Another way to put this is that science isn’t going to tell us what thought or meaning or understanding are. Thus, “it is misleading to talk of thinking as of a ‘mental activity’.”
— Antony Nickles
This is an extra ordinary remark. Thinking is a paradigm of a mental activity. Surely, what he needs to argue is that mental activities, in particular thinking, is not the kind of activity it suggests, because of the contrast with physical activities. Is doing a calculation with pencil and paper a mental or a physical activity? — Ludwig V

Wittgenstein, like Heidegger, is substituting a practice theory for a cognitivist account. Thinking isn’t in the head, it is in the interactive performances that co-determine both the person and their world via our patterns of engagement with each other.

↪Joshs - This is elsewhere referred to as deautomatization — Leontiskos

The use of magnets? Interesting.

There might be something specifically autistic about what Baggs is doing, but the phenomenology doesn't reduce to the autistic cognitive style which promotes stimming — fdrake

One way researchers have attempted to simulate savant skills in neurotypicals is by applying powerful magnets to the brain to impede more rapid processing of complex stimuli. Without the ‘distraction’ of this more complex mode of processing, it was found that subjects began to do the sorts of things savants excel at, in the way that savants do them, by bypassing the ‘normal’ conceptual routes. I suspect that non-autistics can shift into a state of mind that favors a stimming-type intensity of processing by a variety of means, such as hallucingens, which can predispose one form of processing over others , and sleep deprivation, which impairs concentration on high-level cognitive tasks. Perhaps Baggs was misdiagnosed as autistic, but her cognitive challenges nevertheless
enabled and reinforced the pre-conditions for robust stimming.

Indeed.
— Joshs

That strikes me as incredibly reductive. The specificity of Baggs' conduct has been dissolved into a broader glut of sensorially infused and creative sociality. — fdrake

Incredible indeed , oh the horror of it all. No, I was just too lazy to spell out the kinds of differences between autistic and neuro-typical cognition that can explain the preference for stimming on the part of autistics. Such as the difficulties the former have in rapid processing of complex stimuli. We all have to learn at our own pace , and that pace is dictated by a balance between novelty and familiarity. There is a direct connection between the less intense exposure to novelty set by stimming and the kinds of savant feats performed by the likes of Daniel Tammet, who can articulate pi to 22,00 places, which he does not via number crunching but by the unfolding of an imaginary landscape.

Reductively analyzing stimming behavior in terms of arousal mechanisms misses the creative sense-making motivation behind it. Stimming is not a thermostatic mechanism, its pleasure comes from learning to organize a chaotic hodgepodge of sensations into regular patterns.
— Joshs

Didn't you say the same holds for everything we do though — fdrake

Indeed.

being mesmerized by the changing visual patterns of fireworks, ocean waves, a roaring fire.
— Joshs

Those ones probably don't count as stimming. Since they're not repetitious in the context of the stimmer's life. — fdrake

One doesn’t simply passively observe such patterns, but actively engages with them by moving one’s eyes and head to intervene and enhance the action in the direction of anticipatory sense-making.

Just for clarity, by hypersensitivity I mean a much lower than average ability to down regulate arousal associated with that sensation. That is, a hypersensitivity to a sense engenders states of enduring and heightened arousal associated with that sense — fdrake

Reductively analyzing stimming behavior in terms of arousal mechanisms misses the creative sense-making motivation behind it. Stimming is not a thermostatic mechanism, its pleasure comes from learning to organize a chaotic hodgepodge of sensations into regular patterns.

I crawl around on the floor, and lie on the floor wriggling around, at least once a month. It absolutely makes you look at the world differently and allows you to tap into perspectives you have neglected since childhood. — I like sushi

My condo is carpeted so I can do most things on the floor rather than on chairs. I eat dinner, watch tv and internet , and often sleep on the floor. That may not be related to ‘stimming’, but people don’t appreciate how many activities of neurotypicals qualify (fidgeting, rubbing one’s chin in thought, being mesmerized by the changing visual patterns of fireworks, ocean waves, a roaring fire.)

The word varies, the object does not. — Manuel

I’ll just say that the passages Antony had us read offers an alternative to the realist thinking implied by the idea of an object in itself.

