08.31.10

Kant, freedom, and reductionist science

Posted in Kant, Philosophy at 12:42 pm by nemo

Freedom Evolves
This issue is the classic snafu created by causal science. You would think that scientists with so many resources at their disposal would be able to snap out of it and at least read the history of this question.

What I find remarkable is the way that ‘scientific’ publics are unaware of the entire history of this issue, especially as it emerges in Kant. Everyone is kept locked in a box so that the work of people like Kant will not disturb the minds of the brainwashed science cadres.

When you are confronted with the way that a figure like Dennett will convince more than Kant (who is never even mentioned), you know with some sadness that science has failed culturally, and you can also realize why religion is making a comeback. Scientists seem to prefer that alternative, to the approach of Kant who was a friend of science and a critic of religion.

Scientists can’t seem to grapple with the issue. But Kant analyzed that psychology well, with his analysis of the ‘basic antinomies’ of reason.
Scientists are stuck in a mode of thought where their successes produce failure here.
But the options are clear. If you create a culture based on disbelief in free will, you will start in motion something ugly, if not impossible (e.g. the abolition of court law assuming criminal responsibility, etc). It is not a real option.
Kant tried patiently to deal with this issue in the context of science, apparently in vain. Complete idiots like Dennett get the name of philosopher, and we live in that especial case of philosophy in decline where mediocrities like Rorty (and Dennett) can claim to have refuted Kant.

You don’t even need to agree with Kant: simply follow the course of his analysis, and get beyond the willed nescience created by bad science education (indoctrination).

The real answer lies beyond even Kant, perhaps, (and Schopenhauer embraced the same framework as Kant, without agreeing on free will) in a realization that we simply don’t understand the universe. Physics may have confused us with a deceptive universalism of laws. Don’t quote me, however.
But Kant’s formulation clearly states the issues and proposes a way out.

In WHEE, btw, I have a tricky set of hybrids based on ‘self-consciousness’ which is the ‘donkey’ of free will and changes gears with higher and lower degrees of freedom.

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08.02.10

God 2.0: Chopra vs Shermer

Posted in Philosophy, physics at 12:27 pm by nemo

God 2.0. The quantum flapdoodle of New Age author Deepak Chopra is a failed effort to update medieval theology…

I clicked on this right away, only to find that Mike Shermer was taking on Chopra.
I have a few problems with quantum theology, but even after a ‘dog does the paper’ treatment of quantum mechanics grafted on theology the fact remains that there is more in QM than is dreamt of in Shermer’s philosophy.

I think that it is a mistake to persist in using the term ‘god’, if you wish to divorce it from its monotheistic roots in Xtianity, et al.
But the problem with Chopra’s thinking is not that it is worng, but that we can’t arrive at any conclusions that are sound, as with all brands of theism/atheism.

I think that QM rediscovered Kant, and his ‘noumenal’ dimension, and that the paradoxex of physics are bumping up against that provocative and frustrating limit

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Haidt opens Edge junk science lectures on ethics (with a swipe at Kant)

Posted in ethics, Kant, Philosophy at 12:06 pm by nemo

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/morality10/morality.haidt.html: Haidt at Edge

Accusing Kant and Benthan of Asperger’s Syndrome to open a discussion of ethics is a bit much.
(btw, So what if they did have Asperger’s? It is almost a recommendation, quite apart from the groupie science at places like Edge.org, where everyone is a suckup trying to get a book deal)

Haidt must be worried by Kantian ethics here! It is the strongest challenge to reductionist theories of ethics. Kant’s thinking here was a work in progress and appears in several versions, and, in a way, that closer look is needed near the academic courses that teach his ethics in misaleding fashion.
But after all the problems none of these scientists, stuck on Darwinism, can get ethics right, next to Kant’s way of getting it right, at least as to basics.
Kant confronts the issue of freedom next to causality, and creates a framework where freedom is given its place in the discussion. Scientists constantly, over and over and over, get stuck here, and bloviate for us to no avail.
Kant’s ethical project, even if you disagree, points to something scientists can’t accomplish: ‘common ordinary morality’. Kant wished to assist in understanding the moral sense that is already the case. Perhaps his approach is incomplete, or fails, but he raises the issue that scientists bypass: describe morality before theorizing. Not so easy.

For Immanuel Kant, the case is not quite so clear. He also was a loner who loved routine, feared change, focused on his few interests, to the exclusion of all else. And, according to one psychiatrist, Michael Fitzgerald, who diagnoses Asperger’s in historical figures and shows how it contributed to their genius, Fitzgerald thinks that Kant would be diagnosed with Asperger’s. I think the case is not nearly so clear. I think Kant did have better social skills, more ability to empathize. So I wouldn’t say that Kant had Asperger’s, but I think it’s safe to say that he was about as high as could possibly be on systemizing, while still being rather low on empathizing, although not the absolute zero that Bentham was.

