I’d prefer to say ‘true in all possible worlds’. I get that this is not the kind of thing naturalism wants to say, but so much the worse for naturalism!
Aristotelian realism stands in a difficult relationship with naturalism, the project of showing that all of the world and human knowledge can be explained in terms of physics, biology and neuroscience. If mathematical properties are realised in the physical world and capable of being perceived, then mathematics can seem no more inexplicable than colour perception, which surely can be explained in naturalist terms. On the other hand, Aristotelians agree with Platonists that the mathematical grasp of necessities is mysterious. What is necessary is true in all possible worlds, but how can perception see into other possible worlds? The scholastics, the Aristotelian Catholic philosophers of the Middle Ages, were so impressed with the mind’s grasp of necessary truths as to conclude that the intellect was immaterial and immortal. If today’s naturalists do not wish to agree with that, there is a challenge for them ~ James Franklin > The Mathematical World
It has been said that pure presence is constituted temporally through the retention and protension that make meaning possible. In other words, meaning is possible to the extent that the ‘now’ (pure presence) functions as a sign of something that is not present. This functioning is that of retention. The ‘now’ is given something that it does not itself constitute. This thing that is given to it is meaning. But then meaning exceeds the ‘now’ and pure presence.
For example, when memory acts to give meaning to what we are seeing. That meaning, being of memory, is something not present. The ‘now’ is then a re-presentation of that which was recorded in memory. But that which is recorded is always the sign of something that is no longer present.
It is the mind’s ability to replay different contexts or ‘worlds’ in the imagination. But what is it that is being replayed? Meaning. Yet we already know that meaning, as an ideal, transcends any present moment. And is this not precisely the function of the sign? In writing and in computer systems, for example, the sign seems to function autonomously, beyond the presence of consciousness.
Interesting OP, but presents a faulty understanding of the physiological meaning of (and distinction between) structure and function, which is the basic way all parts of an organism are described. Words like “process” and “configuration” are erroneously applied to function (the mind), where they can only be applied to structure.
Indeed, I don’t recall reading the word “function” at all in the OP
So when we claim that a thought is identical with a neural process
But materialism does not. A process is what the physical structure completes – conducted through the physical actions of the neurons – and that process produces a thought - and this thought is the function of the structure
In no way is structure equal to function, no more than what muscle cells do when they operate are equal to the movement produced
Let us return to the original claim: that the neural configuration of the brain is identical with the content of a thought. This is itself an assertion of equality — a judgement that two apparently different things are in fact the same.
I am not sure who made this claim, but configuration again implies physical structure, and the thought is function, and structure does not equal function
The materialist claim that thought is a neural process is therefore itself a judgement about thought.
Again – a misunderstanding in the difference between structure and function
Process is what the physical cells do, function is what happens because of that
The point is that thinking itself does not operate at the level of particular physical states.
Accordingly, a universal truth claim — such as the claim that mind is identical with brain — cannot itself be identical with a particular material configuration located in space and time.
That’s right, it is not. I don’t believe that materialists make this claim. Brain is the structure (the material configuration), mind is the function.
I don’t see how the “now” can be equated with pure presence, because presence is justified by the reality of “now”. In other words, “presence” implies something present at the time which is “now”. Therefore “presence” and “now” are distinct.
So it’s not the “now” which is given something, it is the thing which is present, “pure presence” which is given something. And what it is given is the now, as meaning. So the now exceeds pure presence.
I don’t think this is quite right. Memory does not act. The mind is active and the memory is a tool of the active mind. So it is not the memory itself which gives meaning, it is the mind which interprets the memory. That’s why memory easily gets altered. It’s not merely the case that the memory is faulty, but the mind actively alters the memory, and in exaggerated cases it is called a “creative memory”.
So it’s not the “now” which a re-presentation, it is the thing which is present to the pure presence, as created by the mind, which may be a re-presentation. And the “now” extends far beyond this, to include everything happening, not just the mind interpreting the memory.
In this distinction I take it that you are saying that there is a physical structure which carries out a process. The process is the function of the structure, and completion of the process produces a thought. The terms of “completes”, and “produces a thought”, are not applicable here though, because the process of the physical structure isn’t ever complete (until death I assume). So we cannot relate thoughts to the physical structure in this way.
