Comments by "harvey young" (@harveyyoung3423) on "David Starkey: The West's Crisis is Rooted in the "Universal" World Order it created after WW2." video.

  1. Part 1 On David Starkey's discussion of modernism which could perhaps in the context here be undersatodas the psot frecvh revetuo world of rights law and structurasim. to tak ehs excmpe fo new ways of menauring jdsut look at the history of the meter of of lenght gelay. a old yard was... then pendulm then ciricue of the earth then protype then waev lhghts fo light. stellth emeter own the natiao pgylab. Some of the features of modernism as a prior, and subsuming or sublimating universalism in rights and law are present in the a similar structural way in our conception of science as subsumption of events under universal law that is nomologicaly, e.g. C. G. Hemple. Here then subsumption under law marks the limit of reason that is legal reasoning in use and legislative scope and scientific reason in pragmatic institutional utility and experimental architecture to data expressivity as scientific law. but we need to be carful not to confuse what are classed as normative law or in rights terms natural law, that are prescriptive, and scientific law that is seen as descriptive of the laws of nature. This is a common distinction in philosophy usually traced back to Hume and the is/ought or fact/value distinction. What is odd is that although legislative law and laws of nature are distinct e.g. Hume, they are also related and presuppose and even contradict each other in deep and complex ways. So legislative laws always already draw on conceptions of laws of nature intrinsic to their meaning,. eg Hobbes's state of human nature as self interest and behavioural model of man which ground modern legal, economic and political realisms. this plays out in many institutions of psychiatry and their role in making and law and working with the courts. on the other hand say nomological laws of economics are constructed within institutions as well as people in "natural" face to face exchange contacts. Clearly these economic laws that are seen as a limit to exchange, actually have a primary internal determining or constructing role in the economic law and the face to face exchange. That is, it must be obvious that without all the economic institutions and their laws and standards, the very idea of economic law would collapse. Perhaps even: there are no economic laws no standards without the particular institution' being in play. This is a constructivist picture here which the left are also attracted to in terms of the political and affording origins of these institutions and how the bias in genesis becomes a massive difference in distribution of wealth by some post facto instituional metric. that is the left are condemned to both question and critique the historical origins and purposes of currently effective institutions, but form within the possible data metrics that only exist by "virtue" of the constructed architecture of that institution. Someone might say they are here being hypocritical here, having their cake and eating it too, biting the hand that feeds them, cutting off the branch they are sitting on and so forth. But in fact they have learned much from conservativism and Burke, in that politics is the art of affordance in a real situational place and moment, and this involves working with what we are given or thrown into. It could be called tactics or the problem of the relations between theory and praxis. Either way they recognise the Burkian point of no blank slate, no year zero, no attempt at radical breaks, but they express this as the problem or paradox of praxis and theory and even the tactics to cause a radical break, an event, a "situation". I think a good way into some of the issues here is perhaps from the flanks of these disciplines, that is the stuff people learn to justified there institutional work is rarely put into reflective deep questioning by its practitioners. There is then a story of how the institution came about as a historical fact and its justification then, and an "apparently" separate question about it legitimacy now. a distinction in politics and philosophy of science between the context of creation and the context of justification or legitimacy de facto a de jure as it can be pout by Kant. These are obvious questions for legislative law, but are also questions for the sciences. The key is to think about the difference and relatedness of these two questions. This would seem a massive task akin to an insoluble conspiracy theory that has been added and added to. But one way in is to just pick something an object that can be used to do it all at the same time so to speak. one such way in could be to look at the history and use of the definition of the metre. Perhaps much can be done here on the hill of: me measuring the size of my garden, the department of weights and measures and the National Physics Laboratory. A good book on the strange complexity of this is Saul Kripke's Naming and Necessity 1980. I discussed axiomatic model logic in comments i made to Konstantin Kisin’s talk which is also mostly Kripke but said to originate in the work of Ruth Barcan Marcus. These issues are also at play in the Marcus du Sautoy’s history of mathematics TV series about 10 years ago. The leading questions are like “How long is the standard meter in Paris?” and “Is the standard meter in Paris a meter long?” My take is a question like have the BASIL 3 agreement for the Bank of international Settlements factored in the Baysian audit risk of their own institution, or do they think that like last time in 2010 the international banking system can always use the capture of national populations by the state, tax and austerity as the forced lender of last resort. But the Crash was not the banks it was the middle class mortgages running through them that was on a real outlying curve of Baysain necessity. The financial crisis was rooted in the un-playability of those mortgages, which was allowable by Baysians because they do not see the whole picture that is each individual mortgage to income look ok, but as a whole it is a compositional fallacy or in Kant’s terms if you universalise the Baysian maxim it is a self contradiction. What is true for one is not true for all. The testing by universality criteria for individual mortgages was forgotten during the 1990s and 2000s but then conveniently remembered after 2009. Kripke’s book is accessible and introductory discussion of it and its context is in Roger Scruton’s Modern Philosophy (1994) Chapter 13: Necessity and the a priori.
