| Practical Philosophy » Best Arguments Against Same-Sex Marriage » 8/18/2015 3:12 pm |
- seigneur
- Replies: 172
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iwpoe wrote:seigneur wrote:Doesn't take much. Forget your tax declaration or such. If you say tax authorities are not society, then you are effectively saying that society doesn't exist - again.
Do you understand the distinction between:
X is *in* Y.
and
X is Y
?
Sure I do. But what is your point? Tax authority is *in* society, but not (representative of) society? We are all part of society, but society itself has no will, has no life, does not do anything, etc? How can you assert it when society, just like an individual body, has iron arms that it can use to crush you to death like a bug? In fact it is doing it (to some people) as we speak.
I see no sense in what you are saying.
| Practical Philosophy » Best Arguments Against Same-Sex Marriage » 8/18/2015 2:16 pm |
- seigneur
- Replies: 172
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iwpoe wrote:seigneur wrote:
To compare with eating - eating ensures your survival, but you don't have to do it. Eating is not strictly compulsory. Eating is not an agent so that it would force itself on you. You are completely free to abstain. Try it, and in three days try to repeat your argument that there's no imperative going on here.
There is a moral and biological imperative to eat in the case of the individual.
Says who? The imperative only exists if you want to live. Not everybody wants to live, so the rule is subject to exceptions, and inasmuch as it has its exceptions, it's not an imperative. It's more like a guideline or suggestion. It's a biological instinct, but instincts are not always strictly causally binding.
But if you grant that the imperative exists insofar as the survival instinct is to be considered, then the same applies to society - marriage must be established insofar as society is to survive.
Moreover, were I to wager granting to you that eating is "imperative" upon individual, I can only do so while pointing out that we don't eat all the time - and shouldn't. Gluttony is evil. Sure, we have to eat to survive, but we have to eat the right things and eat them moderately. Similarly, marriage comes with its restrictions. Marriage is best institutionalised by clan/society/state, but in its proper sense, i.e. to denote procreative function, and it cannot compulsory for everybody.iwpoe wrote:seigneur wrote:Instead, there's mutuality between society and the individual. There's an intricate two-way relationship that can be termed causal, but it's not linear.
Perhaps this is, in fact, true, but the whole question has been, "Why *must* we help society?"
Since it's a non-linear two-way relationship, the question is not "Why *must* we help society?". Something like this can be asked, but it's not the *whole* question and not the *only* question.
iwpoe wrote:Also, just secondarily, are you labor
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| Theoretical Philosophy » PP -"Platonism and the Invention of the Problem of Universals" Gerson » 8/18/2015 9:27 am |
- seigneur
- Replies: 24
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iwpoe wrote:
The question is not here whether Aristotle and Plato say conflicting things (they do) or whether one is more important or more accurate than the other (in some respects each man is in his own way: Aristotle has a better exposition of logic, for instance), but rather whether *the way of thought* embodied in Aristotle supplants the one in Plato or whether it is a compatable expansion of it.
I see what you are saying here, and it seems that in my view Aristotle doesn't add anything relevant to Plato at all. Aristotle has a handy formalisation of the syllogism - which is important - but to the *way of thought* he adds nothing. Instead, Aristotle misdirects by his odd critique of forms, and by elaborating a different theory of forms, and by listing some categories while forgetting to say what they are categories of, etc. (Edit: I may come across as anti-Aristotelian. I in fact am. Reading his Metaphysics did this to me.)
iwpoe wrote:It is one thing to say that the natural or sensible realm is in some sense subordinate to the intelligible realm: it is quite another to say that it stands in relation to it as a dream does to the waking world.
I don't see how.
iwpoe wrote:There is only a limited and highly contingent intelligibility to the dream world: things pop up senselessly in dreams and there is no hope of a general account of the structure of dreams as there is for nature.
There's quite a similar inscrutability to both: Open up a thing to see what it's made of, dissect it more to discover what it's really made of, keep subdividing and you'll ultimately end up with nothing but thin air. The same process is repeated in dreams, only blazingly faster or excruciatingly slower, and in both temporal directions.