There seems to be a lack of necessity between our using words like "red", "book" and so on, and assuming there has to be something in the world which is "captured" by these words. But we seem to act as if this does happen; that a "book" is necessarily means that thing made of think wooden pulp with letter in it — Manuel

That there is nothing in the world ‘caputured’ by a word doesn’t mean that the word’s meaning isnt of the world. We could instead say that the use of a word produces a kind of world, or form of life. Rather than thinking of words as inside the head (subjective feeling,etc) and things as in the world (neutral, value-free) and meaning as the fit between them, we can think of words as already of the world, as practices engaging interactively with it.

What do the sensations enact? — fdrake

A sensation, as a figure against a background , enacts a change in that background, a new dimension of sense. I take ’s analysis of word symbols as also applying to sensations. Recognizing a sensation is like using a word. In both cases, we are not simply hooking up a symbol with a mental process, but transforming ourselves by being affected by something in the world.

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/943241

Were you meaning to construe the sensations as symbols? — fdrake

If I recognize a visual pattern as a a unitary object of some sort , I am construing it conceptually. Does this mean that the elements of the image are symbols referring to the recognized meaning? Not exactly. I don’t think they refer so much as enact. I think the same is true of words.

All perception is conceptual. This means that we don’t hear acoustic frequencies, we hear the train whistle. Furthermore the meaning of that train whistle is linked to its relevance within a larger mesh of involvements that define our interests in a given context of purposeful activity. The whistle signifies for us, it is significant, meaningful only in relation to our larger concerns. We are used to thinking of language as communication with other persons. Of course, we also use language to communicate with ourselves And there are many kinds of languages we can use, such as music , visual art, dance, etc. An autistic can create a sort of art by interacting with the physical surroundings and with their body, producing sensations that they sculpt into intricate patterns by which they communicate with themselves. It s a language of thought using sensation rather than verbals symbols.

I do not find any value in working for professors whose only concern in life is the furtherance of objective truth accompanied by a crusade against people who are of the opinion that "wrong understanding" is a thing — KrisGl

Well, in me you have a kindred spirit, but you will be hard-pressed to find more than a tiny handful of contributors to this forum who endorse anything other than some variant of realism.

↪Joshs From own experience I can confirm it is absolutely possible to live in the moment. That is, without a notion of past and future and without any thoughts. I also know from own experience what flow is, that is another state of mind.

What I see in your answer is that it is written very theoretically — Carlo Roosen

Yes, this is what they call philosophy. I’m glad you are able to draw from your own experience but there are now things called ‘books’, and quite a lot of these have been written in recent years in philosophy , psychology, neuroscience and related fields on the subject of consciousness. There is even a journal called Consciousness Studies. Exposing yourself to some of this ‘theory’ may protect you from reinventing the wheel.

Throw a dice or a coin, and cover it with your hand before you see what it shows. Then observe your state of mind, not knowing the result, while you know the answer is there, in "fundamental reality" as well as "in the future". All I want is that you confirm my model with a real-life experience. Then look at the dice or coin, and note how the answer becomes "conceptual reality" as well as "past". Most likely you missed the 'now', the moment you saw it, that is an advanced level.

I am pointing to a way of looking you can no longer find in today's western philosophy. But it is simple and crucial. I call it "verifyable". That means, things cannot be proven in objective (3rd person) terms. But they can easily be confirmed by each person individually (1st person). Just take the step of actually doing the experiment, it doesn't work if you perform the experiment in your mind.

Eastern philosophy is where you can find more on this, although it is rather vague. Try the "Power of Now" by Eckhart Tolle, if you can handle that. — Carlo Roosen

If we truly live in the moment, we would experience absolutely nothing. A single experienced moment of time has three parts. It consists of the immediate past that forms a piece of the now, and the present event which occurs into that just past. A single ‘now’ also includes an anticipation into the next moment. If the immediate past were not a part of the now we wouldn’t be able to enjoy something like music, because the current note would have nothing to connect it to the just past note. We could t perceive anything in our world because most of what we see, hear, touch and smell in an instant comes from memory. We wouldnt have joys and hopes and pleasure because these are about how the present fulfills the past and points desiringly to the next present.

I don’t think inner peace is a matter of living in the moment , since th very idea of the moment is incoherent without its being part of a triadic structure of past-present-future which all occur simultaneously in what we call an instant of time. I think the key to satisfaction is in how harmoniously we anticipate beyond the moment.

The psychologist George Kelly made anticipation the very cornerstone of his psychology. In the following passage , he answers to the claim that the goal should be to live in the moment.

