Comments by "harvey young" (@harveyyoung3423) on "Banning Criticism of Islam: Blasphemy Law by the Back Door. A Labour Government Should Scare Us All" video.

Just from the this is a good discussion. Therefore I will have a go at doing my thing and i can begin with the report, a move from their to all the infinite intersectional relations of references in our political discursive space, even though the Deleuzians think or act as if this space does not exist discursively. So to start off with let me set up a medieval scholastic opposition: Question: God alone knows the real eternal essences and definitions of things. (St Augustine0 The finite human job is to try and arrive at this knowledge, and instil it into natural law as God's law. Without this there is only human law in the natural world according to or in accordance with or describable as self interest and bias etc. Response: There is no God knowing an essence. if there was we wouldn't understand him, if we could we could we communicate it, and not be able to build a legal institution to deliver it in application. . There is only nature, contingency of words, open changing networks of linguistic relations: nominalism's. eg William of Occam etc. Answer: At best we know and speak though only through a kind of analogy (St Thomas Aquinas). Or: AI can do it with algorithms, in a way beyond man and towards God. Epistemologically and Politically though conservatives are not dancing in the dark. We don't need to follow the praxis the politics of the far left, especially by just negating their concepts. I am not first granted existence by international law. but I'm not then for:(not international law). I will have to come back to this later.
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For a very contemporary analytical philosophical view on these problems, i would recommend Timothy Williamson's work which is described as meta metaphysics. I first encountered his work at a conference on "Metametaphysics" at Dusseldorf University a few years ago. He begins from Carnap i would say, along with Ted Snyder's work, engages with many philosophical problems. One way into this would be his various lecture series: I think he did the Oxford John Locke lectures a few years ago, but i would start with his Peking University series posted on YouTube 3 years ago. Titled "Methods of Philosophy" its 10 lectures, the first is on "Philosophy and Common Sense" the 9th is on "Models". He begins by looking at the different common uses of the word "philosophy" and goes on to say he will not provide a definition of "philosophy". I watched some lectures by him a few years ago, while working also on the lefts new Speculative Realism stance on these issues. I have not yet watched the Peking series. I would say my own work on definition and essence probably owes a lot to Husserl's' view of essences as imaginative variation of the object. But what i do is vary it to seeks limits where the model is reduced to the point of metaphysics which is a limit. A limit point that annuls other aspects of the model. For example if we considered sensing or perceiving or knowledge in terms of metaphysical direct causal realism, then at the point where this is real for its self, the "seeing" is not a seeing but a more a reflex. I'm try to frame the difference between a reflex and a seeing using metaphysics as a limit. So the contrast is the metaphysical from the original the position of experience. the contrast is like seeing a part of a room lit up, and starring into a bright light that causes pain rather than a seeing". Its a nice anti Platonist stance or metaphor. Like the touching to feel texture verse touching a hot stove. This helps to make explicit behaviourism and cognitive behaviourism. it also mans these sciences are possible for man, given the right conditions and architecture, over time a person could be shaped into the metaphysical possibility of realism but then there is no space of justification and legitimacy. i think this is similar to Habermas on framing and systems theory, going issues that came up in the Carl Benjamin/Peter Boghossian discussion on YouTube. Two paper's i remember specifically from Dusseldorf were by Dr Sophie Allen on Mathematical Structuralism, and Viktoria Knoll, a post graduate, on Verbal verses real or genuine disputes". Perhaps the main books i have used recently are: Beaney, M. "The Oxford Handbook of the History of Analytical Philosophy" particularly here: Chapter 9 "Quine, Kripke and Putnam" by Baghramian and Jorgensen; and Chapter 10 Miller, A. "The Development of Theories of Meaning" Grayling, A.C. "An Introduction to Philosophical Logic " 3rd Edition. Miller, A. "Philosophy of Language" Bernard Harrison "Philosophy of Language". Along with the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy.
