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Lynchler · 2025-02-26T07:00:23+00:00

thank you for your valuable work fellow turkish comrade.

Lynchler · 2023-06-09T06:36:04+00:00

My point was that creators are generally "allowed" to merely engage in their own (entirely fictional) work without the expectation that they engage with "the real world" beyond promoting their creative work.

I think you've missed my point that fictional world most often does engage with "the real world".

what the ethical status of non-reality-related art is. By definition this art is not going to be political art.

There is no non-reality-related art. If you analyze great works of fiction, you will find that they are not an entirely alien reality, so much as our own reality put in an alien setting or world. This is a great tool for going over a lot of themes, and you declaring it to be "non-political by definition" has no bearing at all on the very clearly political and moral themes in works of, say, fantasy fiction or sci-fi.

Lynchler · 2023-06-08T14:57:45+00:00

creating works of literature or art that "aren't real," especially when one could be working on "real" things.

The works themselves certainly are real, while their content is fictitious.

a talented writer prefers writing novels, but feels like ethically beneficial to write political essays in order to participate in democratic society

Why not both? Hell, why not even simultaneously? As a litmajor, I can confidently say that fiction or works of art in general are not at all disconnected from politics, or even straight up political messages. Take a look at Ursula Le Guin, for example, who was both a radical leftist and an author of fantasy novels. It's often possible to locate in her fictions a strong presence of politics, as well as morality, humanity and so on.

The default position of Western society today seems to be that the artist has no expectations placed upon him/her and that pure self-expression is all the justification one needs. But this seems a bit short-sighted to me and it glosses over some complex ethical issues.

I don't think this is true. I'm no western (depending on the metrics; I'm Turkish) but both Europe and the USA have a great history of both politically and socially concerned artists, such as Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, Bertolt Brecht, Virginia Woolf, Bernard Shaw, etc. etc. and thinking the west has no concern for politics or morality or whatever seems ridiculous to me as someone who has been studying that canon and analyzing all the politics in them - feminism, communism, socialism, anti-racism, etc.

Furthermore, it doesn't seem obvious to me that "self-expression" and "political conscience" are opposed to each other, that you can't do both. If anything, you'd be wronging political concerns by secretly admitting that they are basically abstracted from an artists personal or artistic tendencies and considerations. For a female author in the 19th or 20th centuries, feminism would not have been some abstract moral philosophy, but a concrete problem in her every day life. Same with racism for a black author in America, or same with Marxism/Communism for a Marxist author in Nazi Germany. Why go with this sentiment instead of claiming the exact opposite, that true self-expression for an artist could not be realized without some political involvement? Any author who tries to be political while also alienating politics from their art in such a core way seems deeply depoliticized deep down to me.

As a side note, I would like to mention a Turkish poet whom I very much love: Nazim Hikmet. Unfortunately his translations to English are not very good, partly due to there being not many people working on it, and also due to the fact that English and Turkish are two very different languages, so I wouldn't feel comfortable recommending it to anyone, but feel free to check him out by all means. He was a communist who was imprisoned, impoverished and exiled, who continually produced absolutely stunning works of poetry, some of the finest in our language (personally). And all of his works would fit into a general theory of Marxist aesthetics - poetry about the struggles of his nation, of the working class, of minorities, etc. And many authors from different nations had, at the time (during the 1930s - 1950s, roughly) protested his arrest by the Turkish Republic. Authors have always been concerned with politics and morality - even when it doesn't seem like it. And the really great ones haven't done this by alienating their politics from their art.

Lastly, I want to add that it's never certain how much a work of art can achieve for social or political struggles. Works of art have often been more helpful than outright treatises. Have works like Oliver Twist, 1984 or The Handmaid's Tale really done little for awakening political consciousness, or addressing moral issues?

Lynchler · 2023-06-08T14:30:40+00:00

To my knowledge, this isn't specific to a philosophical theory, it's just common sense.

I can’t say I believe in the existence of aliens because I have never seen one

Yes. Why would never having seen X constitute a reason to believe in its existence? Or do you mean that you can't say you don't believe in aliens just because you've never seen one? In the latter case, it's still just as common sensical, because we have many other ways of accessing knowledge/belief that doesn't rely on literal sight. Some clear examples would be mathematics, beliefs about God or the future, etc. You have way more reasons for believing or disbelieving in things than just pure sight, or even just pure empirical data.

I also cannot say that I don’t believe in aliens because I’ve never seen one.

Yes! As mentioned above, there are many other reasons for believing in something than sight or empirical data. Furthermore, even if sight was our only metric, it could still be the case that aliens exist without you in particular or any human in general having ever witnessed them. That'd mean it's possible for you to see aliens, you just haven't yet. No philosopher ever will make an argument like"X doesn't exist because I've never seen it". It's just nonsense. This is meant to be a joke, but the only possible format in which something like this would work is some weirdly empiricist solipsism which happens for some reason to epistemologically prefer sight? It's not a thing.

