Philosophy The Name of Love's Philosophy Essays

Lanmandragon

Well-known member
Modern philosophy considered broadly distinguishes itself from the earlier Aristotelian and Neo-Platonist philosophies by its rejection of inherent natures imbued with a divinely-given purpose. This teleological-cum-essentialist (or teleo-essentialist) view of reality informed much of early empirical science as it emerged in Medieval Europe, but listening to modern science popularizers like Richard Dawkins or Steven Pinker, you’d be forgiven for thinking the opposite.

Certainly, the founders of modern science such as Galileo Galilee, Isaac Newton, Francis Bacon, and Rene Descartes all rejected the earlier teleo-essentialist view in favor of one that eschewed inherent natures with purposes. According to their new worldview, objects did not have inherent natures or purposes. Instead, each object was a particular individual with nothing in common with any other individual. Those trees outside your window? They aren’t really trees. Each one is an individual thing, and the “treeness” that is supposedly shared between them is just inside your head. The opium that seems have the power to make people fall asleep? There’s nothing inherent to the properties of opium to cause people to do that, and in fact it could cause you to turn into a frog instead. The heart pumping your blood right now? There’s no reason why it does that; it just does.

This worldview seems to contradict common sense. After all, if trees don’t actually have treeness in common, how can we pick out the difference between a tree and a non-tree? If opium doesn’t have the power to make people fall asleep, then why does ingesting opium so often end in the person falling asleep? And if the heart’s purpose isn’t actually to pump blood, why is it so often the case that it does just that?

The moderns do have an answer to this sort of objection. Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume famously held that the mind may perceive event A followed by event B, leading to the formation of an expectation that B will always follow A. But to project this expectation onto the world, he would claim, is not rational. There’s no reason why reality should fit one’s expectations, after all. You may expect opium will make people who take it sleepy, but maybe it will turn someone into a frog instead. John Locke, another Enlightenment thinker, also held that the creation of species of things like “treeness” was similarly the result of projecting our expectations onto reality. There’s no reason for one tree to be like another tree. In other words, it’s all in your head.

This seems like a rather silly idea, but it’s one that’s very popular amongst scientists due to the prominence of Darwinism. Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution gave scientific credibility to the modern philosophy in two ways. First, in proving macro-evolution, he was able to make the case that species are fluid rather than fixed, and this undermined the teleo-essentialist worldview that supposedly relied on the existence of fixed species. Second, he was able to describe apparent goal-directedness in nature in way that seemed to eliminate teleological language. So rather than hearts having the purpose of pumping blood, creatures without hearts, and thus without circulating blood, died out and creatures with hearts survived. And so on for all apparently goal-directed biological functions.

So, we see how such a view would come to dominate modern academia. As we speak, philosophers are working out the logical conclusion of the modern view: that everything is the result of blind laws of nature governing the behavior of inherently meaningless and purposeless physical particles.

For the present purposes, I wish to provide reasons for why I reject this modern rejection of the teleo-essentialist worldview. In short, I believe modern philosophy is a form of universal acid that dissolves everything, leaving one unable to form rational, coherent thoughts about anything. This is because much of how we understand the world and ourselves presupposes the concept of inherent natures pointed towards something else. Everything from philosophy of mind to science to ethics is dissolved by the modern rejection of teleo-essentialism, as demonstrated below.

Philosophy of Mind

One of the main projects of modern naturalist and materialist philosophers is the “mind-body problem.” Though seemingly all of reality can be explained in “scientific” (read: modern philosophical) terms, the mind seems resistant to this. Some of the brightest minds of the twentieth century have tried and failed to explain the mind this way. Though Internet Atheists are so certain they can explain everything in terms of physical science, that the god of the gaps is being filled by modern science, if they are knowledgeable and honest on this issue, they will, if pressed, say “well, we haven’t explained how the mind works just yet. But we will eventually!”

But there is a good reason why the mind cannot be explained “scientifically,” and this reason lies precisely in the method by which the modern philosophy explained all other instances of apparent teleo-essentialism in nature. Though you could dismiss treeness, the power of opium to cause sleep, or the purpose of hearts as mental projections, how could you explain mental projections in this way? If the physical world is really devoid of such things, and all apparent instances of those things existing in the physical world actually exist in your mind, it then follows that the mind is not physical. Cartesian Dualists accepted this as a given, but modern naturalists are forever plagued by this “mind-body problem.”

Thus, a “materialistic explanation of the mind” is like an “atheistic explanation of God” – it’s not an explanation so much as a denial of its very existence. Eliminative materialists like Daniel Dennet, Paul and Patricia Churchland, and Alex Rosenburg all accept this as the natural conclusion of “science.” But their view is incoherent. Take Dennet, who explains consciousness as “an illusion,” disregarding that illusions only exist within the very consciousness Dennet denies even exists. The Churchlands and Rosenburg are similarly incoherent when they attempt to describe their worldview, yet this is the logical end result if one embraces the modern philosophy and is a materialist.

Epistemology

According to Descartes, the purpose of modern science is to describe physical reality. However, science as an activity takes place only within the minds of the scientists themselves. But how can we know that the mental representations of reality within our heads (and by extension, the heads of the scientists) have any kind of relationship the reality itself? To establish that they do, we need to prove that the mental representations have in fact been caused by the things they purportedly represent.

But how can we say this cause-and-effect relationship exists given modern philosophy? According to David Hume, causes and effects are “loose and separate”; that is to say, anything is capable of causing anything in principle because there are no inherent natures or purposes to anything. If this view of reality is correct, there is no guarantee that your particular mental representation of the computer screen you experience as you read this is being caused by an actual computer screen. You could be in the Matrix for all you know.

Of course, this sort of radical skepticism is rarely taken to its logical conclusion by the average person simply because it’s impossible to live as though it were true. However, people who are influenced by this philosophy are inclined to take seriously the relativist view that all belief systems are “socially constructed,” that the representations of reality from one person are particular to that person, and no particular representation represents reality more accurately than any other. This would lead to truth relativism, casting serious doubt on all of our knowledge, scientific or otherwise.

Suppose you were able to escape this problem of skepticism somehow, as Descartes was able to through his ontological argument for God’s existence. Scientific knowledge would still be undermined by the inability to trust inductive knowledge. After all, if modern philosophy is correct, any cause could produce any range of effects. There is nothing inherent about a pencil that says it cannot become an elephant tomorrow, after all. And if you can say that, we cannot say that science is really about anything other than what has happened in the past. Science collapses into history.

Finally, science is undermined by the inability to group things together coherently. If my classification of particular animals as members of the same species or my classification of particular substances as being made of the same molecules is merely a mental projection with no basis in reality, then we cannot know those things at all. All classifications become mental projections. Because we as humans understand things by placing them into categories, modern philosophy makes knowledge of the extramental world impossible in every instance.

Personal Identity

If there is no guarantee that anything will be the same tomorrow as it is today, then there is no guarantee that any given person will be the same person tomorrow as they are today. Without some essential human nature to provide a principle of unity, all that is left are the individual parts that we are constituted of. Indeed, the views of the various modern philosophers seem to confirm this, with each one choosing one part of us and claiming it is what makes us human. Descartes identified the self with the res cogitans or mental substance, an immaterial spirit only contingently related to the body. Locke identified the self with a “stream of consciousness” that he too dissociated from the body of the person. Modern materialists identify the self either with the body (or at least some crucial part of it, like the brain), with some psychological element (memories, personality traits, etc.), or some combination of the two.

