The nominative case
The nominative case—aka subjective case, straight case or upright case—is one of the grammatical cases of a noun or other part of speech, which generally marks the subject of a verb or the predicate noun or predicate adjective, as opposed to its object or other verb arguments. Gen...Read More
In this paper, I will discuss Husserl’s notion of categorial intuition, which is presented in his sixth Logical Investigation. I suggest that Husserl formulates categorial intuition in order to show that there are components of our epistemic judgements which are not reducible to the sensory perceptions that accompany those j...Read More
CSH 0:00
So I just asked Sera why Descartes is famous. He’s so famous. He’s like, they call him the “father of modern philosophy” and all this stuff. He’s super important. But what’s that great thing? Did he actually do anything valuable? Sera said that it was: Descartes was super strong abou...
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There are very few ideal geometrical solids whose names we have to memorize in kindergarten. These objects are exemplified in ordinary objects, but their ideal versions are important enough to warrant special nomenclature. In K1, these shapes are the sphere, cone, cylinder, and cube, which are innately familiar, so we...
Read MoreKant defined practical philosophy as
that concerned with “rules of behavior in regard to free choice”, as opposed to theoretical philosophy that concerned “the rule of knowledge” (Kant 27: 243).
Well, that’s an interesting advance. Rules of behavior—how did they start?
I just got an email from LinkedIn and the top of the Top job picks for you list was an open position for Chief Ethics Officer. And I thought,
Ethics officers? What a cookery crock of crap!
To think that the decency of yore would come day be outsourced to...
Read MoreIf you are going to play the body’s game and not commit suicide, then you ought to yield to the body’s game past that agreement. It is better (for the body) not to suffer than to suffer. It is better (for the body) to have money, which is a temporal buf...
Read MoreWhen we discern someone’s moral character, we seem to grok it in a way that almost immediate. We see one or more proclivities, and then boom—we simply grasp that its bearer is disordered.
According to Kant, the immediacy of our grasp is an illusion. Our sense of wrong is not an ...
Read MoreKant’s metaphysics can be summarized as follows:
Part I: Epistemology
The bottom of the self is agency. So when we say that a cognition (perception) reaches the subject, or hits home, or becomes illumined, or that it makes the journey from object to subject—we mean that the object has made con...
Read MoreAll my life, I’ve used the word reason without knowing its meaning.
But recently I’ve been taking an interest in Deleuze’s concern with the Kantian notion of interest. Deleuze understands Kant by looking at the interests of the faculties; or, rather, he understands the faculties as innate interests that constitute our h...
Read MoreSomeone who rejects your friendship when you are being both kind and sincere—that one has core wrongness. Hating someone because they cause something you hate—that is instinct. It is a mechanism of behavior modification that has been selected for. If some cells really do irritate large numbers of others, their ang...
Read MoreThere cannot be a final theory in principle. We have the (local) universe. Explanation? Explaining the universe means, first, assuming the existence of some transcendent field that contains it. For example, the (local) universe is just a bubble inside the Multiverse, which is a churning vastness that births universes like...
Read MoreI: Ought and awareness
You cannot fear reality if you are doing the right thing. That’s it! That is the Alpha and Omega of all ethics. Doing the right thing—but whence this right?
Cognitive choice, applying epistemic rules to Dasein, has ontological effects at the...
Read MoreDualism and monism are the two central schools of thought on the mind–body problem, although nuanced views have arisen that do not fit one or the other category neatly. Dualism is seen even in the Eastern tradition, in the Sankhya and Yoga schools of Hindu philosophy, and Plato, but i...Read More
The greatest good, which may be the greatest long-term good, is appraised differently by different subjects. But the greatest good is also appraised differently by different parts of the same subject (which may be evidence for “the” subject actually being merely the final calculation arising from multiple competing subjects).
Despite the...
Read MoreWhat if the “what it is like” is just faded sense presence made fuzzy?
There is sense presence and we capture from it rules. Every sayable is a kind, a background field of variation. An instance of a kind falls inside the kind in two ways:
First philosophy is the ultimate set of presumptions that constitute both the striving of the subject and the tone of the whole panoply of being-here. Even the simplest and most attenuated question is the ripe fruit of a mountain of metaphysical presumptions.
The perennial discovery of all trenchant philosophical questioning...
Read MoreLeibniz defined the principle of sufficient reason as that which requires us to acknowledge that there is no fact or truth that lacks a sufficient reason why it should be so, and not otherwise. Our subjective epistemic nature is constituted to to assume that what is real is what is...
