Heidegger

In a message dated 01/10/2006 _artefact at t-online.de_
(mailto:artefact@t-online.de) writes: Cologne 01-Oct-2006

THIS IS STILL SECTION ZWEI OF JUD EVANS’ ANSWER TO Plato Theaet. 155e My
part eine of my response To Part one of Two is still awaiting the moderator’s OK
[it being slightly over the acceptable file-size. I am loathe to split it and
send it as two separate files, for it could complicate things with so many
e-mails and their answers chasing each other. iI intend to leave it for a bit
longer therefore until Malcolm has had a chance to make a decision.

SNIP

JUD EVANS [EARLIER] As for Parmenides he also exhorted us not to speak of
that which *is not* - but that which is not is the Grundbegriff of you whole
fictional ontology. But then you are obviously very selective in your sources
and you only seem to take those bits of Parmenides’ advice that gel with your
curious folkish position. Maybe you find the massed blanket of the vox pupuli
or ontofolk for whom the traditional folk ontology speaks to be in some way a
comfort - a reificational reassurance that you are *on the right track*
philosophically?

DR. ELDRED: It is generally agreed that the Hauptsatz of Parmenides is _to
gar auto noein te kai einai_ “Namely, understanding/thinking and being are
identical/the same/belong together” JUD EVANS: [NOW} Note the extract below
where he lambastes the very notion of Heidegger’s *nothing* or *not-being*
nonsense which he calls *wholly incredible* an opinion with which I wholly agree!

*The one way, assuming that being is and that it is impossible for it not to
be, is the trustworthy path, for truth attends it. The other, that not-being
is and that it necessarily is, I call a wholly incredible course, since thou
canst not recognise not-being (for this is impossible), nor couldst thou
speak of it, for thought and being are the same thing.*

It should be noted that in the above extract that Parmenides is referring
NOT the being in the sense of the use of the word **Being* in the Heideggerian
gerundial sense meaning human existence, or the experience of that existence
as characterised undergone by the risible personification of *Being There* in
the gerundial *dasein* scam. Rather he is plainly referring to being as the
human state of existing [in the sense of living.]

It is my understanding that the introduction of the meaning of ousia in the
sense that Heidegger employed it was a fairly late innovation introduced
either by Plato himself or by some unknown Sophists who had preceded him not long
before he started to use it. If this is true then that PROVES that Parmenides
was NOT using the word in the ookie-spookie sense in the way that those that
followed him did.

There appears to a movement away from Parmenides use of *being* . I had
heard it was going on in academe, amongst the Hellenists, but it was only today
that I came across the fact that Parmenides’ version of *being* was being
challenged as being quite different from the version pushed by Plato and later
copied by Heidegger.

First the historico-philosophical background. It is claimed that such a
concept would have been an anachronism in the age of Parmenides, in the sense
that or meaning that
*being* is *what everything had in common with everything else* or that it
represented the other *Being* version of Plato. Parmenides was born in c. 515
BCE, and it was Socrates 469 BC, [according to Plato] who created the general
concept of *Being.* *Being* in its Latin version was first maintained as
substantive in the Dark Ages [the Golden Age of Folk Philosophy] for theological
reason when God was characterised as *being* and as THE CAPO *BEING* in an
absolute sense.

I would appreciate you opinion regarding the fact that in the proem
Parmenides used the innovative and novel singular * [to on] rather than the customary
or traditional [ta onia] {excuse the crap transliteration I’m using AOL]
which was usually used to describe reality in terms of its constituent
elements, as was the case with for example with Heraclitus, who used the plural to
designate reality, and who was thought to be a special target by Parmenides.. J.
E. Boodin. The Vision of Parmenides. The Philosophical Review. Vol. 52. no
6. pp. 578 - 589 .

JUD EVANS: [BEFORE] and in regard to the evidential proofs with I am
continually pressing you to reveal publicly.

DR. ELDRED: The public revelation here is that you have no answer to this
dilemma that we human beings could leave the identity (the belonging-together)
of human understanding and being and still say anything at all. I challenge
you to be consistent and fall silent forever.

understanding human being implicates you with abstractions which, if they
did not exist, would rob you of your ontological status as a human being.