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06.30.10

Agnosticism and the noumenal

Posted in Kant, Philosophy, Schopenhauer at 2:11 pm by nemo

We have already linked today to: An Agnostic Manifesto, but the essay is worth reading.

I was often over time ‘a sort of atheist’ without realizing it, and this position was really closer to agnosticism than atheism. With the arrival of the New Atheists, vacating the atheist position becomes an necessity since this cultic brand is highly intolerant and contains an entire bible of related beliefs.

The problem is that, philosophically, theism can revinvent itself constantly in ever new guises, in a manner that, while not truly convincing, is dialectically alive. Much atheism arises from the silliness and infantile deterioration of theism into a degenerated theism. A spate of atheism is often a negation of this perverted theism, and as such healthy for the mind.
But the real idea of ‘god’ is not so simply dismissed because it is not so simply defined. And very powerful antinomies of reason, as clearly portrayed by Kant, haunt both the affirmation and/or negation of ‘god’.
This often takes the form of the antinomies of the beginning in time/no beginning in time (The manifesto linked to has a version of this in its question about creating something from nothing).
The mind will be like a dog chasing its tail as it wobbles between theism and atheism. The search to still the mind might be found in an agnostic position.

Beyond that, the transcendental idealism of Kant, seemingly theistic in the case of the latter, and atheistic (or agnostic) in his great successor Schopenhauer, gives us the truest ground for agnosticism, contra Kant, in its reminder that the noumenal is beyond knowing, behind the phenomenal. We cannot ‘know god’ (save that ‘gnostics’ in another sense do so claim) either as a positive or a negative.
Unfortunately Kant muddied his position by reintroducing a redefined version of ‘faith’ to posit an ‘atheist’s redefined god’ somewhere in the vicinity of his ethical discourses. Schopenhauer in a way swept all this aside in his streamlined agnostic transcendental idealism. One problem is that Schopenhauer is almost Buddhist in his strain of pessimism and his concealed metaphysics of the will. But, whatever the case, the great insight into transcendental idealism starting with Kant reminds us that agnosticism confronts the noumenon as it is.
Transcendental idealism, despite its confusing and misleading name which doesn’t mean what it seems, is a highly useful non-belief system constructed as an extension/commentary to Newtonian physics and is highly adaptable to a modified science.

Again, the question of ‘god’ is never simple. Note that the Israelites did not use this word, but instead IHVH, as something to point to beyond simple theism.

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06.16.10

Spinoza versus Kant

Posted in Booknotes, Philosophy at 12:13 pm by nemo

Link to Spinoza contra Kant

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05.16.10

Kant, philosophy of history, non-randomness, and Kant’s successors

Posted in Evolution, Kant, Philosophy at 12:47 pm by nemo

My previous post was very hard on Ruse. There is one consolation: Ruse is not the only second-rate philosopher these days.
EVERY philosopher, post-Kant is somehow second-rate, a world historical puzzle in itself.
Since Kant’s work is egregiously complex, you might read the books of Bryan Magee on Schopenhauer and/or philosophy and/or Wagner to get his take on this, an adolescent vision of Kant’s antinomies. We live in the era of Darwin, and Rorty. Rorty on Kant is a bit of a comedy. I see no problem with pygmies trying to take down Kant, but succeed, where Rorty failed completely.
In general the issue of Kant and pragmatism is a quagmire for young students. I can’t handle pragmatism, myself, why I know not, but perhaps i am fortunate.
I am also fortunate I am not philosopher, leastwise a Kantian, nor have I followed the academic tracks of Kantstudien. But I have been blessed with a kind of vision of Kant’s critique of metaphysics (Magee also describes such a thing in his life, pondering the antinomies at night in bed as a youth) which has helped me beyond measure in understanding science, and evolutionism.

If you study the eonic effect (history and evolution dot com) you will see ‘Kant in action, or applied Kant’, a spectacular insight into historical evolution and the philosophy of history, and that philosophy is a non-random field of emergence in world history (note its connection to the Axial Age, and the eonic effect in general), and what’s more Kant appears eerily at the so-called Great Divide in the eonic series as depicted by me. Study the logic or non-randomness in world history that I provide, and it might become clear why Kant overshadows those who come after him. Very strange, very very strange.

I think biologists might learn from Kant and his successors the teleomechansists. Their work is a bit old-fashioned and needs an uprade, but their basic points are of fundamental importance in the mess of current biology.

