"When and how would Aristotle - or more specifically, an Aristotelian - exercise the virtue of sardonic wit?" (asks UP) "When it's all in fitting proportion and harmony, at the right time, in the right place, in the right measure, a phronemos will tend to figure it out over time. Like, duh. (If that means smoking a bowl to get warmed up, then so be it.)" (answers UP)
If there's one thing I learned in philosophy fight club, it's that those who go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line - er, uh, Aristoteles of Stagira, top student of Platon and tutor to Alexander the Great, founder of such systematic disciplines as dialectic, propositional logic, biology, psychology (let's just say De Anima, which I will get to in just a moment), whose theories took some nearly 2000 years for other thinkers to supersede, etc. etc. and whose most lasting and greatest contribution to philosophy as done today is found in the all-important area of ethics, perhaps along with the topic I'll cover next - those who dare denigrate this man as a philosopher have their work cut out for them to say the least. He keeps getting misrepresented (and like an axiom accepted in the process, etc., as Rand points out) and each time he keeps getting back up. Compare the shoddy treatment of Aristotle by a Bertrand Russell vs. the clue-having approach of a Christopher Shields & Co. at the Stanford Encyclopedia, just to get a small sampling of the oft-recurring picture here.
How would one be able to spot a first-rate metaphilosopher, BTW? I have only semi-developed ideas toward systematic and reliable criteria in this regard. Note that I begin with "dialectic" above, which (presented in a less famous book of writings known as the Topics) is philosophically fundamental to Aristotle's method of approach to any number of life's biggest questions, which yielded great (sprawlingly learned) results then and which I believe can be of timeless and lasting usefulness for human thinkers and actors. ("Be cognitively and practically perfectionistic ffs.")
So, I'd like to apply Aristotelian method as exemplified in De Anima to contemporary pseudo-disputes in philosophy of mind - specifically, the "question" of whether some kind of substance dualism is necessary to understand the mind-body relation. (A dialectic approach is by its very nature reactive against dualisms where they are posited....) On the some-kind-of-dualist side (in the present day, not to mention the most famous and infludential mind-body dualist, Descartes) is David Chalmers, on the some-kind-of-Aristotelian/hylemorphist side is Daniel Dennett, noted atheist (doesn't believe in that supernatural tri-omni God, that's for sure) and (buzzword alert) philosophical naturalist (who might be thereby easily caricatured as a practitioner of scientism, for which see the not-unrelated Rapoport/Dennett Rules [bad news for leftists: advantage Rand & libertarianism]).
Now, Aristotelian-style hylemorphism - coming from the Greek roots for "matter" and "form" - says in basic essence that the soul is the form or organizing principle of a material body (and which in its most mature or developed or perfected activity or energeia - this also seems indispensable to what's Aristotelian proper - also serves as the final cause or telos or (in the case of humans) eudaemonic destiny of the organism). And the point when it comes to philosophy of mind is that the soul or organizing principle ('mind' in the case of humans; 'sentience' in mentally less complex forms of consciousness) is inseparable from the body, both in the metaphysical sense (of things like dependence of one substance or substrate upon another), and in the conceptual sense (i.e., we can't coherently and sensibly conceive of the body-processes and soul-processes going on apart from one another, because their very nature as matter-principle and form-principle, and their functional and/or teleological explanations are inseparable from one another, and perhaps some other considerations).
My sardonic suggestion is this: dualism as represented by Descartes is a metaphysically inferior and magical-thinking-involving, and Aristotelian-style hylemorphism is not only the superior position but is just plain more commonsensical. I mean, for fuck's sake already.
Now, there's this phrase sometimes or often thrown about in philosophy of mind discussions: "neural correlates of consciousness." Now, everyone considerably learned has heard about the phrase "correlation doesn't imply causation." So "neural correlates of consciousness" are not to be taken to mean neural causes of consciousness. We wouldn't want to bias our terminology/framing illictly on behalf of a monocausal-dependency-relationship position (complicated by free will, which is a distinct but not unrelated issue), now, do we? But what, then, does "neural correlates..." do in framing terms if not to indicate that it's a mere correlation or some 1:1 correspondence at best but we would be too quick in our framing to attribute any form of causation to this relationship (and which is perhaps merely put together in thought by habit of association, as Hume might put it)?
So "neural correlates" doesn't help us when some better alternative - let's just pull it out of my ass and call it "neural substrates of consciousness," say - is available to us, now, does it. And what reason is there not to go with the commonsense understanding that what we have here is consciousness and its neural substrate (which is inseparable from what the hoi polloi might call a central nervous system [ffs already, do the folk really have more wisdom on this topic than the academic hairsplitters and would that be surprising?]).
So it wasn't until modern technology of scientific discovery that we find out in detail about these neural . . . this neural substrate of conscious states whereas before in the history of thought - not within the Aristotelian tradition, mind you, but in traditions of thought where true metaphysically real magic is believed to occur or explain the observed - it was not understood "how" the body would be the one and only container of the soul or mind. (This "how" might be a simplified version of the famous so-called hard problem of consciousness as Chalmers formulates/frames it.) But Aristotelian hylemorphism explains how in principle this (mutual?-)dependency relationship (body/matter and soul/form) is not only possible but inescapably necessary. We just need to get careful in how we formulate mental or subject-perspective or first-person predicates on the one hand, as distinct from (but not altogether dualistically opposed to) how we formulate physical or third-person predicates on the other.
