Jay’s Analysis Audio Discussion: Platonism Destroys Materialism

In this discussion, I detail what I argued in my recent article: Platonism as an esoteric tradition provides the complete refutation of rank materialism. From the archetypal forms of nature, to the necessity of their being a psyche, the mind of man is a mirror of all reality, and a mirror of the Divine Mind. For a written account, check out my article:

We the Platonists Shall Have the Victory Over the Materialists

 

For audio MP3, right click and “save as”

The Strangeloop, Metaphysical Models and Reality

“Round and round we go, where we stop, Godel only knows.”

By: Jay

We often hear from those dominated by the notion of “science” so-called that models of reality can never be a grand narrative again, as well as that the conceptual framework utilized to explain the world cannot be extrapolated onto the “external world” with certainty due to the “fact” that the explanatory models themselves are purely human conceptual frameworks.  Explanatory models are not true, we are told, because they have explanatory power. Thus, Newtonian physics is no longer accurate because it breaks down at the subatomic level.

From Kant onwards, the West has adopted the mistaken notion that no mental framework can accurately and with firm certainty be predicated of external reality.  This perceived wisdom dominates academia, particularly in scientific circles.  Epistemology is a no man’s land because Kant has purportedly demonstrated that empirical knowledge can never penetrate the noumenal realm. But is this true?

This is all poppycock and hogwash, and every argument the so-called scientific establishment uses to foist this upon nubile, young college minds is utterly flawed bullshit.  In fact, the claim that all conceptual models are only models is itself a foundational conceptual claim that purports to position its arrogant pontificator in a place of high epistemic privilege.  “We just don’t know,” it spews forth, “whether the concepts in our minds match up to the actual facts of the external world.”  However, following this flawed train, it also follows that we don’t know that our claims of a lack of knowledge are accurate.  In other words, to say all models of reality are flawed because they cannot demonstrate that they obtain for the objects of perception is equally applicable to the universal claim that “all models of reality are flawed and cannot certainly obtain for the external world.”

In fact, the purveyor of this bad argument is generally unaware of basics of linguistic philosophy.   Linguistic philosophy, in fact, points directly back to the reemergence of metaphysics.  But metaphysics is what modernity doesn’t want to talk about, due to the still dominant Enlightenment phantom empiricism.  Though enlightenment empiricism has been refuted a thousand times over, like bin Laden, it magically seems to emerge from the philosophical grave to wreak intellectual havoc.  And now, a whole crop of “New Atheists” who harp all day about the outdated classical arguments for theism furiously slap away at keyboards resurrecting the outdated arguments for classical empiricism and materialism.  So much for intellectual honesty.

One simple way to refute the above fallacy with linguistic philosophy is to show that the very symbols used by the so-called skeptic of models is that the usage of language itself requires a complex set of metaphysical preconditions which must obtain for the very possibility of language at all.  I have written about this before, but it functions well here as a refutation of this common error.

Consider this claim: Read more of this post

Jay’s Analysis – Kant & Wolfgang Pauli – Inner and Outer Worlds

“A system of categories is a complete list of highest kinds or genera. Traditionally, following Aristotle, these have been thought of as highest genera of entities (in the widest sense of the term), so that a system of categories undertaken in this realist spirit would ideally provide an inventory of everything there is, thus answering the most basic of metaphysical questions: “What is there?” Skepticism about the possibilities for discerning the different categories of ‘reality itself’ has led others to approach category systems not with the aim of cataloging the highest kinds in the world itself, but rather with the aim of elucidating the categories of our conceptual system. Thus Kant makes the shift to a conceptualist approach by drawing out the categories that are a priori necessary for any possible cognition of objects. Since such categories are guaranteed to apply to any possible object of cognition, they retain a certain sort of ontological import, although this application is limited to phenomena, not the thing in itself. After Kant, it has been common to approach the project of categories in a neutral spirit that Brian Carr (1987, 7) calls “categorial descriptivism”, as describing the categorial structure that the world would have according to our thought, experience, or language, while refraining from making commitments about whether or not these categories are occupied. Edmund Husserl approaches categories in something like this way, since he begins by laying out categories of meanings, which may then be used to draw out ontological categories (categories of possible objects meant) as the correlates of the meaning categories, without concern for any empirical matter about whether or not there really are objects of the various ontological categories discerned. Read more of this post

Jay’s Analysis Intro to Philosophy – Relativism – Flight From Reality

Truth? Objectivity? Logic? Knowledge? Metaphysics? Who cares? I do! You can’t have a proper education without philosophy! In this discussion, I give an impromptu introduction to philosophy – a 101 class, if you will. I cover the three major branches of philosophy: ethics, knowledge, and metaphysics, and how these three are inter-related and make up a worldview. I give examples, cite relevant philosophical works, and decostruct relativism as a prime example “doing philosophy” and why it matters.