On what basis do you conclude that thought is the function of the structure? You said the process is the function, and thought is produced from the completion of the process. But the brain is a very complex physical structure which serves a multitude of functions in its processes, and many of these are not producing thoughts.
I think this is a misunderstanding. Function is the purpose, not necessarily “what happens”. Observations can see things which are happening which are not necessarily the function of the process. Accidents happen, and ‘by-products” are common. Such things mislead us when we are looking for the purpose of an activity.
Now you’ve gone even further. First you said “a thought” is the function. But that would need to be justified for the reasons explained above. Now you are saying “mind” is the function. But mind is an active process itself and does not at all fulfill your criteria of a “function”, which is the completion of a process. Therefore the two, “mind” and “function” are incompatible and it is impossible that mind is a function of the brain.
That’s what I thought I did, in explaining why you need to distinguish “pure presence” from the “now”. “Presence” is commonly defined as the state or condition of being present. So the reality of “now” validates “being present”. Then “presence” refers to the thing which is in the state of being present (existing now). So we have a distinction between “the presence” (that which is present), and “the now” (that which justifies “is present”). Maybe look it over again, and ask me if you have any specific problems with what I wrote.
You are still missing the point. Why would Socrates do exactly what he faulted the unnamed participant for doing (103a), that is, not maintaining the distinction between (“actual”) things and Forms of (“actual”) things?
So what you call ‘presence’, I believe, is what I call the intentional object in its ideality (repetition, persistence). But the intentional object, ideally, does not exist without temporal constitution (following Husserl’s analyses). That is why its presence is constituted by temporality (retention and protection). But this intentional object is already a sign insofar as retention gives the intentional object its persistence beyond the “now”.
The first reference is given to D M Armstrong ‘A Materialist Theory of Mind’. His form of materialism is very much of the ‘brain-mind identity’ type - that ‘mind is what brain does’. He argues that mental states are physical states of the brain that cause behavior. I noted further on the OP, that there are other forms of materialism, but the point of the argument in the OP is against this particular form of ‘brain-mind’ identity
That is called ‘functionalism’ - ‘a philosophy of mind holding that mental states (beliefs, desires, pain) are constituted solely by their functional role—what they do—rather than their internal physical makeup’. There are arguments against functionalism, but this OP was not one of them.
It’s worth noting that the Phaedo operates on at least two distinct levels. The eschatological aspects — the fate of souls after death, the mythological accounts of the underworld, transmigration — Socrates himself presents as likely stories, approximate accounts of what the arguments point toward rather than philosophical demonstrations. He signals this explicitly and repeatedly.
The epistemological and metaphysical arguments, on the other hand — the argument from equals, the theory of recollection, the affinity of the soul with the intelligible — operate at a different level. These are arguments, subject to examination and refutation, which make an abductive case - arguing from effect to cause - for the ability of the soul to grasp principles and ideas that transcend the empirical domain.
The argument in the OP belongs to the second category. It makes an epistemological claim: that the mind grasps necessary, universal principles — such as equality — that cannot be derived from or reduced to sensory experience. That claim stands independently of anything the Phaedo says about the immortality of the soul or its fate after death.
I don’t think so. What I call “presence” is what you call “pure presence”. This is logically prior to the intentional object. So the intentional object is not relevant here.
Now the issue is that you seem to unite, or equate, pure presence with the now. I explained how the now is logically prior to the pure presence. You’ll find this explained by Derrida in his critique of Husserl in Speech and Phenomena, specifically Ch 5-7.
Ch5:
The dominance of the now not only is integral to the system of the founding contrast established by metaphysics, that be tween form (or eidos or idea) and matter as a contrast between act and potency ("the actual now is necessarily something punctual and remains so, a form that persists through continuous change of matter) (Ideas i, § 81; ET, p. 237); it also assures the tradition that carries over the Greek metaphysics of presence into the “modern” metaphysics of presence understood as self-consciousness, the metaphysics of the idea as representation (Vorstellung). It therefore designates the locus of a problem in which phenomenology confronts every position centered on nonconsciousness that can approach what is ultimately at stake, what is at bottom decisive: the concept of time. It is no accident that The Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness both confirms the dominance of the present and rejects the “after-event” of the becoming conscious of an “unconscious content” which is the structure of temporality implied throughout Freud’s texts.4 Husserl writes to this effect:
Ch 6:
The process by which the living now, produced by spontaneous generation, must, in order to be a now and to be retained in another now, affect itself without recourse to anything empirical but with a new primordial actuality in which it would become a non-now, a past now—this process is indeed a pure auto-affection in which the same is the same only in being affected by the other, only by becoming the other of the same. This auto-affection must be pure since the primordial impression is here affected by nothing other than itself, by the absolute “novelty” of another primordial impression which is another now.
