pavel sebastian's List: phil

• Această contemplare a începutului, arché, a fost înlocuită abia două sute de ani mai tîrziu, odată cu Anaximandru, de meditații despre infinitul (apeiron) ce cuprinde toate posibilitățile, toate forțele care se unesc și se reabsorb unele pe celelalte. Abia atunci, pentru întîia dată, privirea asupra zeilor e transformată într-o idee, ideea de „divinitate“. Odată cu această noțiune apare și primul mo­noteist, poetul Xenofan din Colofon, care se referă la o entitate abstractă: „Unul e Zeul, între zei și oameni cel mai mare, nici la chip, nici la minte asemenea muritorilor“.¹²

   

    Peste încă o sută de ani, Empedocle (490–430 î.H.) susține că Dumnezeu e un spirit nobil dotat cu pute­re inimaginabilă, dar care poate fi reprezentat prin emblema unei sfere invizibile, o sferă perfect rotundă, în repaus pur. Filosofia, iubirea de înțelepciune, e de acum înainte legată de indiferența disciplinată, de privirea reticen­tă și angajamentul pentru devalorizarea imaginii. După cum spune Xenofan, dacă boii ar avea mîini de sculptor, ar ciopli divinități bovine. Filosoful aspiră la atingerea unui adevăr care se află acolo unde ochiul nu bate.

   

    De aici, calea continuă cu Platon (vezi Timeu), pentru care lumea vizibilă e doar o reflexie palidă, o umbră colorată a ideilor. Odată cu Platon se încetățenește un paradox care a dăinuit pînă în zilele noastre: certitu­dinea că întreaga noastră ființă e în căutarea unei viziuni a binelui suprem, deși vizua­lizarea binelui, a divinității, nu e doar imposibilă și un sacrilegiu, ci pur și simplu în afara chestiunii.
• Grecii nu ar fi putut concepe văzul fără raportul asimetric dintre ochiul corporal și obiectul iluminat. Vechii autori vorbesc de raza vizuală în termeni de deget ocular, organ al sufletului, membru psihic impregnat de culorile prinse în actul de îmbinare perceptivă. Școlile filosofice diferă în ceea ce privește locul întîlnirii, nu însă și asupra tezei că e „afară“, undeva dincolo de piele. Pentru Aristotel, amestecul cărnii cu lumea are loc pe obiectul însuși; pentru Platon și, mai tîrziu, stoici, întîlnirea are loc la mijloc de drum, acolo unde ochiul întîlnește umbra colorată lăsată de idei sau acolo unde pojghița obiectelor, desprinsă de soare, e cuprinsă de privire.
• În Evul Mediu, oamenii vorbeau despre visibilia (în latină: imagini vizuale), iar în Antichitate despre emphasis (în greacă: apariția unei suprafețe netede, prezentare, expunere, sens). Noi nu avem cuvinte pentru acest tip de apariție din exterior, ori „pro-punere“. E rezultatul unei complementarități între privirea extrovertită, pe de o parte, și culorile suscitate de strălucirea luminii pe un obiect, de cealaltă. În em­phasis/expunere, cele două părți se contopesc: privirea colorată de lume și lumea colorată de privire. E un eveniment cosmic, fructul potrivirii unor componente asimetrice. Cosmos vine din kosmein, cuvîntul grec pentru alinierea a două părți sau fețe: două armate, maluri, cerul și pămîntul, ochiul și culorile, urechea și sunetul armonios. Rezultatul potrivirii e o bătălie, un rîu, universul, visibilia și muzica. Acest simț pentru proporții ontice, pentru complementarități asimetrice mu­tual constitutive, nu are loc în spațiul descris de axiomele topologiei cognitive a epocii moderne. Nu e de mirare, așadar, că istoria opsis-ului prezenta­tă de Gérard Simon nu e ușor de asimilat.