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05.09.10

More on ‘Soul Talk’

Posted in Kant, Philosophy at 2:20 pm by nemo

Relink to ‘Soul Talk’

No self-respecting professor of philosophy wants to discuss the soul in class. It reeks of old-time theology, or, worse, New Age quantum treacle. The soul has been a dead end in philosophy ever since the positivists unmasked its empty referential center. Scientific philosophy has shown us that there’s no there there.

To say that philosophers should reject ‘soul talk’ may be good positivism, but it is not good philosophy.
This kind of article picks all of the aspects of the question easy to discredit, and makes no effort to deal with the super-hard questions of soul.
Positivism has done nothing here except play ostrich.
A better scientific approach would be to weed out the endless confusion here and study the classic themes on the subject from Plato to the Tibetan book of the Dead.
But most of all, if philosophy is the topic, then the issue of the ‘philosophy of soul’ might focus on the Kantian discourse on the ‘noumenal’ and educate students in the undecidability of the question of soul.

Kant is helpful here because he points to the metaphysical dilemmans of the noumenal, but doesn’t go so far as to deny realities that might be beyond our ken.

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05.08.10

Soul talk and positivistic failure mode

Posted in Kant, Philosophy, Schopenhauer at 12:16 pm by nemo

Soul talk

No self-respecting professor of philosophy wants to discuss the soul in class. It reeks of old-time theology, or, worse, New Age quantum treacle. The soul has been a dead end in philosophy ever since the positivists unmasked its empty referential center. Scientific philosophy has shown us that there’s no there there.

This article, in the Chronicle of Higher Education no less, is a revealing snapshot of the way that scientism has overtaken philosophy and destroyed it.
If anyone wants to argue against the ‘soul’, that is one thing, but to speak as a philosopher with such overconfidence, and to a class of students, is shocking, and a reminder that scientism is killing off the universities.
I have many problems with ‘soul’ philosophies, but, all in all, the issue of soul won’t go away, and hasn’t been touched even by postivists and, laugh all you want here, their ‘scientific philosophy’.
Has this professor never read Kant?

The best way to see the danger of negating soul is to read a philosopher like Schopenhauer who had little patience with religious soul verbiage but who reinvented ‘soul’ beliefs all over again in his manner of discussing transcendental idealism, in the wake of Kant: if out categories of perception are the source of the space-time matrix then it follows that some part of the mind stands beyond space and time. Even if this Kantian, and then Schopenhauerian, logic is flawed, it should remind us that ‘soul’ beliefs are their own worst enemy and veil the reality, which is that they can revive in the twinkling of an eye, most prodigiously via the unwitting efforts of great philosophers.
Schopenhauer on death
But the issue here in a Kantian vein is not arguing for the existence of soul so much as realizing that the noumenal aspect of mind is lost to the students of empiricist dogma. We cannot prove anything about soul, one way or the other.

This article goes off on the tangents of junk talk on ‘soul’. But that is pointless.
And it also shows the way, visible in the depiction of his students, that soul beliefs in all their confusion are naturally endemic and a normal aspect of human evolutionary psychology. They cannot and should not be excised. Instead one can try to rescue them from confusion.

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Harris vs Kant

Posted in ethics, Philosophy at 12:04 pm by nemo

Sam Harris, positivist, and arrogant

I was a little unfair to Harris, and my criticism is only of the celebrity effect that can make idiocy seem rational, and influence a huge peanut gallery.

My last remark solves the problem: Harris is going to put his views in writing, without consulting the literature. This is in circle-squarer range.

It is worth, more ironically, looking at Kant’s project here, which is not based on neuroscience, but which did brilliantly try to bring the issues of ethics within the range of ‘reason’. Seeing what Kant said and where, according to some critics, he went wrong will tell you everything you need to know about Harris’ false ambition.
I may be wrong, for, as noted, he is going to put this nonsense, no doubt, in writing.