But this pure difference, which constitutes the self-presence of the living present, introduces into self-presence from the beginning all the impurity putatively excluded from it. The living present springs forth out of its nonidentity with itself and from the possibility of a retentional trace. It is always already a trace. This trace cannot be thought out on the basis of a simple present whose life would be within itself; the self of the living present is primordially a trace.
Since the trace is the intimate relation of the living present with its outside, the openness upon exteriority in general, upon the sphere of what is not “one’s own,” etc., the temporalization of sense is, from the outset, a “spacing.” As soon as we admit spacing both as “interval” or difference and as openness upon the outside, there can no longer be any absolute inside, for the “outside” has insinuated itself into the movement by which the inside of the nonspatial, which is called “time,” appears, is constituted, is “presented.” Space is “in” time; it is time’s pure leaving-itself; it is the outside-itself" as the self-relation of time.
The going-forth “into the world” is also primordially implied in the movement of temporalization. “Time” cannot be an “absolute subjectivity” precisely because it cannot be conceived on the basis of a present and the self-presence of a present being.
I agree with you. The ‘now’ is logically prior to pure presence (still In his Lectures on the Inner Consciousness of Time, Husserl shows that the identity of any object—including the ideal—is constituted through the synthesis of retention, original impression and protention,This confirms what I am saying about the present, which is entangled in a web within which the sign operates. ). But there’s one thing I’m not quite clear on: you say that “‘presence’ refers to the thing which is in the state of being present (existing now)”.
Which ‘thing’ are you referring to that is in the state of being present?
However, Derrida’s text confirms what I am saying about the present and retention:
“The living present springs forth out of its nonidentity with itself and from the possibility of a retentional trace. It is always already a trace. This trace cannot be thought out on the basis of a simple present whose life would be within itself; the self of the living present is primordially a trace”
there can no longer be any absolute inside, for the “outside” has insinuated itself into the movement by which the inside of the nonspatial, which is called “time,” appears, is constituted, is “presented.” Space is “in” time; it is time’s pure leaving-itself; it is the outside-itself" as the self-relation of time.*
There is no “theory” of recollection. It is another of the myths. Although the possibility of death being annihilation is not present in the Phaedo, where Socrates does not want his friends to dispare, it is one of the possibilities presented in the Apology. If death is annihilation then there can be no recollection.
In the Phaedo he gives an example of recollection:
“ ‘Well now, you know what happens to lovers, whenever they see a lyre or cloak or anything else their loves are accustomed to use: they recognize the lyre, and they get in their mind, don’t they, the form of the boy whose lyre it is? And that is recollection. Likewise, someone seeing Simmias is often reminded of Cebes, and there’d surely be countless other such cases.’(73b-d) There seems to be no distinction here between recollection and being reminded of something. In the example given recollection is independent of stories of death and rebirth.
Socrates then shifts from things perceived to “the equal itself”. (74a).
“But still, it is from those equals, different as they are from that equal, that you have thought of and got the knowledge of it?” (74c)
“Those equals” is plural, that is equal things, not the equal. It is through the combination of sense and thought that we perceive that things are equal. That this is either based on or leads to recollection of “the equal itself” as something learned in death is questionable. Just as the lover’s lyre reminds one of the lover, equal things remind one of the concept of equality.
Of course it can! Sensory experience is not passive reception. We do not simply sense things, we make sense of them. Thinking and seeing work together, free of metaphysical assumptions of transcendence and universals that are something other than concepts created by reason. Equality itself is derivative. Abstracted from and existing independently of things being compared, equality is meaningless.
But these are arguments that you yourself have made use of. Have you changed your mind? The passage about equality that you quoted is embedded within claims of recollection. When you appeal to the “theory of recollection” it is not independent of claims about the immortality of the soul or its fate after death.
Abandoning the myth of recollection you are left with something like innate ideas, and arguments along the lines that such ideas are necessary if we are to comprehend things like equality. It might then be asked what other innate ideas there are and how we are to distinguish innate ideas from other ideas?
