I learned from David Stove at Sydney. He was a`very dry and amusing lecturer with a puckish sense of humor and liberally applied his skeptical wit to all comers (and may he rest in peace).

I have just finished perusing his Darwinian Fairytales, which contains a couple of excellent essays. It is salutary to see these kinds of arguments presented on the basis of the many obvious logical contortions in neodarwinism, by an excellent analytical philosopher with no religious agenda whatever.

But my feeling about him is that he was lacking in spirituality. I find it hard to be more precise than that. But I think it has a large bearing on his whole stance towards idealism, which I don't think he understood. I do understand the shortcomings of Bishop Berkeley, although as I have said all along, my attitude is that he presents one pole of a dialectic (as is evidenced by the fact that his name is writ large on modern philosophy). However, on a deeper level, Stove's crusty, common-sense dismissal of idealism results, in my view, at the very least, from a failure of the imagination.

If you survey the various schools and traditions of philosophy which would fall under the umbrella term 'idealism', you will find that it is represented in all of the world's cultures, be it in the form of Platonism, Neo-platonism, Kantianism, Vedanta, or Vijnavada Buddhism or various Chinese Buddhist schools. You can argue that some of these schools are not idealist in the Platonic sense, but all of them have an important element of 'universal mind' or 'mind-only' in their teaching.

I would suggest, anyway, that all of such idealist philosophical traditions originate with one or another mystical or spiritual visionary. Plato certainly was one such, as also was Plotinus, or in the East, Shankara, and (arguably) the Buddha in India. Anyway throughout history there have always been these streams or schools of thought in religion and philosophy, nearer or further from the surface, depending on the temper of the age. And it is patently clear that the modern and analytical philosophers are completely dismissive of them. There was a gentleman's agreement, I am sure, amongst the likes of Quine, Moore, Frege, Russell, Ayer and all the heavy hitters not to include anything of this ilk in the new, clean, modern, precise and sleek model of Philosophy.

So analytical philosophy is basically, to use an old-fashioned term, 'worldly'. Except for now 'the world' happens to extend out by (what is it?) 13 billion light years in each direction. We are not supposed to be 'spiritual' in the scientific age, we leave the question of 'what is really there' to the experts (who I am sure, we all hope, will find the missing 95% of the universe Real Soon Now). Given that the world is pretty much as Science describes it, philosophy is then 'something done at philosophy departments' - mainly, doing things with words. And we won't have any of this Idealist nonsense, right?

Anyway, I really should have posted this on my blog, I know it completely derails the argument; but it is just that without a meta-philosophical reflection, there is no way for me to explain just why I would think my clever ex-teacher's attitude towards the matter is fundamentally mistaken. My own philosophical tradition now does incorporate perspectives from Advaita Vedanta and Vijanavada and Zen Buddhism; which it must, because I believe the modern/analytical tradition has really exhausted its relevance and is no longer a living philosophy.

I like Kant, though.:bigsmile:

I dunno. Elizabeth Anscombe was a devout Catholic. That didn't prevent her from practicing analytical philosophy.

If you look at the Rabbinic tradition in Judaism you will find a combination of detailed textual analysis that coexists quite comfortably with a spiritual temper.

I learned from David Stove at Sydney. He was a`very dry and amusing lecturer with a puckish sense of humor and liberally applied his skeptical wit to all comers (and may he rest in peace).

I have just finished perusing his Darwinian Fairytales, which contains a couple of excellent essays. It is salutary to see these kinds of arguments presented on the basis of the many obvious logical contortions in neodarwinism, by an excellent analytical philosopher with no religious agenda whatever.

But my feeling about him is that he was lacking in spirituality. I find it hard to be more precise than that. But I think it has a large bearing on his whole stance towards idealism, which I don't think he understood. I do understand the shortcomings of Bishop Berkeley, although as I have said all along, my attitude is that he presents one pole of a dialectic (as is evidenced by the fact that his name is writ large on modern philosophy). However, on a deeper level, Stove's crusty, common-sense dismissal of idealism results, in my view, at the very least, from a failure of the imagination.

If you survey the various schools and traditions of philosophy which would fall under the umbrella term 'idealism', you will find that it is represented in all of the world's cultures, be it in the form of Platonism, Neo-platonism, Kantianism, Vedanta, or Vijnavada Buddhism or various Chinese Buddhist schools. You can argue that some of these schools are not idealist in the Platonic sense, but all of them have an important element of 'universal mind' or 'mind-only' in their teaching.

I would suggest, anyway, that all of such idealist philosophical traditions originate with one or another mystical or spiritual visionary. Plato certainly was one such, as also was Plotinus, or in the East, Shankara, and (arguably) the Buddha in India. Anyway throughout history there have always been these streams or schools of thought in religion and philosophy, nearer or further from the surface, depending on the temper of the age. And it is patently clear that the modern and analytical philosophers are completely dismissive of them. There was a gentleman's agreement, I am sure, amongst the likes of Quine, Moore, Frege, Russell, Ayer and all the heavy hitters not to include anything of this ilk in the new, clean, modern, precise and sleek model of Philosophy.

