Like Macbeth, Western man made an evil decision, which has become the efficient and final cause of other evil decisions. Have we forgotten our encounter with the witches on the heath? It occurred in the late fourteenth century, and what the witches said to the protagonist of this drama was that man could realize himself more fully if he would only abandon his belief in the existence of transcendentals. The powers of darkness were working subtly, as always, and they couched this proposition in the seemingly innocent form of an attack upon universals. The defeat of logical realism in the great medieval debate was the crucial event in the history of Western culture; from this flowed those acts which issue now in modern decadence.One may be accused here of oversimplifying the historical process, but I take the view that the conscious policies of men and governments are not mere rationalizations of what has been brought about by unaccountable forces. They are rather deductions from our most basic ideas of human destiny, and they have a great, though not unobstructed, power to determine our course.For this reason I turn to William of Occam as the best representative of a change which came over man’s conception of reality at this historic juncture. It was William of Occam who propounded the fateful doctrine of nominalism, which denies that universals have a real existence. His triumph tended to leave universal terms mere names serving our convenience. The issue ultimately involved is whether there is a source of truth higher than, and independent of, man; and the answer to the question is decisive for one’s view of the nature and destiny of humankind. The practical result of nominalist philosophy is to banish the reality which is perceived by the intellect and to posit as reality that which is perceived by the senses. With this change in the affirmation of what is real, the whole orientation of culture takes a turn, and we are on the road to modern empiricism.It is easy to be blind to the significance of a change because it is remote in time and abstract in character. Those who have not discovered that world view is the most important thing about a man, as about the men composing a culture, should consider the train of circumstances which have with perfect logic proceeded from this. The denial of universals carries with it the denial of everything transcending experience. The denial of everything transcending experience means inevitably—though ways are found to hedge on this—the denial of truth.With the denial of objective truth there is no escape from the relativism of “man the measure of all things.” The witches spoke with the habitual equivocation of oracles when they told man that by this easy choice he might realize himself more fully, for they were actually initiating a course which cuts one off from reality. Thus began the “abomination of desolation” appearing today as a feeling of alienation from all fixed truth.
too much words
>>24935758Ours is a decidedly non-philosophical, even anti-philosophical, age. This is not to say that we lack "philosophers," of a certain sort; indeed, we have only too many. ... While it may be the case that our age is more cerebral, more abstract, more preoccupied with brain power, with intellectual capacities and skills, than any other age in history, it remains true that we are not philosophical. Indeed, our very abstraction and preoccupation with intelligence is a sign of the "forgetfulness" of philosophy.>We will not pursue the question here about ... whether it is in fact possible to find some objective standard for judgments of taste once one has interpreted beauty essentially as an event in the brain. Indeed, if beauty is nothing more than a subjective feeling of pleasure, which occurs under certain conditions, then the question concerning objective standards loses any real urgency. It seems to me that, if the question was still posed with such zeal in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it is due to a lingering sense that beauty is in fact something important, more than the mere turning of a screw in our mental machinery. If this is true, then the fact that people today seem less inclined to fight about judgments of taste, and show little interest in persuading others about what is beautiful, or learning to make good judgments, educating and forming their tastes, is something that should cause us great alarm. Our alarm ought to grow exponentially if it is in fact true that the way we experience and interpret beauty reveals an understanding of or disposition towards reality in general. In this case, to lose a sense of beauty's connection to reality is, I suggest, to lose a sense of the reality of reality tout court.
>>24935754Are you responding to this thread?: >>24931149
reiterating a half digested catholic telling of the history of philosophy, almost certainly without having read a word of it. babble.
>>24935872Weaver wasn't Catholic.
>>24935901what? who are you even talking about?
>>24935779bro wut? too much words man
>>24935779there's been more good work done in philosophy during the past two hundred years than in most ages in history. are you smoking crack?
Show me something 'transcendental' that exists.I'll wait.
>>24935978Your own consciousness.
>>24935978unity of apperception, synthesis, imagination, etc.
>>24935978Allah
>>24935951NTA, but the OP is a rather famous quote from the early 20th century intellectual historian Richard Weaver, who was a Southern Protestant.
>>24935872>>24935951PffffffttttMidwit alert.
>>24935978>give me empirical proof of something that cannot be proven through mere sense data
>>24937406Thanks for explaining what OP couldn't.>>24937418whether he's protestant, baptist or whatever else, his view on the history of philosophy is as backwards as the average online Catholic's.The idea that William Ockham ushered in the demise of christianity and the 'evil evil' modern world by disagreeing with Plato and Aquinas about universals is just a ridiculous prejudice of modern christians and has no truth to it. Also, being a part of the movement that intellectually moved mankind out of the middle ages is a praiseworthy thing. Why don't we turn this thread into a conversation about universals though? because so far it's been unintelligible.
>>24937458>The idea that William Ockham ushered in the demise of christianity and the 'evil evil' modern world by disagreeing with Plato and Aquinas about universals is just a ridiculous prejudice of modern christians and has no truth to it. Also, being a part of the movement that intellectually moved mankind out of the middle ages is a praiseworthy thing. What a hysterically ahistorical pseudo intellectual comment. read a book nignog
>>24937472you disagree with me about that? why? I wouldn't mind having a good natured conversation about it
>>24935779>indeed, we have only too manyIf only....
