![[Home]](http://www.bayleshanks.com/cartoonbayle.png)
When i took a high-level small discussion course on a topic in analytic philosophy, i found some expectations of mine about what philosophy was like, expectations drawn from intro undergrad courses as well as from pop culture, seem to be incorrect:
what is philosophy (and is 'philosophy' a natural kind?)? 'Philosophy' used to include all kinds of stuff that it doesn't anymore (eg the sciences used to be considered 'philosophy'). One thing i've noticed is that philosophers seem to be the ones who create new language for ideas that are difficult to put into words?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Guide_for_the_Perplexed
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethics :
https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Complexity_of_value
Ontology is the topic concerning the nature of being.
One popular question within ontology is, what are the classes of things that exist? (incidentally, if you like to think about and collect lists of classifications, you might want to look at my collection: systemsOfClassification).
A related thing which shares the same name is what i term a 'computer ontology' (which everyone else just calls an 'ontology'), which is a computer-readable formalization of a taxonomy of concepts, along with some computer-readable semantic information relating the concepts to each other and/or defining the concepts.
substance:
Primary substances are individual objects, e.g. Alice.
Secondary substances are the categories of individual elements, e.g. Human.
A species is the most specific sort of secondary substance (e.g. a human). A genus is a secondary substance which is more general than a species (e.g. a human is a kind of animal; so 'animal' is a species in relation to 'living substance' but a genus in relation to 'human'). A primary substance stands in an isa relationship to its species and genuses (genera). All secondary substances are either species or genera of some primary substance(s).
"Aristotle's account in Categories can, with some oversimplification, be expressed as follows. The primary substances are individual objects, and they can be contrasted with everything else—secondary substances and all other predicables—because they are not predicable of or attributable to anything else. Thus, Fido is a primary substance, and dog—the secondary substance—can be predicated of him. Fat, brown, and taller than Rover are also predicable of him, but in a rather different way from that in which dog is. Aristotle distinguishes between two kinds of predicables, namely those which are ‘said of’ objects and those which are ‘in’ objects. The interpretation of these expression is, as usually with Aristotelian cruxes, very controversial, but a useful way of looking at it is as follows. Dog is said of Fido because it characterizes him as a whole. Fat and the others are described as being in because they pick out a constituent feature that could be said to be, in a logical though not a physical sense, part of, or in him. Fido the individual is not attributable to any further thing at all....If substance did not exist it would be impossible for things in any of the other categories to exist. There could be no instances of properties if there were no substances to possess them." -- http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/substance/
Aristotle was big on analysis by considering what the definition of things was. Each species has a definition that distinguishes it from other things in its genus. However individuals (primary substances) don't have a logical definition.
Aristotle thought that definitions were just ways to differentiate a species from other species in its genera; therefore if there are genera which are not themselves species to any higher genera, then such genera can't be defined. Aristotle calls these things categories. He identifies ten categories:
"each [individual term] signifies either substance or quantity or qualification or a relative or where or when or being in a position or having or doing or being affected. To give a rough idea, ideas of substance are man, horse; of quantity: four foot, five foot; of qualification; white, grammatical; of a relative: double, half, larger; of where: in the Lyceum, in the market-place; of when: yesterday, last year; of being in a position: is-lying, is-sitting; of having: has-shoes-on, has-armour-on; of doing: cutting, burning; of being-affected: being-cut, being-burnt. (1b25 - 2a4)" -- http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/substance/
"Qualia is a term used in philosophy to refer to individual instances of subjective, conscious experience....Examples of qualia are the pain of a headache, the taste of wine, or the perceived redness of an evening sky." -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia
Some arguments for the existence of qualia as an ontologically separate sort of thing from the facts about the physics and biology of our brains:
"Mary the colour scientist knows all the physical facts about colour, including every physical fact about the experience of colour in other people, from the behavior a particular colour is likely to elicit to the specific sequence of neurological firings that register that a colour has been seen. However, she has been confined from birth to a room that is black and white, and is only allowed to observe the outside world through a black and white monitor. When she is allowed to leave the room, it must be admitted that she learns something about the colour red the first time she sees it — specifically, she learns what it is like to see that colour." -- Frank Jackson
"The inverted spectrum thought experiment, originally developed by John Locke,[7] invites us to imagine that we wake up one morning and find that for some unknown reason all the colors in the world have been inverted. Furthermore, we discover that no physical changes have occurred in our brains or bodies that would explain this phenomenon." -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia#Arguments_for_the_existence_of_qualia
Zombies are (the idea of) people who behave the same as everyone else, but who have no conscious experience.
