philosophers act like silly 15 year-old girls wishing to be able to write as well as he did.
Also, there is a math-envy issue. Many modern philosophers suck at math so much that the reader can only fall down to the floor and roll with laughter from side to side.
One form of snobbery when young people start with philosophy is that they often seek obscure texts, difficult to read, supposedly because those have to be better. Total nonsense. Liebniz's Monadology is not a text for beginners or for the public in general, and it's not even accessible for tenured professors of philosophy. That same thing also happens with Hegel: he either was unable to write something digestible or he artificially wrote the way he wrote in order to cover himself with that patina of obscurity that is so attractive. In contrast, Marx was a good writer, and he was the one who introduced many Hegelian ideas in the general public, not Hegel.
And there is the example of Berkeley, who first wrote a difficult to read work explaining his views, and then he decided to dumb it down and write it in the form of a dialogue to make a more readable presentation. He wanted to be read and be influential. Other philosophers don't want to be read, for some reason, and then spend their lives bitching about the shine and fame of other philosophers.
I'm not arguing that good writing equals truth or clear thinking. I say that philosophers who want to be influential make an huge effort to be understood, and that's why they are remembered and they are famous. The bad critics have to make an effort to hide their envy for their success. The good critics focus on the ideas and write an understandable critique.
I think it is better for everyone to start with well written texts, even if they are difficult. Plato is an excellent writer and that's why he is read even today. Aristotle work is incomplete. We read his notebooks, which are not very readable texts. He probably had well written texts that were lost, maybe they were lost because those were written while he was a student of Plato, and the disciples of Aristotle probably thought they were not worth keeping them around. I think the peripatetics were too snobbish and that's one reason why it took so long (a thousand years?) for Aristotelian ideas to become very influential. Who knows, maybe if not for the flaws of his students the world would be better today because Aristotle would have been more influential earlier.
>> As Henry Stapp has expressed it, 'Everything we know about Nature is in accord with the idea that the fundamental process of Nature lies outside spacetime ... but generates events that can be located in space-time.' <<
>> The ancients and their pre-modern inheritors understood reality to be objectively knowable: Mind and matter—the immaterial qualitative and the material quantitative—symbiotically engaged one another in a synthesis called “reality.” The requisite tools to accurately perceive the correspondence of mind and matter were to be found in language and number. But with the advent of the moderns, a new view emerged that was rooted in ancient notions that had largely been refuted and rejected: Namely, that reality is subjective, and, ultimately, all we can ever really know is the contents of our own minds. Even this latter Humean-Kantian thesis was challenged by post-structuralist philosophers, who argued that the world, while indeed subjective, was governed by power structures artificially constructed through language and culture, and that “discourses of power” determine the “subjective reality” for most people. <<
Thanks for the link! I hadn't seen induction explained like that before, but what you have expressed as induction-intellection and induction-intuition are certainly what I called noesis. I will add the book you cite (Aristotelian Account of Induction) to my list of books to read.
There are many entry points to Aristotle. Rand was very *intense* and then she used Aristotle as a good complement to her style. Many Christians would love to be as intense as Ayn Rand. But other Aristotelians have a totally different energy, like Balmes. Perhaps a function of his time, but most likely it was his personality.
My point is that Aristotle is universally liked, even by leftists. Everyone can learn something there and then every author tells similar things with different styles.
Boom, the entire tree of Whig Enlightenment Philosophy is cut, right at the roots.
Your senses DO give you true and real perceptions of the Cosmos of things and their qualities (which are real).
"[While] devising tests to ascertain whether a prospective pilot could effectively detect the aiming point of a complex motion, [Gibson] discovered to his amazement that the physical data available in the so-called “retinal image” do not suffice to determine that point. Then and there he recognized what his colleagues have apparently failed to grasp to this day: namely, that this fact alone disproves the premise upon which the prevailing “image theory” of visual perception is based."
I'm just an unfrozen caveman philosopher. All this talk of "Cartesian bifurcation" and "naive Realism" confuses and frightens me.
