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I agree with oLahav’s sentiment. May elaborate later.

I believe love, the emotion, the evaluation, actually comes second. I think a rational evaluation of the person according to your values is the mechanism that can make love “true.” I think, if you love someone, and the feeling comes first, and there is no rational/conceptual evaluation of the person, you aren’t really loving that person so much as creating a psychological/emotional association and dependency that has nothing to do with them. That’s the old, deeper meaning of “platonic love.” I think it’s what we today erronerously associate with true love. “Love me not for my attributes, love me for me!”

Now, I mean, if one feigns loving another because of some insignificant temporary need like money or hedonistic sex that’s another story. But I think when you know someone and you have that kind of respect and appreciation for them apart from any particular thing they do for you directly, that’s objectively valid and still an evaluation, and that this is different from loving someone where the emotion comes before the evaluation. And I think for it to be love you can’t merely enjoy a specific thing someone does for you, it has to be such that their very being who they are is a value to you. But that’s still an objective use.

I think it’s the mystic, the arbitrary that waters love down, and think an expectation fo that is why people treat relationships so pragmatically today. Much in the way how altruism, which is impossible to practice, stops people from acting ethically, when rational-self interest could show us a practical ethics that is mutually beneficial.

“doesn’t that sort of take away from the magic of love, if we only base our love for them on how useful they are for us?” If we’re talking about a very specific use, no. Those relationships are practical, but they’re not love. This is where the elaborate nature of the concretes we’re dealing with make things appear mystical. But really “true” love is still ultimately based on their value to you, just in a very ubiqtuitous way that makes it appear supernatural, which is why we associate loving someone for their specific traits and the value those show to you with a sort of pragmatic “using” someone. I think loving someone on an emotional love you don’t understand and can’t reduce to their actual traits and why those traits are beneficial to you is the shallow love. You don’t love them, they just have superficial simliarities to things you’ve emotionally associated with love. I think that’s infatuation.

“Are you saying it’s detrimental to believe in something non-concrete?” This really shows the epistemological/metaphysical basis of this, like all, issues. I don’t believe concepts that can’t be given specific concrete representatives like “love” and “government” are invalid. I mean they must be ultimately rooted in cocretes. Abstractions are ways of dealing with concretes cognitively; they don’t exist in of themselves. Plato believed abstractions actually existed by themselves in another dimension, and that our concrete world was inferior to this dimension, and that’s why we have the term “platonic love.” It’s love that can’t be objectively, concretely justified. Now we use it to mean love without sex, but the idea was actually that it had nothing to do with anything perceivable about the person whatsoever, it was mystically endowed. It was “above” the physical world.

“And what about when love is unreciprocated? Does that mean the love did not exist, and that it was just an illusion?” Love being unreciprocted can mean different things depending on the context. I definitly don’t believe that you were unjustified in feeling it in the first place because it’s unreciprocated. You don’t love somone primarily because of their use to you in a romantic relationship. You love them because the fact that they are who they are independently of you is itself a value to you. A relationships is just sometimes the best way to celebrate and enjoy it.

The idea isn’t that the particular things you happen to be doing are the purpose of your life. Your life as a whole is your purpose. So when we speak of “ultimate purpose” or “ultimate value” you can be refering to, say, your highest career and romantic ideals because those would be the top values to your life. I’m not saying you should want the particulars around you to be your final destination just becuase they happen to be in your life. The justification you’re making for the need for an “ultimate goal” or a “beter meaning to life” is that you personally need one emotionally and psychologically. Whether that’s our of an error of thinking or an existential need is up to debate, but you’re still ultimately doing it for your own life. So these ideal you have, this ambition you have, it’s still in the context of your own life.

“What’s the point?” You are. And if you require an ambitious ideal, sure, but the ultimate meaning is still you. You’re suffering from the fallacy that to be important something must be reducible to a more fundamental value. This is very true of the particulars we do. But you need to stop somewhere. If you say your life is meaningful because it’s really for some wider value, what makes the wider value useful? The wider value is really just pointless, and so would anything that justifies it. You need to start somewhere. The only place, existentially, we can start, is our own lives, because that’s our means of acting and because life is the only entity for which value-direction is required.

