Philosophy Discussion Forums

Londoner, your implied objection to EMTe is ad hominem.

Belinda wrote:Londoner, your implied objection to EMTe is ad hominem.

True, but what sort of response would be appropriate?

Remember, the challenge was:

As a psychologist I have a task for you. Deeply unlogical and unphilosophical, so prepare for something truly disturbing, probably first such a game on philosophical boards.

Surely, if the intention is to judge us, not on our arguments but on our psychological state, it is legitimate to reply in the same vein?

As Schopenhauer would say, if the subject is psychology, then an examination of 'motivating forces' becomes the appropriate form of reasoning.

I think it's an existentialist * approach to doing philosophy. You and Fafner have been arguing like essentialists inasmuch as I could understand you both. Is it a good idea to oscillate between deliberately defining contrasts and deliberately comparing harmonies?

* I refer to existentialism as the action of the entire human being visavis the world rather than his abstracted logicality.

The mind game I offered you is to find whether people tend to conclusions or to eternal arguments.

I observe philosophers for a long time and in my opinion they have sort of self-destructing mechanism inscribed in their DNA code. I've talked offline with a philosopher who said me he went to the pub with his fellow. I asked him did they reach any conclusion and he answered me: it's not important, what's important is to put your mind in the state of thought.

So, my task is to force you to focus all your humane activity during specified time on coming to agreement and conclusions. If your vital forces can't be focused on agreement and conclusions then I am right - you're ill.

Does sane person pursuit conflict that ultimately also begins to infect him/her?

You have been observing some not very good philosophers then, EMTe. Don't you see that arguing with a worthy opponent , or teaching someone who does not know, are aids to clarity of thought?

What if the servant is your master?

EMTe wrote:The mind game I offered you is to find whether people tend to conclusions or to eternal arguments.

I observe philosophers for a long time and in my opinion they have sort of self-destructing mechanism inscribed in their DNA code. I've talked offline with a philosopher who said me he went to the pub with his fellow. I asked him did they reach any conclusion and he answered me: it's not important, what's important is to put your mind in the state of thought.

So, my task is to force you to focus all your humane activity during specified time on coming to agreement and conclusions. If your vital forces can't be focused on agreement and conclusions then I am right - you're ill.

Does sane person pursuit conflict that ultimately also begins to infect him/her?

So, as a psychologist, do you claim you can draw that line and say 'that person is sane/insane'? Would you claim know as a fact what is morally right and what is wrong?

Certainly we can define any problem in a way that allows only one answer. 'If the authorities declare someone insane then they are insane'; 'if it is sanctioned by the Church then an action is moral'. (The nature of that sort of argument is, to some extent, the subject of this thread.)

If we were robots we will simply accept such programmed answers, but we aren't. Maybe we would be happier as robots, not troubled with questions we cannot resolve, but that isn't an option. To want to be such a robot is to deny our own humanity....and that really would be a sign we are 'ill'.

Returning to the subject of this thread, namely whether a priori knowledge is a tenable hypothesis. Curiously, also a mosquito must have recourse to a "transcendental ego", according to the Kantian view of a priori categories as constitutive of the world. After all, it lives in a causal and temporal universe, too. This is baffling, in view of the mosquito's miniscule brain, which can hardly be responsible for the complex task of the ordering of existence. Thus, the transcendental ego must be a mind common to all living creatures, a kind of spirit enveloping existence, which the brain is capable of connecting with in order to extract its knowledge. It is a standpoint akin to New Age superstitions. It is curious that scholarly philosophers, even to this day, subscribe to such a theory.

M. Winther

EMTe wrote:What if the servant is your master?

What if indeed! It is true that people get addictions to all sorts of activities including arguing to pass the time, or arguing about intellectual matters to escape from some anxiety or sadness. Those two motivations don't make the arguments illegitimate but are ad hominem objections.

Mlw is correct to suggest getting back on track. But on the point of order I still mildly believe that it is good for mutual learning to oscillate between finding agreements and finding rebuttals or objections. Probably the main participants in this thread have been doing so if only I could comprehend all of what they wrote.

Probably the main participants in this thread have been doing so if only I could comprehend all of what they wrote.