But this talk of James J. Gibson applying empirical science to deep philosophical questions makes me go "hghghghghghg". Must read further. Maybe even learn conjugate complex verbs know what Aristotle say.
As I recall, J.P. Moreland wrote a book, Universals, which presents a case for Realism pretty well, along with counterarguments. It also includes arguments for and against alternatives to Realism, which are both variants of nominalism. It may more fully flesh out your understanding gleaned from Smith.
So, Gibson discovers the first empirical evidence that we conflate the Map for the Territory? Or that we view that Territory and chop it into "belief" maps?
Is this like seeing recurring, Post-Jab Sudden Adult Death Syndrome and thinking it is climate change? 🤣
Hmmm. I think Gibson would say that indirect realists assert that we only ever see a Map, and that what we think is the Territory is actually just a Map in our head; while what we actually see is the Territory, which is why we can distinguish it from a Map, which is an image of the Territory. I'm probably responding to your question too literally! :-|
It is tragic how.... climate change.... is causing sudden adult death syndrome, isn't it...
Trust yer gut, I say👏 The MSM thus shows us maps, hoping to defeat our internal compass but we SEE the territory and we KNOW "They" are lieing, we do. THIS is why there is a trillion dollar MSM, it is needed to shore up faux Narrative, True Lies.
Everything that you covered about Wolfgang Smith was incredibly interesting and well-written.
But what I liked most about this piece was your willingness to acknowledge that you didn’t know something and that you was wrong in what you previously said. I think that is a very powerful thing to do and I greatly respect it.
Christopher Fuchs has a single-user handle of quantum weirdness to offer, a wondrous theory residing comfortably within the tongue-twisty bettabilitarianist framework (aka ‘the world is loose at the joints’) 😊
🗨 If the wave function describes an observer, does the observer have to be human? [...] (“Dogs don’t use wave functions,” Fuchs said. “Heck, I didn’t collapse a wave function until I was 34.”)
We ask now about the possibility of knowing a be-ing that does not belong {53} to the living stream of experiences of the knowing subject. It could be something enduring timelessly or something bound by time. If timebound it may either remain unchanged for the duration of its being or it may be something that changes and if so may in turn change continually through a part or through the whole of its duration.
We ask first: is it possible for a mind that knows in a temporal process to know something that endures timelessly? For this an actual contact between knower and known is needed that is itself something temporal. This will only be possible if the thing enduring timelessly has a relation to the temporal; that is, either it is analogous to a species in individuo [a species in the individual] as we found in the units of experience, or it has an effect on something temporal. In no case can something that knows in temporal acts know anything timelessly enduring immediately in its timeless existence [Existenz]. The effect of the timeless on the temporal may be an effect on the knowing subject itself. (An illustration would be the possibility of knowing God on the basis of his immanence; I do not wish to go into this here.) In the case of an effect on something temporal existing independently of the knowing subject, knowledge of the temporal thing is presupposed. Likewise when the timeless belongs to the structure of the temporal. <<
I'm a fan of Cartesius, even with all his flaws.
But the real reason why he has been probably the most hated and criticized philosopher in the last 400 years is because envy: he was a superb writer. I think that most other philosophers act like silly 15 year-old girls wishing to be able to write as well as he did.
Also, there is a math-envy issue. Many modern philosophers suck at math so much that the reader can only fall down to the floor and roll with laughter from side to side.
One form of snobbery when young people start with philosophy is that they often seek obscure texts, difficult to read, supposedly because those have to be better. Total nonsense. Liebniz's Monadology is not a text for beginners or for the public in general, and it's not even accessible for tenured professors of philosophy. That same thing also happens with Hegel: he either was unable to write something digestible or he artificially wrote the way he wrote in order to cover himself with that patina of obscurity that is so attractive. In contrast, Marx was a good writer, and he was the one who introduced many Hegelian ideas in the general public, not Hegel.