>>24937478You’re dead wrong about Ockhams influence on modern philosophy. His nominalism and Petrarchs humanism influenced everyone from Machiavelli to Bacon to Descartes to Hobbes and beyond. The shift in metaphysical ontics and subsequently all their ontologies, epistemologies, and all theories from this reflect this and undergird the modern mind as a result. Gilispie documents this in plain academic rigor with no religious bias.
>>24937458> Also, being a part of the movement that intellectually moved mankind out of the middle ages is a praiseworthy thing. Imagine saying this when the modern world is on the cusp of global war and biosphere collapse.
>>24935754 >>24937495I don't disagree that he had an influence on the history of Philosophy, of course he did, he was a significant figure. What I object to is the contemporary christian narrative of the slow decline of human reason into all sorts of relativism.>The denial of universals carries with it the denial of everything transcending experience. The denial of everything transcending experience means inevitably—though ways are found to hedge on this—the denial of truth.For example, this sentence here is surely incorrect. That the denial of universals is the denial of all truth is rather silly. How about truth concerning particulars or just truth concerning matters of experience, or logical or mathematical truth? These have all been upheld. Very few people deny all truth just because they don't admit universals.Also that the denial of knowledge of transcendent things entails disbelieving in them isn't true. A great number of philosophers, for example Locke, maintain belief in transcendent things like god, while denying knowledge of them.
>>24937511Moral and aesthetic relativism are incredibly common Anon. Sure, people will affirm them for some things (sexuality) and then deny them for others (racism is bad) but that exactly the sort of misology Weaver is talking about—reason is most fully ruined when it has merely selective, instrumental authority.Second, I think you may be falling into a common problem in philosophy where someone says:>X implies YWhere Y I some consequence that is absurd, unwanted, etc. And then the response is:>But that group says it doesn't like/affirm Y!Ok, that means nothing of itself. Philosophy is full of cases where people have advanced theories that seem to imply things they say they don't want to imply. So, sure, the empiricist paradigm in general didn't want to deny truth. However, look how hard it has gone towards deflation in some areas. "Truth is however the token 'true' is used in a language game or formal system," is arguably just a denial of truth. That is, a traditionalist could well argue that Rorty, etc. are simply guilty of equivocation. They want to say:>"Truth as the adequacy of thought to being cannot be had, but we can just redefine truth as this new thing."Well, the traditionalist has a decent point that, at least in their terms, solutions like Rorty's "truth is just what your peers allow you to get away with" is just epistemic nihilism in disguise.And there are lots of areas where truth has become relativized in this way (some descendents of Wittgenstein, hardcore logical deflationists, more "post-modern" views, etc.). But then the further question is, do the critiques and arguments of the people who embrace relativism work against the traditions they are from? In some cases, I think the critiques are very strong. Empiricism in many classical forms simply *does* tend towards a sort of epistemic nihilism, Hume's arguments against causes and induction being a fine example when paired with the "scandal of deduction." So, even those who deny relativism might still have a problem where they cannot justify this denial according to their own premises.THAT is the problem, not people openly affirming relativism (although I think this is also more common than you allow).
>>24938594One irony here is that the ancient empiricists choose their epistemology specifically BECAUSE it made it impossible to justify any beliefs. They thought that being unable to justify any beliefs, skepticism, would help one achieve dispassion and so be freed from suffering.The crises of 19th and 20th century epistemology are just the system working exactly as it was intended to.The only reason this problem is not obvious is because the modern empiricists somehow successfully got the general public to conflate empiricism with "any use of the senses and science at all." But if you use this expanded definition than Aristotle, Hegel, Aquinas, etc. would all also be "empiricists" (basically everyone would be).
>>24935998>Your>own>consciousness lol
>>24937458No, he's quite right. These heresies seem to be leading towards dystopia if not human extinction.
>>24935754>santa's midnight present delivery isn't mathematically possible!>words are actually just words!Yeah, we know. Everyone knows.Autistic fun ruiners will suffer greatly at the hands of the creator/simulation admin.
>>24937458It's worse, it gave us neoliberalism too.
>>24937404Islam ultimately suffered a similar wound to that if the West though. Shia theology seems to have been more resistant though.
>>24938766Go to Karbala on Ashura and change your mind
>>24938594Yes, epistemology is a much bigger area of focus and therefore a bigger problem for the moderns than for the ancients, but I think this is justly so. Although I think Hume's philosophy is quite disastrous if you really accept it, a lot of his arguments are basically pretty good. How can you really say with certainty that, for example... I don't know, all ducks have two legs or something, when there might be a three footed one sitting on an undiscovered island somewhere? It's certainty, not truth itself that modern empiricists deny. I think it's just an unfair mischaracterisation of someone who is open to being disproven by new discovery, to call them a relativist who thinks nothing is true. Skepticism amongst Wittgensteinians and Positivists as you mentioned I agree is a big problem.Secondly, I think that arguments like the one Weaver has given us, that we ought to accept a certain doctrine in spite of the compelling arguments against it because it will lead to a better society, very ironically deny truth for pragmatic reasons. If the doctrine of universals really were disproven by compelling argument, but you think we shouldn't depart from it because it will lead to a relativistic or atheistic world, then really you're throwing aside the concern for truth and ironically undercutting what you're supposed to be arguing on behalf of. In short, I think you're conflating lack of certainty with relativism, and also I would rather actually pursue truth rather than only pretend to by pragmatically accepting whatever old doctrine allows me to skirt the fear of other people becoming relativists. As for certain post moderns like Derrida, or common people who actually or in practice deny all truth, I agree they are absurd. Some other anon will have to come along and defend them. I don't personally stand against human reason or even universal statements though. I just think that the, generally speaking Christian, tactic of pinning the blame for everything in history that we dislike on one man and his concern over universals is silly. I mean, come on, OP just blamed Ockham for Capitalism, aren't we getting a little ridiculous now?
