DanielCC wrote:

 People go through a knee-jerk associative reaction 'God existed it would be horrible for gay people' without even really understanding the meaning of the concepts involved i.e. that God is by definition the source of all value which is itself morally perfect and if X attitude to gay people is wrong then God is not going to hold it. Before people e.g. Nietzsche, Sartre, Russell and the French libertines thought the non-existence of God implied the non-existence of value; now they just associate it with freedom from a value system they do not like. Of course secular humanists in their malevolence have fostered this.

I have seen this line of argument also by Jeremy here. Sorry for my ignorance on this topic but I am really curious to ask a question. If I grant that God as you defined it exist, you would also certainly be interested in knowing if any religion paint a truthful picture of God and that would also include moral goodness. Do you have an account of morality to be able to answer such question? If God is defined as the good, how can you define what is good other than referring to God? Would it not be impossible to give an account of what is Good? It would be also contentious to accept anything created as good. I don't think anyone would accept that a world with devastating natural disasters, diseases and etc as morally perfect.

Last edited by nojoum (4/24/2018 11:38 am)

DanielCC wrote:

I said God was the source of values rather than the good. Besides even if we did not know why certain things are good we can still have reason to think that they are e.g. our moral intuitions. Consider an analogy with causation: we have prima facia justification to think certain things cause others before we have a theory of causation (of course subsequent theories might undercut our prima facia warrant e.g. Humeanism in the case of causation and atheism in the case of ethics).

It's the same as it would be for other ethical theories - most Consequentialists for instances would not want to say that a person has to understand Consequentialist reasoning before they can rationally recognize X action as good or bad. Even Divine Command theorists like R.M. Adams hold that we don't need to recognize a certain act as accordant with a divine command to know that it's good.
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I see. Sorry for my mistake. I think it is much better now but still I'm not sure if we know what God would value and I should add that intuitions can be a starting point but they are far from being tenable in themselves.

Last edited by nojoum (4/25/2018 2:40 pm)

Philosophical history is really complicated. Descartes, Leibniz, Hume, Kant, Hegel, and Wittgenstein were all geniuses. I happen to think that some form of the ghost-in-the-machine stuff does indeed stick to Descartes, but that doesn't mean that one needn't take him seriously.

"Ghost in the machine" is Ryle, of course. (Wittgenstein's critique is a different one, with some similarities. But as I said in my reply on Wittgenstein in another thread, part of Wittgenstein's concern is to adequately credit the primitive, inexorable character of views about the mind Descartes and the British empiricists take to be obvious.) One result of coining a term like "the dogma of the Ghost in the Machine" is that people later on will take it up and that's all they'll say; gradually people will come to say it without reading the actual argument. But there is an actual argument. Perhaps like most philosophical arguments it's bad, though I don't think it's obviously so. (It's been a while since I've studied Ryle in much detail, but I would be surprised that a Thomist could not​ think that the Cartesian conception of the mind goes wrong in its characterization of the grammar of mind and of substance.)

DanielCC wrote:

People apply the criticism to Substance Dualism in general though, not just Descartes' own philosophy (or more accurately the philosopher of the Cartesian popularisers). The Cartesian concept of matter tends to lead to problems with causation in general, and issues with Representationalism in epistemology are well known, but to reject Substance Dualism on the basis of this is little other than guilt by association.

Ryle's argument is directed at what he calls (of course) "The Official Doctrine". He traces it to Descartes but he clearly intends the argument to have more generality than that, and his description of the view is clearly not intended as Descartes exegesis; he wants rather to exhibit and criticize what is held by "most philosophers, psychologists and religious teachers."

(I gave the impression that the focus was Descartes by saying that I think the criticism, in some form, sticks to Descartes. That was my mistake. Obviously someone post-Ryle can attempt to formulate some sort of substance dualism which evades the criticism, and then we have a new question of whether it does. If the complaint is just that it doesn't, and yet people still apply the "ghost in the machine" epithet to non-Cartesian substance dualism, then I can hardly think Ryle is to be blamed for others misapplying an argument he made to views designed to evade it. Unless philosophy should be polemics-free, which, I take it, most contributors to this thread do not believe.)

