Yeah, probably. Capitalism needs growth, how can capital expand without constant economic activity from all people?

Exponentially expanding layers of capital which manage the smaller layers of capital below them.

Not necessarily but I find it doubtful the topic would have been the subject of the meeting anyway. If Franken had asked more simply if Sessions had ever spoken to a Russian then maybe it would meet the high bar of perjury but given Franken's actual question and Sessions response it's clear that there was no intention to commit perjury. If routine Senate meetings were at all the topic of the question he probably would have been challenged immediately.

Perjury requires three things:

1.) The statement must be false.
2.) The falsehood must be intentional.
3.) The falsehood must be material.


#3 is easy: Sessions wouldn't have been confirmed if he gave any other answer than he did, so his answer was material to the hearing.

#2 is also easy: you can't honor a back door deal if you don't remember it.

#1 is the only question. If you can prove #1, it's perjury.

So again:

It depends on whether he discussed the Trump campaign during those meetings. It's perjury if he did.

One can only speculate what went on in his meeting with the Russian ambassador, and it seems likely that we may never know, but I would certainly be surprised if the topic of the election (and therefore the Trump campaign) didn't come up in the conversation, given the timing, at the very least as casual conversation.

In the hearing, it seems that Sessions was responding more or less to the notion of being a 'surrogate', whatever he took that to mean in his own mind.

OTOH, it is rather suspicious that Sessions would appear to be to be the sole member on the Senate Armed Services Committee to have met with Ambassador Kislyak in 2016 at all.

Sessions is doing it wrong.

Hey! That sounds awfully familiar.

Bets on how long before Trump is impeached?

lol, "is". Whatever that means.

Apparently, a universal "is" also presents a problem for formal logic, and according to Rota's account of Heidegger, we want instead to replace it with a universal "as".

Three Senses of "A is B" in Heidegger

It may be helpful to subdivide Heidegger's view of "A is B" into three stages. However, such a subdivision is no more than a rhetorical device. The development of a person's thought refuses linearization.

The tradition of philosophy constrains us to use words like "problems", "solutions", "arguments", "and "relationships". There is at present no alternative to this language. Heidegger attempted to develop a language which he considered more appropriate, and time will tell whether his lead can be followed.

The first stage of Heidegger's reflection on language¹ is contemporary with the forward leap in logic that began with the work of Frege and the symbolic notation invented by Peano at the turn of the century. Young Heidegger's book reviews shared the enthusiasm for the new logic. At last logic could claim to have risen again to the level of Duns Scotus.

By accident, Heidegger received his training in scholastic logic. Even if Heidegger had been a student of Frege, his critique of logic would not be different. Scholastic logic and mathematical logic have similar objectives. They are logics of objectivity, founded on those assumptions that the later Heidegger summarized in the word Gestell.

Together with the success of the new logic came its end. As the program of the predicate calculus was completed, the hidden assumptions lying beneath formal logic became apparent. The program of formalization that began with Aristotle and that concluded with Frege ignores the ur-problem of the copula, namely, the problem of the meaning of the word is in the statement "A is B". Short of assuming the identity of A and B, an assumption that is belied by our use of two distinct letters, "A" and "B", it is inconceivable how "A" can be something other than itself.

The last philosopher to give serious thought to this problem prior to Heidegger was Hegel. Heidegger, however, chose not to deal with the heritage of Hegel, and followed instead the method of phenomenology inaugurated by Husserl. Thus began the second stage of Heidegger's reflection on "A is B".

Husserl's philosophy may be labelled "salus ex descriptione." Husserl was aware of the problem of the copula, but with characteristic reluctance he does not stage a frontal assault. Instead, he uses the problem as a motivation for a milder critique of logic.

