Comments by "harvey young" (@harveyyoung3423) on "David Starkey Talks"
channel.
-
Note Note between Parts B and C. In part C i will go into the main areas of discussion on Bradley on relations, but first a a bit of a heads up on where i am going with this.
So today a News piece on GB News said that men are being asked if they are pregnant when they go for an x ray ect. Now it is possible to imagine a rational risk reduction program could come up with this. : the property of "Being Pregnant" "actually pregnant" is propositional predicate that we can thinking of as "possible" with relation to a group of animals a sub set of a group of living things. that is the General logic of sets. Now we can have a person who would put “male” as a gender on an medical form when entering hospital. But then “being pregnant” or “possibly pregnant” is entirely contingent for the whole set. I think this is not just a possibility through surgery, but also at the level of DNA gender is not a simple matter, and at the level of intuition either. In the old vocabulary of essences and intrinsic natures (intrinsic relations) the possibility of being pregnant rests on a natural potentiality that could be used as a definition of female. Then it would be a logical and natural impossibility for man to be pregnant. The term can be used metaphorically: “to be giving birth to a PhD thesis” which was a common phrase in this world a few years ago. That aside if a man was pregnant then by definition he must “be a woman”. In an ideal rational system everything is a property, and so properties do not hang together but rather are infinity variable external relations to each other: “Person with penis gives birth”. Definitions are possible here but generally this is a pragmatic choice where to pin down properties into necessary by definition and accidental or contingent. Being might not be a predicate but the type of Being ie in the vocabulary of species genius and subsumptive judgement in Kant, remains an open question and so then do the Generla logic of sets inside sets and so to reference; a members of a set A as to if it is also a member of a set B by definition. This approach though will suffer from logical mathematic structural Category or Group problems (from Galois). The logic of Transitivity commutivity and so on will not hold. Rather they would be in a kind of inexpressible rational space of inconsistency undecidiblity and incompleteness. That is if we “symbolically” imagine the above radical contingency then General logic relations of inferences will not hold for objects. This because space time inference relation for objects (not sets) will not hold. If we emphasize or ground this in a logic of inference for an object then the general logic of sets collapses. Why? Well I think when we have a general set logic we imagine this might be rationally prior to the logic over object relations in space and time. But the logic of sets can be seen as parasitic upon the lateral logic for an object. This is to say if an object A has property power p (a relation to another object) then just with this property in play the general logic will hold. But if we include another property p(2) of A the lateral relation are only for p(2). This means p and p(2) are meant to be external to each other. But for example Kant talks about cinnabar changing in both colour and density on being heated. The idea is I think that there can be no single property change that leaves the others external and un related. The “abstractive act” of governmentality and its general logic has beneath it, and prior to it, a dependency on the transitivity necessity of one property for an object (in agent an patent relations). But if this is the case for all property of all objects generating Gender logic then internal relations will become inter property conflict. The result is internecine conflict and contradiction at the level of General Logic, manifest in one real object having multiple properties. The politics of intersectionality is a pragmatic attempt to stave this problem that is really deep within the erred logic and metaphysics in play here.
The lateral logic and the general logic only consistent with each other and internally for one property at a time. As McDowell says in the “Can Cognitive science determine epistemology” the general logic actually rests on judgement at the lateral level of and between objects, that general logic then abstracts from. The inconsistencies in general logic with multiple properties, are derivative secondary and parasitic on lateral judgment with multiple property’s of objects. Compare a gladiator to a decathlon contestant, or compare a Fourier analysis to the real objects degrees of freedom in a complex harmonic motion. Judgement of objects is the real and General logic is derivative idea an abstract (not the Hegelain Real) the solution to the rational inconstancies is not more set theory but a diagnosis of this original abstraction of the properties in a judgment. Rationalists that give a priority or privilege to consistency of relations in sets of abstracted separate properties, results in inconstancy’s for the object with many properties. The solution is not like a Russell type problem of sets of all sets or a Badiou type problem, it the abstraction and forgetting of the constraints on judged of actual objects. That is that in the judgement we also judge relativity both towards the objects and towards the whole. Nore a telescope and micro scope cannot be placed in one dimension ie along one continuum for a property as is commonly presented. A person stands between micro scope and telescope. The two structures of micro deep and macro expansive can only appear to be on a single continuum for one abstracted property metric. A picture of an atom and a galaxy can be placed in a metric relation of size but this ignores the actual movement of change in both are really incongruent spaces of change is scale.