These views inevitably lead to numerous paradoxes and absurdities. For instance, Descartes’ view means that we aren’t actually our bodies, so whenever our body does something, it is not something “we” do. We are like ghosts in a machine. Locke’s view, if it were true, would mean that, if a computer with my consciousness downloaded onto it were to create two clones with that consciousness after I died, then both those clones would be me at the same time. Thus, if one of the clones died, we would have to say that I am alive and dead simultaneously. These problems and more lead to some modern philosophers claiming that there is no such thing as a “self.”

But the resulting absurdities not only those of the logical kind but of the moral kind as well. Suppose one believed that thought or awareness was what constituted a person. Given modern philosophy, there does not exist any kind of capacity of thought or awareness that persists even when a certain person has no way of exercising that capacity, so only actual episodes of thought or consciousness matter in determining when a person can be said to exist. Given this, nothing that does not in fact demonstrate any episodes of thought or consciousness – such as fetuses or people in “persistent vegetative states” – can plausibly count as a person. On the other hand, since certain non-human animals have episodes of thought or consciousness, then we ought to afford some of them the same personhood as fully formed human beings. Thus, we have arrived at the moral view that claims carnivorism is immoral, but abortion and euthanasia are a-okay.

Human Action

Human action is rendered nonsensical under the modern philosophical view. If one were to take Descartes’ view of the human soul, then it becomes unclear how the mind could cause the body to do anything. How could the ghost inside the machine cause the machine to move, given that the machine is not part of the ghost? The question plagues modern day Cartesian dualists.

Taking the materialist route, meanwhile, means more or less denying humans even have free will. After all, if everything in the material realm is caused by meaningless, purposeless chains of efficient causation between physical particles, then human action is merely the results of physical particles pushed and pulled by blind laws of nature. Human action, under this view, is ultimately no from the behavior of billiard balls on a pool table. This deterministic worldview undermines morality, which presupposes that human can make moral choices.

Human Rights and Ethics

How can we have human rights given the modern philosophy? Thomas Hobbes is most explicit on this – according to him, everyone in the “state of nature” has the “right” to do whatever he wants; that is to say, no one has any rights at all in the moral sense of the term. Moral law does not exist until it is invented by us to stave off the chaotic nightmare that is the “state of nature,” and human rights are merely a matter of social convention.

John Locke attempted to stave off this amoral stance by reference to God’s ownership of us. Since God created us, so the argument goes, we are his property, so anyone who harms another human being in his life, liberty, or property effectively violates God’s rights. Our rights are not inherent to us then, but rather derivative of God’s rights as our owner. But how do we know whether we are violating God’s property rights or not? Outside of a direct appeal to divine revelation, there really is no answer.

Another problem that crops up with regards to “human rights” is that, under the modern philosophy, there is no such thing as human nature. We are all individuals, and our apparent humanity that we supposedly have in common is simply a mental projection onto reality. In other words, what is or isn’t a human being is ultimately a subjective matter, which defeats the entire purpose of human rights in the first place! Those who are committed to both the existence of both human rights and modern philosophy are forced to say “human beings have rights we must respect! Also, we can decide who is or isn’t a human being and can change that on a whim.”

But the problem runs much, much deeper than this. The modern philosophy ultimately makes it impossible to judge any given individual thing to be a better or worse specimen of its type because there are no “types” in extramental reality. But this would mean there are no such thing as better or worse human beings. To say that there is something objectively “good” or “bad” in any sense (including the moral sense) is nonsensical. From this, we get the modernist principle that reason is the “slave of the passions” (in the words of David Hume). Under this view, reason can tell us what we must do to further the realization of whatever it is we value, and it can tell us whether the pursuit of some values would be consistent with the realization of others, but it cannot tell us what ultimate values we ought to have. All moral evaluations are ultimately subjective.

To be charitable, David Hume (and those following after him) need not believe our moral attitudes are as arbitrary as our choice in clothing. They might argue that some moral attitudes are “natural” to us in the sense that they are statistically common in our given area or conducive to our survival. But these judgments lack any normative force. For this reason, the Humean has nothing to say to the sociopath who happens not to share these attitudes. Nor does he have anything to say to ideological groups like Nazis, communists, jihadists, feminists, and the like that wish to remake society in their image via social or genetic engineering. All the Humean can do is shrug and say “well, I hope they don’t succeed.”

Now a Hobbesian might believe that morality is created from the social contract between rationally self-interested individuals. Under this view, what we call morality is nothing more than a mutual non-aggression pact between self-interested individuals driven by passion. To the Hobbesian, only what could be agreed upon by all rationally self-interested persons to be conducive to their mutual advantage is what is “moral.” But this form of morality isn’t moral in any real sense. Under this idea, there’s nothing in principle wrong with kidnapping a child so you could rape and kill them if that’s how you get your kicks. Morality in this view is but an illusion.

Other modern ethical theories similarly flounder. Utilitarianism is all about maximizing “the greatest happiness for the greatest number,” but it inevitably defines “happiness” in subjectivist terms a la Hume while providing no explanation as to why anyone should care about the happiness of the “greatest number” as opposed to his own happiness or the happiness of some favored group. Kantian morality claims something about reason itself demands that we follow his famous Categorical Imperative, according to which you should only follow a principle if you could will it to become a universal law binding on all rational beings. But the Categorical Imperative is a useless test for proving what is or isn’t moral (“tell a lie when it would lead to an overall good result” would pass while “give all you have to the poor and live out your life as a celibate monk” would fail), and we have no way of knowing whether the Categorical Imperative is really true to the nature of human reason given how the modern philosophy Kant presupposes rejects that anything has a nature to begin with. Modern liberal ethicists like John Rawls appeal to the “intuitions” shared by all decent people, but their position basically amounts to Hume’s subjectivism expressed using pseudo-Kantian jargon.

Conclusion

In short, the modern philosophy characterized by the rejection teleo-essentialism is false. It defies common sense on its face, creates numerous philosophical problems when examined, and leads to all kinds of absurdities if followed to its logical conclusion. Sadly, these premises are taken for granted by so many people in the modern day. You cannot use the reductio ad absurdum argument against the bongo; no matter how absurd the conclusions of his premises are, he will embrace them whole-heartedly, descending into irrationalism if he must.
Why does there need to be a gurantee things will be the same? In my experience literally everything in life a gamble. In fact my default assumption for people offering gurantees. Is to assume they're delusional or lying this is meant as a legit question. Not as an attack or whatever.
 

The Name of Love

Far Right Nutjob
Why does there need to be a gurantee things will be the same? In my experience literally everything in life a gamble. In fact my default assumption for people offering gurantees. Is to assume they're delusional or lying this is meant as a legit question. Not as an attack or whatever.

Well, first off, I never, in that essay, proved that things remained the same. That would require proving the existence of real essences, which I argued for in the essay after that one. That particular essay was all about the negative consequences of rejecting the teleo-essentialist worldview.

If we accept Humean skepticism as you are suggesting that we do, then we don't have knowledge of anything, plain and simple. It's utterly incoherent, and by being incoherent, Humean skepticism is proven to be an unreasonable thing to believe in.
 

Lanmandragon

Well-known member
Well, first off, I never, in that essay, proved that things remained the same. That would require proving the existence of real essences, which I argued for in the essay after that one. That particular essay was all about the negative consequences of rejecting the teleo-essentialist worldview.

If we accept Humean skepticism as you are suggesting that we do, then we don't have knowledge of anything, plain and simple. It's utterly incoherent, and by being incoherent, Humean skepticism is proven to be an unreasonable thing to believe in.
I'm not suggesting you or anyone do anything though? I don't expect others to be me that's just foolish. I am skeptical of everything there's no need for others to be.
Anyway continue this is pretty interesting. I just wanted clarification on that one point.
 