The science fiction project Orion's Arm has good informal definitions of sapience, sentience, and something else it calls 'sophonce':
Sapience: having intelligence; what IQ tests try to measure. In the Orion's Arm fictional world, sapience also means 'the ability to think and solve problems'.
Sentience: having awareness; the property of having the capacity to 'experience pleasure or pain' (or similar). In the Orion's Arm fictional world, sentience also requires the ability 'and make predictions about the future'; in the same fictional world, some degree of sapience is a prerequisite for sentience.
Sophonce: having metacognition, including 'self-awareness, including self-reflection and the ability to think about one's thinking'. Both sapience and sentience are prerequisites.
"Phenomenology is the study of structures of consciousness as experienced from the first-person point of view....The Oxford English Dictionary presents the following definition: “Phenomenology. a. The science of phenomena as distinct from being (ontology).... In its root meaning, then, phenomenology is the study of phenomena: literally, appearances as opposed to reality. This ancient distinction launched philosophy as we emerged from Plato's cave...How did philosophy move from a root concept of phenomena to the discipline of phenomenology?
Originally, in the 18th century, “phenomenology” meant the theory of appearances fundamental to empirical knowledge, especially sensory appearances.... By 1889 Franz Brentano used the term to characterize what he called “descriptive psychology”. From there Edmund Husserl took up the term for his new science of consciousness, and the rest is history. "
http://nautil.us/issue/47/consciousness/is-matter-conscious
Is there a sense in which a partitioning of the world into objects which puts all of the molecules comprising all of my cells, and nothing else, is put into one object, is a better division than one which puts most of the molecules in my torso in the same partition with a bunch of surrounding air molecules? Is there a sense in which a categorization of the world with a category for 'tree' is better than one in which there are categories like 'thing with bark and leaves and a prime number of branches under which is sitting a young girl with a book' and others like that, but no category for 'tree'?
"Entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity"
e.g. a simpler theory is better.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solomonoff%27s_theory_of_inductive_inference
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor#Mathematical
The "Pure Reason" in the Critique of Pure Reason means that Kant will only use a priori reasoning. The Critique bit relates to the fact that the main point is just to define the limits of the topic what we can metaphysically know.
Kant sharply criticizes metaphysical theories which seek to make assertions about 'things-in-themselves'. He claims that all that we can really say anything about are possible experiences. For example, if you have the experience of sitting on a chair, then you can infer that there is some object, a thing-in-itself, generating this experience. But what it is, you can't say. You can't say, for example, distinguish between the possibilities of whether your chair and your desk are merely aspects of some divine substance of Wooden Objects, or whether your chair is an aspect of Objects That Are For Your Butt and your desk is an aspect of a separate divine substance of Objects For Work, since these ontological distinctions would make no difference to any possible experience. You can't say whether your experiences of interacting with your chair and your experiences of interacting with your desk are actually from different things-in-themselves or whether there is just one thing-in-itself, "the world". You can't say if there was anything that existed before time, because experience is only possible within time.
However, this does not reduce us to only empirical knowledge, nor does it reduce us to only logical and mathematical knowledge. We can also know things because of regularities in the necessary structure of any possible experience. For example, the fact that experiences must exist in time.