“For example, what about those rare and delectable hours when we can lie in the grass and look up at the fleecy summer clouds? Do we not then take life, savoring each moment as it comes without rudely trying to outguess it? Does one not feel very much alive on such occasions? Certainly! But this, too, is an anticipatory posture. To be sure, it is not the frantic apprehension of popping little events. It is rather a composed anticipation of a slowly drifting universe of great and benign proportions.”

Notice that when many talk about being in the moment , they equate this with being in the ‘flow’, but a flow isn’t about isolated, disconnected moments, it’s about experiencing them as linked to each other in a smooth, harmonious , meaningful way.

I’ve learned that the principle is called ‘relevance realization’ or ‘the salience landscape.’ It’s a guiding principle for all organic life. But self-aware rational beings might have requirements beyond those of other life-forms - think Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Other organisms are not able to consider the nature of existence in the way h.sapiens is, so questions of truth or falsehood don’t arise as part of their ‘salience landscape’. — Wayfarer

It’s true that most philosophers make qualitative distinctions between human and non-human mental processes. For instance, Joseph Rouse, who embraces Barad’s agential realism, argues that non-human animals have what he calls one-dimensional normativity, an ability to organize their thinking intentionally on the basis of normative goals. But for any given species, the overarching goals don’t change over the course of their life, so the only meaning of correctness or incorrectness for them is survival of their way of life. To reset their goals they would need the capacity for two-dimensional conceptual normativity, which only humans have.

Most organisms act to maintain and reproduce their lineage through ongoing responsiveness to life-relevant features of what thereby becomes their biological environment. Con-ceptually articulated ways of life are two-dimensional in the deeper sense that they are oriented not only toward continually maintaining their biological lineage but also toward determining what that way of life is and will be. This sense of two-dimensionality is “deeper” in that it enables those organisms to differentiate how they take their environment to be from how it is.

I think this is the latest version of ‘man the rational animal’ , and given how the supposed gap between human and non-human mental capabilities has had to be continually adjusted lower over the years, I suspect that Rouse’s distinction will eventually prove to be untenable.

Thanks. Looking forward to it.

We’ve talked a lot on TPF recently about thinking and being – not just Irad Kimhi’s book of that title, but the larger issue of how thought mirrors reality. Does the Law of Non-Contradiction state a logical truth? a truth about how things must be in the world? or, somehow, both? neither? — J

I take it Richard Rorty’s book ‘Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature’ didn’t leave much of an impression on you.

But to me that requires the existence of the kind of agency that only begins to appear with organic life (by no means only conscious agency.) That is the reason I'm open to biosemiosis but not to pansemiosis. — Wayfarer

I think whether and how living and non-living processes can be integrated within a single overarching framework is secondary to the kind of model we adopt to integrate mind , body and world within a framework that overcomes the dualism implied by the hard problem. Agential realism doesn’t eliminate all distinctions between the living and the non-living, or between human cognition and living self-organization in general. Some phenomenologists , unlike agential realists, reduce the physical and the material to the living consciousness (Henry, Husserl), whereas Heidegger famously said that humans have world, but animals are poor in world and rocks have no world.

In Thompson’s Mind in Life book, he writes approvingly of Pattee’s approach, so my question is to what extent your thinking , or Donald Hoffman’s thinking, is on the same page as Pattee and Thompson with regard to the relation between mind, body and world, and to Thompson’s biological panpsychism. I think Hoffman learns the wrong lessons from evolutionary theory. He says that the fitness payoff function of evolution contains no information about reality ‘as it is’, so the cognizing subject remains on the appearance ( or ‘illusion ‘ as he call it) side of the appearance-reality distinction, thanks to the gimmick of evolution. I don’t know about Pattee, but Thompson would never describe sense-making in these dualistic terms. Sense-making isnt the result of an arbitrarily produced evolutionary mechanism that just happens to be adaptive for survival, but instead is based on the the fundamental living principle of self-organization To be a living system is to maintain a normative pattern of interacting with an environment in the midst of changing conditions. Sense-making is about pragmatically relevant actions , not concordance with ‘reality as it is’, whatever that’s supposed to mean. This doesn’t make what sense-making reveals as an illusion, or mere appearance as opposed to the really real. It shows us that this is what ‘reality as it is’ IS in itself.

