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"Why do people disdain good old British Empiricism which is a sensible philosophy that sane folk can follow?"

It might have something to do with potatoes.

Tadzio

Could you explain that?

Are you referring to the potato famine?

What does the potato famine have to do with British Empiricism as a philosophical school or movement?

ruveyn

Is it a reference to a type of potato, perhaps?

Who does disdain empiricism? I don't disdain it. I just don't know that much about it and have never been particularly drawn to what I take it to be.

Nietzche is currently storming ahead with 6 votes.

Can each member vote only once?

Will we be able to say anything about what the poll results mean?

You both have been granted permissions by the Gods to so peripateticize,
by the Great Philosophers you both so favorite moon over.

Quod partem madidam mei videtis,
pe quam significor Priapus esse,
non ros est, mihi crede, nec pruina,
sed quod sponte sua solet remitti,
cum mens est pathicae memor puellae.

Tadzio

Hi ruveyn,

"Marx was completely illogical"? And then you cite "good old British Empiricism which is a sensible philosophy that sane folk can follow."

I tried to refresh my memory of British Empiricism versus Continental Rationalism and the conflicts between Leibniz & Spinoza, with the modern version between Wittgenstein & Popper, but the simple fact of the necessity of having a potato to eat seemed to greatly exceed the realms of British Empiricism's level of sanity, yet Marx was held to be the one completely illogical.

Still, I think of Jonathan Swift's satirical essay from 1729 of "A Modest Proposal", weighted with the conflict of the foundations of the U.S.A. and Adam Smith's "The Wealth of Nations" being so close in time. The birth of Adam Smith's taint of Empiricism was from the conception granted by Francis Hutcheson's (1694-1746) alleged "altruistic and aesthetic" twist of Locke's (but taken more Continental in the early Jefferson's America). Using the same liberties of time windows for calling Marx, how did Empiricism's Capitalism deliver repeated otherwise needless famines?

Your previous comments on welfare and food add to my suspicions of falacies inherent in any Empiricism too separate from Continental Rationalism. There's bound to be tons of books on Empiricism's failures in dealing with simple Potato Logic for subsistence food, but are the ones glorifying Empiricism trashing the truth of dismal Capitalism's reality of the fatality of nonsensical potato economics behind the Glorious Towers of Empiricism?

Tadzio

Alvin Plantinga

"Dismal Capitalism" (or at least Dismal Capitalists) produced the computer with which you compose the above screed.

ruveyn

Yes.


No. Voters are anonymous. Also, their motivations are unknown. There are many possible theories to explain this event, and insufficient data to even lead our intuitions to particular theories.

Hi ruveyn,

Your tidbit of Capitalist Propaganda doesn't fly with people who remember the Red-Scare of those "dirty" commies stealing Satan's secrets from the Imperialists, but who also wonder where that darn Sputnik blasted off from, beeping technology to a Moon Rush (Satan soon directed Eisenhower, et al., to the terms of the Binding Arbitration Agreement).

Empiricism is not necessarily Imperialism, as the current computer is manufactured in "China", and the "produced" requires such a large pyramid foundation, that the dying base will soon collapse that God. But, as the ideas of Marx are too high for humanity to reach, the worship of artificial measurement units, worshiped as if they're not deceptions born from illusions masquerading as certainty in an empirical science corrupted by an overly zealousness of baseless Divine Empiricism, soon, well...., the nasty reality of a rotten potato reveals such narrow Empiricism to be not worth dirt.

Don't blame me, as you delivered the ranting screed yourself about "entitlements" most ancient, though I am frustrated that the availability of subsistence gardening is being now fracted up by Capitalism's & Industrialism's driving desperation. The Wise Capitalism knows it is the leech on the dying Industrialism, and that all the Fat Cats must carelessly resort to their "own" cheese in the lowly mouse traps designed to prevent successful simple subsistence of others from the lands of humanity.

For Sure, the Golden Life Boat is not the least bit seaworthy.

Glug, Glug.

Tadzio

Tadzio, I am having difficulty making out your criticism of capitalism. Could you please try to re-explain it?

Hi Awesomelyglorious,

As disorganized notes:
It's mainly the abandonment of Lockian empiricism with the adaptation to the Godly individual as "empiricism", while claiming to be the same with & without Lockian empiricism, to scrap Spinoza's Principle of Sufficient Reason, to make the individual person each their own inherent God (an "individual" was, by this school, back then, limited to only "healthy, wealthy, white, male, straight, 'protesterants'"). This gives the paradox of the Divine Atheist in the "Free Marketplace", and all the fluctuations between total & zero social entitlements of Capitalism,
all of which is rather distinct from "The Wealth of Nations" by Adam Smith (the book used more like a Betsy Ross sewing the Flag than a text).

"John Locke (29 August 1632 – 28 October 1704), widely known as the Father of Liberalism, was an English philosopher and physician regarded as one of the most influential of Enlightenment thinkers. Considered one of the first of the British empiricists, following the tradition of Francis Bacon, he is equally important to social contract theory. His work had a great impact upon the development of epistemology and political philosophy. His writings influenced Voltaire and Rousseau, many Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, as well as the American revolutionaries. His contributions to classical republicanism and liberal theory are reflected in the American Declaration of Independence.