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Here are some comments on Timothy Williams first discussion of common sense. When, at 13:00mins, Timothy Williamson says that in so called "common sense" words mean different things, that is vary, depending on the different contexts of "common Sense" and different at times in history, where is Williamson "standing" when he claims this. That is he is talking as if he has access to some transcendent position of observation and reflection a knowledge perhaps of all the "common senses". this has a feel of Whig historical perspective or a kind of Whigish cognitive access. We may say it jsut reflection of different beliefs and group its descriptive. but this is like sociological statement or even a methodological principle of social and cultural studies. But of course this is a group with its own "common sense", why has this got the external and legitimate position to judge the others from. Has he not made cognitive science and sociology transcendent speakers, meta speakers. Has he not "privileged", without warrant the groups of psychologists and sociologists particular "common sense". Will this not invite such departments to become meta over all disciplines via being made meta over philosophy. I imagine practically this means psychological and social regulations. This kind of questioning i came across while travailing though south America in the late 1980's. I stayed with some anthropologists form Berkeley for a while, and i asked one what is he studying and he said he was studying the anthropologist who were studying the peoples of the region. I said how? and he said by applying the same method they use to them, back to them. the threat of an incoherent standpoint of relativism is addressed as a reflection on reflection, which leads to an infinite regress if this is seen as seeking the absolute ground of the justification of their statements. Another time i was spending time with some astrophysicists and cosmologists at Cambridge. I asked one what he was studying, and he said he was a mathematician who checked the theories of the other researchers for formal structure like abstract (Category Theory, Symmetry, Axiomatic foundations etc) notions of consistency completeness and so on. My worry is that the philosopher here was doing internal critiques and reflections on a discipline, and then thinks that being raised in some "common sense" is something like an education in a discipline. So common sense can be reflected on in the same way. it reminds me of a question to the Churchland's at a conference, when someone asked them if when they leave the lab at 5:30 and go home, do they still communicate in the vocabulary of computational science. Or a traditional point in 20th century philosophy its like thinking you learn your first language, like you learn a second language in a class room. indeed usually experiments in science try to demonstrate how our common sense views are wrong. It almost a universal principle of science to Critique Common sense as "childish" or "not mature". But science does not give us a privileged access to reality, so it has no such licence. Why are the scientists and their departments so concerned to deflate, reduce and even eliminate common sense. Might it be a principle of international universities, to have a stand point that claims to be Planetary or a World View, access to a vocabulary from Nowhere, or everywhere included under it, or they are like a substitutions for what used to be called in medieval times in Europe, God's knowledge of essences and names and definitions. When Williamson says philosophy is a science but not a natural science, i think of the hermeneutic tradition and the German word for Science is very different coming out of German Romanticism. The Hegelian uptake is to change concepts into a notion or process, and this makes definition difficult, but also for Hegel common sense has to be sublated under a higher more abstract Reason, where differences are removed and knowledge moves to wider and wider scope and "lordship" over more and more common sense. the notion is seen as a movement of freedom as escape from nature and then local communities values. it means you need to speak from an institution for your word to have authority, legitimacy and to present a listener with an obligation. The higher you rise up in institutions the greater scope and power of action and the greater legitimacy and authority it would have. When Russell and Moore left Hegel behind, and moved to epistemology and science they were really inviting Hegel back in via their sciences except they are in charge now not the old Hegelians.
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On his example "people used to think the world was flat". This might means or be used in many ways like if you travel too far you will be robbed as there is no governance "rit". Not flat Earth but the world viewed in terms of action and security for a person. Security and govenement "rit" is prior to, or a context for, or a condition for knowledge. This does not make a Round Earth an "extension" or correction and deflation of their common sense rather it is a difference in technologies across 2000 years. not technology of telescopes and differential calculus, but of sailing ships radio communications and so on. A bit Adorno of me perhaps, but can anyone now know and do some old craft techniques. Josiah Wedgewood was able to make the pottery of the ancient world but it is a representation not what they themselves were doing. I know one stick is longer than the other, without using the Standard meter in Paris or the waves of a energy transition in Krypton (i think its krypton?) The weather man can tell me its raining here but i can't be wrong if when i look outside it isn't. At least i cant be wrong in "The same way a meteorological office is wrong. I wander if the ancient Greek pottery making produced errors for rejection similar to the errors of rejection for Wedgwood pottery. Wittgenstein. the difference between ancient Greece and us is not capturable in knowledge terms alone. it is certainly not a difference between what we means by the shape of the earth, this is more an effect or limit not a belief reality difference. Difference in ways of life. But as practical in the widest sense then this is not really a epistemological problem and not a relativism. You cannot put these world into any kind of place or standpoint or department from which, within which to compare them as two elements in some unnamed set.
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A short pause for reflection and i think the above is in part a development from various Adam Curtis documentaries, i watched in the 2000s. Thing was the left then were explicitly claiming to be non teleological non instituional more about feelings and creativity. how change in circumstance changes the frame. I wander how many twigged and didn't tell the rest of us, or were they surprised by the real purpose of all that aesthetic performative freedom to subvert pre established purposes of things.
