Good post--I agree with all of that.Steve3007 wrote: ↑September 14th, 2020, 10:23 amFair enough.Terrapin Station wrote:I'm an atheist who tells other atheists that atheism is a belief--at least if one has at all heard and thought about the idea of a god.
Yes, if they literally haven't thought about it at all. I think most people have thought about it a bit, but just aren't particularly interested in discussing it because it's not very interesting to them and because they don't want to cause offence or awkwardness. "Steer clear of politics and religion" is often a rule when trying to avoid tension in social situations.(I also think it's a bit silly to say that people are atheists when they haven't even thought about this issue at all, but that's another topic.)
The argument between theists who claim that atheism is a belief and atheists who claim that it is a lack of belief (and that there is a fundamental difference) has happened a lot on this board, and often gone on at great length. I think one of the motives stems from the way the argument often develops and the way that the word "belief" is used specifically to mean belief stemming from things other than just empirical evidence, such as cultural conditioning, upbringing, desire/wishful thinking, emotional need etc. That is, the kinds of beliefs that atheists often charge theists with holding and regard as flawed or inadequate. The theist then counters by saying that since atheism is a belief, like theism, the atheist suffers from these "flaws" for the same reasons. So they play the "If I'm going down I'm taking you with me" move. The atheist thinks the best counter-move is to deny that atheism is a belief. I suppose they'd be better advised instead to examine the different types of belief.There's a subset of atheists who are irrationally neurotic about the notion of having any beliefs. They respond like the board member who goes by "evolution" (formerly "creation") when you point out that they have a endless stream of beliefs.
I think evolutions's motive is due to that usage of "belief" and due to the whole "I'm an open-minded inquisitive child, uncorrupted by the prejudices of the adult world, and I can therefore see simple truths that you others can't" schtick.
The God Question
- Terrapin Station
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Re: The God Question
- Angel Trismegistus
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Re: The God Question
John Cage.Terrapin Station wrote: ↑September 14th, 2020, 9:49 amWhich composer do your cats say they prefer?Angel Trismegistus wrote: ↑September 14th, 2020, 4:43 am I've tried for years to convince my cats that Beethoven is a great composer of music. In vain.
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Re: The God Question
Have you read it? Why do you say it "sucks" as an atheistic tome? It's one of the last great attempts at large systematic philosophy.Terrapin Station wrote: ↑September 14th, 2020, 9:57 amAs an "atheistic tome," and as many other things, that one sucks.Angel Trismegistus wrote: ↑September 14th, 2020, 7:07 am
I set the post up in terms of "not so long ago" and Sartre is the more recent "exemplar of good old fashioned civilized pipe smoking Atheism."
Also, Sartre comes with this monumental atheistic tome:
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Re: The God Question
He cried a lot!Angel Trismegistus wrote: ↑September 14th, 2020, 6:12 amGreat name for a cat! So how did he react to Mozart's Requiem?Jklint wrote: ↑September 14th, 2020, 5:17 am I too had a cat. He didn't mind Beethoven or Wagner as long as it was at low volume. But when it came to the Missa Solemnis or Bruckner's Te Deum I couldn't help myself so he left me alone to experience the Divine through sound instead of scripture and all the other useless theistic mumbo jumbo. Btw, the cat's name was Papageno!
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Re: The God Question
Yes. I've read pretty much every infamous philosophy book. I'm not a fan of continental philosophy in general. It's a category characterized by horrible writing. Sartre is one of many authors (along with folks like Marx, Hegel, Heidegger, Derrida, etc.) where I more or less have multiple issues with every sentence they write.Angel Trismegistus wrote: ↑September 14th, 2020, 1:03 pmHave you read it? Why do you say it "sucks" as an atheistic tome? It's one of the last great attempts at large systematic philosophy.Terrapin Station wrote: ↑September 14th, 2020, 9:57 am
As an "atheistic tome," and as many other things, that one sucks.
