El Imparcial, October 6, 1910.

[Note: All translations were done by longknowledge.]

. For me, when Heraclitus says All is in flux, this is no different and equally valid as Quantum Mechanics equations that describe nature via wave/particle equations. However, both descriptions are useful for different aspects of life.


Rich

Sorry, but "for me' is not an argument.

For me it is. It is one of the primary ways I communicate my feelings about the stock market to people, with great success. Much more so than any syllogism.

What one feels is often the only argument. For example, if someone says that they enjoyed playing tennis with me. I feel good. That is it.

Feelings are probably the most important factor in human development.

Rich

What one feels is not an argument in any sense of the the word, "argument" I am familiar with. The purpose of arguments is not to communicate feelings. The purpose is to establish a proposition as true. Perhaps you ought to look up the word in a good dictionary. You seem to be uncertain of its meaning. Words do not mean anything you please them to mean. You might notice that the people who have just won Nobel prizes did not win them for their feelings.

I think what was meant here is that what one feels can be an effective tool to use in an argument, not an argument within itself. You can't refute the feelings of some one else.

I think what was meant here is that what one feels can be an effective tool to use in an argument, not an argument within itself. You can't refute the feelings of some one else. Say, for example, that you and I go and see a movie. When we walk out of the movie you say "I liked that movie." and I say "I disliked that movie." I can't tell you that you dislike the movie no matter how much I want to, because you did enjoy the movie. I can certainly give reasons as to why I disliked the movie to try and change your mind, but it's much harder to argue against when it's opinionated and not logical. Rich simply gave his opinion, opinions can be argued against, it's just not as easy when there's no clear cut answer to how a person should feel about a subject. And also, while Rich may not have been originally arguing with his initial two cents, you made it into an argument the moment you called it into question.

Yes, I agree. And more than this, for me life and philosophy is not simply a set of logical syllogisms, that are pieced together with the purpose of winning some argument. It is about understanding life, and one does this by understanding one's own feelings and those of others. How are they similar? How are they different? Why is this so?

Feelings tap into an aspect of life that thinking alone cannot.

Rich

Recent discussions elsewhere in this Forum have focused on how physics differs from metaphysics. It has been said that physics talks about physical events or "phenomena" and that metaphysics, among other things, talks about talk about physical events or phenomena, i.e., metaphysics talks about physics, but not about physical events. But this could lead to an infinite regression, for in talking about metaphysics and its relationship to physics, are we engaging in talk about talk about talk about physical events, or metametaphysics, and so forth.

Ortega avoids this regression by regarding physics, and also biology, as "metaphysical events." Thus metaphysics could be defined as the study of metaphysical events, including physics and biology.

Now the point also has been raised that physics involves experiments, which are physical events. Experiments are physical events performed to test hypotheses. But what are hypotheses? Hypotheses, in the case of physics, are statements about physical events. This is the part of physics that is usually understood as involving talk about physical events.

And what about the experiments themselves? The purpose of the experiment is to test whether or not the statements about the physical events correspond to the physical events occurring during the experiment. But what is involved in designing the experiment; that is, in making the plan of the sets of physical events to be performed by the physicist during the experiment? Is designing an experiment a physical event? Is it talk about a physical event? Is it a metaphysical event?...

And what is talk? Is it a physical event or a metaphysical event? Or both?
Comments welcome.

My take is that this really concerns our attitude towards knowledge itself. I am not familiar with Gassett, but he has made a fundamental point, which itself would be regarded as controversial by naive realists. He is calling attention to the role of the observing intelligence in the construction of all of our knowledge. Whereas the naive realist account will say that physics measures or gives an account of the nature of reality as such, Gassett here is pointing out that the giving of the account is as much a part of the subject as the objects at which it is directed. So there is a level of self-awareness and self-criticism implicit in this understanding which is not apparent in naive realism. That is my interpretation.

I don't really see how he will avoid a regression here though (other than by declaring 'it is avoided').

As regards some of the other points - it is important to think carefully about the specific use of words such as 'metaphysics' and 'phenomena' and so on. They are such broad words they can be understood in a huge variety of ways, which is often a prelude to confusion, in that then we will all be using the same words, but discussing slightly different ideas. The word 'metaphysics' itself is traceable back to Aristotle. From that time on, metaphysics occupied a particular role in the broader context of Western philosophy and was thought of in particular ways. This is important to understand, only insofar as it helps to form a background understanding of 'metaphysics' which is a notoriously slippery subject. There are many who will not use the word at all, and others who use it to refer to ideas completely outside the tradition in which it was first coined.

As regards phenomena - if you look at modern continental philosophy, the 'phenomenologists' also rejected traditional metaphysics. They talk about 'phenomena' in their effort to analyse 'appearances as such' without reference to the traditional metaphysics. So as soon as you say 'physics talks about phenomena' a slight alarm bell goes off for me, because in philosophical discourse, 'phenomena' has a slightly different connotation to what it might have in physics.