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05.07.10

Gould book authors, and materialism/idealism

Posted in Evolution, Philosophy, physics, Schopenhauer at 3:01 pm by nemo

Critique of Intelligent Design: Materialism versus Creationism from Antiquity to the Present
by John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Richard York

We just discussed the book on Gould by the same two authors who wrote the book above: we have commented here at length on that book, use the search box.
It is an interesting book, but the emphasis on ‘materialism’ is bit passe at this point (as is the design arugment). After all we have had a century of QM (what to say of even more time with electromagnetid field theory), the emphasis on materialism is a ghost from the nineteenth century positivists.
The issue of evolution is not materialism versus design.
Marxists crippled themselves with materialism in the generation of Marx, even as Schopenhauer without religious obsessions produced a version of transcendentalism idealism that would have served Marx better. Marx’s thinking was downright clumsy by comparison.
To be sure Schopenhauer has surface problems in this work that drive people away, surface problems. He ended with a metaphysics of the will, which is odd, or is it right on?
We can see exactly what is missing from evolutionism, stuck in its material reductionism. It is Ok to make the same charge in reverse for Schopenhauer’s idealism, but the point is our suspicion that just as classical physics was resolved with force fields (gravity the first) so…., so we are not sure, but it would seem that a ‘force field’ construct must be involved in the paradoxes of evolution. That may be off, but the fact is that something much more complex than material processes is involved in the processes of development. It is hard to avoid this kind of thinking when you look at the real processes of evolution seen in world history.
Schopenhauer and Kant are much better than simple idealism, which is different. In any case, there is no victor in the dialectic of materialism and idealism. Why did that enter into Marxist fundamentalism, only to confuse the left for over a century. A more sophisticated dialectic would have served better.
Material issues are inescapable, but so are ‘idea’ issues as Schopenhauer understood well, with his artificial and preposterous but cogent annexation of the ‘Platonic ideas’ into his thinking.
You can’t reduce ideas to material forces (or vice versa)>

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04.26.10

Reviving the Humanities, and the bad science education behind Darwinian scientism

Posted in Evolution, Kant, Philosophy, Science & Religion at 3:22 pm by nemo

Book Review–Troy Jollimore on Why Democracy Needs the Humanities
Review of Martha Nussbaum’s Not For Profit
By Troy Jollimore

Nussbaum’s book looks interesting and I will track it down stat.
I think, however, that the situation calls for something more than trying to revive the Humanities. As culture reaches the final stages of existence in the Iron Cage, more is needed than mere literary flourishes. We need a full blown collision of dialectic between the Geisteswissenschaften and Naturwissenschaften, a Romantic Movement rasied from the dead, German Classical Philosophy using assault and (philosophic) battery on the mindless generation of idiots raised in the Flatland of scientism.
We could have a kickoff with Kantians taking on the Darwinists, followed by further such collisions routing the Know Nothings of contemporary Big Science.
And a reform of education might help. That is part of the reason why science is stuck on Darwinism, unable to see where the problem is, and why the New Atheists have muddled both religion and atheism with an ignorance of the history of religion that is almost puzzling, next the bad to awful theories of the evolution of religion. People overspecialized in science training, with no other exposure to educational resources, should be considered suspect of bad thinking, the kind we see at work in the evolution debate, and the debates over the ‘god gene’, etc… Such people are overvalued and armed-and-dangerous.

As a professor in a large state university system, I am quite familiar with the current state of American liberal arts education, at least in our public institutions of higher learning. And I am here to tell you: The news is not good. The public universities in general are in a sorry state, languishing under constantly dwindling funding and lack of public support. Class sizes are growing even as instructors are being let go. Funds for research and other intellectual activities are rapidly disappearing. Many instructors are not being paid their full salaries. And many universities have responded to the situation, or are considering responding, by slashing if not entirely eliminating humanities and arts programs—programs frequently regarded as expensive, nonessential luxuries, in a world increasingly focused on the economic bottom line.

As a result, an ever smaller number of students have at any point during their university careers the special, indeed irreplaceable experience of sitting in a room with a small number of their colleagues and discussing difficult ideas—ideas, in many cases, that are foundational to our civilization—with an instructor who is willing to challenge them and who has the time and energy to take their thoughts seriously. The anonymity and alienation of the large lecture hall or the online course has largely replaced the person-to-person interaction that was once considered the apotheosis, if not indeed the core, of the college experience.

Individual students often fail to realize, of course, just how much of a raw deal they are getting compared to their predecessors; since they spend only four years or so on campus, they are not aware of how much more crowded their classrooms are, or how much less attention their work and intellectual progress receive from their ever more put-upon instructors. But we professors, who tend to stay around for longer, are more vividly aware of the steepness of the decline. It has been true for a while, sadly, that quite a few students were pretty much illiterate when they entered public universities. What is becoming more and more true is that many students are still essentially illiterate when they leave.

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04.17.10

Hegel, atheism, and Solomon’s In the Spirit of Hegel

Posted in atheism, Booknotes, Kant, Philosophy, Science & Religion at 1:17 pm by nemo

In the Spirit of Hegel (Paperback)
~ Robert C. Solomon

Watching the new atheists, I often think of this book by Robert Solomon, a humanist yet student of Hegel, and his tome on Hegel’s classic that attempts to claim that Hegel was an atheist.
Others have thought so, and the same, for Kant.
The point is only that atheism was truly born in the generation of Kant and his successors, as the metaphysical Illusion of religion and false empiricism both came home to the generation of the Enlightenment.