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• • a very good point indeed. the relation between the free market and centralized and decentralized decision-making.
• Indeed, the term "market" needs to be used with care because it has been greatly abused over the last century by theorists on the left and the right. As Simon remarks, the term does not refer to the world of corporations, whether monopolies or oligopolies, since in these commercial institutions decision-making is highly centralized, and prices are set by command.
• as historian Fernand Braudel has made it clear, it is only in markets in the first sense that we have any idea of what the dynamics of price formation are. In other words, it is only in peasant and small town markets that decentralized decision-making leads to prices setting themselves up in a way that we can understand.
• In any other type of market economists simply assume that supply and demand connect to each other in a functional way, but they do not give us any specific dynamics through which this connection is effected.
• Moreover, unlike the idealized version of markets guided by an "invisible hand" to achieve an optimal allocation of resources, real markets are not in any sense optimal. Indeed, like most decentralized, self-organized structures, they are only viable, and since they are not hierarchical they have no goals, and grow and develop mostly by drift.
• Herbert Simonis distinction between command hierarchies and decentralized markets may turn out to be a special case of a more general dichotomy. In the view of philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, this more abstract classes, which they call strata and self-consistent aggregates (or trees and rhizomes), are defined not so much by the locus of control, as by the nature of the elements that are connected together. Strata are composed of homogenous elements, whereas self-consistent aggregates, or to use the term I prefer, meshworks, articulate heterogeneous elements as such.
• the dichotomy between hierarchies and markets, or more generally, between strata and meshworks, should be understood in purely relative terms. In the first place, in reality it is hard to find pure cases of these two structures
• Moreover, hierarchies give rise to meshworks and meshworks to hierarchies
• in the absence of a super-hierarchy to coordinate their interactions, the whole set of institutions will tend to form a meshwork of hierarchies, articulated mostly through local and temporary links.
• • deleuze and guattari's "abstract machine" is an instantiation of a mechanism in physical or natural events.
• Thus, a double operation, a "double articulation" gets us from structures at one scale to structures at another scale. Deleuze and Guattari call these two operations "content" and "expression" , and warn us against confusing them with the old philosophical distinction between "substances" and "forms". The reason is that each one of the two articulations involves substances and forms: sedimentation is not just about accumulating pebbles (substance) but also about sorting them into uniform layers (form); while consolidation not only effects new architectonic couplings between pebbles (form) but also yields a new entity, a sedimentary rock (substance)
• for instance, members of a group who have acquired preferential access to some roles begin to acquire the power to control further access to them, and within these dominant groups criteria for sorting the rest of society into sub-groups begin to crystallize. "It is from such crystallization of differential evaluation criteria and status positions that some specific manifestations of stratification and status differences -such as segregating the life-styles of different strata, the process of mobility between them, the steepness of the stratificational hierarchies, some types of stratum consciousness, as well as the degree and intensity of strata conflict- develops in different societies."
• a second operation is necessary beyond the mere sorting of people into ranks for social classes or castes to become a separate entity: the informal sorting criteria need to be given a theological interpretation and a legal definition, and the elites need to become the guardians and bearers of the newly institutionalized tradition, that is, the legitimizers of change and delineators of the limits of innovation. In short, to transform a loose accumulation of traditional roles (and criteria of access to those roles) into a social class, the latter needs to become consolidated via theological and legal codification.
• "autocatalytic loop", a closed chain of chemical processes involving not only self-stimulation but also self-maintenance, that is, interconnecting a series of mutually-stimulating pairs into a structure which reproduces as a whole
• Francisco Varela and Humberto Maturana, pioneers in the study of autocatalytic loops (e.g. their theory of "autopoeisis") mention two general characteristics of these closed circuits: they are dynamical systems which endogenously generate their own stable states (called "attractors" or "eigenstates"), and they grow and evolve by drift. .
• • growth by drift, may be explained as follows: in the simplest autocalytic loops there are only two reactions, each producing a catalyst for the other. But once this basic two-node network establishes itself, new nodes may insert themselves into the mesh as long as they do not jeopardize its internal consistency.
• The surrounding environment, as source of raw materials, certainly constraints the growth of the meshwork but more in a proscriptive way (what not to do) than in a prescriptive one (what to do).
• First, a set of heterogeneous elements is brought together via an articulation of superpositions , that is, an interconnection of diverse but overlapping elements. (In the case of autocatalytic loops, the nodes in the circuit are joined to each other by their functional complementarities ). Second, a special class of operators, or intercallary elements, is needed to effect this interlock via local connections. (In our case, this is the role played by catalysts, inserting themselves between two other chemical substances to facilitate their interaction). Finally, the interlocked heterogeneities must be capable of endogenously generating stable patterns of behavior (for example, patterns at regular temporal or spatial intervals.) {12} Is it possible to find instances of these three elements in all different spheres of reality?
• And much as strata are defined as an articulation of homogenous elements (and do not involve more specific features of hierarchies such as having a chain of command), so self-consistent aggregates are defined by their articulation of heterogeneous elements and do not necessarily involve other, less general, features (such as growth by drift or internal autonomy).
• I have already mentioned that markets may be considered examples of cultural meshworks. In many cultures weekly markets have traditionally been the meeting place for people with heterogeneous needs and offers. Matching complementary demands (that is, interlocking these people together by their needs and offers) is an operation which is performed automatically by the price mechanism. (Prices transmit not only information about the relative monetary value of different products, but also incentive to buy and sell). All that is needed for this automatic mechanism to work is that prices drop in the face of an excess supply and that quantities produced and offered decline when prices are lowered.
• his conception of very specific abstract machines governing a variety of structure-generating processes not only blurs the distinction between the natural and the artificial, but also that between the living and the inert. It indeed points towards a new form of materialist philosophy in which raw matter-energy through a variety of self-organizing processes and an intense power of morphogenesis, generates all the structures that surround us.
• This conception of very specific abstract machines governing a variety of structure-generating processes not only blurs the distinction between the natural and the artificial, but also that between the living and the inert. It indeed points towards a new form of materialist philosophy in which raw matter-energy through a variety of self-organizing processes and an intense power of morphogenesis, generates all the structures that surround us.
• If the hierarchical components of the mix dominate over the meshwork ones we may speak of a highly stratified  structure, while the opposite combination will be referred to as one with a low degree of stratification.
• Finally, since according to this way of viewing things what truly defines the real world are neither uniform strata nor variable meshworks but the unformed and unstructured morphogenetic flows from which these two derive, it will also be useful to have a label to refer to this special state of matter-energy-information, to this flowing reality animated from within by self-organizing processes constituting a veritable non-organic life : the Body without Organs (BwO):
• the BwO is that glacial reality where the alluvions, sedimentations, coagulations, foldings, and recoilings that compose an organism -and also a signification and a subject- occur.