You’re exegesis is again straining credulity. Immediately after the paragraphs you quoted, at 75d-e, we read:
“Then we must have acquired the knowledge of the equal before we acquired the senses. Is that what we are saying?”
“Yes.”
“So, apparently we must have acquired this knowledge before we were born.””
’So it seems.”
“Therefore, if we were born possessing this knowledge, having acquired it before birth, then is it not the case that before we were born, and at birth, we knew not only the equal, and the more and the less, but everything of that sort too? Indeed, this argument is no more concerned with the equal than with beauty itself, good itself, justice, holiness, and as I say, everything to which we apply the term ‘what it is’, both in the enquiries when we ask questions, and in the responses when we answer them. In which case, we must have acquired the knowledge of all these before birth.”
“That is it.”
“And if after we have acquired it we have not forgotten it every time, we must always be born with the knowledge and live with the knowledge throughout our lives. For that is what knowing is, the retention of knowledge, without loss, once it has been acquired. For we do refer to forgetting as the loss of knowledge, do we not, Simmias?”
“Entirely so, Socrates, of course,” he replied.
On the contrary, universals are the very substance of reason! Otherwise, the argument you are making here would be applicable only in the case of the specific claim to which you were replying! The whole process of ‘making sense of things’ relies on universal judgements, as the original post says - the same, not the same, equals, not equal, greater, smaller, and so on. Universals are the ‘ligatures of reason’.
And for the Greeks, as well as for rationalist philosophy generally, reason is itself a transcendent power.
.‘…we may be surrounded by objects, but even while cognizing them, reason is the origin of something that is neither reducible to, nor derives from them, in any sense. In other words, reason generates a cognition, and a cognition regarding nature is above nature. In a cognition, reason transcends nature in one of two ways: by rising above our natural cognition and making, for example, universal and necessarily claims in theoretical and practical matters not determined by nature, or by assuming an impersonal objective perspective that remains irreducible to the individual I.’
The Powers of Pure Reason: Kant and the Idea of Cosmic Philosophy
Alfredo Ferrarin
This is why philosophical naturalism is self-defeating, per Thomas Nagel’s essay Evolutionary Naturalism and the Fear of Religion. It typically attempts to ‘explain’ reason in the service of natural selection, when, as Nagel argues, if reason is to retain any credibility, it must be due to its independence, not to its dependence on biological imperatives.
It can be said, allegorically, that animals ‘make sense’ of their environment, which of course they do, by way of successful adaption. But in their case, this sense-making neither requires nor yields the universal concepts that the human mind is capable of.
I’ve already addressed that:
Innate capabilities are not necessarily the same thing as innate ideas, at least if “ideas” is understood in the modern sense as specific mental content. In the Platonic dialogues the ideas (eidē) are not items of thought but principles or intelligible structures that the mind is capable of grasping.
What the argument from recollection points to, then, is not a storehouse of pre-installed concepts but a capacity of the mind to recognise and apprehend such principles when it encounters their imperfect instances. The example of equality illustrates this: we recognise that particular things are equal or unequal because we are able to measure them against a standard that is never itself given in sensory experience.
Human beings clearly possess innate capacities of this kind. Human children are born with the ability to acquire language and many other complex cognitive skills that no other species can replicate. This does not mean that particular words or propositions are present at birth, but that the capacity to grasp structured systems is already there.
Of course the ancients had no knowledge of evolution by natural selection, although archaic ideas of development in nature were part of their intellectual milieu. But that historical limitation does not affect the epistemological point at issue here: the argument concerns the conditions under which we can recognise universals and principles at all, not the biological origins of that capacity.
First, the argument is part of Socrates attempt to ease their fear of death. Second, why should Simmias’ judgment be trusted? He accepts the claim because he already believes that the soul can exist apart from the body (64c). Socrates says: “Apparently you doubt whether what is called “learning” is recollection?” Simmias responds ''I don’t doubt it but I do need to undergo just what the argument is about, to be “reminded”. There is a little joke here about reminders and recollection that Socrates had set up. He does not remember or recollect what he previously learned, whether that was in this life or before.
So, he already accepts the argument. But it runs contrary to his attunement argument.
The question is whether universals are discovered or conceived. If reason is the origin then it is not transcendent. Yes, we have the ability to reason.
