Sounds correct. Existence is not free. Existence is random, contingent, limited and fated to become nothing. — Corvus

But that rewords it in a way I can't agree with. All there is for us to witness is our existence and other things that appear in our existence. What is contained therein is a matter to be determined. Important to see that these terms, fandom, contingent, limited, are ALL themselves indeterminate. They have meaning, but these meanings are themselves contingent. This is hermeneutics. To me, the revealing power of phenomenology is the foundational indeterminacy, the openness that one stands in when one's language potentialities proceed in open inquiry and discover the threshold, and NO words are fit to do the foundational work. One does as Heidegger, later on, suggested with his term gelassenheit: one yields, bends to attend to what is there.
For me, this leads only one place, which is value-in-being.

Not sure if we are IN our existence. Aren't we existence? — Corvus

An excellent point to make. Both. Being-in IS our existence. Questions like that beg for a reading of Being and Time.

Yes that is right. Husserl was trying to get to some common ground between various experiences by explaining different tiers of consciousness, in my opinion. They all were trying to describe experience, so I guess Sartre was not so antithetical to phenomenology after all. — Justin5679

Sartre was a phenomenologist, and he followed it the tradition of both following Kant and rejecting Kant. Kant was the one who said all we can ever know is phenomena, and nothing more, separating knowledge from the metaphysical Real and denying phenomena its rightful ontological standing. Phenomenologists refused to throw experience under the bus like this, and argued that our finitude IS existence not secondary to anything.

Well, sure! But teasing out the implications of that, actually treating it as a discussion in analytic philosophy, may also cast some light. There is that which is beyond words, ineffable, 'of which we cannot speak', but we can nevertheless can try and develop a feeling for what it is, and where the boundary lies (rather than just 'shuddup already'.) — Wayfarer

It would be more, shuddup and attend! How does one attend? This takes thoughtful insight, not just shutting up, the thoughtful insight that is implicitly THERE in the shutting up. As the epiphany comes to the mathematician or the scientist, it seems to come from nowhere, the discursivity of thought in the underpinnings of realization unnoticed. Shutting up and allowing the world to "speak" is a matter of all of our speculative resources at bay, yet in an anticipatory silence. Drove Kierkegaard to his dark nights of torment.

Da-sein is the grounding of the truth of beyng. The less that humans are beings, the less that they adhere obstinately to the beings they find themselves to be, all the nearer do they come to being [Sein]. (Not a Buddhism! Just the opposite).

Stunning, really. This from the unapologetic Nazi (that Robert Solomon and others say he was. I've read some of the "black notebooks" and they are pretty hateful.) ?? Levinas' "totality" is premised on just this moral deficit in B&T.

I believe the important philosophical perspective they bring is that of non-dualism. The modern world, cosmopolitan as it is, is then able to consider these perspectives through dialogue with its representatives. (Heidegger seemed aware of this, there's a televised discussion between him and a Buddhist monk on the Internet, and quite a bit of literature on Heidegger and Eastern thought.) I'm also aware of the well-grounded criticisms of Buddhist modernism but nevertheless the Eastern tradition can help cast light on many deep philosophical conundrums of the West.

(Also I will acknowledge that whereas your approach seems defined in terms of the curriculum of philosophy, mine has been eclectic, as I encountered philosophy in pursuit of the idea of spiritual enlightenment. Consequently I am not as well-read in the later 20th C continental philosophers as others here, including yourself, although I'm always open to learn.) — Wayfarer

As you can see, I am no expert. But I do read and think like you, just different books and essays.

Consider that non dualism only makes sense when played off of dualism. I read a paper by Dick Garner, who was a professor at Ohio State, in which he tried to logically formulate the Buddhist resistance to being spoken about plainly, and it was not in the assertion that something is the case or not the case. The Buddhist "truth" was to be found in the cancelation of these (and he drew out the symbolic logic for this).

There is a strange threshold one gets to reading phenomenology, where the "nothing" get a lot of attention. I am reading, and have been for a while, Michel Henry, Jean luc Marion, Jean luc Nancy, when I get the chance.

Heidegger and a Buddhist monk. An interview? Of course, there is that famous Der Spiegel interview where he mentions Buddhism, briefly. Where would I find this?

Yes, Heidegger: Thinking of Being. I'll take a look. Thanks!

Isn't OUR existence devoid of freedom? Everyone on earth came with no choice of theirs. According to Heidegger, we are all thrown into the world by chance. Having biological bodies mean you are not free either. You must eat, drink, sleep, breathe ... in order to keep the life get going, while getting older. Then the body you have been carrying all your life suddenly will give up on you one day for certain, whether you wanted or not. That is no freedom is it?

Freedom is a relative concept. One is free only in certain conditions, movements and actions and thoughts. It is a limited concept too. But existence is definitely not free. — Corvus

Thrownness is the source of freedom. Look at it like this: Freedom is what is provided as possibilities for choice. One, by being-with others (mitda-sein) is thereby freed FOR being with others, that is, because one is capable to be with others--and in the mundane sense this means the obvious, sharing, describing, confessing, commiserating, sympathizing, and on and on, one thereby has certain possiblities open to their freedom. One can now do all those things because one has this "with-others" within one's own existence.

It may sound like an odd way to put it, but Heidegger sees freedom as something that issues from a "potentiality of possibilities" which is, essentially, one's history. Because I lived in the suburbs of a Connecticut city, I am now free or enabled to talk, criticize, recall, etc. about this kind of suburban life. We are free because the future is unmade, and when we realize that our unmade future is "open" we are no longer determined in our actions and thoughts. It is when one simply goes along with the world, believing, acting, obeying as if we were nor free to choose, that one is not free.

But no, we don't choose our existence. We choose IN our existence.

I read the other day that Sartre wrote 17 pages of text for everyday he was alive. And I’d be willing to bet that de Beauvoir did the same. So lots to read, just from those two. — Rob J Kennedy

Heidegger's Being and Time is by far more important. Sartre is derivative. Not that I didn't find him helpful. I like the way he brought for the "uncanny" nature of contingency of the world in Nausea. Creepy, but fascinating. But the foundational for this is best explored in Heidegger, who is seminal: post modern thinking, most of it, is a response to him.

I see no reason to doubt it. The basic facts of arithmetic and logic are not made up but discerned. I think confusion arises from treating objects as mind-independent, when all our judgements about objects are contingent on sense-experience. But then, metaphysics proper never understood objects as being mind-independent in that sense. Yes, we construct the object from experience, but there are real objects, or at least objects which are the same for all observers - ideas, in other words. And as for basic arithmetical facts, they are not objects at all, but the operations of mind, and also invariant from one mind to another. Whereas it seems to me that you have adopted an attitude of unmitigated relativism. — Wayfarer

Unmitigated relativism: There was a time when I would agree with you. Now I am convinced that the lines drawn between the world we are IN and what is supposed to be beyond these lines don't really exist at all. Nothing changes in science nor in our familiar affairs. Relativism? But if a thesis says all knowledge is contextual, and nothing can be affirmed outside of a context, and contexts themselves are relative to other contexts, and there is no way out of this, for one would have to actually demonstrate a contextless propositional environment is even possible to make sense of it, and this necessarily requires, you know, context!; then the very idea of noncontextuality (at this level of the most basic assumptions) is out the window. The great rub is this: This is NOT saying everything is relative, for even relativity is a contextual and contingent idea. Everything is OPEN!!

This is the strength of Heidegger. From here, one can move forward, for we have a new horizon of possibilities that is grounded in the "given" vis a vis the openness of interpretation. Eternity is no longer spatio/temporal eternity, for what we called eternity is now the indeterminacy IN the givenness of the world we are IN. You know how Kant divided ontology, making noumena completely remote from understanding. In this openness, we now are "allowed" to embrace the noumenality IN the phenomenon,
for when we are no longer committed to fixity of any kind interpretatively, we can practice true "gellasenheit".