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Re: The God Question
While your response to continental philosophy in general seems to me fair and on point, I don't think Sartre in particular can be accused of "horrible writing." Foucault and Derrida certainly. But Sartre? Sartre was a great literary artist. And his writing contains none of the obfuscatory charlatanry of the aforementioned cult philosophers. Below I've provided links to a free PDF of Sartre's philosophical novel Nausea. Skip the Introduction and scroll down to "Editors' Note" on page 5, which is where the novel begins.Terrapin Station wrote: ↑September 14th, 2020, 7:29 pmYes. I've read pretty much every infamous philosophy book. I'm not a fan of continental philosophy in general. It's a category characterized by horrible writing. Sartre is one of many authors (along with folks like Marx, Hegel, Heidegger, Derrida, etc.) where I more or less have multiple issues with every sentence they write.Angel Trismegistus wrote: ↑September 14th, 2020, 1:03 pm
Have you read it? Why do you say it "sucks" as an atheistic tome? It's one of the last great attempts at large systematic philosophy.
http://users.telenet.be/sterf/texts/phi ... Nausea.pdf
http://www.kkoworld.com/kitablar/jan_po ... ma-eng.pdf
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Re: The God Question
I think it's possible to be a great literary artist while being not so good at setting out a clear account of a coherent philosophical worldview, and vice versa. I haven't read Being and Nothingness myself, but I did read (or start to read) Nausea a long time ago. As I recall I don't think I found it to be a page turner. But, then, that's a difference between art and argument isn't it? There are more objective measures of the quality of an argument.Angel Trismegistus wrote:Sartre was a great literary artist.
Of the bits and pieces of texts by philosophers that I've read, I've found Bertrand Russell to be one of the best at succinctly setting out an argument with no fewer or more words than are required. But he perhaps would have made a lousy poet.
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Re: The God Question
Sure, a software instruction like, "kill human", has no power on it own. It has no power until is processed by an information processor, like a robot ...
How can a thought be known to exist on its own? If a thought is experienced then it is (or already has been) processed to some extent.
Even mathematics can have an effect, positive or negative, depending on the imaginer. It is the imagining (processing) of imaginary things that has an effect on the imaginer, which may result in action that has an effect on others.
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Re: The God Question
For starters, unlike you, I did find Nausea a page-turner and read it two or three times after that. The lesson to be drawn from our different responses is: "There's no accounting for taste" or "Each one to his own taste" -- yes? As for your efforts to read systematic philosophy in "bits and pieces" -- well, there's the rub, no? Only full immersion in the presentation of the system will do.Steve3007 wrote: ↑September 15th, 2020, 5:25 amI think it's possible to be a great literary artist while being not so good at setting out a clear account of a coherent philosophical worldview, and vice versa. I haven't read Being and Nothingness myself, but I did read (or start to read) Nausea a long time ago. As I recall I don't think I found it to be a page turner. But, then, that's a difference between art and argument isn't it? There are more objective measures of the quality of an argument.Angel Trismegistus wrote:Sartre was a great literary artist.
Of the bits and pieces of texts by philosophers that I've read, I've found Bertrand Russell to be one of the best at succinctly setting out an argument with no fewer or more words than are required. But he perhaps would have made a lousy poet.
As for art and argument, I don't recognize the difference you do. All art is argument, in my opinion, and all argument art.
Yes, Russell's writing is precise and clear. Every aspiring philosopher should read The Problems of Philosophy.
Bertrand Russell
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Re: The God Question
Yes indeed.Angel Trismegistus wrote:The lesson to be drawn from our different responses is: "There's no accounting for taste" or "Each one to his own taste" -- yes?
No. I don't agree with that all-or-nothing view. If it were true then almost nobody's experience/education would do.As for your efforts to read systematic philosophy in "bits and pieces" -- well, there's the rub, no? Only full immersion in the presentation of the system will do.
An interesting opinion.As for art and argument, I don't recognize the difference you do. All art is argument, in my opinion, and all argument art.