If we are to trust the dialogues themselves rather than your favored commentators the eidos are for us, in our ignorance, hypotheticals.
The question whether universals are discovered or conceived is very close to the debate in philosophy of mathematics about whether numbers are discovered or invented. But many philosophers have pointed out that this is probably a false dichotomy.
If numbers were invented, mathematics would be a matter of convention, and mathematical truths could in principle be otherwise. But that does not seem right: once a mathematical structure is understood, its properties appear necessary and invariant.
On the other hand, it is also misleading to say that numbers exist ‘out there somewhere’, independently in a Platonic realm waiting to be discovered.
A more plausible view is that the structures themselves are not arbitrary but necessary and that our access to them occurs through reason. In that sense, they are neither simply invented nor discovered in the ordinary empirical sense. They are normative structures of reason.
I think it’s also true of universals. When we recognise equality, or triangularity, or number, we are not merely inventing a concept. But neither are we perceiving an object as such. What happens is that reason grasps an invariant structure disclosed through perception.
This is why the argument in the Phaedo turns on the distinction between equal things and the equal itself. The point is not that equality exists as an object somewhere, but that our ability to judge things as more or less equal presupposes a standard that is not itself one of the sensible instances.
In that sense the role of reason does not eliminate transcendence. Rather, reason is precisely the capacity by which such invariant structures become intelligible.
That is what is meant by ‘transcendent’ in this context. It need not mean that universals exist as objects in a separate metaphysical realm or as ‘separate things’. In the Platonic argument, the point is simpler than that. To say that the idea of equality is transcendent is simply to say that our grasp of equality exceeds what is given in perception and furthermore that it transcends the perception of this or that equal thing. Hence the passages from Richard Tieszen in this post.
The “thing” here, is whatever it is which is referred to as being present, with the use of the word “presence”. “Presence”, as I said means the state or condition of being present, so something must be in this condition. This might be a subject, consciousness, self, or something like that. But these words have extra connotations, that’s why I believe Husserl uses “pure presence”. From the Derrida quote: ““Time” cannot be an “absolute subjectivity” precisely because it cannot be conceived on the basis of a present and the self-presence of a present being.
So this synthesis, what constitutes an object, is what occurs to the presence, the thing experiencing being present. The now itself, is prior to the presence, so the synthesis of retention and protension is not proper to it, nor necessary to it.
In the material from Derrida, you’ll see a difference between “the actual now”, and “the living present”. The living present is the thing present which is referred to by “pure presence”, and the actual now, is what I called “the now”. He provides a separation between the experience of being present (presence), and the actual now:
‘“Time”’ cannot be an “absolute subjectivity” precisely because it cannot be conceived on the basis of a present and the self-presence of a present being.”
Derrida confirms what you said about the relation between that synthesis and the pure presence. What I took issue with is that you seemed to equate “pure presence” with “now”, not indicating that the latter is prior to, and therefore distinct from the former. Without this distinction, there is no “real now”, and the supposed present of the pure presence is not justified. In other words “presence” would be a mere assertion, and this leaves “the present” as an illusion.
In the latter chapters of Derrida’s Voice and Phenomena, from which I quoted, you’ll see that it is on the basis of this distinction that he produces true external objectivity. You might say that this is how he justifies the reality of the supposed external world. The “spacing-in-time”, becomes the outside, external, and the inside therefore cannot contain everything. This is a completely different principle from the one you are talking about with the synthesis of an object. It is different because what you are talking about is completely on in the inside, internal, whereas Derrida is justifying the objectivity of the outside, external.
I don’t think so; we have this fragment that you brought:
“The process by which the living now, produced by spontaneous generation, must, in order to be a now and to be retained in another now, affect itself without recourse to anything empirical but with a new primordial actuality in which it would become a non-now, a past now—”
Here, it is clearly stated that the ‘now’ must be retained within another ‘now’. This demonstrates that synthesis operates within time; it is within time that the ‘now’ comes into being. It clearly states ‘in order to be now’. In other words, it establishes retention as a condition for the ‘now’ to be the ‘now’.
Derrida argues that there is a structure that transcends the dualism of ‘outside and inside’ (that of retention, etc.) and shows that this structure is that also of the world, insofar as internal temporality is, after all, not purely internal but determined by exteriority (spacing). My point is similar to Derrida’s, as I said earlier: