I do sense the fact that many of the ‘analyticals’ are really pretty rigid in their concentration on ‘language games’ and the like and they often use the famous last words of the Tractatus to stifle discussion of what I consider significant philosophical questions. But, you know, c’est la vie. One moves on to another thread — Wayfarer

None of the supporters of Wittgenstein’s later work I follow would be comfortable with the label of analytic philosopher. The ones whose work I resonate with ( Cavell, Rorty, Rouse, Lyotard) incorporate language games into thinking which tends to be hostile toward analytic concerns. And they also tend to either dismiss or reinterpret those words from the Tractatus on the basis of what they see as his radically different later approach.

Wittgenstein provides himself with no way to account for the knowing subject along with their intentions and locutions. Language becomes a fact, a given, which must be parsed according to "common use" and cannot be parsed vis-a-vis the intentions of individual subjects — Leontiskos

I don’t know if this would be helpful to you, but let’s compare two approaches to intentionality and language within cognitive psychology, Cogntivism and 4EA (embodied, embedded, extended and affective). The latter is also referred to as enactivism. One of the founders of enactivism described cognitivism as:

…the idea of a world or environment with extrinsic, pregiven features that are recovered through a process of representation. In some ways cognitivism is the strongest statement yet of the representational view of the mind inaugurated by Descartes and Locke. Indeed, Jerry Fodor, one of cognitivism's leading and most eloquent exponents, goes so far as to say that the only respect in which cognitivism is a major advance over eighteenth- and nineteenth-century representationism is in its use of the computer as a model of mind.

There are more recent adumbrarions of cogntivism that move away from the idea of the mind as mirror of nature, but they retain the idea of cognition and language as something that takes place inside of a brain via representational , symbolic processing. Enactivism rejects this inside-outside representational model in favor of an approach that draws from pragmatists like James and Dewey, hermeneutic philosophers like Gadamer and phenomenologists like Merleau-Ponty, who was also a child psychologist and wrote much on the psychology of perception. What enactivism learned from these thinkers is that mind, body and world are not separable
entities, but are inextricable aspects of an ecological
system that is based on dynamic sensory-motor coupling between the organism and its environment.

When we perceive a feature of our environment, we are not producing an internal representation of an outside, we are enacting a mode of interaction with our world oriented toward normative goals and purposes shaped on the basis of previous interactions. Perceptually, we construct the meaning of what our world ‘is’ on the basis of what we intend to do with it. These normative expectations and intentions are not just subjectively but equally intersubjectively formed. Language use, like perceptual and cognitive processes, is not just ‘in the head’,not the product of Chomsky-like grammatical modules, but emerges and has its meaning refreshed through actual contexts of social engagement. Enactivists are not denying that there is a certain autonomy to individual cognitive functioning, but it is never a compete autonomy. Enactivists like Shaun Gallagher incorporate notions of the good from Aristotelian phronesis in revealing the ethical nature of social interaction, such as in striking a balance between the needs of individual autonomy and group autonomy in concrete situations.

What enactivists find valuable about Wittgenstein is his recognition that linguistic meaning and intentionality cannot be fully understood via models that begin from the idea thatmentation is a matter of rational representation of a world performed inside a brain.

To speak for oneself is already to speak in relation to a cultural perspective,
— Joshs

Did you just reciprocal co-constitution Wittgenstein scholarship? — fdrake

Was this an attempt to parody pomo? I’ll be back a bit later with my parody of your parody. For now, I’ll just suggest that an effective parody requires that one has first mastered the material one is parodying.

If one takes your approach, no person is speaking for themselves in response to the text but are parroting "so and so's" who speak for others. That means I am not speaking for myself but advancing someone else's view.

So, the humility you are asking from me is a keeping of a gate. And you have shopped out the work to a contractor. — Paine

You are not a solipsistic island dropped into the midst of society. Whether you know it or not, your reading of Wittgenstein will have enough overlaps and resonances with a particular community of Wittgenstein scholars that it will be useful to say , as shorthand, that you identify with the new Wittgensteinians or the old Wittgensteinians, with the therapeutic approach or the non-therapeutic approach, with the Oxford reading or the American reading. This doesn’t mean you think in lock step with any particular reading of Wittgenstein. To speak for oneself is already to speak in relation to a cultural perspective, Whether one feels in tune with it or in opposition to it, one is in both cases tied to it. Explicitly communicating this awareness when discussing philosophical ideas is not the same thing as advancing someone else’s view, but giving others a better sense of where you’re coming from.

I imagine that I can demonstrate that your objection to the quotes from my sources is the result of your opposition to a therapeutic reading of Witt. Whether or not that is the case, instead of wasting time telling me that so and so is misunderstanding him, let’s reveal the difference in underlying metaphysical commitments that separate your reading from mine. Once we locate the general region of scholarship that situates your approach, and differentiates it from mine, we can get into the nitty gritty of your thinking in its uniqueness. I think an approach to reading a philosopher that respects the value of what different communities of thinkers say about him is more productive, and less prone to the risk of gatekeeping, than one that is mainly interested in determining what is the ‘correct’ view of him , while ignoring the way any reading is ensconced within a community of practices.

Of course I prefer my approach, and you prefer yours , but there will never be just one Wittgenstein.

↪Joshs
This, too, fills in a space left empty by Wittgenstein. It mischaracterizes the role of "forms of life." The work does not mark out what a "legitimate role" is. — Paine

I have a feeling a quote from any of my favorite interpreters of Wittgenstien will likely deemed by you as a ‘mischaracterization’ of his views. Ironic term to use in a thread on ‘gatekeeping’. Don’t you think a more humble stance to take toward a thinker who has spawned communities of readers with sharply divergent views of what he meant might be to simply say that you prefer so and so’s reading of him to my sources?