Anyway, overall I very much in agreement with what Gasset is saying here, but the subject is treacherous, one slip and you're in deep water.:bigsmile:

If Ortega defines metaphysics as the study of metaphysical events, and metaphysical events include (and contain) physical studies, such as physics and biology, which discuss physical events, then by Ortega's definition of metaphysics, experiments and hypotheses are metaphysical and relating to physics. The Experiment is posing a question to a question about a physical event, talking about talk about something physical, IE: metaphysical. The hypothesis is talk about something physical, however, and therefore it is neither a physical event nor metaphysical. It is simply physics. The hypothesis, however, is not being further discussed. An experiment attempts to recreate a physical event, not achieve the hypothesis, this is why a hypothesis is not considered metaphysical.

Talk in general can be either a metaphysical event or a physical event, but never both at the same time. When expressing an emotion, feeling, thought, or anything else from within oneself, the act of speaking can be considered physical. When a discussion ensues about metaphysics v physics, however, it can be considered a metaphysical discussion.

This is my interpretation of the quotes and descriptions you provided. I may be missing something in my analysis. What do you think?

The question is what feeling have to do with argument.

But according to your definition above, what is usually understood as 'the philosophy of science' should actually be understood as 'metaphysics'. I don't agree that this is the case, and in fact is an example of why the word 'metaphysics' should be used very carefully.

A further confusion arises with the terms "physical" and "metaphysical", because of the "accident" of assigning the name "ta meta ta physika" ("the (works) after the Physics") as the title of the 13 treatises which traditionally were arranged after those on physics and natural sciences in Aristotle's writings. The name was given c. 70 B.C.E. by Andronicus of Rhodes, and was a reference to that customary ordering of the books, but it was misinterpreted by Latin writers as meaning "the science of what is beyond the physical," and the name of the works was shortened and altered to (ta) "metaphysika" in Medieval Greek and rendered as "metaphysica" in Latin. Whence, the word "metaphysics" came to be used in English to mean "the branch of philosophy which deals with the first causes of things" (discussed in Arostotle's "Metaphysics") and "metaphysical" to mean "abstract, speculative".

So we have to look at the treatises of Aristotle labeled as "ta meta ta phisika" to examine the topics that he included in them and see if they represent something "beyond physics" in any sense other than bibliographic, but I'll leave for another day an examination of Aristotle's "metaphysical" works. [As an aside, I'm a bibliographer by training, as well as being a philosopher by temperament.]

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As regards some of the other points - it is important to think carefully about the specific use of words such as 'metaphysics' and 'phenomena' and so on. They are such broad words they can be understood in a huge variety of ways, which is often a prelude to confusion, in that then we will all be using the same words, but discussing slightly different ideas. The word 'metaphysics' itself is traceable back to Aristotle. From that time on, metaphysics occupied a particular role in the broader context of Western philosophy and was thought of in particular ways. This is important to understand, only insofar as it helps to form a background understanding of 'metaphysics' which is a notoriously slippery subject. There are many who will not use the word at all, and others who use it to refer to ideas completely outside the tradition in which it was first coined.

Man's body, however perfectly formed, still connected him to the temporal and mortal world of animals. His soul, however, united him with the eternity and immortality of God. It was thus man's most noble possession and his greatest source of dignity....So while the highest faculty in animals was sense-perception, in man it was cognition'.

That may be true, for all I know. But you seem to have switched views. You are, at least, no longer saying that feelings are arguments. And that is an improvement.

Feelings tap into an aspect of life that thinking alone cannot

My reading of the original quote is that it is polemical in nature.

Gasset deliberatrly refers 'not to the outer man, the anthropos' - meaning, the phenomenon studied by anthropologists, a being-in-the-world - but rather 'the interior man who thinks feels and wants' - meaning, the first person, the inner man; perhaps we could say 'the soul' but in an allegorical, rather than religious, sense.

He then contrasts his physical, outward nature, which moves and goes from place to place, with the imagination, or the intellect, which is capable of conceiving 'infinite space', or the very thought of space itself. This analogy is extended by the ironic observation that while the law of gravity can determine the exact means by which bodies gravitate towards each other, 'the law of gravitation does not weigh' anything.

I think he is making the point, in this science-obsessed age, that we are continually overlooking the presence and the role of the observing intelligence in the world. I see this passage as basically Kantian in nature - he is showing that despite the apparent solidity and massiveness of the external world, and of ourselves as beings in it, yet the very fact of intelligent observation, of deriving the laws of physics, belongs to a separate realm, that of the 'inner man', as distinct from the anthropos.

This is indeed an ancient intuition in Western philosophy - but one that is continually forgotten and indeed has been abandoned by much post-Enlightenment philosophy. It is an echo of the traditional philosophical tenet of 'the rational soul in the intelligible universe'[. . .]

However, having made that point, to then say that the study of physics itself, or biology in itself, is a metaphysical undertaking, is, I think, to misconstrue the polemical point that Gassett was making. I think he is calling us to be mindful of the irrefutable presence and importance of 'the inner man' (should we say 'person'?) as the final subject of education, but to thereby begin to analyse all of the various branches of the sciences as types of metaphysic would, I think, be a misinterpretation.