  • the body without organs is the instantiation of the "abstract machine". it is the organic before being biology, not yet a strata, not yet a meshwork, but the possibility of their inception. it's not about metaphysics, but about a neo-materialism that acknowledge the incompletness of reality. not to be seen as a "defect" or incongruence with the main drives of matter-energy-information interlocking, the incompletness of reality is a temporal folding in the products of history. reality in itself is without a hierarchy, that's why it seems to us so heterogenous and unstable.
• ince it is ultimately the intensity of each parameter that determines the kind of dynamic involved, and hence, the character of the structures that are generated.
• BwO is made in such a way that it can be occupied, populated only by intensities. Only intensities pass and circulate. Still, the Bwo is not a scene, a place, or even a support upon which something comes to pass... It is not space, nor is it in space; it is matter that occupies space to a given degree -to the degree corresponding to the intensities produced. It is nonstratified, unformed, intense matter, the matrix of intensity, intensity=0 ... Production of the real as an intensive magnitude starting at zero.

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• "Rules, or laws, have no causal efficacy; they do not in fact “generate” anything. They serve merely to describe regularities and consistent relationships in nature. These patterns may be very illuminating and important, but the underlying causal agencies must be separately specified (though often they are not). But that aside, the game of chess illustrates precisely why any laws or rules of emergence and evolution are insufficient. Even in a chess game, you cannot use the rules to predict “history” — i.e., the course of any given game. Indeed, you cannot even reliably predict the next move in a chess game. Why? Because the “system” involves more than the rules of the game. It also includes the players and their unfolding, moment-by-moment decisions among a very large number of available options at each choice point. The game of chess is inescapably historical, even though it is also constrained and shaped by a set of rules, not to mention the laws of physics. Moreover, and this is a key point, the game of chess is also shaped by teleonomic, cybernetic, feedback-driven influences. It is not simply a self-ordered process; it involves an organized, “purposeful” activity." (Corning 2002)
• The usage of the notion "emergence" may generally be subdivided into two perspectives, that of "weak emergence" and "strong emergence". Weak emergence describes new properties arising in systems as a result of the interactions at an elemental level. Emergence, in this case, is merely part of the language, or model that is needed to describe a system's behaviour.
• But if, on the other hand, systems can have qualities not directly traceable to the system's components, but rather to how those components interact, and one is willing to accept that a system supervenes on its components, then it is difficult to account for an emergent property's cause. These new qualities are irreducible to the system's constituent parts (Laughlin 2005). The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. This view of emergence is called strong emergence. Some fields in which strong emergence is more widely used include etiology, epistemology and ontology.
• "The ability to reduce everything to simple fundamental laws does not imply the ability to start from those laws and reconstruct the universe..The constructionist hypothesis breaks down when confronted with the twin difficulties of scale and complexity. At each level of complexity entirely new properties appear. Psychology is not applied biology, nor is biology applied chemistry. We can now see that the whole becomes not merely more, but very different from the sum of its parts."(Anderson 1972)

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• But, insofar as they succeed, they create a recurrent problem for themselves. For workers are also consumers and capitalism requires consumers with the purchasing power to buy its products. So there is tension between the need to keep wages low and the need to keep consumption high.” Capitalism has solved this dilemma, MacIntyre says, by bringing future consumption into the present by dramatic extensions of credit.
• This expansion of credit, he goes on, has been accompanied by a distribution of risk that exposed to ruin millions of people who were unaware of their exposure. So when capitalism once again overextended itself, massive credit was transformed into even more massive debt, “into loss of jobs and loss of wages, into bankruptcies of firms and foreclosures of homes, into one sort of ruin for Ireland, another for Iceland, and a third for California and Illinois.” Not only does capitalism impose the costs of growth or lack of it on those least able to bear them, but much of that debt is unjust. And the “engineers of this debt,” who had already benefited disproportionately, “have been allowed to exempt themselves from the consequences of their delinquent actions.” The imposition of unjust debt is a symptom of the “moral condition of the economic system of advanced modernity, and is in its most basic forms an expression of the vices of intemperateness, and injustice, and imprudence.”
• Those who expose others to risk in the financial markets must spell out in public and in advance the risks that they are distributing in intelligible terms. And when risk-taking goes wrong, the consequences for those who made the decisions must be made as bad as they are for their worst-off victims. Finally, he argues that limits should be set to the burdens imposed by debt on individual and family lives, so that they are not disproportionate—this may involve caps on interest rates, as in Germany, or even forgiving debt.
• Nevertheless, since the formation of the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition, Blond has been seeking and finding connections between MacIntyre, Aquinas, GK Chesterton’s “distributism” of the 1920s, and Jo Grimond’s plea for civic groups in the 1950s. Are these not the antecedents of David Cameron’s big society? The link between Aquinas and the 20th century is distributism, a philosophy which repudiated usury, communism and capitalism in equal measure for an economy based on guilds, specialist associations, self-sufficiency and barter.