OliverCromwell

Permanently Banned
Permanently Banned
Contrary to the claims of modern evolutionists, Darwinism does not entail the kind of infinite variation required for a biological anti-essentialism. Darwinism does not postulate variation in mammalian species with respect to being warm-blooded and breathing air with lungs or with tigers with respect to being land-dwelling or in black rats with respect to not navigating by echolocation. The mistake, Oderberg claims, lies in thinking essences are nothing more than property clusters. Properties are indicators of essence, but even the simplest creature will have an incredibly long list of necessary characteristics, some of which may be unlistable in principle. But an essentialist does not have to list all of the (what may be) infinite characteristics of a creature to be able to enable at least a provisional judgment as to the substantial form of an organism.
Biologists do not postulate variation between mammals with regards to breathing air with lungs because no mammals breathing air with lungs have been observed. Were we to discover an example of a mammal (that is to say, a biological organism cladistically descended from the common ancestor that is arbitrarily identified as the source of the genus Mammalia) with gills tomorrow, biologists would not react not by declaring that this animal is an improper mammal and should not be classified as such, but by revising their notion of the category of "mammal" to include this new information.

Biology has by and large abandoned this concept of seperating biological categories by deliniating ostensible essential characteristics because it is untenable--the sheer number of times the "essential characteristics" of some category has had to be revised due to the discovery of new information rather reveals the absurdity of the entire project. Even this very post demonstrates this--mammals are not, in fact, universally and unambiguiously warm-blooded--some mammals (such as the Arctic ground squirrel) do not exhibit all characteristics that are generally associated with warm-bloodedness, which has led biologists to reconsider the meaningfulness of "warm-blooded" as a designator in the first place. Any credible biologist would tell you today that what classifies an animal as a "mammal" is not some set of essential characteristics but cladistic descent from some arbitrary mammalian common ancestor, and that to insist that your provisional judgement based on such commonly-understood characteristics is correct if it contradicts with this cladistic classification understood by science is as laughable as insisting that Pluto is really a planet or that a meter is not the distance travelled by light in 1/299792458 of a second.

Insofar as you believe that any provisional judgement about the form of a mammal ought to adhere to modern science, such a judgement based on some set of characteristics today is just as likely to be wrong as the provisional judgements about the form of a mammal made by Aristotle when he defined mammals as giving live birth to young and being higher on the great chain of being for doing so. Insofar as you do not believe this, all you have done is construct your own arbitrary, personal definition of "mammal" to include precisely all the characteristics that you have associated with them and precisely none of them that you do not. In which case any "provisional judgement" you make on such a basis has less to do with Darwin or biology and more to do with a lunatic rambling about the four-corned nature of time.

Riddle me this--what is the telos of a Pachyderm?

One mistake this argument makes is confusing essences and essential properties. The essence of a thing explains why a thing has its essential properties. My capacity for humor is an essential property I possess which flows from my essence. But my essence, that of a rational animal, is not an essential property; it explains why I have such essential properties. In this case, rationality implies a capacity for abstract thinking, with which I could form a combination of concepts in my head that that shows the various kinds of dissonance with everyday life. And animality implies a capacity for passion, for finding things surprising. Taken together, these capacities allow me to judge various things or possible things as “humorous.” The capacity for humor is therefore an essential property because it flows from what it means to be a human, and no human could fail to have such a characteristic.

There are demonstrably humans who do not have a capacity for abstract thinking--some of those who are severely autistic lack the capacity for at least some components of what is generally referred to as "abstract thinking" (and indeed are sometimes unable to grasp humor), and yet are considered by all but the most deranged of eugenicists to be just as "human" as everyone else. Even further, anencephalic people also exist, occasionally survive well into early childhood, and have zero capacity for abstract thinking whatsoever. If there are indeed humans who fail to have such a characteristic, how can we designate it an "essential property"?

These sorts of frequent factual flaws illustrate the largest fundemtal problem here--your entire essay is built on a motte-and-bailey between things causally linked and things that merely generally co-occur. There is a fundemental difference between statements like this:

But is there such a thing as teleology? Are things in nature “directed” towards some other thing? Many of the moderns disagree, but their disagreement often comes from their misunderstanding of what teleology is. To them, teleology always involves either a process with stages (as in the development of an acorn into an oak tree) or a part working for the good of a whole (as with a human heart). But as we discussed before, the only thing essential to teleology is an inclination towards an end, such as the tendency of an ice cube to cause its surroundings to grow colder. The ice cube has this tendency as opposed to a tendency to warm its surroundings or cause them to become toxic or not affect anything at all.

Which express a direct and inevitable causal link grounded in scientific fact and in the definition of ice (that ice is the form taken by water when chilled below a certain temperature, and that by the law of thermodynamics, heat will transfer from hotter surfaces surrounding an ice cube to the ice cube itself), and a statement like this:

  • Basic causal regularities: If cause A regularly generate some effect or range of effects B rather than C, D, or no effects at all, then we can say that the telos of A is the generation of B. So, if opioids regularly cause people to go to sleep, we can say that the telos of opioids is to induce sleep.
Which is merely something that is often true, but not inevitably guaranteed by causation. Opioids regularly cause people to go to sleep, but they also sometimes have no effect, or cause death. This sort of relationship does not have the same nature as, say, gravity causing masses to attract each other or thermodynamics causing the transfer of heat between bodies. You set out on this essay to defend the latter, and yet when challenged retreat to the former, presenting an banal, unobjectionable truth everyone accepts to try and trick people into acccepting a much more controversial statement.

What percentage of people need to go to sleep after taking opioids for us to say that the telos of opioids is to induce sleep? 50%? 66%? 99?

Opioids cause people to be numb to pain just as often as they cause people to go to sleep. So why do we say that the telos of opioids is to induce sleep and not to relieve pain?

In fact, opioids cause some people to go to sleep and some people to simply be less responsive to pain in ways that differ between people, but generally predictably. Why is the telos of opioids not to cause people who are above a BMI of X and who have not eaten in Y hours to go to sleep, to cause people who do not fit those categories but do not have genetic mutation Z to simply be numb to pain, and to cause those who do have genetic mutation Z to have an allergic reaction and die? This is a much more accurate illustration of how opioids affect people then merely "induce sleep" and true for a much larger percentage of situations as well--is it not an even more accurate telos as a result? All telos can be subject to stricter individuation at the whims of whoever it is that is arguing for it--is the telos of an acorn to produce a tree? An oak tree? An oak tree or squirrel feces? An oak tree if not subject to serious genetic deformities that inhibit its ability to sprout and not discovered by an animal and eaten before it has the opportunity to do so, but animal feces otherwise? Which is it?

(For that matter, the reverse of individuation is possible too--why is the telos of an acorn not to produce a plant? A living thing? An object on earth? Matter made of atoms?)

The great flaw of essentialism and of teleologically thinking is not that things have causal links to other things, nor that there exists categories which are definitionally seperate from other categories. Both of these statements are so obvious as to be totally banal, and are accepted by every single person who lives on this earth save the greatest of imbeciles and lunatics. The great flaw of your teleo-essentialist worldview is that the causal links that you identify are not, in fact, actual causal links, and that the categories which you identify as essential are in fact arbitrarily defined. This little nugget here is your original sin:

We learn of the essences of things a posteriori supplemented where necessary by a priori metaphysical reflection concerning such things as classification, structure, explanation, causation, unity, specificity and generality, and so on.

Classification, structure, explanation, causation, unity, specificity and generality. That's a lot of different concepts. Concepts which each would require their own, seperate, justification as to why they ought to form some grounding of our concept of the fundamental nature of all things. Concepts which, rather notably, you do not justify at all. That we can learn characteristics of things a posteriori is knowledge that can be divined by a three year old. It is the a priori metaphysical reflection that is the bankrupcy of the teleo-essentialist position--and yet you've spent this entire essay doing little more than misunderstanding science and repeating banal platitudes of simple observation, at worst wrong and at beast utterly meaningless. It leads me to believe that either you do not understand teleology and essentiallism (and its critics) nearly as well as you seem to claim, or that you have some dishonest motive as to why you would so carefully hide the most important and controversial part of your position away behind an endless gallop of platitudes.