So analytical philosophy is basically, to use an old-fashioned term, 'worldly'. Except for now 'the world' happens to extend out by (what is it?) 13 billion light years in each direction. We are not supposed to be 'spiritual' in the scientific age, we leave the question of 'what is really there' to the experts (who I am sure, we all hope, will find the missing 95% of the universe Real Soon Now). Given that the world is pretty much as Science describes it, philosophy is then 'something done at philosophy departments' - mainly, doing things with words. And we won't have any of this Idealist nonsense, right?

Anyway, I really should have posted this on my blog, I know it completely derails the argument; but it is just that without a meta-philosophical reflection, there is no way for me to explain just why I would think my clever ex-teacher's attitude towards the matter is fundamentally mistaken. My own philosophical tradition now does incorporate perspectives from Advaita Vedanta and Vijanavada and Zen Buddhism; which it must, because I believe the modern/analytical tradition has really exhausted its relevance and is no longer a living philosophy.

I like Kant, though.:bigsmile:

Come on, Jeepers--this amounts to misinformed blashpemy on a philosophy forum. Claiming that analytic philosophy is dead because of a few bad apples you've encountered in it, is just as bad as saying mathematics, biology, and physics are dead because most of the individuals working within these disciplines lack a firmly grounded religious world-view such as Laplace, Dawkins, and Hawking who all happen to be atheists. What makes you think analytic philosophy itself goes directly contrary to spirituality? You set up dichotomies that don't exist. Whatever biases, shortsightedness, and shallowness you've come across held by contemporary analytic philosophers is a result of the times, or an individual's own lack of imagination, or a deeply entrenched personal bias toward spirituality that has nothing to do with analytic philosophy as it stands. It is far from obvious to me that these shortcomings you've noticed in some individuals are the necessary bi-products of the nature of the discipline itself. After all, you haven't said anything that actually incriminates analytic philosophy, you only pointed out a very very small minority of individuals you didn't like who are working within in it.

Think of analytic philosophy as the practice of using logical and linguistic analysis alone to expose the errors and blunders committed by others, nothing more, nothing less. Analytic philosophy is guided by a discipline not by a school of thought like you seem to imply when you claim it stunts one's spirituality, imagination, and intuition. It is true, many individuals in academia will get carried away and become egotistical about what they think they know, but this happens in ALL academic disciplines. Some of the a**holes will come with the discipline, but they are not the necessary result of it. And I see no difference in the degree of sin between the widespread unthinking dogmatic fundamentalism too often encountered in organized religion of any stripe than the cool-headed, hard-calculating, and shallow individuals who come out academia. But I no more blame the stupidity encountered in organized religion on the human desire to give one's own life a higher meaning and purpose than I blame the shallow jerks encountered in philosophy on the human instinct to maintain clarity, precision, and logical consistency in the face of pluralistic error and rampant relativism too often encountered in the individual's general quest for objective Truth.

The fault is in the human being's feeble shortcomings, not in the various forces of his own Nature which make him at once a spiritual unity and a logical contradiction.

Same goes for a whole raft of religious philosophers. Peter Geach, Michael Dummet, William Alston, and many more I could name.

And this activity is compatible with any ideology.

Good post. Just one question about the above. Philosophy is or is not compatible with any ideology?

Come on, Jeeprs--this amounts to misinformed blashpemy on a philosophy forum. Claiming that analytic philosophy is dead because of a few bad apples you've encountered in it, is just as bad as saying mathematics, biology, and physics are dead because most of the individuals working within these disciplines lack a firmly grounded religious world-view such as Laplace, Dawkins, and Hawking who all happen to be atheists. What makes you think analytic philosophy itself goes directly contrary to spirituality? You set up dichotomies that don't exist. Whatever biases, shortsightedness, and shallowness you've come across held by contemporary analytic philosophers is a result of the times, or an individual's own lack of imagination, or a deeply entrenched personal bias toward spirituality that has nothing to do with analytic philosophy as it stands. It is far from obvious to me that these shortcomings you've noticed in some individuals are the necessary bi-products of the nature of the discipline itself. After all, you haven't said anything that actually incriminates analytic philosophy, you've only pointed out a very very small minority of individuals you don't like who are working within in it.