“That’s what I like about philosophy, it’s the only place where seemingly incompatible views can somehow be stretched and combined into one.” Possibly. I’ll need some elaboration to see if I agree or disagree.

Very fun.

I’m tempted to say that I don’t think puzzles are the direct subject of philosophy, which I don’t (and I think that attitude stops it from being that logical about the wider issues) but this one is a good exercise for syllogisms and inductive and deductive reasoning in a very clear, fundamental way, so I think it’s worthwhile in a philosophical context. I’m too distracted by the “otherwise unemployable academics” who turn philosophy into nothing but a game so that I forgot for a second how indicative puzzles can be of important attributes of philosophy.

And it’s interesting on its own terms too. Thanks for the post. I’d really like to get better at these puzzels. I think I can add to my views on epistemology and how to improve one’s thinking from them. I’d like to think of more categories of induction/deduction which these are indicative of, and that could help me think more quickly and concisely in general.

(For the sake of discussion I ignored the other factor here – that I don’t believe that what I believe constitutes philosophy is the standard for inclusion here, even if I think I’m objectively right; I don’t wish to discourage anyone from posting whatever they genuinely think is philosophy. Even if you’re unsure. Please keep it up!)

(Blah, double posted by mistake.)

I understand that the significance of facts is contextual and that a true appreciation of them depends on understanding how they relate to you specifically, which varies from person to person, but in order to figure all of that out in a useful way you need to know what facts are true objectively. If something is broken at your work place and everyone looks at this fact and responds to it cynically and apathetically, while you respond to it constructively, you are contextualizing the knowledge differently; but this requires an appreciation of the objective fact that it’s broken to be meaningful or useless; context itself is just other facts. Even when you shift your attitude you are acting on the fact that a better attitude is more prosperous which is objectively true. Your method of thought is more important in most situations than the particulars of the situation, but your method of thought is itself indicative of certain facts about human nature and is only useful when you have a firm grasp of the situation’s particulars.

Although I wouldn’t have written it that way myself, becuase the facts issue is so important to me, I think he likely means “the particular facts of one’s situation,” not facts as in understanding the objective truth in your attemps to rise above one’s circumstance. So I still agree in essence with this piece.

I think love is simply an emotional response to a top value, probably an irreplacable one. As human beings surviving and pursuing happiness, it is necessary that we evaluate the opportunities around us and pursue what we consider to be our values, and our emotions respond accordingly. It is natural that we would feel a very emotional, intense reaction to top values of ours, and when it’s embodied in an irreplacable sort of individual human being, that is particularly intense. I think trying to justifying it with anything mystical, convuluted, or self-sacrifical, waters it down.

And I think it’s as simple as that. Seeing as no non-concrete, mystical worlds exist, basing your love on that is turning your love into an illusion. Love is real when you base it on someone’s actual, concrete attributes and how much of an asset they are to you in this life. And it can become very intense and very real when you experience it that way. I believe in the intensity and euphoria we associate with unexplainable transcendental love, but I believe it can be logically explained based on our real values.

I think the golden rule, as it’s usually called,”do unto others as you would have them do unto you” is definitly useful as a tool to keep fairness and objectivity in interactions, but I don’t think it stands up as an ultimate ethical principle. It doesn’t give us a basic reason why we should treat others with fairness or tell us what we should want have done unto us or what one has a right to demand be done unto us by others.