Self-replication requires an epistemic cut between self and non-self, and between subject and object.

Self-replication requires a distinction between the self that is replicated and the non-self that is not replicated. The self is an individual subject that lives in an environment that is often called objective, but which is more accurately viewed biosemiotically as the subject’s Umwelt or world image. This epistemic cut is also required by the semiotic distinction between the interpreter and what is interpreted, like a sign or a symbol. In physics this is the distinction between the result of a measurement – a symbol – and what is being measured – a material object. — Howard Pattee

If we compare Pattee’s take on the autonomy of self against its world (‘epistemic cut’) with Thompson’s concept of embodied autonomy as ‘operational closure’, a number of differences emerge. For one thing , Pattee’s distinction between interpreter and interpreted , between cognizer and environment, doesn’t seem to see this relation as reciprocally causal such that the Umwelt is not only defined by the cognizer , but through exchanges between interpreter and world both are continually redefined. This doesn’t lend itself to any neatly defined epsitemic cut on the order of a statistical boundary like a Markov blanket.

Enactivists assert a strong notion of world-involvement,
i.e., processes in the environment play more than informational roles in the consti­tution and actualization of life and mind . To enact a world of significance is to engage in actual acts, which are material events with spreading consequences that are both world-changing and agent-changing. Environmental and biological/cognitive processes are mutually enabled and mutually constituted. They interpenetrate at all scales and they co­ordinate across scales.

Historicity and the co-constitution of organism and environment are internally related in the enactive approach. Concerns about the conservation of organization are mostly linked to the self-production requirement of autopoiesis (the regen­eration of the conditions that continuously give rise to the operationally closed network of processes making up the organism). Concerns about barriers, bound­aries, and in general about an organism’s relation to its environment are mostly linked to the condition of self-distinction in the definition of autopoiesis. From an enactive perspective, self-distinction and self-production are dialectically re­lated, that is, they are mutually dependent, though distinct, mo­ments of autopoiesis. You cannot have one set of processes and not the other as long as the organism lives, yet the processes are not the same. All processes subserving self-distinction are themselves products of self-production

With respect to the Evan Thompson quote, the way I interpret that is in line with phenomenology - it aims to avoid dualistic categorisation by avoiding reduction to purely physical or purely mental. part of 'healing the split' caused by mind-body dualism. But I don't think that supports any form of materialism — Wayfarer

What writers like Thompson, Barad and Deleuze mean by ‘material’ is quite different than the way it is meant in causal reductionism. Materiality has to do with discursive practices , and discourse isn't limited to linguistic practices. Materiality is discursive in the sense that it consists of reciprocal acts of affecting and being affected that form normative systems. For Thompson, material interactions between cognizing agent and environment are about the concrete ways that each defines the other through patterns of exchanges.

But he still differentiates living from non-living right at the outset. 'The living order is characterized by the emergence of a new kind of structure in the physical order.' I can't see how what you're advocating is not reductionist — Wayfarer

Reduction to what? Causal determinism? That’s not what one is left with in Barad’s model , any more than it forms the basis of Thompson’s model of consciousness. And Thompson may not be so far apart from Barad as you might think when it comes to the distinction between the physical and the experiential.

He writes:

"I follow the trajectory that arises in the later Husserl and continues in Merleau-Ponty, and that calls for a rethinking of the concept of “nature” in a post-physicalist way—one that doesn't conceive of fundamental nature or physical being in a way that builds in the objectivist idea that such being is intrinsically of essentially non-experiential. But, again, this point doesn't entail that nature is intrinsically or essentially experiential (this is the line that pan-psychists and Whiteheadians take). (Maybe it is, but I don't think we're now in position to know that.) All I want to say for now (or think I have grounds for saying now) is that we can see historically how the concept of nature as physical being got constructed in an objectivist way, while at the same time we can begin to conceive of the possibility of a different kind of construction that would be post-physicalist and post-dualist–that is, beyond the divide between the “mental” (understood as not conceptually involving the physical) and the “physical” (understood as not conceptually involving the mental)."

I know it’s difficult not to associate agency with consciousness...
— Joshs

‘Whereas Barad dilutes the theoretical distinction between mind and matter as well as the distinction between animate and inanimate, the contention here is that it is ethically and politically vital to hold on to a notion of subjectivity understood in terms of the capacity for experience’ - from a critique of Barad’s agential realism.

