Magee equates mind with body. The proper equation should be with mine and brain. The brain and the body are distinct from the mind/consciousness. Modern science knows that consciousness cannot and never has evolved from a naturalist world. Consciousness precedes matter. Matter does not precede mind. Science is working desperately to create consciousness as a pretense to deny the existence of a supreme consciousness or the existence of a human spirit or soul. Good luck…science!
yes, same as usual - exactly what I would expect in England at this time of year if a little colder than last year , but the it is in the nature of weather that it is unpredictable, erratic and constantly changing, and I have never known it to be otherwise throughout my long life, during which I keep careful statistics of the weather. It is an excellent thing that that fraudulent religion of climate change/global warming_ism is gradually being exposed for the fraud it is, moreover it is based and a fundamental misunderstanding and only children and savages suppose it to be anything other than a fraud, because the have the wits and learning of garden furniture and are as credulous as imbecile children.
not least because the television companies making it had a reverence for intellectual matters and believed they were recording recurrently significant dialogues - as surely they were. These are the monastic scrolls of our times...
A time when reason was measured and had truthful objectives. Interesting to compare with Slavoj Zisek: a man of our times surely comparable of mind but a very different means of expression; and like these two gentlemen and Socrates - performers of thinking.
Quine is very impressive, but some issues jump out at me, many of which I sure he’d have acknowledged himself. Quine depends upon propositions, but glosses over the distinction between causal and logical necessity. In other words he glosses over the fact that while logic is clearly the domain of rationality and mind, cause is a mysteriously imagined incarnation of corporeal logic acting via a body. But these bodies must themselves have governing laws as per physics, and physics, along with all of its mathematics, exists to date as an abstract system. Magee rightly puts to Quine that a materialist should have a hard time upholding a serious or genuine ontology of the abstract, but Quine rather glosses over this question , saying these abstracts simply seem practically necessary to keep science’s view coherent. In which case we have, as he himself dubs in other writings, Homeric gods; mysterious hands holding our world together that our sciences do not themselves explain, nor can. The question of the nature of these ‘gods’ should make or break the whole physicalist picture, and indeed he eluded to quantum physics’ primary objects, particles, dragging materialism into quite strange places, away from bodies and more towards what older thinkers might have called spirits: incorporeal forces without heft or visibility. It’s striking to see that even such a strong analytic and materialist view as Quine is (rightly) renowned for upholding, is still troubled to the core by issues that are rather metaphysical. He is also content to let mind in the sense of qualia go unexplained in an important sense: the difference between qualia and straight objects-in-themselves stands between him and the upholding of empiricism. This is a question as old as Parmenides. On what grounds do we trust our senses, if our theory is building a world ever more different to what they tell us? And if we cannot trust our senses what are we to make of the ‘meaning’ of our perceptions, of how observations ‘translate’ into facts in our models? We don’t see in sets. We see in things more like phenomena. How does one translate a phenomena into a set?
Brilliantly put, very succinct, direct and clear, and it's my thoughts as well. I was struck by how much influence Quine has had on late 20th century thinking. One could say he's the quintessence (Quine-tessence?) of scientific materialism (or, perhaps even Scientism...?). I had wondered where that all came from, and now I know. Apparently, Harvard University's philosophy department was quite the dynamo of later 20th century ideas, what with Quine and Rawls. I wonder, should the US lose its economic, military and political supremacy, if their ideas should start to lose their lustre, and perhaps even become discredited to a certain extent? Since China has been on the rise here in the 21st century, I've been seeing more interest and discussion about dialectical materialism and the necessity of a more Hegelian state. It will be interesting to see what develops as time passes.
Well I think if we’re to consider scientism dead we might consider Hegelianism doubly dead. I think they each make up a half-picture. But I’m not familiar enough with the Idealists to state as much confidently. One thing is for sure; what a world ultimately consisting of incorporeal abstracts or ideas would look like is a very odd and tricky question, and I would not assume it to be figured out to date. Hegel wrote prior to many of science’s greatest accomplishments, it’s precisely the obvious power of science vs the apparent feebleness of most ideas that makes the question of its limits so troubling. Whereas to point to the limits of rationalistic ideas, is trivial almost everywhere except in mathematics and phenomenology. We’ve a reckoning yet to be had with the issue I suspect, and I think if Hegelianism returns it should only be to retread old ground in the hopes of finding something we missed. But in the mean time I’d be worried about the political fallout.