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| Practical Philosophy » Best Arguments Against Same-Sex Marriage » 8/18/2015 8:16 am |
- seigneur
- Replies: 172
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iwpoe wrote:
...why would we ever suppose that we have to help society? That society has an imperative 'for itself' doesn't mean that we are obliged to help society do anything.
…
And who's saying we are obliged to help society to do anything? Has anybody ever been obliged to marry? Hasn't bachelorship or heremitic monkhood always been an option?
This precisely highlights how marriage is important for society, not (only) to individuals. It's important for society, but society cannot make everybody follow it - and indeed hasn't. Marriage has symbolic value to individuals, not compulsory value. But the symbolic value is vital to society - namely, the symbol is about the survival of society.
For the survival of society, everybody doesn't have to breed. It suffices when a critical mass of individuals breeds. In order to ensure that a critical mass of individuals breed, certain symbolic social values must be established, institutionalised or ritualised.
To compare with eating - eating ensures your survival, but you don't have to do it. Eating is not strictly compulsory. Eating is not an agent so that it would force itself on you. You are completely free to abstain. Try it, and in three days try to repeat your argument that there's no imperative going on here.
As far as I have seen, nobody here ever said that society imposes marriage on us and we must obey. Instead, there's mutuality between society and the individual. There's an intricate two-way relationship that can be termed causal, but it's not linear. Society has its will and individual has her will, just like any two people may have conflicting wills and for one to push her own will through, she must bend or break the will of another and the other must allow it be bent or broken. Or the wills may be in accord, aiming at the same goal, mutually reinforcing. Such are the conditions and dispositions to consider in mutual relationships that make the relationships non-linear.
| Theoretical Philosophy » PP -"Platonism and the Invention of the Problem of Universals" Gerson » 8/18/2015 7:47 am |
- seigneur
- Replies: 24
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iwpoe wrote:
That's true, but I understood you to ask whether I would support someone who sharply distinguished between the ways of thinking represented in Plato and in Aristotle but then chose the one represented in Plato *in favor* of the one represented in Aristotle. I would take such a person to tend towards being some sort of immaterialist/spiritualist who thinks that the world of the day-to-day and nature is mere illusion.
But when Plato is more informative than Aristotle, then why not decide in favor of Plato?
And I am indeed strongly inclined to think that the day-to-day world is an illusion, but this does not mean it's dismissible by wave of hand. It means that the phenomenal world has an illusory power which is a force to be reckoned with. It's an illusion, but it cannot be said that it doesn't exist. Many people are easily tempted to say that dreams are illusory and therefore they don't exist, but when you see e.g. a nightmare, the fear that emerges is real, you get real sweat etc. When the consequences are real, then the cause, i.e. the dream, is also real.
It's legitimate to say that waking consciousness has priority over dream consciousness, but this is only so based on the discernment between the waking consciousness and dream consciousness. When one cannot discern dream appearances and waking appearances properly, one's analysis of whatever one calls "reality" has no credibility or relevance.
That which is discerned from another cannot be said to be unreal. In order to discern one thing from another, both things must be considered real. Discernment has priority over everything.
| Practical Philosophy » Best Arguments Against Same-Sex Marriage » 8/18/2015 6:57 am |
- seigneur
- Replies: 172
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DanielCC wrote:seigneur wrote:
But the argument is not that marriage is important because the clan designates it so. The argument is that procreation (a specific biological fact) ensures survival to the clan --> survival is important to the clan (if existence is not important, then what is?) --> the clan institutes marriage as a recognition of the importance. Where is the circularity?
Because the clan is being treated as an actual substance/biological entity which has survival and makes moral decision in the same sense that proper substances do. On this view people end up serving, in fact living and creating more leaving beings for the service of, odd emergent entities.
I am trying hard to assume that you don't mean to say something like "society does not exist", but what else are you saying? Do you mean to say "society exists, but everything that is going on in it has no consequence to us"? In brief, I don't see any objection.