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  2. part 2 Around 17:00-20:00 mins David Starkey contrasts Rome as universalism and deduction with place context specificity and induction. There is a third kind of reasoning variously called abduction or abductive inference usually associated with C.S. Pierce and his contrast with "bean counters", but it is also i think present in its way in Baysian inferance. This is also in play in Wilfred Sellers's notion of the "space of reasons" and the "space of law". Seller's like Kant was concerned about the relation of science to man. the contrasts the "scientific image of man" and the "manifest image". With this he can "place" in the space of human experience: a notion of an epistemic "given" a brute sensory or data fact in aesthetic sensing; which he calls the "myth of the given". This has been a big issue recently and the denial of such a given event that "is" both in nature and mind (meaning) at the same "time", i a rejection of pure empiricism and induction, and he described as his Hegelian return. but less has been said about the rationally "given" also in the space of reasons, and here givens are say axioms or logical law A=A, if A=B and B=C then A=C. there is no institutional rule here for the existence of the institution itself, the rule A=A then in Hegel means something like even A=A has a mediation and so a condition. that is an apparent condition grounding the apparent logical truth, or tautology A=A. So the existence of the state is not then as Hegel might claim a Being in immediate contrast and equivalence with nothing, but that the Being of the state its self identity its indexicality reference, the institutional ground of agreement and the people as a people is as legitimacy then mediated. My view is the problem of determination here was already grasped by Kant, forgotten by Hegel, and returns in the Wittgenstein of both the Tractatus and the Philosophical Investigations. The Tractatus says logic propositions are the frame and reference of language, not a deductive certain starting point for inference deductive, but rather A=A is a kind of shadow of what is happening a shadow that maker it look as if A=A was a proposition that just cannot be denied without contradiction. there is more to it than just that, but also since A=A is then no longer a foundation for reasoning. It is seen as internal to reason but not in a way that that internality can be captured by a proposition in reason lie A=A. This simple is really complex. and so associated notiosn of notions of promise contract and duty and legitimacy are all poorly understood as external to the empirical/institutional world, these principle are internal to their systems, they have no otherwise no negation, as traditional rationally and empirically grounded project make it seem to imply is possible. In fact i could take any empirical fact or any apparent moral political principle and run it through our system and rationally get a monster or two monsters.
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  3. part 3 i should note that in previous discussions i have talked about axioms in the mathematical logical and formal sense as it is an issue that has come up in questions previously. These questions i took in the above way, but there are less formal ways of interpreting and thinking about axioms. This is certainly the framework for elucidating a more common use of axiom and is present in Iris Murdoch's "Metaphysics and a Guide to Morals" (1992) Chapter 12: Morals and Politics.