To call Hegel an atheist is provocative, but I doubt many students of Hegel will agree or endorse this nonetheless interesting work, which might caution the new atheists against the superficial anti-theism that the ‘real atheists’ of the Kant generation embraced and then transcended. Hegel is a lost cause at this point, but musing over his ‘atheism’ might help to see that theism and atheism are equally empty.

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01.14.10

TI neither an idealism nor transcendental

Posted in Philosophy at 5:21 pm by nemo

The question of transcendental idealism has been totally filtered out of public philsoophy, but it is a classic insight into the limits of scientism. We witness the stupidity of reductionist science everyday, a two-centuries old critique and repair ignored completely, a sad situation.
The value of that perspective lies not in idealism (TI is not necessarily an idealism) or in the ‘transcendental’ (the term in Kant means something else), but in the attempt to accept the framework of Newtonian science, and yet to show its limits and inherent contradictions, and produce a viable way to proceed.

Visions of a Ghostseer

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12.17.09

More on biocentrism and idealism

Posted in Kant, Philosophy, physics at 5:58 pm by nemo

Comments on Biocentrism Demystified

reece sullivan said,

December 17, 2009 at 12:11 am ·

Stephen,

Would you elaborate on various flavors of idealism; I’m familiar with Berkley, of course, but don’t know how he differs from others, or rather, how others differ from him. Also, what’s your take on panpsychism? I’ve found it attractive, but have just started doing some reading on it.
————————————- Read the rest of this entry »

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11.21.09

Consciousness trying to explain consciousness

Posted in Philosophy, Schopenhauer, Science & Religion at 4:14 pm by nemo

Comment on Schopenhauer and death

reece sullivan said,
November 21, 2009 at 2:56 pm ·
I’ve had a strange relationship with William Blake in that he articulated a lot of things I’d already thought, only a couple hundred years earlier . . . and that we also have the same birthday, oddly, which will actually be a week from today: Nov 28th. At any rate, I found out that he said, as I’d said in different words before, that he’d already died and been “reborn” several times in his “life,” thus, we’re to take it that this might, on some level or the other, be applied to death, proper. Life is a series of deaths. I believe this is something one can see in Proust’s thoughts, too. What holds all these “separate” selves together so that we say they’re a person, ourselves? Proust’s main character was concerned that he would “die and be reborn” so that the (actual) death of his lover would become more and more removed . . . in such a way that he’d be a different person, essentially, only able to sympathize with his past self that lost his lover in the same way that one would sympathize with a stranger who lost his lover. In other words, whatever tragedies or joys we experience eventually become the tragedies or joys of another person: a past self that’s dead and that’s been replaced by a “reborn” self.

Concerning “The World As Will & Idea” and consciousness:
When we think about science, for instance, trying to understand consciousness, we have to realize that the ultimate tool being used to understand and “explain” consciousness is, well, consciousness. The thing trying to understand and trying to explain is that thing we’re trying to understand and explain. We obviously have a hard time trying to categorize or even explain this phenomena itself: is it a “strange loop?” What is it that’s even going on here? Some say that the creative power of consciousness ends up creating a mirror effect, so that, on some level, we can always find something wherever we look that might, to degrees, seem to show us something. This could also parallel holographic explanations of the world. For this reason, I’ve thought for some time that if I could flush these thoughts out more and if I had the time and passion to do so, I’d write a book playing on Schopenhauer’s title named, “The World as Mirror and Idea.” Because it’s consciousness that’s looking, the world will seem to mirror whatever our consciousness is set on.

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10.29.09

Comment on Darwinism vs Schopenhauer

Posted in Evolution, Philosophy at 12:54 pm by nemo

Comment on Reductionist Darwinism vs Schopenhauer

Stephen P. Smith said,
October 27, 2009 at 4:12 pm ·
There is a retreat into our own private ontological cocoon to seek a calm vantage point and place to ponder. There must be such a safe place to go if we are going to make sense of our world, and the thoughts that are entertained make up what is called philosophy. Note being able to find a safe retreat is to subject one`s self to a perpetual strife, and leads to a puppet-like entrapment that is controlled by a dominant voice that knows no peace.

However, the ontological state of retreat can make no claims of knowing the world that is left behind. And so within philosophy we find a renewed call to venture into epistemology. Then the self finds itself leaving the cocoon behind in a metamorphous, and an effort is made to confront the tension that knows no peace; the self enters into empiricism and the mind returns to science. This temporary state continues until the time when the self is called to make sense of the world again.