As a worldview in of itself, this teleo-essentialism of yours is annoying and idiotic but essentially harmless. What is truly intolerable is when you go on to construct your shambling, simplstic brand of reactionary politics from it--one which I strongly suspect would have you laughed out of the room by the likes of Moldbug or any other reactionary with two brain cells to rub together, based on when I spoke to the man. Here is where you make your last fundamental break from science--your jump from "essence" to normative value.

Let us suppose that scientists really did believe that the definition of "mammals" was warm-blooded animals that breath through their lungs. Were scientists to encounter a mammal that does not fit this categorization, it would be cause for them to rethink the validity of their definition of "mammal" in the first place--which was indeed exactly what actually happened historically, when similar such criticisms were raised, leading to the cladistic model that is used today. This is the essense of a proper, scientific category--a category is useful to deliniate a set of things that share common properties and a similar nature. If another thing is discovered that is provably part of that category but does not share those common properties, the response of a scientist is not to reject the new thing but to revise the existing category--as with mammals, with Pluto, and so forth.

And yet your "essentialist" politics does the opposite--it comes across things which do not fit the category to which you have assigned them, and concludes that it is the things rather than the categories that are wrong. A woman is generally submissive, but there are women who are dominant. And therefore, the rational person comes to the conclusion that certain aspects of what is traditionally referred to as "womanness" may not in fact be inherent to the category of "woman", and it is not rational or useful to categorize men in such a way because it it is not descriptive. You, on the other hand, do the opposite--conclude that these things are incorrect because they do not fit the category into which they are sorted, even though those characteristics of the category into which they are sorted were defined purely on the basis of the characteristics of the category's members in the first place.

When most people read a map and see dry land, but arrive and find a river, they shrug and begin to swim. Most people do not angrily grab a bucket and a shovel and try to fill the riverbed with dirt to force it to conform to the map. Then again, I suppose you're far too special to adhere to such modern sensibilities, are you?

A couple more sundry bits of stupidity I felt the need to address:

Nevertheless, we do know of essences by general observation and reasoning. We ask questions like “if I took away this or that quality of the thing in question, would its nature remain the same? Would it continue to display the same characteristic properties, functions, operations, and behavior that it does when it possesses the quality that I remove in thought?” It is through this method that we come to understand whether a quality is either an essential quality or an accidental one.

This is obvious circular reasoning. You define an "essential" quality as one that one which would cause a thing to not display the same characteristic properties, etc. were it taken away. But of course, taking away any quality from a thing will cause it to lose some property, function, operation, behavior, etc. So what distinguishes characteristic properties from non-characteristic ones?

Additionally, while an essentialist can acknowledge the existence of some universal accidental property, it must be admitted that such a thing is an exception, not the rule. In nearly every case, universal characteristics – those found in kinds of a thing everywhere and all times – are nearly always essential. Methodologically speaking, there’s nothing wrong with assuming a universal characteristic is also an essential one.

Ah, yes, right, whether they are essential qualities. So an essential quality is one which... if taken away, will not alter the essential qualities of a thing. Very solid reasoning.

  • Distinctly animal life: Unlike other types of organisms, animals are capable of sensation, appetite, and locomotion. These activities entail a kind of conscious goal-seeking different in kind than the basic biological phenomena.
  • Human thought and action: Human thought has a conceptual structure foreign to other animals; rational thought has intentionality and purpose in the fullest sense.

Neither of these are true--animals are not categorically capable of sensation, appetite, and locomotion, and it's unclear as to whether or not the structure of human thought has a structure totally foreign to otehr animals. Intelligent animals such as chimpanzees, elephants, dolphins, corvids, etc. exhibit many characteristics of rational thought (problem-solving, abstract reasoning, memory, etc.) that humans do--to say nothing of previous members of the genus homo which have since gone extinct, each of which had some intermediate capacity for rational thought between that of humans and animals. Our understanding of thought is not nearly solid enough to make such confident statements as to its fundamental nature

Finally, as mentioned above, when it comes to the true essence of a thing, not just its essential properties, the essentialist is able to make the leap from universality to essentialness without holding either there must be some empirical test for essence or holding all essentialist judgments to be certain on all occasions. Consider the following example:



Though the essence of a thing can only be known through observation, there needn’t be some sort of repeatable empirical test for essence, just as there needn’t be a single, codified empirical test for the real essence of a thing. So, essentialism is definitely true.
One often encounters strawmen, but rarely does one encounter a strawman that is literally about strawmen. Excuse me, I need to savor this moment for a second.

Yes, if you walk into a field and see a scarecrow, you can easily and obviously determine that a scarecrow is not a human, and the conclusions that are presented here would seem rather self-evident. It's certainly easy to distinguish a scarecrow from a human being when the common stereotype of a scarecrow does indeed distinguish them accurately from human beings. But stereotypes (in the Putnamian sense) do not always accurately adhere to the underlying reference term to which they refer. If you walk into a field and see a field of brocolli, can you determine that they are cabbage? If you argue that no, they are not essentially cabbage, because cabbage is a vegetable that comes in large balls whereas brocolli is a vegetable that comes in small stalks, and a farmer retorts that both are strains of the wild cabbage and thus of the same essense, who is correct? Does the font of essentiality spring from genetic origin or from use and/or common understanding? Does it identify with the reference term defined by subject experts or with the stereotype of common use? For philosophy among crows, I imagine that the dinstinction between humans and scarecrows presents a real challenge to their formulation of essentialism. For us, however, it is ambiguities such as these that underly the main problems with essentialism--the scarecrow example tells us nothing.

Furthermore, everything in the world can be classified into an infinite number of taxonomic schemes that classify items according to an infinite number of characteristics. By stereotype, a human is a being that is alive, that is shaped like a hominid, and that sweats. A human is essentially an animal, but it is also essentially a hominid-shaped-thing in the taxonomy of shaped-things that ascends to circular objects and descends to infinitely more complex shapes (a category that it shares with scarecrows), a thing-that-sometimes-gathers-water-on-its-exterior-surface-due-to-some-physical-property-of-its-interior in the taxonomy of things-which-exhude-water, from things that do not exhude water to things which exhude water from every concievable portion of its surface (a category that it shares with neither animals nor scarecrows, but it does share with cold glasses of water), a thing-which-washes-itself-by-standing-upright-and-scrubbing-soap-over-its-body in the taxonomy of things that wash themselves, from things that do not wash at all to things that wash extensively for most of their lives (a category it shares with a certain kind of rat from South America, but not any other living things), a thing-which-knows-of-the-classical-novel-jane-eyre (a category it shares with all other humans who have recieved a middle school education but not the scarecrow or you) in the taxonomy from nonliving things to things with a basic American education, and a-thing-which-properly-does-not-enjoy-isekai-shit (a category it shares with most other human beings but not you) in the taxonomy from things with great taste to things with shit taste. Does this mean that the human shape is an essential characteristic of being a human (a stipulation which may be put to test by quadruple amputees)? Sweating? The ability to shower?
 
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OliverCromwell

Permanently Banned
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My god, I thought I was dealing with a reactionary but it turns out I’m dealing with something even worse—an amateur metaphysician.
Philosophy of Mind

One of the main projects of modern naturalist and materialist philosophers is the “mind-body problem.” Though seemingly all of reality can be explained in “scientific” (read: modern philosophical) terms, the mind seems resistant to this. Some of the brightest minds of the twentieth century have tried and failed to explain the mind this way. Though Internet Atheists are so certain they can explain everything in terms of physical science, that the god of the gaps is being filled by modern science, if they are knowledgeable and honest on this issue, they will, if pressed, say “well, we haven’t explained how the mind works just yet. But we will eventually!”