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Party B3: The Quote again: I recall from years ago a paper in a collection on Islamic philosophy I think The Cambridge Companion series. I'm sure there was a discussion of signifier and signified there (sign?). Defiantly a lot on the text as a kind of breaking the fourth wall with the reader like the religious text refers to itself which can be a difficulty for signifier and signified dichotomies, because it risk being a closed system. They referenced Wittgenstein's Tractatus i think, but it puts me in mind of Derrida. who they claim was not a linguistic idealist of signifiers only. One view is that our Enlightenment epistemology is hopeless trapped in a hermeneutic circle from separation of mind and body , mind and world, langue and body and world. one view is in medieval thought they had no such separation and so how they understand language is very different from say contemporary linguistics. and its applications in cognitive science and bias in cognitive linguistics research. One hint form my phenomenology Husserl seminars is the idea, that some word many word we understand immediately like danger or I am in pain. this means they betray an immediate connection of body knowledge and world and others. Absolutely anti Hegelian and close to remarks by Wittgenstein.: eg some things are not interpreted or mediated by Language. You have the meaning with the sign with the feeling and with the world at once. For example perhaps. I used to love those Hitler parodies form the Downfall movie with the German mis translated at the foot of the screen. My mate though is fluent in German living there for 20 odd years. he cannot watch the parodies cos the German is immediate to his understanding so its not funny more incongruitous. The perils of learning a foreign language and the perks of being bereft of such knowledge or is it bereft of such habitual acculturalisation? Can an abstract purpose to come and to aim for be immediate to us?
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Part B4: reading on i feel I've entered a mine field here. You cant step outside your skin, but you should be able to step outside your culture? That is a natural verses ethical or cultural dichotomy. When you say someone "can" leave because there is law preventing it, the can here is the idea of an act that is not a simple violation of a law, but rather if the whole purpose of the law is the furtherance of the Islamic field (its Groundnorm perhaps in Hans Kelsen), then leaving the religion is an attempt to leave the entirety of the law and so "by definition " perhaps it is to leave a community that is if it is so constituted originally by and through the law alone. Again these are dichotomies that do not withstand much philosophical scrutiny. One thinks of natural law as Antigone against the Kings purpose with the law. that is ethos first the private sphere before the law not justice to come. We need laws to protect us from the law: like circumscribing sphere of privacy from within the law itself , but this is now a difficult category to separate from the polis. Could try make it a higher purpose or a limit but difficult. The laws of science have no such boundary the community the family the private thoughts are all open to the inspection of science in its quest to know and engineer human mental life for its purposes. Even if that is security ie claiming to protect privacy itself. The sciences allows the law to spread over these traditional categorical limits of law. All your face book messages and chats and emails are a route into people knowing stuff about you even you don't know. if you say securty demands this not purpose then what is happening here its a covert or implicit or project to remove all risk form all aspects of life. its negative but still a progress. a new groundnorm? like no one says since 2010 we will make your life better they say more like we wont let it get worse. Instead of attractors like super rich people we have the archetypes of really bad political situations in the world to scare us as oppose to attract us. its theological like we are avoiding the devil rather than progressing to God? no the devil is the law (Job) we are using the devil to protect us from the world as seen though law itself as a series of evil and bad acts. there is no outside if the devil as law is in charge. But God is in charge so this must mean a non teleological relation of God to the various real spheres behind the phenomena of the law. the devil is not Gods legal perception the devil like law sees only incontinence and illegality like a demonic gestalt. God perception is not like this and God is first. the complete sublimation of this into law is a project that can happen it is a possibility but not a necessity.
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Part 5: My take on page 16 is that the definition geos beyond a simple epistemology because they have wired in power relations and power differentials. This is just classic old school Marxism from Hegel and the master slave conflict and Foucault that is before or at least framing any all epistemology. the question then is about the "knowledge" of these power relations. but this "knowledge" is not transcendental or transcendent its itself is trapped and framed by power relations. You know you can ask who paid for the funding for the research into knowledge of power relations in psychology and cultural studies etc.