JUD EVANS [NOW] It is not the case that the strings of abstractional words
actually EXIST - it is simply that that are AVAILABLE as components of our
linguistical communicative system of exchanging neurological templates of the
way we exist in relation to what we are thinking ABOUT ANYTHING at the time of
thinking and communicating. What you claim here is a Meinongian fantasy - the
fantasy is [that according to you and Meinong] anything we think or say
causes the things we think or say to exist, so if I think of and utter an
abstraction like: *beauty,* or an abstraction like: *The polka-dot ice-cream parlour
that doubles as a church on top of Mount Everest, * then automatically
*beauty* or *The polka-dot ice-cream parlour that doubles as a church on top of
Mount Everest* then automatically exist. That is plainly ridiculous and I doubt
very much if many of you transcendentalists friends would agree with you herr?

DR. ELDRED: Even for a mechanist ontologist like Descartes there were two
realities. res cogitans and res extensa, i. e. thinking reality and extended
reality, but you reduce thinking to an abstraction like of brain activity.

JUD EVANS: You are confusing your neurological philosophy. Functionalism
says that mental states are constituted by their causal relations to one another
and to sensory inputs to the brain and behavioural outputs. Eliminativists
are NOT epiphenomenologists who view thinking as secondary phenomenon that is a
by-product of another phenomenon - the brain. The brain is NOT a
*phenomenon* it is a wet lump of meat you can pick up, smell, see, take a bite of and
taste and hear the PLOP! when you drop it on the tiles-floor of the autopsy
dept floor. Behaviorism identified mental states with behavioral dispositions;
physicalism in its most influential version identifies mental states with
brain states. Cartesian Dualism said the ultimate nature of the mental was to be
found in a special mental substance [which he never identified] For the
eliminativists there is simply the thinking brain - period.

Even the most besotted materialist neurophysicist investigating the brain
has to concede that he is investigating an (ontic) CORRELATION between brain
activity and consciousness, i. e. he has to accept this brute fact that there is
a phenomenon such as consciousness, WITHOUT having the slightest clue
ontologically about what this consciousness is.

JUD EVANS: You need t bone up a bit - a large part of the neurological
establishment has turned against these of notions of Folk Psychology. Psycholgy is
dead on its feet now anyway - like the church - the psychological
establishment version is only manned by a gaggle of head-scarved toothless old
onto-crones.

JUD EVANS [EARLIER] You don’t even have to describe them or even talk about
them - just SHOW US the damn things, and then the cruel pin can be withdrawn
and you can flutter back up to the light-bulb and dance in the clearing of
*Being* and ping your worshipping wings against the white hot vitrification of
Heidegger’s verity.

DR. ELDRED: Contemplate the thought and/or statement ‘This is a cup’, as I
have called on you to do many times before.

JUD EVANS [NOW] I wnat to see your abstractional the *Being* of the cup - I
can think about the cup another time.

DR. ELDRED: [EARLIER] I have no intention of trying to escape from the modes
of existential understanding which my species has developed over thousands
of years. It would be an impossible and silly thing to essay. However the
intelligence with which I have been blessed due to the happenstance of the
catenulate causal interactions which preceded me is enough for me to comprehend
that the objects of the cosmos existed long before any human had reached such a
level of sentience that he or she could understand the fact. At this stage I
am curious to discover whether your rejection is that of a pre-Michael Eldred
cosmos or a pre-human one? Am I to understand you correct that you are
claiming that (A) there existed no cosmos before you were born or (B) that no
cosmos existed before there were humans who could comprehend the cosmos as the
cosmos? [or world]

DR. ELDRED: Already been through this point ad nauseum. Ontology is not a
matter of considering empirical individuals such as Michael Eldred.

JUD EVANS: [NOW} Oh yes it IS! I am not a part of Heidegger’s silly *Formal
ontology* conspiracy against philosophy. I am interested in the *traditional
ontology* of what exists and what does not exist. You are not answering my
questions, yo are merely incessantly regurgitating the formal ological*
intonation over and over again like you kept incessantly repeating bits from the
bible in the belief that the more times you repeat them in some sort of a
spell-like way they will cause the pimple on the end of your nose to go away.

Just simply answer the questions - her they are again - they are not
DIFFICULT questions any young kid who just joined the list could supply his or her
version. Am I to understand you correct that you are claiming that:

(A) There existed no cosmos before you were born

or

(B) That no cosmos existed before there were humans who could comprehend the
cosmos as the cosmos? [or world]

DR. ELDRED: You seem hung up on empiricist individualism.

