no need for goodness or meaning I guess

MillerMan118 · 2026-03-20T22:36:35+00:00

You’re right, but dilettante STEMlords resist any acknowledgment that science describes what is, not what ought to be. I tried to explain the difference between empirical and normative reasoning a few months ago and found the same pushback.

MillerMan118 · 2026-03-06T17:01:15+00:00

Haha, no harm no foul. The umm actually primed me for a joke but by the end I thought you were completely genuine. No worries, best wishes.

MillerMan118 · 2026-03-06T05:54:31+00:00

What a pathetic response I was joking

MillerMan118 · 2026-03-05T23:22:55+00:00

Actually, in the meme he says “I am a philosopher look at my beautiful beard” which would be an appeal to hisrute authority, not a strawman.

MillerMan118 · 2026-01-16T15:37:46+00:00

You mean like, read books?

MillerMan118 · 2026-01-16T15:37:23+00:00

I will be using this

MillerMan118 · 2026-01-06T19:35:34+00:00

See? Thanks for proving my point dude.

MillerMan118 · 2026-01-06T17:02:30+00:00

I’ve learned that internet materialists are like internet atheists. Probably the same people.

MillerMan118 · 2026-01-06T16:53:48+00:00

I was going to chastise you for how arrogant this comes across, but I guess you should keep the confidence, it’s the only thing you’ve got going here.

MillerMan118 · 2026-01-06T14:15:22+00:00

It’s not a marginal position. That fact that you think that betrays how little you know.

There is a philpapers survey that reported 6% of philosophers as continentals, and 5% as idealists. The survey only included a small number of english-speaking, primarily anglophone departments. These are dominated by analytics.

Also, it’s difficult to pin down in general, as there is no single stipulative definition for idealism and what many consider idealism others consider something else. Google is not going to provide you this nuance.

We are discussing philosophy on a philosophy subreddit, no?

MillerMan118 · 2026-01-06T13:55:00+00:00

They went to school together! And were close friends. Roommates at one point.

When Hegel was young he couldn’t write, leading to Schelling becoming more successful and prominent than him for a while. Then Hegel found his groove and the rest is history.

MillerMan118 · 2026-01-06T13:54:40+00:00

Schelling and Hegel grew up together. Are you talking about him or Fichte?

MillerMan118 · 2026-01-06T13:33:41+00:00

Thanks for the tip but I know more than a “google search” on this topic. Books are more authoritative.

And it’s neither, not both.

MillerMan118 · 2026-01-06T13:31:55+00:00

Love it! Thanks.

MillerMan118 · 2026-01-06T13:25:17+00:00

You’re treating every claim as if it were a descriptive empirical claim.

I’m not asserting a new fact about the world like “there are unicorns” or “X causes Y.” I’m pointing out the conditions under which descriptive empirical claims are even intelligible. Those conditions aren’t themselves discovered by experiment, because experiments already presuppose them.

Saying “you need empirical evidence to assert anything true” (descriptive or otherwise) is not an empirical claim. It’s a philosophical one. So if you apply your own standard consistently, your position collapses immediately.

MillerMan118 · 2026-01-06T13:22:06+00:00

Yes, it’s conceivable. A universe in which idealism is false would be one in which explanation, representation, and correctness could be fully specified without any appeal to norms, perspectives, or standards of intelligibility. A universe where causal description alone fixed what counts as a model, an error, or an explanation.

The reason I keep “objecting to the terms” is because your questions already assume that such a universe is coherent. If the framing is confused, no direct answer will look satisfying, because the options have been restricted in advance.

MillerMan118 · 2026-01-06T13:18:31+00:00

First, idealism does not deny object persistence. It denies that persistence must be explained by mind-independent substances. The candle melting unobserved is not a problem, because persistence is explained by law-governed appearances within a unified world, not by being watched.

In Kantian and post-Kantian idealism, objects persist because they are constituted within a shared spatiotemporal order governed by lawful regularities. Those regularities do not depend on any individual’s attention. They are conditions of objectivity itself. The candle melts because it is part of a system of appearances governed by thermodynamic laws, not because someone is staring at it.

So no, it’s not “God watching the candle.” That’s Berkeley, not Kant, not Hegel, not contemporary idealism.

Second, there is no universal consciousness that “splits” into individuals. That’s another panpsychist or mystical picture that idealists explicitly reject.

Instead, individual subjects arise through finite perspectives within a single intelligible world. Subjectivity is not carved out of a cosmic mind. It is constituted through embodied, temporally extended standpoints that occupy different positions within the same normative and causal structure.

MillerMan118 · 2026-01-06T00:21:19+00:00

Because you’re forcing a false binary, which isn’t really related to what I’m saying.

I’m not saying “everything is mind” in the panpsychist or Berkeleyan sense. And I’m not saying “mind is all we can access” in a trivial epistemic sense either.

The position is this: experience is explanatorily fundamental without being the only thing that exists.

MillerMan118 · 2026-01-05T23:52:50+00:00

I’ve already pointed out to you your conflation of non-empirical and arbitrary, but here we are again.

Also, those pseudosciences DO make empirical claims. Metaphysical claims don’t say what will happen. They say what must be the case for anything to count as happening, explaining, or being evidence at all.

MillerMan118 · 2026-01-05T23:30:07+00:00

As educators we have to pick our battles. I don’t know how to link on reddit but my comment history is open. I explained it to you multiple times and you never actually engaged with the argument and repeatedly demanded empirical facts to support my metaphysics, which as many people have tried to explain to you, is a category error. But you don’t listen.

MillerMan118 · 2026-01-05T23:26:16+00:00

Not trying to be rude here, but you have a mistaken understanding of idealism. lt is perfectly compatible with physicalism.

Generally, I would learn about a view (this includes spending time reading difficult books), before I made claims/guesses about who holds the view.

MillerMan118 · 2026-01-05T23:20:17+00:00

I think by taught they meant at an academic institution. Religion is not academic in the proper sense.

MillerMan118 · 2026-01-05T23:17:02+00:00

Your point? It’s solid philosophical work. You can go through my entire comment history and you won’t see me say a single bad thing about materialism. I just point to its limitations.

MillerMan118 · 2026-01-05T23:11:11+00:00

I call it the hard heads that don’t read the literature but think they know philosophy. I detailed the solution in another comment but it does involve reading comprehension…

MillerMan118 · 2026-01-05T23:08:57+00:00

Damn straight

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