↪Tom Storm Barad’s ‘agential realism’. Streetlight mentioned it also. As a form of materialism, it is obliged to deny the ontological distinction between animate and inanimate, per the above — Wayfarer

What I’m calling practice theory isn’t restricted to Barad’s work. It includes the projects of Heidegger, Wittgenstein, phenomenology , hermeneutics, poststructuralists like Foucault and Deleuze, as well as enactivists like Evan Thompson. The issue for Thompson isn’t whether the animate and the inanimate are ontologically distinct, but how to understand subjectivity in terms of autonomous processes of self-organization in living systems. Instead of viewing subjectivity as an inner , ineffable content, he views it as the derivative product of distributed neural networks. Subjectivity is a selfless
virtual self , an agent that emerges from a pattern or aggregate of personal processes.

I'm not clear how the subjective experience of eating chocolate, say, is a product of, shall we say, patterns of interaction within a network, shaped by how beings engage with their environment. I'm trying to understand what this frame contributes to a 'deflation' of the hard problem. Can you tease this out a little more for a layperson? — Tom Storm

I think the hard problem comes down to the seeming chasm between what we think of as feeling and the way that empiricism treats objects other than minds. We are taught that non-mental entities have no inner feeling content, only neutral properties and attributes that dictate how they interact with other entities. And we contrast this dead neutrality with what seems to us to be an inner spark or soul or spirit that imbues a mind with feeling and sentience. In doing this we are treating both non-mental objects and subjective feeling as possessing intrinsic properties that exist apart from their interaction with the world. Put differently , we think essence, existence and being apart from interaction and relation: physical
objects have a dead, neutral being and subjective consciousness has a feeling being.

The practice-based approach I’m advocating argues that what seem like two irreconcilable contents, dead neutrality and living feeling, are not intrinsic contents or properties at all. There is such thing as intrinsicality, ‘inner’ feeling, static existence , being or essence. What we mistakenly believe to be such is instead a difference made by interaction. The world is composed of bits of differences. These differences are created through their interaction with other differences. But we must not think of these interacting differences in deterministic empirical terms as efficient causes. We’re not talking here about physical particles with assigned properties which produce predictable effects. Each difference is something new in the world, a new value. A system of differences is a system of values, each affecting and changing the others. These valuative differences are the origin of what we call ‘feeling’ and they are also the origin of the seemingly ‘dead’, affectively ‘neutral’ physical features of the world.

But in order to recognize this, we have to stop thinking of subjective feeling as a static inner content, and we have to stop treating non-mental objects as having pre-assigned internal properties producing dead, neutral ‘causes’ and ‘effects’. You may wonder how any normative stability is possible given all this continual transformation , but such stabilities are the rule. We always find ourselves ensconced within some community or other, and thus are able from the start to understand others even though we participate in these discursive practices with our own perspective. This is how we are able to agree on such things as scientific laws.

.All other corners of the world untouched by our participation also are agentially perspectival with respect to themselves via their interaffecting within configurative patterns of interaction.
— Joshs

isn't that panpsychism? — Wayfarer

What is it in my description that evokes the notion of psyche for you? Is it the word ‘agent’? I know it’s difficult not to associate agency with consciousness. Consciousness itself implies self-consciousness, an immediate self-affection , a pure internality. But what I’m talking about is neither self-affecting intrinsicality nor efficiently causal relationality nor representationalism. It is a notion which marries the fecundity of consciousness with the relativism of interaction without succumbing to either empiricism or idealism.

Hoffman builds his case using evolutionary game theory, demonstrating that perceptions that accurately represent reality are not favored by natural selection. He further critiques the conventional view of physicalism—the idea that the physical world is the foundation of all reality—arguing that space, time, and objects themselves are human constructs rather than fundamental aspects of the universe. Instead, he suggests that consciousness itself might be fundamental, proposing a theory in which reality consists of a network of conscious agents interacting — Wayfarer

Well, he’s got it partly right in talking about a network of interacting agents. But he needs to jettison the Cartesian anthropcentrism. Agency isn’t a mind or consciousness, it is perspectival patterns of interacting practices. The part of that world that humans interact is ‘true’ just as it appears to us to be, a discursive structure of performances that changes as our situated ways of interacting with it changes. Our understandings of the world aren’t ideas in the head, they are activities of engagement.All other corners of the world untouched by our participation also are agentially perspectival with respect to themselves via their interaffecting within configurative patterns of interaction. Hoffman and Chalmers still think of consciousness as an Ideal substance.

