(no subject)
It is obvious to most Americans that we, as a nation, are becoming divided in a way that is trending towards disaster. This divide is fundamental in that it goes to the very core of two radically different ways of justifying life as a subjectivist. This translates immediately into a disagreement as to the meaning of war from two subjective positions. BTW, our kids "feel" this, but don't have the arguments to explain their black clothes.
My argument names these two the religious and the secular. In philosophy that generally means the rationalists and the empiricists. Implicitly they are the asserted cardinalists and the asserted anti-cardinalists, neither backing up their assertion - they are subjective.
A cardinalist is one who asserts a relation with the "absolute". An anti-cardinalist is a relativist who rejects the idea of "the absolute" all together. That, by implication, makes him/her an exclusive ordinalist.
Imagine a see saw that, in theory, represents everything asserted cardinal at one end and everything asserted anti-cardinal (ordinal) at the other. Or, because I have already established a relation between ordinal/cardinal and relative/absolute, we could have a see saw with relative/absolute as the extremes.
From Pythagoras to Kant, there is only one fundamental answer to the question: how is it that cardinal numbers describe perfection when perception doesn't know what that means?. Pythagoras said it was because numbers had a "special" (read "non-relational") status, which meant that the reason was beyond the mind to know. This makes a practical solution impossible. When Heraclitus says that everything is change, he can't integrate absolute change to cardinal numbers because THEY don't change. That cardinal numbers don't change then becomes the basis of Parmenides' argument. The mind/body dichotomy is the same as the relation between practice and theory. By explaining the relation between practice and theory it is possible to rid the world of the mind/body dichotomy. Cardinal numbers are the theoretical child of ordinal numbers; they are conceptual. Ordinals are derived from experience, they are perceptual. Ordinals are practical, cardinals are part of the theory that sometimes ordinals can lead to cardinals. As in the case of recognizing that the ordinal "all" is identical to the cardinal "100%".
Philosophy, from Pythagoras to Kant, is a history of the refusal to look at the mind/body problem except from one perspective, the subjective cardinal, (god is all). A subjective cardinalist is one who claims to know where cardinality comes from, but has no evidence to back the claim. Kant, in an attempt to save the subjective cardinal, compares it, for the first time, to the subjective ordinal.
Hume had pushed Kant into the role of trying to save causality without giving up god. No one had been able to figure out a way to integrate them. Kant came up with the first fundamental change in 2400 years. He said the integration is impossible, from our subjective perspective. By that, Kant was implying that god has both an ordinal and a cardinal perspective but we are only aware of the cardinal, and we don't know how. Perception is not perfect and so can not be integrated to god who is equal to perfection. Kant's "pure knowledge" is an attempt to make gods perfection available by an end run around perception.
The first thing that did was to make Kant walk up the see saw and reside alone at the anti-cardinal end, making him the first secularist. Gradually though, people started to look at his idea and see some improvement over the subjective cardinal. For one, it was not dogmatic, well, except for one thing, it had no starting point, no cardinality at all. That is the dogma of the relativist.
Still, with no Rand, and a misunderstanding of the meaning of Thales, seemingly "no dogma" was better than blatant dogma. Fifty years ago the church seemed unchallenged, but was in fact under severe attack in the philosophy and math departments all around the world. 2000's election gave us proof that Kant has caught up and the see saw is balanced. Four years later only strengthens that argument. The fact that there was no significant change supports the idea that as a nation, and maybe as a world, we are stuck between two opposites that because of the dogma of each, can see only their own perspective. The biggest difference between the two is that the subjective cardinalist is a liar, the anti-cardinalist is just mistaken.
My argument names these two the religious and the secular. In philosophy that generally means the rationalists and the empiricists. Implicitly they are the asserted cardinalists and the asserted anti-cardinalists, neither backing up their assertion - they are subjective.
A cardinalist is one who asserts a relation with the "absolute". An anti-cardinalist is a relativist who rejects the idea of "the absolute" all together. That, by implication, makes him/her an exclusive ordinalist.
Imagine a see saw that, in theory, represents everything asserted cardinal at one end and everything asserted anti-cardinal (ordinal) at the other. Or, because I have already established a relation between ordinal/cardinal and relative/absolute, we could have a see saw with relative/absolute as the extremes.
From Pythagoras to Kant, there is only one fundamental answer to the question: how is it that cardinal numbers describe perfection when perception doesn't know what that means?. Pythagoras said it was because numbers had a "special" (read "non-relational") status, which meant that the reason was beyond the mind to know. This makes a practical solution impossible. When Heraclitus says that everything is change, he can't integrate absolute change to cardinal numbers because THEY don't change. That cardinal numbers don't change then becomes the basis of Parmenides' argument. The mind/body dichotomy is the same as the relation between practice and theory. By explaining the relation between practice and theory it is possible to rid the world of the mind/body dichotomy. Cardinal numbers are the theoretical child of ordinal numbers; they are conceptual. Ordinals are derived from experience, they are perceptual. Ordinals are practical, cardinals are part of the theory that sometimes ordinals can lead to cardinals. As in the case of recognizing that the ordinal "all" is identical to the cardinal "100%".
Philosophy, from Pythagoras to Kant, is a history of the refusal to look at the mind/body problem except from one perspective, the subjective cardinal, (god is all). A subjective cardinalist is one who claims to know where cardinality comes from, but has no evidence to back the claim. Kant, in an attempt to save the subjective cardinal, compares it, for the first time, to the subjective ordinal.
Hume had pushed Kant into the role of trying to save causality without giving up god. No one had been able to figure out a way to integrate them. Kant came up with the first fundamental change in 2400 years. He said the integration is impossible, from our subjective perspective. By that, Kant was implying that god has both an ordinal and a cardinal perspective but we are only aware of the cardinal, and we don't know how. Perception is not perfect and so can not be integrated to god who is equal to perfection. Kant's "pure knowledge" is an attempt to make gods perfection available by an end run around perception.
The first thing that did was to make Kant walk up the see saw and reside alone at the anti-cardinal end, making him the first secularist. Gradually though, people started to look at his idea and see some improvement over the subjective cardinal. For one, it was not dogmatic, well, except for one thing, it had no starting point, no cardinality at all. That is the dogma of the relativist.
Still, with no Rand, and a misunderstanding of the meaning of Thales, seemingly "no dogma" was better than blatant dogma. Fifty years ago the church seemed unchallenged, but was in fact under severe attack in the philosophy and math departments all around the world. 2000's election gave us proof that Kant has caught up and the see saw is balanced. Four years later only strengthens that argument. The fact that there was no significant change supports the idea that as a nation, and maybe as a world, we are stuck between two opposites that because of the dogma of each, can see only their own perspective. The biggest difference between the two is that the subjective cardinalist is a liar, the anti-cardinalist is just mistaken.