But there is a good reason why the mind cannot be explained “scientifically,” and this reason lies precisely in the method by which the modern philosophy explained all other instances of apparent teleo-essentialism in nature. Though you could dismiss treeness, the power of opium to cause sleep, or the purpose of hearts as mental projections, how could you explain mental projections in this way? If the physical world is really devoid of such things, and all apparent instances of those things existing in the physical world actually exist in your mind, it then follows that the mind is not physical. Cartesian Dualists accepted this as a given, but modern naturalists are forever plagued by this “mind-body problem.”

Thus, a “materialistic explanation of the mind” is like an “atheistic explanation of God” – it’s not an explanation so much as a denial of its very existence. Eliminative materialists like Daniel Dennet, Paul and Patricia Churchland, and Alex Rosenburg all accept this as the natural conclusion of “science.” But their view is incoherent. Take Dennet, who explains consciousness as “an illusion,” disregarding that illusions only exist within the very consciousness Dennet denies even exists. The Churchlands and Rosenburg are similarly incoherent when they attempt to describe their worldview, yet this is the logical end result if one embraces the modern philosophy and is a materialist.

This is a fundamental misunderstanding of Dennett—Dennett does not deny that consciousness exists, only that qualia do not in the typical sense in which they are defined (being ineffable, private, intrinsic, and immediately apprehensible). The book is called Consciousness Explained, not Consciousness Denied.

Even if you do reject this particular eliminativist theory of mind, a brief glance at SEP should reveal that there are dozens of others outside this “teleo-essentialist” position of yours, some of which (Chalmers, for instance) are directly opposed to Dennett. Please be honest when representing the beliefs of your opposition—it’s absolutely not the case that the only two alternatives in the world are Dennett and you.

Epistemology

According to Descartes, the purpose of modern science is to describe physical reality. However, science as an activity takes place only within the minds of the scientists themselves. But how can we know that the mental representations of reality within our heads (and by extension, the heads of the scientists) have any kind of relationship the reality itself? To establish that they do, we need to prove that the mental representations have in fact been caused by the things they purportedly represent.

But how can we say this cause-and-effect relationship exists given modern philosophy? According to David Hume, causes and effects are “loose and separate”; that is to say, anything is capable of causing anything in principle because there are no inherent natures or purposes to anything. If this view of reality is correct, there is no guarantee that your particular mental representation of the computer screen you experience as you read this is being caused by an actual computer screen. You could be in the Matrix for all you know.

Of course, this sort of radical skepticism is rarely taken to its logical conclusion by the average person simply because it’s impossible to live as though it were true. However, people who are influenced by this philosophy are inclined to take seriously the relativist view that all belief systems are “socially constructed,” that the representations of reality from one person are particular to that person, and no particular representation represents reality more accurately than any other. This would lead to truth relativism, casting serious doubt on all of our knowledge, scientific or otherwise.

Suppose you were able to escape this problem of skepticism somehow, as Descartes was able to through his ontological argument for God’s existence. Scientific knowledge would still be undermined by the inability to trust inductive knowledge. After all, if modern philosophy is correct, any cause could produce any range of effects. There is nothing inherent about a pencil that says it cannot become an elephant tomorrow, after all. And if you can say that, we cannot say that science is really about anything other than what has happened in the past. Science collapses into history.

Finally, science is undermined by the inability to group things together coherently. If my classification of particular animals as members of the same species or my classification of particular substances as being made of the same molecules is merely a mental projection with no basis in reality, then we cannot know those things at all. All classifications become mental projections. Because we as humans understand things by placing them into categories, modern philosophy makes knowledge of the extramental world impossible in every instance.

Popper addressed the issue of inductive knowledge a century ago—the business of science is not verification on the basis of induction but falsification, which is indeed possible even if induction is invalid. “Scientific knowledge” simply refers to that knowledge which science has been unable to falsify, and thus is at least more likely to be true than the vast number of hypotheses that science has falsified.

Categories are created because, as you acknowledge, they are pragmatically useful, as human beings often think categorically and it is thus often useful to understand the universe through use of these categories. Shockingly, while the perception of human beings may not accurately reflect the extrasensory world (this is a matter of metaphysics and, thus, is essentially worthless to discuss), human beings perception does tend to overlap in such a way that the categories formed by one person out of his perceptions are generally applicable and usable by other people as well. Do I know that the category that I refer to as "solids" and identify as having a solid texture are in fact perceived as having a liquid texture by some other person that he simply calls "solid"? Philosophically, no. But insofar as they interact with the rest of reality in some consistent, directly analogous between my experiences' and someone else's, what does it matter? The conclusions one arrives at through science are just as useful in my world, and in theirs.

As an aside, Hilary Putnam also wrote extensively about this topic from a completely opposite point of view (as a realist) and, as I understand it, addressed your points here as well, and he also did so without requiring any concessions to your "teleo-essentialism". I have not read him and am not familiar with him so I don't feel comfortable trying to convey his thought, but it seems tremendously dishonest to not even bring him up when trying to argue that your pet worldview disproves the whole breadth of modern philosophy on this topic, neglecting perhaps one of the most important thinkers in this area entirely.

Personal Identity

If there is no guarantee that anything will be the same tomorrow as it is today, then there is no guarantee that any given person will be the same person tomorrow as they are today. Without some essential human nature to provide a principle of unity, all that is left are the individual parts that we are constituted of. Indeed, the views of the various modern philosophers seem to confirm this, with each one choosing one part of us and claiming it is what makes us human. Descartes identified the self with the res cogitans or mental substance, an immaterial spirit only contingently related to the body. Locke identified the self with a “stream of consciousness” that he too dissociated from the body of the person. Modern materialists identify the self either with the body (or at least some crucial part of it, like the brain), with some psychological element (memories, personality traits, etc.), or some combination of the two.

These views inevitably lead to numerous paradoxes and absurdities. For instance, Descartes’ view means that we aren’t actually our bodies, so whenever our body does something, it is not something “we” do. We are like ghosts in a machine. Locke’s view, if it were true, would mean that, if a computer with my consciousness downloaded onto it were to create two clones with that consciousness after I died, then both those clones would be me at the same time. Thus, if one of the clones died, we would have to say that I am alive and dead simultaneously. These problems and more lead to some modern philosophers claiming that there is no such thing as a “self.”

But the resulting absurdities not only those of the logical kind but of the moral kind as well. Suppose one believed that thought or awareness was what constituted a person. Given modern philosophy, there does not exist any kind of capacity of thought or awareness that persists even when a certain person has no way of exercising that capacity, so only actual episodes of thought or consciousness matter in determining when a person can be said to exist. Given this, nothing that does not in fact demonstrate any episodes of thought or consciousness – such as fetuses or people in “persistent vegetative states” – can plausibly count as a person. On the other hand, since certain non-human animals have episodes of thought or consciousness, then we ought to afford some of them the same personhood as fully formed human beings. Thus, we have arrived at the moral view that claims carnivorism is immoral, but abortion and euthanasia are a-okay.

Yes, there is no essential human nature to provide a principle of unity. There is also no requirement that there ought to be either. If this leads us to initially counterintuitive conceptions of the self... so what? You haven't proved that these things are untrue, only that you find them weird. Yes, we aren't actually our bodies, whenever our body does something, it's not something "we" do. Yes, if a computer has your consciousness uploaded to it, it and you are both you at the same time. Yes, you have no connection to any of your past selves as Parfait suggested, it's purely psychological. So what? You call them "paradoxes" but a paradox means something--an inherent logical contradiction--which you haven't shown and have only asserted. What about these situations makes them impossible?