Rorty, of course, we leave behind....and keep. There is no such thing as non propositional knowledge, her says; yet what it is that is to be fit into a proposition is indeterminate. As I see it, the world can once more BE, what it once was, arguably, prior to the bloating of knowledge assumptions that fixate it with such vigor and authority. Standing in the openness of Being is not a philosophical exercise. It is something else. The world is something else, something "tout autre".

Thank you very much. I didn't know that Wittgenstein articulated this thought. — Ludwig V

Just to say, when you read this in the Lecture on Ethics (online and free) you will not find exactly my interpretation. You read it an make up your on mind how this goes.

I think Buddhism is far better at mapping these ideas of what can and cannot be said - much more so than 20th century philosophy, although to explore it would be beyond the scope of the thread. Suffice to point to the 'parable of the raft', an early Buddhist text, in which the Buddha compares his instruction to a raft, thrown together out of twigs and branches, necessary to cross the river, but not to be clung to as being in itself a kind of ultimate. I think it contrasts with the absolutism of Judeo-Christian culture. Anyway, that's a major digression as far as this thread is concerned, I won't pursue it, but thanks for your replies. — Wayfarer

I think Buddhists, Hindus (not everyday Hindus praying to Ganesh) are the most advanced people in the world. The serious ones, dedicated to overcoming the self, overcoming all "attachments". Dock the raft, and move on, away from yogas. Language is a yoga. It may be more, that is, it may have an ontological significance we know about, and I suspect this true, for language and agency itself seem inseparable. Without language, where is the "I" of an experience, mundane, profound or otherwise?

No, I wouldn't say so. This would seem to flatten out what makes the "scientific method" distinct, why it only emerged in the modern era, etc. It renders all perception, seemingly even animal perception, "scientific," and collapses the meaningful distinction between pseudosciences, such as astrology, and the sciences.That is, it generalizes the term "scientific" to the point where it no longer has anything like its original meaning, which I don't think is helpful. — Count Timothy von Icarus

No, no. Pseudo sciences are what they are because there is no repeatable results, the essence of the scientific method. And the scientific method certainly did not emerge only in the modern era. The wheel, the pulley, the lever, and on and on, is science. Animal perception? The cow sees grass is greener on the other side and relocates. Was this science? It was proto-science. Our conditional sentential structure "If P, then Q" is a formalization of this. We don't use this "principle" when we conduct our affairs, generally, either.
Nothing at all about the scientific method is undone by observing that such a "principle" is grounded in everydayness, any more that logic is offended by it, too, being ubiquitous in ordinary affairs. Sometimes we are illogical, sometimes logical. Logic remains what it is, even if I leave the house on a rainy day without an umbrella.

I think it might be more useful to say that there are general principles that are essential to making the scientific method work that are also relevant to statistics, probability theory, perception, Hebbian "fire-together-wire-together" neuronal activity, and how physical information works at a basic level. — Count Timothy von Icarus

But this is about ontology: the Being that is presupposed by talk about neuronal activity. See Karl Popper on this. It is called the hypothetical deductive method, or, this is how I learned it, and this is offered as a replacement to induction. The idea is that when an object is encountered, we are always already equipped with a body of theories that already define the object. Knowledge is predelineated. See Thomas Kuhn Structures of Scientific Revolutions: Normal science is paradigmatic meaning assumptions already in place that make "shifts" even possible. The mind works like this, and one does not encounter an object ex nihilo, but rather the object is "deductively" determined from an existing data base, if you like that term.

No one denies the terms you talk about have validity. But "how physical information works at a basic level," in philosophy, has to be THE basic level. Otherwise you are just doing science.

It doesn't seem helpful to make every human action "scientific," in the same way it doesn't seem helpful to make it all "pragmatic." What exactly is the universal goal that is being pursued such that all things are pragmatic? Moreover, importantly, there seems to be a useful distinction between what is commonly called pragmatic and what isn't — a notable difference between pragmatist epistemology and Aristotleanism, etc. If the point is simply that people have purposes, why not just say that? — Count Timothy von Icarus

We don't just "say that" because it is not about the vague sense of people having purposes. It is a rigorous description of what a knowledge relationship is between epistemic agents and their objects. Walk into a classroom and there are chairs, desks, a white board, markers, and so on. The question is, what ARE these to you AS YOU KNOW what they are. They are use-values to you. A chair you can sit in, a desk you can write on, and so on. Of course, these all just sit there as well, as things merely present, but it just sitting there is not what knowledge is about. Knowledge is about what happens when you turn your attention to them and activate their meaning. Encounter a bank teller and think of all that comes to mind in terms of what a bank teller qua bank teller is, and you will have a list of all a bank teller Does.

But this really is not the point. The reason pragmatics is foundational is TIME. It starts with Augustine (earlier, I know) and then Kant comes along. To understand pragmatism, you would have to read Kant's deduction. Not that pragmatists are Kantians, but that is a very long story. When one encounters something, an object, a feeling, an idea, what is this encounter? Everything hangs on the answer to this, but alas, it is a very long story. When an infant, the encounter had no knowledge dimension, this "blooming and buzzing" knew nothing. A chair was not a chair, nor a cat a cat. How do you think knowledge relations are made? In the learning process.

Is the meaning of what? The meaning of a door is opening a door or the meaning of opening a door is opening a door? Is it that things are known in terms of their final causes? I'd agree with that, but the formal, material, and efficient causes can be objects of our inquiry as well, and these are all made manifest to some degree in perception. — Count Timothy von Icarus

But this is about the knowledge relation. You are the knower. What do you know when you say you know what a car door is? This is the point. You know what will happen when you approach the door, try to open it or close it, roll down the window, etc. When your eyes meet the car door and you are engaged with its possibilities, this is the essence of your knowledge of what a car door IS. The OP is saying that it takes an epistemic agent to "make the door what it its" because apart from these pragmatic engagements, there is no meaningful ontology. Talk about its existence independent of this agency is impossible. Major idea of the OP is this.

I don't know what to make of this. Truth is often a constraint on freedom, something that asserts itself in the world against our will our expectations. How does this definition apply to usual cases of truth and falsity? E.g., if someone tells me Miami is the capital of Florida or a mechanic claims to have fixed my car and it starts having the same problems again?

Freedom would seem to be posterior to perception. It is the sort of thing that must be developed. Infants do not have much by way of freedom.

Hamlet's stoic lemma that "there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so," was understood by the Stoics as a very limited sort of freedom. Rather than a declaration of moral relativism or moral freedom, it assets our affective freedom as we respond to events. Yet even the Stoics admitted that this freedom was limited.

But "nothing is either true or false but thinking makes it so?" I am not sure about this one. Yes, there is a sense in which thought and belief are required to give the appearance/reality distinction content but truth does not arise from mere "thinking that it is so." I would say that, to avoid a sort of nihilism, truth has to be grounded in the intelligibility of the world, which is a part of thought, but which transcends it. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Truth is made, not discovered. See Rorty's Mirror of Nature and his Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (goes without saying my thoughts derive from others). When we encounter an object, it is an interface, a construction of a phenomenon in a pragmatic interface. What there is "outside" of this is impossible to say, for even to speak of an outside is to borrow from contexts where something being outside makes sense, like the outside of a house. There is no outside that can be imagined. This is Wittgenstein.

It is not a mere "thinking that it is so." It is a matter that thinking is "of a piece" with the object. One is not a mirror of nature. Does this idea make any sense at all? If you talk about the physical neurons of a brain as you did above, as part of what explains knoweldge, the question is begged: how does one affirm such a thing, neurons, that is? Why, IN this very neuronal matrix. But this physicality is supposed to be outside of the brain's interior.

Intelligibility of the world? I assume you mean by world you mean the things laying around. These have intelligibility? How does one make the move from the intelligibility of the mind, to that of the world? One can simply affirm this, true, and suspend justification, but you know justification is everything to a meaningful assertion. I can't imagine how this works.

