Merry Christmas 2023

December 18, 2023 / chr1 / Leave a comment

As posted: (it’s a long one): ‘Postmodern Religion And The Faith Of Social Justice‘

Let’s say you use mathematics and/or engineer systems, in pursuit of new knowledge and truth.

Come worship at the Human Pagoda!

Are you an artist, captivated by the beauty of this world?

We have an ecopodment for you.

At the cutting-edge Institute of Global Citizens (IGC), we draft rules for tomorrow’s leaders.

As a thought-leader, your contributions will feed into a Council of Purely Democratic Representation, uniting our fractured world and restoring Nature’s purity.

Swim in the warm bath of the (S)elf. Float in the bowl of Romantic Nature.

Freedom is next at Peace Pavilion West.

As posted, someone called me a Postmodern Conservative a while back, and I’d just like to say that there are many identities juxtaposed at the intersectionality of bodies in space. Dominant narratives, meta-narratives, and counter-narratives serve to liber…

Merry Christmas!

R.I.P.

From Partially Examined Life-‘John Searle Interview Of Perception: Part One’

December 2, 2021 / chr1 / Leave a comment

From Partially Examined Life: ‘John Searle Interview of Perception: Part One‘

Direct, naive realism requires some explanation of consciousness and a theory of perception:

‘We interview John about Seeing Things as They Are: A Theory of Perception (2015). What is perception? Searle says that it’s not a matter of seeing a representation, which is then somehow related to things in the real world. We see the actual objects, with no mediation. But then how can there be illusions?
Well, we see things under an aspect: a presentation of the thing. And that presentation presents itself as caused by just that thing that the perception is of. If these “conditions of satisfaction” (i.e., that the perception is actually caused by that thing) are not met, then we have a case of illusion: we thought we were perceiving that thing, but we really weren’t. Simple! Right? Searle lays out his theory for us and amusingly dismisses much of the history of philosophy.’

Related On This Site: Via A Reader-‘John Searle On The Philosophy Of Language’

From The Stanford Encyclopedia Of Philosophy: Charles Sanders Peirce

Some Sunday Quotations: (On) Kant, Locke, and Pierce

Via Youtube: (1 of 3) Kant, Chomsky and the Problem of Knowledge

Repost-Roger Scruton At The WSJ: ‘Memo To Hawking: There’s Still Room For God’

March 21, 2017 / chr1 / Leave a comment

Full post here. (link may not last)

Perhaps Hawking is guilty of a little hubris in weighing in with such certitude on the God question?

Here’s a quote of his Hawking’s posted previously:

“His [Kant’s}argument for the thesis was that if the universe did not have a beginning, there would be an infinite period of time before any event, which he considered absurd. The argument for the antithesis was that if the universe had a beginning, there would be an infinite period of time before it, so why should the universe begin at any one particular time? In fact, his cases for both the thesis and the antithesis are really the same argument. They are both based on his unspoken assumption that time continues back forever, whether or not the universe had existed forever.”

-Stephen Hawking-A Brief History of Time

Not so much that time continues back forever, but that it’s impossible to conceive of a point outside of time. Kant wished to argue that both time and space are not necessarily inherent characteristics of the universe (or any object at all…especially those objects with which we have no direct experience, like a black hole, though according to Kant we can have knowledge of objects) but rather time and space are part of our onboard apparatus, and preconditions for us have intelligible experience in the first place (unlike as is assumed in calculus, for example). He constructed a vast metaphysics to make his point in the hopes of putting metaphysics on the same ground as the sciences (the Enlightenment was going strong around him, and he latched onto Newton’s laws especially). It’s questionable as to whether or not he succeeded, but fascinating to think about nonetheless.

Also On This Site: Roger Scruton In The American Spectator Via A & L Daily: Farewell To Judgment…From YouTube: Roger Scruton On Religious Freedom, Islam & Atheism…

Via The University Of British Colombia: Kant-Summary Of Essential Points…From Bryan Magee’s Talking Philosophy On Youtube: Geoffrey Warnock On Kant…Sunday Quotation: From Jonathan Bennett On Kant

From The Times Higher Education: Simon Blackburn On The The Atheist/Believer Debate…From Bloggingheads: Adam Frank And Eliezer Yudkowsky

From Maverick Philosopher: ‘Peter van Inwagen, “A Theory Of Properties,” Exposition And Critique

January 24, 2015 / chr1 / 2 Comments

Exposition and critique here.

‘I’ll begin the critique with the last point. “We never see properties, although we see that certain things have certain properties.” (179) If van Inwagen can ‘peter out,’ so can I: I honestly don’t know what to make of the second clause of the quoted sentence. I am now, with a brain properly caffeinated, staring at my blue coffee cup in good light. Van Inwagen’s claim is that I do not see the blueness of the cup, though I do see that the cup is blue. Here I balk. If I don’t see blueness, or blue, when I look at the cup, how can I see (literally see, with the eyes of the head, not the eye of the mind) that the cup is blue?’

From Darwinian Conservatism: ‘The Evolution of Mind and Mathematics: Dehaene Versus Plantinga and Nagel’Repost: From the Cambridge Companion To Plato-T.H. Irwin’s “Plato: The intellectual Background’

From The Stanford Encyclopedia Of Philosophy: Charles Sanders Peirce

December 31, 2010March 26, 2016 / chr1 / Leave a comment

Full entry here.

The previous point must be tempered with the fact that Peirce increasingly became a philosopher with broad and deep sympathies for both transcendental idealism and absolute idealism. His Kantian affinities are simpler and easier to understand than his Hegelian leanings. Having rejected a great deal in Kant, Peirce nevertheless shared with Charles Renouvier the view that Kant’s (quasi-)concept of the Ding an sich can play no role whatsoever in philosophy or in science other than the role that Kant ultimately assigned to it, viz. the role of a Grenzbegriff: a boundary-concept, or, perhaps a bit more accurately, a limiting concept. A supposed “reality” that is “outside” of every logical possibility of empirical or logical interaction with “it” can play no direct role in the sciences. Science can deal only with phenomena, that is to say, only with what can “appear” somehow in experience. All scientific concepts must somehow be traceable back to phenomenological roots. Thus, even when Peirce calls himself a “realist” or is called by others a “realist,” it must be kept in mind that Peirce was always a realist of the Kantian “empirical” sort and not a Kantian “transcendental realist.” His realism is similar to what Hilary Putnam has called “internal realism.” (As was said, Peirce was also a realist in quite another sense of he word: he was a realist or an anti-nominalist in the medieval sense.)

Hilary Putnam On The Philosophy Of Science: Bryan Magee’s Talking Philosophy On YouTube