Re: “On what grounds do we trust our senses, if our theory is building a world ever more different to what they tell us?” The problem here is in your premise. It isn’t our “theory” that tells us that the picture our unaided senses gives us is incomplete, it’s our observation using extensions of our senses that tells us this, our radio telescopes, our electron microscopes, our Hadron colliders. We don’t merely theorize subatomic particles and quantum phenomena; we confirm their existence empirically. The notion that any entity invisible to the naked eye is somehow equivalent to a supernatural entity, a “god”, as you put it, strikes me as extraordinarily primitive.
@Jeffry Phillips Burns I’m afraid I have to disagree with you. Our radio telescopes are only giving us empirical data insomuch as our theory agrees they aren’t producing distortions. This is a serious point when you get to detectors used on things we can hardly even get hints of with the naked eye. We can use relatively straightforward measures to check that a lens isn’t blurring, but there’s a necessary logical inference that a lens pointed at the sky is the same as a lens pointed at a normal nearby object. It’s an inference that is easy to accept, and we all do accept it, but it’s validity is only as real as abstract logic is, and this is emphatically not a thing empiricism can help us with, so we are run into old rationalistic problems like what logical objects are, relations, etc, all extremely abstract and hard to pin down, and these are the ‘Homeric Gods’ that survive with us today; the ones that beset logic and mathematics.
This person should call himself a sophist. He wants to acknowledge himself as an entity, but yet denies himself as anything other than matter. Is the generation of language no different than a primitive chemical reaction!
He denies the mind-body problem by denying it as a legitimate pursuit. He refuses to deal with it by saying there is not enough time to discuss the issue.
The mind and the body are not separate things because a mind is not a thing unto itself. Saying there is a dualism between the body and the mind is like saying there's a dualism between the body and running. Running is something your body does, just like thinking is something your body does, but there is no jogging sphere separate from the sphere of the body, just like there's no mental sphere separate from the sphere of the body, which can be difficult for us to remember especially in our age of mass-literacy.
I hope that his papers are written in a more clear and well structured way!I have never heard a poorer speaker in my life,it makes me wonder if he truly grasped the nature of the concepts he makes reference to!I personally doubt it!The time for explanations will come!
I read that he didn't enjoy teaching, or that he wasn't very good at it, or both. Both, I think. Or neither. But it's Quine...so long as you don't talk politics, it's quite an experience. Gavagai...non verba
You can build a difficult thought out better when you can restart a sentence as many times as you need until it’s perfect. I find I think better when I write than when I talk, and I’m sure many writers can say the same.
Is the dualism between abstract objects and material objects not similar to classic dualism? The improvement seems very little Unless: he seems to say the reality of abstract objects is defendable because of the (discovered) similar abstract nature of fundamental physical reality. Doesn't this imply due to his argument he is unknowingly equating one with the other, basically siding with Max Tegmarks modern mathematicalism? That the sets and topologies he is talking about as abstract objects, actually also underly the physical world? And that basically, the world thus also is nothing more but an abstract object, or at least its foundations are? That the foundations of the physical world ARE abstract objects?
Your point is very interesting but Quine's argument for the acceptance of mathematical abstract objects is their seeming indispensability to empirical science.
With respect, I think this interesting video is a clear example of why philosophy has now withdrawn into its own corner and attracts very few students. The world is burning, and these analytic guys have nothing to say about it. Social theory? Political thought? Ethics? Anything? At least Russell was engaged; these guys are just Wittgenstein sitting in his room.
*Your*world (whatever you mean by world) maybe "burning", mine isn't From where do you get the curious idea that "the world is burning"? How exactly do you experience "the world"?
What are you talking about? There are a lot of analytic philosophers that do ethics and political philosophy. It's a whole vibrant field. Quine just wasn't one of them. There are a lot of legitimate criticisms of analytic philosophy, but this one just betrays your ignorance about the subject.
