To Insist there is an Independent Reality is an Oxymoron.

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tapaticmadness
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Re: To Insist there is an Independent Reality is an Oxymoron.

Post by tapaticmadness »

Skepdick wrote: Sat Apr 04, 2020 12:58 pm
tapaticmadness wrote: Sat Apr 04, 2020 12:49 pm I don't think they are the same, but I would have to check that out. I can't exactly remember Kant since he is not someone I usually think about. There is certainly a different "feel" between Kant's Idealism and traditional Platonism, which is much more poetic.
There's a different feel because they are different narratives from different people, but they are describing the same thing - the human condition.

Which is more similar than different across humans.
The "human condition" is a favorite among humanists. I personally think our view of man is much too anthropomorphic. The gods are also a big part of mankind. He is also theomorphic. That's Platonism.
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Re: To Insist there is an Independent Reality is an Oxymoron.

Post by Skepdick »

tapaticmadness wrote: Sat Apr 04, 2020 1:11 pm The "human condition" is a favorite among humanists. I personally think our view of man is much too anthropomorphic. The gods are also a big part of mankind. He is also theomorphic. That's Platonism.
Obviously it's anthropomorphic - it's the mind-projection fallacy at play. Even our Gods are made in our image.
tapaticmadness
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Re: To Insist there is an Independent Reality is an Oxymoron.

Post by tapaticmadness »

Skepdick wrote: Sat Apr 04, 2020 1:40 pm
tapaticmadness wrote: Sat Apr 04, 2020 1:11 pm The "human condition" is a favorite among humanists. I personally think our view of man is much too anthropomorphic. The gods are also a big part of mankind. He is also theomorphic. That's Platonism.
Obviously it's anthropomorphic - it's the mind-projection fallacy at play. Even our Gods are made in our image.
I’m going to use your word “mind-projection” as the beginning of my explanation of the difference between Plato and Kant. First, here is an excerpt from Camille Paglia, one of my favorite writers. Maybe you know of her books.

Here’s a quote from Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae -

“Apollonian form was derived from Egypt but perfected in Greece. Coleridge says, “The Greeks idolized the finite,” while Northern Europeans have “a tendency to the infinite.” Spengler similarly identifies the modern “Faustian soul” with “pure and limitless space.” Following Nietzsche, he calls the Apollonian “the principle of visible limits” and applies it to the Greek city-state: “All that lay beyond the visual range of this political atom was alien.” The Greek statue, “the empirical visible body,” symbolizes classical reality: “the material, the optically definite, the comprehensible, the immediately present.” The Greeks were, in my phrase, visionary materialists. They saw things and persons hard and glittery, radiant with Apollonian glamour. We know the Maenadic Dionysus mainly through the impressionistic medium of Archaic vase painting. He appears in statue form only when he loses his beard and female garb and turns ephebic Olympian, in the fifth century and after. High classic Athenian culture is based on Apollonian definitiveness and externality. “The whole tendency of Greek philosophy after Plato,” remarks Gilbert Murray, “was away from the outer world towards the world of the soul.” The shift of Greek thought from outer to inner parallels the shift in art from the male to the female nude, from homosexual to heterosexual taste. Spengler says of Greek society, “What was far away, invisible, was ipso facto ‘not there’.” I cited Karen Horney’s observation that a woman cannot see her own genitals. The Greek world-view was predicated on the model of absolute outwardness of male sex organs. Athenian culture flourished in externalities, the open air of the agora and the nudity of the palestra. There are no female nudes in major fifth-century art because female sexuality was imaginatively “not there,” buried like the Furies turned Eumenides. To the old complaint that the Greeks gave their statues the genitals of little boys, one could reply that the male nude offers the whole body as a projected genital. The modestly stooping Knidian Aphrodite marks the turn toward spiritual and sexual internality. It is the end of Apollo.”

