Tag Archives: metaphysics

[Game: Demon’s Souls, FromSoftware, 2009]
Slayer of Reason:

A Thorough Epistemological Philosophical Analysis of FromSoftware’s Demon’s Souls

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Introduction:

From the immersive maturity of its mechanical and narrative details, to the unparalleled sense of consideration for consequences that it fosters among players, to the sheer number of genuinely unique and refreshing design risks that it takes—Demon’s Souls is as much a captivating revelation today as it was upon release. Yet, as with each of the later Miyazaki-led FromSoft games that follow in its footsteps (in fact, perhaps moreso than any of its descendants), Demon’s Souls poses numerous difficulties for analysis.

It shares the cryptic approach to storytelling and the elements of nonlinearity that crop up in all of FromSoftware’s recent works, but that’s not all. In addition, it is a game which changes from player to player and session to session in a non-random fashion. Enemy placements, enemy statistics, NPC interactions, and even the availability of a few small regions of the levels all depend to some degree on the circumstances in which the player succeeds or fails.

You will not be surprised to hear me claim, however, that the odd structure and content of Demon’s Souls nevertheless do coalesce into a coherent reading. In the interest of pursuing that reading, our primary ally will be the field of epistemology. In a nutshell, epistemology is the study of knowledge—which includes such topics as belief, truth, justification, and skepticism. Armed with tools from that and related fields of philosophy, we will explore the following interpretation: Demon’s Souls offers a discussion of the limits of human knowledge, and how people believe and act given such limits. That might sound strange or overly vague—but in the sections ahead I intend to provide specificity and support for it, through careful attention to both the game itself and the relevant philosophy.

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[Game: Demon’s Souls, FromSoftware, 2009]
Slayer of Reason:

A Thorough Epistemological Philosophical Analysis of FromSoftware’s Demon’s Souls

 was last modified: March 3rd, 2024 by Daniel Podgorski

[Topics: Critical Idealism, Empiricism, Metaphysics, Rationalism]
Controlled Demolition:

How Immanuel Kant Rescued the Field of Metaphysics by Tearing it Down

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Immanuel Kant Sketch by M.R.P. - metaphysics

Caricature Sketch by M.R.P.

Introduction:

In popular discourse, the word ‘metaphysics’ is used derisively to refer to baseless mysticism. But that’s not how philosophers use the word. In philosophy, metaphysics stands alongside topics like epistemology, ethics, and logic as a major branch of the field. Put simply, for philosophers, the word ‘metaphysics’ refers to the field that concerns itself with the nature of being. Accordingly, this field asks extremely fundamental questions, like: At the lowest level, what is there in reality? What constitutes the identity of a singular thing? And how and when does one thing ever become a different thing?

Given such important and fundamental subject matter, it may surprise you to hear Immanuel Kant’s account of the state of metaphysics toward the end of the Enlightenment: “All false art, all vain wisdom, lasts its time but finally destroys itself, and its highest culture is also the epoch of its decay. That this time is come for metaphysics appears from the state into which it has fallen among all learned nations” (Kant Prolegomena 998).

In these words, and others like them, Kant mounts an attack on the metaphysical philosophy of both his contemporaries and of the centuries leading up to his lifetime. He felt that the field amounted to little more than a highly formalized version of what the word ‘metaphysics’ conjures among laypeople today: baseless mysticism. It was baseless, he felt, because it amounted to nothing but coherent guesswork (i.e. as long as folks kept their systems consistent, they were entirely unfalsifiable); and it was mystical, he felt, because it was completely disconnected from the actual grounds of all knowledge (i.e. it was not pertinent to our actual experiences in life, our possible experiences in life, nor the conditions that make experience in general possible).

But despite these glaring flaws he identified, Kant felt the field was not entirely beyond salvaging, and he himself made a concerted effort toward clearing away the centuries of mistakes in order to provide a new and firm ground from which to build anew.

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[Topics: Critical Idealism, Empiricism, Metaphysics, Rationalism]
Controlled Demolition:

How Immanuel Kant Rescued the Field of Metaphysics by Tearing it Down

 was last modified: March 8th, 2024 by Daniel Podgorski

[Topics: Critical Idealism, Phenomenology, Speculative Realism]
The World According to Headphones:

A Defense of Immanuel Kant against Recent Criticism by Speculative Realists

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Immanuel Kant, painting by Jean-Marc Nattier - anthropocentrism, speculative realism, object-oriented ontology

Immanuel Kant by Jean-Marc Nattier

Introduction:

There has been a recent trend in philosophy, particularly by some working under various flavors of speculative realism (such as objected-oriented ontology and speculative materialism) to accuse Kantian metaphysics of problematic anthropocentrism—meaning the undue privileging of humans or humanity. These accusations seem to result from a belief that Immanuel Kant’s intervention in philosophy amounted to an expansion of the powers of the human mind, placing it in charge of the category of reality. That is, however, not what Kant did.