JUD EVANS: [NOW} Be that as it may just answer the questions they won’t hurt
you.

DR. ELDRED: Ontology is concerned with the identity of human understanding
and being.

JUD EVANS: [NOW} Correction - YOUR Heideggerian *Formal ontology* type of
ontology is concerned with the identity of human understanding and being. MY
type of ontology concerns what exists and what doesn’t

DR. ELDRED:

I am saying neither A) nor B) but, for the nth time: Nothing at all can be
said about what exists or does not exist OUTSIDE the identity of human
understanding and being.

JUD EVANS [NOW] Of COURSE NOTHING can be said BY YOU about what exists or
does not exist OUTSIDE the identity of human understanding and being before YOU
were born or AFTER you are dead. But that attitude ids pure solipsism. The
people who survive you and the people who lived before you can say as much as
they like about what exists or does not exist. You remind me of Mrs Edwards in
Dyllan Thomas’ *Under Milk Wood* of whom the poet made her husband say:
*When she shuts her eyes - it’s NIGHT!*

JUD EVANS [NOW] It’s late now and I’m a bit tired. Tomorrow is my first full
day back for the start of my second year of my course.

I will catch up with the rest soon - still no word from malcolm about my
missing PART ONE of TWO.

regards,

Jud.

All we human beings can say ontologically is how beings show themselves AS
SUCH to understanding. The simplest way beings present themselves to human
understanding is AS something. In the philosophical tradition, therefore,
’something’ has the place of the first, most basic category, i. e. the first and
simplest way in which beings are addressed (from _katagorein_, to address) AS
such by human understanding. The one and the many are further categories, such
as itself and the other are. You can follow up on the very subtle dialectic
of itself (_to auto_) and other (_to heteron_) in relation to movement
(_kinaesis_) and standstill
(_stasis_) and being (_to on_) in Plato’s Sophist which remains to this day
a wonderful and deep initiation into ontological thinking. One you ‘get’ this
dialectic of five categories (Plato calls them _genae_ or ‘genera’), you
will have become an initiate of genuine philosophy.

JUD EVANS: [BEFORE] Let us if we may stick to the ontological facts
concerning WHAT EXISTS AND WHAT DOES NOT EXIST and consider the ways in which you
intend to prove to the world that these extraordinary claims of yours can be
verified and proved. So I ask you again - please prove that what you claim
exists exists and where and when I may inspect these fictional [or if your prefer]
*abstractional * objects of which you are a self-appointed custodian.

DR. ELDRED: The onus is rather on you to prove that the phenomena before our
eyes, especially before our mind’s eye, of each and every one of us — such
as the phenomenon of something –, with which we are all thoroughly intimate
and familiar, do not exist. Your touchy-feely criterion of really real
existence is simply a peculiar idee fixe of yours. What exists first and foremost
for us human beings understanding the world are the ideas within which all that
is shapes up and becomes understandable.

JUD EVANS: [NOW} You turn your begging-bowl of solicitation for your
*fallacy of appeal to authority* to the masses, which is the hallmark of the
folk ontologist - now you can understand why the term was created and is
spreading like memetic wildfire throughout our institutions of higher learning.

ME: You yourself have been indulging copiously in appeals to the masses in
desperate attempts to show my desperation in the face of your ostensibly
superior argumentative onslaught. Phenomenology appeals to the phenomena we see
before our mind’s eye, and such appeals are in principle open to every single
human being. In British empiricist philosophy classes this is termed
(misleadingly) the “method of introspection”.

DR. ELDRED: You claim that I am deluded to assert that abstractions such as
the category of something exists. When someone is suffering from delusions,
however, and sees things that do not exist, some explanation is provided of the
delusion, either that what is seen is in truth something else
(e. g. what the deluded one sees as his general’s hat is in truth a tea
cosy), or that what is said to exist is merely imagined and refers to nothing
that is truly present and apparent to anyone present on the basis of its own
phenomenal evidence.

JUD EVANS: [NOW} Yes it is true - I DO think you are deluded - but in spite
of that I am willing to allow you the chace

ME: If you think I’m deluded, then the delusion needs to be unravelled
through cogent argument, not through the assertion ad nauseum that abstractions do
not exist. I have already demonstrated a thousand times that abstractions
exist and that in truth they are that which exists most of all for us
understanding human beings because without them we would not be understanding human
beings.