As you know the Romantic Age followed Kant. It was a time of the mysterious inner world of the Noumena. Woman ruled Nature. She was dark and hidden. The Light of Apollonian Athens gave way to the twilight of the North. The main difference between Plato and Kant is the difference between the Beautiful Boy of Classical Greece and the languid Female Goddess of Romanticism. External vs. Internal. The visible vs. the unseen. Phenomena vs. noumena. The Supernatural vs. Nature. In Kant’s Romanticism it is Nature that rules. The homosexual Supernatural is banished. Everything outer is a projection of the inner world of man as nature. Thus your idea of mind-projection. Nature gives birth to the gods in your philosophy. That is High Romanticism.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/v4z8ypp8t0f0m ... e.pdf?dl=0
Veritas Aequitas
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Re: To Insist there is an Independent Reality is an Oxymoron.

Post by Veritas Aequitas »

tapaticmadness wrote: Sat Apr 04, 2020 11:46 am
Veritas Aequitas wrote: Sat Apr 04, 2020 9:36 am
tapaticmadness wrote: Sat Apr 04, 2020 9:22 am

You really are a hardcore rationalist.
I am a rational and practical person but,
Nope I was never and will never be an ideological rationalist.

Per Kant, I am an empirical realist - the external empirical world is real but
at the same time entangled and intertwined [dependent origination] with the human conditions, thus I am also a transcendental idealist.
I actually have great respect for Kant and the German tradition, but you seem to have no respect for the Realism that came out of Cambridge in the early twentieth century. Or you know nothing about it. So I'm sending you a book that might be of interest to you. https://www.dropbox.com/s/pxcippfptwhh7 ... 9.pdf?dl=0

I still think you are a materialist, which has no connection to Philosophical Realism.
That is not Realism, it is Analytic Philosophy which is contrasted with Continental Philosophy.
I am very well versed with Analytic Philosophy.
I am not interested in that book.
I can agree with lots of views from Analytic Philosophy but not with the grandeur they [e.g. logical positivists] arrogantly claimed for it.
I have a heavier inclination for the Continental Philosophy especially of Kant's.

Think?? nope I am never a materialist in the philosophical category.
Philosophical Materialism has been debunked by Berkeley long time ago.

Whatever your 'Realism' demonstrate it is realistic.
Veritas Aequitas
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Re: To Insist there is an Independent Reality is an Oxymoron.

Post by Veritas Aequitas »

Skepdick wrote: Sat Apr 04, 2020 12:23 pm
tapaticmadness wrote: Sat Apr 04, 2020 12:10 pm Are you talking to me?
No. I was quoting VA.
tapaticmadness wrote: Sat Apr 04, 2020 12:10 pm Yes, I am proud to say I am a Platonist. Unfortunately, what people understand by that word is all over the intellectual map. The Aristotelians and the Thomists say that Platonists start out as excessively spiritual and end up decadent. The Platonists accuse the Aristoteians of not knowing how to dance. I can dance.
What I mean by calling him a Platonist is that at "transcendental idealism" is simply a re-description of Platonic forms.

https://www.britannica.com/topic/transc ... l-idealism
Transcendental idealism, also called formalistic idealism, term applied to the epistemology of the 18th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant, who held that the human self, or transcendental ego, constructs knowledge out of sense impressions and from universal concepts called categories that it imposes upon them.
A "formalistic idealism" is the same thing as a "Platonic form".

Different languages - same idea.
Dumb and ignorant of Kant.

Kant's Transcendental Idealism is not Plato's Idealism re Plato's Ideas.

Kant condemned Plato's use of ideas which is totally different from Kant's Categories.
Plato made use of the expression 'Idea' in such a way as quite evidently to have meant by it something which not only can never be borrowed from the Senses but far surpasses even the Concepts of Understanding (with which Aristotle occupied himself), inasmuch as in Experience nothing is ever to be met with that is coincident with it. 1
For Plato Ideas are archetypes of the Things themselves, and not, in the manner of the Categories, merely keys to Possible Experiences.
Critique of Pure Reason B370
Kant critiqued Plato's ideas are going into la la land, i.e. woo woo;
It was thus that Plato left the World of the Senses, as setting too narrow Limits to 2 the Understanding, and ventured out beyond it on the wings of the Ideas, in the empty Space of the Pure Understanding.
[A5] [B9]
Veritas Aequitas
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Re: To Insist there is an Independent Reality is an Oxymoron.