How can it be that an approach which claims to privilege the common use of language does not use language in a common way?
— Leontiskos

Yes. Especially with regard to feeling and concept talk — fdrake

The ordinariness or commonness of the words contained in Wittgenstein’s later work isn’t to be determined by seeing how often they have been used by the wider culture, but in how Wittgenstein employs them to connect with and carry forward what is immediately relevant to the reader. It is these concerns that are common, and where the meaning of language finds purchase.

I don't understand Wittgenstein to be denigrating the role of the philosopher in PI 194. It is an expression of humility toward what has been created around the philosopher. If all the problems of philosophy are without value, then one should stop. And yet Wittgenstein is out there digging in ancient grounds. — Paine

I think Lee Braver has a point when he characterizes this quote by Wittgenstein as:

branding the problems of philosophy simply foreign to mundane life.Their very existence is due to this separation, to the disorienting extrapolation from our usual sense of a term to situations where no proper usage has been settled A philosopher theorizing is a bit like a dog trying to fetch a snowball thrown into a snow­bank, looking up quizzically when no amount of digging unearths it. The great philosophical debates represent, for Wittgenstein, divergent applica­tions of pictures that have been carried far beyond their legitimate role.

↪Joshs
I think he is good-intestioned, not malicious but if my critiques of a philosopher could never get beyond the philosopher in question, I don’t know what to call that. As if, the only reason Wittgenstein is (can be or is) wrong is because we don’t know enough Wittgenstein…just knowing his philosophy obviously shows Wittgenstein is right, right? Let me present to you more Wittgenstein so we can see how right Wittgenstein is. — schopenhauer1

Le me tactful suggest you have a chip on your shoulder and it’s causing you to blame the messenger rather than your difficulty in deciphering the message. You have the advantage here. 90% of the contributors to this forum do not ally themselves with postmodern , poststructuralist or deconstructive philosophy, and I’m including within those groups the later Wittgenstein, at least as people like Antony and myself read him. Let me make it clear: when I talk about deciphering the message, I dont mean agreeing with it, swallowing the koolaid, joining the cult. I mean having the capability of summarizing its content effectively so that one understands what one is disagreeing with. I dont agree entirely with Antony’s take on Wittgenstein , and I am critical of many aspects of Wittgenstein’s ideas, but I have no problem in thinking from within the world that Antony spins out so as to have lively engagements with him. Some others who have engaged with him remain outsiders to that world and resent him for it. To them, he is indeed an ‘elite gatekeeper’.

What is it about SPECIFICALLY Wittgenstein that it elicits the worst forms of elitism and gatekeeping in this forum?

Is it that Wittgenstein tends to bring out these personality-types that like to gatekeep when discussing on a forum setting?

Is Wittgenstein liable to group-think whereby the only way one can read Wittgenstein is an adherent who must use ONLY a BETTER interpretation of Wittgenstein to refute Wittgenstein — schopenhauer1

I would like to use a specific example to clarify what gatekeeping means to you( forgive me, Antony).
I consider Antony Nickles’ discussions of Wittgenstein’s ideas on this forum to be some of the most rigorous and informative contributions to this site, not only because it jibes with my understanding of Witt, but because he is able to bring Witt’s way of looking at the whole ( as seen by Antony) alive by careful use of the author’s vocabulary. I have noticed the frustration and exasperation of many of Antony’s interlocutors as they try and fail to make their way into that world that Antony is painting, and I can’t help but suspect that a few of them blame Antony’s ‘elitism’ for their being shut out of that world. I’m curious as to whether you consider Antony’s approach as a type of gatekeeping.

Heidegger tells a long story about how the concerns of philosophy were corrupted by some elements of its practice. He wrote (and lectured) at length upon how Nietzsche was the last practitioner of the mistake.

There are a lot of other points of contrast and conflict between their views but let me start with simply observing that Wittgenstein has negative interest in the romance and nostalgia expressed thereby — Paine

Rorty’s analysis of Wittgenstein’s peculiar use of the word philosophy may go some way toward appreciating the basis of his lack of interest in its history.

The more one reflects on the relation between Wittgenstein's technical use of “philosophy” and its everyday use, the more he appears to have redefined “philosophy” to mean “all those bad things I feel tempted to do” Such persuasive redefinitions of “philosophy” are characteristic of the attempt to step back from philosophy as a continuing conversation and to see that conversation against a stable, ahistorical background. Knowledge of that background, it is thought, will permit one to criticize the conversation itself, rather than joining in it.

The transcendental turn and the linguistic turn were both taken by people who thought that disputes among philosophers might fruitfully be viewed from an Archimedean point outside the controversies these phi-losophers conduct. The idea, in both cases, was that we should step back from the controversy and show that the clash of theories is possible only because both sets of theorists missed something that was already there, waiting to be noticed.

Once we give up on the project of “stepping back”, we will think of the strange ways in which philosophers talk not as needing to be elucidated out of existence, but as suggestions for talking differently, on all fours with suggestions made by scientists and poets. A few philosophers, we may admit, are “like savages, primitive people, who hear the expressions of civilized men, and then draw the queerest conclusions from it”. (PI 194) But most of them are not. They are, rather, contributors to the progress of civilization. Knowledgeable about the dead ends down which we have gone in the past, they are anxious that future generations should fare better. If we see philosophy in this historicist way, we shall have to give up on the idea that there is a special relation between something called “language” and something else called “philosophy.”

Particularly, in PI Wittgenstein is equivocal about use defining meaning in all cases. "For a large class of cases of the employment of the word ‘meaning’ — though not for all— this word can be explained in this way: the meaning of a word is its use in the language” (Philosophical Investigations 43, emphasis mine). — Count Timothy von Icarus

There’s more than one way to translate this quote, and Anscombe’s may not be the best way.

