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Introduction
Philosophers
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One or Many
Some philosophers are monists, arguing that the world must be a unity, one unchanging thing, and that all the multiplicity and change that we see is mere illusion.
Some are dualists, puzzled how the immaterial One (usually Mind or the Ideal) can possibly interact with the material Many (the Body or the World). There are other kinds of dualists, but the idealism/materialism divide has a long history in philosophy under dozens of different names through the ages. Monists generally reduce the physical world to the ideal, or vice versa, or argued that the ideal and physical worlds were somehow both something else - a "neutral monism.". But their underlying dualism is inescapable. Many philosophers prefer triads, triplicities, or trinities as their fundamental structures, and in these we may find the most sensible way to divide the world as we know it into “worlds,” realms, or orders. Those who divide their philosophy into four usually arrange it two by two (Schopenhauer, Heidegger, Derrida - who did it in jest, and against Christian trinitues). There are a few who think a pentad has explanatory power. Another handful look to the mystical seven (the number of planets and thus days of the week) for understanding. Since the Pythagoreans drew their triangular diagram of the tetractus, ten has been a divine number for some. Aristotle found ten categories. The neo-Platonist Kabalists have ten sephiroth. In string theory, there are ten dimensions reflecting the components of Einstein’s general relativity equations. The most important philosopher since Aristotle, Immanuel Kant, structured his architectonic into twelve categories, arranged four by three. We will scrutinize these architectures to see if the thinkers divide their worlds the same way, whatever they call their divisions. There is a surprising amount of agreement among them, considering their disagreements on terminology. One of the "founders" of quantum mechanics. Niels Bohr, saw the wave-particle dual nature of quantum mechanics as connected to many other philosophical dualisms. We have compiled a semi-chronological list of various philosophical terms used through the ages that seem highly correlated with the fundamental ideal-material duality. Over the centuries many philosophers have seen a fundamental dualism. Most have invented their own names for this dualism. Not all have meant the very same things, but the great similarities allow us to collect all these dualisms into a quasi-chronological table, where similarities and slight differences become more clear. Of course many have claimed to be monists. "All is One," they said, as they generally reduced the physical world to the ideal, or vice versa, or argued that the ideal and physical worlds were somehow both something else. But their underlying dualism was inescapable. Many philosophers saw the need for the two sides to work together. Immanuel Kant wrote Gedanken ohne Inhalt sind leer. Charles Sanders Peirce rewrote it as If Materialism without Idealism is blind, With a nod to Kant and Peirce, we can say Concepts without Percepts are empty. And although Freedom and Values are not a Dualism, they too require one another and we can observe Freedom without Values is Absurd (Continental Existentialism).
After dualisms, the next most popular philosophical architectonic structures are triads, triplicities, or trinities. Some philosophers describe their triads as three "worlds," just as dualism is often described in terms of an Ideal World and a Material World. The deep philosophical (and scientific) question is - do these divisions "carve Nature at the joints," as Plato put it in the Phaedrus, (265e)? We analyze examples, and find that the three worlds are most often simply the canonical Ideal/Material dualism with an interpolated third world corresponding to a human world (or more broadly, the biological world), with its obvious connection to the world of "subjective?" ideas above and the "objective" material world below. Gottlob Frege's Three Realms
Karl Popper's Three Worlds (clearly influenced by Frege)
Charles Sanders Peirce's Three Universes of Experience. Peirce's first and third worlds are both immaterial (our Sum), with the material world in the middle. So a better triad would have had Signs in the middle as human inventions mediating between the ideal and the material. Peirce's triad of Objects - Percepts - Concepts is in the correct order.
The Information Philosopher's Three levels of Information Emergence (seen in our tri-color I-Phi logo)
Bob Doyle's Three Sources that "Ground" Authoritative Knowledge
Terrence Deacon's three kinds of dynamics.
Merlin Donald's levels of Culture Emergence.
Types of Triads
A Few Tetrads
Those who divide their philosophy into four usually arrange it two by two (Schopenhauer, Heidegger, Derrida - in jest). There are a few who think a pentad has explanatory power. Another handful look to the mystical seven (the number of planets and thus days) for understanding. Since the Pythagoreans drew their triangular diagram of the tetractus, ten has been a divine number for some. Aristotle found ten categories. The neo-Platonist Kabalists have ten sephiroth. The most important philosopher since Aristotle, Immanuel Kant, structured his architectonic into twelve categories, arranged four by three. We will scrutinize these architectures to see if the various thinkers divide their worlds the same way, whatever they call their divisions. We'll see that there is a surprising amount of agreement among them, especially considering their disagreements on terminology. For Teachers
For Scholars
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