Kant defines 'idealism' as "the claim that there are none other than thinking beings; the other things that we believe we perceive in intuition are only representations in thinking beings, to which in fact no object existing outside these beings corresponds" -- Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics. He disagrees with this claim. So, his theory of "trancendental idealism" is NOT an idealist theory. That's why he added the word "trancendental" before idealism, to distinguish it (although imo the fact that the theory's name contains the word 'idealism' is very confusing and he should have called it something else). I think the word "transcendental" is intended to refer to the connection between our internal experience and the external world (things-in-themselves). In practice Kant's theory shares many similarities to idealism because, although formally he admits the existence of objects-in-themselves (e.g. independent of our minds), we can't know almost anything about them because almost everything we know either comes through our sense data, or is purely formal logical knowledge, or is a consequence of knowledge about the structure of the nature of experience itself, which is closely related to the structure of mind. Even today there are critics of Kant who call him an idealist or subjectivist, a charge which annoyed Kant greatly; in the Prolegomena To Any Future Metaphysics he goes on and on about how people think he's an idealist when actually he's the opposite.
I haven't read the Critique of Pure Reason, only the Prolegomena To Any Future Metaphysics, which Kant intended to be a summary of the Critique because the Critique was so long. However my feeling was that the Prolegomena, because it didn't progress methodically explaining every step, was probably even harder to read than the Critique would have been.
The Prolegomena To Any Future Metaphysics is so named because, since seeks to define the limits to what we can metaphysically know, in a sense it comes prior to actual contentful metaphysical discussion. A lot of the book is Kant trying to say what I just said, and some of it is Kant defining terms such as 'experience' and 'intuition', and some of it (mostly the Judgements and Categories and related parts) is Kant talking about what he thinks we can know a priori about the structure (some writers say 'anatomy') of the mind and experience, and some of it is Kant going thru various metaphysical questions and saying how his theory of Trancendental Idealism answers them.
The last bit is imo quite deflationary and the answer almost always turns out to be "we can't ever answer this question because it concerns things-in-themselves", which is similar to how nowadays scientific thought answers questions about God with, "That hypothesis is non-falsifiable and therefore we must remain agnostic", or with "By definition science doesn't deal with supernatural entities, so it cannot address that question". However in most cases Kant then goes on to reinterpret the language of the question to refer, not to things-in-themselves, but rather to questions concerning the nature of possible experiences, and then answers the rewritten questions. I find these rewritten questions to be uninteresting; afaict Kant's real answer to most of the questions is simply "we can't know" and he should have stopped there and avoided confusion (a friend told me that he once heard a theory that Kant tried to make the Critique deliberately obscure so that he wouldn't be punished by the Church for denying the possibility of a rational argument for the existence of God, but i've never found any evidence for that).
The whole book is very confusingly written, uses long phrases with complicated words where shorter ones would have done, and is very redundant. Kant could have used a good editor. However, from the perspective of cognitive studies, the definitions and the parts about the Judgements and Categories are relevant, as they are a sketch towards what in today's A.I. would be called a computer 'ontology' and a 'cognitive architecture' which is underappreciated in today's A.I. community.
(all tables have four sections, arranged spatially as:
1
2 3
4even though i'll write then in columns)
"Logical table of judgements:
1. According to quantity Universal Particular Singular
2. According to quality Affirmative Negative Infinite
3. According to relation Categorical Hypothetical Disjunctive
4. According to modality Problematic Assertoric Apodictic "
"Trancendental table of concepts of the understanding:
1. According to quantity Unity (measure) Plurality (magnitude) Totality (the whole)
2. According to quality Reality Negation Limitation
3. According to relation Substance (Inherence and Substance) Cause (Causality and Dependence) Community
4. According to modality Possibility Existence Necessity "
The entries in these two tables correspond to each other. The nature of the correspondence is that in the former table we have a purely logical notion. In the latter table, we have regularity in the structure of experience, or of mind, which arises from the logical notion and the fact that our minds work rationally (i think Kant sort of defines 'mind' to be 'rational mind', and experience to be involved with the operation of a rational mind, so he rules out by definition the possibility of experiences of illogic).