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• Frege had brought the modern tradition to an end by replacing epistemology with the theory of meaning as the foundation of philosophy in general has been an influential interpretation, but has increasingly been challenged in the past decades.
• the two traditional functions of language with regard to thought that Hobbes and Locke distinguished in the context of their respective epistemological reflections. These were: (a) the indispensable assistance of language to memory, or to the representation and recording of one’s own thoughts, and (b) its role as a necessary vehicle of the communication of one’s own thoughts to other people.

• But if we produce the symbol of an idea that a perception has called to mind, we create in this way a firm, new focus about which ideas gather. We then select another idea from these in order to elicit its symbol. Thus we penetrate step by step into the inner world of our ideas and move about there at will, using the realm of sensibles itself to free ourselves from its constraint. Symbols have the same importance for thought that discovering how to use the wind to sail against the wind had for navigation….

   

  Also, without symbols we would scarcely lift ourselves to conceptual thinking. Thus in applying the same symbol to different but similar things, we actually no longer symbolize the individual thing, but rather what the similarities have in common: the concept. This concept is first gained by symbolizing it; for since it is, in itself, imperceptible, it requires a perceptible representative in order to appear to  us”
• Kant´s idea that objectivity is not a feature of things-in-themselves, but of things as they are constituted and apprehended by means of logical forms of judgment, pure categories of understanding and pure forms of intuition.
• all and only that part of the content of natural language expressions is to be represented that is of significance for logical inference; and this is what Frege called the “conceptual content” of an expression
• Frege means by “Begriffsschrift” a symbolic system in which, contrary to natural language, the written symbols come to express their subject matter directly, that is, without the intervention of speech
• Historically, the idea of a concept script derives from the Leibnizian project of developing a so-called “universal characteristic” (characteristica universalis): A universal symbolic system in which every complex concept is completely defined based on a set of primitive concepts and logical rules of inference and definition, and which thus enables us to make the conceptual structure of our universe explicit. Such a symbolic system would also contain a logical calculus (calculus ratiocinator) consisting of purely syntactic inference rules based on the types of symbols used within the formal language. However, according to the Leibnizian conception, logic itself is not merely a calculus but expressible in an ideal language, that is, in the universal characteristic. Frege certainly adopted this view of logic from Leibniz;

  • isn't this a common denominator among contemporary analytical philosophy and rationality theories? the question that one might raise is the degree of legitimacy of such an approach. if symbols are the common denominators between mathematics, logic and common language, the normative and the prescriptive wants of the former two are entirely out of their reach. Their only justification could be that of language being an interface between thoughts and reason, when in fact it mediates thoughts with consciousness, reason being applicable retrospectively to a conscious thought.
• Frege did not regard language as the source of thought contents; he did regard logic, however, as consisting of (true) thought contents
• The sense is a way an object is determined by an expression
• The object or function that the expression stands for is the expression’s significance (“Bedeutung”), also called “reference” or “referent”
• It follows that for each particular sense there can be maximally one significance/reference, while numerous distinct senses may correspond to the same significance, representing the various ways the object (or concept) that an expression stands for can be uniquely given to us in thought.
• For Frege, not only proper names but also concept words and relational expressions possess sense and significance.
• Their significance then is a concept or relation, not an object, and their sense – though Frege does not say much about it – presumably consists in a logical thought component that contains the necessary and sufficient conditions for an object to fall under the concept (or stand in the relation to another object). Finally, the sense of a complete sentence is a thought, and its significance a truth-value.
• the distinction between sense and significance allows for an expansion of Frege’s semantics to belief ascriptions, that is, to sentences of the form “John believed that the earth is flat.”
• The idea is that this sentence may be true independently of whether the embedded part of it (“the earth is flat”) is true.