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  4. Part 4 That's a great reading of T.S. Eliot. I started to get into T.S. Eliot because I am a fan of Bob Dylan and in a documentary they discussed links between Dylan and Eliot and Dylan even references this in Desolation Row clearly a take on The Wasteland. In deed i went to a conference on philosophy and literature years ago having probably only ever read Watership Down, 1984, Lord of the Flies, and The Trial. Someone did a complicated paper and no seemed to be able to ask a question, so with the fearlessness of someone who knows nothing, i asked a question: where i compared something he said to Eliot, and he goes something like "that's perfect, that's the point, great " i turned to my mate and said "that's the only poem i know, and I only know it form a documentary on Dylan". i had to get down the pub quickly after that in case someone thought i was some literary critic, and and found out it was just luck, like i know one book and if i mention it in 100 high level literature conferences i am bound to be appearing to be "appropriate" in one of 'em. but only until they get me at the coffee counter, with another question. Gettier Problem in epistemology, or Moore's certainty against idealism or the Problem of Criteria in Wittgenstein's On Certainty. For anything like multiculturaism, or relativism to even be a semantically possible situation and that before any data, you would have to create a genuinely pure legal and scientific system of international institutions. Whereas David Starkey sees hi project of universalism in science and right as a mistake given the context of our place of birth and with it a certain immediacy of understanding, the universalists just see this as work "on the ground" "in the field" or "community projects". what they are doing is trying to create world and a workable standpoint that can really observe from something like a Gods Eye View, have monopoly on objective real meaning, and then on accusation of "moral luck" "the equality and partiality" criteria they can sett about raising our natural lives as if we were all born in the same place. Domestic Science, Education universities all do this. we move form our Gothic homes to one of those Airport Waiting Rooms type architecture. indeed you can only talk genuinely about equality and moral luck when these institutions are created and reach to the ground. indeed relativism requires the opposite, universalism, to even make sense. and so the paradox is that the journey to escape a kind of subjectivism of natures place by the creation of overarching universal institutions, will then actualise rather the potential of nature becoming relative truly. The result: massive interference with our lives for efficiency and equality, a class of people who hold monopoly on knowledge, and its institutional use through policies no one is even expected to understand. Increased expertise and class separation is not a problem for them since they see the universal science of right as unsayable and necessarily putting the subjects out of the game by the authority of abstract knowledge and its ability to look and critique our lives by standards we do not understand and criticism is met with "go and study law go and study science. These new people with quasi God like power of knowledge, action and exculpation, are there at the centre of the liberal right, and the left. these in conflict over economic and politics and law agree on science and law and on this: tactility for most, not reflected on in the universal institutional courses that just talk about the other if there is any reflection at all with all the technology to learn about. I mentioned in my discussion of Konstantin Kisin how the Hegelian F.H. Bradley had been taken down by Russell Moore Whitehead and Wittgenstein. Eliot was doing a PhD on Bradley at the time and i think he was there. What's the quote I'm after something like "Time ladies, time gentlemen, time..." Great talk by David Starkey, many thanks.
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  5. part 5 the questions are great. Just a point on Derrida and those French Philosophers: all of them Derrida Foucault and Deleuze are all against universalism. Even in their complex writings its pretty explicit. Derrida calls this logocentrism, metaphysics of universalism, and binary logic. Earlier J-F Lyotard (who coined "postmodernism" i think and no one reads anymore) had called it a meta narrative or later a grand narrative. They used this much against the still pro Soviet left in France in 1970s. coming out of more a phenomenological tradition the problem of the other is seen in terms of the inaccessible of radical alterity to a solipsism of the structures of cognition (Husserl), the cognitive epistemological framework for beings as unknowable is due to the forgetting and burying of Being in the cognitive epoch, and as real knowledge embedded in actual human practices (Heidegger). now in this tradition and hermeneutics, the other is the "horizon of understanding or even the infinite ungraspable other, the impossible theological demand (Levinas i think). On binary logic then I don't think that inference can be captured in binary outcomes. They represent it as such often but it is somewhat down stream from the full sense. There is an interesting discussion on the role of Montesquieu to the founding fathers in Franz Neumann's introduction to The Spirit of the laws. By contrast Stalin went to visit the students and department of linguistics, at Moscow university. He was very critical of the professors their for thinking that in one generation an army of Marxist linguists could get rid of