Everything is possible until it is necessary, and both these concepts are contingent on the concept of negation, and negation contingent on the disjunction of plurality of experience, as in derived a posteriori. Logic precedes that of which there is formal systems, or of which there are the field of "Logic" the same way physics precedes everything ever thought in the field of physics — Julian August

This take on logic sounds more compatible with Analytic than with recent Continental approaches. Re your analogy of logic to physics, for many continental philosophers there is the field of formal logic, and there are the more general presuppositions grounding this formal field, which limit it to subject-object propositions generating necessary relations of truth or falsity, negation or affirmation. But there are more fundamental logics which are not propositional in nature.

Objectivity then is about descriptions that smooth out the differences that arise from variances in subjects' phenomenal experience. You view the same phenomena in many different ways, using tools, experiments, etc., and identify the morphisms between all perspectives. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Do we view the same phenomena or view similar phenomena that we call the same for the convenience of fabricating the kinds of objects that are amenable to mathematical calculation?

there is a strong tendency for the mathematical patterns "at work in," or "describing" natural phenomena to be similar at very different levels of scale — Count Timothy von Icarus

Karen Barad is among those who suggest that the geometric notion of scale must be supplemented with a topological notion of it. What this means is that scales interact each other to produce not just quantitative but qualitative changes in material forms.

the observation of mathematical patterns that describe and predict the world are among the very best established empirical facts. — Count Timothy von Icarus

That’s because the presuppositions concerning the irreducible basis of objectness which underlie mathematical logic guarantee that it will generate a world of excellently established facts. It fits the world that we already pre-fitted to make amenable to the grammar of mathematics. The very prioritization of established facts over the creative shift in the criteria of factuality demonstrates how the way mathematical reasoning formulates its questions already delineates the field of possible answers.

it seems obvious that living things must incorporate within themselves descriptions of nature that are isomorphic to nature. Such descriptions might be highly compressed, based on heuristics that make them prone to error, etc., but this doesn't preclude the fact that they are to some extent accurate descriptions of nature — Count Timothy von Icarus

It depends on how we describe living things. From an enactivist perspective, an organism is an inseparable system of reciprocal relations among brain, body and environment. There is a certain operational closure giving organisms a normative goal-oriented orientation toward their world but, strictly speaking, no inside and no outside, no separable parts or forms. The cognitively knowing organism doesn’t represent its surroundings, it interacts with it guided by expectations and purposes that can be validated or invalidated. If there is anything isomorphic between such self-organizing organisms-environment systems and nature in general it would not be particular contents but a general principle of organization that applies to all living things. Piaget identified such a formal principle as the equilbrating functions of assimilation-accommodation, which he suggested could be extended to non-living complex systems.

I think the sciences are slowly moving away from the idea, exemplified by the periodic table, of pre-existing forms that reappear throughout nature. They are coming to realize that such abstractions cover over the fact that no entity pre-exists its interaction with other entities within a configuration of relations. The ‘entities’ are nothing but the changing interactions themselves, which tend to form relatively stable configurations. According to this approach, the world is not representation but enaction.

We can only know of the world in-itself through logical limitations and consequences. Namely, some "thing" must be there. But beyond that, everything is a model we create that attempts to represent what is there. Knowledge is the the logical application of our representations for our best chance at matching to the consequences of its existence. But such an existence can only be known as the representations we hold, as we only know how the thing in-itself impacts the world, not what it truly is to exist as itself unobserved — Philosophim

“Logical”, “model”, “representation”. I just want to point out that these concepts get their sense from to a particular sort of metaphysical foundation. If we shifted to a different metaphysics, we could find ourselves putting into question the assumed priority of logical, representational modeling as our fundamental mode of access to the world.

Logic is in the mind, but not of it. It’s not our invention but what we are able to discover through reason. I really don’t think that the idea of a world where there are no necessary facts is even an hypothesis — Wayfarer

You are allowing yourself to be fooled by your invented grammar. Mathematics, and the logic it is based on, rests on a peculiar way humans decided at a certain point in their history ( actually, as a gradual process of development) to formulate the idea of the persistingly present, self-identical object. Doing so led to subsequent assumptions such as the law of identity, the law of non-contradiction, geometrical forms such as lines and magnitudes, and propositional statements binding or separating a subject and predicate. Mathematical structures are only ‘embedded’ in the world to the extent that we force the world into such odd forms. But such processes of objectivation are derived modes of thinking which hide within themselves what gives them their sense and intelligibly. Put differently, a persisting object only persists for us in its meaning by continuing to be the same differently.

2+2 is true because of the shared presupposition built into the grammar of 2+2. A=A is true because it is presupposed as a basis for our formulation of objectness. Presuppositions are ‘true’’ in all possible worlds only to the extent that all possible worlds share the same or similar presuppositions. Given that presuppositions are contestable, partially shared constructs emerging from and maintained in actual interpersonal contexts of use, the truth of a proposition is dependent on this preserving of a particular meaningful sense of a proposition. When underlying presuppositions change , the propositions whose intelligibility depends on them dont become false, they either change their meaning and criteria of truth, or become non-sensical. When the sense of a proposition changes slowly enough, we tend not to notice the change in meaning and instead reify the proposition as self-identically repeatable. This is how we end up fooling ourselves into believing that mathematical structures are embedded in the world. What is embedded in the world is human discursive interactions, not the abstract forms that we fabricate out of these relationships.

And I think we can say that part of General Relativity is important for metaphysics. We shouldn't have a metaphysics that says modern physics is wrong. It would be a bad system, imo. — Manuel

A metaphysics is not a piece of evidence or a collection of facts to be compared against scientific claims. It’s the meta-framework within which scientific claims, facts and evidence are intelligible. Change the metaphysics and we don’t ‘disprove’ a science’s facts, we change their sense and relevance.

Heidegger wrote:

Metaphysics grounds an age, in that through a specific interpretation of what is and through a specific comprehension of truth it gives to that age the basis upon which it is essentially formed. This basis holds complete dominion over all the phenomena that distinguish the age. Conversely, in order that there may be an adequate reflection upon these phenomena themselves, the metaphysical basis for them must let itself be apprehended.

I was under impression that metaphysics has remained unchanged since the days of Aristotle whose work did not really gain traction until the age of Reason or Enlightenment beginning in the 17th century where Kant, Liebniz and others built upon it ? — simplyG

Metaphysical assumptions change with every cultural
era and with every innovation in philosophy. We can see this historical development in the transition from the neo-Platonism of Philo and Augustine to the neo-Aristotelianism of Maimonides and Aquinas, from the rationalism of Descartes to the empiricism of Hume to the Idealism of Kant and Hegel, to the various postmodernist philosophies.

In the sense that I defined it in the OP, I don't think we need metaphysics to expose errors in our reasoning: we can do so without making ontological claims — Bob Ross

We wouldn’t be able to distinguish truth from error in the first place if we didn’t have a pre-existing system of criteria ( theory) on the basis of which to make such determinations. Theory is a manifestation of a metaphysical viewpoint. If all we are interested in is exposing errors in reasoning, then we need not question our underlying metaphysical assumptions. In fact , we would be incapable of doing so if we merely remain stuck within a particular theoretical framework by looking for errors. The profoundly creative work of science consists not in exposing errors in reasoning but in changing the subject, turning the frame on its head, redefining the criteria of truth and error, not just checking our answers to old questions but asking different questions. In other words, transforming the underlying metaphysical presuppositions.

Heidegger wrote:

Metaphysics grounds an age, in that through a specific interpretation of what is and through a specific comprehension of truth it gives to that age the basis upon which it is essentially formed. This basis holds complete dominion over all the phenomena that distinguish the age. Conversely, in order that there may be an adequate reflection upon these phenomena themselves, the metaphysical basis for them must let itself be apprehended.

There’s more to metaphysics than just imagination it also includes reasoning not based upon experience but using deduction thereof such as found in math. It also includes tautologies which again are aspects of reason — simplyG

Metaphysics also exposes the error in our thinking. So, while that does not count as "knowledge", it makes us examine, or even discover, how we think ordinarily about reality, or the carelessness of how we think, or what we take for granted as true. — L'éléphant

This is an Enlightenment view of what metaphysics is and does. In other words, the metaphysical presuppositions of Enlightenment philosophy involve the belief that one can secure truth through deductive reasoning. Post-Enlightenment metaphysics is quite different.

Mathematical truth is not a supposition. It is logical independently of what we think — EnPassant

I think I’m going to put that on a T-shirt

It is the other war around; the universe is embedded in mathematics. pi is a geometric proportion but it can, with infinite precision, be expressed as infinite series -

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leibniz_formula_for_%CF%80

Numbers are eternal objects and the universe is designed around them. — EnPassant

This is true. The universe is designed around numbers. But who designed the scientific concept of ‘universe’ such that mathematics meshes with it so conveniently? Perhaps mathematics and the logic on which it’s based rest on presuppositions about the world rather than the world itself. This would mean that logic and math are derived forms of thinking or grammars.

More broadly, this makes me question my responses to human-created art. How much of that is just as hollow as that produced by machines? I don’t really want to ask “Is it art” - we’ve been through that before. Well, maybe I do… I can certainly see why it frightens graphic artists. I can see plenty of applications where it could replace human image-making e.g. book covers, posters, advertisements, book illustrations, comic books… — T Clark

Here’s an excellent argument against the notion that A.I. can ‘create’ art:

Reality does not require "faith" ... insofar as whatever there is constrains – encompasses – whatever else we believe or do not believe "is the case". — 180 Proof

Unless there is a reciprocal relation between the constraints posed by whatever there is and our way of life, which makes intelligible what we believe or do not believe is the case. Put differently, whatever there is is always produced via interaction within a web of relations contributing an ineradicable element of expectation, or ‘faith’.

This requires assuming that intentional or 'subject/object' consciousness reduces to the the 'Being, Consciousness, Bliss' of the Upanishads. This is nondualism, the rejection of all the distinctions that you say we should reject.

We seem to agree but maybe use the words differently — FrancisRay

Phenomenology offers this kind of approach, and a number of writers embracing phenomenology ( Evan Thompson, Francisco Varela) have tried to meld this philosophy with meditative traditions. But I have a problem with the notion of pure self-reflexive awareness, precisely in its claim to being devoid of intentional content.
The phenomenologist Edmund Husserl reduced everything to consciousness, but this ‘inwardness’ consisted of self and object poles in inseparable interaction via intentional directness. The nature of the self is continually being transformed by the world.

You're conflating consciousness and experience, but I;m suggesting that the former is prior to the latter. Bear in mind that experience-experiencer is a duality that must be reduced in order to overcome dualism — FrancisRay

How does making consciousness prior to experience eliminate the hard problem, which results from separating body and mind, subject and object? It seems to me that your approach reifies dualism by hardening the separation between these aspects of being. Dont we need to find a way to think subject and object, mind and world, inside and outside, feeling and thinking, experiencer and experience together, rather than giving one side priority over the other?

Most of Christina’s points rely on a comparison of religious modes of inquiry and scientific method. But her assumptions about how science proceeds amounts to scientism, which confuses itself with science. Scientism assumes a single ‘scientific method’ which offers a mode of access to truth that is superior to all other modes. I’m a dyed-in-the-wool atheist but I believe that neither a religious belief nor a scientific paradigm can be proved true or false. In other words, evidence does not enable us to choose between rival paradigms, because change in science assumptions is neither deductive nor inductive. Instead, it involves shifts in metaphysical presuppositions, just as does change in religious belief. If religious belief doesn’t evolve then neither does scientific theory.
I’m an atheist not because religion lacks evidence or is ‘untrue’ but because I find my worldview allows the world to make sense to me in a more elegant and harmonious way.

You cannot use physics to explain the special case of 'life'. This requires a special perspective, namely that of biology or better: metabiology. — Wolfgang

Do you think the reason we cannot use physics to explain life is because of some fundamental ontological difference between two natural domains, or is it that the conceptual understanding embodied in the vocabulary of physics hasn’t yet ‘caught up with’ that of evolution-based biology? In other words, have we imposed the difficulty on ourselves by the narrow way we have constructed our theories of physics up till now?

. I deliberately used the term metabiology of mind to make it clear that metaphysics is not sufficient to explain the specificity of all living things and especially of consciousness. After all, it is not physics that describes life, but biology. And there is only one brain and it is organic and not spiritual — Wolfgang

Are you saying that metaphysics is to be understood exclusively in relation to physics rather than to biology and psychology as well?

Without a metabiology of mind, brain research, as well as the philosophy of mind, will continue to sleepwalk between utilitarianism (which should not be underestimated) and philosophical speculation. — Wolfgang

What do you think of this review of the field of metabiology by Arturo Carsetti?

https://researchoutreach.org/articles/metabiology-complexity-natural-evolution/?amp=1

Greek ethical notions such as phronesis and areti are in opposition to universalizing ethics, and manage quite well without embracing Heidegger's destining of Being.

The essence of a thing is not the meaning of Being. Our involvement with it can take many forms, including building extermination camps — Fooloso4

Yes, Greek culture was a paragon of ethical humanism. They didn’t have the technology for concentration camps, but they were able to manage the technology of slavery quite well.

What is the connection between Being and ethics? — Fooloso4

The essence of a thing, including an ethical value, is to be found in the contextual particularity of our involvement with it. This precludes universalizing ethics.

↪Joshs For the record, my personal view is that ethics is not Heidegger's primary focus. I concede its "relative absence" in the interest of ongoing discussion. Either way, I don't think it is central to the thesis of the OP. — Pantagruel

Without determining whether Heidegger offers an ethics, and, if he does, without defining the nature of this ethics, it seems to me we can’t counter the implication of the OP, which is based on Wolin’s book Heidegger in Ruins. That is, the question is, is Heidegger’s reputation really in ruins? Wolin wants us to conclude that the ethical implications of Heidegger’s work, its most important feature, are dangerous and deserve to be left in ruins. I agree with the many who have been influenced by his philosophy that the method of grounding ethics his work offers is relevant and important.

But how many times does this poor argument need to be unmasked? Here are some places where it has already been done — Leontiskos

Lovely. I highly recommend Jean Luc Nancy’s The Banality of Heidegger for an antidote to Wolin’s book. To summarize, Heidegger absorbs the anti-semitic tropes from his culture, but not without reinterpreting them. For instance, he rejects the biological, racialized concept of jewry. Jewry represents for him a mode of thinking, a technicized, logicized instrumentalism that he traces back to Plato and Aristotle and which Jews co-opted from the Greeks and spread to Christianity and which reaches its apex with Enlightenement science. He considered Nazism to be the ultimate expression of this technicized thinking. Nancy argues that the ethical tools Heidegger provides in
his thinking can be used to insulate against the very essentialism that Heidegger succumbs to.

It should be noted that Levinas, who was strongly influenced by Heidegger but who offered a philosophical critique of his work, essentializes the jews in a different direction. He argues that we can discern two currents or styles of thinking in Western philosophy since its origins, the Greek and the Jewish. The Greek current focuses on neutral truth and the Jewish deems the ethical as fundamental.

Again, I think it depends on whether Heidegger's philosophy implicates the moral sphere. For an ethicist to produce a work of great import and then choose actions which are deeply flawed is incongruous. — Leontiskos

I’m sure your actions, from the vantage of a century or so hence, will come to be construed as deeply ethically flawed.

The problem is evident in the Introduction to Being and Time. Heidegger claims that the question of the meaning of Being is the fundamental question, the human question. H. says that we must make the inquirer, Dasein, transparent in his own Being. To ignore the ethical dimension of human being is to make what he intends to make transparent opaque. — Fooloso4

Heidegger doesn’t ignore the ethical dimension of Being, any more than Focault, Deleuze and Guattari ignore ethics in their work. One cannot properly think responsibility and justice without an understanding of Being. The question of Being is in its essence an ethical question. This is a central idea in Derrida. I think you’re looking for a prescriptive ethics and, not finding it , infer the total
absence of an ethical dimension.

Many authors have taken such as stance. For instance, Todd May writes:

“Second, however, is the question of whether poststructuralism admits of an ethics at all. In a
discourse that emphasizes the local and the contingent, is there room for principles of evaluation that are, if they are not to be mere personal reactions to situations, universal in scope?”