“If I had to say what is the main mistake made by philosophers of the present generation, includ­ing Moore, I would say that it is that when language is looked at, what is looked at is a form of words and not the use made of the form of words” (Wittgenstein)

Philosophical problems do not arise in ordinary life precisely because there we use language rather than stopping to study it. Besides Wittgen­stein’s qualification (“for a large class of cases—though not for all”), G. E. M. rendering of the oft-quoted section 43 of the Investigations dis­torts his sentence by translating erklären as “define” rather than “explain” or “clarify.” Although a word’s meaning cannot be simply equated with its use, which would be the kind of debatable theory Wittgenstein says he isn’t proposing, we can only investigate its meaning from how it is used and what it is used for, just as we can only understand chess by watching it being played rather than staring at the queen under a microscope.(Lee Braver)

the opposition to ontology in Derrida and Foucault on the grounds that it limits freedom, or Deleuze's suggestion that this can be bypassed via the recognition of ontology as "creative" relies on particular modern assumptions about freedom and the relation of knowledge to freedom.

Were ontology indeed something we "discover," more than something we create, then a move to dispense with it or to assume we have more creative control over it than we do can't empower a freedom defined by actuality. Knowledge is crucial to actuality. Plotinus uses Oedipus as an example of this. Oedipus is in a way a model of freedom, a king, competent, wise, disciplined, etc. And yet he kills his father, the very thing he had spent his entire life trying to avoid, and so in a crucial way a truth that lays outside the compass of what he can fathom obviously makes him unfree. — Count Timothy von Icarus

The opposition between discovery and creation, knowledge and freedom, is deconstructed in Derrida and Heidegger such that, rather than giving preference to one over the other, they reveal these gestures as co-implied in all actions.
For instance, for Heidegger we always already find ourselves in the midst of a world, and in this sense our world is alway pre-understood by us, recognizable and familiar in some fashion. We know how to make our way around our world in a pragmatic sense. But this world
that we already comport ourselves toward in an understanding way is continually changing itself as a whole in subtle ways, so that the ways in which it is understood, made familiar and recognizable, change along with a changing world. It his means that the world we actually live in is neither unfathomable to us nor under the willful
control of previously learned knowledge.

Aquinas does not take up considerations that are identical to Locke, Berkley, or Hume, but the chain of reasoning is quite similar — Count Timothy von Icarus

It wouldn’t occur to you as a useful project to link together the Enlightenmment philosophies of figures like Descartes and Locke with ways of thinking informing the music, art, literature, poetry, sciences and political theory of that era, and then to do the same with Aquinas and the cultural modalities of his era? If we take Rembrandt vs Giotto as an example, do you not see taking place in the historical gap between the two a substantial innovation in construing what makes the human human, an innovation that mirrors the move from the medieval to the modern period in philosophical, scientific and literary modes of thought? Or are thinkers and artists just little islands of rationality and personal feeling only indirectly plugged into larger social conventions and practices?

Aquinas pretty much constructs Locke's arguments re primary/secondary qualities and Berkeley's arguments re there being "nothing but," ideas. He just rejects both of these. Solipsism, subjectivist epistemic nihilism (and a version of it in fideism) , extreme relativism (Protagoras' "man is the measure of all things) were going concerns going back to the pre-Socrartics. The medievals were aware of these, they just rejected them by in large — Count Timothy von Icarus

I don’t have the reverence for philosophical predecessors that you do. I view the thought of individuals as inextricably bound to an intersubjectively formed system of thought , a cultural episteme or worldview that ties multiple thinkers together, despite their differences. These cultural worldviews( classical, medieval, modern, postmodern) succeed each other neither logically nor arbitrarily, but make it impossible to resurrect the past without already reinterpreting it from one’s own cultural vantage. Did a neo-Aristotelian thinker from the 13th century like Aquinas leap beyond his era’s epistemic limits such as to enable him to grasp and reject what Locke and Berkeley were up to? Call me a skeptic, especially since it is hard to imagine in what way their concepts would even be intelligible without first passing through Descartes, unless you want to argue that Aquinas also knew what Descartes would be up to.

Generally speaking, the classical/scholastic view would be that God is both "inside" and "outside" the system
— Count Timothy von Icarus

Transcendent yet immanent. Something the 'new atheists' could never comprehend — Wayfarer

Deleuze’s philosophy is transcendent yet immanent in a way that draws upon but goes beyond the modern philosophical resources that underlie the subject-object thinking of the new atheists. By contrast, the classical/scholastic tradition hadnt yet arrived at a notion of subjective consciousness, and as a result, had nothing like the modern concept of the object. Therefore, the notion of the subject-dependent nature of objective experience would be utterly alien to them. By contrast, if the new atheists have trouble comprehending the classical/ scholastic orientation, it is only because they fail to recognize how their own approaches rely on transformations of those earlier ways of thinking.
The modern subject-object scheme the new atheists embrace creates the transcendental out of the resources of the empirical.

I read it all, and while I think it fairly clearly conveys what the common sense view is, it then declares itself to not be that, and what it is (the last paragraph) kind of lost me. I could not, from that, summarize what Husserl is trying to get at — noAxioms

Can you say some more in simple terms about what this might be? Do you mean that time is also an aspect of consciousness and therefore located in our cognitive apparatus (but that may be closer to Kant?). — Tom Storm

Maybe this from Dan Zahavi will help:

What is time? In daily life time is spoken of in a variety of ways. The universe is said to have existed for many billions of years. In geology one can say that the Permian period, the most recent period of the Paleozoic period, lasted around 41 million years. One can also speak of the medieval age; one can refer to the German occupation of Denmark which began on April 9, 1940; and one can announce that the train will leave in twenty-two min-utes. In other words, in daily life it is taken for granted that there is a dat-able, measurable, historical, and cosmic time. Husserl's analysis, however, is not primarily concerned with these forms of time, though by no means is he denying that one can speak of an objective time.

Rather he claims that it is philosophically unacceptable simply to assume that time possesses such an objective status. The phenomenologically pertinent question is how time can appear with such a validity, that is, how it is constituted with such a validity: In order to begin this analysis, it is, however, necessary to perform an epoche. We will have to suspend our naive beliefs regarding the existence and nature of objective time, and, instead, take our point of departure in the type of time we are directly acquainted with. We have to turn to experienced or lived time.