I agree. That is one of the bits and pieces that I've read.Every aspiring philosopher should read The Problems of Philosophy.
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Re: The God Question
It is not that difficult to remove things from, or add things to, a concept. However this changes the concept. A difficulty with trying to discuss the "God" concept is that are many very different variations of this concept. It has mutated insanely.
Is the concept of "God" not based on the concept of "god" - a god of something that evolved to become the God of everything, becoming increasingly powerful until someone said infinity? From infinity there is nowhere to go except the opposite direction ...
If everything is stripped away from a concept, then it becomes omni-ambiguous?
Does this thread have agency? The OP states this thread is devoted to the philosophical exploration of the distinction between two propositions. Any attempt to debate the truth of either proposition could be viewed as a deviation away from this devotion?
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Re: The God Question
The difference between the functional words of the questions underlying the two propositions ('does' and 'what') is one significant distinction that can be drawn. There are also questions about the differences between 'exist' and 'nature' which are yet to be answered.Steve3007 wrote: ↑September 11th, 2020, 7:04 amI think that may be true of quite a lot of "is there a God?" style topics. But this one, in the OP at least, seems to explicitly propose separating the proposition "God exists" from any discussion about what we're supposed to actually be looking for in order to answer that question. That point was the subject of quite a lot of the early posts.-0+ wrote:This whole thread ultimately boils down to questions about the latter. What does 'God', 'exist', and 'nature' mean? Methods that can be applied consistently by all participants are needed to test if something qualifies as God, exists, nature, etc.
A Latin definition of 'God' has been offered which challenges comprehension. However, 'God' is the one thing that both propositions have in common, so the definition of God may be irrelevant to any distinction drawing between the two propositions?
If 'God' can be replaced by variable X, and the gap in the second proposition can be replaced by variable Y then:
Proposition 1: X exists.
Proposition 2: The nature of X is Y.
How equivalent is proposition 2 to: X has nature?
If they are close enough to equivalent then the only remaining relevant question may be: What is the difference between 'exists' and 'has nature'?
Is anyone going to try to answer this?
Just because weak practices are often followed in philosophy discussions, is this any reason not to endeavour to develop more robust practices?Steve3007 wrote: ↑September 11th, 2020, 7:04 am Yes it may be folly, and ideally we rigourously and unambiguously define the words in a proposition, to the satisfaction of all participants, before evaluating it. But that rarely happens in practice. In practice there are usually numerous misunderstandings based on differences in word usage.
Questions of what is meaningful may be less relevant than what is useful. Ambiguous meanings can be useful in literature to help evoke pleasing experiences, but these are less useful for proposition testing. A word or phrase may be useful for proposition testing if a method is defined that can be used to consistently test this.
In this case, methods are needed for Does_Exist and Has_Nature.
In the absence of definitive methods, each proposition tester will apply their own subjective methods which can differ wildly from one tester to another.
This will depend on the details of any method that is applied to test a proposition.Steve3007 wrote: ↑September 11th, 2020, 7:04 am If we imagine the possibility of perfectly, unambiguously defining every word we're about to use, would you say that all false propositions are then false either because they making testably false empirical claims or because they contradict themselves? i.e. do they all boil down to the form "there is a pink elephant in this room" or "2 + 2 = 5"?
Software engineers define methods that execute consistently for all participants. Philosophers can too.