I know this is unclear but I’m working on it.
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
At 18:00 mins Professor David Starkey claims of the Popes at Rome in the 16 th century:
“these Popes are primarily rulers” and students came from all over Europe (Erasmus) to study primarily law at Padua not Theology.
I want to expand on this to look at the context of the changes of the view of nature from Aristotelain Potentiality and Actuality: growth development freedom and consent, to nature as causal law series and “efficient” “material”(?) causal “force”. This wrt. human experience is now a contrast between experience as reflection freedom consent and justification verse experience as direct causal force. (my example consider the difference between seeing an object and nodding, verses reacting by a flinch of the head to a painful blinding light. Indeed Ricky Gervais in a recent discussion with Richard Dawkins made a very sophisticated joke out of this from the context of the existace of God drawing on Hume Kant Hegel and Husserl. Something like “I can doubt whether God exists or not, but I cannot doubt whether I believe that God exists or not”. )
There is another myth that the Catholic Universities like Padua were full of dogmatic Aristotelians, ignorant of the new sciences. Ceasar Cremoninus held that it was not possible to argue from the movement of the heavens to the existence of God as the mover. Thus he rejects Aquinas’s argument for the existence of God as unmoved mover drawn from Aristotle’s metaphysics.
“In other words the idea of nature as a more or less independent system was gaining ground; and, indeed, Cremoninus insisted on the autonomy of physical science. He based his own scientific ideas, however, on those of Aristotle and rejected the newer ideas in physics, including the Copernican astronomy.” (Copleston, Fredrick. SJ. “A History of Philosophy Volume 3: Ockham to Suarez” (1960) pg 226)
So at Padua there is an Aristotelian tradition in conflict with Renaissance Humanism e.g. Florence and northern Europe. That is the Humanists, at once, in praise of Cicero, and moving towards neo Platonism that linked St Paul’s “love of God” through observing creatures, with Plato’s “love of absolute beauty” where we are reminded of eternal ideas by their temporal and material imitations”. The Aristotelians viewed this as an individualist movement the extreme version Ciceronianism was viewed as replacing Aristotle with the Tyranny of Cicero.
The neo-Platonists and Humanists made Rhetoric central to education e.g. public speaking from Cicero’s work but I think they had no knowledge of Aristotle’s Rhetoric at that time. They held Cicero Rhetoric (logos as speech) above Aristotle’s “artificial” logic of deduction. The “natural” working of the mind has concern for real things and so not an ontology and metaphysics of universals and particulars but parts and wholes in the hands of Petrus Ramus for example. (Note: This shift from logos as deductive logic towards logos as speech is repeated in the second half of the 20th Century with J. L. Austin’s Speech Acts against Russell for example, but this became via Paul Grice a theory of discursively and communication pragmatics and linguistics, in which, as a mixture of Behaviourism and scientific communication theory and social psychology becomes the site and discipline of the arguments for political correctness against freedom of speech, which roughly passes though arguments from communication efficiency to communicative justice.)
But the debate will slide towards conflicting views of nature, those following Aristotle’s Physics as potentiality and actuality, and those who begin to use new developments in mathematics in understanding nature that will lead to nature as series algebra geometry rule and law. (see David Webb’s essays in “Heidegger, Ethics and the Practice of Ontology” (2009) particularly “The Contingency of Freedom: Heidegger Reading Kant”; “Dimension and Difference: From Undifferentiatedness to Singularity”; and “Continuity and the Experience of Language as Such”)
Here’s is a nice metaphor for the distinction I have used myself for some time now but I have just found in an old paper by Douglas Gasking “Causation and Recipes” (1955) in John Hospers “Readings in Introductory Philosophical Analysis” (1969).
