05.15.08
Posted in Science, Philosophy at 6:45 pm by nemo
Comment on Experimental philosophy:
The question is: do philosophers need to be scientists (specialists) beside being philosophers?
I think the dilemma is false, and a sign of the age of specialization we live in. And of the attitude of reductionist scientists who arrogantly think they have transcended philosophy. There is no absolute division between philosophy and science. The easiest way to consider that is in terms of Kant, whose response to Newtonian physics was to consider the hidden metaphysical premises latent in science itself. And the inability of science to create the correct foundation for a discourse on freedom and ethics in the context of causal science. His resolution of the problem in the framework of transcendental idealism should be understood by all scientists, instead we see this extremely limited attitude of scientism adopting the posture of omniscience with respect to all knowledge. The result is a betrayal of science, what to say of its incomprehension of philosophy.
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04.02.08
Posted in Philosophy, Science & Religion at 6:41 pm by nemo
Berlinski
He seemed very taken with the idea that if you reject God you are left without a final arbiter for questions about morality. As I’ve written before at this blog, my own view is that clear thinking about moral issues can not begin until the idea of God as moral arbiter is discarded. So I was not too impressed with that little argument.
Kant said as much, insisting on the autonomy of the moral agent. But can science deal with the idea of freedom in the context of its causal universalism? Read the rest of this entry »
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03.11.08
Posted in religion, Philosophy at 6:46 pm by nemo
James comments on Kantian Ethics 101.
James said,
March 11, 2008 at 1:13 pm
“Even if we back away from Kant’s strict thinking, we are left with the acute nature of his stylized analysis which uncovers something deep that Buddhists must confront as the barrier of ‘desire’ blocks the deeper man. ”
How so?
Actually, I think you are doing a doubletake here, since associating Buddhism with Kantian ethics is counterintuitive, and in many ways quite false. Many yogis and self-styled esoteric spiritual types (consider Gurdjieff or Crowley) are quite hoitytoidy and consider themselves quite beyond mere ethics for mortals, it seems. Crowley almost seems to produce a demonic mockery of the Kantian discourse on will. Who gets the last laugh?
My point was merely that where a ‘Buddhist’ would use meditation to generate consciousness in the friction between the desire body and some higher aspect of himself, an active ethical self-realization after the manner of Kant would produce essentially the same effect, at least in theory (what a difficult discipline), a point long lost in Christian religious churches but historically present in some orthodox monastic traditions, and certainly in many sufistic traditions. Study the Pietist movement(s) in the mainline of Protestantism (kant’s background, which he rejected, but which influenced his ethical cast of mind), and you see something like attempts at active spiritual practice, too often resulting in cultic confusions, but nonetheless the closest humble Christians come to the world of meditation.
But, perhaps, your head-scratching ‘how so’ is right. We can’t really equate such different things. I will say, again, that the strangely arrogant stance of many who consider themselves esoteric spiritual wonders toward the spiritual commoners in exoteric religion gets a bit tiresome in my book. The ordinar religionist may be in a hopeless muddle, but who isn’t, the ethical void of many high-priced gurus (high priced whores) simply shows the way they have sold their will for the ‘cheap success’ of high octane self-consciousness.
There is an important clue to such types: most wouldn’t be intelligent enough to grasp Kantian thinking, and hide behind their ‘higher consciousness’ with pompous bluff.
I am no fan of that especial devil Gurdjieff, but he at least pointed to the fact that the ‘path of will’ stands beyond the paths of the yogis. Well, maybe, but who has found that way? It is a latent evolutionary possibility that none of us has the wit to realize.
Actually, it is always with us, and always has been, in the default, or defunct, format of Christianity (or Islam, etc…). The beings in this path are on this path by a technicality of logic, but everything after that is the daily turnover of their ‘original sins’.
See my point, and don’t take that the wrong way. We can condescend, and reject, Christianity, and perhaps with good reason, but it’s worth going to see a AA meeting, a congress of ‘hopeless cases’, real drunks, sitting through their ‘path of will’ that has no ‘will’ whatsoever, but perhaps some possibility of ‘repentance’ or redemption (both decayed terms of the path of ‘will’). This goes a long way toward explaining our difficulty with something like Christianity as we mature and wish to move beyond it (and we should be free to do so).