Nor does Kant ‘privilege’ humans as subjects while ‘degrading’ non-humans as objects. After all, in his terminology all subjects are objects to each other—and to the extent that something apparently inanimate could be construed as a subject (perhaps through the metaphor of a physical reference frame, or through some notion of panpsychism), all humans are objects to it.

Speculative realists speak disapprovingly of what they call the ‘correlationism’ that pervades Kant, as Kant observes that we will only ever have access to our representations of (and the relationship between) reality and our mind, without ever having direct unmediated ‘external’ access to either. Somehow speculative realists interpret this sharp limitation and restriction that Kant places on the scope of human knowledge as instead being an empowering or even ‘reifying’ of human knowledge.

Now, I could list and flatly deny such claims for a while longer. But that doesn’t seem very productive. So, instead, I’d like to take a step back and mount a proper defense against such ideas. I’ll do this by using this article to explain (in the broadest and most accessible strokes I can) what the low-level insights of Kantian philosophy actually involve.

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[Topics: Critical Idealism, Phenomenology, Speculative Realism]
The World According to Headphones:

A Defense of Immanuel Kant against Recent Criticism by Speculative Realists

 was last modified: March 24th, 2023 by Daniel Podgorski

[Game: Half-Life, Valve, 1998]
Half-Lively:

Half-Life, Black Mesa, and the Work of Art in the Age of Post-release Modification

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Introduction:

In an unassuming former monastery building adjacent to the church of Santa Maria Delle Grazie in Milan, Italy, there is a wall decorated with the remnants of a mural painted by Leonardo da Vinci. In English, the mural in question is known as The Last Supper, and—due to a combination of the oil-painting-like techniques employed by da Vinci (which differed considerably from Fresco techniques, and thus were very unconventional for mural work) together with aspects of the construction and later history of the building—the work is badly damaged.

Meanwhile, about 20 minutes away, in a space on an upper floor of the Galleria Vittorio Emannuelle II shopping complex (next to the Milan Cathedral), at the time of writing this there is an exhibit known as Leonardo3 which includes, among other features, a computer-aided reconstruction of what The Last Supper would have looked like at the time of its original completion by da Vinci in 1498. The question I now pose to you, dear readers, is a simple one: if these were the only two options in existence, which one would you say is what is meant by the phrase, ‘The Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci?’

I’ll give you my own answer to this quandary in due time, and (regardless of your own response) it’s almost guaranteed to be an answer you don’t expect. But I can’t provide it just yet, as first I need to take some time to introduce and discuss the main topic of this article: Half-Life. And I need to do that in order to adjudicate a similar superficially straightforward dilemma. The Half-Life remake Black Mesa is a terrific game, is an incredible labor of love, and is the single greatest fan-led project of its kind ever completed. But on top of all of that, does Black Mesa also count as being Half-Life itself?

The Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci - Half-Life, Black Mesa, Valve, art, Walter Benjamin

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[Game: Half-Life, Valve, 1998]
Half-Lively:

Half-Life, Black Mesa, and the Work of Art in the Age of Post-release Modification

 was last modified: March 10th, 2024 by Daniel Podgorski

[Topics: Compatibilism, Determinism, Free Will, Philosophy of Language]
Free Will Twice Defined:

On the Linguistic Conflict of Compatibilism and Incompatibilism

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Arthur Schopenhauer Sketch by M.R.P. - compatibilism - free will - determinism

Caricature Sketch by M.R.P.

Introduction:

“Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills” (Schopenhauer 531).

Attentive readers of last week’s post in this series will have noted that its discussion of meaning, while relevant to the meaningfulness of moral action, is more broadly applicable to all philosophical discussions of meaning. Using that article as a transitional moment, I will now move away from discussing moral action directly and, at least for a time, toward discussing human action more generally.

One of the most persistent debates across the history of philosophy, when it comes to human behavior and morality, is that of whether determinism or free will is true. But in order to get at that debate, I will instead today be confronting an intimately related debate of roughly equal age, that of whether determinism and free will are compatible or not. Many laypeople are casual incompatibilists, and would be quick to dismiss this latter debate as so much sophistry, feeling that determinism and free will are intractable opposites. But various different versions of compatibilism have had some strong defenders over the years, including Thomas Aquinas, David Hume, Peter Strawson, and the majority of professional philosophers in the world today. So what is compatibilism, and how does it respond to incompatibilism?

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[Topics: Compatibilism, Determinism, Free Will, Philosophy of Language]
Free Will Twice Defined:

On the Linguistic Conflict of Compatibilism and Incompatibilism

 was last modified: March 22nd, 2023 by Daniel Podgorski