And there is the example of Berkeley, who first wrote a difficult to read work explaining his views, and then he decided to dumb it down and write it in the form of a dialogue to make a more readable presentation. He wanted to be read and be influential. Other philosophers don't want to be read, for some reason, and then spend their lives bitching about the shine and fame of other philosophers.
I'm not arguing that good writing equals truth or clear thinking. I say that philosophers who want to be influential make an huge effort to be understood, and that's why they are remembered and they are famous. The bad critics have to make an effort to hide their envy for their success. The good critics focus on the ideas and write an understandable critique.
I think it is better for everyone to start with well written texts, even if they are difficult. Plato is an excellent writer and that's why he is read even today. Aristotle work is incomplete. We read his notebooks, which are not very readable texts. He probably had well written texts that were lost, maybe they were lost because those were written while he was a student of Plato, and the disciples of Aristotle probably thought they were not worth keeping them around. I think the peripatetics were too snobbish and that's one reason why it took so long (a thousand years?) for Aristotelian ideas to become very influential. Who knows, maybe if not for the flaws of his students the world would be better today because Aristotle would have been more influential earlier.
I like Yeats's opinion of The Scholars --
Bald heads forgetful of their sins,
Old, learned, respectable bald heads
Edit and annotate the lines
That young men, tossing on their beds,
Rhymed out in love’s despair
To flatter beauty’s ignorant ear.
They’ll cough in the ink to the world’s end;
Wear out the carpet with their shoes
Earning respect; have no strange friend;
If they have sinned nobody knows.
Lord, what would they say
Did their Catullus walk that way?
>> As Henry Stapp has expressed it, 'Everything we know about Nature is in accord with the idea that the fundamental process of Nature lies outside spacetime ... but generates events that can be located in space-time.' <<
I am reminded of this essay from sometime back:
https://renovatio.zaytuna.edu/article/the-matter-of-metaphysics
Relevant snippet:
>> The ancients and their pre-modern inheritors understood reality to be objectively knowable: Mind and matter—the immaterial qualitative and the material quantitative—symbiotically engaged one another in a synthesis called “reality.” The requisite tools to accurately perceive the correspondence of mind and matter were to be found in language and number. But with the advent of the moderns, a new view emerged that was rooted in ancient notions that had largely been refuted and rejected: Namely, that reality is subjective, and, ultimately, all we can ever really know is the contents of our own minds. Even this latter Humean-Kantian thesis was challenged by post-structuralist philosophers, who argued that the world, while indeed subjective, was governed by power structures artificially constructed through language and culture, and that “discourses of power” determine the “subjective reality” for most people. <<
Thanks for the shout out.
I keep meaning to comment on your posts, especially those on noesis, with which I am in agreement.
For instance, this: Induction & Intellection: Excerpt From Uncertainty
https://www.wmbriggs.com/post/22364/
Thanks for the link! I hadn't seen induction explained like that before, but what you have expressed as induction-intellection and induction-intuition are certainly what I called noesis. I will add the book you cite (Aristotelian Account of Induction) to my list of books to read.
You can't go wrong by going back to Aristotle, as you very well know.
Amen to that. I actually discovered Aristotle by way of Ayn Rand. I wonder if that's a common pipeline to Neo-Aristotelianism.
Might be, but I have no Rand in me (one of these days...). I got there through people like David Stove, Ed Jaynes and Ed Feser.
There are many entry points to Aristotle. Rand was very *intense* and then she used Aristotle as a good complement to her style. Many Christians would love to be as intense as Ayn Rand. But other Aristotelians have a totally different energy, like Balmes. Perhaps a function of his time, but most likely it was his personality.
My point is that Aristotle is universally liked, even by leftists. Everyone can learn something there and then every author tells similar things with different styles.
Realism is NOT naive.
Boom, the entire tree of Whig Enlightenment Philosophy is cut, right at the roots.
Your senses DO give you true and real perceptions of the Cosmos of things and their qualities (which are real).