However, there is some argument about the whether Kant actually meant the items in the table to line up with one another. E.g. in "Kant's Anatomy of the Intelligent Mind", opines "Since singular judgement is listed third under the moments of quantity in the table of categories, many assume that Kant traced unity not to singular but to universal judgement. But it is difficult to make sense of the notion that unity corresponds to universal logical form and totality to singular. Kant's trichotomous ordering of the categories under each heading seems to be due not primarily to the sequence of the corresponding functions of judgment in the table of judgements, but rather to the fact that the third member of each categorial trichtomy must be understood as resulting from the combination of the first two..."
For an example of correspondence, note that Relation:Hypothetical corresponds to Relation:Cause. Hypothetical is Kant's word for the logical connective of implication. Clearly the mental structure of the concept of causation is 'the same shape as' (in the sense of homo/isomorphism) the structure of the concept of logical implication.
What some of the others mean:
Judgements: This is a linguistic/logical issue. Here we're talking about the logical/grammatical form of assertions. That is, we're classifying assertions as to their form.
Judgements of Quantity: Universal involves 'all men', for example the statement "all men are mortal". Particular involves 'some men'. Singular involves 'This man' or 'The man'. Note that this terminology does not match modern usage; today we would map kant's universal->universal quantification, kant's particular -> existential quantification, kant's singular -> particular or singular (no quantification).
Judgements of Quality: affirmative is like 'F is G'. negative is like "it is not the case that F is G"; infinite is like "F is non-G". i think. sometimes i get negative and infinite confused. About infinite judgements, Kant says unhelpfully that, "Although I have taken something away from the possibilities of what the soul might be like, I have not thereby said what it is or clarified the concept of the soul, there are still an infinite number of possible ways the soul could be. The content of an infinite judgment is purely limitative of our knowledge rather than amplitative of it." Norman Kemp's interpretation ( http://www.gutenberg.org/files/43572/43572-0.txt ) is that the point is that infinite judgements are like affirmative ones and unlike negative judgements in that they have content attached to the notion of what F is (the content is the entire infinity of everything except for G); but unlike affirmative judgements, and like negative ones, the effect of infinite judgements is only to limit possibilities, not to actually tell you what something is (because even though G has been eliminated, there are still an infinity of possibilities left for what F could be, so you still don't know anything specific about its structure).
Judgements of Relation: Categorical are judgements like "P". Hypothetical are like "If P then Q”. Disjunctives are like "Fs are either Gs or Hs or …" "where where each partition of the total domain is mutually exclusive and the total set of partitions is exhaustive", quoting http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-judgment/ (e.g. disjunctions are like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sum_type in programming languages).
Judgements of Modality: Problematic/Assertoric/Apodictic are the modalities of possible/actual/necessary.
Unhelpfully, Kant refuses to define the categories, at least within the Critique: "I purposely omit the definitions of the categories in this treatise...to give them here would only bide from our view the main aim of our investigation, at the same time raising doubts and objections, the consideration of which, without injustice to our main purpose, may be very well postponed till another opportunity. Meanwhile, it ought to be sufficiently clear, from the little we have already said on this subject, that the formation of a complete vocabulary of pure conceptions, accompanied by all the requisite explanations, is not only a possible, but an easy undertaking."
Category of quantity: Unity is a single thing. Plurality is some unspecified aggregation of things. Totality is "plurality contemplated as unity". Note that the concept of a number belongs to the category of totality, not plurality; when we say "3 sheep" we are contemplating the group of three sheep as a single thing.
Category of quality: i don't have much to say about this, except that to me perhaps this is just the obvious semantics for the corresponding judgements?
Category of relation: Substance (inherence and subsistence): We have entities which have properties (substance and accident). Cause is cause and effect. Community is a bunch of things that jointly affect/simultaneously/reciprocally one another. An example Kant gives is "a body the parts of which mutually attract and repel each other". The connection to disjunction is that if you have a sum type (e.g. the days of the week), then if you say "day X is Monday", you simultaineously exclude the possibilities that "day X is Tuesday", "day X is Wedesneday", etc; and if you say simultaneously "day X is not Tuesday", "day X is not Wednesday", "day X is not Thursday", "day X is not Friday", "day X is not Saturday", "day X is not Sunday", you imply that day X must be Monday. So, the relation of logical implication between the seven propositions (of the form "day X is (some particular day)") follows a pattern where one things can simultaneously lead to many things, and many things can all simultaneously lead to one thing, rather than the one-to-one chaining pattern in ordinary implication.