DR. ELDRED: [PREVIOUSLY] But you do not claim either. All you do is keep
repeating that abstractions, such as the category of something that is
thoroughly manifest to each of us, does not exist, without showing that what we see in
truth is not something but Contradictio in adjecto other thing, nor even
claiming that we merely imagine something.

JUD EVANS: [NOW] It’s simple then - just prove them.

DR. ELDRED: That’s why your materialist eliminativism is a contradictio in
adjecto. The only consistent conduct for a materialist eliminativist would be
to fall forever mute — and not self-indulge in long-winded pugilism directed
at anything genuinely philosophical.

JUD EVANS: [BEFORE] There IS NO contradiction between the adjective causal
and the noun object it qualifies-

DR. ELDRED: A “contradictio in adjecto” has nothing to do with adjectives.
It means, “abject contradiction”.

JUD EVANS: [NOW} You are wrong I’m afraid:

ME: Oops. Yes, you’re right. Thanks for the correction. These days, however,
in both English and German “contradictio in adjecto” is understood more
loosely as a “contradiction in terms” or a “Widerspruch in sich”.

Jud: Ein verbreiteter Spezialfall des Oxymoron ist die Contradictio in
adjecto (lat. „Widerspruch in der Beifügung“). Oft steht dabei ein
Adjektiv, welches normalerweise ein Substantiv näher erläutert, im Widerspruch zu
diesem. Here are some examples of contradictio in adjecto for you to see that
in all cases the adjective contradicts the noun - in other words the term is
just a fancy way of describing an oxymoronically conjoining contradictory term
as in: a *deafening silence - a tiny giant, a forced volunteer, an honest
liar, a wrong proof, a variation of the constants, an eloquent silence, the
relatively best.* It has no connection with the Latin word for abject
- which is: *abiectus.* abicio -icere -ieci -iectum [to throw down or away]..
Transf. , [to pronounce carelessly, break off abruptly ; to get rid of, give
up; to dash to the ground, weaken, dishearten]. Hence partic. abiectus -a
-um; of position [low, common]; of character [cowardly, mean]; of style,
[without force, prosaic]. Adv. abiecte, [without spirit, meanly]. abiectio -onis f.
[throwing away]; ‘animi’ , [despondency,
despair].http://www.archives.nd.edu/cgi-bin/lookup.pl? stem=ab&ending=iectusBTW. Nietzsche used it in this
adverbial sense in Beyond Good and Evil.

JUD EVANS: [BEFORE] … because EVERY OBJECT IN THE COSMOS exists that way
as a changing entity. You claim that folk philosophy is *genuinly
philosophical*

DR. ELDRED: It would be real nice if the folk, or some folk, could really do
this folk ontology.

JUD EVANS: [NOW} They call it *folk ontology* PRECISELY because the folk
CANNOT DO ONTOLOGY.

JUD EVANS: [BEFORE] and yet you consistently refuse to provide any evidence
whatsoever to back up the claims of your philosophy which is grounded and
constructed upon the very abstraction which you fail to prove exists. You
yourself have just employed a contradictio in adjecto in your description of folk
philosophy as *genuinly philosophical* when it fact it is just out of date
speculation based upon absolute fiction.

DR. ELDRED: The evidence I have constantly provided is to call on you to
open your eyes, especially your mind’s eye. Just relax, stop denying and take a
look around.

JUD EVANS: [NOW} Calling upon someone who rejects the very existence of what
you claim exists to *open their eyes* is just whistling in the dark - the
only way to deal with somebody like me whose eyes are already wide open is bring
the phenomenological objects or
*metaphysical objects* or whatever gobble de gook you folk ontologists use
to describe the indescribable and PRODUCE THEM FOR INSPECTION.

ME: Your incessant assertions that ABSTRACTIONS DO NOT EXIST is merely
shouting in the dark. Go on, open your eyes. You presuppose these abstractions as
existent in every single one of your thoughts (cf. below)

JUD EVANS: [BEFORE] If by that you mean if I Jud Evans did not exist I would
not be able to type these words - you are quite correct - and what point are
you trying to make in saying that - I would have thought it was pretty
obvious to anybody?