DanielCC wrote:How can something be important yet neither good nor bad?
Eating is important for survival, but too much eating is bad. Too little eating is also bad. So, it's not eating itself which is either good or bad, but how you do it.
| Theoretical Philosophy » PP -"Platonism and the Invention of the Problem of Universals" Gerson » 8/18/2015 6:40 am |
- seigneur
- Replies: 24
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iwpoe wrote:seigneur wrote:
Why?
Because it tends towards denial of the reality or knowability of the world of everyday experience, and the natural world is a legitimate realm of knowledge.
But is this concern appropriate? Isn't it evident that the natural world is not the only legitimate realm of knowledge, and Plato points this out while Aristotle doesn't?
| Theoretical Philosophy » Substantial Form » 8/18/2015 6:23 am |
- seigneur
- Replies: 11
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Still, is there an Aristotelian answer to a point raised in the article, namely, how to attribute formal functions?
Benjamin Hill wrote:Think of the problem as like describing a key opening a lock: is the event caused by the shape of the key or the setting of the lock’s tumblers? Ideally they’d be isomorphic so that each key opened one and only one lock and each lock had one and only one key that could open it, but in actuality that is rarely the case. A key with three bittings partially inserted into a lock with only two pins (corresponding exactly to the key’s first two bittings of course) would be opened by that key—is what’s responsible for the key’s opening the lock the formal aitia of the key’s shape or the material aitia of the pins’ setting? It does not seem possible to non-vacuously decide this...
So, on Aristotelianism, is the functionality of the lock attributable to the substantial form of the lock or of the key? Or is it attributable in some other way?
| Practical Philosophy » Best Arguments Against Same-Sex Marriage » 8/18/2015 5:53 am |
- seigneur
- Replies: 172
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DanielCC wrote:
I gear this is going to become cyclical - whatever a society or a clan designates as important is no indication to its really being so (I will reiterate that marriage may be important - I just don't think its important for this reason).
But the argument is not that marriage is important because the clan designates it so. The argument is that procreation (a specific biological fact) ensures survival to the clan --> survival is important to the clan (if existence is not important, then what is?) --> the clan institutes marriage as a recognition of the importance. Where is the circularity?
DanielCC wrote:Dito the OFloinn's example makes the point that historically marriage was largely a way of handling procreation; it is not asked though whether this was in fact a good thing or a bad thing.
Importance is neither good or bad. Neither is survival good or bad. It's merely important. If one thinks survival is not important, then isn't it an indication that one has essentially stopped thinking?
Given these correctives, none of the objections in this thread address the matter and no alternative opens up the essence for marriage and none provides a good reason to accept SSM.
| Theoretical Philosophy » Substantial Form » 8/18/2015 4:15 am |
- seigneur
- Replies: 11
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The article is interesting and takes us nicely through the distinctions that seem relevant to the author. However, the critique of substantial forms itself stems from confusion about the distinctions involved.
The main thrust of the critique is stated up front.Benjamin Hill wrote:The most obvious and natural way for Aristotelians to respond to these [counter-]arguments is by increasingly physicalizing substantial forms. But then the physicalized notion of form are no longer able to function as formal causes. Thus there is no basis for retaining such entities in one’s ontology.
In the critique, the author indeed takes us through the "physicalizing", but I don't see how such physicalizing is necessary. For example,
Benjamin Hill wrote:Heap and continuum unity are characterized by in principle physical divisibility. A part of a heap may be removed from any other part. Ditto for a continuum, even if that division could only be performed by God’s omnipotence.
As far as I know, the point of continuum unity (contrasted with atomistic heap unity) is precisely that physical divisibility is not possible. Space is the paradigmatic example example of continuum unity, both logically and physically indivisible. Space is a good analogy to understand the nature of form-matter relationship, where the primary difference between the analogy and that which is denoted by the analogy is that that which is denoted by the analogy is non-physical. There's no reason I see why the person who holds to substantial forms should physicalize the form-matter relationship.