Re: Joy of this, Joy of that

On 14/12/2024 18:40, D wrote:

  On Sat, 14 Dec 2024, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
 

On 14/12/2024 10:57, D wrote:

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On Fri, 13 Dec 2024, rbowman wrote:
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On Fri, 13 Dec 2024 11:13:50 +0100, D wrote:
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Zeno? Well, it does sound you made quite an attack on the first book out
of 12!  My least favourite part of that series is the middle ages and
the christian philosophers and theologians. For some reason, very, very
uninteresting to me. But greek, yes, rome, yes, then nothing, up until
the enlightenment, when things start to become interesting again.

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I'd have to look at the ordering but I think that's where my interest
petered out. I liked the Nominalists. Confirmation bias, I guess. My
natural setting regards Platonic realism as a major wrong turn in thought.
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Amen! The nominalists were (are) the Donald Trump of metaphysicists!

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Nominalism is a crude form of transcendental idealism in that it clearly separates the term, from the reality it describes.
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Which as you say, is not Platonic realism.
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The problem with Plato is that his realism was really idealism, in that he regarded the ideas as more fundamental than things.
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As I said, Kant really drew everything together to produce the hybrid model in which the world - whether you think of it as material or not - was to be distinguished absolutely from our *conception *of it....

 What is your opinion on the transcendental error?
 The Transcendental Error: One significant flaw in Kant’s thinking is what has been termed the “transcendental error.” This refers to Kant’s tendency to conflate the limits of human cognition with the nature of reality itself.

I never thought that at all. He was in fact completely distinct in his thinking between 'the world in itself' and 'the world of our perceptions., as being utterly different -  though related.
Many materialist simply cannot understand it - to them the world is what they think it is and see it as, and therefore Kant is simply nonsense.

According to critics like Peter Strawson, while Kant correctly seeks to explore what we can understand about our experiences, he mistakenly concludes that these limits are imposed by our cognitive faculties on a reality that could be structured differently.

That is exactly right, and to my certain knowledge it can be: Because Strawson cant do it doesn't mean it cant be done.

This leads to an incoherent position where one cannot meaningfully consider a reality devoid of these structures because such a consideration relies on the very cognitive faculties that Kant claims impose those structures. Thus, this misunderstanding undermines the objective status of knowledge and reality.

Of course., That is the whole point. The knowledge and reality we have is entirely relative to or world view - the end results of the *reification* of 'whatever the fuck the external world really is' by the mind into a world view that encompasses the very nature of way we consider to be real.
Strawson seems to be a Beleiver. He wants there to be a simple objective   reality that we can grasp. Kant says 'its there, but we cannot grasp it: It has to go through our processes of categorisation before it is intelligible to us'.

 In The Bounds of Sense, P. F. Strawson suggests a reading of Kant's first Critique that, once accepted, forces rejection of most of the original arguments, including transcendental idealism. Strawson contends that, had Kant followed out the implications of all that he said, he would have seen that there were many self-contradictions implicit in the whole.[12]: 403 

Well strawspn seems to be a bit of a dick. We remember Kant and Schopenhaer, not Strawson.
Schopenhauer corrected Kant a bit, which was good. Chiefly he saw the implication of 'the world in itself' more clearly and pointed out that 'things in themselves' was in fact wrong, because the idea of plurality and division was again something that happened in the mind, not necessarily in the world.

 Strawson views the analytic argument of the transcendental deduction as the most valuable idea in the text, and regards transcendental idealism as an unavoidable error in Kant's greatly productive system.

Not sure what transcendental deduction was. Oh. The argument that says transcendental idealism is in fact what we really do.
I get the feeling Strawson isn't the brightest bulb in the box. To me one follows inevitably from the other. They are aspects of the same view.

 In Strawson's traditional reading (also favored in the work of Paul Guyer and Rae Langton), the Kantian term phenomena (literally, things that can be seen—from Greek: phainomenon, "observable") refers to the world of appearances, or the world of "things" sensed.[13]: 99–101  They are tagged as "phenomena" to remind the reader that humans confuse these derivative appearances with whatever may be the forever unavailable "things in themselves" behind our perceptions.

