An Interview with Christian Sorensen on Philosophy in Shorthand (Part Seven)
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/06/22
Abstract
Christian is a Philosopher that comes from Belgium. What identifies him the most and above all is simplicity, for everything is better with “vanilla flavour.” Perhaps, for this reason, his intellectual passion is criticism and irony, in the sense of trying to reveal what “hides behind the mask,” and give birth to the true. For him, ignorance and knowledge never “cross paths.” What he likes the most in his leisure time, is to go for a walk with his wife. He discusses: existence; knowledge; values; language; mind; reason; law; political philosophy; feminist philosophy; a religious experience; society; sport; potentiality; actuality; determinism; indeterminism; freedom of the will; constraint of the will; matter; mind over matter or matter over mind; the chicken or the egg (or the BBQ or the frying pan); introspection; identity; perdurantism; space; time; necessity; dualism; monism; trialism; physicalism rather than idealism; neutral monism; metametaphysics; metaphysical deflationism; ontological deflationism; first philosophy; Shamanic metaphysics; possibility; a material cause; a formal cause; a efficient cause; a final cause; another type of cause; Monadology; a priori; a posteriori; and logical positivism.
Keywords: actuality, cause, chicken, Christian Sorensen, egg, idealism, knowledge, Monadology, philosophy, potentiality.
An Interview with Christian Sorensen on Philosophy in Shorthand (Part Seven)[1],[2]*
*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citation style listing after the interview.*
1. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Let’s do philosophy quick-draw: What is existence?
Christian Sorensen: Is “to be,” by “being there,” where “potentiality” is currently on “motion.”
2. Jacobsen: What is knowledge?
Sorenson: Is an “intellectual scar” of “failed attempts” of trying to get through “a mirror.”
3. Jacobsen: What are values?
Sorenson: Are “universal moral recipients” completed with “particular contents.”
4. Jacobsen: What is language?
Sorenson: Is a “symbolic” and “symbolizing” medium, “responsible” for human “incommunication.”
5. Jacobsen: What is mind?
Sorenson: Is “an indecipherable black box,” where the “origin” and “end” of its tape “meet at the same point.”
6. Jacobsen: What is reason?
Sorenson: Is the “purest essence” of universe.
7. Jacobsen: What is law?
Sorenson: The “name of father” and its “out-out.”
8. Jacobsen: What is political philosophy?
Sorenson: Is “a packed in tuna cans” philosophy.
9. Jacobsen: What is feminist philosophy?
Sorenson: Besides from being the philosophy of “man’s annihilation,” it is the philosophy of woman “flying at ground level,” with “deep feelings” towards “Safo of Lesbos.”
10. Jacobsen: What is a religious experience?
Sorenson: It s “an erotic experience” lived spiritually.
11. Jacobsen: What is society?
Sorenson: It is “a human way” of living the “animal gregarious instinct.”
12. Jacobsen: What is sport?
Sorenson: It is a “socially agreed evasive expression” of “basic survival” instincts.
13. Jacobsen: What is potentiality?
Sorenson: Is the “possibility of being,” but that yet“ is not.”
14. Jacobsen: What is actuality?
Sorenson: Something “that is real,” but at the very moment that I realize it, “is no longer being.”
15. Jacobsen: What is determinism?
Sorenson: Destiny.
16. Jacobsen: What is indeterminism?
Sorenson: The god of “absurd.”
17. Jacobsen: What is freedom of the will?
Sorenson: A “reactive formation” of the “feeling of slavery.”
18. Jacobsen: What is constraint of the will?
Sorenson: The “repression” for fear of “punishment.”
19. Jacobsen: What is matter?
Sorenson: The “half” of everything.
20. Jacobsen: Is it mind over matter or matter over mind?
Sorenson: It depends. In “very extreme intelligences,” it is “the mind” that is above the matter, but in “the rest,” is the opposite, since it is “the matter” that is over the mind.
21. Jacobsen: What came first: the chicken or the egg (or the BBQ or the frying pan)?
Sorenson: The “chicken,” since although “I don’t know” who put the animal there, because maybe it was an egg, but perhaps not, and then it could have been a demiurge or the spontaneous generation, “I do know” however, that for “the egg” to be there, “necessarily” it must have been laid by a “chicken.”
22. Jacobsen: What is introspection?
Sorenson: Is “to self-flex,” in order to reach an “internal sight.”
23. Jacobsen: What is identity?
Sorenson: Is “a mirror image,” assumed as something “real and proper,” but that “does not exist” nor “does it belongs” to ourselves.
