Metaphysics, Philosophy, and Theology

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Gumby Bush

Metaphysics without value theory basically only exists... well, never, but logical positivism tried in the 20th century. Even that, however, came with claims about the connections of evaluative claims to matters of fact a la Hume and other early modern philosophers (Hobbes and Pufendorf already saw evaluative claims as having to be added on to factual ones).

Historically, logical positivism is more or less a series of footnotes to Hume. Hume taught that reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions; his meta-ethics was emotivist, and so was his value theory. (The is/ought dichotomy, which you refer to, is of course part of this.) And logical positivism also is emotivist; see Ayer for example. That doesn't lead to any sort of rational approach to ethics—it comes down to "well, how do you feel about doing that?"—but it seems to be a value theory.

[Anders]

Empirically, reason does seem to be more used to motivate decisions we've taken for other reason than to make decisions. When decisions are cut off from emotions, the results are disastrous.

[oneofmanynameless]

Originally Posted by Gumby Bush

Metaphysics without value theory basically only exists... well, never, but logical positivism tried in the 20th century. Even that, however, came with claims about the connections of evaluative claims to matters of fact a la Hume and other early modern philosophers (Hobbes and Pufendorf already saw evaluative claims as having to be added on to factual ones)...

cut off the quote to shorten the length of this post on the screen, but I'm responding to everything you said.

I've only recently decided I needed to take my fragmented understanding of different philosophies (and in particular ethics systems) and build a more comprehensive understanding. This was extremely helpful. It is probable that my understanding of what metaphysics is is still too far off and that what I was originally thinking is best described by a different word.

[oneofmanynameless]

Originally Posted by Anders

Empirically, reason does seem to be more used to motivate decisions we've taken for other reason than to make decisions. When decisions are cut off from emotions, the results are disastrous.

I once had the thought that the distinction between reason and emotions is nonsense: emotions happen for reasons based on certain a certain type of intelligence and are a type of thought. Reason that doesn't take emotion into account is missing half of it's cognitive facilities.

[Anders]

There's something to that. I recommend d'Amasio's book Descarte's Error and Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind if you want to know more about the links between reason and emotion (DE) and reason, emotion and morality (TRM).

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by Anders

Empirically, reason does seem to be more used to motivate decisions we've taken for other reason than to make decisions.

Sort of depends on what you define as 'reason'. Typical definitions provide means for going from axioms to conclusions, or objectives to methods, but have no method of choosing axioms or objectives other than ruling out some combinations as inconsistent.