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• In Kant's conception, an argument of this kind begins with an uncontroversial premise about our thought, experience, or knowledge, and then reasons to a substantive and unobvious necessary condition of this premise. Typically, this reasoning from uncontroversial premise to substantive conclusion is intended to be priori in some sense, either strict (Smit 1999) or more relaxed (Philip Kitcher 1981, Pereboom 1990).
• Targets of Kant's transcendental arguments include skepticism about the applicability of concepts not derived from experience to the world of experience, and skepticism about the existence of objects external to us in space.
• In Kant's derivative epistemological sense, a deduction is an argument that aims to justify the use of a concept, one that demonstrates that the concept correctly applies to objects.
• For Kant a concept is a priori just in case its source is the understanding of the subject and not in sensory experience
• The specific a priori concepts whose applicability to objects of experience Kant intends to vindicate in the Transcendental Deduction are those given in his Table of Categories (A80/B106); they are Unity, Plurality, and Totality (the Categories of Quantity); Reality, Negation, and Limitation (the Categories of Quality); Inherence and Subsistence, Causality and Dependence, and Community (the Categories of Relation), and Possibility-Impossibility, Existence-Non-existence, Necessity-Contingency (the Categories of Modality).
• a transcendental deduction begins with a slender premise about any possible human experience, a premise to which reasonable participants in the debate can agree, and then contends that a necessary condition for the truth of that premise is the applicability of the a priori concepts in question to the objects of experience.
• More specifically, the sub-arguments in Kant's Transcendental Deduction begin with a slender premise either about the self-attributability of mental items, apperception, or else (more controversially) a premise about some necessary and universal feature of our experience of objects.
• Kant then attempts to establish a theory that features a kind of mental processing he calls synthesis by showing that its truth is a necessary condition for the truth of such a slender premise.
• a priori concepts have an essential role in this sort of mental processing.
• On a metaphysical idealist interpretation of his position, the objects of experience result from this mental processing, and it is due to the role that the categories have in this processing that they correctly apply to these objects.
• In the Transcendental Deduction Kant would thus intend to secure a normative claim, that the categories correctly apply to the objects of our experience, by establishing a psychological theory
• Kant intends to derive the categories from the specific modes or forms of any human thought about the world, the logical forms of judgment.
• Since the understanding of the subject is the source of the categories, and also a faculty that yields synthesis, the subject plays a crucial role in mental processing.
• It is important for Kant's view on mental processing that this subject is distinct from its representations
• the principle of the necessary unity of apperception.
• synthesis is needed to explain how we can grasp an aspect of self-consciousness that this principle highlights
• Apperception is the apprehension of a mental state, a representation, as one's own; one might characterize it as the self-ascription or self-attribution of a mental state
• In Kant's conception, my apperception has necessary unity since all of my representations must be grounded
• “in pure apperception, that is, in the thoroughgoing identity of the self in all possible representations”
• • the observed observer -luhmann
• (The principle of the necessary unity of apperception) It must be the case that each of my representations is such that I can attribute it to my self, a subject which is the same for all of my self-attributions, which is distinct from its representations, and which can be conscious of its representations (A116, B131–2, B134–5).
• “through the ‘I’, as simple representation, nothing manifold is given; only in intuition, which is distinct from the ‘I’, can a manifold be given”

  • against Hume's associationism
• the point Kant focuses on is the identity or sameness of the subject of different self-attributions, and my being conscious of this identity.
• • Kant : It must be possible for the ‘I think’ to accompany all my representations; for otherwise something would be represented in me which could not be thought at all===> nominalist view

  • the nominalist view of such a position claims that there should be a co-consciousness between each element of the manifold of an intuition and the I think accompanies that element. the criticism states that Kant cannot argue the holist position, while the nominalist position is credible.
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  • • the holist position of synthesis is that all the elements of the manifold of an intuition , taken together, are accompanied by the I think. 
• That relation comes about, not simply through my accompanying each representation with consciousness, but only in so far as I conjoin one representation with another, and am conscious of the synthesis of them (B133)
• only a priori synthesis can explain how I might represent the identity of my apperceptive consciousness (B133) or how I might represent the identity of the apperceiving subject (B135) for different elements of the manifold of intuition to which I can attach the I think.

  • for Hume, the subject is not distinct of his representations

  • except if there is a perception of these perceptions which would be intrinsically to the subject.
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  • • kant criticize hume's representationalism as lacking a distinct corelation with the subject of those representations. if all we perceive are sensible stimuli, ordered by their own order of being perceived, there is no direct implication  of a subject to assume these representations as coinciding with his self. such a situation would imply a lag between reality and subject.
• In Kant's conception, by contrast, accounting for our sense of the identity of the conscious subject of different self-attributions requires that this subject be distinct from its representations.
• Hume's theory lacks the resources to account for my representation-relation to the identity of the subject.
• Hume's view cannot explain how I can “represent to myself the identity of the consciousness in [i.e. throughout] these representations”

  • for Kant, an intuition is a mode of cognition(An objective perception is cognition;Cognition involves two factors: first, the concept through which an object in general is thought (the category); and secondly, the intuition, through which it is given.).the intuition relates immediately to the object:it means that it represents the object without bringing it under a general concept.
    Intuitions represent single objects, particulars, rather than groups of objects. It is general concepts which represent many single things under one heading.