Isn't ontological freedom a misnomer? Ontology doesn't have anything to do with freedom. Ontology deals with the issues on existence i.e. what is to be existent or non-existent? viz. Does God exist? Does soul exist? Can nonexistent object exist? ... etc etc.

Freedom is a property of actions, motions and thoughts.
X is free to move, do, go, carry out, decide ...etc.
Y is free from contamination, illness, breaking, mistake, death ...etc.

Isn't ontological freedom an inappropriate combination of the words? Maybe Sartre had some argument for making up the combinatory concept. If he had, could you further elaborate on it? — Corvus

It is OUR existence. Freedom, that is.

Is there any doubt that Sartre will always come down on the side of free will? — Arne

Freedom, not free will. Sartre was not an anti-determinist. Freedom is not a concept, but a structure of consciousness. Phenomenologists are descriptive, and freedom is evident when one stands before choices and is free to choose. A tree or a stone doesn't have choices, this is the basis for positing freedom.

Think of it like this: there you stand on the precipice of an unmade future, and this is an abiding condition, that is, there is no way out of this for it is the very constitution of your existence, to be at this threshold. This is our freedom. Most of the time, we are, in Sartre's vocabulary, in bad faith, meaning we deem ourselves like things with a nature or essence, and we simply go along with the world as a teacher, an electrician, a mother, lover of cheddar cheese, and everything else in your "totality" to use a Heideggerian term, and it never occurs to us that we can bring these roles on life's stage under review and gainsay them. But once this happens, and you interrogate your auto-pilot living in habits (Kierkegaard) and routines, you see that everything that can be done by you can be brought before judgment. So there you are, again, on this precipice of a decision to go to the market, feed the cat, collude with the Nazis (as lots of Frenchmen did), and here one has to see that as one stands in this "place," no possibility for action escapes notice. If it does, and you just don't think about it, then your freedom cannot review it and you are beneath responsibility (this is entirely derivative of Kierkegaard's Concept of Anxiety. Reading this book one finds over and over, oh, here is where Sartre gets it). One cannot be responsible for what one doesn't explcitly know, as I am not responsible for ritual greeting practices in some remote society, for in the choice, one cannot reject or accept it.

As to psychology: I refer to Heidegger, and Sartre is the same, I am sure. When one chooses freely, it is a choice made from the "potentiality of possibilities" of one's own existence. When one chooses, the nature of the choice cannot exceed these possiblities any more than I can choose to marry or not marry according to 19th century Zulu customs; I don't even know what these are. The psychology of it is more the way choices are finite within a culture. Nazi collusion among the French during occupation, which Sartre resented greatly and wanted to argue that this was freely chosen behavior, was in full knowledge of the moral context this was in. Sartre was saying excuses for collusion were not acceptable. They knew.

The over-arching issue of modernity, and of human existence generally, is the illusion of otherness, the sense of separateness and apart-ness that is part of the very condition of being born. As you suggest, Zen has bearing on this - which is why, I think, Heidegger acknowledges it (in the well-known anecdote of him being found reading one of D T Suzuki's books and praising it. Recall that Suzuki was lecturing at Columbia University during the latter half of Heidegger's career and was a contemporary. There was also a considerable exchange of ideas between Heidegger and the Kyoto School.) But Zen is an exotic tradition and can't simply be assimilated or appropriated by Western culture, while Heidegger, as I understand it, wished to maintain the philosophical dialogue within the bounds of the Western tradition. But nevertheless the convergence of phenomenology and existentialism with Buddhist praxis has become a factor in current discourse (mainly through publication of The Embodied Mind but also in other works.)

Anyway, I've spent some time with Japanese Buddhists, and the point of their culture is precisely to 'enter into a dynamic of temporal dealings in the world' but to do so whilst fully mindful of both its transience and its beauty. They have ways of understanding the centrality of 'the unmanifest' (mu) without absolutizing it. That is what their culture is, being able to maintain that, and it's still largely lacking in Western culture, and one of the main reasons the West has turned to Zen as a meaningful philosophy.

Agree you're not preaching positivism, but the 'all metaphysics is bad metaphysics' comes dangerously close. Many depictions of metaphysics in modern philosophy are poisoned in my view. — Wayfarer

Consider that the moment it is spoken, it is bad metaphysics. This is the point. Of course, this is a philosophy forum and one does have to speak. But nothing in the Japanese exotic tradition is going to make any difference. The world as such does not speak. Logic does not tell you what logic is and value the same. This philosophical metaphysics in Kant through Derrida culminates in, well, let John Caputo say this:

If Derrida thinks that the surcharge of surreal, hyperousiological being dreams the dream of pure presence without différance, does that imply that something that would be plainly and simply “absolutely other” is plainly impossible? Now this is a delicate point about which we must be clear because, as we have seen, Derrida is not against dreams, is not against the impossible, and is not against the tout autre. Far from it. Everything in deconstruction, we are contending, turns on a passion for the impossible, on setting a place at the table for the tout autre, which is the impossible.

Caputo, John D.. The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion (Indiana Series in the Philosophy of Religion) (p. 20). Indiana University Press.

The moment it is spoken it is taken up in a totality of possible thought. Language is pragmatic, and has nothing to "say" about the world. It is a tool for discovery. It "stands in" for things in the world. It is not that enigmatic terms like ineffability, ultimate reality, nirvana, the sacred, the holy, and so on are nonsense. They are a means to an end that itself is not a means to and end, but is an end, as Kierkegaard put it, it stands as its own presupposition. This is value-in-being. There is a very good reason why Wittgenstein refused to speak about "the world" and "value" in the Tractatus. These are simply given. Heidegger's dasein can be talked about for centuries because the language possibilities are endless if one is committed to the totality of language possibilities. The endless conversation humanity is having with itself, as Rorty famously said. But this is not metaphysics, not really. Metaphysics is in the cat, the sofa, the coffee cup--these are Wittgenstein's world, which is mystical, a miracle, if you like.

I am not really sure I've understood what you were trying to get across. Language and knowledge as a whole are pragmatic? But then why does the theory vs praxis division seem so obvious to us and why is it useful in philosophy? Is truth not sought for its own good? It would seem to be in many thinkers.

I'm more confused by the idea that perception could be "pragmatic." It seems like perception just happens, regardless of if you intend to use it for something or not. — Count Timothy von Icarus

What happens when you "see" something? Why are you not shocked? Because memory informs the occasion, making it familiar. So what is familiarity? Repetition of results. This is the scientific method, isn't it? Every time I see something, I can predict what it will do or not do. This is the basic knowledge relation with the world, to experience, have repeated outcomes, then "know" something to "be" because the seeing is inherently anticipatory, a "consummated" anticipation, to use Dewey's term, is when what is an anticipated outcome is confirmed, as when I tie my shoes or open a car door: I grab the handle and push or pull or whatever, and this frees the door from its holding, and just like that, the door opens! So, what IS a door? Just this consummatory event, the process to consummation, the door opening, is the "meaning".

In pragmatism, this kind of explicit activity, like opening a car door, is IN the perceptual event itself. This is the point. To take note of something at all is an event that is familiar, and familiarity is due to this "forward looking" consummation of an existing belief, i.e, experiment confirmed in the occurrent event: I look up, see a rabbit, I "always already" know rabbits! Nothing new here, just a confirmation of what I already know, pretty much. We are walking embodiments of the scientific method, confirming what is there already in the potentialities of possibilities afforded by past experiences.