“From one point of view the progress of natural science can be viewed as resulting from the substitution of pure inference licences for recipes” (pg 152)
My view is then that we have to view the developments of mathematics and physical science to a nomological view of nature, could be viewed as bringing nature under the realm of a legal context. That is Rome and Cicero as Law, replacing Greek and Aristotle and processes of learning and virtue and means. From “aim” to “objectivity”
In terms of “experience” and change, Erasmus was a synergist: the grace of God must be by agreement between God and man e.g. in freedom, as opposed to the monergist, eg. Luther and Reformed Protestantism, which held that the grace of God needed no human cooperation. (Wikipedia “Erasmus”) this issue can be used to express the difference between the view of nature as cause: as law and force; and the notion of nature as process becoming growth e.g. actuality and potentiality. For a very long and complex version of this we have Hobbes Leviathon from Job, though Burke and Kant on the sublime and awe.
1
-
1
-
Part 3: At 35:00mins in David Starkey tells us that the round table, the inner circle of the court, could not survive, the realisation of a new form of war fare for them total war. That the players at the table recognised that with the advent of total war, that was instrumentally effective, but unlimited, the vocabulary of the round table of virtue duty etc, had lost its normative force. That is the pure vocabulary of force and hypothetical imperatives, means ends rationality, was antithetical to agent centred, subject and responsibility centred ethical vocabulary. That is when ends justify the means absolutely, ethical vocabulary is eliminated. We might say though, the old vices of excess are now the new virtues. That pride as selfishness, is now the new ethical norm and reason and explanation and justification internally for the agent and externally for the historical observer. The old multitude of virtue of chiviraly, are replaced by an abstracted single vice of self and tactics. We then already see the transformation of the normative human being from aesthetic wisdom of synthetic unity of the virtues, to singular vice of self-interest at this point. it is this then that Hobbes will make his model of man, an animal with strategic intelligence for higher level self-interest. At the same time as Hobbes there are radical changes in the notions of just war from the virtue agent approach of Aquinas to the legalistic approach of Grotius. but now notice that whereas the old virtues sat at a mean between two extreme vices of excess and deficiency of the body, now in 17th century man is wholly and bodily essentially of the extreme of abstracted pride as selfishness. Now the old left-over virtues of the abstraction are taken out of the body of the subject and seen as legal rules and definitions of what "not to do" that are applied to the subject's body by force. The old Virtue and Vice imminent and continuous relations in the body, are seen as abstracted separable singular non-relational names, that can be separated placing the vice in the subject and the virtue in institutions of law wherein increasingly the agents of those institutions have no need for virtue since they too are self-interested to be limited in use of the law by rights of the subject in self-interest of that law. now there is no need for virtue or vice only law and an ontology of man as by nature self-interested and by legal norm a right holder. We finally get Richard Posner's economic theory of law, that of course was already chiselled into the semantics centuries ago waiting to be revealed. Whereas virtue referred to people in the law at first, we then had them split into law users and laws of the practice of using laws law as right laws. there is no meta virtue no duty in fact, only adherence to various levels of law so really subject and sovereign have disappeared into complex legal codes.
But there is a revival of virtue in politics and ethics, but that might be even worse, since the use of virtue into this system of laws will means negative laws forbidding vice and obligating virtue but all done from a n abstract separation of law appliers and those its applied to, but now a demand for virtuous agents and subjects within this legal structure of negative and positive obligations backed up by force. The return of the old legal order that reaches right down into our bodies and seeks by legal machine right and good our bodily reorganisation. nothing is private here. it will happen though institutions of positive capability arguing for equality of opportunity for both the individual and the community both left and right. It will use combinations of legal risk probability, with institutions of employment and institutions of social justice, and i think both will draw deeply on modern medical science particularly psychology wherein modern CBT mindfulness is similar to old Roman Stoicism. this will know no end or limit on interventions in the person the family and the community. and all players left right religious etc will argue only over different content and aims and objectives. the basic logical institutional structure over the body, they will all share and agree on. Will men mostly of the lower social order still be expected to fight the wars, wars that have seen Cheverly, transformed but a constant, though all these semantics rearrangements. White Feathers for the un-Mindfull?
1
-
Welfare destroyed "Self help" societies? Have a look at channel 4 News from yesterday (14 08 24). They did two pieces: One discussing "means testing" with David Phillips of the Institute of Fiscal Studies (the context was Scotland and Taxation); the other on inflation over the last 15 years and the Bank of England's interest rates, but just covering the last few years.