Ontology cannot be separated from epistemology. Likewise, philosophy cannot be separated from science. Self-evidence is stark, but neither philosophy or science can get beyond their precondition that marks the barrier of self. At best a doorway is discovered, and through this doorway a better vantage point can be found and a better view of self seen.

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10.22.09

Heidegger cult

Posted in Philosophy at 2:41 pm by nemo

End of Heidegger cult?

How many scholarly stakes in the heart will we need before Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), still regarded by some as Germany’s greatest 20th-century philosopher, reaches his final resting place as a prolific, provincial Nazi hack? Overrated in his prime, bizarrely venerated by acolytes even now, the pretentious old Black Forest babbler makes one wonder whether there’s a university-press equivalent of wolfsbane, guaranteed to keep philosophical frauds at a distance.

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09.28.09

Scientism and the antinomies of freedom

Posted in Kant, Philosophy, Science at 3:56 pm by nemo

The Science of Freedom
Students of science these days are given a very narrow history of their subject. But real science education should include the history of modern philosophic reaction to Newtonianism, and the paradoxes that are generated by reductionism. Beginning with Rousseau and Kant a counterpoint to modern science arose that tried to clarify the issues that subsequently became suppressed by the rise of scientism.

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09.21.09

Self and space-time

Posted in Kant, Philosophy, Science at 1:06 pm by nemo

Arnhart comment on Essentialism and Self

Larry Arnhart said,
September 20, 2009 at 7:35 pm ·
So the human self is beyond “the space-time framework”?
I have no idea what you are talking about.
Could you please explain how something is real although it does not exist in time or space?

Larry, if I could answer that question I would be the world’s greatest philosopher, able to resolve Plationic ideas and the rest of it.

The statement is a variant of a Kantian idea: if the mind constructs space/time, then the mind must (at some level, not totally) be beyond space and time.
It is a classic Kantian issue, with respect to phenomena and noumena. Note that the distinction of phenomena and noumena is not the same as material/spiritual and/or existence/non-existence.
As a trained philsopher you should be less surprised that this issue haunts darwinism. You can be a philosopher or a Darwin propagandist. The latter expresses shock at challenges to scientism. The former knows better and sees the plight of science here.
I, for myself, have often considered the Indian Samkhya here: then the answer to your question might be that some aspects of the self (not the self as such) is material in some sense, yet perhaps beyond space and time. Universal materialism by definition, in that framework can have some kind of ‘existence’, whose status we do not understand.

In any case there are plenty of things that are real, but not in space and time: the abstraction of an isoceles triangle: where and when is that in space and time, apart from its realizations as drawn figures?
These issues are not so simple, as you should know. Most regrettably, scientists are trained to be stupid about such classic questions, and trained to do precisely the metaphysical blunders Kant warned against. What a misfortune.
But in general these are the hard questions Kant warns us are not easy to deal with, intractable, and dialectically unstable.

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08.28.09

The use of history by philosophers

Posted in History, Kant, Philosophy at 2:26 pm by nemo

From Evolving Thoughts: The use of history by philosophers

One thing is clear: scientists, and Darwinists, have abused the study of history. Scientists because they obsessively deny freedom in thinking history is reducible to physical laws, and Darwinists because their false view of evolution is the source of endlessly denied endlessly applied Social Darinism.

The use of history by philosophers should be a question about the philosophy of history, and there the philosopher Kant proposes the clearest outline of that: Kant’s Challenge: http://history-and-evolution.com/whee/chap4_4.htm

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08.02.09

Nietzsche overrated?

Posted in Philosophy at 1:14 pm by nemo

Comments on Nietzsche post

Stephen P. Smith said,

August 1, 2009 at 4:17 pm
Here is another N-man link that is worthy of review:

http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/Friedrich_Nietzsche

James said,
August 1, 2009 at 5:52 pm

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QslXTuhQUCY

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06.16.09

Wolin enters the reason/faith fray

Posted in Philosophy, religion, Science, secularism at 4:39 pm by nemo

Reason vs. Faith: the Battle Continues, an essay by Richard Wolin.
This discussion by Wolin is somewhat more helpful than the Fish/Eagleton postmod concession to the antisecularists (which is of course not an endorsement of all Wolin’s statements, & check out his Seduction of Unreason).
It is significant that he starts with Hegel (why not Kant or Rousseau?) who was the trickiest of the tricky on the subject, but who had a unique sensitivity to the dilemmas of modernity and tradition. However, again, I can hardly endorse Hegel’s views. That very profound philosophic generation beginning with Kant is now replaced with the degenerated version holding forth between Dawkins groupies promoting scientism and Bible Belt fundamentalists.
It might help to start over at that point and look at the way the issues were framed. Hegel, whatever our stance toward his thinking as a whole, was able to think he could reconcile Christianity and secularism, as a final voice in the Protestant Reformation, as it were. Yet he thought that religion was transcended in philosophy (by his definition) and had a stunningly exotic view or descant on the Enlightenment theme of Reason, well versed as he was in the whole gamut of challenges to Enlightenment Reason discourse.