People should read Heidegger all they like. I don't seek to ban his books. I myself am inclined to avoid whenever possible those who, inter alia, think and are determined to tell everyone that certain groups of people (including themselves) are distinctive in spirit, or have a special place in the world, are especially a part of or have a unique understanding of "Being" or who knows what else is said to qualify as the kind of mystical-religious-philosophical locus of ultimate reality some of us need to manufacture, which in any case cannot be defined or understood through the use of reason; who think reason itself is detrimental to attaining what's true or real, and believe that it should be replaced by something or other like dancing, or marching, exercising, working (because it makes us "free") or running about the mountains in lederhosen pretending to be a peasant. Particularly when they are, also, unrepentant Nazis. — Ciceronianus

Wolin gets Heidegger half right in this respect. Heidegger did indeed reserve a special place for his own parochial culture over others. In his mind rural culture was better suited to grasping Being urban culture, the German volk grounded in blood and soil were better suited to this thinking than ‘rootless’ jews or other foreigners. What Wolin doesnt get is that the thinking of Being itself is a thinking of pragmatic engagement that in its particularities clashes with the structures of totalitarian political institutions. Wolin believes that at the heart of Heidegger’s concept of being is nothing but right wing fascist philosophy dressed up in mystic poetic terminology. But his philosophy is profoundly different from the sorts of conservative philosophies that were fashionable at the time, and still appear today. So Heidegger’s thinking appears as something new and radical but tied to the vestiges of parochial nationalism.

I don't see how the problem goes away unless one argues that Heidegger's academic work is inherently contrary to the unappealing aspects, and that he simply failed to recognize the way in which his philosophy precludes antisemitism, or Nazism, etc. A tall task. — Leontiskos

I hope this helps:

Eugene Gendlin was a Viennese Jew who , at age 13 , just barely made it out of Austria alive in 1939. As a philosopher and psychologist at the University of Chicago, he avoided reading Heidegger for years because of his political activities.After finally reading and embracing aspects of his philosophy, Gendlin wrote a remarkable analysis of the historical context of Heidegger’s actions. He didn’t excuse Heidegger or explain away what he did , but , like another famous Jewish philosopher who suffered at the hands of the Nazis, Emmanuel Levinas, he showed Heidegger’s faults to be symptomatic of a weakness endemic to European thinking. Rather than conveniently indulging in a pose of moral superiority, patting himself on the back for his righteousness, he looked beyond the individual to a climate of thinking common not just to the Nazis but to those who opposed them.

Here’s the first part of Gendlin’s article , plus the last paragraph:

“Jung offers deep and indispensable insights. I did not like knowing that Jung had said: "Hitler is the embodiment of the German spirit." The Nazis knew his views. Records show that they considered sending for Jung to help Rudolph Hess with his mental trouble.

Similarly, I had not wanted to know that Dostoevsky hated Jews, Germans, and Poles. He gave influential speeches in favor of the Panslavic movement. That movement was a direct cause of the Russian-French alliance and the World War.

What I heard of Heidegger's Nazi views made me decide not to read him at all. I read him when I was almost 40 years old. Then I realized that Heidegger's thought was already in mine, from my reading of so many others who had learned from him.

With these three we are forced to wonder: Must we not mistrust their seemingly deep insights? How could we want these insights for ourselves, if they came out of experience so insensitive to moral ugliness? Perhaps it might not matter if the insights were less deep. But they open into what is most precious in human nature and life. The depth is beyond question. The insights are genuine.

So one attempts to break out of the dilemma on the other side: Is there a way Nazism or hatred of other peoples might be not so bad? Could it have seemed different at the time? No chance of that, either. I am a Jewish refugee from Vienna, a lucky one to whom nothing very bad happened. I remember what 1938 looked like, not only to a Jew, but to others. I remember the conflicts it made in people. They could not help knowing which instincts were which. Many writers and ordinary people had no difficulty seeing the events for what they were, at the time.

So we return to question the insights again. But by now they are among our own deepest insights. We go back and forth: Nothing gives way on either side.

Did these men simply make mistakes? We can forgive mistakes. A human individual can develop far beyond others, but surely only on one or two dimensions. No one can be great in more than a few ways. And Heidegger did write of his "mistakes" in his application to be allowed to teach again at Freiburg (1946). He also distanced himself from the Nazi party already in 1934, long before most Germans. I have no difficulty understanding any person's mistake, and less difficulty if someone is highly developed in other ways. No human can have every kind of strength and judgement. On a personal level there is really no problem.

Why he was so silent about the mistake is also more than personal. It is the silence of a whole generation. I will return to this silence.

The problem is not about him, personally, at all. I pose a problem for us. The problem is, why his kind of philosophy---our kind of philosophy---fails to protect against this "mistake." That is the philosophical question.