If that is me, then in my exchange with Fafner, we were looking at analytic propositions that either seemed to say things about 'the real world' or might be linked to propositions about the real world.

Since our whole object in seeking such a 'synthetic a priori' proposition is that it would provide a sound basis on which to apply logic and thus discover other truths about the world, then they ought to be express-able as logical propositions.

I did not think this was possible. I thought that if you analysed them then they would always be found to contain some form of self-contradiction.

As things developed and we looked at examples, we found this disagreement was a reflection of different ideas about the nature of logic. Fafner saw it as a refinement of ordinary speech, but I saw it as more like maths.

I think this is how philosophy works generally, like the Socratic dialogue. Somebody says something; it is usually in the form of an 'a priori', but when we dispute it we find that actually our respective positions rest on pre-suppositions that perhaps we were not aware of. It doesn't follow we therefore 'agree', but I would say that it constitutes progress.

But to briefly take up Mlw's invitation, I don't see the problem with Kant's "transcendental ego". He uses the term to distinguish the fact we can be aware of ourselves as individuals through reflection, but we cannot experience ourselves in the same way as we experience objects. I do not see how you can interpret that as implying 'a kind of spirit enveloping existence'.

Londoner wrote: But to briefly take up Mlw's invitation, I don't see the problem with Kant's "transcendental ego". He uses the term to distinguish the fact we can be aware of ourselves as individuals through reflection, but we cannot experience ourselves in the same way as we experience objects. I do not see how you can interpret that as implying 'a kind of spirit enveloping existence'.

I was just fascinated by the the fact that mosquitos too, have a transcendental ego, a mind that structures experience, including time, space, and causality. The transcendental ego is being an a priori necessary condition for the possibility of any experience whatsoever. It is not a little thing. By some, it is understood as that part of you that is God--a God-consciousness. It is easy to think of as 'a kind of spirit enveloping existence'.

According to Fichte, one of the foremost interpreters of Kant, all reality begins with the transcendental ego. It is a conscious being that expands itself infinitely to comprehend everything. For Fichte, objects exist only as the objects of consciousness.

According to Schopenhauer, the transcendental ego is quite the reverse: it is an unconscious will-power that lies outside time and space, responsible for the manifestation and unification of phenomena. It underlies the phenomenal world as "the Will". It is the whole of reality for Schopenhauer.

Nietzsche, for his part, discarded the notion of a transcendental ego.

M. Winther

I do not read it like that.

We cannot say that a mosquito has a transcendental ego, because we do not know it in the way we know of an object. To think that we have one ourselves is only to say that 'something is thinking'. As such it is a logical precondition of any further examination of our thoughts, but it isn't a thing in itself.

If we guess that the mosquito has its own identity, then to say 'the mosquito thinks...' is to say it has a transcendental ego, but it doesn't follow that the mosquito therefore experiences or reflects on its experience in the same way we do.

I agree that Fichte had a version of the transcendental ego that may be seen as some sort of religious-type idea, but I don't agree that he was interpreting Kant.

Londoner wrote:If we were robots we will simply accept such programmed answers

I'm not saying I'd love to turn people into robots, I am just interested in general issue of looking for truth. My question is: do people look for consensus at all or they just present their ideas and only confirm in their beliefs when they get older. If that is so - that's fine by me, but philosophers as a breed should not say that they pursue truth. If you want to be honest you should say "I sit with others and present my opinions for simple pleasure of having an intelligent discussion about unresolved problems." But that poses another problem, because if you philosophise for simple pleasure of philosophizing and at the same time you use logical arguments to persuade your opponent to accept your truth we have incosistency here.

See my point. Arguments are logical, but your real-life nature doesn't need any solutions, you just love to have intelligent chitchats with friendly people and deep in your heart you hope it will stay that way.

Sorry for offtopic, I won't post in this thread again, I just love to destroy philosophical debates. ^^

EMTe

See my point. Arguments are logical, but your real-life nature doesn't need any solutions, you just love to have intelligent chitchats with friendly people and deep in your heart you hope it will stay that way.

As I have tried to explain, logic is like maths. It is a great way to solve clearly defined problems, but few problems are like that.

But if I am wrong, if philosophy consists of recreational chitchat from people who could arrive at the correct answers by applying logic but prefer not to do so, why not prove this by telling us those answers?