There is a lot in Wolin’s essay, fit for more discussion, but I would note that he seems on the verge of postdarwinism, so why not burst asunder from the Darwin pretense.
Much of the responsibility for the confusion over secularism springs, not from religionists, but from the way it has been hijacked by such a narrow set of viewpoints on the secular side, the Darwin to Dawkins axis of natural selection metaphysics and lame-footed atheism unable to grasp the complexities of religion.
The generation from Kant to Hegel/Marx tackled the question of religion and secularism and created a set of frameworks that can help the current discussion. I cannot hope that conservative Christains will avail themselves of any of this (e.g. Platinga, thus, is the sophistical lifeboat for Christians against that ‘dratted’ Kant), but I can expect scientists to have the capacity to review the historical record of secularism, and be aware of the complexity of the issues at the dawn of modernity, at which point secularism became defined.
But as Wolin senses, a cadre that finds Dennett’s Breaking the Spell serious discourse on religion is, like fundamentalism, too far gone to deal with a situation that threatens to produce real chaos.
You can’t possibly hope to roll back secularism. If you try it the Thirty Years War begins anew, adding more years to that bloody conflict. That, in a way, is the protection of secularism. You can rant on religion all you please, but you likely don’t have the stomach to add more years to the original thirty, so, end of discussion.
And those who call themselves secularists tend to have lost the thread of their curious ‘ism’, which isn’t a genuflection toward scientific fundamentalism, but a multidimensional set of cultural chords that pose the question of both science and the evolution of freedom. It is the inability of the culture dominated by the degenerating culture of scientism that, in failing to really address what modernity is, has fed its own opposition, feeding the flames of religious reaction.
To be sure, the Weberian indictment of the ‘iron cage’, noted by Wolin, seems a terminal verdict on modernity by one of its greatests sociologists. But I think that Weber’s dire conclusion arose not in response to modernity, as such, but precisely to the generation sliding into Darwinian scientism, and the cadre-closure of scientific professionalism. That’s not the same as the culture of modernity, which is a robust totality with more potential in principle for, not religion, but religious understanding, than the in any case long lost fantasy world of medievalism, pined after by conservatives religionists, who would die of fright if their conservative fantasies were ever realized.
I hold no brief for conservatives plying the evolution debate in the schools, but, like it or not, the symbolism of their actions points to a failure of education.
The point should be understood by those who construct the education of scientists, who would not be condemned to life in the iron cage if their educational guides did not insist on it.

In 1802 Georg W.F. Hegel wrote an impassioned treatise on faith and reason, articulating the major philosophical conflict of the day. Among European intellectual circles, the Enlightenment credo, which celebrated the “sovereignty of reason,” had recently triumphed. From that standpoint, human intellect was a self-sufficient measure of the true, the just, and the good. The outlook’s real target, of course, was religion, which the philosophes viewed as the last redoubt of delusion and superstition. Theological claims, they held, could only lead mankind astray. Once the last ramparts of unreason were breached — our mental Bastilles, as it were — sovereign reason would take command and, presumably, human perfection would not be long in coming.

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06.10.09

Philosophy and the ‘great divide’

Posted in Philosophy, The Eonic Effect at 5:52 pm by nemo

The Great Divide
James’ spontaneous sense of the decline of philosophy since Kant is significant. And if we look at the eonic effect, the modern transition and its Great Divide we see why this period was so clustered with innovations, cultural, not just technological, innovations.

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Philosophy in decline

Posted in Philosophy, The Eonic Effect at 3:33 pm by nemo

Comment on Experimental Philosophy

James said,
June 10, 2009 at 3:21 pm · Philosophy in decline? We have to speak in the past tense here. Disregarding all of the praise for Quine, Kripke, Wittgenstein, etc., has the 20th century-present produced one philosopher who can be mentioned in the same breath as Kant?

Bull’s eye. You might look closely at the eonic effect, and the way philosophy matches the pattern, especially in modernity near the great divide.