I am convinced this is right, but then, one has to reconceive what it is to be a self in-the-world, as Heidegger does. His "ready to hand" in environments of "equipmental" needs and meanings. What you call perception just happening is likely what Heidegger calls presence at hand. Things just sitting around here and there which I understand to be use in waiting. Turn your attention to them, and they are alive we meanings that issue from your personal history, as well as your culture's history (where it all comes from). But Heidegger isn't exactly like the pragmatists (Dewey, Peirce, James, later Rorty) and his view of language is more complicated. But his analysis of human dasein and time is extraordinarily revealing. We are not IN time; we ARE time. We ARE forward looking beings, and perception is historically interpretative. You can see the Hegelian influence in this: Heidegger doesn't not talk about the personal soul, and I believe this is Hegel as well. The Zeitgeist of the Hegelian time frame is found in Heidgger,

Truth is not traditional truth, some kind of agreement between subject and object. Truth is dynamic disclosure, aletheia, revealed in the event of the self creation by the explicit act of drawing upon one's potentiality of possibilities in the openness of one's freedom.

You're familiar with the 'myth of the given'? It critiques the view that knowledge is based on a foundation of given sensory experience, saying that all perception is conceptually mediated; that is, our understanding and interpretation of sensory data are always shaped by our prior knowledge, beliefs, and concepts. So there can be no pure or immediate knowledge derived directly from sense data. I don't see how that can be avoided. And your reference to 'bad metaphysics' sounds like A J Ayer! — Wayfarer

Derrida and his criticism of Heidegger is the "final" critique, isn't it. After deconstruction one can either follow Husserl's reduction to it grand finale, or retreat back into more conversation, aka analytic philosophy. For if language can only produce the "trace" effect of its own existence, and philosophical correspondence and representation are thereby obviated, then language hangs eternally on its own peg. "Turtles all the way down" is what Hawking told when talking about foundations of ontology.

But sense data is no longer sense data, and this is most important to see that deconstruction liberates absolutely. And though it seems like a sleight of hand, it is most powerful if realized for its existential insight. What is it we are liberated from? Knowledge assumptions that clutter perception. What is knowledge? It is essentially pragmatic. To know is to enter into a dynamic of temporal dealings in the world. Language is really this, even in the saying "language is really like this" Heidegger runs through Derrida, only the latter takes the final breathe of philosophical meaning making, accusing Heidegger of the same thing Husserl was so rightly accused of, which is affirming presence, i.e., "the given". Even Heidegger gets pummeled by the Zen master's fan!

Husserl's reduction leads to only one place, being silent whereof one cannot speak. And one cannot speak of Being as such, which is where we are.

No, not A J Ayer. Reading positivists' writing is an exercise in learning why one should not be reading positivists' writing. It is conceived in a mentality of narrow logical rigidity. Very good at arguing arguments; terrible at understanding the world.

This seems to me the right way to approach the problem. Is it too brutal to observe that the description of the cat is not the cat. Why should it be? It would be pointless if it were. But when we are dealing with the cat, interacting with it, it is the cat we are interacting with, and not a description of it. Is describing the cat inter-acting with it? Clearly not in the sense required to state the problem. To accept a sense of interaction that includes description as interaction is to dissolve the problem by definition and will satisfy no-one. — Ludwig V

As I see it, yes. And when one turns attention to this or that cat issue, this, too , refers us to anticipated possibilities. Even if God were to come down and announce her presence, this would be greeted by an awe and wonder based on the familiar things in the world. Wittgenstein said in his Lecture on Ethics that, say a man's head turns suddenly into a lion's head. We would all be shocked, suspect a miracle; that is, until science got a hold of it and a discovery, perhaps something completely new, was measured, compared, tested in different environments, etc. And if this were simply not explainable because the results defied the repeatability requirement of science, then this, too, would be admitted and normalized. We would call this "chaos". There are many things called chaos by science.

I made an entire argument to the effect that beliefs aren't propositions and certainly not propositions of a formal system obeying the usual laws. If they were, the use of truth predicate would be impossible and understanding of the Godel sentences would be impossible. And we do understand (are able to asses the truth conditions of) the Godel sentences like "this statements is unprovable". As I said, understanding must be something more more than a set of sentences. That's why Carnap's syntactic view of theories failed and he himself changed sides to the semantic one. — Johnnie

Depends on what you mean by a sentence. And re. "formal system of obeying usual laws," the same. I call sentences pragmatic constructions that are demonstrated by the conditional form if...then... This does not mean at all that one brings out this sentential structure whenever one crosses the street. But what we call beliefs about streets are really established anticipations at the ready whenever streets enter one's actual affairs. Knowledge is "predelineated," there as a potentiality prior to street crossing, street repair, street anecdotes, and so on. The truth as a propositional property amounts to this anticipatory feature of any given knowledge claim.

Beliefs are propositional because propositions are expressions of actual engagement. I take logic as an abstraction of this. i suppose I would treat Godel sentences accordingly, noting that there is nothing, save logic itself, that prevents such constructions, for there is no other system that can be used to see where things go wrong. Self contradiction are then, not an issue any more than modus ponens is. It is just the structure of language.

But I don't really know about how logicians handle Godel sentences.

Opening statements such as this really help people getting on your side. Keep it up. — Lionino

Just responding to your preemptive, "You are jumping from topic to topic chaotically. First, JTB, then intentionality, now solipsism. This is my closing statement for this thread ヾ(¬ _ ¬)" which I thought rude.

By "an epistemology", I imagine you mean an epistemology system. Surely by telling you things I commit myself to some epistemological claims, but that is a truism. By telling you what I think the nature of existence is, I am talking to you about ontology, not epistemology — you are yet to prove otherwise. So I don't know what epistemology I am committing myself to by telling you something, because as far as I know, everybody is also committing to it by saying something.
You are speaking in vague terms, I can't know for sure what you are referring to because you don't give examples. — Lionino

Speech and existence: how can you separate these? Examples: One may point to a chair, and say, that is not language, but is entirely apart from the language we use to talk about it. I say, if this were true, then there must be a means of affirming it to be true outside of language. Not unlike one affirming the brain to be an entity beyond the thoughts and experiences the brain produces, but having to deal with the brain itself being generated by thoughts and experience. Once analysis reveals that all one has ever, or can ever, acknowledge about the word is the phenomenon, then the chair/the brain, and the thought that conceives, that is, "speaks," its existence are delivered from the delimitations of ordinary dealings. The point is, even when the thing is right before your eyes, there is no way to affirm this "radical exteriority" of the thing. This is why I discuss causality itself, which is not "truth bearing" in any way. All roads lead to phenomenology.

this is NOT to say there is nothing there that is not language and experience. Important to see this. Rather, it is saying that when we think about what that is, there is nothing to say, and we should keep quite about it. Can we say it "exists"? Well, this itself is a language-structured inquiry. Language is always, already there, IN the apprehension.

And, when you are "talking to you about ontology, not epistemology" you are nevertheless talking! The "talking about" is inherently epistemic. You bring the knowledge claim, and a great number of knowledge claims implicitly, into the ontology...that is, of course, unless you can demonstrate that the language and structures of experience that are integral to the perceptual act can be set aside allowing you to apprehend the object "as it is." I just do not think this possible. You would, and this comes from Wittgenstein's discussion about logic and its foundations, have to be in a third pov, outside language, and this in turn would require yet another outside pov to affirm this, and so on.

Is it because you know what it is? — Wayfarer

Knowledge is a strange bird. Does mouse know cheese? Or the excitement in seeing it? Or its own reproductive urges (putting it nicely)? Yes and no. Yes, because knowledge is familiarity. No because it is not our symbolic familiarity. My thinking is that language stands "open" to the world, and truth is aletheia, a disclosure or unhiddeness. What it discloses is its own nature, that is, language is reflexive, and discovery is the self, so language is the pragmatic modality of the telos of self discovery.

the basis of the forms is that they are the what-it-is-ness of a particular. So you know a post as a post, because you recognise it as such. To a post itself, it is nothing, of course, because it's an inanimate object, so its form is imposed on it by the fencemaker, but the same general idea applies to particulars of other kinds - they exist insofar as they exemplify a form, which is what makes them intelligible. If they had no form, they wouldn't be anything. — Wayfarer

Well, they would not be nothing at all. But they remain transcendental. The qualia of being appeared to redly, e.g., is not nothing because, you know, it's just not nothing. "There" it is. MOST telling is events of explicit value, like having your flesh scorched of eating Hagen dasz. Or experiencing real happiness. These arise in the givenness of the world and while they certainly are entangled interpretatively, as in, ice cream makes you fat or "no pain, no gain," the value experience as such actually HAS an "as such" nature: the good and the bad of experience, designated in philosophy as aesthetics and ethics. The mouse "knows," that is, is familiar with this as well. It is truly primordial and its transcendence, that is, its has stand alone independence of language and cannot be spoken (as Wittgenstein was so emphatic about in his Tractatus). Givenness cannot be spoken.