Think of analytic philosophy as the practice of using logical and linguistic analysis alone to expose the errors and blunders committed by others, nothing more, nothing less. Analytic philosophy is guided by a discipline not by a school of thought like you seem to imply when you claim it stunts one's spirituality, imagination, and intuition. It is true, many individuals in philosophy will get carried away and become egotistical about what they think they know, but this happens in ALL academic disciplines. Some of the a**holes will come with the territory, but they are not the necessary result of it. And I see no difference in the degree of sin between the widespread unthinking dogmatic fundamentalism too often encountered in organized religion of any stripe than the cool-headed, hard-calculating, and shallow individuals who come out academia. But I no more blame the widespread stupidity in organized religion on the human desire to give one's own life a higher meaning and purpose than I blame the shallow jerks in philosophy on the human instinct to maintain clarity, precision, and logical consistency in the face of pluralistic error and rampant relativism too often encountered in the individual's general quest for objective Truth.

The fault is in the human being's feeble shortcomings, not in the various forces of his own Nature at work which make him at once a spiritual unity and a beautiful contradiction, assuming he has the spittle enough to continue pursuing both aspects of himself.

Berkeley's contention against the primary and secondary qualities distinction and Lockean Substance as "an object existing distinct from these perceptible qualities but I know not what" is just ONE of Berkeley's problem with materialism in his texts.

Berkeley considers a long series of arguments concerning different sensible qualities, including the so-called "primary" ones. In each case, Hylas is forced to admit that no object existing outside the mind could have both a pair of seemingly incompatible properties (hot and cold, sweet and sour, large and small, swift and slowly). The conclusion is that sensible qualities exist only as ideas in the mind of the perceiver.

From this, Berkeley thinks it follows that there is no material substance outside one's perception of it--or rather that we have no intelligible concept of any material substance existing outside the mind. The reason is that if we abstract from all the sensible qualities, there is nothing left to discuss or consider. So there is no positive Idea of Material Substance.

But wait a minute:
How does Berkeley go from:


(a) We have no intelligible concept of any material substance existing outside the mind.
to
(b) Therefore, No Material Substance can exist outside the mind?

Even if (a) were true (which I don't think it is), and precisely BECAUSE (a) were true, Berkeley CANNOT infer that Material Substance existing independently of the mind doesn't exist. After all, Berkeley doesn't even have the concept of Material Substance, right? So He is inferring from an epistemological premise to a metaphysical conclusion about which Berkeley knows nothing of.

To be consistent with what (a) actually says, how do we even know that (b) is true?
We can't know (b) is true, precisely BECAUSE (a) is true. So the inference from (a) to (b) is Berkeley's own way of being totally inconsistent with his very own view.
Bad news for Berkeley! He is doing the exact same thing he is accusing his interlocutors of doing, namely, going beyond the bounds of possible experience and asserting a metaphysical thesis about metaphysical states of affairs.
It simply doesn't matter what you assert if (a) is true--that Material Substance Exists, or that Material Substance does not Exist: either way, you are going to be caught being inconsistent with Berkeley's own premise (a) since then one would be using the complete linguistically meaningless concept "Material Substance" in one's talk in order to draw a conclusion about the ontological status of all Material Substance. Nice try, no cigar, Berkeley.

So Berkeley's contention, here, is just part of his CORE and CENTRAL argument--what I consider Berkeley's MASTER ARGUMENT--that crops up everywhere in his Dialogues. It looks exactly like this:

(1) You can't perceive any sensible thing without perceiving it.

Berkeley repeatedly says that to suppose otherwise is to be involved in a contradiction. And Berkeley is correct because (1) is necessarily true. But then Berkeley invalidly infers,

(2) Therefore, sensible things cannot exist unperceived.

He constantly goes from,

(A) I cannot perceive that object X exists without at the same time being in a position to perceive that it does,
to
(B) Object X exists only insofar as I perceive that it does.

This inference is INVALID.

Berkeley's arguments work if and only if

(I) the act of perceiving an object just is the object of perception,
in other words,
(I) act of perceiving X=X that is perceived.

But this alleged identity statement is dubious, not to mention completely unargued for in Berkeley's Dialogues. Philonous agrees with Hylas throughout that it is "common sense" to think that sensible things really exist and are immediately perceived.
But then he draws the conclusion from several very poor arguments that sensible things are wholly mind-dependent since, according to Berkeley's implausible view, the sensation of an object just is the object sensed.

But this just amounts to wholescale rejection of the sensation/object distinction without offering any arguments for telling us why collapsing this distinction is plausible in the first place. And each of his arguments relies on doing just this.

But this logical structure I've been presenting is the backbone of every silly argument Berkeley gives in support of Idealism in this text. If you actually took the time to deconstruct the logic in the text instead of taking it at face value, you find this result, pal.

You obviously don't know how philosophy is practiced. When someone presents an argument with premises and a conclusion, many times the conclusion will not follow from those premises. So OUR task consists in uncovering those premise to be as charitable as possible to our opponent so that we DON'T misrepresent him. In my case, not ONCE have I ascribed beliefs to Berkeley he does not actually hold. IF YOU think I am incorrect about the premises I have given on these posts that are not actually Berkeley's own premises, then YOU need to tell me why they are not actually Berkeley's premises because I don't see it at all.