The central question is: How can I experience such objects as melodies? Husserls fundamental claim is that our experience of a temporal object (as well as our experience of change and succession) would be impossible if our consciousness were only conscious of that which is given in a punctual now, and if the stream of consciousness consequently consisted in a series of isolated now-points, like a line of pearls. If this were the case, were we only able to experience that which is given right now, we would, in fact, be unable to experience anything with a temporal extension, that is, anything that endured. This is obviously not the case, so consequently we are forced to acknowledge that our consciousness, one way or the other, can encompass more than that which is given right now. We can be co-conscious of that which has just been, and that which is just about to occur.

However, the crucial question still remains, how can we be conscious of that which is no longer or not yet present to our consciousness? According to Brentano, it is our imagination that enables us to tran-scend the punctual now. We perceive that which occurs right now, and imagine that which is no longer or which has not yet occurred. Husserl, however, rejects this proposal since he considers it to imply a counterintuitive claim: We cannot perceive objects with temporal extension, we can only imagine them. Thus, Brentanos theory seems unable to account for the fact that we are apparently able to hear, and not simply imagine, a piece of music or an entire conversation.

Husserls own alternative is to insist on the width of presence. Let us imagine that we are hearing a triad consisting of the tones C, D, and E. If we focus on the last part of this perception, the one that occurs when the tone E sounds, we do not find a consciousness that is exclusively conscious of the tone E, but a consciousness that is still conscious of the two former notes D and C. And not only that, we find a consciousness that still hears the first two notes (it neither imagines nor remembers them). This does not mean that there is no difference between our consciousness of the present tone E and our consciousness of the tones D and C. D and C are not simultaneous with E, but, on the contrary, we are experiencing a temporal succession. D and C are tones that have been and are perceived as past, for which reason we can actually experience the triad in its temporal duration, rather than simply as iso-lated tones that replace each other abruptly.l We can perceive temporal objects because consciousness is not caught in the now. We do not merely perceive the now-phase of the triad, but also its past and future phases.

By phenomenological I meant phenomenological philosophy
— Joshs
I looked up the SEP article on this, and I don't think I used the term incorrectly. It doesn't seem to presume any particular interpretation of mind. It says:
"In its root meaning, then, phenomenology is the study of phenomena: literally, appearances as opposed to reality."
This is what I am talking about. The phenomenal experience of say a person does not vary depending on which interpretation of time is 'reality'. The experience is the same, and has to be, else there very much would be an empirical test to falsify some of them. — noAxioms

The definition you found refers to the ordinary conception of ‘phenomenological’. What I had in mind is a specific meaning of phenomenology unique to philosophers like Husserl and Merleau-Ponty. This IEP snippet may give you a sense of what I mean:

Husserl believed that every experience for intentional conscious has a temporal character or background. We experience spatial objects, both successive (e.g., a passing automobile) and stationary (e.g., a house), as temporal. We do not, on the other hand, experience all temporal objects (e.g., an imagined sequence or spoken sentence) as spatial. For the phenomenologist, even non-temporal objects (e.g., geometrical postulates) presuppose time because we experience their timeless character over time; for example, it takes time for me to count from one to five although these numbers themselves remain timeless, and it takes some a long time to understand and appreciate the force of timeless geometrical postulates.

To this point, common sense views of time may find Husserl agreeable. Such agreement ceases, however, for those who expect Husserl to proclaim that time resembles an indefinite series of nows (like seconds) passing from the future through the present into the past (as a river flows from the top of a mountain into a lake). This common sense conception of time understands the future as not-yet-now, the past as no-longer-now, and the present as what now-is, a thin, ephemeral slice of time. Such is the natural attitude’s view of time, the time of the world, of measurement, of clocks, calendars, science, management, calculation, cultural and anthropological history, etc. This common sense view is not the phenomenologist’s, who suspends all naïve presuppositions through the reduction.

Phenomenology’s fundamental methodological device, the “phenomenological reduction,” involves the philosopher’s bracketing of her natural belief about the world, much like in mathematics when we bracket questions about whether numbers are mind-independent objects. This natural belief Husserl terms the “natural attitude,” under which label he includes dogmatic scientific and philosophical beliefs, as well as uncritical, every-day, common sense assumptions.

the point I was making was simply that the very idea of a ‘vast univere’ in which we are a ‘mere blip’ is something that only rational sentient beings understand. Again the objective view relegates us to blip-hood in our own minds — Wayfarer

Have you read any of Australian philosopher Jeff Malpas’ work? I just finished an article in which he critiques Dreyfus and Spinoza’s distinction between deflationary and robust realism. They define the former as the kinds of everyday truths that are inseparable from our pragmatic, goal-oriented involvement with the world. The latter refer to scientific truths, which give us access to the things in themselves. I’m curious about your reaction to his take on the ’mind-dependence’ of the world.

“…the dependence of our ways on engagement with
things on us, and so on our existing practices, does not warrant any further inference to the claim either that the things that we encounter or with which we are engaged are dependent on us for their character or for the fact of their existence, or that our grasp of those things is only in terms of how they `appear’ rather than how they `are’ . To take an example I have used elsewhere, a map of some portion of space depends on a particular set of interests on the part of the mapmaker, and the likely user of the map, as well as on certain conventional forms of presentation, but this in no way impugns the capacity of the map to accurately `describe’ (and thereby to give access to) some portion of objective space.

The argument that Dreyfus and Spinosa attribute to the deflationary realist, and which they present as demonstrating the impossibility, from the everyday
perspective, of understanding things as they are `in themselves’ depends either on conflating the question of the independence of things with the independence of our means of access to things or else on treating the one as
implying the other. Moreover, the style of argument they advance is not new, but is similar to a style of argument that has commonly been used to argue for the mind-dependence of objects, and which typically depends on much the same assumptions. Idealists have sometimes argued that one could not conceive of objects as existing independently of the mind, since to conceive of an object as supposedly existing in this way is already for the object to be before the mind in the very fact of its being conceived. Yet that the conception of an object is dependent on the mind -as all conceptions are-implies nothing about the dependence on the mind of the object that is conceived.