DR. ELDRED: I am not just talking about empirical individuals, but
ontologically about human understanding and being in their identity with one another.
The British empiricist in you cannot get beyond individualism.

JUD EVANS: [NOW} But we are not addressing chattering human individuals
gossiping out their ideas of what they think they understand [ and plainly do
not] nor are we addressing British empiricists who you allege cannot get beyond
individualism. We are trying to address what exists and what does not exist,
but you keep changing the subject like some addict who keeps deflecting any
mention of abstinence.

ME: Not “we are trying to address what exists and what does not exist”, but
you are trying to set the agenda, claiming that this uninteresting question is
THE ontological question par excellence. In truth, the ontological question
par excellence is how beings show themselves AS beings to human understanding.

DR. ELDRED: WITHIN this identity, of course, something can be said about
what has been and what will be — we are not restricted to the present in
articulating our understanding, but can develop, say, a theoretical understanding
of the so-called Big Bang billions of years ago when there were no humans
around. OUTSIDE the identity of human understanding and being, however, there are
no human beings and nothing at all to be said.

JUD EVANS: [BEFORE] The above is very true, but it is diverging from the
main focus of the discussion, which concerns the fact that we ARE here now and
that you believe that certain fictions actually exist and I do not and I am
trying to get you to start coming up with some evidence and proofs for the
claims you keep making.

DR. ELDRED: Yes, “we ARE here now”, and can think and say ONLY from WITHIN
our human understanding of the world, so we have to pay attention to how a
world shapes up within and for human understanding. We cannot possibly do any
better than that. It’s mere twaddle to attempt to say anything at all about
things in themselves, outside at possible human experience and understanding of
them.

JUD EVANS: [NOW} As I type I look down at the keyboard which plainly exists
as a thing in itself. Are you claiming that it DOES NOT exist as a thing in
itself?

ME: No, I am not saying that the keyboard “exists as a thing in itself”.
Rather, I have been attacking your own formulation for several e-mails now, to
wit, “*things in themselves* [objects existing in the way that they exist
uninfluenced by humans nattering] and “objects are independent things in
themselves” Sun, 17 Sep 2006
19:18:05 EDT I interpret “nattering” here as human understanding.

Furthermore, even to say that something “exists in itself” is to employ the
abstract category of “in itself” which, as an abstract idea, ostensibly does
not exist. The category “in itself” is called by the Greek _kath’ auto_. In
Aristotle this category is contrasted with _to symbebaekos_, standardly, but
misleadingly, rendered as ‘the accidental’. _To symbebaekos_ is the participial
noun derived from the verb _symbainein_ which means literally ‘to go along
with’. _To symbebaekos_ is that which simply ‘goes along’ with something,
modifying it. I. e. it is what happens to something. E. g. even when you happen
to type on your keyboard, it remains what it is _kath’ auto_, i. e. “in
itself”, even though it is changed by your typing on it. So this is a further
contradiction in which you entangle yourself as an eliminativist, saying things
affirmatively (such as “causal objects exist in themselves”) whilst at the same
time denying the existence of “causal objects in themselves” as a
meaningless abstraction.

Jud: Perhaps you’re claiming that it exists as part of another thing’s self,
or are you claiming that it clings for comfort and company to some swirling
flock of Platonic *somethings* in the sky, which sometimes make a visitation
to the other room in your flat in order to go *bump in the night* or hover
like hesitant hawks awaiting for some ill-informed human to summon them down as
a stand-in *something,* if strange sounds are made in another room, or if a
hostess is too lazy to list the available drinks on offer?

DR. ELDRED: You persist in shining your tiny flashlight on that rusty
toolbox of mechanistically mutually impinging causal objects under your bed that
your wife keeps banging the Hoover up against, claiming that only they exist,
but everyone can see otherwise, namely, that what you keep denigrating as
“useful fictions” actually do exist. We cannot be human beings at all outside the
identity of human understanding and being, and to be understanding human
beings, we must see, first and foremost, the ideas, especially the abstract and
most abstract ideas that allow the world to shape up as a world and be
understood. Even though, for the most part, we overlook these ideas
(such as ’something’) upon which we vitally and essentially depend, and take
them for granted, ontological thinking’s task is to bring these ideas to
light — and philosophy from Plato through to Heidegger is this endeavour to
make us aware of what we already implicitly know.