>>24939700Weaver doesn't say we should accept realism because it is useful. I cannot think of anyone who says this. I think this is a strawman because no one embraces it. They are simply pointing out that consequences of ideas they already take to be false for other reasons. This is completely fair given that common arguments for liberalism, empiricism, nominalism are not a rejection of realism, but rather the claim that it is unknowable and that it is more pragmatic to agree to disagree and proceed from their "neutral" skeptical position. It's a response to that line: "no, it isn't even pragmatic, it produced a dystopian hellscape."Second, the epistemic inaccessibility of universals, intelligible principles, etc. is a consequence of Enlightenment presuppositions. So sure, Hume's arguments are good IF you accept his premises. But the whole first books of the Treaties are Hume explaining to us how the mind works (and saying that basically all the past thinkers of East and West were wrong about this, reason is simply inert and only discursive and calculative). He claims the no the causes of ideas, how they emerge from sense perception.How does he know this? How does he know his own psychology is valid? According to his own epistemology, he actually cannot know any of these things. At best he can appeal to introspection (although he has already undermined this as a source of knowledge). But why is Hume reliable on introspection but all the saints and sages of the pre-modern West and East ridiculously flawed in assuming some sort of contemplative knowledge, knowing by becoming, the need for virtue and spiritual exercises, noesis/intellectus, etc?Well Hume doesn't actually advance an argument against these at all (because the Reformation had already marginalized them, especially in his Reformed context). He just presupposes that he, Hume, is right, because thus says Hume. Kant likewise just takes the wholly discursive nature of human reason to be axiomatic, without argument. Wittgenstein deals with the same issues re "justification must end somewhere" that Aristotle takes up in the PA, but doesn't even consider noesis as a solution because he has become culturally blind to it.The premises are hardly unimpeachable, but moreover they aren't even defended most of the time, just assumed. That, or they are defended by knocking down strawmen.
>>24939937Actually, to assume that thought can be of anything intelligible without there being real forms is itself to have already presupposed nominalism. Hence, the attempt to prove that notions of form actually emerge from wholly discursive pattern recognition not only set up the "Hard Problem" and "Chinese Room" issue, they also presuppose the very thing they are setting out to show.Basically, it's a cheap trick to try to refute a metaphysical position by "refusing to do metaphysics" and then asserting one's own position by default as "neutral."You see this all the time though, down to this day. "We cannot know metaphysical truths, or they are at least speculative, therefore we must simply proceed as if nominalism were true. I win by default." Of course, the entire notion that metaphysical truths are especially speculative is already presupposing empiricism, etc. (as Charles Taylor points out in a very good deconstruction late in A Secular Age). The preference for the immediate and particular isn't prima facie obvious though. It runs counter to the general trends in philosophy up to the modern era and its inversion originally had more to do with subverting Catholic authority and control than anything else. That doesn't make it wrong, but it does show it isn't the product of "pure reason" (as if no one had pure reason before 1600). And it also assumes, rather than argues that the Aristotleian via media whereby particulars are "better know to us" and intelligible principles "better known in themselves" is ALSO wrong by default.Only its dominance and the fact that modern society, like every other society in history, positively indoctrinates the young into its mold, has made this foundations of this house of cards transparent.
>>24935978You have to show it to yourself
>>24939937I think you're being a little unfair to Hume who I think does manage to justify himself fairly well if not perfectly, but I don't want to play Hume's defender either. I really want to pick on 'contemplative knowledge.' Perhaps you're right that I've only been met with straw men who carry this pragmatic argument, but I see it so commonly from... maybe not the best sources then. Perhaps I'm also too loaded down with these enlightenment presuppositions because I can't really understand how anything beyond experience really could be known through contemplation, noesis/pure reason alone.
>>24940020Not him, but the statement “nothing beyond experience can be known” is itself not knowable by experience. There’s nothing in experience telling you that nothing can be known outside of it. You should drop this presupposition because it’s self refuting and start from retorsion, which is where you get the law of non contradiction and intelligibility.
