(December 17, 2023 at 1:29 am)Istvan Wrote: Science fans seem to have the ability to play both sides of the coin. If there's a gene or neuron that can explain a phenomenon, they can explain it away as the inexorable algorithmic operation of material processes; if there's not, they simply dismiss it as an illusion and that's supposed to suffice as an explanation.
Yes, it appears that this is where the real work needs to be done. The reductionist material view leaves too many things open, and adherence to it would demand that far too many things that are just obviously real would have to get thrown out.
Quote:Glad to find someone else who appreciates Gabriel's oddball approach to academic philosophy. I was in a bookstore in Barcelona in 2015 when I ran across Why The World Does Not Exist. I admit the title alone was Istvan-bait, but aside from my initial misgivings about his anti-constructivist stance I found his work very well-developed and lucidly presented.
That's a great pleasure, isn't it? To run across a book out of the blue like that, that ends up changing the way you see things.
The first time I did the student backpacking thing across Europe I drove my brother crazy by insisting on scouring every shelf in every bookstore.
I'm far from expert on what Gabriel is describing. But it seems to exist in a kind of constellation with several other wonderful thinkers who are orbiting, or reacting to, German Idealism. For example Blake and Coleridge have fascinating theories about how the subject/object divide is overcome, so that we can know the Thing in Itself -- but not in a passive, analytical way. And of course it all has roots in Plotinus, as far as I can tell: "To see the sun the eye must become sun-like; to see beauty the beholder must become beautiful."
Now I want to go back and read Gabriel again....