As an aside, once again you're ignoring a major philosopher who just so happens to be able to defend the same largely intuitive worldview about the self and consciousness that you're defending but does so without a ridiculous appeal to something as antiquaited as your teleo-essentialism--in this case, John Searle and The Rediscovery of the Mind.

Few moral thinkers believe that animals have the same moral worth as human beings (this is to my knowledge a belief restricted to a narrow subset of utilitarians like Singer) and there are absolutely reasons why one might want to defend the lives of those who are in vegitative states--from a contractarian perspective, for instance, I may well become a vegetable in the future, and should that happen I would very much like it that society not kill me.
Human Action

Human action is rendered nonsensical under the modern philosophical view. If one were to take Descartes’ view of the human soul, then it becomes unclear how the mind could cause the body to do anything. How could the ghost inside the machine cause the machine to move, given that the machine is not part of the ghost? The question plagues modern day Cartesian dualists.

Taking the materialist route, meanwhile, means more or less denying humans even have free will. After all, if everything in the material realm is caused by meaningless, purposeless chains of efficient causation between physical particles, then human action is merely the results of physical particles pushed and pulled by blind laws of nature. Human action, under this view, is ultimately no from the behavior of billiard balls on a pool table. This deterministic worldview undermines morality, which presupposes that human can make moral choices.

Once again, you're essentially just making a bare assertion. If it really is the case that human beings have no ability to choose differently (as distinct from Free Will, given the way Compatibilists and non-Compatibilists disagree on the meaning of that term)... so what? This is no reason to disbelieve materialism--it does not make it rationally any less justifiable. And if that leads to the conclusion (as a certain breed of contractarian, for instance, might suggest) that morality is a purely functional arrangement arising from predetermined actors pursuing their own self-interest rather than a choice... so what? Once again, this is not a disproof, it is a conclusion.

For that matter, I find it extremely interesting that you're arguing this from a Catholic, Christian perspective given that Aquinas and most major Catholic thinkers I'm aware of also accepted compatibilism, and therefore determinism (in fact, the very kind of determinism that the outright majority of determinists also accept).

Human Rights and Ethics

How can we have human rights given the modern philosophy? Thomas Hobbes is most explicit on this – according to him, everyone in the “state of nature” has the “right” to do whatever he wants; that is to say, no one has any rights at all in the moral sense of the term. Moral law does not exist until it is invented by us to stave off the chaotic nightmare that is the “state of nature,” and human rights are merely a matter of social convention.

John Locke attempted to stave off this amoral stance by reference to God’s ownership of us. Since God created us, so the argument goes, we are his property, so anyone who harms another human being in his life, liberty, or property effectively violates God’s rights. Our rights are not inherent to us then, but rather derivative of God’s rights as our owner. But how do we know whether we are violating God’s property rights or not? Outside of a direct appeal to divine revelation, there really is no answer.

Another problem that crops up with regards to “human rights” is that, under the modern philosophy, there is no such thing as human nature. We are all individuals, and our apparent humanity that we supposedly have in common is simply a mental projection onto reality. In other words, what is or isn’t a human being is ultimately a subjective matter, which defeats the entire purpose of human rights in the first place! Those who are committed to both the existence of both human rights and modern philosophy are forced to say “human beings have rights we must respect! Also, we can decide who is or isn’t a human being and can change that on a whim.”

But the problem runs much, much deeper than this. The modern philosophy ultimately makes it impossible to judge any given individual thing to be a better or worse specimen of its type because there are no “types” in extramental reality. But this would mean there are no such thing as better or worse human beings. To say that there is something objectively “good” or “bad” in any sense (including the moral sense) is nonsensical. From this, we get the modernist principle that reason is the “slave of the passions” (in the words of David Hume). Under this view, reason can tell us what we must do to further the realization of whatever it is we value, and it can tell us whether the pursuit of some values would be consistent with the realization of others, but it cannot tell us what ultimate values we ought to have. All moral evaluations are ultimately subjective.

To be charitable, David Hume (and those following after him) need not believe our moral attitudes are as arbitrary as our choice in clothing. They might argue that some moral attitudes are “natural” to us in the sense that they are statistically common in our given area or conducive to our survival. But these judgments lack any normative force. For this reason, the Humean has nothing to say to the sociopath who happens not to share these attitudes. Nor does he have anything to say to ideological groups like Nazis, communists, jihadists, feminists, and the like that wish to remake society in their image via social or genetic engineering. All the Humean can do is shrug and say “well, I hope they don’t succeed.”

Now a Hobbesian might believe that morality is created from the social contract between rationally self-interested individuals. Under this view, what we call morality is nothing more than a mutual non-aggression pact between self-interested individuals driven by passion. To the Hobbesian, only what could be agreed upon by all rationally self-interested persons to be conducive to their mutual advantage is what is “moral.” But this form of morality isn’t moral in any real sense. Under this idea, there’s nothing in principle wrong with kidnapping a child so you could rape and kill them if that’s how you get your kicks. Morality in this view is but an illusion.

Other modern ethical theories similarly flounder. Utilitarianism is all about maximizing “the greatest happiness for the greatest number,” but it inevitably defines “happiness” in subjectivist terms a la Hume while providing no explanation as to why anyone should care about the happiness of the “greatest number” as opposed to his own happiness or the happiness of some favored group. Kantian morality claims something about reason itself demands that we follow his famous Categorical Imperative, according to which you should only follow a principle if you could will it to become a universal law binding on all rational beings. But the Categorical Imperative is a useless test for proving what is or isn’t moral (“tell a lie when it would lead to an overall good result” would pass while “give all you have to the poor and live out your life as a celibate monk” would fail), and we have no way of knowing whether the Categorical Imperative is really true to the nature of human reason given how the modern philosophy Kant presupposes rejects that anything has a nature to begin with. Modern liberal ethicists like John Rawls appeal to the “intuitions” shared by all decent people, but their position basically amounts to Hume’s subjectivism expressed using pseudo-Kantian jargon.

(I have addressed this in a different thread and do not feel particularly eager to do so again)

As a more general aside, just as you've consistently been unwilling to engage charitably with either the views that you're discussing or with other views that present alternatives without resorting to your "teleo-essentialism", throughout this entire essay you also seem completely unwilling to engage with Hume himself or his criticism of induction that is the centerpiece of your entire work here. At no point in this entire essay have you ever attempted to show that Hume is wrong (to say nothing of engaging with the work of later philosophers such as Goodman who have further built on Hume's work), you have simply demonstrated some (extremely arguable) conclusions that may follow from accepting Hume's argument as correct which you happen to dislike. But your personal distaste is no reason to reject the argument itself--and thussofar you have resoundingly failed at showing any reason why we ought to.

It's especially laughable because, like, dude. David Hume lived three hundred years ago. He preceded the vast majority of modern philosophy and people have been responding to him and attempting to prove him wrong for centuries. Arguably the foundation of modern philosophy, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, was an attempt to disprove Hume. Not only have you not engaged with any of these, you've somehow presented an argument about how all modern philosophy is bad while ignoring the work of Immanuel fucking Kant, work which directly answers the main criticism that you are making here while being, you know, modern philosophy.

I don't really have anything else to say about this beyond pointing out that basically the entirety of this essay was reducible to this:

samHarris3.png


Certainly fine company you're keeping right there!
 