The Good of Metaphysics and the Sophists

Aristotle's Masterful "Metaphysics"

By: Jay

For Aristotle, the starting point of Wisdom, or philosophy, was metaphysics.  Modernity has more or less rejected metaphysics in its quest for self-destruction.  But metaphysics will never go away, because metaphysics is reality itself – the study of the totality of what is.  Metaphysics is the starting point in terms of actual foundations of knowledge and presupposition, yet comes at the end of the process of pedagogy, as it is the highest science.   Nowadays, aside from some continental philosophers who follow in the train of genius writers like Husserl, theoria and metaphysics have been jettisoned for pragmatism, post-modernism and other forms of nonsense that Ayn Rand aptly describes as the self-destruction of philosophy.  There is a long train of contributors to this gradual decline.

Unfortunately, certain basic flaws in Aristotle’s own position led to the decline, particularly his adoption of empiricism.  Aristotle cut the world off from the possibility of any other world or reality or dimension, and while it took a millennia or two, this ultimately resulted in materialism, positivism and then, the tossing out of all meaning and purpose.  In fact, that last notion was crucial for early moderns like Bacon who did have legitimate scruples with Aristotle.  Aristotle had adopted several ideas about the natural world from tradition, such as that the heavens are perfectly unchanged, static realities, or that rocks have an essential quality of “going downward.”   Bacon rightly laughed at this, but Bacon didn’t foresee that tossing out Aristotle’s final cause, or telos, would result in the total collapse of philosophy.

The place of Thomas Aquinas can also not be forgotten in this chain.  Aquinas followed suit with an Aristotelian-Platonic synthesis (so he thought), which placed human reasoning on an independent basis that never touched the divine, since the absolutely simple divine essence, within which the divine archetypes upon which even “natural” reasoning was based, were never accessed by the mind of man in this life.  He held this because of his idea of simplicity, which was such that the divinity, which is also the ground of human knowledge, never interacts with or connects to the abstracted phantasms in man’s mind, since the exemplars themselves are “in the divine essence” is a “First Cause” that is always only able to “reveal” itself by created effects in this life.  Bacon departed from these ideas, and turned to a more consistent (so he thought) empiricism.  Read more of this post

Transcendental Worldview/System Analysis: A Materialist Test Case

Presuppositional Pillars

An Example from Linguistics

By: Jay

Several recent discussions I’ve had demonstrate the importance of thinking in terms of a worldview, which amounts to ultimately adopting transcendental argumentation. This is relevant, not only for apologetics and arguing for God’s existence, but for analysis in general, especially as it applies to analyzing systems of thought, be it some given community’s modus operandi or a religious system, etc. This is precisely the revolution transcendental argumentation brought, but which has largely gone unnoticed. There are many reasons for this. In the numerous debates I’ve had with thinkers, one can often detect this process, even when the opponent cannot. Once one is aware of worldview thinking and transcendental argumentation, it is truly a paradigm shift in the approach to rational discourse, be it some issue of metaphysics or morals.

What we can trace out from this is that persons operate on the basis of their presuppositions. More often than not, individuals are inconsistent with their operating principles, and hold to conflicting positions. When dealing with more intelligent individuals, this tendency is certainly decreased, yet more often than not it is still a prevalent tendency.  For example, we may look at a person who claims to be a hardcore, reductionist materialist. Irrespective of the goal of argumentation involved in engaging or analyzing this person, one can trace out the kind of conclusions they ought to come to, given their pre-commitments. Thus, for an illustrative example, a reductionist materialist will often make the universal claim that “all that exists is matter.”  This is problematic on numerous levels, not merely that it attempts to show what it cannot do in its own system. But thinking of this view as a totality system is what is key.  In other words, we trace out all the multitude implications of what would follow from adopting the foundational precondition that this person believes to be “rational.”

First of all, we consider the claim itself – that all that exists is purely material. On the first level of analysis, we can consider whether this question is possible to demonstrate, since generally those who advocate such a notion will also claim they adhere to the “scientific method.”  The scientific method, however, gives no possibility of ever demonstrating such a universal claim. One would have to demonstrate perceptual knowledge of every possible location in the universe, and further show that each locale is purely material. This is of course, impossible, but even if it were, it would not follow from some mind doing this that some locale not presently under examination does not contain something immaterial. It is impossible to demonstrate a universal negative. But rarely would any materialist go to such extremes, though I have seen some otherwise highly intelligent people jump to absurd and irrational conclusions in such worldview analyses. What usually occurs at this point is that the person concedes that his view is a hypothesis, and it is the most rational. It becomes an agnostic view.  A view, however, which admits that it’s most foundational premise is itself doubtful begins to give rise to bigger and bigger problems. Read more of this post

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