Though at that point we would be kind of in the realm of both Hegel and Marx -- the historical a priori looks a lot like those big theories of history to me. And that's getting close to a similar totalizing project, at least on its face — Moliere

That’s what pragmatist-hermeneutical and poststructural models of practice are for. For Hegel and Marx the dialectic totalizes historical becoming. In these latter models cultural becoming is contextually situated and non-totalizable. It is normativity all the way down.

This is a tall order, but if you had to name a single work by Derrida that shows him at his best, what would it be? If I haven't read it, I'll try to. — J

Hmm, you might try his lecture course on Heidegger from the mid ‘60’s:
‘Heidegger: The Question of Being and History’

He keeps the play on language to a minimum here, opting instead for a straightforward exposition ( or as straightforward as he gets). His interviews are another way to avoid the rhetorical tricks. I recommend ‘Points’ and ‘Positions’, as well as the last part of Limited, Inc.

What would be more interesting is to understand why such implications arise within a formal system in the first place. Once we understand that, we can assess whether it’s reasonable to assume those implications might also hold for language or nature.

Did Wittgenstein even attempt to figure out why — Skalidris

Yes he did. He would never argue that the implications of mathematics are “irrelevant to the real world”. Rather, the implications of formal systems can only be made sense of if we recognize that they are only intelligible within the language game , or ‘form of life’, that they belong to, and that they are of no help in explaining the transition between language games.

↪Janus . . . And then there's Derrida. Like Janus, I've done my due diligence with him and have concluded that he's an extremely good rhetorician who discovered a "cool gig" and stuck with it. So, an exception to every — J

I have to disagree here. I’ve read and published on Derrida, and see his most substantive contribution to philosophy as recognizing where Heidegger stopped short of explicating the most radical implications of his own thinking. I think Heidegger is the most advance thinker of our era, and Derrida took his ideas a bit further, albeit only a little bit.

As evidence of this I reference the difference between Kant's categories and the most general scientific theories -- I don't see any need for a group of categories to make sense of science. I don't think the structure of the mind or the minds relationship to being is the site of knowledge, but of comfort — Moliere

What if in place of Kant’s Transcendental categories we substituted normative social practices? Doesn’t that stay true to Kant’s insight concerning the inseparable role of subjectivity in the construction of meaning while avoiding a solipsistic idealism? Don’t we need to think in terms of normative social practices in order to make sense of science?

how one approaches paradoxes depends on how one views logic in the first place. If we follow the peripatetic axiom that "nothing is in the intellect that was not first in the senses," my question is "where are the paradoxes in the senses or out in the world?" I have never experienced anything both be and not be without qualification, only stipulated sign systems that declare that "if something is true it is false," and stuff of that sort. — Count Timothy von Icarus

What is true is true in relation to a normed pattern. Perception, as pattern recognition, is conceptually based. This means that expectations guide recognition of perceprual objects. It also means that in assimilating the world to our expectations we at the same time modify those expectations to accomodate to the novel aspects of what we perceive. Put differently, in a certain sense what we perceive both is and is not what we anticipated. This not the same as saying that it is both true and false, since the sense of meaning of a conceptual pattern is being qualitatively adjusted in perceiving something. Thus the thing we continually recognize continues to be true differently. With regard to formal logic, if we think of a logic as producing a rule, then in following a rule we operate the same as we do in perceiving. The criteria of rule-following no more guarantees a criterion for correctly following it than our previous experience with a perceived object tells us how to recognize it correctly now.

Anything goes" is a recipe for conservatism, since if anything goes then the way things are is as viable as the way they might be, and there is no sound reason for change. — Banno

“Anything goes” is also the common strawman argument against a logical pluralism that is taken disparagingly to imply a ‘relativism’ or or ‘nihilism’, a view that those accused of relativism never actually hold, according to Rorty.

I noticed that you have a strong interest in the work of Ayn Rand.
— Joshs

what — SophistiCat

This is from his public webpage:

For many years I wrote very few essays, but instead made thousands of pages of notes on things I noticed about ideas, other human beings, and art. I studied Ayn Rand's essays, and they meant a lot to me.