As for the “rise above individualism” thing, I think your view of how relationships should end up “one’s own interest in the interest of all others and one’s own harm if one harms others” is quite valuable but that a fundamental epistemological and ethical betrayal of individualism is harmful to that end. The human means of knowing truth is reason integrating sense perception, which requires independent judgement. In ethics, we are fundamentally acting as agents for ourselves and must value our own lives in order to pursue anything else, and if we don’t appreciate this we will turn it into a dog-eat-dog world. Ultimately we have to be self-interested, and the only way to have harmonious relationships, is to create an ethics of rational self-interest that (as it would, if created rationally) integrates the fact of harmonious, fair relationships as part of that. If we advocate ultimately living for others or ultimately using other’s as our onus of proof, we will all destroy ourselves, and ethically end up simply trying to exploit others, as morality will be impossible to practise (which actual altruism is), causing us to merely hedonistically trying to exploit altruism. Real truth requires us to see beyond ourselves in the sense of using reason to see things objectively and understand that the universe is not centered on us as opposed to a short-sighted “me right now” attitude, but that reason is not collective either. “It’s true because I feel it” is no more wrong than “it’s true because I think other people would want me to.” The real onus is: “it’s true becuase I can prove it. It’s true becuase it makes sense.”

Ethics is not relative, but it’s contextual. What I mean is that ethical truth is not a random, undefinable, subjective play it by ear type issue, but it’s not handed down in pre-packaged commandments. A system of ethics needs to be (and in my belief has been in part by Ayn Rand) created based on the objective needs of human life, and that will include respecting the rights of others. And only via this can we live harmoniously, or at all. And these ethics cannot just be followed blindly, but must be justified and understood, to be properly implimented, and they will be objectively derived, but understood and contextually applied.

Fundamentally what do “right” and “wrong” mean? They must refer to a right or wrong for something, and the only something which can cease to exist and which can pursue goals is life. Life is the only entity that pursues values which, if it fails in, it will destroy itself in that failing; life is the only means of evaluation, the only thing for which anything can be “right” or “wrong.” So life is necessarily our standard, and seeing as we are our selves and that’s how our minds are divided and all action we take is via our own lives, whose life is necessarily our own. So it stands to reason that any system of ethics we create must be for living our own lifes here in reality. And yeah, harmonious relationships are definitly integral to that, but they are not an end in themselves, as ubiquitously necessary as they are. Taking living for others as an ultimate justification will just make people cynical, in that they will believe they must sacrifice themselves in order to be moral, so they’ll just stop being moral or use morality as something to hedonistically exploit, as most people take the altruism we clamor about today.

I apologize if I gave you the impression I was acting in a vainful battle or implying intolerance to your right to pursue your thoughts or beliefs.

I believe there is actually objective in answers in philosophical discussions and explain my view of what those are forcefully, as I believe that’s part of the paradigm of useful free expression. I didn’t mean anything personally antagonizing or to imply that you shouldn’t be contradicting me.

I disagree “that no one can teach others any thing unless it is already present in the taught,” unless you mean available to them with their own independent reason.

“Life is not all that easy as it seems!” I don’t think anyone here or in most places considers life or these issues easy. I don’t think I’m implying these issues are easy by stating there are actual objective, useful answers.

Yes, it’s definitly a matter of one’s own realization. But not all realizations are true or beneficial, although I do believe in another’s right to pursue whichever he or she happens to have even I don’t think it’s a true or beneficial one.

Yes. Yes it does. Everything we say that we can prove by integration sense perception and logic in our day to day life is absolute truth. We take “absolute” to mean “transcendental,” but that’s the fraud of mystifying certainty and absolutism that most philosophy has perpetrated for us, rooted in the mind-body dichotomy.

All we know, all that our words refer to, is the world around us, and no matter what else we discover, what we know is still true here. We can find universe where the laws of physics are different, but the laws of physics will have always been true here and now. Absolute truth is quite available to us, and mystifying it is one of the deadly frauds we have perpetrated on us my the intelligentsia.

We’ve discovered with science the world of subatomic particles and the world of galaxies. But there’s nothing to make these scales more “absolute” than the scale, than the level we see things on. Of course we see things in our terms, but so long as we’re aware of that, there’s nothing subjective about that, nothing non “absolute” about it. Your knowledge of the layout of your house is absolutely true even if you just moved in and forget what street it’s on for a moment. Our knowledge of the material world as we see it is true no matter what else we discover.

As for the whole “oneness” thing, yeah, there’s important in the sense that there’s only one existence and all truths integrate, which we should remember, and keeps our objectivity. But we, as individuals, are distinct entities from the other particulars that we see, and really knowing that we are not omnipotent and can’t be is how we stop our “subjective” qualities from actually being distortions.