Post by Veritas Aequitas »

tapaticmadness wrote: Sat Apr 04, 2020 12:49 pm
Skepdick wrote: Sat Apr 04, 2020 12:23 pm
tapaticmadness wrote: Sat Apr 04, 2020 12:10 pm Are you talking to me?
No. I was quoting VA.
tapaticmadness wrote: Sat Apr 04, 2020 12:10 pm Yes, I am proud to say I am a Platonist. Unfortunately, what people understand by that word is all over the intellectual map. The Aristotelians and the Thomists say that Platonists start out as excessively spiritual and end up decadent. The Platonists accuse the Aristoteians of not knowing how to dance. I can dance.
What I mean by calling him a Platonist is that at "transcendental idealism" is simply a re-description of Platonic forms.

https://www.britannica.com/topic/transc ... l-idealism
Transcendental idealism, also called formalistic idealism, term applied to the epistemology of the 18th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant, who held that the human self, or transcendental ego, constructs knowledge out of sense impressions and from universal concepts called categories that it imposes upon them.
A "formalistic idealism" is the same thing as a "Platonic form".

Different languages - same idea.
I don't think they are the same, but I would have to check that out. I can't exactly remember Kant since he is not someone I usually think about. There is certainly a different "feel" between Kant's Idealism and traditional Platonism, which is much more poetic.
Yes Kant's Transcendental Idealism is different from Platonism.
Note Kant's critique of Plato in the above post.
Veritas Aequitas
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Re: To Insist there is an Independent Reality is an Oxymoron.

Post by Veritas Aequitas »

tapaticmadness wrote: Sat Apr 04, 2020 11:15 pm As you know the Romantic Age followed Kant. It was a time of the mysterious inner world of the Noumena. Woman ruled Nature. She was dark and hidden. The Light of Apollonian Athens gave way to the twilight of the North. The main difference between Plato and Kant is the difference between the Beautiful Boy of Classical Greece and the languid Female Goddess of Romanticism. External vs. Internal. The visible vs. the unseen. Phenomena vs. noumena. The Supernatural vs. Nature. In Kant’s Romanticism it is Nature that rules. The homosexual Supernatural is banished. Everything outer is a projection of the inner world of man as nature. Thus your idea of mind-projection. Nature gives birth to the gods in your philosophy. That is High Romanticism.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/v4z8ypp8t0f0m ... e.pdf?dl=0
The writer did not understand Kant's philosophy.

The noumenon is not a thing that is mysterious.
The noumenon is merely an assumption as a limiting concept.
The Concept of a Noumenon is thus a merely limiting Concept, the Function of which is to curb the pretensions of Sensibility; and it is therefore only of negative employment.
CPR- B311
'Negative Employment' means one cannot take it as a thing or reify something out of what is merely an assumption.
tapaticmadness
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Re: To Insist there is an Independent Reality is an Oxymoron.

Post by tapaticmadness »

Veritas Aequitas wrote: Sun Apr 05, 2020 4:42 am
tapaticmadness wrote: Sat Apr 04, 2020 11:15 pm As you know the Romantic Age followed Kant. It was a time of the mysterious inner world of the Noumena. Woman ruled Nature. She was dark and hidden. The Light of Apollonian Athens gave way to the twilight of the North. The main difference between Plato and Kant is the difference between the Beautiful Boy of Classical Greece and the languid Female Goddess of Romanticism. External vs. Internal. The visible vs. the unseen. Phenomena vs. noumena. The Supernatural vs. Nature. In Kant’s Romanticism it is Nature that rules. The homosexual Supernatural is banished. Everything outer is a projection of the inner world of man as nature. Thus your idea of mind-projection. Nature gives birth to the gods in your philosophy. That is High Romanticism.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/v4z8ypp8t0f0m ... e.pdf?dl=0
The writer did not understand Kant's philosophy.