The "form" we give the object, the entity of some kind? For me, one has to go through the likes of Kant, Kierkegaard, Husserl, Heidegger and Derrida as well as the pragmatists...okay, LOTS of thinking that culminates in Derrida and post modern thinking. I certainly am no expert on this, and my thoughts thus far are: Philosophy is a pragmatic endeavor, for all language is pragmatic, the essential telos of which is the discovery of one's own being, a "beyond dasein," if you will. Evidence for this lies int he pervasive "sense" of existence or reality that is IN the givenness of our being, and IN this givenness is the presence of value-in-being. Our dasein leads us to one inevitability: out of dasein, that is, our "existence" and into our transcendence, discovered in what Kierkegaard calls a "qualitative movement" when one realizes one's essential alienation in the everydayness of things. What is our transcendence? This is evidenced in the affective dimension of our existence, and this is difficult to pin because we all are different.

Honestly, few have interest in this kind of esoteria. I consider Buddhists, the serious ones, among the most "enlightened". The quintessential phenomenologists, taking the Husserlian reduction to its conclusion, its telos. Buddhism gets VERY simple, doesn't it? Meditation is the radicalization of the Husserlian Cartesian method, which is apophatic. Husserl's "epoche" leads to an annihilation of "the world," (our being in the world) and its telos is not truth as correspondence, or coherence, but truth as a radical existential affectivity. This is a long argument.

A genuine realist should see “forms” not merely as a solution to a distinctly modern problem of knowledge, but as part of an alternative conception of knowledge, a conception that is not so much desired and awaiting defense, as forgotten and so no longer desired. Characterized by forms, reality had an intrinsic intelligibility, not just in each of its parts but as a whole. With forms as causes, there are interconnections between different parts of an intelligible world, indeed there are overlapping matrices of intelligibility in the world, making possible an ascent from the more particular, posterior, and mundane to the more universal, primary, and noble. — What's Wrong with Ockham, Joshua Hochschild

Interesting to compare what Husserl has to say about "realism," not referring to the tradition, but to the issue of what is "out there" affirmations:

As phenomenologists we avoid all such affirmations. But if we “do not place ourselves on their ground”, do not “co-operate with them”, we do not for that reason cast them away. They are there still, and belong essentially to the phenomenon as a very part of it. Rather, we contemplate them ourselves; instead of working with them, we make them into objects; and we take the thesis of perception and its components also as constituent portions of the phenomenon.

Affirmations here refer to the "affirmation that posits a “real” thing or “transcendent” nature as a whole, or “co-operates” in setting up these positions." He understands that we "posit" real things as things beyond the conditions of our experiencing them by "making" them into objects. The traditional position of reals res extensa is reduced to a "part of" the phenomenon. So the idea here is this: True, reality ha(s) an intrinsic intelligibility, not just in each of its parts but as a whole, but reality is phenomena. All phenomena. Anything posited beyond this is just bad metaphysics. Where is the justification to invent realities beyond what is given? Husserl is essentially not denying realism, but insists that analysis goes further to embrace the real of our contribution in the perceptual act. Reals things are there, and they are intelligible, and they are over there, not me. But ALL of this is in the phenomenological presentation.

It doesn’t follow that if something is a statement then it’s a belief. It can be knowledge or deliberate fiction. — Johnnie

No, this is not the claim. The claim is that if something is a belief, it is a proposition. This may not hold for the pigeons outside my window, but their existence is not ours.

If there would be no difference between beliefs and perceptions, and if you would be stuck in a world of language, then you wouldn't know that there is a world and have no reason to lament the supposed limits of language. Yet you do know, but argue against it. — jkop

Perhaps you would find agreement with what I said to Count Timothy von Icarus. I would add to that, this: It is not that thee is no world to "know." But knowing does not give one the kind of "ontological" intimacy you seem to be suggesting. To knowledge, the world will remain transcendental. There is my cat, that lamp, that fence post over there, and here am I. Nothing is going tp bridge that distance, no matter how one theorizes epistemic relations. I know that they exist, but I don't know what that means. This is because language is pragmatic: in perceptual events I DEAL with the world, and meaning is bound up in this.

But then, what is, as I see it, that insistence that something is there in some uncanny and impossible sense of the Real? It isn't the fence post that delivers this to me from its being. IT is over there, but this intimation of real Being is somehow IN the "presence" of the encounter. Where does this come from? It comes from me, the perceiver. This "sense" of "absolute being" is me.

With language, this often seems to go back to the idea that the meanings of words must be (partially) grounded in social practice and rules. That's a fine thesis, but it should prompt the further question: "what determines social practices and rules?" Strangely, some people seem to miss this question, and this is how you end up with word meanings that are fully divorced from the world — language as a barrier to intelligibilities rather than a tool for actualizing them. — Count Timothy von Icarus

It is not as if it's all language. Rather, it is all interpretation. The many impositions that intrude into my world are value intrusions, meaning I care about things. The language is essentially pragmatic and pragmatism is a forward looking structure of our existence. To have a knowledge relationship with the world is to draw from the past and anticipate the future. So what IS my cat? It is, in the occurrent event of encountering it, an "if...then..." structured body of possibilities that comprise my memory of my cat, and cats in general, and environments in which they can be aggressive or congenial, and so on, that spontaneously come into play.

The "being" of my cat is the default possibilities that come into play when I see my cat, and all "seeing" is essentially pragmatic. I know everything on my desk, which means I am familiar with these things. The question is, what is familiarity? Clearly, it is something that is repeated over and over and doesn't change in some essential ways, so when I see it, deal with it, it responds in anticipated ways. This should sound familiar, for it is the scientific method: repeatable results, consistent outcomes; this is the way we live in the world, and this is what language does for us. We are all scientists with every step we take, confirming in this step that solid concrete will provide a certain resistance to the step, as has been demonstrated in countless "experiments" of walking.

This is the reason why we will never be "divorced" from the world, nor will we understand what it is in the res extensa of things, things being over there, as they are, stand alone existing or being real. Knowledge claims are simply not of that nature. They are pragmatic.

On the other hand, it is not as if the "world as such" is a nonsense concept (as Rorty would have it), referring to a world that is "there" independently of pragmatic context. As I see it, in this transcendental imposition the world makes us endure and deal with, there is one survivor of the "pragmatic reduction" I just spoke of. This is value-in-being.

That is a long story. The qualia "yellow" as such means nothing and its presence is exhaustively accounted for in our pragmatic dealings with the color. But ethics and aesthetics! This is whole different kettle of fish.

Just to add, I am reminded of Foucault in an introductory book. Molloy is dying:

Foucault associates himself
with the modernist voice of Beckett’s Molloy: ‘I must go on; I can’t
go on; I must go on; I must say words as long as there are words, I
must say them until they find me, until they say me . . .’ (Samuel
Beckett, The Unnameable, quoted in DL, 215).

Those dying words are striking, to me. Just look at all the wonder and surprise and terror, all given to oneself by oneself in "the saying." Obviously this is not the abstraction of language, its rules and vocabularies. This is the "real" rub: the world's existence apart from what can be said: it not nonsense to say it, but we cannot "say" why it is not nonsense. This is the madness of philosophy's final "word" by my thinking. We have entered the Buddhist's world of extraordinary disclosure, which is why Buddhist and Hindu texts are so enigmatic. Putting down language puts down much, much more than "simple words," for words never were just words; they give experience structure and familiarity.