After its symbolic rewriting in the language of set theory, logic reduced the interpretations of is in the sentence "A is B" to one of only two senses: either as "A is contained in B" or as "A is a member of B", where A and B are sets. Husserl uncovered other relationships between A and B which he proved not to be reducible to containment or membership of sets. He laid bare the underlying assumptions of formal logic by showing that logic gives favored treatment to two relations while ignoring all other relations, some of which deserve to be made rigorous. It was Husserl's intention to enlarge logic by formalizing new relationships, although it is not clear what Husserl intended by "formalization."

Heidegger took advantage of Husserl's spadework² to develop a new language designed for an attack on the foundational problems of logic. He made use of Husserl's discovery of new relations in a more radical way than his teacher may have wished. One such is singled out as fundamental: the relation of Fundierung. In his Third Logical Investigation, Husserl had foreshadowed the central role of Fundierung, but he did not go far enough in implementing his discovery.

Heidegger's argument leads to the dissolution of the problem of the copula as well as to the discovery of the conditions of possibility of Fundierung. A stereotyped summary might go as follows.

As I speak to you, you listen to me through sounds which somehow make sense. The sense of my words is not the same as the sound. Sense and sound are related by a Fundierungszusammenhang. Husserl gave an incisive description of Fundierungszusammenhang, the upshot of which is to prove that the relations of membership and containment are subordinate to the primitive relation of Fundierung.

Heidegger shows that the conditions of possibility of Fundierung can be found only if Fundierung is viewed as a special (ontic) instances of some universal (ontological) problem. The Zusammenhang between A and B is a problem only when the phenomena of Fundierung and "A is B" will be special instances. Where shall we find the betokening of such universality? We will find it when we place Fundierung and the "is" in parallel with other phenomena which will all be seen as instances of one and the same universal concept.

Descartes had seen the problem of the is in "A is B" as an impenetrable mystery. Heidegger does not attempt to to dispel the mystery. Instead, he shows that Descartes' mystery is "the same" mystery as several others, for example, the mystery of Fundierung, because of the prejudice that the two mysteries of the is and of the "Fundierungszusammenhang" are of a different kind. But what if we realized that the mystery is the condition of possibility of all "relationships?" Then the mysteries would reduce to one single mystery, namely the condition of possibility of "relationships." But a universal mystery is no different from a universal law. Heidegger concludes with the discovery of the universal law of the as.

The universal as is given various names in Heidegger's writings: it will be the primordial Nicht between beings and Being, the ontological difference, the Beyond, the primordial es gibt, the Ereignis.

The discovery of the universal as is Heidegger's contribution to philosophy.³

Heidegger's later thought in no way alters this discovery. He came to believe that the language of phenomenology, in which his middle writings are couched, was inadequate to his discovery. The later Heidegger wanted to recast his discovery in a non-objectivistic language, since the universal as lies beyond objectivity. The universal "as" is the surgence of sense in Man, the shepherd of Being.

The disclosure of the primordial as is the end of a search that began with Plato, followed a long route through Descartes, Leibniz, Kant, Vico, Hegel, Dilthey and Husserl. This search comes to its conclusion with Heidegger.

[1] Martin Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, Band 1, Frühe Schriften, Klostermann, Frankfurt am Main, 1978, p. 42 and p.174

[2] Martin Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, Band 2, Sein und Zeit, Klostermann, Frankfurt am Main, 1977

[3] Martin Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, Band 65, Beiträge zur Philosophie, Klostermann, Frankfurt am Main, 1989

None of the current scandals seem bad enough as they currently stand, so I guess we'll have to wait for the next one to come around (in a couple of weeks).

OTOH, if Trump succeeds in a coverup, my guess is never.

TL;DR: language is a poor tool for understanding reality.

Of course the failed attempts of philosophers don't have anything to say it about it, but just maybe Billy boy was going for the reverse of understanding the "realities" of the situation.

Trump will get impeached roughly one news cycle after the coming trade war finishes annihilating the American working class.

haha:

https://www.apnews.com/acc9849816604be9bceb8d08fa9afcae/Trump,-hitting-back,-accuses-Schumer-of-Putin-ties

http://www.politico.com/story/2017/03/nancy-pelosi-sergey-kislyak-meeting-235653

One of those moments where he kind of wins you over, even when he's being an ******* (and, in fact, because he's an *******).