Ochkam lived in this guy's head rent free>romanticism?Ochkam>nigger jazz?Ochkam>women wearing pants Ochkam
>>24940020Noesis isn't only about magical/spiritual knowledge, it explains how mental life has any content at all. A major problem here is the tendency to only read Plato and Aristotle, then skip to Descartes. But this is an area that is hugely developed in Middle Platonism and achieves a stable, mature from from late-antiquity through the medieval period.Basically, if thought was only dianoia/ratio, it would be nothing but discursive rule following. It would basically be the Chinese Room, or a Bayesian Brain less the magic of "strong emergence" that is used to "explain" the phenomenological experience of understanding. A being of pure ratio with no intellectus would be something like an LLM, receiving data and calculating over it.The problems of removing intellectus haven't gone away; they are all over modern philosophy of mind.The ancients and medievals do lots of good phenomenological studies of this but the best explanations that can be summed up are quick metaphors:Boethius' says ratio is to intellectus as a circle is to its center.Aquinas says ratio is to intellectus as moving towards a goal is to resting in it, or as acquisition in to possession (or participation).Dionysius the Areopagite compares an encircling movement around a multitude and the return to unity that contains the multitude. You could consider here, analogously, the way a function virtually contains all its possible outputs (its solution set).So noesis isn't magic. It occurs at every step of the reasoning process. We constantly move between dianoia and noesis.The reason intellectual virtue and knowing by becoming are important here is because of the metaphysics of knowledge and anthropology. Truth is being qua intelligible to the dematerializing power of the intellect is trainable. It is corrupted by vice because it is directed towards instrumental uses, as a slave of the lower appetites. It does not transcend its own finitude, because it is the desire for Goodness, Beauty, and Truth as such that takes us beyond the finitude of what we already are and believe and desire, in search of what is really true and truly Good. Reason is ecstatic and erotic in this way, even back in Plato, but preforming this function fully involves being rightly ordered. If "everything is received in the manner of the receiver" (Aquinas, Boethius, or Kant absolutizes this insight) then obviously greater understanding will require transformation.But the characterization of noesis as "you just know" or "mystical magic knowledge" is a strawman. Of course the senses are involved. "Nothing is in the intellect that is not first in the senses." The fact is though that raw sense data plus purely calculative reason never produced phenomenological experience or *understanding*. Understanding involves the senses here. What is being denied is that you can have just the senses, plus discursive calculation, and get the act of understanding (even if you had some sort of receptive categories).
>>24939937>>24940088But where ARE these universals? Where are these things that would start to make total sense if the wrongful presuppositions were discarded? Where are these truths that were apprehended yesterday, but not today?Surely they are not in biology, as the ancients were wildly wrong about innumerable things. They are not in their physics either, nor any sort of meteorology. It's not in their medicine, as traditional medicine may through centuries of trial and error capture some workings but understands little about the underlying mechanisms. It's not their astronomy, even though it was particularly relevant to the theology of Plato and Aristotle. It's not history, as historians today are much better at finding truth compared to the embellished tales and hearsay of the ancients. It can't be mathematics, as it makes absolutely no difference to the practicing mathematician whether he is a platonist or a fictionalist, while math continues to objectively advance into deeper territory, there the presupposition changes nothing at all.How does Middle Platonism account for these mistakes in its description of reason and universals?
>>24940088BTW, there is an interesting parallel here to how hardcore old-school materialists deny the reality of information and computation. These are only interpretations. Really there are only particles (or field fluctuations). Information and computation (all the rage today it seems) get dismissed as illusory or "projections of the mind" (materialists are ever the implicit dualists).But this is just the same old fetishizing of the immediate and sensible. In a way, it's a fetishizing of the common sensibles since they tend to deny that color, smell, etc. *really* exist and that only what can be known through all the senses is most real. The funny thing is they so often cry about "anthropomorphism" when it seems pretty obvious that the preference for shape, volume, density, etc. comes down to "what is best grasped by the human senses taken together."But this is basically just elevating one's toe as an organ of truth over one's mind. Likewise, the post-modern phenomenological versions of this same fetish, in their elevation of immediacy and phobia of "riefication" end up suggesting that the infant or person with brain damage, not the scientist or sage, experiences reality most fully any truly because they do so without misleading "constructions" and concepts. The absurdity of this becomes apparent when you realize that it means that the unformed (infant) and damaged (stroke victim) mind becomes the paradigm of access to reality, while the sage is ever deluded, simply due to this one ungrounded preference.
>>24940099First, you're asking a theory of mind to make instrumental advanced in technology, which seems both unfair and beside the point. Please demonstrate how nominalism builds cars for example?Second, I see we've reached the strawman of: "nominalism and empiricism are the same thing as the scientific method. Therefore if science is useful, these philosophical positions are true."This is a fallacy of equivocation. The metaphysical situation is baited and switched for a methodology that was being developed back when realism was still reigning. But where is the empirical evidence that nominalism makes for better scientific and technological progress?Did nominalism really aid science? Advances in the scientific method preceded the metaphysical shifts of the "New Science." Likewise, the Great Divergence whereby the West became much wealthier and much more technologically advanced than India and China starts back in the Renaissance and follows a fairly modest trajectory until the 19th century. But this is centuries AFTER the rise to dominance of the new nominalist science, and the fastest point of divergence actually corresponds to the high point of Hegelianism and idealism. Nor does it seem like there is particularly strong empirical evidence for a strong relationship between the new empiricism and technological development. The juxtaposition of Anglo empiricism and a strong rationalism overlapped the ascendency of France and a military and economic hegemon. Nor does the evidence seem particularly strong at the individual level. There are plenty examples of great inventors and scientists who weren't particularly strong empiricists or nominalists. Nor am I aware of any empirical evidence that shows that, in general, being more of an empiricist makes one a better scientist. Nor was ancient empiricism a path to technological and scientific development. Hence, pace the many "Whig histories" that paint empiricism and nominalism and the core drivers of the scientific revolution, the connection seems contingent, and in many places far less direct than this. For one thing, it shouldn't have taken two centuries to speed up if it was really the New Science that drove change, and it shouldn't have accelerated most during the high point of idealism. Likewise, the later 20th century was the high point of empiricism and Anglo-American dominance in philosophy and yet this is precisely when Asia starts to close the gap with the West, with China eclipsing the EU by the early 21st century and the Gulf states catching and surpassing some European ones in wealth.