Right, languages are socially constructed symbol systems. Moreover, symbolic representations are asymmetric. However, it doesn't follow that the possibility to answer what something is is thereby confined to symbolic possibilities that supposedly make the task impossible. Nor must we assume that the world wears its symbolic possibilities on its sleeves.

For example, the principle of composition enables us to describe the world in unlimited ways. I don't know of a good reason to believe that none of them could ever correspond to the ways the world is. — jkop

But then, all you can say that can provide a possible alternative construal of what the world is, is done in language.

Meaning is constructed "out of" contextuality. One is tempted to say the world "causes" us to have language, but even here, the term 'cause' has it meaning entirely in generative complex of other terms. And there is something truly right about this. Take the simple causal idea I have been pushing about things in the world and knowledge claims. Causal sequences "convey" or "deliver" nothing. The one end is entirely other than the other in such a sequence. So even if you are working with such a simple intuitive causal model (the kind of thing simply assumed by everyday thinking and science), it has to hit you that in the general assumptions about the way the world works, knowledge never happens.

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. But what is knowledge if not spoken, thought, written? Instinctual knowledge? Well, "instinct" is a word. Certainly, it is derived after many years of research into the psyche, animal or otherwise, but this research, as being about a language-independent world, cannot step out of language to affirm this world. And even when one digs into the parts and principles of language itself, one is in the very domain of language. No way out! For cognition, understanding, knowledge. Derrida said, if I can recall the quote, words don't stand for things; they "stand in" for "things". A bit like saying We stand in for things.

Language is our existence.

We start with a tautology
it is impossible to affirm something about the being or existence or reality [...] in the world without this reality being, well, affirmed, and this is an epistemic term
— Astrophel
to justify the controversial (if same) statement that epistemology and ontology
are the same, I suspect, or mutually entailed — Lionino

You have to put your thinking cap on, Lionino. Note first that the OP says epistemology and ontology are the same or mutually entailed. To say "it is impossible to affirm something about the being or existence or reality" is meant simply as a standard way to talk about something being what it "IS", but in order to posit something like this, one needs to "affirm" that it is true. And to affirm something is an epistemic event. You see this? In other words, in order for something about existence to be affirmed, whether it is existence "as such" or some property, or really, anything at all, one has to state this is the case. And stating it to be the case, requires justification. Again: Tell me what you think the nature of existence is, and you find that you are telling me, and so "the telling" is propositional, and you have thereby committed yourself to an epistemology. This is analytic: Whatever existence is is bound analytically to the saying it is.

This is why Wittgenstein refused to talk about "the world" or the nature of ethics, value. He knew that these were "mystical" or transcendental, and to speak of them made no sense. Unless, that is, existence is taken as "equiprimordially" complex, as Heidegger did. He affirmed there is no such thing as "a simple primordial ground." Looks to me like he agrees with Witt.

Anyway, this should be clear. To affirm something IS as a claim about philosophical ontology, must BE a claim. And this is epistemic, claims that things "are" the case.

You give no example of "taking a hard look at what IS" neither of "justification of positing it". We are left with completely vague phrases. — Lionino

But the theme is ontology! What IS is meant to be a matter of philosophical inquiry into the nature of being. The title is "on the matter of epistemology and ontology."

You would want to justify that by saying that epistemology is the same ontology, but you are yet to prove it. Until now, something being true and us being justified in believing it are still separate matters, and you haven't proven otherwise. — Lionino

The OP is not a dissertation. It does state that the two are analytically bound: what IS must bestated to BE. Try to prove the contrary. Am I saying that my cat IS language? Yes and no. It is a huge and fascinating issue. It is saying that whatever "lies outside of language" is impossible to affirm, and once it is affirmed, it is affirmed by being brought into a language context, and understood. Consider that this cat of mine "as I see it" is ontologically complex, stabilized as a cat by my long history of experiences with cats and cat contexts. The seeing the cat cannot just be a simple primordiality, like Descartes' res extensa. Proof for this? Simple. Ask what a cat IS, and see how much language issues forth. That is not res extensa.

Is this supposed to be "How do I know that I know? And how do I know that I know that I know?". Because that would be a related though different point.

Is my interpretation of your OP wrong? If so, please explain to me while referencing the OP. If the OP needs rewriting, go ahead. — Lionino

The point is to see that affirming something is true ALWAYS begs the question. "P is true" is never a stand alone singularity. Take the statement "Francis has ten coins in his pocket." This is true, for all practical purposes, and we talk like this all the time. But ask about the assumptions in place in the saying and we discover the questions never end. It is not about the facts being dubious, but about the terms themselves being indeterminate. Making sense of coins, pockets, coins being in pockets, people who have coins in their pockets is part and parcel of a vast language matrix that makes sense of things in contexts, and these contexts have their sense in other contexts, and there is never an end to the search for some final vocabulary that is "of the world itself outside of language." "P is true" is really "P's truth is indeterminate."
Then there is the other, related, problem with knowledge claims. How does epistemic connectivity actually work? Keeping in mind that causality that delivers "data" to the eye, the ear, delivers nothing at all. At the end of a causal chain of events, the final event is entirely other than the first. If not causality, then what? I am particularly fond of this way of looking at it because of its simplicity. One doesn't need Kant's "how are synthetic apriori judgments possible." Just look at the plain facts and things go south instantly.

If seeing the lamp means confirming a conformed version of the lamp, then the word 'seeing' is used in a different sense than when seeing means the visual experience of the lamp's visible features. In this sense you never see the lamp but something else, a figment of conformity, whose visual features are conceptual, not empirical. — jkop

No, no. And Kant has little to do with it. Call it common sense: You learned a language long ago. What was that? The infant mind faces models of interpersonal relations in parents, others, and in this language is observed and assimilated and associations between things and their language counterparts established. Now there you are, years later, equipped with this symbolic system to describe, discuss, think. Asked what something is, and there is language "ready to hand" for deployment.

As an infant, the world was a "blooming and buzzing" mess. The process of it achieving some articulation in your world was through language, unlike a rabbit's world, say. A rabbit goes hopping around through hill and dale, BUT: she is not hopping through a language articulated world, a symbolic world. In that world, is a hill a "hill"? Obviously not. But it is for your world.

Do you really think the world wears its symbolic possibilities "on its sleeve" so to speak? Or are these possibilities generated in social environments, making an alinguistic world (whatever that could be; notice how my saying this stands as a performative contradiction. The difficulty of Wittgenstein's Tractatus leaps to mind) toe the line of our categories for our pragmatic (and existential?) endeavors?

Just so. It is a bit foggy this morning, so I may be overusing misty metaphors, but here again one might hope Astrophel's cloud might eventually also condense into something a bit more transparent.

For now it might be best left to itself. — Banno

Just to note, Banno, that Lionino did a hit a run, that is, made a disparaging comment, then announced he didn't want to discuss it any more. Like taking the ball and going home. Not acceptable.

His trouble was that he was confused about the issue do to a lack of reading that investigates the agent's contribution in the apprehension of objects in the world.

Yes, historically and throughout disparate cultures and eras, and through all different minds. Hegel lived before Darwin. I think his ideas could make significant use of natural selection, and might have spread to "all minds."

If we were to one day meet ETs and exchange ideas with them, I think we'd be including them as well. Being coming to know itself as self happens everywhere there is subjectivity.

I think selection-like processes at work in the cosmos more generally and the sort of fractal recurrence we see at different scales would have really interested Hegel. Astronomy was in its infancy in his day though, I don't even think our galaxy was known as a thing back then, although Kant had proposed the nebular theory of solar system development by then. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Hegelian Darwinsim? I like this because evolution as a physical process fails to see that the theory itself is produced IN an evolutionary manifestation. The evolved organism is neither an organism, nor anything else we can imagine beyond the framework of our own delimited determinations. Not organically delimited, but phenomenologically delimited.