Anyway Kantian ethics is like an apparition out of the blue. Note that it is a gesture of philosophy, an abstraction. It may be of no practical use!? Kant insists on the significance of ‘ordinary moral understanding’ and claims no more than to try and clarify the basis of what is already present in the most ordinary of men (a species character, as it were), but subject to confusions and blights on its inherent vitality as an aspect of human nature.
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03.10.08
Posted in religion, Philosophy at 7:49 pm by nemo
The comments in previous post referenced Kant’s moral theory. Here’s a quick link:
Philosophy 302: Ethics Kantian Ethics, below.
Nemo: Kant raises a question that haunts Buddhists and yogis: the nature of will, desire, and inclination.
Kant’s strict moralism seems at first foreign to standard public usage, but the interaction of will and inclination is a crucial one. Even if we back away from Kant’s strict thinking, we are left with the acute nature of his stylized analysis which uncovers something deep that Buddhists must confront as the barrier of ‘desire’ blocks the deeper man. Kant, no yogi, nevertheless stumbled on this through the pure contemplation of ethics.
Here’s a short snapshot from the link source, with the remarkable gist, “Kant believes only actions performed for the sake of duty have moral worth”:
Introduction: An attraction to the Kantian doctrines of obligation is begun along the following lines:
Read the rest of this entry »
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Posted in Philosophy, Science & Religion at 6:09 pm by nemo
James comment on Religion of atheism, and shifting sand dunes
James said,
March 7, 2008 at 8:15 pm
It’s unfair that these reductionists have co-opted “atheism.” I don’t see much in common between them and Schopenhauer besides the lack of belief in a deity or “higher power.”
The question of Schopenhauer is especially apt since his, and Kant’s, transcendental idealism shows the mysterious matrix that lies behind all these views.
That’s why I recommended Schopenhauer to SK: there is something comprehensive about this phase of German classical philosophy: at a stroke, the legacies of ‘mysticism’ (Vedanta/Upanishadism), philosophy, science, and religion come together in one common framework.
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02.03.08
Posted in Philosophy, 1848+, Critique of Evolutionary Economy at 5:11 pm by nemo
Filed under: Introduction to Marxism class, economics, socialism — louisproyect @ 7:45 pm
(This was posted to the Introduction to Marxism mailing list, an online class. For more information go to http://groups.yahoo.com/group/marxism_class/.)
I have already commented on this ‘Marxism class’, and also on idealism/ideology, and should leave them alone, but the question of Marx’s German Ideology raises a significant, and no doubt heretical, point. The context of Marx’s reaction against ‘German idealism’ as the world ‘idealism’ devolved to ‘ideology’ was the passage from ‘philosphy’ to the study of ideology. Read the rest of this entry »
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Posted in Philosophy at 4:40 pm by nemo
Do personal beliefs change behavior?
Do our beliefs about free will change our behavior? It seems they do. Here researchers primed some subjects to believe that our behavior is wholly determined by environment and genes, and that free will is a myth. (This is a theme of Dawkins who says that punishing a criminal is like kicking your car when it breaks down) Those subjects acted less ethically than those not primed. Beliefs influence behavior.
The issue was better put by Kant with his ’should’ implies ‘can’.
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01.29.08
Posted in Philosophy at 3:30 pm by nemo
Review of: Revolution in Mind: The Creation of Psychoanalysis
By THEODORE DALRYMPLE
January 16, 2008
What, if anything, did Sigmund Freud actually discover? What concrete human knowledge would be lacking if he, or someone very like him, had never lived?
It is worth backtracking via Nietzsche to Schopenhauer, looking at the context of Freud’s generation, conveniently forgotten by those who still buy into his theories.
Schopenhauer’s ‘discovery’ of the unconscious did the job right, and remains still the real mccoy.
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01.14.08
Posted in Science, Philosophy at 2:34 pm by nemo
James comments on Darwinism to discredit science?