So the issue of "means testing" must be seen in the context of other equivocating uses of "mean": means as individual capability, mean as average of a well formed data set, "mean" as in Aristotle's Ethics on Character and virtue, mean as in means-ends, and means as in golden mean, and common use of mean. I am inspired by Kant and Pater Geach in drawing attention to terms with related but very different meanings. So these are abstractly distinct concepts but they all really involve each other as all in play in any judgement and situation. In this they regulate each other in a sense. But the abstractive method leads people to think any one use of "mean" within its own proximate conceptual context, is then independent of the other uses of means and their conceptual context. So for example if we take the statistical mean and think about food prices then the price for one food category is a mean equilibrium from Supply Demand curve. This means that price will necessarily be sub affordable for those bellow the price and super affordable for those above it. Thus that price will be a necessity below their copiability, means but within freedom for for those above. there can be no means end relation then for the later. statistical mean necessitate freedom for some and bellow necessity "beyond their means" for others. this really comes into view if we compare a super market audit of a goods and a person shopping basket. their are endless ways of doing this for each pair of uses of mean here.
Now inflation as a mean is basically driven by "core" prices that don't include food prices as as significant contributor. What inflation relates to for core mean is really mortgages payments, and these are effectively set by bank of England interest rates. Inflation effectively hits the poo, but also savers are losing money but debtors are paying back less money. That would suggest inflation is good for people with high mortgage, but the raising of interest rates and mortgage payments follow, this effects the new buyers, and so property prices.
The bank bail outs of 2009-10 was due to the high mortgage debts of the middle and upper classes, being unpayable, eg they all didn't get the top job in the city they hoped when then went out on a massive leverage for falsely anticipated means to pay it back. it was a compositional fallacy (Henry Sidgwick Ethics) the subprime mortgages were those of the middle and upper middle classes in cities like London, disguised by the hiding them among many other mortgage types and other banking series. The subprime mortgages were not as we were told those of the poor, the poor mortgages were used to hide the real middleclass metropolitan unpayable mortgages. The bank bailout was the means to the end of bailing out the overleveraged middle and upper middleclass mortgages but on a massive national international scale. The governments across the West then bailed out the middle classes from having to take the losses as well as the gains so risk free investment if enough middleclass do it at the same time they are the necessity not the poor.
Data: pre 2008 the house prices began to fall in London, then the bank bailout made the house prices flat line and then the Quantitative Easing which damages the poor caused the house prices to start to rise again and so prevented negative equity as well as existential housing issue for middleclass. Of course what followed was mass immigration that obviously also artificially keeps house prices high, and then the paradoxical failure of the market to build houses for the new demand, this was in the interests of the middleclass too.
So this places the interests of the poor and the middleclass in opposition, but an opposition that can be hidden and diverted into a million technical distinctions. So on David Starkey's point about Labour being now the party for the rich and middleclass not working class, can be discerned form what they do. Remember they are saying there is less money than they thought, well lets see who take the hit.
The rest is the politics of distraction confusion and diversion. This is where Labour voter capacity means lie in the middle class London metropolitan high debited mortgages. I'm not at all sure now that the Conservative and Right opponents of the left are opposed to this part of middleclass mortgage "forgiveness" and middleclass mortgage "welfare" that both the Labour and Tory/LibDem coalition of 2008-12 practiced, while disguising it as a State of Emergency in terms the of the Bank audit concept of risk, and then gradually with the law and medical health they made "risk" not the "risky" middleclass but the "risky" social media. We were in a de facto State of Emergency due to "risky" mortgages by the middleclass, but now the term risk means non middleclass on Social media. the mediation as the medical notion of risk during the pandemic. Key here was the secretary of States' decision to express the reason not as an exception but as just a supra normative response as super normative defining in terms of empirical degrees of risk. They basically drove the pandemic response in the same terms as the banking bailout vie risk. And now like any state of emergency you can never leave risk now is the new ontology of excuse and control and silencing. In this the rioters have been a great help to the metropolitan middleclass offering them on a plate a new tool of suppression.
I know this is thin but I've been doing this non stop for years and I am in need of a break.
1
-
So Newsnight last night ended with a review of the papers and the "I" went on mortgage rates set to drop 3.5 %. There you go. you see while the Conservatives and the Right go on about what is central to them free speech and immigration, the left make their really important move, their Reason Detra, the wealth and power and separation of the middle and upper middle class's from the rest. You see what is important to you might not be to them. They sacrifice little risk or lose in these arguments, but for opposition its is central.