>>24940128Another example, nominalism and atomism come centuries earlier in Islam (driven by very similar voluntarist theological concerns about divine freedom). Did they experience a scientific revolution?Nope. So nominalism and other early modern doctrines seem insufficient for a scientific revolution (the ideas did not cause this in Islam or in the ancient world). Are they necessary? Certainly we are told that today, just as we are told rights and pluralism can only ever exist within liberalism (despite historical examples to the contrary).Apparently, a lot of people buy this. Even imaginative sci-fi writers seem convinced that any sufficiently advanced alien race must subscribe to Western European Enlightenment empiricism, often right down to using the theological language of "natural laws" that are "obeyed."However, I would maintain that this is simply a failure of imagination. Nominalism is neither necessary nor sufficient for scientific advances, whereas it does lead directly to moral degeneracy and skepticism.
>>24935978The "I". It is the transcendental object of the non-reflexive act of reflexivity.t. Sarte
>>24940088>Truth is being qua intelligible to the dematerializing power of the intellect is trainablefascinating definition, thanks for making this thread interesting.>>24940099>>24940105Neither of these replies are from me btw, I probably won't reply anymore. The concept of intellectus is still rather weird for me as someone who mainly studies Kant and Hegel, I don't really understand it. You're correct that I'm mostly familiar with just Plato and Aristotle so why don't you let me know a few primary sources where I might read about Intellectus and knowledge beyond experience. For reference I already own the penguin selected Aquinas if there's anything relevant in there.
>>24940128>>24940140Fair point. I think you could argue that nominalism and empiricism helped pave the way for some key scientific advances, particularly early on when they helped to dismantle bad doctrines and superstition. However, they arguably retarded progress in many key areas like the information theory revolution, quantum foundations, etc. Adam Becker's book What is Real? Is pretty good on how widespread this problem was in physics and the whole EES controversy in biology shows something of similar scope has happened there.But I think the stronger argument is for negative effects in ethics and politics (e.g. MacIntyre). I don't think metaphysics ultimately has that much to do with technology development except in some specific cases where dogma has cut against new theories (which as noted, happened in both directions).
>>24940128>First, you're asking a theory of mind to make instrumental advanced in technology, which seems both unfair and beside the point. Please demonstrate how nominalism builds cars for example?>Second, I see we've reached the strawman of: "nominalism and empiricism are the same thing as the scientific method. Therefore if science is useful, these philosophical positions are true."I'm not saying either of these things, you misunderstand. The old paradigms could've all perfectly been overturned back during the times of realism, it wouldn't make any difference as to the fact that for thousands of years the reigning paradigms over all the of natural sciences ran contrary to later discoveries. My question is, if the mind can readily grasp universals, why did these wrong paradigms take root in the first place?
>>24935960Yes, truly a golden age. What's funny is that Kant and Berkley's positions were thought up in ages prior, and people literally went "but that would be idiotic" and dismissed them.We also have such greats as:>There is no truth, only le interpretation. This is true and not only interpretation!>There are no absolutes. This is absolutely true.>Truth is constructed out of language and so always contingent and shifting. This is an unchanging fact.Not to mention basically every sophists' position—from justice as a contract theory to "good argument is whatever makes people agree with us and gets us what we want"—all lampooned by Plato and dismissed as sophistry for millennia, becoming mainstream positions.I suppose for abject sophistry we've done pretty good.
>>24940194just here waiting for a reply from not retarded guy, please return to paste eating.
>>24940179Why exactly do you think: "the mind can grasp trees as a specific sort of thing," implies "thus, biology should be readily understood just by looking at things?"You do realize Aristotle was quite the experimental biologist right? And things like the underdetermination of theory by evidence are treated by Epicures and Aquinas (Aquinas had a whole treatise on this). Albert Magnus, Aquinas' mentor, is a huge figure in the development of the modern scientific method. No one claims that a grasp of real forms implies direct access to perfect knowledge.In fact, it's a pretty common position that no forms can be known in their entirety because to know something completely requires:A. Understanding its context (which is at the limit, everything)B. Understanding its causes (which ultimately means understanding the first cause).Eriugena puts this plainly at the opening of the Periphyseon using Saint Denys and Saint Gregory the Theologian as authorities. Saint Thomas claims that all the efforts of the human intellect will never exhaust the essence of a single fly in a Pentecost sermon. Saint Theresa of Ávila says something similar in the Interior Castle re ants and water.The claim isn't that noesis grants us transparent access to things internal workings or their workings in every context (this would be absurd, especially considering how relational and dynamic their ontology tends to be). It's that we can know something of them so that we can say: "yes there are cats, and as an organism with a principle of unity, a being, not as an ensemble of sense data or particles that we are pragmatically assigning a name to." It's easiest to see this by looking at the opposite end, the denial or ordinary objects. People point out that we could come up with terms like "flout" for the discontinuous halves of foxes and trout taken together. This, there are innumerable objects everywhere, or else no real objects at all and only labeled applied because they are "useful" (nominalism is closely related to volantarism, use makes things what they are, extrinsically). Not every nominalist wants to go this far. The point is more that they have an extremely hard time avoiding an infinite number of objects or arbitrary objects (and other related problems like the problem of the many, or the broader problem of the one and the many). Some of the basically reinvented realism with tropes because of this, but then they aren't really even nominalists anymore, just realists in denial or who only know strawman realism.