James said,
January 13, 2008 at 3:56 pm
For some mind boggling reason, both the reductionists and critics of “materialism” can’t grasp some very simple points that you’ve made. Questions of whether some aspect of man goes beyond the brain or “survives” death should fall squarely within “naturalism:”
“Methodological naturalism, as current in the conduct of science, often muddles the question of ‘naturalism’ in its stances toward mind, consciousness and values, sometimes making them seem ‘spiritual’ unless subjected to reductionist revisionism.”
“But let’s declare the ‘material/spiritual’ distinction bad terminology. The ‘mind’ is not a ‘spiritual’ entity, but it doesn’t follow we can reduce it to simple mechanics.”
http://www.history-and-evolution.com/kant/page2.htm
Thanks for the quote. The only real way out, to me, is the Kant/Schopenhauer route. A related cousin to this is the Indian Samkhya tradition, where ‘mind’ is explicitly part of the ‘natural’ domain (prakriti). Samkya, Kant/Schopenhauer still make ‘dualism’ explicit, but this is not quite the same as the ‘material/spiritual’ duality. In transcendental idealism the question of ’soul’ and ‘body’ vanish into a higher framework (or almost, Kant is perhaps less clear than Schopenhauer)
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01.09.08
Posted in religion, Philosophy at 5:43 pm by nemo
Paulos’ Irreligion is somehow par for the course, but one of his discussions, the First Cause argument, while it certainly deserves the kind of skeptical scrutiny Paulos gives it, might have elaborated on the Kantian treatment.
1. Everything has a cause, or perhaps many causes.
2. Nothing is its own cause.
3. Causal chains can’t go on forever.
4. So there has to be a first cause.
5. That first cause is God, who therefore exists.
The ‘dialectic’ in his first critique deals with the double antinomy surrounding such arguments. The arguments on this subject are double-edged, or double contradictions, and the result is the challenge to reason itself, and the resolution via the intuitions of transcendental idealism.
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12.26.07
Posted in Philosophy at 10:49 pm by nemo
Question from James:
I know you’ve written frequently about Schopenhauer’s general framework of transcendental idealism, but what do you think about the specifics of his metaphysics of the will? What do you think about his attempt to provide an atheistic account of teleology?
Good question. I am not sure what you mean by teleology here. I tend to think and use the term historically because of my own work. Schopenhauer was very ahistorical, yet ironically his work is helpful (at least to me) in coming to a new view on the philosophy of history. Read the rest of this entry »
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12.24.07
Posted in Philosophy, The Eonic Effect at 4:07 pm by nemo
I am putting this under the category of The Eonic Effect. Anyone remember why (after reading WH&EE)?
The pre-Socratic philosopher sparked an intellectual revolution that still echoes today. Yet for philosophy and science to continue to progress in the 21st century, we may need to embark on an entirely new cognitive journey
Raymond Tallis’s book The Enduring Significance of Parmenides (Continuum) will be published in 2008
Read the rest of this entry »
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12.13.07
Posted in Philosophy at 5:21 pm by nemo
The New New Philosophy
It could be that this will lead to something, but the suspicious must be that philosophy in decline wishes to ape scientism. What it should be doing is exposing it.
It’s part of a recent movement known as “experimental philosophy,” which has rudely challenged the way professional philosophers like to think of themselves. Not only are philosophers unaccustomed to gathering data; many have also come to define themselves by their disinclination to do so. The professional bailiwick we’ve staked out is the empyrean of pure thought. Colleagues in biology have P.C.R. machines to run and microscope slides to dye; political scientists have demographic trends to crunch; psychologists have their rats and mazes. We philosophers wave them on with kindly looks. We know the experimental sciences are terribly important, but the role we prefer is that of the Catholic priest presiding at a wedding, confident that his support for the practice carries all the more weight for being entirely theoretical. Philosophers don’t observe; we don’t experiment; we don’t measure; and we don’t count. We reflect. We love nothing more than our “thought experiments,” but the key word there is thought. As the president of one of philosophy’s more illustrious professional associations, the Aristotelian Society, said a few years ago, “If anything can be pursued in an armchair, philosophy can.”
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Posted in Philosophy, Booknotes at 4:18 pm by nemo
Born to Shop: How Marketers Brainwash Babies
Marketers are targeting kids at disturbingly young ages, compromising the nation’s health, creativity and democracy.
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