With respect too, but we don't (nor try) to "attracts" students into philosophy department AS economy/finance or STEM department did. Maybe you just forgot what philosophy literally means✌
Magee is brilliant. I would love to spend a significant time in his lectures.
The king of recapitulation
What's a 'significant time'?
Magee equates mind with body. The proper equation should be with mine and brain. The brain and the body are distinct from the mind/consciousness. Modern science knows that consciousness cannot and never has evolved from a naturalist world. Consciousness precedes matter. Matter does not precede mind. Science is working desperately to create consciousness as a pretense to deny the existence of a supreme consciousness or the existence of a human spirit or soul. Good luck…science!
and what, one may ask - and would like to be answered - does Paulson mean by 'IN'? @321bytor
The quality of the video and sound is superb! It's also very interesting! Thanks for doing this.
41:14 it looks like the discussion on semantic ascent went on there but was edited out in production. It was probably very interesting!
yes, same as usual - exactly what I would expect in England at this time of year if a little colder than last year , but the it is in the nature of weather that it is unpredictable, erratic and constantly changing, and I have never known it to be otherwise throughout my long life, during which I keep careful statistics of the weather.
It is an excellent thing that that fraudulent religion of climate change/global warming_ism is gradually being exposed for the fraud it is, moreover it is based and a fundamental misunderstanding and only children and savages suppose it to be anything other than a fraud, because the have the wits and learning of garden furniture and are as credulous as imbecile children.
not least because the television companies making it had a reverence for intellectual matters and believed they were recording recurrently significant dialogues - as surely they were. These are the monastic scrolls of our times...
I prefer your channel to watching other things. Thanks for making these videos available
Good for you?
A time when reason was measured and had truthful objectives. Interesting to compare with Slavoj Zisek: a man of our times surely comparable of mind but a very different means of expression; and like these two gentlemen and Socrates - performers of thinking.
Quine is a simple man explaining complex truths, watch this more than once
Quine certainly is on the list of most important second-half-of-twentieth-century philosophers. I’d add Strawson to the list.
What are your immediate thoughts on Wittgenstein?
have to check out Strawson
"A man of measured merriment," as Sinclair Lewis once said (in Arrowsmith)
If it ws not declared right in the beginning that he was the greatest philosopher allive, I wouldn't have believed it.
I cant get over that background
Quine is very impressive, but some issues jump out at me, many of which I sure he’d have acknowledged himself.
Quine depends upon propositions, but glosses over the distinction between causal and logical necessity. In other words he glosses over the fact that while logic is clearly the domain of rationality and mind, cause is a mysteriously imagined incarnation of corporeal logic acting via a body.
But these bodies must themselves have governing laws as per physics, and physics, along with all of its mathematics, exists to date as an abstract system.
Magee rightly puts to Quine that a materialist should have a hard time upholding a serious or genuine ontology of the abstract, but Quine rather glosses over this question , saying these abstracts simply seem practically necessary to keep science’s view coherent.
In which case we have, as he himself dubs in other writings, Homeric gods; mysterious hands holding our world together that our sciences do not themselves explain, nor can.
The question of the nature of these ‘gods’ should make or break the whole physicalist picture, and indeed he eluded to quantum physics’ primary objects, particles, dragging materialism into quite strange places, away from bodies and more towards what older thinkers might have called spirits: incorporeal forces without heft or visibility.
It’s striking to see that even such a strong analytic and materialist view as Quine is (rightly) renowned for upholding, is still troubled to the core by issues that are rather metaphysical.
He is also content to let mind in the sense of qualia go unexplained in an important sense: the difference between qualia and straight objects-in-themselves stands between him and the upholding of empiricism.
This is a question as old as Parmenides.
On what grounds do we trust our senses, if our theory is building a world ever more different to what they tell us?
And if we cannot trust our senses what are we to make of the ‘meaning’ of our perceptions, of how observations ‘translate’ into facts in our models?
We don’t see in sets. We see in things more like phenomena. How does one translate a phenomena into a set?
Brilliantly put, very succinct, direct and clear, and it's my thoughts as well. I was struck by how much influence Quine has had on late 20th century thinking. One could say he's the quintessence (Quine-tessence?) of scientific materialism (or, perhaps even Scientism...?). I had wondered where that all came from, and now I know.