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Part B6: I like this quote from, the report(pg 18) Where does this end? Some people are promoting the term ‘Christophobia’ in order to join in the competition for victim status. But if every ideology gets its own ‘phobia’, will it not be possible to legitimately criticise any? We could have Toryphobia, Capitalistophobia, Socialistophobia, Atheistophobia, Sikhophobia, Hinduphobia, Communistophobia, Environmentalistophobia, Libertarianophobia… Yes this is the trap to avoid alright. Anti-science sciencephobia, questioning the science, conspiracy theories, social media, spreading falsities as facts, dangerous anti science ideas, critiquing medical science is a risk to everybody’s health. One thing in Kant is the idea that Critique can be reflective not just purposeful, reflective Critique and subversion of tools of use in an institution, for an alternative purpose are not the same things. Though people pretend to do the first when doing the second. Indeed most people have only the second move in their tools box. That is politics as power relations and purpose only. Really a Critique cannot be a like a legal evidence audit or list. Ie just a series of as many bad things as you can find. I get it as tool for political change though the law but do we really want to try and mimic the lefts method they have worked on this since the 1960’s there is no leap frogging here. The marches in the streets looked spontaneous but are really the icing on the cake of decades of work in university and charity and advocacy groups. You can’t mimic this without the substance education institutions behind you. There job was to “create” new communities from concepts, ours is not at all the same kind of project. Not sure its even a project as such definitely not legal driven. They made this their battle field in the 1980’s and 1990s when we were all parting for the millennium, and laughing at them, or mostly ignoring them, or ignorant of them. Hay though some with the skills are more guilty than others without!
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B6 note 1a A bit of autobiography. My first lecture on Kant at UCL/Imperial London Uni in 1989-90 was as part of as course on the History of the Philosophy of Science. Each figure from Bacon to Whewel had one two hour lecture except Kant which was booked as two lectures. On the day of the first Kant one the lecturer was on business, so it was cancelled. The second lecture was cut in half to one hour. The guy just drew a matrix of four squares 2x2. He labelled one side analytic and synthetic "propositions" (not judgements), and the other a priori knowledge the other a posteriori knowledge. This produces four apparent possibilities in the structure: analytic propositions known a priori (ie definitions tautologies necessity connection of subject to predicate ) , synthetic propositions known a posteriori (that is empirical propositions with contingent connection of subject to predicate known only after experience ) and the contested ones, synthetic a priori propositions (where the connection between the subject and predicate is not by definition but also cannot be the result of contingent experience to make the connection as a posteriori but the connection is also knowable a priori before experience). A fourth possibility in the matrix was analytic a posteriori which was claimed to be a non place. (years later my Kant supervisor claimed that this was not a non place). I knew a bit about Kant from friends doing philosophy while i was doing physics maths and education degree. So i was a bit disappointed at the one hour lecture. The following year though on philosophy of science course with Nicholas Maxwell a student in the seminar questioned the tutor on his interpretation of Kant in his work. So they arranged to use the next seminar to argue over this. That seminar was fascinating even though i couldn't under stand a word of it. I did understand though that dealing with Kant was at a whole new level of work and would take a long time to even get started. I still though though from doing physics and maths, that the other philosophical positions missed something important about what was going on about the "Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the natural sciences" (Eugene P. Winger). The Kant introduction lecture above was a summary of Kant's starting point in the Critique of Pure Reason. I remember a book on Kant claiming that Kant in that introduction had mealy fell into laying out the beginning in the style of a Medieval Scholastic debate, and this was idiosyncratic. This all tied in with a general view of a radical break between pre enlightenment medieval, ancient thought and the enlightenment and Critical philosophy. I was beginning to think though that the dialectical opening in Kant here was "key", a "key stone"? That he had not laid out a completed system, to then go to task on the metaphysical tradition, but his own view had its self emerged from the dialectic contradictions in the metaphysical tradition. This meant continuity to me and this i worked on in Galileo's theory of inertia or momentum as connected to the medieval traditions of impetus, and his experiments were constructed in accord with a Euclidean geometry diagram. Henry of Ghent for the Church had just picked the wrong dialectic from which to take on Galileo. Ghent was as expert in mathematics and science as Galileo which led him to challenge him at the level of mathematics, and not the human and intentionality verses a cosmology of mathematical necessity and efficient causal determinism dialectic. This was my alternative to the Kuhn debate's on scientific change as a radical break eg paradyme shift (in truth conditions). If Ghent had watched Galileo actually doing his experiments he would have seen that he used his pulse to time the motions of the balls, and so his apparatus included necessarily his body his feelings and the dialectic of character and the virtues. So Galileo's cosmology of a mathematical determined universe with man in it as a relational part, presupposed an Aristotelian character and raising in a culture of people and things. This suggests that character of the scientist is a priori to, even constitutive to empirical data. New dimension or dialectics for Kant's matrix emerges that of character verses mechanism, or vice and virtue as terms over propositions or judgements. We can also see that institutions and economics and politics are in play with Galileo a dialectic of public and private duty and the structure of governance, also in some way over the propositions. But my view on the four square matrix is that they are not distinct squares ie not disjuncts, for in Kant’s system synthetic a priori must already be in play over any synthetic a posterior, and I went much further that synthetic a priori propositions must be in play in analytic a priori propositions to. This “already in paly” analogy means that they can be represented as metaphysical relations and so by running them to their limits at one level, the other level collapses into pure metaphysics, so keeping the first open is a condition of the alter not collapsing to zero. Imagine Galileo doing his experiment when drunk, or if he gets too existed at finding a law of nature here, or his institution are offering money for such a law.