Exactly so, Or, post Schopenhauer, the 'thing in itself' - experience of something utterly beyond comprehension that we chunk into things and events in space time linked by causality. And out of that process pops the world of phenomena - the 'material world'  as I use the term, as an emergent property of the process itself.
That is, the real data is elsewhere - we create structures that point to it and call that the real world.

The necessary preconditions of experience, the components that humans bring to their apprehending of the world, the forms of perception such as space and time, are what make a priori judgments possible, but all of this process of comprehending what lies fundamental to human experience fails to bring anyone beyond the inherent limits of human sensibility.

Sounds right to me.  To go further you need special techniques, to glimpse the world and indeed consciousness from a special place. Then it becomes clear.
If you cant conceive of or arrive at that space or place, then it's all nonsense.
I suspect Strawson simply can't.

Kant's system requires the existence of noumena to prevent a rejection of external reality altogether, and it is this concept (senseless objects of which we can have no real understanding) to which Strawson objects in his book.
 

Well there ya go. If you are creating a real metaphysical system you end up with awkward bits that many people don't like.
Strawson presumably didn't like quantum physics either :-)
I shuffled this all around in my head and came to various conclusions and people said 'you sound like Schopenhauer' and a friend who is a philosophy professor threw Kant at me and he was right. I had arrived in the same ballpark as Kant. And more so Schopenhauer, at least in the context of the best model of what 'external reality'  was.
But I disagreed with both of them on the moral and life choice conclusions they drew, as far as I can remember.
The 'problem' of transcendental idealism is it must needs introduce an element that is anathema to materialist and realist alike , and that is the necessary postulating of  an independent entity that takes 'whatever is the case' - the 'world-in-itself'  - the 'noumenal world' and turns it into [maps it, performs a 'transform' on it]  the 'phenomenal world' that everybody casually takes as 'real'.
And that entity is the person's mind, consciousness, or  soul etc etc. In fact the material world ,as we commonly understand it, moves around in the TI model to become the emergent cross-product of the world-in-itself *as interpreted by*' the 'consciousness'* .. which has to be independent or you get recursive paradoxes.  You can't have the mind creating a material reality which has the mind as an emergent property of that material reality, It's unstable! Worse, it is dangerously insane and people who cant break out of that can go insane. Cognitive dissonance protects us from having that thought.
Dyed in the wool materialists don't want consciousness and choice to be independent. They have already decided to make them emergent properties of *matter*, and so they think Kant is a cunt, trying possibly to reintroduce the supernatural by the back door.
My own thought is that right or wrong, the  answers that that model gives, solve a huge amount of subjectivity in the human experience.

The middle ages were restrictive in terms of Christianity, but Jewish mysticism and philosophy flourished, as did the philosophy and science of the Persians. Before that became subsumed by Islam and vanished.
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The study of what people *thought* was real, through the ages, is a fascinating history that isn't really covered by any discipline. Myths and Magics, religions and gods, forces and demiurges. And then to Materialism and Laws of Nature.

 A cross section of the history of ideas and philosophy of science maybe? It is very interesting!
 

I spent many years looking at religions, magical systems, cults and so on. And the paranormal and unexplained 'weird shit'. It is even more peppered with total bullshit than philosophy, but it does give a clue as to how  weird some peoples minds are.
And now and again I glimpsed something that might have made sense, if it hadn't been  reported by complete idiots who couldn't think clearly.
Some one said once I should invent a new religion. I did a test. I invented the Church of the Yo-yo.  Believe in the Yo-yo and be saved.  I had a great little electric yo-yo . Mesmerising. Some twit from the 'children of God' even believed me.
I stopped there. I don't lust for power over peoples minds, and their purses.
Funnily enough, I was very familiar with UFO cults and the like and the 'men in black meme' and when the film came out I was  super amused when one of my employees insisted in explaining what 'men in black' were.
I didn't think admitting I probably knew ten times more than they did was consistent with running an orderly business.
--
"Socialist governments traditionally do make a financial mess. They always run out of other people's money. It's quite a characteristic of them"
Margaret Thatcher