His philosophy allowed for this mistake. It is therefore not just the personal accident. There is an inherent, systematic connection. These deep insights permit inhuman, racist views. To find the systematic connection, we must look exactly where these views---our views---are deepest, most precious, and not false but true. What was lacking at that most true point?

Something very important was lacking at the deepest point. We don't notice the lack, because when we read these writings today, we assume and add what is lacking.

I became an American when I was 13. As a child I had not belonged in, or identified with, Austria. I had been alienated in some confused and inarticulate way. I found I could really be an American, and I am one.

But, some European peculiarities remain from before. At the Heidegger Circle I laugh silently to myself, when other Americans discuss and share Heidegger's view that to be human is to dwell historically as a people on a soil. How do my fellow Americans manage to dwell with Heidegger on German soil?

My colleagues read this in a universalized way. For us, in the Heidegger Circle, the human is the same everywhere in this respect, and equally valuable. Humans are culturally particularized, certainly, but this particularization is itself universal. Humans are one species. They are all culturally particular. This universal assertion holds across us all, and we see no problem.

Indeed, after 1945 Heidegger writes of the dangers of technological reason on a "planetary" level. But it is reason, which is thus planetary---the same universal reason he says he had always attacked. (Spiegel Interview.) Heidegger's planetary view differs from our more recent understanding of human universality. The difference has not been much written about, so there are no familiar phrases for it. For Heidegger there is no common human nature which is then also particularized and altered in history. There is no human nature that lasts through change by history. There is only the historical particular, no human nature.

Humans eat and sleep differently in different cultures. They arrange different sexual rituals, build different "nests," and raise their young differently. In an animal species the members do all this in the same way. Humans are not even a species. So, at least, it seemed to those thinkers who entered into what is most deeply human.

To them, the deepest and most prized aspect of humans was the cultural and historical particular.

In our generation we easily and conveniently universalize the particularization. Not Heidegger. For him, what is most valuable is the necessarily particular indwelling in one people's history and language, on its land, and not another's. We change it without noticing, to read: any indwelling in any people's history is this most highly valued aspect.

**************************
Last paragraph:

It is partly the influence of his work in us, which now makes us unable to grasp how he could have failed to sense the nonrational universality of humans. Today, in Chicago, when we look at Louis Sullivan's buildings, the ones that created modern architecture, we wonder why he used so much granite. Why didn't he use just steel and windows?

To understand may be to forgive, but it is certainly not to excuse. Without pretending to lighten the horror, we need to understand why that tradition of thought also brought
horror. Only so can we think through what we draw from our immediate past. Only then can we recover the other past, right behind that one. We need both, to articulate our own, non-rational universalization of human depth.“

But your presupposition is that the two bodies of work are in conflict, and that we therefore must choose either one or the other. Why think that? On my (admittedly limited) view, the two are not in conflict. — Leontiskos

No, my presupposition is that the two bodies of work are two aspects of the same thinking, and that we must use each side to better understand the other. But one side is profoundly richer, deeper , more fully elaborated than the other. Without a thoroughgoing scholarly immersion in that side, one ends misreading Heidegger’s philosophical use of the word ‘destruction’ for the conventional meaning, as Richard Wolin does. This is one of innumerable misreadings he makes in his diatribe against H.

When ↪Pantagruel attempts to excuse Heidegger on the basis that he was an intellectual and not a moralist, he seems to implicitly commit himself to the view that Heidegger's academic work is largely non-moral, and is therefore not contrary (nor promotional) to the moral evils of Nazism. This approach also does not see the two bodies of work as conflicting — Leontiskos

I would disagree that Heidegger’s work doesnt imply an ethics. It does. Both Derrida and Levinas have connected the limits of the ethicial implications of his thought with his political mistakes.

Margolis, a self-professed relativist who stressed the importance of cultural and historical situatedness, would not accept the kind of Heidegger apologetic we see here — Fooloso4

Margolis’s relativism seems to go only so far. He appears to embrace Foucault but his critiques of Husserl, Ricouer, Heidegger, Rorty and various postmodern writers seems to indicate his inability to make the phenomenological (and beyond that, deconstructive) move into a thoroughly relational model of being. Instead, he insists on maintaining a split between the methods of human and natural science, based on his belief in a certain notion of an ‘objective' physical reality. He says cultural time is reversible but physical time is irreversible:.