JUD EVANS: [NOW} I enjoyed the stuff about the causal objects under the bed
- 50-years ago I would have thought you were referring to the pisspot which
caused one the luxury of staying in the warm bedroom instead of fighting
against the storm to reach the lavatory at the bottom of the yard. [happy
days]*Everyone* that YOU mix with - those who mitseinically dance the metaphysical
mambo with you on the dance-floor of Dasein - may believe the guff about the
existence of abstraction - but the gang I run with think differently. Now the
fact that your gang is bigger than my gang makes not a lot of difference - the
fact that there are x-million muslims does not mean that their prophet was
right and the fact that there are x-million Catholics doesn’t mean that the
ex-Hitler Jugend guy in charge is infallible either. I keep telling you that it
is a waste of time to regurgitate aspects of human linguistic behaviour and
the point to the abstract and most abstract ideas that allow the world to
shape up as a world and be understood - they are human created communicational
shortcuts and nothing more and have no bearing whatsoever on your claims that
they really, really exist other than the fact that the ho polloi have been
USING these terms for thousands of years and have come to take it for granted
that they actually exist. Das Volk can be forgiven for this - but I can see no
excuse for their more educated and articulate mouthpieces to descend to the
same level.

JUD EVANS: [BEFORE] OK, humankind can argue as much as they like about their
perception of the manner, mode or way in which that which exists is
perceived to exist through the imperfect sensorial medium of their sensors - but
there is no argument AT ALL about the actuality that ONLY objects exist, and that
they exist IN the way that they exist. If you have hard evidence that
objects DO NOT exist in the way that they exist then now is your opportunity to
present it to the public.

DR. ELDRED: I have not for a moment denied the existence of the tangible
things around us. Why should I?

JUD EVANS: [NOW} You did say somewhere that without humans the at things in
themselves do not exist?

ME: No, I never said that. Why do you persevere in perverting what I said?
Hammer in, if you will, my formulation above about “Nothing can be said….”..
Write it out a hundred times as homework.

DR. ELDRED: But you’re stuck in onticity, and do not see the ontological
task of grasping both the causality and the objectivity of your “causal objects”
in well-founded, thought-through concepts. Debating whether or not certain
beings exist is beside the ontological point and a task for the explorers of
onticity of whatever kind. If you hadn’t written off all philosophy from Plato
through to Heidegger as “folk ontology”, you could have learned something.
You seem to be deluded that your rumbunctiously aggressive polemic can wipe
these greats off the slate as mere idiots. Philosophy does not work that way.
Philosophy moves and changes only through fine minds thinking carefully and
deeply. Since your eliminativism eliminates minds as non-existent, perhaps that
does not matter to you.

JUD EVANS: [NOW} Of COURSE I see all the aspects you point out - I am a
highly educated aware member of society with a catholic interest in every aspect
of our world, from our political institutions to poetry - from history to
hermeneutics, from music to metaphysics - from math to foreign languages. I have
raised many children, known many relationships - have been an assiduous
omnivorous reader of educational and aesthetic books and magazines since I was a
small kid. To make the wild statements that I have not been thinking carefully
is just another way of saying that I have not been thinking carefully and
deeply in the poplarist mode that you have chosen - a mode that I have an
understanding of but no sympathy with. As to the *greats of
*philosophy* they are the *greats* of YOUR KIND of philosophy NOT mine

ME: You seem to have pretty much eliminated every great from the greats of
philosophy. Who’s left? Bertrand Russell?

Jud: - for me thinkers have to earn my respect and the only mitigating
factors that I can think of to excuse the crap that Socrates, and Plato spewed out
was the fact that they lived in a society that had so recently been nothing
more than bare-assed savages. As for Heidegger I shall employ the
*Contradictio in adjecto*
*elequent or deafening silence* to speak for me.

ME: Even in these last few e-mails you have been polemically dismissing and
denigrating all ontology from Socrates and Plato on.

JUD EVANS: [BEFORE] We eliminativists [and I had this out with MichaelP
years ago) employ such terms for convenience - in order to avoid long-winded
circumlocution. For the eliminativist the use of such words does not imply that
he or she accepts for one moment that universals exist. I have no intention of
embarking upon a long section to explain the various ways in which the
eliminativist concept of the individual can be extrapolated, for I have done so
endlessly on this list for years. The bottom line is this. Whilst the folk
ontologist uses universals in language and actually [consciously or
unconsciously] believes that they exist - the eliminativist uses such useful fictions but
recognises then as verbal conveniences and DENIES THAT THEY EXIST.