Heh, that’s an old one. I’d ask the professor for a less marginalizing sentence myself!

Inform me of the rationale if I’m missing it, but isn’t calling it “bitch magazine” just giving chauvinists fodder for their stereotyping? Shouldn’t we be promoting gender equality as something constructive and mutually beneficial, not something antagonistic? I believe it is the first two, and I think most of you would agree.

I think looking purely at the fact that men control most of the world today as the primary problem is hugely oversimplifying (although it is very likely that in a world without sexism women would have a much greater share of power, and that is definitly the case about most non-Western countries.) I believe sexism and racism persist today despite their social unpopularity because we have failed to grasp the basic positive belief that underlies gender and racial blindness in evaluating people: rational individualism. The premise that human beings have the ability to be rational and that this choice lies with individuals who should be judged as individuals, not collectives. Despite our disfavor for racism and sexism per se, we still look at people as collectives, and so we implicitly allow racism and sexism to spread. This causes us to see gender and racial issues as zero-sum, group-eat-group, and so no progress is made, we just fight back and forth.

Many so-called feminists today generalize against men and are prematurely forgiving to women that act badly. Now, I’m not trying to say that men suffer from as much injustice as women, especially in terms of the world as a whole, but my point is that by judging suffering by collectives were allowing sexism’s basic premise in. Certain women do act in sexist way that generalizes men, and much of male chauvinism I see around me (which makes me sick and I’ve started speaking out against) is accepted because it is shown as a reaction against the sexist “feminists.” And then the sexist women justify themselves with the chauvinists.

So a cycle develops. Sexist, and racist, people justify themselves with sexism and racism in the other gender. And the net result is really that individuals who wish to be judged as individuals and to interact with other individuals freely are punished, and individuals who try to exploit the tribe gain. I believe that competent, fair men and women have a lot more in common with each other than either does with an irrational person in the same gender. A woman given a position she doesn’t deserve purely because of gender quotas does not put us in the right direction. Clearly many women are suffering from unfairness, so we should look at how to make sure they have equal opportunity and are not being misjudged so that they can organically reach positions of power; that is, don’t just arbitrarily increase the number of women in positions, but put them in a position where they have a fair chance to get them, so that the right women do. Think about it more and we can see there are many, many facets to which all forms of prejudice are cyclical and survive by setting better individuals of each group against eachother. But I do not benefit when a competent woman is not hired because the man hiring her is sexist and you, frankly, do not benefit if a woman is hired only because of a quota; we should all want to live in a world where the most competent people are put into positions and where we all have, despite our gender, the opportunity to become competent. Sure, that will result in more women, becuase they are currently underepresented, and I think that’s great, but our emphasis should be on fairness, not primarily gender numbers. So we shouldn’t think: is it a man or a woman’s world? But: is it a world where people are being judged fairly? And right now, unfortunately, it isn’t close enough to that.

Oh, oLahav, to respond to some of your more concrete comments on my view of the meaning of life that you made a while ago…

I’m saying that life itself is the only meaning and that everything else should be judged on the standard of one’s life. So you’re saying: doesn’t that exclude caring about other people. Well, you’re the proprioter of your own life, so you tell me. Are you telling me that other people aren’t a value to your life?

I’m sure you do, of course, but that hypothetical is merely the best way to show what I mean. “Me me me right now” and your own life being your ultimate purpose are two very different things. I believe in rationally pursuing one’s self-interest over the long-term, and that means respecting the rights of all others and building relationships with people you evaluate to be of value to you. And don’t take that as some sort of manipulative exploitative thing. By “value” I don’t mean necessarily financial (although that’s legitimate, so long as you do it in the form of material trade and don’t pretend it’s anything ese) value. I mean that when someone is close to us, such as our friends or romantic partners, defending them and doing things for them is entirely consistent with our life as our own ends. Who would want sacrificial love, love as a favor, love out of duty?