Apparently, Harvard University's philosophy department was quite the dynamo of later 20th century ideas, what with Quine and Rawls. I wonder, should the US lose its economic, military and political supremacy, if their ideas should start to lose their lustre, and perhaps even become discredited to a certain extent? Since China has been on the rise here in the 21st century, I've been seeing more interest and discussion about dialectical materialism and the necessity of a more Hegelian state. It will be interesting to see what develops as time passes.
Well I think if we’re to consider scientism dead we might consider Hegelianism doubly dead.
I think they each make up a half-picture. But I’m not familiar enough with the Idealists to state as much confidently.
One thing is for sure; what a world ultimately consisting of incorporeal abstracts or ideas would look like is a very odd and tricky question, and I would not assume it to be figured out to date.
Hegel wrote prior to many of science’s greatest accomplishments, it’s precisely the obvious power of science vs the apparent feebleness of most ideas that makes the question of its limits so troubling.
Whereas to point to the limits of rationalistic ideas, is trivial almost everywhere except in mathematics and phenomenology.
We’ve a reckoning yet to be had with the issue I suspect, and I think if Hegelianism returns it should only be to retread old ground in the hopes of finding something we missed.
But in the mean time I’d be worried about the political fallout.
Re: “On what grounds do we trust our senses, if our theory is building a world ever more different to what they tell us?” The problem here is in your premise. It isn’t our “theory” that tells us that the picture our unaided senses gives us is incomplete, it’s our observation using extensions of our senses that tells us this, our radio telescopes, our electron microscopes, our Hadron colliders. We don’t merely theorize subatomic particles and quantum phenomena; we confirm their existence empirically. The notion that any entity invisible to the naked eye is somehow equivalent to a supernatural entity, a “god”, as you put it, strikes me as extraordinarily primitive.
@@johnmanno2052 “Succinct”? Hardly.
@Jeffry Phillips Burns I’m afraid I have to disagree with you.
Our radio telescopes are only giving us empirical data insomuch as our theory agrees they aren’t producing distortions.
This is a serious point when you get to detectors used on things we can hardly even get hints of with the naked eye.
We can use relatively straightforward measures to check that a lens isn’t blurring, but there’s a necessary logical inference that a lens pointed at the sky is the same as a lens pointed at a normal nearby object.
It’s an inference that is easy to accept, and we all do accept it, but it’s validity is only as real as abstract logic is, and this is emphatically not a thing empiricism can help us with, so we are run into old rationalistic problems like what logical objects are, relations, etc, all extremely abstract and hard to pin down, and these are the ‘Homeric Gods’ that survive with us today; the ones that beset logic and mathematics.
Watching thiis because Ive never heard of Quine. But we all need to understand the thinking of the US military and cultural hegemon.
Mind and matter are energy in different disguises
Yes, and occupying the same space of consciousness.
7:40 ㏘
Tuesday, November 7, 2023 (PST)
Time in San Francisco, CA
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The philosopher explores the connective “tisssssyyyyyyouuuuuu”.😂
Life is what the least of us make the most of us feel th eleast of us make the most of.
Who or what is "us"? - You and which particular identifiable interlocutor?
These were the days that programs like this were aired on T.V.
Now we have Kardashians and the bachelor. 😂😂😂
Who or what areKardashians?
@@vhawk1951kl they are philosophical monsters like Descartes genius malignus or Schopenhauer’s badger.
@@sof553 Do try to be a little specific, 'they' is a little vague , I have no idea who 'they' may or might be be
Based Schopenhauerian Magee really grilled Quine for his sheltered materialism throughout the video.
The spitting image of Hunter S. Thompson!
I had the same thought! His somewhat garbled, stammering speech also call Dr. Gonzo to mind.
Quine says philosophy is part of science but isn’t it the opposite? Without disrespect for science, philosophy is much broader.
Was Quine proficient in portuguese ?
Yes, even wrote a book in portuguese
18 22
The mind is just another (neural) activity of the body. Why not?
How the Beeb has fallen!