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Part B6 note 1b. I used to think Kant was wrong to lay it out this way but after reading Rawls "Theory of Justice" i realised Kant did it like this so it would be a new heuristic for rational human politics and institutions. From there the job shifts from reason as rational justification to legitimacy and agreement in judgment. These traditions of political concepts as constitutive of propositions, are a transformed view of concepts as rules and are the source for much metaphysical debate among the people in institutions and their character and duties as these are reworked metaphysics in institutions, and functions. The simple field of law is too thin and wide to capture this as a calling to account". The law is too weak on response to Critique of elites from subjects, who are conceived at he level of representations in public institutions. The Critique needs to be thicker in character and narrower in "rit" (cf. Bernard Williams). Ordinary people on the other hand are not in a public representational mode of proposing as subjects, they are not in their lives public or private metaphysicians. So the elates must read the relevant entries in the Kant Dictionary by Howard Caygill. (Ref to follow) in being called to account at the disputation on dialectical metaphysics they are "doing" in their public roles. But them as "private" subjects and the rest of us subjects are not at the level of representation so not in the game of using metaphysics or Critical metaphysics. The subjects are as the stone masons outside the monastery. Public and private are not radically distinct here but for the latter its a question of a different kind altogether without the separation of mind body and world. eg. see the opening paragraphs of Wittgenstein Philosophical Investigations. "Brick" "Slab" "Wall" "pass" "builder A" "builder B".
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There is a PDF of the P.I. online by Dave Allen (coincidence?) The left then just don't get it. They do policy to subjects like someone might use a mechanical linguistic synthesis as a chat up line heuristic.
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Caygill "Kant Dictionary": Definition, Determinant Judgement, Determination, Dialectic, Much of this approach came from me reading the version of Kant's Lectures on Logic. So i spent a lot of time on this, months and months. No one saw me for ages. Just after i had finished my mate happened to come round. A the time i was chilling out trying to synchronise the music of Jeff Wayne's "War of the Worlds" (1978?) with Steven Spielberg's movie of "War of the Worlds". He had a better grip of technology than me and started to help me out in my important project. Then my supervisor phoned my mobile i hadn't seen him for months. I didn't dare answer the phone at that point. I said to my mate like as if i was on the phone to my supervisor "I can't talk right now I'm trying to synchronise the...War of the Worlds music to the War of the Worlds film". You need to read Ibu Khaldun's classic medieval book. Like now!
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In reference to connecting Kant to Rawls through the level of metaphysics i should say that it was inspired also by Ian Shapiro's Yale Course on YouTube "The Moral Foundations of Politics", where he makes explicit Rawls claim to be offering a political not metaphysical interpretation. So i chose to interpret it metaphysically after Kant and Wittgenstein and others. This means a very different view of the Categories of relations, that is they are "simultaneous": cannot be understood as propositions or forms on their own (cf the unity of the virtues in Aristotle and you need all even for competence in one) So of his moral or practical philosophy how the versions of the Categorical Imperative(s) are "simultaneous" in "meaning". this makes for a different thinking about Kant and politics i.e. legitimacy and the de jure de facto opposition, in a way very different from Rawls or Nozick's way of linking the two as a Social Contract Theory. This view of the relations and Cat Imp as these being "simultaneous" (a bad word because of just being an expression of temporal simultaneity or connotation or meaning), i thought of in 2000's but a few papers haver come out recently tentatively moving this way.
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