”Their [cultural meanings] narrative structure—their past, for instance—is, as we have said again and again, always subject to further change by way of further interpretation. Nothing like this obtains in the physical world...The human world is significantly different from the physical—in possessing Intentional structures; it is conceptually richer and more complex in virtue of incorporating the other—and more. The physical world must be older, we say, than human life, and independent of human inquiry; otherwise, all our conjectures make no sense.”

Disentangling the two is not as easy as Heidegger's students would wish. — Leontiskos

.

Let’s be clear about what are entangled here. On one side are the public record of Heidegger’s political actions, and his collected comments concerning his views about National Socialism and the Jews. On the other side are dozens of philosophical works spanning 6 decades and comprising tens of thousands of pages.

If as responsible readers we are charged with the task of using the public record and scattered diary fragments to illuminate the meaning of his published work, and vice versa, which of these two sides of Heidegger’s life do you think deserves the most attention in clarifying the ‘true’ intentions of as careful and complex a thinker as Heidegger?
I think it’s no coincidence that those, like Wolin, who are most inclined to treat Heidegger’s political activities and non-published comments as a proxy for actually mastering his published work are the ones who want to dismiss his philosophy entirely.

Two centuries ago slavery was a social norm widely embraced and even more widely tolerated. So whom from that time period should we exempt from moral censure?
— Pantagruel

There were plenty of Germans in Heidegger's time who did not fall for the Nazi foolishness, and if Heidegger is to be held up as a paragon of human brilliance I don't think this argument holds water. — Leontiskos

It had better hold water, or else the concept of human brilliance needs to be done away with.

Two centuries ago slavery was a social norm widely embraced and even more widely tolerated. So whom from that time period should we exempt from moral censure? Anyone today who espoused slavery would be rightly seen as a monster. Social contexts create themselves as norms. Sometimes extremely dubious things get realized as social contexts, it's the nature of the beast. Man can be a very ugly animal. As unpleasant a fact as social reality is, it is a reality. You downplay your awareness of the exigency of the social context at your own risk. Your outrage is far more of a social than an intellectual response, anyone can see that. If it were intellectual, then it would only be a matter of letting Heidegger's writings speak for themselves, wouldn't it? — Pantagruel

Good points. If Heidegger’s mistake was cultural essentialism, the eclipsing of individual difference in favor of the social whole, Ciceronianus’s mistake is subjective individualism, which downplays the social shaping of individual subjectivity. Both tendencies are formed within discursive traditions, and both can lead to potentially dangerous ethical myopia.

As for his philosophy, such as it is, it seems to me that Dewey's alleged observation that Heidegger "reads like a Swabian peasant trying to sound like me" describes whatever is of worth in it, by my understanding, if we subtract H's mysticism and Romanticism — Ciceronianus

Coming from you , that’s a compliment, given the brilliance of Dewey.

Yes, we are all too quick to criticize those who supported Hitler and the Nazi regime and referred to the Holocaust as the "self-annihilation of the Jews." The "wrong side of a socio-historic movement," forsooth. — Ciceronianus

I don’t know if it is any more improper to refer to supporters of Hitler as being on the wrong side of a sociologist-historic movement than it is to characterize Trump supporters that way.

“On Sunday evening, just as Rosh Hashanah was coming to a close, Trump posted a meme on his social-media platform, Truth Social, excoriating “liberal Jews” who had “voted to destroy America”.(Atlantic Magazine)

I would say language-games never reflect the facts. Rather, facts only get their sense within language-games.
— Joshs

From Wittgenstein's Zettel:

Do I want to say, then, that certain facts are favorable to the formation of certain concepts; or again unfavorable? And does experience teach us this? It is a fact of experience that human beings alter their concepts, exchange them for others when they learn new facts; when in this way what was formerly important to them becomes unimportant, and vice versa. (It is discovered e.g. that what formerly counted as a difference in kind, is really only a difference in degree”.