The idealist simply conflates, as one might put it, the dependence of conception with the conception of dependence. Dreyfus and Spinosa do much the same-‘consequently they are led to suppose that there is no possibility of access to things `in themselves’ from within the framework of the everyday and that the defence of scientific realism must therefore depend on severing the scientific from our ordinary, everyday access to things. Yet as Davidson says of language, our practices `do not distort the truth about the world’ , instead they are precisely what make it possible to utter truths at all. That science can indeed give us an objective account of the world - an account of the world `as it is in itself’ -is possible only because, and not in spite, of our being already `given over’ to the world in our ordinary practice.” (The Fragility of Robust Realism: A Reply to Dreyfus and Spinosa)

What is missing is the phenomenological experience of time
— Joshs
The phenomenological experience of time is identical for every interpretation. That's why they're called interpretations. — noAxioms

By phenomenological I meant phenomenological
philosophy ( Husserl, Mwrleau-Ponty.) This does not mean mere introspection, but a method of
reflection on experience that brings out structures unavailable to empirical third person models.

None of the theories of time listed here get to the root of time from a philosophical standpoint. What is missing is the phenomenological experience of time , which involves a different notion of evidence than empirical naturalism makes use of.

Heidegger’s point about science is that it is not equipped to question its own presuppositions, and that when it does so it is no longer doing science but philosophy.
— Joshs

:chin:

It comes across as straightforward to me that this applies to pretty much everything. X is not equipped to question the presuppositions of X, by questioning it you are doing something other (more basic) than X. It almost makes me think of Goedel — Lionino

You’re right that the place to question axioms is not within the axiomatic system itself. I think the issue has to do with how far one is prepared to go in one’s questioning of the origin of presuppositions, and the groundlessness of grounds. Goedel himself was not prepared to engage in a radical questioning of the basis of mathematical axioms, which is why he remained a Platonist. Similarly, a philosophy of science like that of Popper is not willing to radically put into question the assumption of universal norms of method in science.

The way I read "natural from moral" above is to infer you mean morality at least has its basis in nature (a lessening of the two are one, and inseparable). Ought is derived from is. And you cite Heidegger above. But I read H (assuming you depicted H precisely not loosely (as I might)) as implicitly saying not that the pursuit of any knowledge requires a natural framework, Laws of Nature, [to re-present?] or that the two are actually inseparable, but rather that there be convention on how some basic structures should be framed and settled upon as "true"; i.e., how to "construct" a universal framework for our further constructions, or pursuits — ENOAH

I meant that morality has its basis in the qualitative schemes we construct out of our interaction with our world. Within the realm of science, there has been a longstanding tendency to call these constructed schemes models of ‘nature’, as though our schemes were representations of some natural reality external to and independent of these schemes. In fact, Heidegger protests against not only the idea of a world independent of our models of it , but the very idea of a subjective or intersubjective scheme, model, narrative , theory that we impose on the world. He wanted to get away from a subject-object dualism entirely, and the accompanying assumption of a normativity or conventionalism within which we view each other and the world.

He claimed that we fall into such inauthentic conventionalism (Das Man, the ‘they’) when we fail to understand the underlying basis of experience in authentic Being, which is not a subject representing a world to itself, but a self continually changed by ‘coming back to itself’ from its world. And this world , for its part, changes reciprocally with self.

At any rate, whether we go with Heidegger’s attempt to abandon subject-object normative schemes and representations , or retain the idea that humans construct normative models from their interactions with a world, in both cases what ‘is’ is already organized on the basis of prior expectations and anticipations. Scientific as well as ethical facts are made intelligible on the basis of pre-existing assumptions. What ‘is’ is always an interpretation, biased in advance in one direction or another, relative to already in-place goals and purposes. Science can never be a neutral bystander in relation to ethical concerns because its determination of what factually ‘is’ is loaded with its own presuppositions about what ought to be, which is inextricably entangled with all other aspects of the culture in which those scientists live. The consensually arrived at ethical principles guiding the culture of an era do not exist in counterpoint to the scientific understanding produced in that era. Rather, they are variations of the same biases.

The role of moral structures can be seen most clearly not within a community closely united by shared understandings, but between communities divided by differing intelligibilities. The individual deemed in violation of one group’s moral norms has found themselves caught between two communities, just as is the case with scientific heretics. It is unfortunate that the very bonding around shared intelligibilities that forms a unified community inevitably leads to alienation from those outside of the community. It then becomes necessary to protect that community from foreign ideas and actions which threaten to introduce dangerous incoherence into the normative culture. Thus the need for moral codes and structures.

It should be mentioned that , like our scientific models, our ethical norms aren’t conventions in the sense of optional fashions that we put on or take off as reasonable members of a consensual community. These are deeply held commitments grounded in presuppositions that guide central aspects of our lives. When such presuppositions are brought into question , we risk the loss of our anchoring in the world , our ability to makes sense of it and our place in it. This is why wars are fought over ethical principles.

Heidegger’s point that a science presupposes as its very condition of possibility a set of metaphysical assumptions about how the world ought to be understood, which implies an ethics
— Joshs

Is that really Heidegger's point? Because that seems to apply to much more than just science. — Lionino

Heidegger’s point about science is that it is not equipped to question its own presuppositions, and that when it does so it is no longer doing science but philosophy. One can liken this to Kuhn’s distinction between normal and revolutionary science.

Heidegger’s point that a science presupposes as its very condition of possibility a set of metaphysical assumptions about how the world ought to be understood.
— Joshs

Unsurprisingly, another horrible point from Heidegger that doesn't capture anything about hte scientific enterprise — AmadeusD

It’s pretty much the same point that Thomas Kuhn makes about science.