First of all, consider this: can you think of any philosophers generally thought of as Analytic who mentioned Hegel positively, or at all, in their work?
— Joshs

John McDowell and Robert Brandom. — Janus

It’s true that the Pittsburgh school is well versed in Hegel, but I would argue that in embracing Hegel, hermeneutics, and other Continental strands of thought based on a grounding in Hegel, they represent a departure from ‘classic’ Analytic thought. Rorty wasn’t the only one among that group who thought that what they were doing was no longer Analytic philosophy. Putnam said:

“Thus we have a paradox: at the very moment when analytic philosophy is recognized as the "dominant movement" in world philosophy, it has come to the end of its own project-the dead end, not the completion.”

I think that the direction take by the Pittsburgh school was reflective of increasing crosstalk between Analytic and Continental types which has led to a blurring of the boundaries between them , to the point where perhaps these labels are no longer very useful. I want to share this from Quora, because I found it to be so thorough , and also because I’m know. around here for extensive quotes and I didn’t want to let anyone down.

My take on the matter is that it starts from Hegel; Analytic Philosophers, due to very biased (and wrong, I think) readings of german idealism by Russell and Moore, jump from Kant to Frege, leaving them unable to share a common language with Continental Philosophers, which carried on the tradition from Kant through the nineteenth century.

I guess then that in Analytic Philosophy, the bridging has been done by those Philosophers who stumbled upon Hegel; I'm referring to the Pittsburgh School of Philosophy, who enlists Wilfrid Sellars (who said that his major work "empiricism and Philosophy of Mind" were in fact hegelian meditations), Richard Rorty (who bridges Epistemology to Hermeneutics in "Philosophy and the mirror of Nature" and in various essays collected in "Consequences of Pragmatism" and "Essays on Heidegger and Others"; he also engaged very deeply with post-modernism, in the guise of Lyotard and Derrida, coming to strikingly close conclusions), John McDowell (Pittsburgh Epistemologist whose "Mind And World" was defined by himself as propedeutic to the reading of Hegel's Phenomenology of The Spirit, and whose work drew fruitful Epistemological and Metaphisical comparisons of Sellars and Gadamer), and finally Robert Brandom, whose theory of Inferentialism defined in his masterpiece "Making It Explicit" is essentially a Semantic Reading of Hegel (Brandom is actually working on a book on Hegel's Phenomenology).


We have then other Analytic Philosophers whose work does not explicitly refers to Continental Philosophers, but can be thought as Analytic Philosophers arrived at "Continental" conclusions. In Epistemology they are of course Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend (especially the latter, he has nothing in common with the teleology of contemporary analytic Philosophers such as Quine or Searle), Bas Van Fraassen (whose epistemology draws from the latter wittgenstein to form a "constructive empiricism" he also calls "hermeneutic") and the Communitarian epistemologist such as David Bloor and Martin Kusch (Kusch actually wrote his PhD dissertation under Jaakko Hintikka on the theme of Language in Husserl, Heidegger and Gadamer, and also devoted a book to Michel Foucault's Epistemolgy. His interests shifted towards a more standard analytic Philosophy in later years, but in his book "Knowledge by Agreement" he writes that his position is so strongly influenced by the likes of Gadamer and Habermas that he sees no opportunity to engage critically with their thoughts in the book). Hilary Putnam then has been a Reader of certain Continental Philosophers, such as Buber, Levinas and Habermas, and its later internal realism share some views with Rorty on the subjects of truth and knowledge. Michael Dummett has produced one of the most important researches in Analytic Philosophy by drawing its birth through a comparison of Frege's Philosophy and Husserl's phenomenology. Some Philosophers of Mind are actually rediscovering the works of phenomenologists such as Maurice Merleau-ponty on the subjects of perception (even though their understanding of these works is at least doubtful). Other lesser known Analytic philosophers have engaged with continental thoughts (Diego Marconi wrote his PhD dissertation under Sellars on Hegel's Logic, Stanley Cavell has written extensively on Heidegger, Jacques Bouveresse has compared philosophy of language of Hermeneutics with the latter Wittgenstein and with Speech Act theory)