Question is then are the Conservatives and the Right concerned about the middle class rip off of the poor? Probably not in my experience. I guess many of them at the top have massive mortgages themselves. Convenient for all involved that Labour launch this following riots free speech discussions and that most serious people are on holiday. That way the right can choose not to respond at all. So the left help the right to avoid their shared middle class interests ever to be discussed. Not that it would be given the 24/7 coverage of wars, films and stories of dead children, the American elections, racism, sexual assault, who cares about 3.5%?
Look I'm not saying those issues are not important, I'm just saying what is the centre of gravity for you is not for them, but left and right do share the same fundamental centre of gravity which is private wealth from passive income in the form of houses and mortgages. they are using these issues to detract from key policy so it is subliminal to public consent and legitimacy. They are banging on about the public square the public sphere again. Kant through Habermas and beyond, if you want to get stuck in debating a deliberately impossible dialectic of free speech verses risk. I know cos the whole debater is now in the frame of law and rights and medical health and risk. Its a distraction, but important non the less. Btu always look to the edges of the frame ,as Derrida said "The Margins" eg Bobby Fisher stuff.
1
-
I've just watched some of a "Spiked" YouTube on religion and progressivism in Ireland "The Brendan O'Neill show with Ian O'Doherty" (15 08 24). I thought my comment there might be of interest here. So I post it bellow.
I don't think I've ever been on here at "Spiked" before: I don't know your politics but i want to comment on this interesting bit at 25:00 mins, where a link is made between Christianity and Progressivist politics in terms of the view that both share a structure of reason that allows its supporters to just replace making judgement in responsibility, with following a kind of deduction. That is replacing reasoning in a judgment in a situation, with reasoning as the subsumption of a description of the situation under a rule or law. The former type of judgement requires experience wisdom and the acquired ability to aesthetically discern a situation maybe its truth, the later though in the real world is not a simple deduction of a case under a rule but rather the tactical trialgualtion of the description of the case and the rules appealed to along with the forward looking rational commitments on possible future cases. This tactics approach i think goes back beyond Socialism and Marx to Hegel who replaced the conflict with the other model for Kant's epistemology or intentionality model. The later is not simple, far from it, it is very difficult to work out how best to tactic a description and appeal to a rule along with future possible risks of contradiction in inconsistency. But this is very different from attempting to judge situation as it is in itself.
What ahs become tactical approach to reason under rules and conventions then started off as Natural Law. It well set out by Aquinas as deduction, but he thought errors in deduction were due to vice and different cultural context (he gives the example of the Germans). So Aquinas recognises a gap, but not i think that this gap means a space for cynical and self interested tactics. People think these days that politics is all about tactics and this is where intelligence fits in, the virtue of clever in the pursuit of self interests. In fact this is too clever for most on the left that just read the answer from an appropriate paper or progressive guru. The context here is Natural Law as Universal Human Rights. Because of it's legal context and model then, the kind of tactics people train in is law. Both Natural Law Christianity and Human Rights Law, share a similar structure of reason and logic, but whereas the Christian tradition sees the gap as a problem of casuistry, the modern Human Rights tradition sees he gap as a space for freedom and tactical affordance for self interest.
The link between the Natural Law, and Human Rights law , is thin in the extreme, theology is a almost opposite cosmology and image of man, to the scientific cosmology and its casual behavioural self interested image of man. (See Wilfred Sellars The Manifest and Scientific Images of Man and John McDowell "On Sellars Thomism)
Only a burocrat in the extreme would really think these two are cosmologically and humanly isomorphic, but from the context of an office it might seem that the day to day practices are similar and one can distort into the other. Indeed the church can end up like a legalism of tactics too. but these are very different notions of human freedom here. I'm not a psychologist but its seems the Natural Law Human Rights tradition has absorbed some of Aquinas on the gap, in that errored judgement is a kind of result of vice, if the error is by a friend then its a vice of stupidity, if the error is by an enemy its due to vice effecting their epistemology. Academic types fear above all else being thought of, or spoken of as stupid. Their enemies fear charges of the vice of racism and the "punishment" or "cure" by Cognitive behavioural psychology sciences.
Maybe the Cognitive Behavioural therapist is more like a Nun then.
1