>>24940179>>24940225Actually, I think this is a pretty fair article on that universals are supposed to do and allows that Ockham is often unfairly maligned (as ITT) but also still pushes on the consequences of his thought.IMO, Ockham sort of deserves it because if you read him his work is full of ridiculous strawman versions of the via antiqua that he was obviously knowledgeable enough to know were simply bad faith caricatures. I get the feeling he had a bit of a troll personality. I feel that way about Hume sometimes too DESU. And I say this as someone who started reading Ockham pretty undecided and hopeful. He does do some really neat things in logic that 20th century analytics would later borrow though, and he is great for that and some linguistic stuff.
>>24940238>>24940179Shoot, here is the article: https://www.academia.edu/36162636/What_s_Wrong_with_Ockham_Reassessing_the_Role_of_Nominalism_in_the_Dissolution_of_the_West
>>24940205I will not be silent. These Germans destroyed my culture and made me into a vidya and pr0n addicted incel.
>>24940258
>>24940258Hegel has a very classical view of freedom and politics and a realist ontology. The medievals who get fetishized would probably like him except for him being a heretic. He's arguably the most "ancient facing" of the big modern thinkers. I am pretty sure he studied the Patristics early on and he definitely knew his Eckhart and Boehme.
>>24935758Ah, the refrain of /lit/.
>>24940158Unfortunately, I don't know of any antique treatise that focus specifically on this. The idea is very common, but for that reason people don't really discuss it in one place. The terminology also varies. For instance, Saint Gregory of Nyssa will speak of theoria versus logismos, and Proclus sometimes seems to have rational imagination (phantasia) as a third faculty.Question 79 in the first part of the Summa would be a good starting point though. And then in the first part of the second part there is Q57 and 58 on the intellectual virtues.But for a more accessible account that uses modern philosophy of language and phenomenology in concert with Aristotle and Aquinas Robert Sokolowski's The Phenomenology of the Human Person is really great. That addresses other things but it has a very full treatment on the difference between the simple grasp of wholes and composite ratiocination. Jensen's The Human Person is quite accessible too, although it doesn't hit on this distinction quite a clearly.
>>24940452BTW, this is a real problem in the literature. It either focuses exclusively on Plato and Aristotle, where the distinction is real but embryonic, or else jumps right to mystical contemplation. I believe this both contributes to and is a product of modern caricatures. But really, all ratiocination is going to involve a moving back and forth between the apprehension of simple wholes and composition, division, and concatenation. Like I said, Sokolowski does get at this quite well, it's just that the book isn't exactly focused on this. C.S. Lewis is also clearly aware of this in his book on medieval and renaissance literature when he takes on the "deflation of reason," but he doesn't really go into depth since his goal is more to show why romantic appeals to reason might seem sterile to us today. The early division can be seen in In Metaphysics, IX 10. There Aristotle distinguishes between two kinds of knowledge/truth:There is asytheta, which involves truth as the conformity of thought and speech to reality (whose opposite is falsity) and adiareta, truth as the grasping of a whole, apprehension (whose opposite is simply ignorance). Sokolowski looks at this in phenomenological terms. To think about (combine, divide, etc.) a rabbit, I have to have first apprehended it.This goes along with the "three acts of the mind" that used to be essential to logic (although now people tend to only learn formal logic, without any discussion of material logic or what logic is).There we have:We can also consider the "three acts of the mind:"1. Simple Apprehension - knowing what something is. This produces terms - it deals with essences.2. Judging, i.e., "is something such and such." This produces propositions, and moves from apprehension (whose opposite is ignorance) to judgement (where the opposite of a true judgement is a false one). Because truth is the adequacy of thought to being, and it is the intellect, not propositions, that primarily bear truth, we can speak of both in terms of "truth/knowledge."3. Reasoning, which deals with why something is such and such. This produces arguments. It deals with causes, or we might say "reasons" today.Well, here we start with apprehension, and the goal is ideally to go out into the multiplicity of the world and return with a fuller simple grasp of an intelligible principle.