OliverCromwell

Permanently Banned
Permanently Banned
Actually, upon reading your essay a second time, I've come to the realization that all the points I previously made don't fully capture the extent to which your argument is incorrect--its primary problem is even more fundamental than I previously suggested. One can disprove the entirety of your essay within the first three paragraphs:

Modern philosophy considered broadly distinguishes itself from the earlier Aristotelian and Neo-Platonist philosophies by its rejection of inherent natures imbued with a divinely-given purpose. This teleological-cum-essentialist (or teleo-essentialist) view of reality informed much of early empirical science as it emerged in Medieval Europe, but listening to modern science popularizers like Richard Dawkins or Steven Pinker, you’d be forgiven for thinking the opposite.

Certainly, the founders of modern science such as Galileo Galilee, Isaac Newton, Francis Bacon, and Rene Descartes all rejected the earlier teleo-essentialist view in favor of one that eschewed inherent natures with purposes. According to their new worldview, objects did not have inherent natures or purposes. Instead, each object was a particular individual with nothing in common with any other individual. Those trees outside your window? They aren’t really trees. Each one is an individual thing, and the “treeness” that is supposedly shared between them is just inside your head. The opium that seems have the power to make people fall asleep? There’s nothing inherent to the properties of opium to cause people to do that, and in fact it could cause you to turn into a frog instead. The heart pumping your blood right now? There’s no reason why it does that; it just does.

This worldview seems to contradict common sense. After all, if trees don’t actually have treeness in common, how can we pick out the difference between a tree and a non-tree? If opium doesn’t have the power to make people fall asleep, then why does ingesting opium so often end in the person falling asleep? And if the heart’s purpose isn’t actually to pump blood, why is it so often the case that it does just that?

The notion that this belief:

Instead, each object was a particular individual with nothing in common with any other individual.

Is common is wrong. Fundamentally, utterly, totally wrong. The vast majority of modern philosophers, scientists, and the like do not believe this worldview that you accuse them of--it is, in fact, limited to a small minority of extreme skeptics and in no way reflects the foundation of the "modern" belief system. What most modern people, and especially the vast majority of modern scientists, believe is that things have some set of characteristics, some of which are shared with other things. Groupings of things--such as species, states of matter, planets, etc--are made on the basis of those things always sharing some set of the same characteristics. Some of these groupings on the basis of category are arbitrary and meaningful only in the sense of classification (such as a planet, which much fulfill several criteria but whose criteria have no inherent meaning or connection) while others, to our knowledge, seem to have logical connections between their different qualities (such as mammals, who are categorized by their common descent from the last mammalian ancestor but, to our knowledge, also always share certain other qualities such as endothermy which are inherited from said last mammalian ancestor).

Where the modern worldview differs from your atavistic one is not that modern thinkers reject that groupings exist and that objects have shared qualities. It is that the modern thinker understands that groupings are defined by their members, rather than that members are defined by the grouping to which they are a part. It is not the case that a thing is a mammal, so it must be descended from the mammalian common ancestor and be an endotherm. Rather, it is the case that this thing is descended from the mammalian common ancestor and is an endotherm, so we call it a mammal.

If we believe that a classification is established on the basis of some set of characteristics which are logically connected (such as mammals, which are defined by their common descent from the last mammalian common ancestors but that we also believe are always endothermic as a result of this descent) but discover a thing that does not possess all the requisite qualities of classification--such as an animal descending from the last mammalian common ancestor that is not an endotherm--we do not question the nature of the thing that is discovered, but instead understand that it is cause for revising the classification, because it is now demonstrated that the the characteristics of the classification are not intrinsically linked as we once thought. Likewise, if we discover that some thing contained within a classification do not meet the arbitrarily selected characteristics under which the classification is defined--such as realizing that Pluto does not satisfy all the qualities of a planet, which is an arbitrary grouping--we either revise the existing definition, or reclassify the thing into a different category.

In that sense, no object has an inherent nature or purpose derived from its membership from some category in which it is a part. The category, instead, is derived from the nature of the objects contained within it--since all mammals are endotherms, we say that "mammals are endotherms". If all mammals prove not to be endotherms, we do not say that all mammals are endotherms, or that all mammals ought to be endotherms and that the existence of non-endothermic mammals is some sort of failing or offense. Instead, we redefine "mammal" to not include endothermy, because that turned out to be a scientifically incorrect statement.

Throughout this entire essay and throughout the entirety of your posting, you attempt to frame the conflict between your anarchronistic teleo-essentialist worldview and modernity as one between structure and lack of structure, or something along those lines. But that is not the nature of the conflict at all--the conflict between your worldview and modernity is a conflict between imprecision and precision, or between stereotype and fact. Your worldview is laughable--and is laughed at by those you refer to as the "moderns"--not because the moderns reject all meaning and structure, but because you take imprecise stereotype to be fact, and then from there conclude that imprecise stereotype defines nature and meaning. You and I both agree that mammals are sometimes warm-blooded. Where we depart is when you conclude that this means that mammals are warm-blooded, and then that mammals are meant to be warm-blooded, and then finally that it is part of the nature and/or purpose of mammals to be warm-blooded. And in this disagreement, I am clearly and unambiguiously more correct than you--because mammals, as it turns out, were not categorically warm-blooded and in fact also included some heterotherms, and I did not end up saying something as ridiculous and factually incorrect as "the nature of mammals is to be warm-blooded" whereas you did. That is why the modern view is correct, and your "teleo-essentialism" is wrong.

(And of course, your politics take this to an even more laughable extent, which is clearly illustrated by the naturallistic analogies you yourself readily make. Not only do you jump from "some women display submissive personalities" to "women display submissive personalities" and "women ought to display submissive personalities" and finally that "it is the nature of women to have submissive personalities and their purpose to be submissive", you then proceed to jump from there to "we should favor those women who are submissive to those women who are not, and act to correct those women who are not submissive to make them more submissive as befits their nature". Even under your own logic of telos, it would be ridiculous to say this about any natural thing. Even if we go "mammals are usually warm-blooded" to "it is the nature of mammals to be warmblooded", it would be absurd to then say "we should favor those mammals that are warm-blooded to those mammals that are not, and act to correct those mammals who are not warm-blooded to make them more warm-blooded as befits their nature". That would be ridiculous, and literally no one believes it--no scientist, Christian, Aristotelian, or anyone else, has ever argued that the Arctic Squirrel is a "bad" mammal or a "wrong" animal because it is challenging the nature of mammals by not being fully warm-blooded. When Diogenes confronted Plato with a plucked chicken, he reacted like any sane person would--by realizing that his categorization of man was incorrect, and revising it to exclude the example that Diogenes presented--not by insisting that a plucked chicken is a man but is a bad man, and it ought to have all the other characteristics of man (such as conscious thought, reason, etc.) or else it is an offense before god's natural order)

Your entire argument is a strawman, and follows your general pattern of dishonestly drawing a false dichotomy between your "teleo-essentialist" worldview and one particular doctrine originating from modern philosophy (typically an unusually extreme one) which you happen to dislike, the latter of which you proceed to present as the end-be-all of modern thought and therefore a reason why people ought to accept your doctrine instead. But that is rarely, if ever, actually the case--the breadth of "modern" science and philosophy (which you seem to define as any philosophy having happened after the medieval period) is incredibly vast, and almost never do all modern scientists and philosophers agree on the issues that you accuse them of. Only in your discussion of ethics do you even show any degree of willingness to engage with disagreements that are already extant in modern philosophy and even attempt to discuss the full extent of views that modern philosophers have--in each of the others you are simply picking one chosen enemy and failing to consider all the other ones which might just so happen to conveniently be less conducive to your arguments. It suggests to me that you have either never made an adequete study of either science or philosophy even at the shallowest level, or are deliberately choosing to withhold information from others who have not out of bad faith as you attempt to argue for your own pet doctrine. Neither of these possibilities reflect well on your ability to serve as a philosophical authority.