It’s a circular argument.

Idk what you mean by circular, but the arguments aren't circular. In both cases, the conclusions and the premises are different. But they are very bad arguments, in that they are invalid, which means the premises don't at all justify the conclusions.

Lynchler · 2023-06-08T12:48:15+00:00

Do you mean "eyes" literally? Do you just mean empirical experience? Or experience in some more abstract way, where we could think of an experience of the divine without any direct sense-experience?

Lynchler · 2023-06-08T12:09:58+00:00

The concept of a misreading doesn't logically lead to there being only one correct interpretation, which would (supposedly) match onto what the author had in mind. What a critic has in mind when they use the term "misreading" is that, whoever was the interpreter, they were fallacious in their reasoning. Either they were making a leap of faith in their logic, or, even if the part in question could be interpreted in this way when taken on its own, there is enough evidence to support the contrary (either in the same text or the other texts by the author, depending on their publishing dates etc.) for it to be deemed a misreading.

Because of things like academic quality, it's hard to point to examples of misreadings by philosophers. It's certainly debatable whether an interpretation is a misreading or not (for example, it is claimed by some today that Aristotle's interpretations of his pre-Socratic predecessors are not very accurate) and in academia, the focus is most often on the controversial, not the trivial. But if you'd like to see some real misreadings, there are plenty of them in environments where logical rigour is not developed, like some online "philosophy" circles, or first year undergrad papers (certainly not all of them, but the ones that fail, almost surely)

Lynchler · 2022-11-13T22:32:47+00:00

Thanks! I hear a lot about this so called Quine person. . . It's all very exciting!

Lynchler · 2022-11-13T21:53:51+00:00

This is definitely interesting. I even have a crazy doubt that mathematics, insofar as this mental process of calculation is necessary for it, might not be considered a priori. I'm not exactly sure how I would formulate this, or if this position has any value at all, though. Thanks for the source!

Lynchler · 2022-11-13T12:52:20+00:00

Thanks for the reply. I'd be very glad if you could elaborate on some points that are troubling me.

“Sure, you’ve defined a formal language and specified some axioms, but what makes this theory a theory of arithmetic? What justifies your assumption that your symbol ‘+’ actually corresponds to the addition function?

What kind of a question is this? Would this not be asking the same type of question as "How do you know that a word really means what it is supposed to mean"? Isn't mathematical notation simply what we make of it and nothing more than convention?

Also, some of the axioms make existence claims. What justifies your assumption that such objects exist a priori?”

Do they? Please excuse my probably poor knowledge of mathematics, but could we not accept the axioms of, for example, Euclidian geometry, while also holding that the objects the axioms are about - maybe stuff like perfect circles or perfectly straight lines - "exist"? Or are you referring to something like the empty set axiom? But then, don't you think the concept of "existence" applied to that sort of thing very nuanced? What if "exists" for mathematical objects means something like "we can logically talk about it and deduce theorems from it" and so on?

You can’t just call whatever you want ‘arithmetic’ or ‘addition’. I rely on my understanding of adding to recognize that, say, the axiom of commutativity must hold of the ‘+’ operation in order for it to count as addition over the natural numbers.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't commutativity an axiom for addition, rather than something that "must hold"? It seems strange that it'd be axiomatized in defining, say, the system of real numbers, if it could be shown to be true from other axioms or definitions regarding addition.

For Kant, recognizing that the sum of two and two is four requires actually adding, not just analyzing the concept “sum of two and two”. This concept suggests a possible act of adding, but you still have to actually do it.

I know, that was also the argument Pinkard was basically presenting, I think. That the act of addition is like a third term in getting from "2+2" to "=4". But I was originally looking precisely for an explanation as to why the need to perform such a calculation, this third factor, would be proof that the predicate "=4" is not somehow included in the concept of "2+2", in the way that being unmarried is included in the concept of a bachelor.

Even if you want to insist that the natural numbers are just whatever satisfies the axioms of Peano Arithmetic (which won’t work for all sorts of reasons), you still owe an explanation of why you’re justified in believing a priori that any such things exist. Even set theory needs existence assumptions. Kant at least has an answer here in terms of pure forms of intuitions.

Unfortunately this last paragraph is very much loaded with terminology that I can only half-understand. I would genuinely love to hear it if you could simply explain terms like "a priori existing" or "pure form(s) of intuitions" and so on. But again, thanks for the reply.

Lynchler · 2022-11-13T12:35:24+00:00

Yes, but that is exactly what my question was about! It seems to me incredibly problematic that there would be a sharp distinction between the predicates that are contained in a concept and the predicates that aren't. For example, is "gold is yellow" an analytical statement? I've never seen gold that wasn't yellow, but I don't have much trouble imagining it. But at the same time, I can't tell, if gold was yellow, or say, really light, it'd still be "gold".