>>24940555As Dionysius puts it in On The Divine Names>Further, there is a movement of soul, circular indeed,----the entrance into itself from things without, and the unified convolution of its intellectual powers, bequeathing to it inerrancy, as it were, in a sort of circle, and turning and collecting itself, from the many things without, first to itself, then, as having become single, uniting with the uniquely unified powers...But a soul is moved spirally, in so far as it is illuminated, as to the divine kinds of knowledge, in a manner proper to itself, not intuitively and at once, but logically and discursively; and, as it were, by mingled and relative operations; but in a straight line, when, not entering into itself, and being moved by unique intuition (for this, as I said, is the circular), but advancing to things around itself, and from things without, it is, as it were, conducted from certain symbols, varied and multiplied, to the simple and unified contemplations.You can see this in Plotinus too. From Eric Perl's excellent "Thinking Being:">In arguing that being qua intelligible is not apart from but is the content of intellectual apprehension, Plotinus is upholding what may be called an 'identity theory of truth,’ an understanding of truth not as a mere extrinsic correspondence but as the sameness of thought and reality. The weakness of any correspondence theory of truth is that on such a theory thought can never reach outside itself to that with which it supposedly corresponds.1 Thought can be ‘adequate’ (literally, ‘equal-to’) to reality only if it is one with, the same as, reality. In Aristotle’s formulation, which as we have seen Plotinus cites in support of his position, knowledge is the same as the known.2>If thought and reality are not together in this way, then, as Plotinus argues, there is no truth, for truth just is the togetherness of being with thought. Plotinus’ arguments against the separation of intellect and being thus resonate profoundly with the nihilistic predicament of modernity. If thought and reality are conceived in modern terms, as ‘subject’ and ‘object,’ extrinsic to and over against one another, and truth is conceived as a mere correspondence between them, then thought cannot get to reality at all, then there can be no knowledge, and in the end, since nothing is given to thought, no truth and no reality. We must rather understand thought in classical Platonic, Aristotelian, and Plotinian terms, as an openness to, an embracing of, a being-with reality, and of reality as not apart from but as, in Plotinus’ phenomenological terms, “given” to thought. This, again, is the very meaning of the identification of being as εἶδος or ἰδέα. Being means nothing if it is not given to thought; thought means nothing if it is not the apprehension of being. Hence at the paradigmatic level of both, intellect as perfect apprehension and the forms as perfect being, they coincide.
>>24935754i'm nonphilosophical dimwit, so sorry for dumb question, but why exactly "nominalism is true" -> "there is nothing transcendental and truth doesn't exist"?if i decide that "chairs are a meme, it's just a name, there is no platonic ideal of a chair", why can't i still belive that "there is god and truth and real physical world, just everything in it is a shitload of particular objects"?
>>24940258>paternity tests
what does /lit/ think of reading philosophy 'backwards' for a noob?
>>24940194>We also have such greats as:>There is no truth, only le interpretation. This is true and not only interpretation!>There are no absolutes. This is absolutely true.>Truth is constructed out of language and so always contingent and shifting. This is an unchanging fact.holy midwitgod levels of hedoesn'tknow
>>24935754I was thinking this anon is good at writing like a chad from the ancient past c.a. 1950.
>>24935754I see objectivity in the sense of group consciousness synonymous with (malignant) ideology and utopianism, on the other hand I see objectivity in the sense of pure mathematics comparable with knowledge, philosophy, growth, enlightenment , blooming and innovation.
>>24935779Kant distinguished between “beauty” and mere “interest”.
>>24935754have you actually read the book in your pic?
>>24941368>why exactly "nominalism is true" -> "there is nothing transcendental and truth doesn't exist"?that doesn't imply that at all. OP is just parroting this retarded anti nominalist theory that's popular in these orthodox christian and catholic revival books.
>>24941368How do you know a particular object you never saw before would be labelled a chair by others? The label has to reference something real that isn't particular.The honest critique of this kind of platonism is that the chair is emergent instead of fundamental but it doesn't change much, it's still there like an atomic element in the possibility space of the world.In Conway's game of life recognizable patterns emerge that we give labels to, even though the rules are simple these patterns exist encoded within those rules, almost like a table of atomic elements. The possibility space given by the rules is real and explorable and it always existed.https://www.youtube.com/shorts/srvQHlha4gc
>>24940194can you give examples of contemporary philosophers that hold any of these positions? I suspect that you don't actually read any of the philosophy written today.
>>24941368There is not really an easy way to answer this. You really have to look at the history of philosophy. This sort of radical position actually showed up right away in Medieval nominalism. Everything is just God's will. God can make a dog be a cat. God can make child rape good. God can make hating God good. Christ could have been a dog or rock. There was a very similar move in Islam too, and they came to very similar conclusions with atomism, occasionalism, and even a sort of empiricism.This history is not irrelevant for our secular age. People who say "I'm an atheist and our society is secular so these debates are old history," are like medieval Christians if they tried to say Platonism was irrelevant to their thought because "we stopped being Pagan."But, you also had huge efforts and projects to avoid this sort of arbitrariness. How successful were they? Well, you can see the various different tales, with humanism, fideism, and naturalism representing three major strains. However, the same sorts of issues, everything and all descriptions bottoming out in a sort of arbitrariness or sheer willing crop up over and over (particularly in the 20th century). These take many different forms. Often, God disappears. It is the individual or the language community who make things what they are. An ant is an ant because the community has said "this counts as an ant." Why do they do this? Because it is useful? Why is it useful? Often a road block is thrown up here to say that we shouldn't do metaphysics, that it isn't useful, or is interminable, etc. Thus, usefulness becomes a sort of metaphysical primitive that makes everything what it is. This is basically just the original voluntarism but God has become man (often democratized or man collectively as a market). That's just one strain, but it isn't unpopular.There is also hardcore eliminativism. R. Scott Bakker is popular here. He's a fine example. He thinks naturalism and science is true, as far as that goes, but truth itself isn't really metaphysical, it's all just a mechanistic selection process in the end. But other eliminitivists are more explicit about denying any thick understanding of truth. Really, there is just physical forces and selection.Or you have more post-modern approaches, although these often use some of the same ideas as the pragmatist voluntarism mentioned above. They tend to replace the individual with either the language or with a sea of desires and constraints that "constructs" intelligibility. But difference and particulars are always primary, and so any truth expressed in language, which will use universals, is always subject to change and revision. It is never the same. It is motile. But if no truth stays true in the same way, then even the truth of this very fact is also always changing.