This may come as a shock to someone like you who seems to have established their entire identity on "mirror mirror on the wall, who's the most right-wing of them all?" but people don't consider you a right-wing nutjob because of your politics. They consider you a nutjob because of your utterly vacuous thinking, of which your deformed reactionary politics are merely a subset. All of this pretty clearly proves that you take the lack of intelligence and understanding that goes into your politics into just about everything else you do as well. Quoth Diogenes, "I think you will find here is the emptiness".
 
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OliverCromwell

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Permanently Banned
What I am saying is that you cannot use mathematical models to capture all of reality. That's a position called ontic structural realism, which is what I don't hold. I hold an epistemic structural realist position, in which science and mathematics cannot capture the full picture of reality as a while.

You have not shown me that Boolean Algebra (whatever that is) has proven there is no cardinality, full stop. That seems to go against common sense, and it honestly sounds like claims to the effect of "Quantum Physics disproves materialism" or "Einsteinian Relativity disproves the reality of change." You are reading into the math a view of reality that the math itself does not show. You must start at first principles (i.e. metaphysics) before you go anywhere else, or you will end up with bad metaphysics based on your unexamined assertions. In other words, you need to metaphysically demonstrate that there is no such thing as a "first or last" independent of Boolean Algebra using metaphysics.

I never said that mathematics are based on or reducible to physical laws, so nice strawman there. I specifically was against reductionist views of reality. What I'm arguing for is that mathematics cannot describe everything that we can know.

I also agree with you that mathematics would remain the same even under different physical laws. 1+1=2 is definitionally true, for instance. My problem is that your assertion "Boolean Algebra says [Insert Metaphysical Point Here]" is wrong because Boolean Algebra by itself cannot make any metaphysical points! Only metaphysics can make metaphysical points. What I think is happening here is that you are reading into Boolean Algebra conclusions that the math itself does not show.

I need you to actually refute what I've argued for in my first essay: that all things of our experience have a real distinction between their essence and their existence, so they cannot rely on any internal principle to exist at any given point in time; therefore, their existence requires some cause outside of themselves that exists concurrent to them to keep them into existence. This creates a hierarchical causal series in which each member depends on the existence of the previous member in order to exist. An infinite regress in this kind of series would render the universe unintelligible, so there must be a first cause. That first cause is God (whose essence is existence itself). Therefore, the Doctrine of Divine Conservation is true.
Mathematics is logic, and mathematics has proven that the notion that all sets can be represented as an ordinal is a logical contradiction--it cannot be true. Cantor's diagonal argument proved this over a century ago. So your notion that if god had parts, then those parts would be prior to it is not supported by your current argument--to establish a causal chain (A comes first, B comes after A, C comes after B, and so forth) of the kind you are suggesting requires a well-ordering, which in turn can only exist if the set in question can be mapped to the set of ordinals, something you have not proven that the universe, and/or whatever context god exists in, necessarily must have. Without that there is no reason to believe that any given chain of events must have a start--no subset of real numbers has a designated "beginning", for instance. Why must any given chain of events be any different?

Furthermore, it's you who has to prove something here, not us. Even before we get into any of this talk about ordinality, you cannot simply assume that the universe has a weak ordering, because orderings are not an inherent characteristic of sets--you must yourself define a weak ordering and prove that it is consistent. Your argument does not do so, and thus any argument that derives from the assumption of an ordering such as ontological priority is invalid to begin with.

The use of boolean algebra by @Doomsought was an example which you clearly don't have the mathematical background to understand. But even without that it should be clear that your argument is spurious here, given that it seems to make an assumption which can be logically proven to be incorrect from first principles. Unless your first principles are that everything must have ordinality, and in that case your first principles are provably contradictory by the aforementioned diagonalization argument--you might as well say that your first principles are "cats are dogs".
 
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OliverCromwell

Permanently Banned
Permanently Banned
@The Name of Love I can't help but notice that it's been a month and you still haven't responded to any of this. I thought you said you were, and I quote, "specialize[d] in history, politics, philosophy, and Christian apologetics" while you were shitting up this forum and others with your inane drivel? Because right now it looks like you're a little bitch whose bullshit can't stand up to the slightest bit of challenge.
 
D

Deleted member 88

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@The Name of Love I can't help but notice that it's been a month and you still haven't responded to any of this. I thought you said you were, and I quote, "specialize[d] in history, politics, philosophy, and Christian apologetics" while you were shitting up this forum and others with your inane drivel? Because right now it looks like you're a little bitch whose bullshit can't stand up to the slightest bit of challenge.
He's probably busy or otherwise occupied.
 

Scottty

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One of the innate problems with Thomistic philosophy, is that it seems to be ignoring the reality of the Fall. We are not in a perfect universe where everything is as it's meant to be. Sin and evil are part of current reality.
So one cannot simply look at how something is, and assume that is what is right.
 
D

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I think the same would apply to Platonic idealism. The world we live in is messy and manifestly imperfect.

Christians have a hope of a perfect world to come, but that does not mean we pretend things are great or at least passable now.

I think that’s one of the greatest intellectual mistakes one can make-ought and is are too often conflated.

Just because something is being, does not mean it should be. Be, used to define the state or current condition of something.

On the converse-just because something is, does not mean that ought not either.

Or to use a colloquialism, “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it”.
 

Hlaalu Agent

Nerevar going to let you down
Founder
It's been closed since the Berne Convention, don'tcha know?

Hmm, there is something I could share with him that would send him through the roof. Said thing, vexes me quite so, and would due to his worldview vex him like Trump breathing vexes his foes. Of course, I am not suggesting to do this to mess with him, but to light a fire under or within him. I intended on sharing it anyways, because I figured it would be of interest- vexing at that. And what it is, is another youtuber, one that I somewhat respect taking their turn at idiocy. Perhaps taking what could be a valid point and running head long into being an ideologue.
 

The Name of Love

Far Right Nutjob
One of the innate problems with Thomistic philosophy, is that it seems to be ignoring the reality of the Fall. We are not in a perfect universe where everything is as it's meant to be. Sin and evil are part of current reality.
So one cannot simply look at how something is, and assume that is what is right.
I find it utterly impossible to justify this. How can you say that Thomism "seems to be ignore the reality of the Fall"? Especially since Thomas Aquinas wrote extensively on the subject?
 

The Name of Love

Far Right Nutjob
I feel I have to write this little tidbit against Oliver Cromwell, who is, I'm sorry to say, no longer among us. May he troll somewhere else.

The problem with much of his work is that he seemed to be dead-set on leveling cliched arguments at me. For example, he seemed not to understand how essentialism worked. He seemed to think that finding the essential property was impossible even though I told him how over and over again. He strawmanned the Aristotelian view of categoricals, not seeming to understand that when I said "humans have a capacity for humor," I was speaking of a norm.

He also didn't know about some of the authors he cited. For example, he cited Hilary Putnam as an example of a non-Aristotelian that was a scientific realist... even though he was a natural kind essentialist.

Finally, he didn't seem to understand the point of the fourth essay I did, "Universal Acid of Modernity." The entire point of it was to show how a lot of the commonly held philosophical beliefs led to bizarre outcomes. That Oliver defended scientific instrumentalism of all things basically proved my point. A philosophy that says that science doesn't give us any true information is pretty... out there, in my opinion.

In closing, Oliver, I wasn't a "little bitch" for avoiding you. I did so because I just didn't feel like arguing with some anonymous troll on an obscure Internet forum was worth my time. If you ever read this again, contact me on SpaceBattles. We can talk there or on Discord, where we can "have at it" to your heart's content if that's what you really want to do.
 
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Scottty

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Founder

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