You see me. I see you. Most fundamental is such a relation between humans, beings who have their being in others. Imagine then the horror when, like a thunderclap, the insight that all may not be as it seems flashes across your mind, as if the tabula rasa, as imagined by Locke, were firmly polarised, and that the truth of it was you began with a BLACK slate, one which flecks of white crudely illuminated the phenomenal world, and this insight, you may fear, is but the first fleck of white on a pitch black slate. So radically idealist is it that you may find sitting down and ceasing the entire ordeal of philosophy is in order. Really, you have just begun. I speak in Descartes's language when I say that truly, nothing outside of mind can be known to be true. And whose mind is it? Yours. Well, mine actually. Cogito, ergo sum. I think, therefore I am. Descartes brought the multitude of doubts we can have to our attention. A mathematician, Descartes employed the analogy of an Evil Demon who could fool our senses, and that until one can rule out universal deception, even math is doubtable in principle. Maybe others have expanded as I now shall. Regardless, it could all prove quite useless. Say, then, that a demon IS tricking my senses. I can only doubt the DEMON'S existence through a strange mental leap, and that is that I am the demon tricking my own senses. Let's go back to the original statement of "Cogito, ergo sum". I only know that I exist. That brings radical doubt into the equation. How then could I not doubt even this demons existence? I must doubt this demon. For my doubt of mathematics to employ another doubtful entity, one might call this an overstretching of the original phrases reach or employ Occam's Razor. But should I say that I am the demon, which can be doubted to be true, but can also be doubted to be false, one finds a more parsimoniously becoming idea wherein I assume this demon exists, while also assuming I exist, but doubting anything beyond myself, I must therefore consider that I am this demon which causes me to doubt, and, rather obviously, it is my mind which causes me to doubt, as this demon does, so evidently this demon and my mind are ontologically indistinguishable.
>>25166552>cogitoTo say that there is thinking is to posit more than simply thought itself. In recognizing anything there must be a subject with awareness. Hence, ergo sum.However, awareness itself is not a primitive that stands on its own. Awareness is a product of differentiation. Differentiation is a product of retention. Retention is a product of time. To recognize that there is a thought, one must recognize that there can be absence of a thought. In other words, any object of recognition necessarily contains in itself what it is not. The essence of an object is what it is not. Water is water because it is not anything else. Fire is fire because it is not anything else. A thought is a thought because it is not anything else.Without this distinction there is no differentiation, no thought, no awareness.To think is to know that thinking is not simply all there is. It is to retain, even for an infinitesimally small period of time, knowledge of what the current state is not.We cannot doubt time.
>>25166552They're teaching me him in philosophy class this semester, although I already read his main works. I don't like the fact he tortured animals.
>>25166583Oh yeah I forgot about that
>>25166583dualist golems are not to be listened to
>>25166583Maimon had a Cartesian phase as a young man and used to beat animals at random to shock and amaze his friends. He writes about it in his autobiography.
Why do we have so much faith in grammar?
>>25166665What about pluralists?