DR. ELDRED: Be that as it may. The denial of existence is no solution, for
your situation is much more dire. It is not at all that you are merely a
conformist that goes along with convention, but that, with every sentence you say
and every thought you think, you are in self-contradiction.

JUD EVANS: [NOW} I am part of no convention. My personal ontology of
Eliminative Determinism is (as far as] I know a unique creation of my own. In fact I
am very probably the only member of this list who has actually produced a
fully functional ontology. Now obviously you disagree with its principles, but
at least it stands up well to criticism and I have no trouble at all defending
it and I am willing to provide evidence for my claims at every turn - which
is something that you cannot say for your ontology which if you are honest,
you will admit is not really an ontology at all - but no more than blind faith
in the manner of the masses that you represent?

DR. ELDRED: E. g. walking past an elm, you think to yourself, that elm over
there looks sick, and you mean that singular elm over there in its singularity
and no other.

JUD EVANS: [NOW} The fact that I address that singular elm over there in its
singularity does NOT mean that I am unaware of the other elm trees that
exist in the world.

ME: And I did not claim in a single word that you were “unaware of the other
elm trees that exist in the world”. You still don’t get the point.

Jud: Some of them I am personally aware of - others I am willing to accept
on the say-so of others. The fact the we do not accept that universals exist
[the very idea seems utterly childish and ridiculous] …

ME: But the word and the thought is a universal without which, if it did not
exist, you would not be able to see the elm before you AS an elm.

Jud: … does NOT mean that we disregard all the other individual elms in
the world.

ME: Pure rubbish and red herring. Why switch the subject? You can only
understand “all the other individual elms in the world” because each of these many
elms is an elm, i. e. a kind of tree, i. e. an abstract universal. Without
such an ontologically prior understanding, it would be impossible for your
understanding to group together the many elms AS the many elms they are. This
predicament has always been the downfall of simple-minded empiricism and
nominalism.

DR. ELDRED: You intend to think solely the elm in its singularity, but
cannot avoid thinking “elm”, a kind of tree.

JUD EVANS: [NOW} You are just erecting *straw elms* - but nothing of the
sort that you claim describes the reality of the eliminativist.

ME: The eliminativist reality is a delusion because it overlooks the
existence of the idea of elm as a kind of tree. Such an idea is a really existing
abstraction compared to which the data given to the human senses are a
meaningless jumble.

DR. ELDRED: So, in thinking that that elm looks sick, you think and
understand a universal, namely ‘elm” as a kind of tree, and you cannot do otherwise.
And so you are left in the dilemma of saying and thinking affirmatively
universals whilst at the very same time denying that they exist. No deeper
self-contradiction is possible.

JUD EVANS: [NOW} I think of the kind of tree an elm is but it is the
individuate elms that exists -

ME: Even to make this (erroneous) claim, namely, “it is the individuate elm
that exists”, you must presuppose the universal “individuate” as existent. As
I say, every single thing you think or say as an eliminativist enmeshes you
all the more tightly in self-contradiction.

Jud: … NOT *The thinking of the kind of tree an elm is* which is no more
than an existential modality of the thinker about elm trees. Is that TOO
difficult for you to understand?

ME: It’s silly nonsense. There is no existent whatsoever that does not exist
in “an existential modality”, i. e. AS what and how and relative to and
where and when, etc. it is. In other words, it’s bogus to try to separate the
sheer existence of a being and its existential modality. Why? Because we can
only say ANYTHING AT ALL about beings from WITHIN the identity of human
understanding and being. The way beings present themselves phenomenally to our human
understanding IS what and how they are. There is no possible beyond. We must
remain silent about the beyond of human understanding and any possible human
experience, that is, if we want to avoid asserting meaningless twaddle.

Jud: Once more thank you for the good natured tenor of your contributions -
we are miles apart ontologically I know, but I like to think that mine are
also suitably restrained in the cause of our common interest - the philosophical
truths that we both hold dear.

Jud Evans.

ME: Yes, I do think that aspects of this debate are philosophically
interesting.

Jud Evans.
Personal Website: http://evans-experientialism.freewebspac…

Posted on Tuesday, October 3rd, 2006 at 12:25 am
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