The point about appealing to evolutionary biology in support of an ethic is exactly an instance of the naturalistic fallacy.. Ethical norms typically involve evaluative judgments that cannot be directly derived from facts about the natural world — Wayfarer

The problem isn’t with naturalism per se, but with a reductionistic, objectivist form of naturalism. Even an externalist like Dennett recognized that a freedom is built into biological processes that makes moral deliberation something that cannot be subsumed under any pre-determined scheme. As Dennett argued in his book, Freedom Evolves, the reason ethical norms cannot be directly derived from facts about the natural world is that those facts themselves evolve. What one can take from evolutionary theory and apply to ethics is the notion of the radical contingency of normative schemes of action.

↪Shawn It’s also a version of the naturalistic fallacy. — Wayfarer

I think the fallacy is in thinking we can separate out the natural from the moral, the ‘is’ from the ‘ought’. Richard Polt, a supposed Heidegger expert, should know bettter, since it was precisely Heidegger’s point that a science presupposes as its very condition of possibility a set of metaphysical assumptions about how the world ought to be understood, which implies an ethics. Furthermore , Heidegger would argue that Polt’s own formulation of ethics falls into what Heidegger calls machination, the technological thinking of enframing. Do humans prefer altruism over selfishness? Is one ethically better than the other? Or is this choice between Hobbes’ selfish beast and Rosseau’s altruistic innocent caught up in the same subjectivist humanism that spawned modern empirical naturalism?

Joshs: One may "aim at continuous development of insights into the perspectives of others unlike ourselves" in the absence of moral facts. — Philo Sofer

Absolutely, that’s what I meant. A morality without blame is precisely one which recognizes the relativity of perspective and strives for mutual insight rather than conformity to rules principles, assumptions about correctness of thought or action. I believe that actions by others that we judge as evil or immoral are by believed to be ethically righteous from their own perspective, and our task isn’t to convince the other that they are evil, but to find a way to bridge the difference between perspectives.

Constructive feedback is welcome — Philo Sofer

I am sympathetic to your moral nihilism stance, but what would you think of a position that rejects a morality based on blame and culpability, but leaves intact a morality that aims at continuous development of insights into the perspectives of others unlike our selves? The o better explain. what I mean , your goal of peace of mind forces on emotions and feelings, but does t seem to connect those feelings to what is most responsible for the disruption of peace of mind; namely, our failure to relate to the behaviors of others. The sorts of day to day negative emotions that ruin peace of mind, such as anger and guilt, are bound up with our struggles to understand why others we care about let us down, violate our expectations or standards, or why we do the same to others. It seems to me, the , that the o my remains me way to achieve the kinds of emotions and feelings that promote peace of mind is via a stance of moral
nihilism with regard to blame and culpability, but a positive morality aimed at optimal perspective shifting.

n order to choose any goals or aims, one must be vital enough to choose. One must perform the basic actions entailed in survival; these are the minimum requirement — Vera Mont

You’re separating ‘raw’ vitality from the normative patterns of interaction that comprise what a living system actually does and is. I think this is an artificial separation , and makes living self-organization a secondary to a physicalistic notion of life.

That sounds to me like a hyperbolic description of a simple matter: be born, live, eat, eliminate, rest, want things, procreate (or not) die. There is no meaning to being what it is over time: it already is and has no choice about what it is — Vera Mont

It does have a choice every moment. That’s what it means to be a normative system with aims and purposes. The constraints and affordance of an environment for oganisms and psychological systems are defined in relation to the specifically directed patterns of their functioning. When a choice is made between a ‘good’ and ‘bad’ option , it is not just the living system passively responding to what impinges on it from the world, or programmed into it, but the organism modifying its built niche according to aims which themselves are subtly refined in context of interaction with an outside. Conditioning is bi-directional, from world to living system and from living system to world.

The meaning of a living system isnt pre-given like a manufactured tool, it is continually re-established in subtly new ways through actual interaction with a world.

I'll add a top layer, to live ethically and morally - I think the two words mean the same thing, but both in case someone thinks they mean different things. A distinction that while the "lower" levels might be described as transactional, this top layer is not. — tim wood

It seems to me you’re splitting off a supposed
‘top layer’ of e and morality from everyday means-ends motivation , when in fact this top layer is embedded within and informs every motivated action we take, no matter how trivial. Every action we take in order to accomplish some aim understands that aim in relation to larger aims , and those larger aims are done for the sake of a self whose overall purposes are bound up with a core sense of one’s relation to others, how we see ourselves as mattering or others and how they matter to us, our sense of belonging and esteem. All of these features are bound together at the top, or superordinate level of our identity, and infuse the meaning and direction of all our actions.

The underlying necessity is the same: to keep living. The layer on top of that is: to live well. The first one is much the same for every being; the second diverges. The particular requirements for a good life differ from species to species; the desires we hope will improve our life* varies by individual.
So, there are root, long term, permanent aims that require small daily action to keep going, each one of which is proposed, planned and executed with purpose — Vera Mont

I think we need to make a distinction between ‘just living’ and perpetuating a particular way of living. Organisms don’t just live, they continually enact a specific normative pattern of interaction with an environment. It is this normative pattern that survives or perishes, not simply being alive as an abstract concept. If an organism is no longer able to maintain the dynamic consistency of its patterned exchanges with its niche, it is no longer that organism. To keep living as a body doesn’t capture what is relevant to the specific aims of a living system. It is these aims which are synonymous with what it means for it to continue to be what it is over time.

Applying this perspective to the normative psychological aims of humans, the motives that drive us aren’t the short term means to a long term end of merely staying alive as a body, these short term ‘in order to’s’ define the normative nature of the person as a psychological system. We live for the sake of our norms , not for the sake of an abstract notion of life.