I like Jasmin Trachtler’s reading of the above quote:

“…even if grammar or concept formation corresponds to
general facts of nature, this does not mean that grammar
can be explained causally, nor that it can be justified by
“nature”—it merely means that grammar does not seem to
be completely random in a trivial sense. Grammar is, as
Wittgenstein says, autonomous (cf. BT 236r)—autonomy,
however, is not absolute independence as it is not a
“complete detachment.” We might have as well other terms
and make other conceptual distinctions. As Wittgenstein
emphasises, both in the 1930s and in his later
investigations, our concepts cannot be justified as the
“right” ones or as corresponding to “nature”: they are
neither “reasonable” nor “unreasonable,” neither “right”
nor “wrong.” As he puts it, the belief that “our concepts are
the only reasonable ones consists in […] [t]hat it doesn’t
occur to us that others are concerned with completely
di!erent things, and that our concepts are connected with
what interests us, with what matters to us” (LW II, 46).
With this, however, Wittgenstein does not want to set up a
hypothesis:

I am not saying: if such-and-such facts of nature
were different, people would have different
concepts (in the sense of a hypothesis). Rather: if
anyone believes that certain concepts are
absolutely the right ones, and that having
di!erent ones would mean not realizing
something that we realize—then let him imagine
certain very general facts of nature to be
di!erent from what we are used to, and the
formation of concepts di!erent from the usual
ones will become intelligible to him. (PPF, xii,
366)

There are plenty of language-games that reflect facts or states-of-affairs. Many of the language-games of science reflect facts, as do other areas of study. — Sam26

Apparently you’re not a fan of Kuhn and Feyerabend.

We know that there are many different language-games, and some of these language-games, (e.g. religious and political language-games) don't always reflect the facts. — Sam26

I would say language-games never reflect the facts. Rather, facts only get their sense within language-games.

So Moore's language-game doesn't do what Moore thinks it does, viz., provide a proof of the external world. So Wittgenstein rejects Moore's language-game, and all such language-games that amount to a subjective knowing, i.e., the mistaken idea, common in many quarters today, that "I know..." is purely subjective (one's conviction). This idea has wrecked havoc on many belief systems. It's very destructive. — Sam26

Is it that Wittgenstein rejects Moore’s language-game or that he is showing Moore what a language game is? Does the idea of rejecting a language-game make sense?

That's beautifully expressed. Probably belongs in the Certainty thread too — Tom Storm

I Certainly hope so

So an alien species was capable of travelling a million light years but they weren’t clever enough to leave us with anything but a corpse?

But yet we want to maintain our inherent uniqueness, that you can’t know “This!” (#253), that my experience is still paramount to communication and the failure is intellectually explainable. That our intelligibility to each other is just “constructing, through joint action, shared systems of intelligibility” and not an ongoing responsibility to be responsive to each other and our moral claims on each other, or, all to often, to fail or refuse to make ourselves intelligible. — Antony Nickles

I thought you might be amused by the similarity between your last sentence and this by Karen Barad:

What if we were to recognize that responsibility is “the essential, primary and fundamental mode" of objectivity as well as subjectivity? Ethics is therefore not about right response to a radically exterior/ ized other, but about responsibility and accountability for the lively relationalities of becoming of which we are a part.”

…and this by Shaun Gallagher:

“ As the enactivist approach makes clear, a participant in interaction with another person is called to respond if the interaction is to continue. My response to the other, in the primary instance, just is my engaging in interaction with her—by responding positively or negatively with action to her action.…according to Levinas, the face-to-face relation primarily registers in an ethical order: the other, in her alterity, is such that she makes an ethical demand on me, to which I am obligated to respond…the failure to enact that transcendence [recognizing the alterity of the other], as when we simply objectify or reify the other person, is also a possibility of relational contingency.”

Barad and Gallagher both utilize Wittgenstein in their work, and are being more faithful to him than I am when I question their (and his) notions of relational responsibility. But just to be clear, the radically social constructionist position Im arguing from doesn’t see shared systems of intelligibility as grounded in autonomous selves. On the contrary, the self is derived concept , a social construction. Since responsivity is a given of relational being, the challenge isn’t how to become responsive to each other, morally or otherwise. The issue is how to enrich and enlarge the system of relational intelligibility that defines us as ‘selves’ within a tradition, so that we can make sense of and embrace alien traditions.

As Ken Gergen writes:

“... groups whose actions are coordinated around given constructions of reality risk their traditions by exposing them to the ravages of the outliers. That is, from their perspective, efforts must be made to protect the boundaries of understanding, to prevent the signifiers from escaping into the free-standing environment where meaning is decried or dissipated. In this sense, unfair or exclusionary practices are not frequently so from the standpoint of the actors. Rather, they may seem altogether fair, just and essential to sustain valued ideals against the infidels at the gates.