I agree with Jeeprs that analytical philosophy is 'dead' in the sense of Scientism.
Analytical philosophy was once touted as king of philosophy by many
as if it is the ONLY way to whatever.

But i admit, analytical philosophy is very useful and necessary as a back-end tool, especially for modulating, control and feedback.

Actually, I never said analytical philosophy was dead. I said it was 'worldly'. That is rather an old-fashioned term, but it is not an insult: it is an observation.

---------- Post added 03-27-2010 at 07:36 PM ----------

To which I will add an observation that came up in a thread a few weeks ago: that the world does not contain its own explanation. (The response was, I recall: 'why should it'?)

I would hope that analytic philosophy was worldly. If it isn't, what sort of method/activity could it be?

Perhaps an alternative to worldly philosophy would be a transcendental philosophy. The last para was a reference to the cosmological argument, but I will shut up now, I have derailed this thread enough as it is.

To Berkeley, he understood there are two main concepts of matter, i.e. common sense
empirical matter and the philosophical materialists' Matter.
As I had often stated, Berkeley started with the intention to refute the philosophical
Materialists' concept of 'Matter' i.e. the Matter-in-itself.

Instead of requesting Hylas to prove the existence of his "Matter-in-itself", B volunteered to

demonstrate that Matter-in-itself is non-sensical and do not exist.

He started with ordinary matter and stripping all their properties to look for the Matter,
i.e. Matter-in-itself that Hylas claimed to have absolute existence.
By the end of the first Dialogue , Berkeley had demonstrated that there is no Matter-in-itself to be found anywhere.

Berkeley agreed that there is 'matter' outside one's perception of it, but no Matter, i.e. Matter-in-itself can exists outside of one's 'perception'.

'Perception' in this sense is not plain seeing things, but refers to how the 'immediate object' is given or actualized.

The confusion is merely semantics. It should be,

(x) We have no intelligible concept of any material substance called Matter, i.e. matter-in-itself, existing outside the mind;
(y) Therefore, no material substance called Matter, i.e. Matter-in-itself, can existing outside the mind.

I am not too bothered about Kant's refutation of idealism, other than to respect him for

his transcendental idealism and its worthiness.
I believe Kant added a refutation to Berkeley to cut-off the comparison of his philosophy With the apparent negativeness of Berkeley's philosophy. (based on misinterpretation)

In your MASTER ARGUMENT, your interpretation of 'perception' is wrong in the Berkelean sense.
The perception in the Berkelean sense does not mean perceiving in the ordinary sense of seeing an object.
Perception in the Berkelean sense is similar to the German "Anschuuang".

Berkeley's argument is precisely;
(I) the act of perceiving an object just is the object of perception,
in other words,
(I) act of perceiving X=X that is perceived.

The Berkelean perception is related to the following of IDEA and how it is actualized at the given immediate objects of THE UNDERSTANDING and intuition. This is a reference, not argument.

But I don't think that analytic philosophy is "a philosophy", either worldly or not. At least not in the way that (say) Kantianism is a philosophy. I think that Wittgenstein was right. Philosophy should not be a theory or a dogma, but an activity. Emerson's philosophy is just that, a theory, a kind of view of the world. But that is not what analytic philosophy is. I think that is what is not understood about it, and it attracts the hostility the unfamiliar always attracts, especially when what is unfamiliar is understood in terms of the familiar. What is sometimes called, "a paradigm shift" is needed.

Nicely said.

Analytic Philosophy is a merely a definite style (or attitude) of approach to certain types of questions asked, and we all know that it never offers any "absolutely given unquestioned axioms" with respect to how its very own methodology should even be undertaken.

Take Quine, for instance: in his "Two Dogmas of Empricism" he ironically makes some pretty bold Dogmatic-like kinds of claims in the attempt not to be Dogmatic. So even though he arrived at some conclusions pretty counterintuitive to common sense (such as a claiming that all priori necessities [even logical truths such as the principle of non-contradition] could easily be contingently synthetic a posteriori) the analytic method still got him there, but by no means does this method tell us that what Quine says is dogmatically true!--especially considering that Quine had arrived at the conclusion that all logical truths can be doubted by using this very logical and linguistic analysis whose universally applicability he is doubting altogether. So one might accuse Quine's own attitude for being Dogmatic if he thinks he can consistently even do this at all--(which happens to be my own charge toward him).

Similary, mathematics is a style of approach to certain questions about the formal properties and relations between numerical values. But it is not intended to answer all questions about everything simply because not everything can be quantified and expressed within a mathematical framework.

Scientific methodology is a style of approach to certain questions asked about the workings of the empirical world. But it is not intended to be a universal framework that I have to apply to all questions I have about my day to day empirical experience.