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Re: The God Question
I read Nausea, too, and hated it. But at least there's a better excuse there--I have pretty narrow tastes when it comes to fiction. I pretty much only like "genre fiction," which is an industry term for more pulpy SciFi, fantasy, horror, mystery/thrillers, action/adventure, comedy-oriented stuff, etc. I'm not at all a fan of realist drama or soap-operatic fiction, etc. I don't want fiction about people doing everyday things, having relationship problems, etc. I want fiction that shows me what sorts of fantastical things people can imagine, with lots of action, etc. The same thing goes for my taste in films. This is also a reason that I'm still a big fan of a lot of kids' fiction. It tends to focus on imaginative, fantastical (and often fun, at least slightly humorous) stuff.Angel Trismegistus wrote: ↑September 15th, 2020, 4:56 amWhile your response to continental philosophy in general seems to me fair and on point, I don't think Sartre in particular can be accused of "horrible writing." Foucault and Derrida certainly. But Sartre? Sartre was a great literary artist. And his writing contains none of the obfuscatory charlatanry of the aforementioned cult philosophers. Below I've provided links to a free PDF of Sartre's philosophical novel Nausea. Skip the Introduction and scroll down to "Editors' Note" on page 5, which is where the novel begins.Terrapin Station wrote: ↑September 14th, 2020, 7:29 pm
Yes. I've read pretty much every infamous philosophy book. I'm not a fan of continental philosophy in general. It's a category characterized by horrible writing. Sartre is one of many authors (along with folks like Marx, Hegel, Heidegger, Derrida, etc.) where I more or less have multiple issues with every sentence they write.
http://users.telenet.be/sterf/texts/phi ... Nausea.pdf
http://www.kkoworld.com/kitablar/jan_po ... ma-eng.pdf
There are a handful of realist drama authors I admire, by the way, but in those cases it's despite their subject matter--stylistically, they're good enough writers that enjoy them on a more formal level. A few examples there are Hemingway, Steinbeck and Dickens.
Anyway, re Being and Nothingness here are a couple "gems" selected at random (punctuation, capitalization, spelling, etc. are all Sartre's--well, per the Hazel E. Barnes translation, at least):
"To affirm that being is only what it is would be at least to leave being intact so far as it is its own surpassing . . . it is not enough to affirm that the understanding finds in being only what it is; we must also explain how being, which is what it is, can be only that. Such a process would derive its legitimacy from the consideration of the phenomenon of being as such and not from the negating process of the understanding."
"We are dealing here with an unconditional necessity: whatever the For-itself under consideration may be, it is in one certain sense; it is since it can be named, since certain characteristics may be affirmed or denied concerning it. But in so far as it is For-itself, it is never what it is. What it is is behind it as the perpetual surpassed. It is precisely this surpassed facticity which we call the Past. The Past then is a necessary structure of the For-itself; the For-itself can exist only as a nihilating surpassing, and this surpassing implies something surpassed. Consequently it is impossible at any particular moment when we consider a For-itself, to appreciate it as not-yet-having a Past. We need not believe that the For-itself exists first and arises in the world in the absolute newness of a being without a past and then and that it then gradually constitutes a past for itself. But whatever may be the circumstances under which the For-itself arises in the world, it comes to the world in the ekstatic unity of a relation with its Past; there is no absolute beginning which without ever having a past would become past. Since the For-itself qua For-itself has to be its past, it comes into the world with a Past."
Yikes!
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Re: The God Question
"The nature of x" is another way of saying "These are (at least the supposed or stipulated) properties/characteristics of x."-0+ wrote: ↑September 15th, 2020, 9:10 am Proposition 1: X exists.
Proposition 2: The nature of X is Y.
How equivalent is proposition 2 to: X has nature?
If they are close enough to equivalent then the only remaining relevant question may be: What is the difference between 'exists' and 'has nature'?
Is anyone going to try to answer this?
"X has nature" is a very awkward way of speaking relative to conventional contemporary English. "X has a nature" would be more conventional, but again, that would just be a way of saying that x has a(n at least proposed) set of properties or characteristics. "X has a nature" isn't akin to saying that x exists.
Dracula has a nature--he's a vampire who survives on human blood sucked from persons' necks; he can't be exposed to sunlight (at least not for any length of time), etc., etc., but Dracula doesn't exist. He's a fictional creation.