"[While] devising tests to ascertain whether a prospective pilot could effectively detect the aiming point of a complex motion, [Gibson] discovered to his amazement that the physical data available in the so-called “retinal image” do not suffice to determine that point. Then and there he recognized what his colleagues have apparently failed to grasp to this day: namely, that this fact alone disproves the premise upon which the prevailing “image theory” of visual perception is based."
I'm just an unfrozen caveman philosopher. All this talk of "Cartesian bifurcation" and "naive Realism" confuses and frightens me.
But this talk of James J. Gibson applying empirical science to deep philosophical questions makes me go "hghghghghghg". Must read further. Maybe even learn conjugate complex verbs know what Aristotle say.
As I recall, J.P. Moreland wrote a book, Universals, which presents a case for Realism pretty well, along with counterarguments. It also includes arguments for and against alternatives to Realism, which are both variants of nominalism. It may more fully flesh out your understanding gleaned from Smith.
So, Gibson discovers the first empirical evidence that we conflate the Map for the Territory? Or that we view that Territory and chop it into "belief" maps?
Is this like seeing recurring, Post-Jab Sudden Adult Death Syndrome and thinking it is climate change? 🤣
Hmmm. I think Gibson would say that indirect realists assert that we only ever see a Map, and that what we think is the Territory is actually just a Map in our head; while what we actually see is the Territory, which is why we can distinguish it from a Map, which is an image of the Territory. I'm probably responding to your question too literally! :-|
It is tragic how.... climate change.... is causing sudden adult death syndrome, isn't it...
Trust yer gut, I say👏 The MSM thus shows us maps, hoping to defeat our internal compass but we SEE the territory and we KNOW "They" are lieing, we do. THIS is why there is a trillion dollar MSM, it is needed to shore up faux Narrative, True Lies.
A case can tentatively be made the msm produces smth other than the designation 'maps' routinely implies 😏
200% agree
Everything that you covered about Wolfgang Smith was incredibly interesting and well-written.
But what I liked most about this piece was your willingness to acknowledge that you didn’t know something and that you was wrong in what you previously said. I think that is a very powerful thing to do and I greatly respect it.
Christopher Fuchs has a single-user handle of quantum weirdness to offer, a wondrous theory residing comfortably within the tongue-twisty bettabilitarianist framework (aka ‘the world is loose at the joints’) 😊
🗨 If the wave function describes an observer, does the observer have to be human? [...] (“Dogs don’t use wave functions,” Fuchs said. “Heck, I didn’t collapse a wave function until I was 34.”)
quantamagazine.org/quantum-bayesianism-explained-by-its-founder-20150604
🗨 If Chris Fuchs did not exist then God would have been remiss in not inventing him. ~~David Mermin
As for the discussion regarding timeless entities (i.e. those entities "outside space time") here's something penned by Edith Stein from a while back:
https://renovatio.zaytuna.edu/article/knowledge-truth-being
Relevant:
>> [Timeless objects]
We ask now about the possibility of knowing a be-ing that does not belong {53} to the living stream of experiences of the knowing subject. It could be something enduring timelessly or something bound by time. If timebound it may either remain unchanged for the duration of its being or it may be something that changes and if so may in turn change continually through a part or through the whole of its duration.
We ask first: is it possible for a mind that knows in a temporal process to know something that endures timelessly? For this an actual contact between knower and known is needed that is itself something temporal. This will only be possible if the thing enduring timelessly has a relation to the temporal; that is, either it is analogous to a species in individuo [a species in the individual] as we found in the units of experience, or it has an effect on something temporal. In no case can something that knows in temporal acts know anything timelessly enduring immediately in its timeless existence [Existenz]. The effect of the timeless on the temporal may be an effect on the knowing subject itself. (An illustration would be the possibility of knowing God on the basis of his immanence; I do not wish to go into this here.) In the case of an effect on something temporal existing independently of the knowing subject, knowledge of the temporal thing is presupposed. Likewise when the timeless belongs to the structure of the temporal. <<