Even more suspicious when you consider the meeting followed another meeting with the Ukrainian ambassador.

I think there may be some confusion on Rota's part, or maybe he's just using Heidegger for his own argument, but "as" seems to be the ideal replacement of Husserl, not of Heidegger. To Husserl we stop worrying about the existence of things, or their essential being, but instead worry about them as what they appear to be, because we can't definitively ground objects in an external world. If you trust Dreyfus' account of Heidegger, Husserl's "objects are as they appear" is a sort of ultimate Cartesianism, the maximal representation of a philosophy which treats us as subjects in a world of objects.

Heidegger doesn't want to completely get rid of the mode of existence where we treat ourselves as subjects in a world of objects, i.e. the scientific world view, but he points out in a really clear way how this sort of mode of sitting back and thinking about things in an abstract way is only one of many possible ways of being. His example is when you're using a hammer: when you're using a hammer well, you don't even contemplate it, it just becomes an extension of you. This is a sort of being that's just out there in the world, with no philosophical metaphysic laid on top. Which is to say, the hammer isn't "appearing" at all, so Husserl's "objects as they appear" account simply is inadequate to describe actually existing.

What it means, though, to reject the sole notion of objects, is that really we aren't seeking objective truth, almost ever; we're searching our whole lives for things to care about. Objects never present themselves to us in a fully objective way, they present themselves to us in a world of human meaning, so in that sense, we view everything as a sort of equipment, it has a purpose and we want to care about it. It's the crime of the philosophers, then, who have tried very hard to remove caring from thought, and any philosophical account which abandons caring about things is a bad one.

I don't know how Heidegger speaks about being in terms of logic. But Rota seems correct claiming Heidegger is generalizing of the problem of being, but at the same time lets us believe there is a permanent gap between capital-B being and the way being presents itself. Rota's account is pretty good.



This more accurately describes late-era Wittgenstein than it does Heidegger.

Heidegger's also points out that being is sort of just a ****ty placeholder we use to describe what's often intangible, and to begin talking about being as an object or a property of something is a mistake. This being as an object is exactly what Heidegger is saying we can't have, and it's rather peculiar since existence is something we understand completely immediately, all of the time, yet it's also one of the most opaque "things" (if you'll excuse the language) we can consider.

Because "thing" is a human psychological abstraction for an otherwise inexplicable continuum of field excitations, which evolved without rigor or grounding in reality.

I'm fun at parties.

My greatest take-away from studying metaphysics (as little as I did) was that roughly 85% of it was concerning imprecision in human language or reasoning, rather than anything we can claim to be a genuine first principle.

As someone who has basically spent no time at all reading the primary sources of Western philosophy canon. would it be fair to say that to be fairly reading philosophy, the first thing one must do is assume that any perceived inconsistency in a philosopher's argument ultimately won't actually turn out to create the great problems you think it will, once you've fully tried to make his / her argument work?

In math it's easy enough to gloss over proofs of each lemma, but in philosophy I assume a bit more good faith (even enthusiasm) is required, i.e., taking the point of view of your adversary (unlike math, where you ought to fight and look for counterexamples)? In math, many times a step of a proof is wrong, but even big mistakes can be worked around, like bugs in software, so long as the mathematician had the right intuition for the machinery that really made the theorem likely to be true.

At any rate, if philosophers spend most of their time arguing about language, mathematicians spend most of their time translating between languages. But to me, philosophy is about ideas, not language (just like math). To the extent philosophers talk about confusion in language (Wittgenstein and later?), well, I'm not really sure if they jumped the shark like math did with things like Russel and Whitehead's Principia Mathematica, or if they were just trying to debug philosophy.