all the localism context and attitudes dispositions associated with common usage and have everyone speaking a general universalist language. Indeed he got into a debate with them and wrote some interesting essays in Pravda on this. It seems Stalin on this issue at least was the one lacking exess. On Descartes contrasted with Hobbes, i would say it is Hobbes that holds a universal conception of man but perhaps only because it did a job in English Civil War and Thirty years War that was affording, i.e. he was using it as rhetoric not a foundation. Even so a foundation for politics law and the science of man it became. by contrast Descartes is concerned with justification, that there is a structure of reason a structure to thought and thinking that has its own space independent of the world of facts and events. Now the Hobbes Descartes difference is not so much man as machine verses man as non material soul, but the order of factual events, a history of what happened and why, verse the order of normativity justification or legitimacy. not so easy to make this difference as history, to be more than dots of facts is casual and intentional explanation and understanding . it has to work within a justificational space of legitimacy, not easy to ground in natural historical facts themselves. But also much modern 20th century as criticised Descartes for the lack of connection of mind to the world. it manifests here in my discussion as the mind having abstract ideas and content and laws of thought, but the whole thing is cut off form the world in terms both of getting content admitted into this mindful structure and get ideas in this structure to have application in a real practical context. There is a introductory book on Politics and History (i can't find it at the moment) but it divided the page into two halves on the left history of events and on the right the history of justification. lots of nice dialectical presentations. The 20th century Critiques of Descartes go by the main term of "externalism" as they variously show an absence of the body and the practical world a source of meaning in the real. This is different from "externalism" as in moral ethical epistemology though. these arguments against Descartes are in Hegel Kant and by Hobbes himself. I recall Anthony Kenny wrote some nice stuff on this. On the last point we might want to draw a contrast from Russell between knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description. in description or any set of predicates we seem to be able to grasp a p[articular object tin its reference and individuality. in a structure this make everything look like predication, like a property. Our language then mediates our relation to reference. in Hegel i think then it appears that the structure of possible predication can have only true and false for each predicate and each predicate is viewed as analytically separable and o independent from each other. Contrast Kant's example of changing heated Cinibar qualities) in Kant predicate have an original unity held in relation to an object and self awareness of such a relation to the object but not the unity. the qualities or predicates then have an original unity. this unity as original means limits are internal to proposition with respect to other propositions in a real case before us in acquaintance. idealism is the error at root of thinking these propositions as if they have each their own inbuilt autonomous limit or some external casual limit. they limit each other. Kant say the unity of the manifold the unity of the object the unity of apperception are all the same unity at once. it seem to me Wittgenstein was closer to Kant then, than Russell if we allow Kant this "with acquaintance" so long as its not simply a direct causal relation a material cause (c.f Anscombe and Onora O'Neill and claim Russell wanted to leave acquaintance behind for a more Leibnizian view of all possible predicates. Clearly predication has logical limits of non contradiction, but also extra and before logical limits of exclusion of predicates with respect to certain other predicates). One does have the feeling they are drifting back to Bradley's problem of the unity of the relations in a judgement. Description is mediated and structured institutionally it is representational thought knowledge and action it has concepts limited by the necessities of institutional knowledge data and institutional action as legislation. Terms in descriptive mode here function in a very different way from how we use language normally without the limits of institutionality although they are busy trying to get us to re engineer our ordinary language to be as if the creation of an institution for us all with conceptual capture and subsumption under instituional concepts no private langue of acquaintance except via institutional mediation and its standards and criteria and in the end our absolute dependency on it to just say hello to someone. On the last bit, people think Hegel can be rescued from the disenchantment charge and the institutional charge by emphasising his Aristotelianism of process growth in nature. But then instead of the sublimation machine we have pruning i guess. indeed early Marx still had the Aristotelian view of man as craft and tool user and maker etc. Here self appears with production in action, tasks are finite have and end a feeling of accomplishment of a goal achieved of it being authored by me and public. In Marxism this is lost for infinite tasks without an end utopia. again a crat action by a person making something verse mediated mechanical reproduction though many series of predications.
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