But here is how the first-person and third-person perspectives are inseparably linked in the hylemorphic framework: The MRI machine (say) locates some kind of activity in some portion of the brain and this is (causally) associated with the person's inner mental experience which only that person has direct or any other sort of full access to. (Empathic pain at another's pain is very much associated with the others' first-person pain-access, but it's a different sort of unwanted mental state, what we might usually say is emotional pain rather than physical pain or bad-sensation.) This is a commonsense distinction (what I experience on the one hand; what data the MRI picks up on the other), but it doesn't lend any support that I can see to a dualistic framing. First-person experience is distinct from third-person observation or explanation, is all.
And it seems to me like Descartes, in his otherwise admirably independent-minded zeal to free his thought from scholastic-ish dogmas of a petrified 'Aristotelianism,' ditched the hylemorphic and biologically-based teleology baby along with the cosmic-teleology bathwater, and in the process came up with what must ultimately be deemed a shitty philosophy of mind (with magical thinking about the pineal gland as putative 'locus' of the [coincidental? incidental? occasional? parallel? wtf?] 'interaction' being the icing on the cake).
(On TV now, News channel headline: "Warren accuses Sanders of Sexism." Really? That's what gets the mass interest? Genuinely fascinating... (Also, does Demo-rat Rep. Hakeem Jeffries not see how he's in self-parody mode whenever he uses the phrase "1600 Pennsylvania Avenue," like in his latest, "Putin wants to artificially install his buddy Trump once again at 1600...". This in addition to stuff like "Grand Wizard of 1600...". The guy's a clown.))
Prof. Huemer likes common sense, he presumably prefers sophisticated explanations for common sense positions should tend to be preferred over the alternatives, we see how sophisticated treatments of the mind/body distinction (ugh) can run afoul of common sense, we can see how Cartesian or other dualism has fundamentally bad or misleading framing of the "problem" whereas Aristotelianism offers a compelling a dialectically-complete solution to the problem (read: compelling explanatory understanding of the phenomena taking systematically into account all the contributing and entailed phenomena), and yet Huemer chides those of us who identify (in serious and fundamental and quite-well-supported ways) as Aristotelian? (If it's the term "Aristotelian" that's problematic, then: where would an intellectually-perfectionistic/dialectically-complete approach to philosophy of mind lead if not hylemorphism? Alternatively: how does a non-caricatured (i.e., not eliminative-materialist but rather substrate-reductionist) Dennett not basically have the last word on the "problem"?)
[Addendum: just to make sure that the pro-hylemorphism point is sufficiently battered home: We might hear a dualist say something to the effect of, Well, the component or constituent parts of an organism don't have mental experiences. The nerve fibers being impinged aren't the subjects of the pain; the organism is. So that's why we are left to wonder how it is that at organism-scale all these non-conscious components end up giving rise to something conscious? A parallel question arises with respect to free will: how can an organism composed of mechanically-determined components end up, at organism scale, having free will or self-direction capability? And yet in both cases the Aristotelian seems to have the answer - that the person raising the question has already given the answer! IOW: When we speak about what happens at organism-scale, we're already contextualizing what it is that's going on with the component parts such that we can't simply treat the nerve fibers being impinged upon in isolation from the explanatory framework (something something survival value and then also observations about the most mature or developed condition/activity of the organism [self-actualization in the case of humans, etc.]). In this explanatory framework, the nerve fibers being impinged upon just is the efficient cause - the causing event - of the organism's pain-sensation. One might say from the third-person explanatory standpoint that it just is the (locus of) the organism's pain-sensation (whether or not the organism is ever aware of the causal explanation). (Hint: an Aristotelian might bring up distinctions in explanation or causal account as appropriate/fitting for the subject matter., without ruling out multiple accounts applicable to the same phenomena - hence, for example, why he says there are characteristically four distinct causes at work in nature, all interdependent but all contributing something irreducibly distinct and transferable across multiple phenomena. (The wood constituted by wood molecules serves as a material principle or cause, a formal cause at the level of the wood's principle of organization, and this wood can be put to use either in a boat or in a house - a transferability characteristic. The principle involved in nervous system tissue appearing across numerous instantiated organisms even though nervous system tissue is by no means easily transferable with present technology, is another example of the fourfold-causal principles at work at and what levels of explanation.)]
[Addendum #2: This is another can of worms, but Huemer basically says "Please don't be an Objectivist (Ayn Rand devotee)." His interpretation of the content of Randian egoism varies quite a lot from mine (vetted by that Rand-and-dialectics guy at the head of that now-university-published Rand journal). (The "hypothetical Objectivist" he describes is nothing like the actual friends-of-friends-of-Peikoff I had the great pleasure of real-time interacting with in person this past year; nothing noble-soul- or benevolent-sense-of-life-like about disintegrating a homeless person who adds two seconds to one's commute time. Like, duh.) I guess it's these sorts of variations in interpretations that can at least sometimes be philosophically interesting or instructive (as in: better application of Dennett/Rapoport Rules, please; too much failure at this throughout the history of philosophy and thought generally), which is why 'History of Philosophy' can remain a lively field. Shouldn't we at least be up to snuff as to what/how a (representative figure like a) Christopher Shields understands as being 'authentically Aristotelian', if one isn't particularly interested in spending the bulk of one's scholarly time combing the history-of-philosophy scholarly literature? (In the case of Rand/Objectivism, the leading scholarly authority around today would be Peikoff, so it helps to have a clue about this guy's input on what's what in Objectivism if one is to issue forth any sort of authoritative-sounding opinions about Rand/Objectivism. This is by Ayn Rand's own public attestations in 1976 (Ayn Rand Letter) and 1980 (open letter of recommendation appearing in 1997's Letters of Ayn Rand) about Peikoff's expertise in her philosophic thought, no less.)]
