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"Is Man Just Another Animal?" Professor Steve Jones says...

gorski said:
Johnny, one MUST know Hegel for this one to "work" - you just can not understand it without it. You have some 'notes' in my posts...

Phil did set out various characteristics of what he means by "soul" - but most "debaters" have either forgotten it in a jiffy or never understood it for starters. Not dissimilar to treatment of my posts - ignore and wilfully misinterpret, stretch my meaning madly to suit their needs, never make an effort, never ask the right questions. Bah!

And the nature of questions put forward to him is generally rather lamentable, usually coming from crude materialism, positivism, biologism and whatnot. The worst is that plenty of forumites seem to treat him with blessed, hardly contained contempt, even though he invented thinking for them...
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Tbf Gorski, that's mostly my fault. I do mess around on here sometimes, as well as express serious ideas, and I can understand how some people might not be able to tell the difference.

We also need to remember just how deeply engrained materialism is for many of these people. As I've said before, it's the default position in the C21st West, and so it takes a fair bit of effort to think beyond it. Failure to do so doesn't make them bad people.
 
Johnny Canuck3 said:
No. There's a quantitative difference. Our brains do much 'more' of what it is that brains do, than animal brains - so much more that we've convinced ourselves that we must be different from them. We're not.

It's like comparing a Commodore 64 with the most recent generations of computers. The Commodore had 64k RAM. Looking around, it appears that now, there is 128GB RAM available on a single stick. The capabilities of the two things are vastly different. But at essence, they are the same type of thing.

A qualitative difference would be if human skin contained chlorophyll, and we were able to synthesize energy from light. That's something that no animal can do.
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After a certain point a quantitative difference becomes qualitative.

That's Hegel that is.
 
phildwyer said:
After a certain point a quantitative difference becomes qualitative.

That's Hegel that is.
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That's Engels. Hegel worked it the other way round.

Perhaps you might consider that the very terms "quantity" and "quality" cause more confusion than clarity.
 
gorski said:
Told you, Phil, how can expect this lot to understand and especially accept Hegel...??? :D

It matters not you were discerning re. the notion and carefully connected it with the major philosophical tradition - just not gonna go down well, try as hard as you can... :(
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Actually quite a few of them have taken my advice and cracked the Phenomenology over the years. I think LBJ had a go.

And even the others have at least been forced to re-evaluate their basic assumptions and realize that life is a bit more complicated than it appears to be.

Obviously there are some who can never be reached, but even they have their role to play. There's room for everyone here!
 
Changes from one generation to the next are not quantitative. All change is qualitative, including gradual, imperceptible change.
 
phildwyer said:
The devil you say. Got a ref?
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Sure.
1877: Anti-Duhring - XII. Quantity and Quality

Or even more so here:
1. The law of the transformation of quantity into quality and vice versa. For our purpose, we could express this by saying that in nature, in a manner exactly fixed for each individual case, qualitative changes can only occur by the quantitative addition or subtraction of matter or motion (so-called energy).
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1883-Dialectics of Nature-ch2
 
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phildwyer said:
Perfect, thanks. Was he consciously revising Hegel, do you know?
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To an extent. But also he thought he was being very orthodox. The idea was to invert Hegel. I think Engels (and Marx) had an indirect familiarty with Hegel - filtered by one of his followers whose name I forget.

I can't remember exactly what Hegel was saying in his two books on logic about quantity and quality - he said a lot. But he does set out quality first and then quantity not the other way round. I would have to read it again...
 
Knotted said:
To an extent. But also he thought he was being very orthodox. The idea was to invert Hegel. I think Engels (and Marx) had an indirect familiarty with Hegel - filtered by one of his followers whose name I forget.

I can't remember exactly what Hegel was saying in his two books on logic about quantity and quality - he said a lot. But he does set out quality first and then quantity not the other way round. I would have to read it again...
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Marx and Engels both had a profound and direct knowledge of Hegel.

Engels did see himself as inverting Hegel, but Marx did not. And the quote about turning Hegel on his head was responsible for the disastrous misconception that Marx was a metaphysical materialist, as well as the misreading of Hegel as idealist.
 
If anyone is interested:

Philosophy Courses

 
 
 
 
 
I've taken two awful ideas from Hegel.

The first is 'Geist'. This adds a level of mysticism to the clear thinking of Kant.

The second is the Hegelian dialectic: thesis + antithesis > synthesis. One of the worst ideas in the entire history of thought.
 
gorski said:
Johnny, one MUST know Hegel for this one to "work" - you just can not understand it without it. You have some 'notes' in my posts...

Phil did set out various characteristics of what he means by "soul" - but most "debaters" have either forgotten it in a jiffy or never understood it for starters. Not dissimilar to treatment of my posts - ignore and wilfully misinterpret, stretch my meaning madly to suit their needs, never make an effort, never ask the right questions. Bah!

And the nature of questions put forward to him is generally rather lamentable, usually coming from crude materialism, positivism, biologism and whatnot. The worst is that plenty of forumites seem to treat him with blessed, hardly contained contempt, even though he invented thinking for them...
Click to expand...

Get a room. On your own. Stay there. Pompous twit.

People aren't asking the right questions. Really.
:D:D:p
Blaine the audience.
:rolleyes:

Why won't they listen to my genius. Why won't they read The same books as me
 
beesonthewhatnow said:
Dolphins have souls.

Truly, you learn something new every day.
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It must be great to be so easily surprised. The world must seem a cornucopia of novelty. Every day a new revelation -- or maybe several of them. I picture you wandering about in a permanent state of childlike awe. Is it a bit scary sometimes though?
 
phildwyer said:
It must be great to be so easily surprised. The world must seem a cornucopia of novelty. Every day a new revelation -- or maybe several of them. I picture you wandering about in a permanent state of childlike awe. Is it a bit scary sometimes though?
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But not immortal ones. :D

You're a religious nut, and all your positions spring from that, no matter how much you bluster.
 
littlebabyjesus said:
I've taken two awful ideas from Hegel.

The first is 'Geist'. This adds a level of mysticism to the clear thinking of Kant.

The second is the Hegelian dialectic: thesis + antithesis > synthesis. One of the worst ideas in the entire history of thought.
Click to expand...

How did you get Geist from Kant? It's not a mystical concept, it just means "Mind."

And what's so dreadful about the dialectic?
 
phildwyer said:
How did you get Geist from Kant? It's not a mystical concept, it just means "Mind."

And what's so dreadful about the dialectic?
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Geist is not from Kant. it's from Hegel (or at least it is Hegel's use of the term that I'm talking about), added by him to Kant's considerations. It doesn't just mean 'mind'. Hegel makes claims about it, as I'm sure you well know.

Hegel's dialectic is arbitrary, absurd and useless. Other than that it's great.
 
littlebabyjesus said:
Geist is not from Kant. it's from Hegel, added by him to Kant's considerations. It doesn't just mean 'mind'.

Hegel's dialectic is arbitrary, absurd and useless. Other than that it's great.
Click to expand...

No, I mean why do you think Geist is an "addition" to Kant. Why is there any connection at all?
 
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