Well, the answer to your question (er not really phrased as a question but you know) “How, I’ve yet to figure out…” in my view is exemplified in this very discussion. Rk said, for example: “I believe the purpose of all this is to teach us to see the meaninglessness of all this and discover the real meaning.” By “all this” he meant the world available to us, cut off from some “better” world. Earlier he said: “I believe that as one grows spiritually, one realises that the real evolution/development is inherent with the shedding of the false sense/illusion of an individual ego.” So, “meaning” lies in leaving the perceivable world around us with our sense of individualism. To find meaning in life is to leave the world in which we live.

And that’s the tragic viewpoint given to us by Plato (and this is all very much rooted in epistemology, and in what is being said the ultimate truth discussion, which I will comment on shortly) with his transcendental world of superior pure concepts above our material world and his allegory of the cave, where we are all chained down looking at shadows. We’re made to feel guilty for everything concerning our sense of individualism, what we can directly perceive and deal with, and the goals and signifigance we attach to them. We’re supossed to find meaning in something undefinable and impossible. So were caught between finding a conceptual, ethical, philosophical meaning and actually being able to live our life concretely.

Hence, on the other side of the coin, you find hedonistic, short-sighted individuals who don’t care about anything other than his immediate whim. How can you blame them? They’ve been told that forgetting themselves and their earthly desires is the key to meaning; who the hell wants to do that?

We talk about the “meaning of life” but we forget what it is that the word “life” refers to. It refers to this. It refers to this thing we do every day, that you OLahav do when you write about business and your non-philosophy interests, it refers to when all of us gets up every morning and pursues what we will enjoy and what furthers our life. We are individuals, our minds are independent, we do perceive actual provable material entities and integrate that info with our mind, and this experience, being all that there is, all that our information can refer to, is what morality should be working on, not teaching us to betray it. And we could deal with this world a lot better and a lot more ethically if we made morality about this world.

“If we get too caught up in what is fleeting and unimportant, we disregard what the long-term holds for us.” That is indeed true, when it comes to whims, when it comes to throwing out all context for whatever you feel like right now. But at the sum of our lives there is nothing but concrete, nothing but the day to day life our primitive senses show us. Ethical systems and long-term, conceptual thinking is great for integrating our knowledge of all these days to get the most out of them as a whole, but the long-term is nothing but a bunch of short-terms and we will not serve it by feeling guilty for feeling immediate pleasure and taking pride in who we are as individuals.

Of course, so long as we believe that sense perception is “primitive” and that conceptualization is possible without it, we’re stuck on this ethical issue. So I should proceed to argue in favor of evidence-reason integration in epistemology so I can back myself up. And for the individual being the primary unit of life to deal with.

I am working on one. I will indeed inform you.

The premise of this question is to distract you with irrelavent information. Many riddle-style questions require you to twist all the information around in an unintuitive way. In this question, it uses the information and the potentially unintuitive answer as a decoy, and actually has an intuitive answer, which ironically may less intuitive. It’d work better verbally.

Absolutely not!

Oh, um, wait a minute…

Keep in mind I didn’t even read all that, but I think Aristotle ruled everything and Plato ruled destroying civilization.

That being said, we might want to continue this in a thread in my community (if we do continue it) instead of hijacking this one!

You’re right.

When you say this is just conjecture do you mean you’re guessing that that’s the reason or that the popular belief that that is why he painted it that way is just conjecture? I’m really, really confident that is the idea. Even if there isn’t stated explanations by Rapheal, which I was under the impression there is, just knowing both philosophers thoroghly and seeing that makes it way too consistent to be a coincidence.

I didn’t recognize the quote, but yeah, it is unfortunate she put the Socrates quote beside Plato now that I’m aware of it.. I would find it less of a problem if the quote were from a 20th or 21st century scholar and not someone closely related to the person in the picture; it would feel less misleading.

Haha Krista you got the philosophy nerds coming on and being anal about the details of your arguement essay!

P.S. Krista you mispelt always. This is Learnhub’s peer review in action.

P.P.S. Plato wasn’t exactly Aristotle’s “master” and my strong preference for the second makes me slightly unhappy with that way of describing it =P