But here is what I don't agree about Hegel. It's Kierkegaard who complained that Hegel had "forgotten that we exist." The way I see it, there is no account of what our existence is about that can exceed the concrete living reality of an individual experience. This rests with the brief but startling encounter itself, and things get Cartesian. I am referring to Michel Henry's Essence of Manifestation, where he writes

when I say 'I am happy' or more simply 'I am', that which turns out to
be 'aimed at' by my affirmation is possible only insofar as Being has
already appeared. Thus shonld not the true object of an inaugural
inquiry be the Being of the ego rather than the ego itself, or more
precisely, the Being in and by which the ego can rise to existence
and acquire its own Being? This is why the Cartesian beginning is
not at all 'radical', because such a beginning is possible only upon
a foundation which he did not clarify and which is more radical than
the beginning.

He is following through on Husserl's reduction. The Cartesian move toward an indubitable foundation for being and epistemology gave Descartes the cogito, but his res extensa is thereby derivative. Henry is saying the cogito cannot even be conceived without an object, that is, if one thinks, it is not an independent agency of thought that is absolutely confirmed as a stand alone agency of thought. Such a thing is inconceivable. What cannot be doubted is the phenomenon "in consciousness". This makes the Cartesian method complete in determining the world as the world in a non derivative way. It is not historical, but structural. The point is, the structural comes first. It is antecedent to any historical ontology. It is the hands on "fleshy" encounter with the world that, while certainly open and interpretatively indeterminate, the therest "there" possible.
Kierkegaard was right in affirming existence over essence, if you want to talk like that. Of course, the cogito is affirmed as well, which is the whole idea of Henry Essence of Manifestation: how do the eidetic structures imposed on phenomena provide for this clarity of the affirmation of existence, given that existence can be "conceived" to be not of the nature of language at all. Case in point: put a lighted match to your finger and observe. This is not an interpretative exercise, but is altogether something else. Any form of rationalism or historicism has to deal with this.

But for me, this doesn't go far enough. It is not the phenomenon as such that steals the show for ontological affirmation. It is value-in-being. The cat is taken "as" a cat in an interpretative apprehension of "that" on the rug (as Heidegger put it). But this "taking as" is an historical apprehension in a language event. In value, the "affectivity" is, if you will, its own essence. Unspeakable, but, as Wittgenstein writes in Culture and Value, "What is Good is Divine too. That, strangely enough, sums up my ethics."

There may be an historical account to the generative possibilities of experience, but this, too, would be conceived in the primordial structure of a lived experience.

Astrophel is being a bit obtuse in general — AmadeusD

I beg your puddin! Obtuse? Me? Okay, here and there.

Your question 'how is knowledge that you see a lamp possible' follows from the assumption that you never see the lamp, only something prior to the seeing, in your own seeing.

To ask how it is possible to know that you see the lamp under the assumption that you never see it is not only impossible to answer but confused. You can dig deeper than Kant, but the root problem arises from that assumption, which in turn is derived from a rejection of naive realism.

Assuming naive realism, then you do in fact see the lamp, not something else in your own seeing. Seeing it, and the fact that it is there and visible, makes it possible to know that you're seeing it. — jkop

It is from Rorty, frankly. And he took a very disputatious issue and made a simple remark that really has nothing at all to do with schools of philosophical thought. I consider it a kind of primordial observation due to its simplicity: how does anything out there get in here? It is a question of knowledge, so the Gettier problems have a place, because when you examine all of the analytic efforts to deal with knowledge and the traditional analysis, the severed arm solution, the barn facsimile solution, and others, assumed that the normal causal sequencing that led from P to S had to be reestablished. But there was no recourse made to the matter of P being true being itself problematic. The problem lies in justification being separated from the truth of a thing, as if in the perception of P, P's being true had some independent standing apart from the conditions in play justify positing P. To do this, it has to be show that P can be disentangled from justification. I say can't be done.

Not so much naive realism. True, such a thing fails miserably to explain knowledge relations. But keep in mind that Quine held just this view that causality was the bottom line for all inquiries into relations in the world:
the terms that play a leading role in a good conceptual apparatus are terms that promise to play a
leading role in causal explanation; and causal explanation is polarized. Causal explanations of
psychology are to be sought in physiology, of physiology in biology, of biology in chemistry,
and of chemistry in physics—in the elementary physical states.(Quine, “Facts of the Matter,” 168–69)

Physics was the bottom line.

Certainly does NOT follow from the assumption that I never see the lamp. Not sure where this comes from. But a question that looks at the knowledge relation between me and my lamp and asks how it this possible? It is stunning in its simplicity as a existential query. I mean, forget philosophy. Two objects, a brain and a lamp. Causality fails instantly. So how?

Resort to talk about the "things in themselves" and their impossible "transcendental" nature is a start.It could be that what we acknowledge as apodictic causality is really an underlying metaphysical unity. Quantum entanglement seems to suggest something like this.

What you refer to as the "3" of Heidegger's description of artist, art, and relation between these, can be found in Aquinas' description of the Holy Trinity. His description refers to father, son, and the relation between these two, represented in the Holy Trinity as as Holy Spirit. I believe this specific trinity, the Holy Trinity, was first described by Augustine, but the derivation of trinities in general may be traced back to Plato's tripartite soul. In Augustine the Holy Trinity is described by the analogy of memory, reason (or understanding), and will. — Metaphysician Undercover

It is also found in Kierkegaard's body, soul and spirit. The spirit is the dialectical tension that manifests as anxiety and alienation once one discovers the "nothing" at the foundation of everyday existence and turns away from "the sin of the race" which is essentially the temptations of the mundane affairs of a culture, especially, for Kierkegaard, the "idolatry" of Christendom. Sin begins here. Interesting to see how Heidegger plays this out in Being and Time.

Derrida in particular, bring the temporal nature of being to the forefront. — Metaphysician Undercover

Where, I wonder, does Derrida do this?

You’re misreading the meaning of transcendence of the object for Husserl. What transcends the noematic appearance of the spatial object is not external to the subjective process. It is immanent to it. — Joshs

Yet Ideas I seems to take a different position:

The tree plain and simple, the thing in nature, is as different as it can be from this perceived tree as such, which as perceptual meaning belongs to the perception, and that inseparably. The tree plain and simple can burn away, resolve itself into its chemical elements, and so forth. But the meaning—the meaning of this perception, something that belongs necessarily to its essence—cannot burn away; it has no chemical elements, no forces, no real properties.

But later, he does make the point clear:

As phenomenologists we avoid all such affirmations. But if we “do not place ourselves on their ground”, do not “co-operate with them”, we do not for that reason cast them away. They are there still, and belong essentially to the phenomenon as a very part of it. Rather, we contemplate them ourselves; instead of working with them, we make them into objects; and we take the thesis of perception and its components also as constituent portions of the phenomenon.

So I didn't really read closely enough. It is "the affirmations" that are not cast away, not the transcendental objects themselves. The affirmations are obviously there, but he is saying we make these affirmations about their independent existence out of the phenomena. Thus, it looks like Husserl's version of what Heidegger will later call "the they": a constructed "natural world" of general assumptions superimposed on a foundational ontology revealed in phenomenological analysis of Being and Time. We take, for Heidegger, the former "as" a natural world. Husserl is saying close to the same thing. The difference between them lies in the fantastic claim Husserl makes about this reduced phenomena being absolute.

So thanks for that!

An agent is you or I, not a proposition. A judgement might be put in propositional terms, if that is what you mean. — Banno

Depends on what is meant by a proposition. S knows P, but this knowing has to be unpacked, and it certainly is not as if when I see my cat I am explicitly recalling all the cat-presence indicators about the look of cats, their behavioral possibilities, and the rest. But clearly, I am already knowledgeable prior to actual encounter, about cats, this cat. There is history there that informs my familiarity, so this is a recollection, if not explicit, but merely "attending" to make cat recognition possible. The cat presence a "region" of associated experiences with cats that create the affect of knowing.