The noumenon is not a thing that is mysterious.
The noumenon is merely an assumption as a limiting concept.
The Concept of a Noumenon is thus a merely limiting Concept, the Function of which is to curb the pretensions of Sensibility; and it is therefore only of negative employment.
CPR- B311
'Negative Employment' means one cannot take it as a thing or reify something out of what is merely an assumption.
On the one hand you are against reification of abstract concepts. Everything a realist says is real, you say is reification. On the other hand you say that everything we think comes back to neurophysiolgy and the brain. Then you rather strangely insist that you are not a materialist. If there are no abstract concepts and there is only the brain, then you are a materialist
Veritas Aequitas
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Re: To Insist there is an Independent Reality is an Oxymoron.

Post by Veritas Aequitas »

tapaticmadness wrote: Sun Apr 05, 2020 5:40 am
Veritas Aequitas wrote: Sun Apr 05, 2020 4:42 am
tapaticmadness wrote: Sat Apr 04, 2020 11:15 pm As you know the Romantic Age followed Kant. It was a time of the mysterious inner world of the Noumena. Woman ruled Nature. She was dark and hidden. The Light of Apollonian Athens gave way to the twilight of the North. The main difference between Plato and Kant is the difference between the Beautiful Boy of Classical Greece and the languid Female Goddess of Romanticism. External vs. Internal. The visible vs. the unseen. Phenomena vs. noumena. The Supernatural vs. Nature. In Kant’s Romanticism it is Nature that rules. The homosexual Supernatural is banished. Everything outer is a projection of the inner world of man as nature. Thus your idea of mind-projection. Nature gives birth to the gods in your philosophy. That is High Romanticism.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/v4z8ypp8t0f0m ... e.pdf?dl=0
The writer did not understand Kant's philosophy.

The noumenon is not a thing that is mysterious.
The noumenon is merely an assumption as a limiting concept.
The Concept of a Noumenon is thus a merely limiting Concept, the Function of which is to curb the pretensions of Sensibility; and it is therefore only of negative employment.
CPR- B311
'Negative Employment' means one cannot take it as a thing or reify something out of what is merely an assumption.
On the one hand you are against reification of abstract concepts. Everything a realist says is real, you say is reification. On the other hand you say that everything we think comes back to neurophysiolgy and the brain. Then you rather strangely insist that you are not a materialist. If there are no abstract concepts and there is only the brain, then you are a materialist
Note the definition of materialism:
Materialism is a form of philosophical monism that holds that matter is the fundamental substance in nature, and that all things, including mental states and consciousness, are results of material interactions.
According to philosophical materialism, mind and consciousness are by-products or epiphenomena of material processes (such as the biochemistry of the human brain and nervous system), without which they cannot exist.
This concept [Materialism] directly contrasts with idealism, where mind and consciousness are first-order realities to which matter is subject and material interactions are secondary.
Note the bolded above;
one aspect of my view is transcendental idealism, so how can I be a materialist?
tapaticmadness
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Re: To Insist there is an Independent Reality is an Oxymoron.

Post by tapaticmadness »

Veritas Aequitas wrote: Sun Apr 05, 2020 6:04 am
one aspect of my view is transcendental idealism, so how can I be a materialist?
In plain English tell be what a mind is and how it is different from a material thing. I know that for someone steeped in Continental Philosophy the very idea of speaking in plain English might be a novel and impossible idea, but try. I believe in minds and that they are different from material things and I could easily explain what a mind is in plain English.

Please don't give me excerpts from some philosophical dictionary. I want YOUR words.
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Re: To Insist there is an Independent Reality is an Oxymoron.

Post by Veritas Aequitas »

tapaticmadness wrote: Sun Apr 05, 2020 7:22 am
Veritas Aequitas wrote: Sun Apr 05, 2020 6:04 am
one aspect of my view is transcendental idealism, so how can I be a materialist?
In plain English tell be what a mind is and how it is different from a material thing. I know that for someone steeped in Continental Philosophy the very idea of speaking in plain English might be a novel and impossible idea, but try. I believe in minds and that they are different from material things and I could easily explain what a mind is in plain English.

Please don't give me excerpts from some philosophical dictionary. I want YOUR words.
I believe we have gone tru this before.

To me, 'mind' is an emergent and a convenient placeholder for all mental activities.
There is no individual thing or entity which is specifically a 'mind'.
This is like describing a group of people as a team, etc.
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Re: To Insist there is an Independent Reality is an Oxymoron.