  • it seems a little to complicated to ask for a "representation of the consciousness in these representations". the logical argument would be indeed coherently assumed if consciousness can be represented as a form of self-awareness, but in the complicated kantian philosophy, a phenomenologist is more closely linked to what Kant is asserting. This does not invaluate Kant's position, but it does offer an understanding for the position Hume assumed. 
• The way I represent the sameness of the subject is akin to how I commonly represent the identity over time of ordinary objects
• by a cognitive sensitivity to similarities among the intrinsic properties represented.
• Thus my representation of the identity of the subject comes about “only in so far as I conjoin one representation with another, and am conscious of the synthesis of them”
• This consciousness is profitably interpreted as conscious awareness not of the act or process of synthesis itself, but rather of the unity that is its outcome
• So to explain how I represent the identity of the subject of different self-attributions, I must generate or at least recognize the right sort of unity among these representations, and synthesis must be recruited to account for this unity.
• Understanding is, to use general terms, the faculty of cognitions (Erkenntnisse). They consist (bestehen) in the determinate relation of given representations to an object: and an object is that in the concept of which the manifold of a given intuition is united. Now all unification of representations demands unity of consciousness in the synthesis of them. Consequently it is the unity of consciousness that alone constitutes the relation of representations to an object, and therefore their objective validity and the fact that they are cognitions (Erkenntnisse): and upon it therefore rests the very possibility of the understanding.

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• C.S. Peirce argued there there is no power of intuition in the sense of a cognition unconditioned by inference, and no power of introspection, intuitive or otherwise, and that awareness of an internal world is by hypothetical inference from external facts. Introspection and intuition were staple philosophical tools at least since Descartes
• He argued that there is no absolutely first cognition in a cognitive process; such a process has its beginning but can always be analyzed into finer cognitive stages. That which we call introspection does not give privileged access to knowledge about the mind - the self is a concept that is derived from our interaction with the external world and not the other way around

• All knowledge is conceptual; the given, having no conceptual structure of its own, is not even a possible object of knowledge. Foundationalism of the classical empiricist sort is thus directly precluded. Lewis’s task for MWO is in effect a pragmatic solution to Hume’s problem of induction: an account of the order we bring to experience which renders knowledge possible but makes no appeal to anything lying outside of experience. Prefiguring contemporary externalist accounts of representation, Lewis argues that both representative realism and phenomenalism are incoherent. Knowledge as correct interpretation is independent of whether the phenomenal character of experience is a “likeness” of the real object known, because the phenomenal character of experience only receives its function as a sign from its conceptual interpretation, that is, from its significance for future experience and action. The question of the validity of knowledge claims is thus for Lewis fundamentally the question of the normative significance of our empirical assessments for action.
• Lewis argued that our spontaneous interpretation of experience by way of concepts that have objective significance for future experience constitutes a kind of diagnosis of appearance .
• If we could not recognize a sensuous content in our classification of it with qualitatively similar ones which have acquired predictive significance in the past, interpretation would be impossible.
• Despite the fact that such recognition is spontaneous and unconsidered it has the logical character of a generalization.
• The basis of the empirical judgment lies in the fact that past instances of such classification have been successful. Our empirical knowledge claims are dependent for their justification upon this body of conceptual interpretations in two ways. First, the world, in the form of future events implicitly predicted (or not) by our empirical judgments, will confirm or disconfirm those judgments: all empirical knowledge is thus merely probable. But secondly, the classification of immediate apprehensions by way of concepts justifying particular empirical judgments is itself generalization even when those concepts have come to function as a criterion of sense meaning. Concepts become criteria of classification because they allow us to make empirically valid judgments, and because they fit usefully in the larger structure of our concepts.
• The implications of a concept within a system become criteria of its applicability in that system. If later experience does not accord with the logical implications of our application of a concept to a particular, we will withdraw the application of the concept.
• Persistent failure of individual concepts to apply fruitfully to experience will lead us to readjust the system as a whole.
• Without a system of conceptual interpretation, no experience is possible, but which system of interpretation we use is a matter of choice and what we experience is given to us by reality. The importance of the given in this story is its independence . Our conceptual system can at best specify a system of possible worlds; within it the actual is not to be deduced but acknowledged. In short, Lewis’s theory of knowledge in MWO is a pragmatic theory of inquiry which combines rationalist and naturalistic elements to make knowledge of the real both fallible and progressive without recourse to transcendental guarantees.
• A concept is thus merely a relational pattern.

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• Kant distinguishes two notions of the sublime: the mathematically sublime and the dynamically sublime. In the case of both notions, the experience of the sublime consists in a feeling of the superiority of our own power of reason, as a supersensible faculty, over nature
• • imagination does not have the task of understanding. reason does. The confusion Kant is making here is between imagination and  the unconscious as a depository of thoughts, representations and sensations.