Interestingly, under some presentations of constructive mathematics (e.g. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mathematics-constructive/ ) it seems to be exactly this category of community which is considered problematic in non-constructive proofs. Some e.g. Feferman seem to propose that perhaps this is sort of reasoning is only a problem when we are dealing with infinite communities of dubious reality, e.g. the reals, a not when we deal with e.g. finite communities. Kant's focus on the surpringly simultaneous pattern of the logic of sum types seems to shed light on why this may be disturbing; nonconstructive proofs involving reals involve deductions with a pattern of simultaineous logical interaction between all uncountably many reals, in which the presence of every other real is required. If you have any doubt as the reality of every single real (for example, if you doubt the reality of indefinable reals) then a conclusion from this method of deduction isn't justified, and furthermore the simultaneous influence of uncountably many things on your conclusion is startling in any case.
Category of modality: i don't have much to say about this, except that to me perhaps this is just the obvious semantics for the corresponding judgements?
Aristotle invented the logical syllogism, as well as the aristotelian hylomorphic theory as well as the aristotelian categories covered above (todo).
some other philosophers to cover:
"In The Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle (384 /322) describes three approaches to knowledge. In Greek, the three are episteme, techné and phronesis.
Whereas episteme concerns theoretical know why and techné denotes technical know how, phronesis emphasizes practical knowledge and practical ethics.
Aristotle classified knowledge in three different types Episteme (Scientific Knoledge), Techné (Skill and crafts) and Phronesis (Wisdom).
1.►Episteme: It means “to know” in Greek. It is related to scientific knowledge. Attributes: Universal, invariable, context-independent. ...
Aristotle distinguished between Sophia and Phronesis in the following manner. Sophia involves reasoning concerning universal truths, while Phronesis includes a capability of rational thinking.
In order to practice phronesis, Aristotle felt that political abilities were required, as well as thinking abilities. Aristotle categorized there elements of character (ethos) in the following manner: 1) phronesis (how to act in particular situations), 2) areté (virtue) and 3) eunoia (goodwill).-
" Deleuze's works fall into two groups: on one hand, monographs interpreting the work of other philosophers (Spinoza, Leibniz, Hume, Kant, Nietzsche, Bergson, Foucault) and artists (Proust, Kafka, Francis Bacon); on the other, eclectic philosophical tomes organized by concept (e.g., difference, sense, events, schizophrenia, cinema, philosophy). Regardless of topic, however, Deleuze consistently develops variations on similar ideas. " -- https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Gilles_Deleuze#Philosophy
"
Deleuze's main philosophical project in the works he wrote prior to his collaborations with Guattari can be baldly summarized as an inversion of the traditional metaphysical relationship between identity and difference. Traditionally, difference is seen as derivative from identity: e.g., to say that "X is different from Y" assumes some X and Y with at least relatively stable identities (as in Plato's forms). To the contrary, Deleuze claims that all identities are effects of difference. Identities are neither logically nor metaphysically prior to difference, Deleuze argues, "given that there exist differences of nature between things of the same genus."[14] That is, not only are no two things ever the same, the categories we use to identify individuals in the first place derive from differences. Apparent identities such as "X" are composed of endless series of differences, where "X" = "the difference between x and x'", and "x'" = "the difference between...", and so forth. Difference, in other words, goes all the way down. To confront reality honestly, Deleuze argues, we must grasp beings exactly as they are, and concepts of identity (forms, categories, resemblances, unities of apperception, predicates, etc.) fail to attain what he calls "difference in itself." "If philosophy has a positive and direct relation to things, it is only insofar as philosophy claims to grasp the thing itself, according to what it is, in its difference from everything it is not, in other words, in its internal difference."[15]