OTOH, the stuff that Rota discussed (and Reid's post) are interesting me because it seems that the philosophers are still talking about ideas, even though they've gone to the domain of language. Of course they don't need to be trying to clarify reality (or debug philosophy) to raise some interesting ideas about how to think about how humans think.

I guess what I am trying to say is, if you assume good faith, you at worst wasted your time, since philosophy was never supposed to be some kind of machine that divines insight about the world, unless it gives you a new way of seeing things that lets you do that through other means.

If math is said to be the "science of patterns", perhaps philosophy is literally just a bunch of patterns of thought expressed in language, perhaps confused in many instances, but only because language itself has no filter for complete non-sense.

Which is not to say that there don't exist personalities who are probably allergic to the less rigorous philosophy in the world (can we call them reductionists?), in which case they probably shouldn't waste their time with it at all.

In the worst case, philosophy is rationalizing non-sense.

OTOH, let's not forget that human language evolved from what probably started out as no more than grunting sounds.

P.S. I have no idea what I'm talking about, so here's the salt shaker.

I did bring this on myself for trying to bring up philosophy to address something that happened in IRL (Clinton's "is is" thing), so Jon is totally right.

I just thought it was amusing to think that something inane as Clinton's lying could raise a philosophical question, and had remembered the Rota essay.

A "charitable" approach assumes that, if there appears to be a contradiction in a philosophical text, it is more likely that the interpreter fails to interpret the text correctly, and more careful analysis will reveal that the contradiction isn't really a contradiction. But not all philosophers are so charitable (and sometimes, they shouldn't be. There definitely can be contradictions and inconsistencies). In the English speaking world, where analytic philosophy is dominant, academic philosophers are much more eager to evaluate the validity of arguments or point out contradictions than they are on the European continent (so-called "continental philosophy", which is also practiced in North America, but usually not in philosophy departments), where the thinkers of the western philosophical canon are often treated with more reverence.

Which is just to say it can vary from person to person and from philosophical school to philosophical school. There isn't one approach.

I like the philosophical texts where the contradictions are present and intentional and it's all nonsense.

I live my life according to TimeCube

yeah stuff like that

If I were better read, I suppose I'd make a bad faith suggestion as to just which otherwise respected philosopher falls into this category, just to be a dick and look smart.

Going back to the thread topic for a moment, the latest flap seems to be Trump's meltdown over some conspiracy theory that Breitbart ran from Mark Levin's radio program, about Obama spying on him and trying to pit some kind of deep state against him in some sort of silent "coup".

I am beginning to think that Trump's downfall might be that the echo chamber of conspiracy theories he's sealed himself within might just be enough so that his paranoid rage does him in? He's already alienated the rank and file as well as the existing leadership of the intelligence community, and even his own aids won't try to back up this latest bogus tweet.

But, if Trump is going to get his information from Levin's rants directly, and actually believes that he has less to lose if Congress makes those FISA warrants the subject of a congressional investigation, I think there exists the chance that his overconfidence in the conspiracy theories of his own media bubble could put himself on a collision course with Congress, when whatever investigation ends up making Trump look far worse than Obama.

Of course it's probably all just a diversionary tactic, albeit with the POTUS inflicting some unnecessary, self-inflicted wounds along the way.

"Obama wiretapped me" ~= "the FBI had probable cause to believe I am guilty of specific crimes, and they were able to convince a federal judge that wiretapping my phones would yield evidence of them"

Right. And this would be true... except that FBI Director Comey and the Director of National Intelligence under Obama have both denied that this even happened.

Breitbart.com may be giving you 'fake news', Mr. President.

I saw his tweets on this alleged wiretapping. Seriously, this succession of tweets on the topic seemed like it was written in a manic fit.

Leo Strauss?

I happen to enjoy Strauss, but he's widely panned by "professional" philosophers as an obscurantist.

And as the intellectual grandfather of the Iraq War and neoconservatism (though others contest it).

.

Isn't "spook" a racial slur?