So if this is a rough account of agency, and I think it is, then we are implicit-proposition-bearing agencies. This must be the case in order to explain how it is that we live in a world so implicitly comfortable all the time. To perceive is to apperceive, so we are agents of apperception.

I do not follow what this says. In so far as agency produces an effect, of course it can be put into propositional terms. I went to the fridge to get a beer. I gather that we agree that actions can be put into statements. That's not metaphysics. — Banno

But ask, how is it that prior to getting the beer, you already know about refrigerators and their capacity to contain beer? If you want to say the agency precedes knowledge, then, as I see it, you have a lot of explaining to do, for to do this explaining you would be IN a matrix of propositional knowledge. Any thing you "put your eyes on" will be well received by an understanding, even if it is alien in appearance, it will be assimilated to a standard way of fixating beliefs. See Kuhn's "Structures" for the way science historically evolved. We are living "paradigms" in a world. Agency is paradigmatic, if you will.

Are you claiming not to have any beliefs about the way things are? About chairs and cups and trees and so on? Folk believe in chairs and cups and trees, and have beliefs about them, but have enough sense to realise that chairs and cups and trees are different to beliefs. If you think that somehow all there are, are beliefs about beliefs, then enjoy your solipsism, and I'll leave you to it. — Banno

No one is saying there is no world in public "space". This is a big issue. What is there is an event. This has to be understood. And this event IS me. An event in ME. Not at all to deny there are things in the world, but that they are not me. And our shared knowledge of the world in indeterminate (see Quine, e.g.) though pragmatically effective. I am not at all locked into some cul de sac solipsism. Why? Well, just look around. There are other things and people everywhere. The idea is preposterous. But the event of knowing is Me. How do I get out of the ME? THAT is metaphysics. I can say with confidence that physicalism leads to the worst solipsism one can imagine. It does not even get THAT far. How do you make a causal relation into an epistemic one?

Simply the cup's having a handle. Sure, that the cup has a handle is a human expression, but that does not imply that the cup is a belief, or that the cup has no handle.

You sometimes misjudge, perhaps believing the cup has a handle when it does not. But if all there are, are your beliefs, then such a situation could not even be framed. — Banno

All that is there in my beliefs are possibilities, not fixity. Beliefs are open and interpretative. See Wittgenstein's Lecture on Ethics. A man's head turns into a lion's head. A miracle! That is, until scientific accounting steps in. Then all is normalized. Science's paradigms take the in unknow, the unpredictable, the "radically contingent" (Sartre) and brings them all to heel. Perhaps a paradigm shift is in order. No one takes the so called "four humors" seriously any more in the medical community. The world showed otherwise, but note how the terms 'four' and 'humor' are still with us. The meanings and their application change, but this is an evolving language phenomenon. Future "discoveries" will just like this.

The world does not much care what you believe, and will continue to inflict novelty and surprise on your beliefs.

The world is what is the case, not what you believe to be the case.

Which is the point at which I entered the this thread. — Banno

But my beliefs are mostly public. It is not about "my" beliefs when I go shopping and do my taxes. We all know. This is what is being discussed. The self is an embodiment of this language consensus, this cultural literacy, if you will (not to invoke what E D Hirsh said back then).

A monadic predicate like "the cup has a handle". Which is a very different proposition to "Astrophel does not believe that the cup has a handle". You've segregated yourself from the world by poor logic. — Banno

My belief that the cup has no handle cannot be loosened from beliefs about cups in general that are always already there when a cup matter arises. Negative statements cannot be logically torn from their positive counterparts.

The distance is not between language and the world, it is between our self and our self, due to the fact that, through language, we always come to ourselves from the world. — Joshs

But then, this divests the self of agency. What is the utmost me and mine becomes a public me and mine. I take Kierkegaard's side on this, modified: I exist, but certainly not in the present at hand mode of existence (res extensa for Descartes) but in the radical indeterminacy of actual encounter.
There is this radical face to face with the world that discloses something alien that is not reducible to the totality of potentiality that issues from the repository of past experiences. Heidegger wrote pages on this in Being and Time, but as I see it, really didn't get it.

Hence the WWII indifference to the holocaust that he is criticized for. I don't think he understood ethics.

Nietzsche certainly thought that the buck stops with value. To be more precise, with a value-positing will to power. So in truth , the irreducible is the endless self-overcoming of value. But I don’t think that’s the kind of value-thinking you have in mind. — Joshs

But Nietzsche had this weird love of the gladiatorial. Really? If one is going to make that "qualitative move" into making value-as-such (not that there is such a thing) the bottom line for providing the essence of ethics, then the question goes to the value of a value vis a vis other values. Bentham did something like this, but his hedonic calculator was, as I recall, a quantitative measure in order address practical choices. This is a hard issue to discuss, for how does one escape the cultural bias? Is a pig satisfied less than Socrates unsatisfied? Is a good mud fight less than a philosophical epiphany?

But then, how about Emerson's walk in a "bare common" and is glad to the brink of fear? Or Wordsworth's intimations of immortality? These have a dimension that raises the matter out of the mundane and into something else, the "awe and wonder" as Rudolf Otto put it of the world. Heidegger leans this way in some of his later writing (Discourse, on Thinking comes to mind. Bringing Care into the essence of dasein as he did was eye opening for me. His call for yielding, using the term gelasenheit, puts him on the threshold ), but what I have in mind here is along the lines of pseudo Dionysius the Areopagite and Eckhart.

It is not likely you take any of this seriously. Philosopher generally don't. But blood and guts Nietzsche? I don't think so.

For a physicalist, it is clear how it does. What is the problem exactly? Problem of consciousness? Rehash of the problems of mind-body dualism? — Lionino

If it's clear, please tell me, in a nut shell.

Ok, so intentionality. There are several different alternatives for that, none is preferred over the other, possibly never will. — Lionino

No Lionino. None of these. The question posed here is presupposed by this physicalism, for it is more basic: prior to getting to the scientific perspective, one can inquire about the foundations of its perceptual knowledge claims. Consider something simple: your manifest cognitive abilities issue from a physical brain, but then, it is through these very cognitive abilities that one arrives at brains being there at all. All a brain can do to manufacture phenomenal experience, so the brain that is supposed to be responsible for this very experience is itself part and parcel of just this.

This is question begging of the worst kind. You would need a third pov outside the brain to posit the brain being there apart from a mere construct within the brain. But then, this, too, would need a perspective guaranteeing that this third pov is not itself just a brain manifestation rather than a "real" brain, and so on.

Right. Lightwaves, brain chemistry etc set the causal conditions that satisfy seeing a lamp, which in turn is justification for the belief that there is a lamp.

Perceptions are different from beliefs. I can't detach my conscious awareness of there being a lamp in front of me when I see it. The belief, however, that there is a lamp can be maintained or rejected regardless of the whereabouts of the lamp. — jkop

And no one is denying that you see a lamp when you see a lamp. This is never brought into question. The question is, how is knowledge that you see a lamp possible? For this one has to do some digging, that is, think about how a person is "wired" to the world, and THIS is as sticky a wicket as can be. Again, non one questions there being a lamp, your seeing it there on a table, and so on. Rather, given that this is the case, what must also be the case that makes this so?

I don't think perceptions are different from beliefs. All perceptions are apperceptions. When you see a cup, you know what it is IN the seeing, that is, the cup is already known prior to the seeing, and seeing it is a confirmation about the conformity between what you see and the predelineated "cupness" that you come into the perceptual encounter with that allows you to spontaneously without question or analysis note that it is indeed a cup (See Kant's infamous transcendental deduction in his Critique of Pure Reason. He calls this the imagination, the way an event is constructed in a temporal unity, A tough read, though.)