Post by tapaticmadness »

Veritas Aequitas wrote: Sun Apr 05, 2020 8:07 am
tapaticmadness wrote: Sun Apr 05, 2020 7:22 am
Veritas Aequitas wrote: Sun Apr 05, 2020 6:04 am
one aspect of my view is transcendental idealism, so how can I be a materialist?
In plain English tell be what a mind is and how it is different from a material thing. I know that for someone steeped in Continental Philosophy the very idea of speaking in plain English might be a novel and impossible idea, but try. I believe in minds and that they are different from material things and I could easily explain what a mind is in plain English.

Please don't give me excerpts from some philosophical dictionary. I want YOUR words.
I believe we have gone tru this before.

To me, 'mind' is an emergent and a convenient placeholder for all mental activities.
There is no individual thing or entity which is specifically a 'mind'.
This is like describing a group of people as a team, etc.
Yes, but what is a mental activity? I assume they group together.
Veritas Aequitas
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Re: To Insist there is an Independent Reality is an Oxymoron.

Post by Veritas Aequitas »

tapaticmadness wrote: Sun Apr 05, 2020 8:45 am
Veritas Aequitas wrote: Sun Apr 05, 2020 8:07 am
tapaticmadness wrote: Sun Apr 05, 2020 7:22 am

In plain English tell be what a mind is and how it is different from a material thing. I know that for someone steeped in Continental Philosophy the very idea of speaking in plain English might be a novel and impossible idea, but try. I believe in minds and that they are different from material things and I could easily explain what a mind is in plain English.

Please don't give me excerpts from some philosophical dictionary. I want YOUR words.
I believe we have gone tru this before.

To me, 'mind' is an emergent and a convenient placeholder for all mental activities.
There is no individual thing or entity which is specifically a 'mind'.
This is like describing a group of people as a team, etc.
Yes, but what is a mental activity? I assume they group together.
All mental activities are conveniently traced to the "mind" which is not a thing.

Thinking is a mental activity.
Being emotional is a mental activity.
Certain instinctual thoughts are mental activities.
Being psychosomatic is a mental problem.
All sort of mental illness results from mental activities.
tapaticmadness
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Re: To Insist there is an Independent Reality is an Oxymoron.

Post by tapaticmadness »

Veritas Aequitas wrote: Sun Apr 05, 2020 9:36 am
All mental activities are conveniently traced to the "mind" which is not a thing.

Thinking is a mental activity.
Being emotional is a mental activity.
Certain instinctual thoughts are mental activities.
Being psychosomatic is a mental problem.
All sort of mental illness results from mental activities.
Let's say I have the thought 'I forgot my car keys' or 'The sun is 93 million miles from the earth" or 'My foot hurts' or 'Jack said he would come at three o'clock' or 'I should have put more salt in this soup' or 'When I was a child I had a red wagon' What is that thought that I have expressed in English? What is the connection between the thought and the English expression?
Skepdick
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Re: To Insist there is an Independent Reality is an Oxymoron.

Post by Skepdick »

Veritas Aequitas wrote: Sun Apr 05, 2020 4:27 am Kant condemned Plato's use of ideas which is totally different from Kant's Categories.
So where is the difference?
Veritas Aequitas wrote: Sun Apr 05, 2020 4:27 am For Plato Ideas are archetypes of the Things themselves, and not, in the manner of the Categories, merely keys to Possible Experiences.
Critique of Pure Reason B370.
Yes. Platonic archetypes are models. Like scientific/mathematical models.

Or if you were to use the language of physical information the concept of a "hydrogen atom" is called a pattern of information, but any particular hydrogen atom is called an instance of information.

Whether "a hydrogen atom" is a "thing in itself" is only a point of disagreement for dumb philosophers.

A scientists would simply say: "What measurement would you take to resolve the dispute?"
Veritas Aequitas wrote: Sun Apr 05, 2020 4:27 am Kant critiqued Plato's ideas are going into la la land, i.e. woo woo;
How is "la la land" different from "transcendentalism"?
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