[MD] Tit's

[MarshaV]

Ron, 
    
Does an independent thing exist?  Was my question somehow incorrect?  
 
Marsha 


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Ron Kulp" <RKulp at ebwalshinc.com>
To: <moq_discuss at moqtalk.org>
Sent: Thursday, July 24, 2008 9:28 AM
Subject: Re: [MD] Tit's


> 
>   
> Marsha:
> 
> I remember a while back you ardently defending tit's.  I think maybe you
> have softened your view.  Are tit's independent, autonomous entities, or
> not?  Example?  Are tit's patterns?  Or something different?  
> 
> Or maybe this post should wait until the levels post has come to a
> finite conclusion.  But then, can anything comprised of patterns have a
> finite conclusion?  Useful?  Yes.  Absolute?  No way, Jose.    
> 
> 
> Ron:
> I think what Krimmel needs to distinguish, and I'm not sure that Kant
> does,
> is differentiate between noumena and things in themselves.
> Roughly, a noumenon may be distinguished from the following concepts,
> although there is debate of the synonymity between them:
> 
> Thing-in-itself, an actual object and its properties independent of any
> observer. 
> the Absolute, the totality of things; all that is, whether it has been
> discovered or not. 
> For instance, the philosopher Immanuel Kant used the term noumenon
> synonymously with the phrase thing in itself.
> 
> A phenomenon is that which is perceived; A noumenon is the actual object
> that emits the phenomenon in question.
> 
> these both use the classical terms of Objecthood. No doubt Kant was
> headed in the right direction but still under the analytical SOM
> assumption of independent objects.
> Kant's writings show points of difference between noumena and
> things-themselves. For instance, he regards things-in-themselves as
> existing:
> 
> "...though we cannot know these objects as things in themselves, we must
> yet be in a position at least to think them as things in themselves;
> otherwise we should be landed in the absurd conclusion that there can be
> appearance without anything that appears." 
> 
> Schopenhauer's critique
> Schopenhauer claimed that Kant used the word incorrectly. He explained
> in "Criticism of the Kantian Philosophy", which first appeared as an
> appendix to The World as Will and Representation:
> 
> "But it was just this difference between abstract knowledge and
> knowledge of perception, entirely overlooked by Kant, which the ancient
> philosophers denoted by noumena and phenomena. (See Sextus Empiricus,
> Outlines of Pyrrhonism, Book I, Chapter 13, ' What is thought (noumena)
> is opposed to what appears or is perceived (phenomena).' ) This contrast
> and utter disproportion greatly occupied these philosophers in the
> philosophemes of the Eleatics, in Plato's doctrine of the Ideas, in the
> dialectic of the Megarics, and later the scholastics in the dispute
> between nominalism and realism, whose seed, so late in developing, was
> already contained in the opposite mental tendencies of Plato and
> Aristotle. But Kant who, in an unwarrantable manner, entirely neglected
> the thing for the expression of which those words phenomena and noumena
> had already been taken, now takes possession of the words, as if they
> were still unclaimed, in order to denote by them his
> things-in-themselves and his phenomena." [26]
> 
> The Noumenon's original meaning of "that which is thought" is not
> compatible with the "thing-in-itself," which signifies things as they
> exist apart from being images in the mind of an observer.
> 
> -wiki
>