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05.13.09

Hegel: Christian or atheist? another view

Posted in Philosophy at 1:50 pm by nemo

Comment on Was Hegel an Atheist

Stephen P. Smith said,
May 13, 2009 at 12:32 pm ·
Was Hegel an atheist? Here is a worthy essay:

http://philosophy.eserver.org/hegel-christianity.html

Nothing I said yesterday took sides on this question. Mostly it is a case of Hegel being an atheist with respect to sillier definitions/concepts/beliefs about ‘god’.

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05.12.09

Booknotes: Solomon book on Hegel. Was Hegel an atheist?

Posted in atheism, Booknotes, Philosophy at 7:11 pm by nemo

In the Spirit of Hegel, by Robert Solomon

I was a bit cavalier with Hegel today (sorry, didn’t mean a word of it), in my post on Wright’s book and Sullivan’s review. Or perhaps not.
Hegel is something of an enigma, and the book by Solomon is unusual in pursuing the underground tradition that arose after his death, to the effect that he was actually an atheist.
This argument, not popular with many theological Hegelians, is not a view I either share or reject, I merely point to the larger historical context of German Classical philosophy and its significance.

This book might be of interest to secular humanists trying to grasp the way in which plain vanilla atheism, which is at least honest and out front, and even granting that the deviousness of Hegel makes him no role model, craps out as easily as naive theism.
Hegel is seeking the third term in the dialectic (??) between theism and atheism, and his overworked brain cranks out ‘geist’. The term could be freely translated ‘cosmic chewing gum’.
I don’t buy it, but it is curiously interesting to observe from a distance, and if string theorists can do better, let me know, STAT.
It is an indirect exercise in what is meant by the term ‘god’, if that is a question that still has any importance.
Hegel’s transposition of the semantics of reference arises in a kind of descant on the fate of Protestantism in modernity.
Perhaps it isn’t important, perhaps Solomon is wrong, and yet the strange experiment of Hegel is a challenge to humanists to consider something more than tin-can atheism as a pat belief system, based, no less, on the sawdust foundations of Darwinism.

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05.10.09

Eagleton/Fish attack liberalism??

Posted in 1848+, Philosophy, politics, Science & Religion, Ultra Far Left at 2:36 pm by nemo

Fish in his God Talk also takes on the question of liberalism etc, this I presume from Eagleton (whose book I have not read), and here their argument goes into postmodern garbage mode.
I think this formulation is completely off, and an attack on liberalism is egregious here. We have seen enough of what remains of degenerating Christianity to feel quite sure that whatever the problems with liberalism, they are not going to be solved by faith in the Christian religion.
In fact, liberalism, as a vehicle of freedom, was always an upgrade to religion hidden behind its secular disguise. And a repair job done on the decayed endgame of Axial Age religion which treated man as a passive object not deserving of freedom. The beginnings of a critique of that religious cast began with Protestantism and completed with the birth of liberalism. Etc… There are thousands of books on the history of liberalism. So Eagleton/Fish leave me baffled at this point, as if they were turning into postmodern neo-cons.
To be sure this is in part a leftist attack on liberalism, and its exploitations/distortions. Fair enough, but how is this going to be resolved by embracing the reactionary deceptions of Christianity and faith in god?
Similar remarks are possible on the idea of progress.
Progress is either an ideology of various elites, in which case, its critique is inevitable, or progress is a property of large-scale historical systems, in which case its reality, as the battle of the ancients and moderns made clear, is definite.
Read the rest of this entry »

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05.07.09

Self–and beyond space-time

Posted in Philosophy at 3:28 pm by nemo

Self-and space-time
There is hardly a more frustrating subject: the moment you attempt to correct the imbalance of scientism, you fall into metaphysics.
That’s why the approach of Schopenhauer, thence of Kant, remains the avenue of last resort.
Schopenhauer’s thinking is amusing because he never explores religious hype, or even the real implications of his own thinking.
But a whole sutra worth of insight pops out, all of a sudden, unexpectedly
Dennett’s attack on ‘free will’ in the video cited today is irresponsible pandering to a young science/Dawkins audience. To defend ‘free will’ is not some indulgence in reprehensible fantasy fulfilment. This from the man pegged ‘philosopher’ for the current generation.

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04.29.09

Idealism vs materialism

Posted in Philosophy at 3:25 pm by nemo

Fessing up about idealism

The interaction of idealism and materialism tends to go nowhere. And the term itself doesn’t have much meaning as is.
The so-called ‘transcendental idealism’ of Kant is a unique way to mediate idealism and materialism, or naturalism.
And, as the eonic effect suggests, this has direct relevance to the question of evolution.

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04.27.09

Defending free will

Posted in Philosophy at 2:50 pm by nemo

How not to defend free will

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