Like Kant and Bergson, Deleuze considers traditional notions of space and time as unifying forms imposed by the subject. He therefore concludes that pure difference is non-spatio-temporal; it is an idea, what Deleuze calls "the virtual". (The coinage refers to Proust's definition of what is constant in both the past and the present: "real without being actual, ideal without being abstract."[16]) While Deleuze's virtual ideas superficially resemble Plato's forms and Kant's ideas of pure reason, they are not originals or models, nor do they transcend possible experience; instead they are the conditions of actual experience, the internal difference in itself. "The concept they [the conditions] form is identical to its object."[17] A Deleuzean idea or concept of difference is therefore not a wraith-like abstraction of an experienced thing, it is a real system of differential relations that creates actual spaces, times, and sensations.[18]
Thus, Deleuze at times refers to his philosophy as a transcendental empiricism, alluding to Kant and Schelling. In Kant's transcendental idealism, experience only makes sense when organized by forms of sensibility (namely, space and time) and intellectual categories (such as causality). Assuming the content of these forms and categories to be qualities of the world as it exists independently of our perceptual access, according to Kant, spawns seductive but senseless metaphysical beliefs (for example, extending the concept of causality beyond possible experience results in unverifiable speculation about a first cause). Deleuze inverts the Kantian arrangement: experience exceeds our concepts by presenting novelty, and this raw experience of difference actualizes an idea, unfettered by our prior categories, forcing us to invent new ways of thinking (see below, Epistemology). ... In Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962), for example, reality is a play of forces; "-- https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Gilles_Deleuze#Metaphysics
" Deleuze's politics, like indeed all his and Guattari's concepts and categories, is closely related to his Spinozist and Nietzschean materialism, with its conception of the world as an ever-changing and intricately related monstrous collection of forces and arrangements that is always constituting modes of existence at the same time as it destroys them. Such a materialism conceives the world as not only without finitude, but also without delineated subjects or objects; let us call them 'things'.11 Of course, this is not a refutation of the existence of things, but it is a refusal to present them in any ontological or epistemological primacy. There are things, but only as they are constituted in particular, varied, and mutable relations of force.12
If the world is at base a primary flux of matter without form or constant, then things are always a temporary product of a channelling of this flux in what Deleuze and Guattari call 'assemblages' or 'arrangements' (cf. ATP: 503"” 5).13 Nietzsche calls this channelling a process of 'interpretation': the process whereby matter is cut and assembled by a particular series of forces that, as Foucault's work has emphasized, respect no 'ideal'/'material' dichotomy. Any interpretation of a thing or an event does not come after the fact, but is part of its composition, as one of many forces immanent to it. As Deleuze (n.d.a: n.p.) puts it: 'Nietzsche's idea is that things and actions are already interpretations. So, to interpret is to interpret interpretations and, in this way, already to change things, "to change life".' The coherence of things is not, then, a function of their position in the centre of a series of concentric circles of channelling or interpretation. Things are far more unstable than this. Without a primary form before interpretation, the thing is situated at a meeting point of a perpetually changing series of interpretations/forces and is thus never 'finished'.14" -- https://libcom.org/library/deleuze-marx-politics-nicholas-thoburn-introduction
" In Fashionable Nonsense (1997), Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont accuse Deleuze of abusing mathematical and scientific terms, particularly by sliding between accepted technical meanings and his own idiosyncratic use of those terms in his philosophical system. (But see above, Deleuze's interpretations.) Deleuze's writings on subjects such as calculus and quantum mechanics are, according to Sokal and Bricmont, vague, meaningless, or unjustified. ... The pinnacle of Deleuzean practice, then, is creativity. "Herein, perhaps, lies the secret: to bring into existence and not to judge. If it is so disgusting to judge, it is not because everything is of equal value, but on the contrary because what has value can be made or distinguished only by defying judgment. What expert judgment, in art, could ever bear on the work to come?"[28] ... Deleuze's studies of individual philosophers and artists are purposely heterodox. In Nietzsche and Philosophy, for example, Deleuze claims that Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morality is an attempt to rewrite Kant's Critique of Pure Reason,[29] even though Nietzsche nowhere mentions the First Critique in the Genealogy, and the Genealogy's moral topics are far removed from the epistemological focus of Kant's book. Likewise, Deleuze claims that univocity is the organizing principle of Spinoza's philosophy, despite the total absence of the term from any of Spinoza's works. Deleuze once famously described his method of interpreting philosophers as "buggery (enculage)", as sneaking behind an author and producing an offspring which is recognizably his, yet also monstrous and different.[30]
