Hey, I am interested in following up with this topic, but do you mind posting this at the new forum? We've moved like 50% of activity over there, and are hoping to complete the move asap. Thanks.

Due_Kindheartedness wrote:

What do you think of socionics?

 
I'm not familiar with it, but I just read Wikipedia.  I'm very interested in personality typing though.

I'm going to make a case that is stronger than what I actually believe, but is something I have been pondering, and would enjoy some feedback:

I've a read a number of articles like this one: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/11/psychologys-replication-crisis-real/576223/

If this replicability crisis is not solved is it not damning of psychology as a real science?  In addition to the replication problems, psychology doesn't seem to an agreed upon understanding of what the mind actually is.  For example, most people agree that psychology is the science that studies the brain. But, what is the relationship between mind and brain? Most see them as connected, but no one has a plausible account of how they are connected specifically.  There is no agreed upon meta-psychology, or general accounting of the structures and powers of the mind.  If something goes wrong with the mind, one can go see a counselor, psychiatrist, clinical psychologist, psychoanalyst, possibly a neurologist, or a priest, and you could probably produce convincing reasons to favor any of those over the others. (Obviously some cases would be easy to determine the correct specialist, but a great many would not be.)  It's certainly  not clear that any of these groups have much better success rates in minor mental illness, like depression or OCD.  Psychoanalysis has been thoroughly ousted from academic psychology (and increasingly so in psychiatry), but some of the latest studies on success rates of these types of illness show that while CBT and related therapies work extremely well short term, psychoanalysis has much better success rates after 5 years of no treatment. 
Perhaps that's not fair though, as healing and medicine are really a type of industry,  and not a pure science.  But even among scientists, is it agreed how to study the mind?  There are still behaviorists, introspectionists, people who merely collect observational correlations and record them...  Isn't it true that a unifi

I had a thought the other day and I'm curious what you think about it.  Typically as Westerners we think about the divine as transcendent, as Subsistent Being, standing outside creation.  But insofar as we see Being in the world, can we not also conceive of God as immanent, through the being that each creature has?  If we can, it would seem that the transcendentals would be the properties of God insofar as he is immanent, because the transcendentals are predicates that are co-extensive with Being.  In that case, the transcendentals would be the other side of the coin of negative theology, which seeks to "describe" God-as-transcendent.

That makes sense to me, but I'm curious to hear thoughts and objections.

RomanJoe wrote:

Just a thought I've been entertaining along with a couple questions for those willing to answer:

The medieval tradition emphasized metaphysics over epistemology by discovering the nature of reality and then from there determining how humans epistemically relate to it. E.g. Reality is partitioned into substantial forms and man's intellect can abstract that form and come to know it. Generally speaking, modern philosophers of a Kantian and Cartesian bent emphasize epistemology over metaphysics by starting with the subjective conscious self and then coming to understand the world only through that subjective lense. Why such a dramatic philosophical shift? What do you think is the proper interplay between metaphysics and epistemology?

Although contemporary philosophers may have abandoned the point of view you mention, you are right that part of the modern project is a subjective turn from metaphysics to epistemology.  These ideas were the result of Enlightenment thinking in many ways.  When individualism is promoted it makes sense for your "first-philosophy" to begin with individual impressions or perceptions.  When you start with a religious worldview, it makes sense to begin with God or Being. 

Similarly, where the modernist is committed to reductionism (again based on a sort of metaphysical individualism which says wholes are merely the sum of parts) the AT view stresses both material cause (reductive causation, for lack of a better term) and formal cause (top-down causation, which sees the form or essence of a whole as prior to the parts).  Ultimately, I see the epistemology/metaphysics change as  but one part of a larger change of Western man's worldview that began with something like nominalism and the Reformation and ended with something like the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. Why this larger change occured is a different and harder question though.