  • how can reason be superior to imagination, when imagination in itself is a part of reason, and not a distinct faculty? Kant sees them as distinct but they are not.
• In the case of the mathematically sublime, the feeling of reason's superiority over nature takes the form, more specifically, of a feeling of reason's superiority to imagination, conceived of as the natural capacity required for sensory apprehension, including the apprehension of the magnitudes of empirically given things.
• We have this feeling when we are confronted with something that is so large that it overwhelms imagination's capacity to comprehend it.
• The fact that we are capable, through reason, of thinking infinity as a whole, “indicates a faculty of the mind which surpasses every standard of sense”
• • I see the mathematically sublime in Kant as a lack in the capacity of rational deduction, based on a low string of informations. An architect would see the St.Peter basilica as mathematically sublime as a peasant?  I argue that the latter would see it as sublime, and not the architect
• While Kant's discussion of the mathematically sublime mentions, apparently as examples, the Pyramids in Egypt and St. Peter's Basilica in Rome (§26, 252), he claims that the most appropriate examples are of things in nature. More specifically, they must be natural things the concept of which does not involve the idea of an end (§26, 252-253): this rules out animals, the concept of which is connected with the idea of biological function, but it apparently includes mountains and the sea (§26, 256).
• • what is the relation between what Rudolf Otto explained as the numinous - a "non-rational, non-sensory experience or feeling whose primary and immediate object is outside the self" - and the sublime? is it the same thing? the numinous is a mystery, terrifying and fascinating in the same time.
• Kant says that we consider nature as “dynamically sublime” when we consider it as “a power that has no dominion over us”
• We have the feeling of the dynamically sublime when we experience nature as fearful while knowing ourselves to be in a position of safety and hence without in fact being afraid.
• The feeling associated with the sublime is a feeling of pleasure in the superiority of our reason over nature, but it also involves displeasure.
• In the case of the mathematically sublime, the displeasure comes from the awareness of the inadequacy of our imagination; in the dynamical case it comes from the awareness of our physical powerlessness in the face of nature's might.
• Kant also describes the feeling of the sublime as a “pleasure which is possible only by means of a displeasure”
• and as a “negative liking”
• • for Kant a judgment counts as scientific knowing if and only if (1) the self-evident or clear-and-distinct character of the propositional content of that judgment necessitates the cognizer's belief in that proposition, (2) the belief is coherent with a suitably wide set of other beliefs, and (3) that proposition is also true.o conviction or certainty for Kant does not entail truth. In this way, truth is a relatively external and extrinsic factor in relation to justification: truth is irreducibly something the world gives to us, not something we can make for ourselves, due to “the fact that the manifold for intuition must already be given (gegeben)” 

  • here is the difference between what we see today as instrumental rationality and Kant's practical reason (which was preoccupied by morality) : for Kant, practical reason did not implied an end or goals for an agent's actions. To be moral was an end in itself, not a economic reason. Today's instrumental rationality preoccupies itself with the nature of beliefs and their soundness. For Kant, belief is a matter of cognitive semantics, not of epistemology; belief for Kant is a defeasible rational pro-attitude arising from and presupposing an act of judgment and its propositional content. Justified true belief is for Kant scientific knowledge.Kant holds that a belief constitutes scientific knowing if and only if the judgment underlying that belief is not only subjectively sufficient for believing but is also objectively sufficient for believing, and coherent with a suitably wide set of other beliefs (A60/B85), and also true, although it still remains fallible.
  • 2 more sticky notes...

  • • it's not the object, but the aesthetic judgement which is represented as purposive. the aesthetic judgement is not represented as purposive for imagination or judgement, but for reason.

    • if in making a judgement of the sublime, we regard the object as "contrapurposive", this means that practical reason is not implied in such a judgement, although Kant appears to identify the sublime with the feeling of respect, which in his practical philosophy is associated with recognition of the moral laws.
• In making a judgment of the sublime, we regard the object as “contrapurposive,” rather than purposive, for the faculties of imagination and judgment (§23, 245). While judgments of the sublime do involve the representation of purposiveness, the purposiveness differs from that involved in a judgment of beauty in two ways. (a) It is not the object, but the aesthetic judgment itself which is represented as purposive. (b) The aesthetic judgment is represented as purposive not for imagination or judgment, but for reason (§27, 260) or for the “whole vocation of the mind” (§27, 259).
• • The claim to universal validity made by a judgment of the sublime rests, not on the universal validity of the conditions of cognition, but rather on the universal validity of moral feeling (§29, 255-256).
    
  • While we can correctly call objects beautiful, we cannot properly call them sublime (§23, 245); sublimity strictly speaking “is not contained in anything in nature, but only in our mind” (§28, 264).
    