Locke's theory of mind is often cited as the origin of modern conceptions of identity and the self, figuring prominently in the work of later philosophers such as Hume, Rousseau and Kant. Locke was the first to define the self through a continuity of consciousness. He postulated that the mind was a blank slate or tabula rasa. Contrary to pre-existing Cartesian philosophy, he maintained that we are born without innate ideas, and that knowledge is instead determined only by experience derived from sense perception."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Locke

"Francis Hutcheson: his life, teaching and position in the history of philosophy" by William Robert Scott (1900), page 227:
"This addition to the argument involves the abandonment of Lockian empiricism, taken over with the idea of Reflection from the Essay on the Passions."

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=c ... iricism%22

"Heathcliff and the Great Hunger: studies in Irish culture" by Terry Eagleton (1995),
page 122.

"Life of Adam Smith" by John Rae (1895).

Spinoza's Principle of Sufficent Reason (PSR), & Spinoza's critic's scorned "hideous hypothesis" (Hume & Smith too, also by 'The Life of Adam Smith' by Ian Simpson Ross).

Tadzio

I was alive while Joe McCarthy made his tipsy way to the halls of Congress to read his "list" of Commie infiltrators. Think of him as the drunk version of the Lord High Executioner. He has a little list, he has a little list.

In point of FACT, the system of economics based on markets and largely private ownership of the means of production has delivered the goods to the general population. Compare semi-Capitalist America to non-Capitalist Haiti or Bangledesh.

ruveyn

I guess I still have problems.

1) Economics isn't exactly empirical. It isn't anti-empirical either. However, the arguments for capitalism often fall from theory, because practice is too mixed. (This isn't to say that no empirical case exists, it's just that statistics are a pain to use and most students are not taught these statistics. The bare minimum we can prove empirically is that the USSR and similar models have failed, and that other existing non-capitalist systems haven't provided growth.) Theory is usually driven by the notion that people do respond to incentives and try with some success to attain their goals with their resources, which is pretty fair.
2) Economic models of capitalism involve no violation of the principle of sufficient reason. Desires are usually treated as exogenous(and treating something as exogenous is a valid scientific move, not a statement about sufficient reasons). However, from that, the proper behavior actually tends to follow mathematically. The only brand of economics that can be argued to violate the PSR is Austrian Economics with their conception of the entrepreneur, and that's because they are trying to get an unpredictable and difficult to analyze event into their conceptual system.
3) I still don't see capitalism, even if failing to be derived from John Locke proves anything right or wrong about it. I mean, prognosticating about the failure of major societal systems is a massive prediction, and as such is hard to reasonably justify.

Empiricism is very simple. Everything we know comes through our senses. There are no true innate and inborn ideas. All ideas most be generated from sense and perception.

ruveyn

Hi Awesomelyglorious,

I'm thinking more in terms of "reason", with actual Capitalism not having the "rational" individual or group in terms of economics (Capitalism is more of a slogan like "Where's the beef?, with most of the stock phrases coming from Adam Smith's mentor than Smith). Next, a major part of "reason" is discarded in the earlier forms of British Empiricism, with Hume discarding more "reason" with further separation of the individual from Nature (and more primary for intelligence versus the group than Locke's "Tabula rasa" (currently, still in much dispute, as Stephen Pinker flip-flops in word games currently, while I prefer B.F. Skinner)).

I tried to refresh my memory of PSR by:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sufficient-reason/

I'm thinking of reading a newer book, like "Spinoza" (The Routledge Philosophers) by Michael Della Rocca, with previews including:
"Sometimes subsequent philosophy in particular seems to be a concerted effort to deny the pretensions of reason....Locke, Hume, and Kant.. each wrote a big book" that could all be entitled "Critique of Pure Reason."

(G II 137)
"Most of those who have written about affects,....Indeed they seem to conceive man in Nature as a dominion
within a dominion. For they believe that man disturbs, rather than follows, the order of Nature." (page 5)
https://www.google.com/search?sourceid= ... +II+137%22

Communism hasn't failed any more than Capitalism has, with the recent multi-trillion dollar losses as evidence of things deathly wrong. Climate correlates more to particular wealth of native populaces than does economic systems and/or technologies (Peter Farb made the observation that primitive social systems require as little as 2 hours of labor a day for subsistence, while with modern technology, many people are below subsistence with more than 8 hours of labor a day).

Ruveyn's "Empiricism is very simple. Everything we know comes through our senses. There are no true innate and inborn ideas. All ideas most be generated from sense and perception," is counter the more popular views shortly ago supported by Pinker (with Pinker then having "nature over nurture", but later playing the game that genetics is much the same as long term nurture extending across for surviving generations). The all through "senses" stance is counter the "man disturbs the order of nature" (older similar term was the "Homunculus" that "drove" each unique human), and hence, there, B.F. Skinner is intolerable, as is pure Empiricism that doesn't make an exception for the demanded miraculous properties of individual persons.

"After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency" by Quentin Meillassoux is another recent book that might help merge all the "probabilistic" aspects into conditional "contingencies" (if the words have, and are used by, the same definitions), much like Skinner's notion of frequency counts for determining contingencies of human behaviours. I wonder if reviews are well founded that include such as "While David Hume had already debunked the notion that one can know the truth of the principle of sufficient reason, he failed to convert this deficit into a positive gain for epistemology. Moreover, Hume smuggled in metaphysical presuppositions about a necessity internal to things themselves even as he claimed that our access is limited by our understanding of probability," as being addressed through the book's cited "penetrating critique of the post-Kantian 'correlationism'". Then, was it Feynman that noted that the first theoretical model to actually predict what a result would be without a large number of trial-and-error experiments was in the 1940's?

Tadzio