​For the record, I do think Ryle's style and arguments are overblown, and I wouldn't put him on my list of geniuses. Among the ordinary language philosophers, Wittgenstein and Austin are far more interesting and cogent, I think.

DanielCC wrote:

Ryle's argument is linked to something like Behaviorism even if his Behaviorism was not the same as that of Skinner and Watson.

'Something like Behaviorism' could be any of many things, not all of which are objectionable.

DanielCC wrote:

Even if Wittgenstein cannot be blamed for that directly he is responsible for the plaints against 'private language' which informed the Behaviorist thinking of many e.g. Quine.

I don't think Quine's behaviorism has much at all to do with Wittgenstein's arguments against private language. (Indeed, epistemology naturalized, which puts every claim about the world, including those about human language, to the "tribunal of sense experience", seems to need a private language rather badly.) Quine's behaviorism was rather motivated by his (also un-Wittgensteinian) desire to banish all intensionality from language.

​I'll grant that the formula "the meaning of a word is its use" can easily be given a behaviorist reading and has indeed inspired some behaviorist/eliminativist-like projects, like Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature​. But that's just a misreading, for which Wittgenstein is not responsible.

DanielCC wrote:

I will grant that he may have been a genius but I doubt that he left us - written at any rate - any genius philosophy (and by that I mean anything the level of Russell or Hegel).

Well, I don't expect to convince you otherwise, but I think the Philosophical Investigations​ is very much at and above the level of a great deal of what Russell wrote, though Russell was also a brilliant philosopher (far more given than Wittgenstein to polemics, caricature, and disdain for philosophical topics like God's existence and the soul). I venture the same goes for the Tractatus​. I can't say much about Hegel.

DanielCC wrote:

As for Thomists, they have their own rhetorical agenda, closely associated with Aristotelianism, which is pure 'anti-Platonic' virtue signalling. A form of hylemorphic dualism might be correct but it's more likely to be found as such by a detailed matter/form analysis of substances in general rather than by presenting us with two false alternatives as Thomist popularisers so often do.

I'm rather disillusioned with Thomist rhetoric, so I'm with you there.

About Ryle, relatively few people who drop his name or use the 'ghost in the machine' phrase quote his argument in whole or in part (in fact they are more likely to assume it has something to do with the interaction problem - just as many people may mention Ockham's name in connection with Nominalism but virtually no one actually gives an Ockhamist argument beyond wailing about parsimony). Likewise few of Ryle's other philosophical arguments e.g. his anti-Platonist stuff, are actuelly referenced - he is appealed to as a rhetorical device and thus cannot be rebutted (one gets the same with Wittgeinsten re private language and language games).
 

Greg wrote:

'Something like Behaviorism' could be any of many things, not all of which are objectionable.

Take that as concluding from the fact that a certain mental state is often accompanied by a certain behavior that said behavior is identical with or part of that mental state (here I think it's the 'part of' side of the disjunct where we will disagree). Granted Wittgenstein's own comments along these lines sometimes had a Morean 'against the sceptics' bent rather than a deliberately materialist one.
 

Greg wrote:

Well, I don't expect to convince you otherwise, but I think the Philosophical Investigations​ is very much at and above the level of a great deal of what Russell wrote, though Russell was also a brilliant philosopher (far more given than Wittgenstein to polemics, caricature, and disdain for philosophical topics like God's existence and the soul). I venture the same goes for the Tractatus​. I can't say much about Hegel.

Well Russell had a wealth of arguments and interesting positions e.g. the theory of descriptions, knowledge by acquaintance/description, lots of work on universals, the archetonic project in philosophy of mathematics and late period arguments about truthmakers (those later alone I think are more valuable than anything Wittgenstein produced). Even if they were wrong they were (normally) clearly argued and present more material to grapple with than Wittgenstein's oblique and often oracular utterances.

I am curious though why you think the Tractatus is superior to Russell - how is it not a variation on Russell's own Logical Atomism albeit with a greater reliance on Imagism (the Image theory of the proposition) and splashes of Wittgenstein's quitistic mysticism?

Last edited by DanielCC (4/27/2018 9:39 am)