Read MoreIt is hard to impossible to understand desire. Why?
Entelechy, active power, conatus (effort/striving), nisus (urge/desire), primary force, internal principle of change, light, self-surpassing, ebullient surplus, inner movement, proprioception of mere time, or what Kant called spontaneity.
Why? Understanding means comprehension, and comprehension means has been capped. The comprehended thing...
Read MoreExistentialism is envy and sour grapes for smart people.
SAD FACT: There are people who love their vocation and who look forward to getting up in the morning. There are people in love with their bad faith, who meld blissfully with their constructed identities, and who love their lives. They...
Read MoreThe reality that the world presents is simultaneously what can be measured. Even subjective qualia—like saltiness—can be transcribed into magnitude (and so enjoy universal agreement) when we attend to their intensity. Salty and bitter may be entirely subjective, but their quantification is universal, and so objective.
The world that is rea...
Read MoreDescartes says that the model of objective reality is extension.
But Salvia teaches that the essence of reality is not extension but heaviness, mass, and physical solidity. We acquire our sense of reality from the counter-force that greets our acts of pushing against things. Reality, or thingy-ness, is abstracted from...
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Digital is the new real
Agreement about the flaw makes the flaw real and your judgment valid. What could be happier? Ontologically negating the oppressor AND the joy of being right about something that others cannot even see.
Passion is relaxed interest.
Hillary is Devil; Trump, a Golden Roman God....
Read MoreCapital, which is money that seeks to attract more money, has agentive qualities. We say that people make demands on behalf of capital, but if the soul is just a pattern of biological action, then we can say that capital makes those demands and be ontologically correct. Also, capital works...
Read MoreCSH: Fara said, “Did smoke was.”
And I realized that once humans have economic surplus—enough food and their society is organized—they get bored. People have a lot of cognitive survival machinery. Once survival is taken care of the machinery doesn’t take a rest. Instead, it creates games, makes art, theorizes nature an...
Read MoreCSH: Wei was saying that we can’t get geometry and arithmetic wrong because those sciences merely report back on our very means of apprehension. That is to say, mis-grasping a geometric or arithmetic truth is impossible. If you understand the sentence then you already grasp its truth and cannot misjudge i...
Read MoreRick Roderick was the light, guide, and joy of my life for 20 years.
I just realized something. I now know the secret of his power. The reason Rick was so smart is that he was so fearless about human self-twisting. Human lives are run and ruined by passion. Rick...
Read MorePreserving passing in time through clever mechanics
Kant: We transcend time by making it objective, by building a model of time, in time, such that the model presents the progression of time with the passing of time. The act of...
Read MoreMarxian materialism in a nutshell:
The subject exists as constant adjustment to the extra-subjective.
Here’s a timely example. Think about how you value the substance of your secreted words when you posit them materially (chisel, paint, manually punch into paper) as opposed to how you value them when you “enter” them ...
Read MoreCSH: Zora was saying that we demand that ultimate reality be irrational. According to survival-oriented reason, a religion that promoted suicide is a failure and a bad choice. But the picture of ultimate reality in atheistic science is not as comfortable as the picture of reality that has a god,...
Read MoreQ: What is the interest in this Kantian-Buddhist analysis? Why is it the highest good to do this type of thinking? Why is it so pleasurable? And why is it so valuable? Why is metaphysics valuable (if it is)? When is metaphysics valuable?
A: When it addresses impact—when it addresses t...
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CSH: Fara was wondering out loud about the Western prejudice for the immutable. We were talking about how necessary truths indicate a realm that is invulnerable to change and time. Rationalism wants truths that can never be falsified. We are attracted to this. Or: history indicates that people are attracted...
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All of life is bewitchment by metaphor.
Our natural language is a grimoire of metaphors.
Look at perdure. First, look at endure. It’s from the Old French endurer, which came from the Latin indurare ‘harden,’ from in- ‘in’ + durus ‘hard.’
Now perdure. It’s from the French perdurer, from Latin perdurare ‘endu...
Read MoreCSH: My dissertation is about the fact that understanding operates as a combination of discrete elements. It makes utterances that are distinct blobs—the subject-blob and the predicate-blob. Each of these is intended in a different way. The intentions are different. The two blobs are like two substances.
Two questions:
Q1: W...
Read MoreCSH: New tack, starting from “the world must be capable of being talked about.”
Annie: Does it have to be though? I feel like the most important parts of the world are the ones you can’t talk about.
CSH: I agree. And Kant agrees also. But there is a sense world...
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