This corporate master lackey
This person should call himself a sophist. He wants to acknowledge himself as an entity, but yet denies himself as anything other than matter. Is the generation of language no different than a primitive chemical reaction!
We pay tuition to listen to this man construct a maze!
He is definitely removing the illusion of world comprehensibility.
Do you indeed? - Exactly how much do you pay?
It all fell apart when he tried to put abstract things into his purely "Physicalist" system.
good job he wrote most of his ideas down innit
Schopenhauer would have mopped the floor with this q-tip
I like philosophy but this interview was kind of dull
So, where does the impulse come from thst causes one to pursue something such as philosophy.? Why would the pure matter reality pursue learning?
Who or what is the “knower”?
What is it that “makes an hypothesis” or does
the counting of mathematics, laws. and rules? and what is it
that is doing the observations.
Numbers and laws exist only in our minds. They are a mental representation of the function of matter.
I didn’t find the interview to be dull, but I did find the “materialist” to be a dullard. Questions that he cannot answer are dismissed as irrelevant.
He denies the mind-body problem by denying it as a legitimate pursuit. He refuses to deal with it by saying there is not enough time to discuss the issue.
The mind and the body are not separate things because a mind is not a thing unto itself. Saying there is a dualism between the body and the mind is like saying there's a dualism between the body and running. Running is something your body does, just like thinking is something your body does, but there is no jogging sphere separate from the sphere of the body, just like there's no mental sphere separate from the sphere of the body, which can be difficult for us to remember especially in our age of mass-literacy.
I hope that his papers are written in a more clear and well structured way!I have never heard a poorer speaker in my life,it makes me wonder if he truly grasped the nature of the concepts he makes reference to!I personally doubt it!The time for explanations will come!
He’s a philosopher, not an orator 🤷♂️
I’ve never heard anyone more eruditely explain what we have proven to be true!
Although brilliant, Quine is not a pristine talker.
That surprised me. In print he doesn't come across as at all hesitant.
I read that he didn't enjoy teaching, or that he wasn't very good at it, or both. Both, I think. Or neither. But it's Quine...so long as you don't talk politics, it's quite an experience. Gavagai...non verba
You can build a difficult thought out better when you can restart a sentence as many times as you need until it’s perfect.
I find I think better when I write than when I talk, and I’m sure many writers can say the same.
@@eternaldoorman5228 You want him to type in ellipses?
Henrique Cardoso: That’s a peculiar use of the term “pristine”.
Is the dualism between abstract objects and material objects not similar to classic dualism? The improvement seems very little
Unless: he seems to say the reality of abstract objects is defendable because of the (discovered) similar abstract nature of fundamental physical reality. Doesn't this imply due to his argument he is unknowingly equating one with the other, basically siding with Max Tegmarks modern mathematicalism? That the sets and topologies he is talking about as abstract objects, actually also underly the physical world? And that basically, the world thus also is nothing more but an abstract object, or at least its foundations are? That the foundations of the physical world ARE abstract objects?
Your point is very interesting but Quine's argument for the acceptance of mathematical abstract objects is their seeming indispensability to empirical science.
@@Xcalator35 Considering science is also an abstract object that makes sense. But science only exists in the mind, human minds
With respect, I think this interesting video is a clear example of why philosophy has now withdrawn into its own corner and attracts very few students. The world is burning, and these analytic guys have nothing to say about it. Social theory? Political thought? Ethics? Anything? At least Russell was engaged; these guys are just Wittgenstein sitting in his room.
*Your*world (whatever you mean by world) maybe "burning", mine isn't
From where do you get the curious idea that "the world is burning"?
How exactly do you experience "the world"?
What are you talking about? There are a lot of analytic philosophers that do ethics and political philosophy. It's a whole vibrant field. Quine just wasn't one of them. There are a lot of legitimate criticisms of analytic philosophy, but this one just betrays your ignorance about the subject.
@@vhawk1951kl Seen the weather recently?
@@Huesos138 Who currently is engaged? Peter Singer. Maybe. Who else?
With respect too, but we don't (nor try) to "attracts" students into philosophy department AS economy/finance or STEM department did. Maybe you just forgot what philosophy literally means✌