>>24942261>>24941368Of course, you still have plenty of realists, from more Victorian type scientific realists to centrist liberal realist types. The question is, given their premises, can they actually resist the critiques of the anti-realists and relativists? The many "crises" suggest they cannot. Often they end up defaulting to the same sort of pragmatism as their opponents or else appeals to common sense.Hence, the claim is not so much that "nominalism makes everyone accept relativism" (although it does help more people accept it) but rather "does nominalism imply relativism, even if people don't want it to?"I forgot one less camp, the objective/subjective folks. These people buy into a strong dichotomy between the objective, which is "out there" in the world, in itself, and the subjective experience of that objective world. The problem with this dichotomy is that if you assume it to start off, as much modern thought does, and particularly if you also assume nominalism, then all we ever have access to is the subjective. We construct reality. We can never know about reality outside experience. Knowing cats, dogs, and trees doesn't tell you anything about the world outside your own head because the concepts cat, dog, and tree aren't real forms, they are just mental constructs. Indeed, arguably on this view there is no good justification for the idea that subjectivity, appearances, are even appearances. We have to assume this. If we don't assume this, appearances just are the reality, and so we have subjective idealism and arguably solipsism, which also implies relativism.So folks like >>24942075 can roll out the "all these scholars are actually retarded tradcaths (even though a bunch are secular, Jewish, etc.) all they want. They rarely seem to have read any of these genealogies. They just slap a label on it, and dismiss it. But even a serious fan of liberalism and modernity who actually knows their philosophical history knows this doesn't work. The fact is, relativism and solipsism was put to bed pretty hard in early antiquity. It popped up now and again, but it is rarely a going concern. In modern thought they show up over and over, either being actually embraced (rare until the 19th century) or with various great minds accusing each other of implying such conclusions. Well, all these modern philosophers weren't "trad caths" or "anti-moderns." Hegel, for instance, in seeing these sorts of implications in Kant, or Fichte, aren't trad Cath anti-moderns. They are grappling with real issues. Same thing with Berkeley.That doesn't mean the older thought was better or worth returning to. It does mean that people who try to dismiss the relationship between nominalism and fideism, secularism, and relativism are ignorant though.
>>24941980Indeed, I think that's probably who he is thinking of (with Schiller, Hegel, Goethe, etc.) in his appeal to the 18th and 19th centuries. Schindler has a whole book on German idealism and he is not wholly critical of it, although he seems more favorable towards Schelling and Hegel. David Bentley Hart is pretty similar here and he has a lot of respect for Kant but ultimately parts with him and takes a position closer to Schindler's.
>>24935978>In mathematics, a transcendental number is a real or complex number that is not algebraic: that is, not the root of a non-zero polynomial with integer (or, equivalently, rational) coefficients. The best-known transcendental numbers are π and e.[1][2] The quality of a number being transcendental is called transcendence.
>>24942302Isn't this just irrational numbers?
>>24940099>But where ARE these universals? Where are these things that would start to make total sense if the wrongful presuppositions were discarded? Where are these truths that were apprehended yesterday, but not today?If you read Jean Bodin's work on witchcraft and compare it to the work on the field being put out today it doesn't even compare. Western medicine cannot even deal with simple cases of demonic possession and just give people sedatives like haloperidol. It can be hard for a culture to see it's own blindspots, but don't assume for a moment they aren't there.
>>24942345Yes. How does it feel knowing that your so-called "rational" world is built on nothing but LIES?
>>24940099I think you're profoundly misunderstanding both how the ancients saw universals (and essences, natures, and quiddity, they are related but not the same) and why moderns advocate for them friend.No one says that realism obviates the need for experiments and the scientific method. Indeed, the scientific method started being developed when pretty much everyone was a realist, and there are tons of examples of famous realist inventors and scientists.
>>24942649I am always puzzled when people think ideas that held sway for so long are so easily and obviously refuted. Do people think everyone before the modern period was just an idiot? Were Aristotle and Plotinus just too stupid to see the obvious?You get things like:>If the mind grasps forms, why couldn't people cure cancer and infectious diseases?>Ha, getting eaten by a tiger is bad for you, but good for the tiger. Therefore morality is relative.>Ha, different people have different norms, so morality is relative. So is aesthetics.>Different people use different sounds for different things, therefore language cannot involve real forms.But the ancients were keenly aware that "barbarians" hadn't different norms and languages than them. They understood scientific progress to some degree, even if not to the extent we do today. They understood engineering and improvements in engineering. They clearly got that when a thief steals it is "good" for the thief.If you think these obvious examples totally destroy objective, metaphysically grounded morality, meaning, beauty, forms, etc. then it's a pretty good sign you don't understand why people accepted them in the slightest.
>>24942663>>Ha, different people have different norms, so morality is relative. So is aesthetics.i get moral realism, because god gave us morals or something, but how does aesthetic realism works?
>>24942663>I am always puzzled when people think ideas that held sway for so long are so easily and obviously refuted. Do people think everyone before the modern period was just an idiot? Were Aristotle and Plotinus just too stupid to see the obvious?Aristotle's teeth are an obvious early case of the mandela effect, where the past is actually in constant flux (due to time travel? stranger things have certainly happened) and as such certain facts seem wrong or inaccurate when viewed from a modern linear-time perspective.