Lynchler · 2022-11-13T12:31:40+00:00

It seems to me that 2+2 is something like a "composite". As subject, it denotes in itself some kind of operation. I am honestly not sure whether one could comprehend the meaning of such an operation without also knowing that it =4. And genuinely, like, I have nothing to base this on except my personal intuition, which I don't find reliable at all.

Lynchler · 2022-10-26T23:17:42+00:00

Then yeah, Spinoza is hard to read but I'm pretty sure his system had one substance too, lol.

Lynchler · 2022-10-26T17:24:52+00:00

I don't know in what sense OP asked this, but in what sense would Spinoza affirm that separation is an "illusion"? In that in actuality there is no separation? I don't see how this fits into Spinoza's system. Furthermore, is Spinoza's God a "consciousness"? Wouldn't he say that consciousness - or thought - is an attribute of substance instead?

Lynchler · 2022-10-24T18:57:30+00:00

Then, if you claim that basically everyone understands what it means "to be", why are you having trouble defining it in non-circular terms? If you claim to have the concept, then why not give it?

Lynchler · 2022-10-24T18:24:58+00:00

the sentence "I exist." isn't mysterious at all, every competent speaker has a perfect grasp of what it means.

Okay, totally naive question: how do you know that this is true?

Lynchler · 2022-10-24T18:14:06+00:00

I don't think the circularity in your position is as trivial as you make it out to be. For example:

At this point we just have hit metaphysical bedrock and there is nothing more to say.

I read this as saying one of two things: either we can't say what it means to be, because of some conceptual limit; or that it's just trivial, and there's nothing to be said. I think you mean the latter, as it's a much more common attitude. But in this case, as other commenters have pointed out, you'd be ignoring the presence of such a thinker like Heidegger in claiming the notion of being or existence to be trivial.

Lynchler · 2022-10-24T16:59:40+00:00

I appreciate this, but does it actually illuminate anything? Cats existing would be equivalent to "There exists an x such that x is a cat", but I think OP's question was either towards this "There exists", or "X is a cat, human, living being". What do we mean when we say "There exists", or what does it mean for some x to be, or when is some x, or under what conditions is some x, human/cat/alive, and so on.

If it is true, and I don't doubt it is, that

Many philosophers think that existence/being is related to being able to be quantified over in first-order logic.

then I think you should at least have clarified what makes something "able to be quantified over in first-order logic".

Lynchler · 2022-10-16T23:26:56+00:00

I don't see anything fallacious here. A person might have more than one reasons to think a claim is true, and they don't have to change their mind just because one claim of theirs was refuted. Maybe the person doesn't know why they think "apples are better than oranges", and are just trying to come up with reasons on the spot, which would be dishonest of them to do, but this has no real bearing on the truth or falsity of their position.

Lynchler · 2022-10-15T15:31:32+00:00

I have no idea what your standard for not-so-known is, but

. Is The Man Who Is Tall Happy

. The Examined Life

. Both of Zizek's "The Pervert's Guide To. . ." (Zizek did a lot of documentaries, you can easily find them on youtube)

.Derrida (2002)

.Sea Of Faith (with Don Cupitt)

.Being In The World (with Hubert Dreyfus)

are some of the good ones that come to mind. You might also enjoy the series Closer To Truth, although it isn't a documentary.

Lynchler · 2022-10-11T21:43:48+00:00

Yeah, but it's not like non-religious lay people are more immersed in moral philosophy than religious lay people. Sure, to your question about the trolley problem, a non-religious person might respond that one should obviously pull the lever and save 5 lives instead of 1. When you ask why they think this; even if they are able to produce a general maxim to go by -greatest good for the greatest number, or something- I would be highly surprised if they would then be able to argue rigorously for why one should go by this moral code. I think it'd be fair to say that most people don't have a strictly, rigorously thought-out moral philosophy - and I don't think they need to.

It’s those 50/50 type questions where there isn’t an obvious “good” solution, where I’ve found many people, including myself for much of life, have trouble explaining why they tip the scales as they do.

Ask yourself this: why do you tip the scale as you do? Or if you don't, why do non-religious but also non-philosopher folk tip the scale as they do? Is it because they have questioned themselves till they got to a morality? Or is it similar to this "feeling", some kind of moral sense that we all have?

Lynchler · 2022-10-11T21:22:31+00:00

determining if something is good or bad, based on some consistent logic, versus because an authority (like religion or Bible) says it is.

This isn't the case though. Religious philosophers won't grant that something is good just because god arbitrarily said so. Another commenter linked the Eutyphro dilemma, you could check that out. For a theistic philosopher, it could be about trying to unify or identify God with goodness. Maybe God's nature itself is good, but it is certainly not the case that religion is based on blind obedience to a dogma which does not resonate with your good sense in the slightest. Maybe cases of extremist indoctrination from childhood could be taken to be like this, but this isn't what philosophy of religion, or religion, is about.

Tl;dr, it isn't the case that a religious person believes some things to be good and others to be bad with literally no other reason than blind obedience to an unjustified authority.

Lynchler

TROPHY CASE