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Re: The God Question
That's phenomenology, and pretty straightforward and clear as phenomenological writing goes -- compared, say, to Husserl or Heidegger. Our fellow member Hereandnow would no doubt find these passages elementary. Okay, so phenomenology is not your cup of tea. So be it. The "For-itself" is Sartre's phenomenological designation for human being, as opposed to the "Being In-itself" which is Sartre's phenomenological term for the things of the world that don't possess consciousness, like the furniture you're presently using at your computer. Anyway, there's nothing that says anyone should cotton to phenomenological speak. My only point in responding to your post was that Sartre shouldn't be lumped together with the likes of Derrida and Foucault, whose writing makes my eyes bleed. Hemingway, Steinbeck and Dickens are among my favorite novelists, but my tastes by and large do not run to science fiction and fantasy novels.Terrapin Station wrote: ↑September 15th, 2020, 9:41 amI read Nausea, too, and hated it. But at least there's a better excuse there--I have pretty narrow tastes when it comes to fiction. I pretty much only like "genre fiction," which is an industry term for more pulpy SciFi, fantasy, horror, mystery/thrillers, action/adventure, comedy-oriented stuff, etc. I'm not at all a fan of realist drama or soap-operatic fiction, etc. I don't want fiction about people doing everyday things, having relationship problems, etc. I want fiction that shows me what sorts of fantastical things people can imagine, with lots of action, etc. The same thing goes for my taste in films. This is also a reason that I'm still a big fan of a lot of kids' fiction. It tends to focus on imaginative, fantastical (and often fun, at least slightly humorous) stuff.Angel Trismegistus wrote: ↑September 15th, 2020, 4:56 am
While your response to continental philosophy in general seems to me fair and on point, I don't think Sartre in particular can be accused of "horrible writing." Foucault and Derrida certainly. But Sartre? Sartre was a great literary artist. And his writing contains none of the obfuscatory charlatanry of the aforementioned cult philosophers. Below I've provided links to a free PDF of Sartre's philosophical novel Nausea. Skip the Introduction and scroll down to "Editors' Note" on page 5, which is where the novel begins.
http://users.telenet.be/sterf/texts/phi ... Nausea.pdf
http://www.kkoworld.com/kitablar/jan_po ... ma-eng.pdf
There are a handful of realist drama authors I admire, by the way, but in those cases it's despite their subject matter--stylistically, they're good enough writers that enjoy them on a more formal level. A few examples there are Hemingway, Steinbeck and Dickens.
Anyway, re Being and Nothingness here are a couple "gems" selected at random (punctuation, capitalization, spelling, etc. are all Sartre's--well, per the Hazel E. Barnes translation, at least):
"To affirm that being is only what it is would be at least to leave being intact so far as it is its own surpassing . . . it is not enough to affirm that the understanding finds in being only what it is; we must also explain how being, which is what it is, can be only that. Such a process would derive its legitimacy from the consideration of the phenomenon of being as such and not from the negating process of the understanding."
"We are dealing here with an unconditional necessity: whatever the For-itself under consideration may be, it is in one certain sense; it is since it can be named, since certain characteristics may be affirmed or denied concerning it. But in so far as it is For-itself, it is never what it is. What it is is behind it as the perpetual surpassed. It is precisely this surpassed facticity which we call the Past. The Past then is a necessary structure of the For-itself; the For-itself can exist only as a nihilating surpassing, and this surpassing implies something surpassed. Consequently it is impossible at any particular moment when we consider a For-itself, to appreciate it as not-yet-having a Past. We need not believe that the For-itself exists first and arises in the world in the absolute newness of a being without a past and then and that it then gradually constitutes a past for itself. But whatever may be the circumstances under which the For-itself arises in the world, it comes to the world in the ekstatic unity of a relation with its Past; there is no absolute beginning which without ever having a past would become past. Since the For-itself qua For-itself has to be its past, it comes into the world with a Past."
Yikes!
2023/2024 Philosophy Books of the Month
Mark Victor Hansen, Relentless: Wisdom Behind the Incomparable Chicken Soup for the Soul
by Mitzi Perdue
February 2023
Rediscovering the Wisdom of Human Nature: How Civilization Destroys Happiness
by Chet Shupe
March 2023