The organism and the environment have memory, and the organism -- us -- can also reflect on those interactions, and develop some sense of how things are related, and the great variability of those relatings. There's a possibility there of coming to feel at home in the world, which can be very difficult for us. And in feeling at home, achieving freedom, which is also hard for us — Srap Tasmaner

We do indeed have memory, but is that memory a static archive, or does it reassemble the past on the basis of where we are going? Do we understand history from the past forward or from our future to what has been? Heidegger said that feeling at home in the world conceals from us the strangeness and uncanniness of being-in-the-world, and that we only gain freedom when we no longer feel at home in the world. I agree with both you and Heidegger: if our world is so familiar that we treat it as an unchanging given, then we achieve no freedom. But by the same token, if the world is so unintelligible
that we can’t make any sense of it at all, we are imprisonment by chaos.

That makes the issue of "being alive" a little tricky, because it's easy to say that this is the primary and overarching goal of a living organism, but it's also set apart, as that which enables any other goal. Is there something else set apart from such goals, perhaps also set apart from maintaining yourself as a living organism? I think there sort of is.

@unenlightened gives you the first bit: this kind of purposiveness is something that inheres in living, in acting, in being, not something outside it. Getting your ducks in a row is a row-ly way of behaving with ducks — Srap Tasmaner

I’m not sure that ‘being alive’ makes sense as a goal from a biological point of view. I think it’s sort of thinking is a throwback to the early days of Darwinism, when organisms were set off from a world, as if they were dropped into a separate environment and then subject to one-way selective pressure from that environment. But an organism isnt a an already determined thing, like a rock, surviving or not in a world. It is a system of interactions that maintains itself as a normative pattern of exchanges. It is not a living thing that survives, it is these patterns. And it is a misnomer to say that they survive. What they do is continually transform themselves, but in such a way that they maintain a relative self -consistency throughout these changes. I would not separate goal from purpose here. Any adjustment within the organism-environment system that maintains or strengthens the self-consistency of the specific manner of organismic functioning fulfills its goals and purposes, and modifications which fragment such integrity work against its purposes. Since the organism’s current normative patterns shape the possibilities of future changes to the organism, there can be no purpose that comes from on high, or from a causal below, entirely independent of the total style of its functioning.

Note that what I just said concerning the nature of functioning of living systems can be applied in a general sense to human psychological and cultural goals and purposes. Theories, faiths, schemes of understanding , value systems and worldviews function like living systems. The are normatively structured interactions with a human created niche (our linguistically formed technological and social world). The aim of such schemes, practices and worldviews is to maintain their ability to assimilate events without disintegrating into incoherence and unintelligibly .
To the extent that a system of ideas survives, it does so not by simply duplicating itself, but by changing itself constantly in subtle or not so subtle ways so as to keep
up with a constantly changing environment that it is instrumental in shaping.

In understanding the concept of purpose, both at the biological and psychological level, it is crucial to appreciate the reciprocal , reflexive nature of the person-world interaction. Persons aren’t dropped into a world with purposes any more than organisms are dropped into an environment with purposes. Purpose is a dynamically self-adjusting back and forth between self and world , remaking itself constantly both from the side of the organism and its environment. There can be no transcending purpose when the very notion of intention is not only responsive to but mutually shaped by an outside.

One of my favorite discussions of purpose is from Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals. Here he argues that the history of a thing, an organism , a cultural tradition only appears to be explicable in the basin of a pre-given purpose, when in fact such teleological notions are post hoc:

But ‘purpose in law' is the last thing we should apply to the history of the emergence of law: on the contrary, there is no more important proposition for every sort of history than that which we arrive at only with great effort but which we really should reach, – namely that the origin of the emergence of a thing and its ultimate usefulness, its practical application and incorporation into a system of ends, are toto coelo separate; that anything in existence, having somehow come about, is continually interpreted anew, requisitioned anew, transformed and redirected to a new purpose by a power superior to it; that everything that occurs in the organic world consists of overpowering, dominating, and in their turn, overpowering and dominating consist of re-interpretation, adjustment, in the process of which their former ‘meaning' [Sinn] and ‘purpose' must necessarily be obscured or completely obliterated.

No matter how perfectly you have understood the usefulness of any physiological organ (or legal institution, social custom, political usage, art form or religious rite), you have not yet thereby grasped how it emerged: uncomfortable and unpleasant as this may sound to more elderly ears,– for people down the ages have believed that the obvious purpose of a thing, its utility, form and shape, are its reason for existence, the eye is made to see, the hand to grasp. So people think punishment has evolved for the purpose of punishing. But every purpose and use is just a sign that the will to power has achieved mastery over something less powerful, and has impressed upon it its own idea [Sinn] of a use function; and the whole history of a ‘thing', an organ, a tradition can to this extent be a continuous chain of signs, continually revealing new interpretations and adaptations, the causes of which need not be connected even amongst themselves, but rather sometimes just follow and replace one another at random.

The ‘development' of a thing, a tradition, an organ is therefore certainly not its progressus towards a goal, still less is it a logical progressus, taking the shortest route with least expenditure of energy and cost, – instead it is a succession of more or less profound, more or less mutually independent processes of subjugation exacted on the thing, added to this the resistances encountered every time, the attempted transformations for the purpose of defense and reaction, and the results, too, of successful countermeasures. The form is fluid, the ‘meaning' [Sinn] even more so . . . It is no different inside any individual organism: every time the whole grows appreciably, the ‘meaning' [Sinn] of the individual organs shifts…

“The meaning of a sensation is something primary and biologically given. There is no need to interpret the feelings of hunger and thirst, for example. The meaning of a sensation is embedded in the sensation itself. It may be said that a sensation is its meaning. Primary feelings are genetically given, and constructed in the course of gestation just as organs are. They are “standard equipment” in every animal body.”