The various monographs thus are not attempts to present what Nietzsche or Spinoza strictly intended, but re-stagings of their ideas in different and unexpected ways. Deleuze's peculiar readings aim to enact the creativity he believes is the acme of philosophical practice.[31] A parallel in painting Deleuze points to is Francis Bacon's Study after Velázquez—it is quite beside the point to say that Bacon "gets Velasquez wrong".[32] Similar considerations apply, in Deleuze's view, to his own uses of mathematical and scientific terms, pace critics such as Alan Sokal: "I'm not saying that Resnais and Prigogine, or Godard and Thom, are doing the same thing. I'm pointing out, rather, that there are remarkable similarities between scientific creators of functions and cinematic creators of images. And the same goes for philosophical concepts, since there are distinct concepts of these spaces."[33] " -- https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Gilles_Deleuze#Reception , https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Gilles_Deleuze#Values , https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Gilles_Deleuze#Deleuze.27s_interpretations
"the structuralist representation of empiricism (empiricists are those who confuse episodic, observable facts for knowledge)" -- http://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviewofbooks/reviews/2012/491
--- Metaphysics
Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason: Kant sought to point out limits in what can possibly be known about metaphysics (a "critique"). His was a critique of "pure reason" insofar as it rested solely on a priori reasoning, rather than empirical evidence. He said that, for any statement S such that S's truth or falsity would make no difference to any possible experience, we cannot ever know whether S is true or false. He notes that many questions studied in the metaphysics of his time are of this nature, and hence attempting to answer these questions are futile.
non-Archimedean time: "A non-Archimedean time theory of time is any theory that holds that there exist instants infinitely in the future or infinitely in the past. It is so called because, if the instants of such time are assigned numbers, the set of such numbers must be non-Archimedean." -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-Archimedean_time
Links:
Old-school Western metaphysics and logic
Aristotle:
Neoplatonic:
Thomism:
Augustinism:
Medieval philosophy:
---
The square of opposition, and similar things
---
Arguments on the existence of God
https://www.susanrigetti.com/philosophy
---
flavors of utilitarianism / some of the decisions you would need to make to make utilitarianism complete/precise:
Is morality objective, with just one true morality just like there is apparently only one true set of laws of physics ("moral realism") or is it subjective/intersubjective (sometimes called "moral relativism")?
Is utilitarianism applied to each individual action ("act utilitarianism"), or is utilitarianism just a system used to infer moral rules which we then follow ("rule utilitarianism")?
Are bad things (eg pain) qualitatively different from good things (eg pleasure) (sometimes called "negative utilitarianism"), or are bad things just like pleasure, but with negative utility ("classical utilitarianism")?
Are some kinds of utility qualitatively different from others (Mill's "higher pleasures"), or is it all interchangable with raw physical pleasure (sometimes described as "hedonism")?
If you know the utility that each individual person would get from a state of events, how do you calculate the utility of the state events for everyone combined? Two examples are "total utilitarianism" (the combined utility is the sum of the individual utilities) and "average utilitarianism" (the combined utility is the average of the individual utilities).
Is actively doing something different from passively allowing it to happen ("Acts and omissions doctrine"), for example, is failing to save someone's life as bad as murdering them?
How do you treat the potential bringing into existence of people who do not exist in the status quo? Is failing to allow a potential future person to be conceived and born the same as killing them? What about failing to cause a potential future person to be conceived and born? For example, if there is an opportunity for a social event at which two people would meet and fall in love, causing them to later have children when otherwise neither of them would have children, then is failing to cause this social event to occur the same as murder?
Some apparent paradoxes of some of these choices:
---