  • While judgments of beauty involve a relation between the faculties of imagination and understanding, the faculties brought into relation in a judgment of the sublime are imagination and reason (§29, 266).
• The idea that aesthetic judgment plays a role in grounding the possibility of morality for human beings is suggested at a very general level in the Introduction to the Critique of Judgment, where Kant describes the faculty of judgment as bridging “the great gulf” betweeen the concept of nature and that of freedom (IX, 195).
• Aesthetic experience serves as a propadeutic for morality, in that “the beautiful prepares us to love something, even nature, without interest; the sublime, to esteem it, even contrary to our (sensible) interest”
• The demand for universal agreement in judgments of the sublime rests on an appeal to moral feeling
• Taking a direct interest in the beauty of nature indicates “a good soul” and a “mental attunement favorable to moral feeling”
• Beauty serves as the “symbol” of morality (§59, passim), in that a judgment of beauty “legislates for itself” rather than being “subjected to a heteronomy of laws of experience” (§59, 353); relatedly, feelings of pleasure in the beautiful are analogous to moral consciousness
• Beauty gives sensible form to moral ideas (§60, 356); this is related both to the view that there is an analogy between the experience of beauty and moral feeling (see (ii) above), and to the view that beauty is the expression of aesthetic ideas (see 2.6). Because of this, the development of moral ideas is the “true propadeutic” for taste

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• A popular nominalist theory of properties is so-called Trope Theory
• Trope theory does not reject the existence of properties, but takes properties to be certain entities usually called ‘tropes’
• Tropes are particulars, in the same sense in which individual people and individual apples are particulars. Thus when there is a scarlet apple the scarletness of the apple is not a universal but a particular scarletness, the scarletness of this apple, which exists exactly where and when this apple is   scarlet
• But what makes scarlet tropes scarlet tropes? One possible answer here is that scarlet tropes are scarlet tropes because they resemble each other, where resemblance is not explained in terms of instantiating some same universal
• • set theory cannot be aplied in this insatnce. we do not have  a scarlet S class where S={a,b,c,d}, but As, Bs,Cs,Ds...Xs n+1
• There are some ways out for the trope theorist. One solution is to argue that the regress is not vicious at all and that at most it represents an increment in the number of entities (not kinds of entities) postulated by the theory. Another solution is to deny the existence of resemblance tropes and make do only with resembling tropes
• But for Predicate Nominalism there is nothing like scarletness. According to this theory a thing is scarlet in virtue of the fact that the predicate ‘scarlet’ applies to it
• Similarly, according to Concept Nominalism (or Conceptualism), there is nothing like scarletness and a thing is scarlet in virtue of its falling under the concept  scarlet
• • these view fall under the "social construction" fallacy which mainly consist of a kind of relativism that denies the existence of an external realism. 
• Ostrich  Nominalism.^[11]  This view, held by Quine, among others, maintains that there is nothing in virtue of which our thing is scarlet: it just is scarlet
• Modal Realism, for instance David Lewis', according to which other possible worlds exist and contain things of the same kinds as the things in the actual world (see Lewis 1986a). Then properties get identified with classes whose members need not belong to the same possible world. Thus the property of scarlet things is the class of things that are scarlet in any possible   world.^[15]  And even if every actual F is a G and vice versa, since not every possible F is a G or vice versa, what makes something F, namely belonging to the class of actual and possible Fs, is not the same as what makes it G. The theory denies that there are and there could be necessarily coextensive properties.
• Resemblance Nominalism
• According to this theory, it is not that scarlet things resemble one another because they are scarlet, but what makes them scarlet is that they resemble one another
• The resemblance nominalist ontology is an ontology of resembling particulars like horses, atoms, houses, stars, men (and classes). But the resemblance nominalist does not reify resemblance. Thus that a and b resemble each other does not require that there are three entities there: a, b and a third, relational entity that is their resemblance. The only entities involved in that situation are a and b.
• Like Class Nominalism, Resemblance Nominalism faces the problem about the identity of coextensive properties, and the solution is the same, namely to adopt some version of Modal Realism according to which merely possible particulars are as real as actual ones.
• Thus (part of) what makes a certain apple scarlet is that it resembles all scarlet things, including merely possible scarlet things.

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• So when I cannot represent myself through speech, and cocoon myself in words (ironically, as I am doing now), I become hyper-aware of my body; its slightly slouched posture; its anxious tics; and its physical presence in space as an object in the field of other people’s line of vision.  Second realization, my unease with dancing was due to this lack of trust I had in my body; as if my body would betray me, and make a fool out of me (as if there is a “me” apart from my body).  As if. For there is no spirit apart from the body (and vice versa) but there is also no unity between body and spirit – only fragile disjunctures and frictions and pleasures. 
• • the lack of words, of our civilized way of expression, is making way to our more primal form of communication, the body, as a biological construct, and as a background for ant psychological symptoms. There is no split between mind and body, only a different perception of these two. We cannot perceive our body as it reacts, we can only observe our lack of control over it, afterwards.

• friendships based on “understanding [the other person’s] notion of fullness
• Ubuntu, the Zulu term for an ethic of interdependence