— Mind and the Cosmic Order: How the Mind Creates the Features & Structure of All Things, and Why this Insight Transforms Physics by Charles Pinter — Wayfarer

This doesnt seem right to me. Sensations from the eyes, ears, nose , skin and movement are massively intercorrelated on the basis of overarching normative patterns of interacting with a world. The purpose of perceptual sensation is to guide action , and it gets its meaning from such action. Action, furthermore, is anticipatory, and as such brings into play all of the sense modalities directly or indirectly. A kitten deprived from birth of interaction with its surrounding cannot see , despite having a normal visual system. Visually perceived objects have no meaning because such meaning must come from what we are intending to DO with objects, and our anticipation of the response of those objects to our actions. Even supposedly primal sensations like hunger are interpretive. My mother died from starvation as a result of advanced alzheimer’s. This is not uncommon. A person with dementia loses the ability to interpret the meaning of their hunger ‘sensations’ as these are interconnected with other sources of perception within a functional totality whose purposiveness becomes fragmented with the loss of a sense of time, place and identity.

This is a question I thought of surrounding the problem of other minds (Given that I can only observe the behavior of others, how can I know that others have minds?) — TigerFan98

First of all, we only know what a mind or self or subject is in the first place because we already find ourselves immersed in a world that is ‘outside’. There are many spheres of outsideness. Our memories belong to the most intimate sphere of outsideness. our bodily sensations are a next closest sphere of the outside. A further outside comprise the inanimate objects we interact with, and the furthest outside belongs to intelligent creatures who behave i. ways that are unpredictable. If we have never encountered another mind, then we don’t yet have a concept of ourselves as a mind . We may view our ‘self’ instead in animistic terms.

But given that your question assumes that we understand the concept of a mind, determining that another has a mind involves distinguishing their behavior from that of an inanimate object or a programmed machine. is there any foolproof way of doing this? I would think not. All we have to go on is our pragmatic trial and error explorations of their unfolding responses to our interactions with them. And what are we looking for? I would assume here that what distinguishes a machine simulation from the behavior of a living system is that the actions of the former eventually form a predicable pattern. If we never reach the point in our dealings with an unknown entity where they cease to surprise us, then I would say that for all practical purposes we can say that they have a mind.

It is a flat out rejection of "the place" where these foundational ideas have their existence: metaphysics (in case you are interested, a great look at this comes from Heidegger's The Word of Nietzsche; God Is Dead, where he calls N a metaphysician because "will to power", he claims, is just a continuation of the "place" of metaphysics). To see the post modern move, think of metaphysics as a completely empty concept! As meaningless as 'ummgablgdt'. Just nothing at all. It is not only God and Christian platonism that goes down the drain, but the possibility itself of making sense of the context in which these occur. I am Rorty's opposite, really: loosely speaking, he says nothing is metaphysical. I say everything is metaphysical! — Astrophel

For Heidegger, overcoming metaphysics doesn't mean leaving it behind. Like Derrida, he recognizes that it is a matter of revealing what is left unsaid by metaphysics. Metaphysics is ontotheology, the twin features of the ontic, in the form of beings, and the theological, in the guise of the Being of beings, the manner of disclosure of beings as a whole. What metaphysics conceals is the establishment (and re-establishment) of the grounding of Beings as a whole in the uncanniness of the displacing transit of temporality. As long as there are beings there will
be metaphysics.

Said Tom Storm:

Most of my days are filled with joy despite my position that life is inherently without meaning. Perhaps it's because I've had practice? I've been a nihilist for close to 50 years. Of course, as meaning making creatures, we can't help but find or make meaning wherever we go. Those who can't do this probably have some survival deficits.
— Tom Storm

How do you counter? Especially on his point on "survival deficit"? — baker

If one is able to find joy in day to day experiences, then one is not finding these experiences to be meaningless in themselves, and thus one is not nihilistic about the continent flow of life. Only if one ties the value of those day to day events with some overarching or absolutist meaning of life, and rejects such an absolute, is one a nihilist about concrete experience.

We can reject the thoughts of others for sure. Ignore them to the best of our ability. But they're already memorised. Especially if they're of perosnal importance/implication, outrageous, shocking or otherwise emotive.

In some sense I would say there's no such thing as "selective hearing" only "selective listening" -ie the actionable consequence of registering what you heard. — Benj96

The computer metaphor of mind, where the mind inputs data , information from ann external world and then processes this raw data, only takes us so far. Whether we ‘want’ to experience an event or not, even at the perceptual level experience is already conceptually processed and filtered relative to our goals and expectations. Put differently, we may not ‘want’ to see or hear something, but when it knocks at the gates of consciousness, whether we allow it entry or not depends on its relevance and interest for us. This is where models of conditioning and brainwashing fall short. What other people expose us to only provides an opportunity for us to make something out of it. Whether in fact we do, and what exactly we make out of it, is up to us, not them.

However the question of intentionality in a general sense is not so easily disposed of, which is why it was used as a wedge by Franz Brentano, and which ultimately gave rise to phenomenology. And the issue of intentionality or at least goal-directedness is also responsible for something like a rehabilitation of Aristotle's 'final causation' which is starting to enjoy a comeback in philosophy of biology. (And really, all 'final causation' is, is 'why something happens', so it's forward-looking, rather than the backward-looking 'physical causation'.) — Wayfarer

If we trace the concept of intentionality from Brentano to the myriad fields he influenced, such as cognitive psychology, psychoanalysis and phenomenology ( Freud, the Gestalt psychologists and Husserl were all students of his), my guess is we will uncover uses of the notion of intentionality that lie on the ‘other’ side of positivism than the one you would like to champion. We could call their versions of it ‘left’ intentionality as opposed to your ‘right’ intentionality. Whereas positivism rests on unexamined metaphysical presuppositions underlying their notion of objective causality, the ‘left’ intentionality of poststructuralism and enactivist cognitivism relies on the ecological holism of reciprocal causality.

The nature of causes is not pre-supposed beforehand but emerges from the context of interactions within a biological and social system. What gives intentionality its purposiveness is that biological and social systems organize themselves normatively, which means that they are anticipative. Sense making is guided by expectations emerging from patterns of interaction. What ‘right’ intentionality seems to have in common with positivism is the need to ground the normative purposiveness of intentional behavior in a metaphysical a priori.