I hope I have made clear to regular readers of this humble mind that I am not a believer in panpsychism. My own view of the mind-body relation, on the other hand, is a form of emergentism, which ends up in a place quite similar to old-fashioned mind-body dualism and interactionism. But I did find of interest a recent paper's breakdown of the three broad arguments for panpsychism: the continuity argument, the Hegelian argument, and the Agnostic argument. In brief that means: 1) Continuity. All matter must have some element of mind in it because otherwise there would be a radical and incomprehensible discontinuity in the history of matter in the world. 2) Hegelian. Panpsychism offers a sort of dialectical synthesis between materialism and dualism with the upside of each and the downside of neither. 3) Agnostic. No idea of the intrinsically non-experiential [something neither mental nor proto-mental] could even be intelligible to us. The overall point of the p...
Posts
Someone asked on the question-and-answer site Quora, what are the differences between Hegel and Marx with regard to their understanding of the State? My answer: That’s a complicated question. You’re deep in the weeds here. But here is where you might start research on Hegel in particular: https://www.iep.utm.edu/hegelsoc... Very short course. For Hegel the State is the third moment in the usual dialectical triad, where the family is the thesis and civil society is the antithesis. Both are subsumed into the State. You don’t know what this means because it isn’t how normal folk talk? I’m with you. You can delve more deeply into what he meant by the terms involved, but it won't change that. For Marx the State is the executive committee of the ruling class. See the difference? Marx didn’t use the dialectical terminology that, as a Hegelian, he knew perfectly well how to throw about, when it came time to DEFINE the state. Marx did talk like normal folk in defining the state, a...
This is a shout-out to Thom Brooks and Sebastian Stein, the editors behind a new anthology HEGEL'S POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY from Oxford University Press. Brooks is a professor of political philosophy at Durham University. I may have mentioned him in this blog before, because he has his own blog that regularly comments on Brit and Eurozone politics in a way I find stimulating. Stein is with the philosophy department of the University of Heidelberg. Other than that, I know nothing about him at all. But I'm not surprised Hegel is taught in Heidelberg. And I know little about the book, except what one can gather from a review by Timothy Brownlee of Xavier University, at NDPR: https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/hegels-political-philosophy-on-the-normative-significance-of-method-and-system/ It seems from that review that one of the big questions underlying the book is whether what one thinks of the value of Hegel's political philosophy rises and falls with what one thinks of the v...
William James made the following points about Hegelian philosophy in an 1882 article. 1. We cannot eat our cake and have it; that is, the only real contradiction there can be between thoughts is where one is true, the other false. When that happens, one must go forever, nor is there any 'higher synthesis' in which both can wholly revive. 2. A chasm is not a bridge in any utilizable sense; that is, no mere negation can be the instrument of a positive advance in thought. 3. The continua, time, space, and the ego, are bridges because they are without chasm. 4. But they bridge over the chasms between represented qualities only partially. 5. Their partial bridging, however, makes the qualities share in a common world. 6. The other characteristics of the qualities are separate facts. 7. But the same quality appears in many times and space. Generic sameness of the quality wherever found becomes thus a further means by which the jolts are reduced. 8. But between different q...
I mentioned Samuel Alexander last week in the course of discussing the semantics of emergence. At one time, I considered Alexander to be an important and impressive philosopher. I'm afraid I've outgrown his appeal, but he is certainly worth a blog entry of his own. He is the author of Space, Time, and Deity (1920). If you are interested in the social history of academe, you might also want to know that he was the first Jewish fellow of an Oxbridge college. The book named above is one of the early expressions of metaphysicians' efforts to incorporate Einsteinian physics into their own speculations. Space and Time are named separately in the title, but the book is suffused with the idea that they are one, and that this one thing, spacetime, is not merely (as many philosophers have thought and still think) a matter of relationships among objects or events, it is a directly intuited substance. What is more, spacetime is THE substance for Alexander. Over t...
Last summer, Valdi Ingthorsson, of Lund University in Sweden, released a book on the philosophy of time, with the title McTaggart's Paradox. https://rdingthorsson.wordpress.com/summary-of-mctaggarts-paradox/ I will provide some background material on the subject he is discussing, in Part I of this two-part discussion. In the second,which I hope to have ready by this coming Thursday, I'll speak to what Ingthorsson brings to this table. But let's start, as Ingthorsson does, with John M. E. McTaggart, a philosopher who flourished a century ago and who in 1908 published a landmark essay on the subject of time. http://www.ditext.com/mctaggart/time.html "McTaggart's paradox" is a key argument of his for the unreality of time. If I understand it the gist is this: in order for time to be real, the past and future have to exist in parity with each other (and with the present). Yet that can only be the case if time is not real, that is, if events of...
My sometimes random web-surfing has just brought me in contact with what seems to be a thing in the world of psychotherapy. Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT) apparently takes its name as a mutant of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, which is well established. David M. Clark of Oxford was a pioneer in CBT, in the 1980s, merging the already established (but until then adversarial) cognitive and behavioral approaches, originally with the idea of helping people cope with trauma and anxiety disorders. That much I knew. What I didn't know until recently was that this, too, gets the dialectical twist from the see-saw brigade. Hegelian badness looms over everything. Just one word: Aaaaargh.
Again I'm cribbing from something I wrote for Yahoo!Answers. The question was, "10 reasons why world war 2 started?" My answer, composed rather off the cuff, ran as follows: I'm glad you allow for causative pluralism. I'll get you half way there with five causes: 1. The inherent dynamism of fascistic nationalisms, which need to prove their superiority to other nations in order to secure their domestic support; 2. In Japan (which wasn't really fascistic in the same sense as its European allies) a collective inferiority complex, which left them wanting to prove themselves at least as powerful as the western imperialists operating in east Asia; 3. The widespread theories of Admiral Mahan on the centrality of naval power in history, and the superior position in which island-nations are placed for empire building. This, too, inspired Japan and helped guide other nations too in a disastrous direction; 4. The excesses of the Versailles Treaty that the ...
Somebody at Yahoo!Answers asks what is "dialectical materialism." When answering such a question I try to abstract from the whole question of my personal reaction to the thing to be defined and just ... well ... answer the question. Regular readers of this blog will know perfectly well that my reaction to DiaMat is negative. But that wasn't asked! So I went with this: ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Dialectical materialism is the metaphysical side of Marxism. On the one hand there is Hegel, the Towering Figure of mid 19th century German thought. Hegel developed a system sometimes known as "dialectical idealism" which says that the world moves in zig-zags, and that the ultimate goal of the movement is an Absolute Idea that knows itself and is all in all. God, then, is not the Creator of the world but its summation and Judge, and the world moves in its zig zag (back-and-forth among contraries, but none...
"Morph"? Really? Back in 2005 I wrote a review of a then three-volume set of books on "Speculative Capital" by one Nasser Saber. Read more about that here, if you like. A very short account is that the review was not a favorable one, but did have as a consequence a memorable exchange in which Saber indicated he would provide a full demolition of my inanity in his fourth volume. Thus far there has been no fourth volume. I'm a patient guy. In the meantime, I see that Nasser is no longer actively maintaining his blog, apparently because he is engaged in the final stretch of writing for this fourth volume. So perhaps 2012 will be the year it finally appears. His wife, Sarina Saber, has told his fans on the blog "Dialectics of Finance" that she will keep the flames burning on her own companion blog, " Dialectics of Social Change." On that companion blog, she has recently posted a bit of dialog that appears to represent a conversatio...