24. Jacobsen: What is perdurantism?
Sorenson: A theory that believes that “objects endure” through their “temporal parts” and “not as a whole,” as “films” may do through the frames of which they are made up, although loses its “identity cohesion.”
25. Jacobsen: What is space?
Sorenson: Is ”a void” similar “to nothingness” since “it does not contains” something, but is different from the former, because “it exists.”
26. Jacobsen: What is time?
Sorenson: The existence of “past and future.”
27. Jacobsen: What is necessity?
Sorenson: It is “a condition” that demands “the presence” of “an antecedent,” for the occurrence of “a consequent.”
28. Jacobsen: What is dualism?
Sorenson: Is to sustain the existence of “two opposing faces” that unite in the “person of universe.”
29. Jacobsen: What is monism?
Sorenson: It is a doctrine similar to what occurs “to some blind,” who by grabbing the ears, tail and the trunk, each one of them believes that has an elephant in its hands.
30. Jacobsen: What is trialism?
Sorenson: It is a theory that maintains that “the legal world” is formed by three elements that are respectively the facts, norms and the values.
31. Jacobsen: What is physicalism rather than idealism (covered before)?
Sorenson: Is to believe that “everything” that exists, is made up “of matter” instead “of spirit” as a “unique substance.”
32. Jacobsen: What is neutral monism?
Sorenson: A theory that maintains that the “unique substance” of everything that exists, is neither “physical” nor “spiritual,” but is instead “a neutral matter,” which in “its nature” is neither one nor the other.
33. Jacobsen: Sometimes, things can get rather comical, verbose, inflated, arrogant, and way, way too pedantic and academic. What is metametaphysics?
Sorenson: Indeed it is “an extreme arrogance,” since is equivalent from an “ontological” assumption in which God could exists, to maintain that there is “something above” its being, or according to a “logical” point of view, to suppose that there is “something beyond” this last, which in itself and in both cases, “it is unsustainable” in function of any rational perspective.
34. Jacobsen: What is metaphysical deflationism?
Sorenson: It is a form “of eliminativism” in relation to “meanings” and “semantics,” and therefore aims to eliminate the “truth property.”
35. Jacobsen: What is ontological deflationism?
Sorenson: Is a form “of eliminativism” that pretends to denies “beings property” as “existing.”
36. Jacobsen: What is first philosophy?
Sorenson: In certain manner is “a natural theology,” that aims to study “the being” and “its properties” as such, in order to arrive at “ultimate responses.”
37. Jacobsen: What is Shamanic metaphysics?
Sorenson: Strictly speaking, it is a “pseudo-metaphysics,” since although it studies the being and its properties beyond the world of physics, and reaches final explanations regarding everything, these are loaded with “superstitions and tribal mysticism,” and lack absolutely of “all logical validity.”
38. Jacobsen: What is possibility?
Sorenson: Is the “presence,” of a admissibility condition regarding something that can “become to be.”
39. Jacobsen: What is a material cause?
Sorenson: Is what something “is made” of.
40. Jacobsen: What is a formal cause?
Sorenson: Is that “what is” something.
41. Jacobsen: What is a efficient cause?
Sorenson: It is what “has produced” something.
42. Jacobsen: What is a final cause?
Sorenson: Is what something “exists for,” or towards what “it tends” or can “become” to be.
43. Jacobsen: What is another type of cause?
Sorenson: An “un-caused” cause.
44. Jacobsen: What is Monadology?
Sorenson: It is the “metaphysics” of “simple substances” or “monads,” that are “formal atoms,” that is to say, they are not “physical” but of “metaphysical” nature.
45. Jacobsen: What is a priori?
Sorenson: It is a “judgment,” that is made on the basis of an “empty form” in itself.
46. Jacobsen: What is a posteriori?
Sorenson: It is a “judgment” that takes place after “a form” has been completed by “a content.”
47. Jacobsen: What is logical positivism?
Sorenson: Is a current of philosophy of science, that limits “the validity” of “scientific method,” only to what is “empirical and verifiable.”
Appendix I: Footnotes
[1] Independent Philosopher.
[2] Individual Publication Date: June 22, 2020: http://www.in-sightjournal.com/sorensen-seven; Full Issue Publication Date: September 1, 2020: https://in-sightjournal.com/insight-issues/.
*High range testing (HRT) should be taken with honest skepticism grounded in the limited empirical development of the field at present, even in spite of honest and sincere efforts. If a higher general intelligence score, then the greater the variability in, and margin of error in, the general intelligence scores because of the greater rarity in the population.
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