In continental Philosophy the matter is a little more complex. Many continentals do not engage with the mainstream analytic thought, because it is viewed (quite arguably) as discovering platitudes already well known, or to have misguided aims (the desperate search for grounding beliefs and knowledge, described by Heidegger as the real problem of philosophy, this search, not the ground itself).
Many important continental Philosophers have nonetheless shown that they do indeed read analytic works: Jurgen Habermas has written extensively on Speech Acts, Putnam, Davidson, and has been one of the first to recognize the significance of Robert Brandom's works. Karl-Otto Apel has crafted a neo-kantian philosophy (sometimes called also neo-hermeneutics) by a thorough and careful reading and comparing the later Wittgenstein and Heidegger. Ernst Tugendhat book "Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die sprachanalytische Philosophie" can be considered one of the best works by a continental philosopher on the themes of Analytic Philosophy. Some Continental "Masters" have shown an acquaintance with analytic themes and authors; Gadamer remarked how the Hermeneutic he detailed in Wahrheit und Methode (1960) contains a great deal of concepts also found in Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations.

↪Joshs OK, thanks. It's an interesting take on Rorty's part but I'm not sure it's held by too many others. It makes for some strange groupings -- Husserl is meant to have more in common with Quine, on this view, than e.g. Heidegger or Sartre, which seems wrong — J

I agree with you about Husserl and phenomenology. I think Rorty misread them. I see Husserl’s and Sartre’s work as very much indebted to Hegelianism. But Rorty isn’t the only one who treats Hegel as a crucial philosophical and cultural dividing line. First of all, consider this: can you think of any philosophers generally thought of as Analytic who mentioned Hegel positively, or at all, in their work? The same is not true with regard to Kant, Hume and Leibnitz. In the political world, Hegel has been targeted by conservatives such as Andrew Breitbart, who blamed Hegel for Marx, Relativism, Critical theory, poststructuralism, postmodernism and deconstructionism. And he would be right in that such movements would not have been possible without Hegel.

Perhaps it would have better to say something like "In the early 20th century a split in methods and interests occurred within philosophy, and Husserl was a bellwether." I was trying to pinpoint the "two-camps" division, before which Hegel et al. were simply philosophy, common property of all philosophers. Only in retrospect were they seen as prefiguring Continental phil. Or that's my version of the history, anyway. — J

My take aligns somewhat with that of Rorty, who argues that analytic philosophy doesn’t go any further than Kantian modes of metaphysics, which is why he refers to the community of post-analytic philosophers he identifies with (James, Dewey, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, Foucault, Sellars, Davidson, Putnam, etc) as ‘we Hegelians’.

…both analytic philosophy and phenomenology were throwbacks to a pre-Hegelian, more or less Kantian, way of thinking - attempts to preserve what I am calling "metaphysics" by making it the study of the "conditions of possibility" of a medium (consciousness, language).

I think that analytic philosophy culminates in Quine, the later Wittgenstein, Sellars, and Davidson-which is to say that it transcends and cancels itself. These thinkers successfully, and rightly, blur the positivist distinctions between the semantic and the pragmatic, the analytic and the synthetic, the linguistic and the empirical, theory and observation. Davidson's attack on the scheme/content distinction, in particular, summarizes and synthesizes Wittgenstein's mockery of his own Tractatus, Quine's criticisms of Carnap, and Sellars's attack on the empiricist “Myth of the Given." Davidson's holism and coherentism shows how language looks once we get rid of the central presupposition of Philosophy: that true sentences divide into an upper and a lower division-the sentences which correspond to something and those which are "true" only by courtesy or convention.

Case in point, perhaps, is Husserl, arguably the father of Continental thought. — J

That might come as news to Hegel, Schelling, Schopenhauer, Dilthey, Nietzsche and Bergson. On the other hand, it would be accurate to call Husserl the father of Phenomenology.

I think that when we consider personhood and rationality in general we are going to have to deal with borderline cases, and at least some of these will fall into the ethical community. We'll need more that my definition of a person to settle some of these issues. — Kurt Keefner

I noticed that you have a strong interest in the work of Ayn Rand. Do you think that her ideas on selfhood are compatible with those of Merleau-Ponty?

I agree with that. Thinking about things in new and fruitful ways can certainly be a positive creative aspect of philosophy. Philosophy as art more than as science. I think the caution needs to be there to avoid imagining those ways as being absolute truths rather as being useful provisional entertainings. — Janus

You’re missing Rorty’s point. He believes that the goal of science isnt to arrive at the way things truly are, but to enhance social solidarity. For Rorty it is not just philosophy that resembles art but science as well.