Michael McGettigan
pnwdisaster.bsky.social
Michael McGettigan
@pnwdisaster.bsky.social
Pain of Reason
Philosophy in Portland Oregon
Boston University
University of Tübingen
Loyola University Chicago
How does this guarantee intelligibility? Because the form of predication, being the form in which world *is* thought and can be known, is also the form of thought as such. We cannot not know thought, so we cannot not know world as such.
June 2, 2025 at 3:58 PM
To explicate the form of judgment (predication) we require terms for many formal/intelligible aspects of that form. We do not require "existence" and adding it diminishes rather than augments the sought-after intelligibility because it has nothing to do with the form of judgment
June 2, 2025 at 3:58 PM
Only this structure allows for *implications* so that a judgment may contain a contradiction and thus be impossible, even if it seems quite intelligible, and the words are ordinary
To think through what is intelligible is possible only because we are thinking the form of judgment
June 2, 2025 at 3:58 PM
Of course, "Theaetetus sits" is intelligible all its own. We are making intelligible, articulating, expositing the point that only words in *this* structure can be true or false and thus refer to something. Only in this structure does world, or what is, or reality enter language
June 2, 2025 at 3:58 PM
If we focus on Plato's point that a word alone is neither true nor false, but words placed in the form of judgment (Theatatus sits) all of the sudden are *true or false* and thus *about* something, we can see that making this intelligible is the source of philosophical concepts.
June 2, 2025 at 3:57 PM
If philosophy is knowledge, its terms must be anchored in what philosophers think; not their private thoughts, but the nature of what only thought can know. Is there such? How do we fix meaning here? I offer Aristotle's forms of predication as a very powerful way to do this.
June 2, 2025 at 3:57 PM
In a frequent ordinary use of words that get meaning from a context, one often hears that philosophers "make things up" and that their words are gibberish, that philosophy doesn't "work" like science.
June 2, 2025 at 3:57 PM
It won’t surprise you that I value Koch so highly because he begins always from out of reflection on predication, on his way to thought, subjectivity nature and physics.
May 13, 2025 at 10:45 PM
No I’ve never heard of it before but will check out. Thanks!
May 13, 2025 at 10:37 PM
He rode historical shotgun to Paul Gottfried‘s navigating idiosyncratically the philosophical narratives and justifications
May 6, 2025 at 6:38 PM
Or again, undergo Plato's dialogues, not as exposing someone else's flaws in saying what something is, but how those flaws are our own, and only discipline of the argument (logos) purifies us of their distortions.
Argument is noetic catharsis.
May 1, 2025 at 4:17 PM
7/ Hence the object known is the inner difference of a true thought, and such objects cannot stand in *any* relation of "efficient" causality to thought because this unitary act is not a motion, hence not brought about from outside the thought/object (teacher/student) unity.
April 20, 2025 at 3:56 PM
6/ If knowledge simply arose due to something affecting our sense organs, perception would already be science and error would be impossible. We see what we see and hear what we hear in perception; there is no difference between eg sound and hearing but here there is no object yet
April 20, 2025 at 3:55 PM
5/ Thought is self-determining according to its form: we enact thinking like any other dispositional capacity. But as thought is actualized qua knowledge, the kind of knowledge it is, its form, will determine -or not -whether an object acts upon it.
April 20, 2025 at 3:55 PM
4/ Crucially the student cannot affect this relation to the teacher by any decision whatsoever. Deciding to learn, she can fail. Deciding not to learn, she might learn anyway, per accidens. This shows how thought and its object are not mediated by "subjective* decisions.
April 20, 2025 at 3:54 PM
3/ The being of the object of knowledge is *subsequent* to the true thought of it. This is not creation or construction, but act-potency. The student doesn't create or construct the teacher either!
April 20, 2025 at 3:54 PM