Does he get around to critiquing other superstitions like immanence ? — plaque flag

.

He critiques the superstition in religion.

“Religious figures and philosophical concepts are not really on the same plane of immanence. The plane of immanence that is populated by figures “is not exactly philosophical, but prephilosophical…. In the case of figures, the prephilosophical shows that a creation of concepts or a philosophical formation was not the inevitable destination of the plane of immanence itself but that it could unfold in wisdoms and religions according to a bifurcation that wards off philosophy in advance from the point of view of its very possibility…”

When we attribute immanence to something transcendent to it, we move from philosophical concepts to religious figures.

You are only agreeing with me. Transrational mysticism, educated irrationalism, ...
I'm not saying it's bad. Just that it's irrationalism...ironic-ambiguous at best — plaque flag

You’ll have to explain to me the way you’re understanding a rational-irrational binary. For writers like Derrida, Foucault, Heidegger and Deleuze all that’s left of the rational is a kind of relative intelligibility, a way of anticipating the new that finds aspects of similarity with what came before, a relative ongoing consistency ( kind of like the ‘rationality’ of Kuhnian normal science vs the irrationality of revolutionary scientific change) . But this anticipatory coherence is not completely absent in what would be called irrational experience, because there can be no experience utterly devoid of anticipatory familiarity. The confusing, the incoherent, the surprising are kinds of anticipation also, since any new experience will come pre-structured to an extent. Thus the rational and the irrational are species or modes of the same process. The most rational experience has built into its core an element of foreignness and incoherence, of absolute novelty, while the irrational has within itself an element of the familiar, the anticipated and the coherent. It should not be a matter of giving preference to the rational over the irrational through some idealized totalization, like a dialectical unity of differences which subordinates the negative and the irrational to a lessor status.
Rather, our understanding of metaphysics can be built on what is common to both the rational and the irrational as irreducible in experience (anticipatory structure of pragmatic relaronality). The rational can never ultimately ‘overcome’ the irrational, and has no priority over it, no superior power. Each are modes of becoming, necessitating each other in an endless intertwining dance. Each is affirmative and creative in its own way. Normal science needs revolutionary science , and vice versa. Encouraging and accelerating the flow of becoming in all its modalities is the thing, not trying to catch and freeze in place a moment of the rational so as to stave off the inevitable moment of revolutionary change and the irrational which follow upon and are inspired by the moment of the rational and the normal.

I'm taking inspiration from Deleuze in my flat ontology thread. Haven't studied him closely, but I like the immanence theme. — plaque flag

Yes, well keep in mind that his plane of immanance is the immanence of difference to itself, from which vantage Deleuze critiques such notions as lived experience , subjectivity, interpretation, representation, hierarchy, form, opposition, analogy, semiotics and communicative agreement.

there is no way to step outside the various vocabularies we have employed and find a metavocabulary which somehow takes account of all possible vocabularies, all possible ways of judging and feeling.

He's doing the thing he says he can't do. He's speaking within a finite vocabulary about all possible vocabularies. — plaque flag

What Rorty is saying must continually reaffirm itself differently in the very act of re-enacting the saying. Thus, his finite statement cannot asset itself as a theoretical claim but rather as an invitation to a way of life, wherein we see ourselves , at each moment, as participating in a continual reinvention of the meaning of our vocabulary. When someone claims that a metavocabulary exists out there somewhere, Rorty has no basis to deny this claim, to call it unjustified or irrational. Others have more carefully made the point that Rorty is trying to make here, which is that post-structuralism’s approach to language is not a truth claim or belief, but instead is performative. Rorty can only enact what happens for him in the conversation in which someone else makes a truth claim concerning something like a metavocabulary.

Here are some 'irrationalist' offerings from Rorty though. I didn't have a good pdf on hand, so they are chosen from some cheap quote site. But it's the bald pragmatist irrationalism I've been thinking about lately.


Truth is what your contemporaries let you get away with.

Truth [is] what is better for us to believe. — plaque flag

I can add to those quotes sources like Deleuze, who argued that the rational is just a species of irrationality.

That's undeniably slick, but you put the stability of the meaning of your own claim in such jeopardy that it's hard to take you 100% at your word.

If you are making a point about relentless semantic drift, I'm with you, but that drift can't be so rapid that the thesis of this drift is unintelligible. If you deny the ideal communication community completely, with involves relatively stable semantic and inferential norms, you are basically what I'd call a transrational mystic. A fine personal choice perhaps, but at the sacrifice of 'leverage.' — plaque flag

Is there any writer you know of that this seems to be true of (transrational mysticism)? Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida?
This reminds me of Rorty’s assertion that he never met a radical relativist, that the accusation leveled against postmodernism, post-structuralism and deconstruction is a red herring.

When you say semantic drift can’t be too rapid, what is it in the structure of semantics that allows such drift to take place at all? Isnt our determination of how violent, arbitrary and polarizing such drift is at its core a function of how substantially we ground the basis of semantics? I suggest that it is those discourses that begin from identity and the persistence of self-identity which are forced to characterize drift in oppositional and polarizing terms. By contrast, those discourses which begin from difference within identity( the most rapid onset of drift imaginable , from your vantage) that reveal intricate relational stabilities internal to discursive communities, and unseen by those philosophies for whom drift is only secondary to semantic meaning, an unfortunate accident that can happen to it and that we must recover from.
We don’t communicate by avoiding drift, drift is the condition of possibility of comminication. Stable normative understanding results from a dance of responsive interchange in which my utterance doesn’t mean what it means until your response determines it, and vice versa. This interchange is drifting semantically every moment in an intricate way, and this is what maintains its stability.

Notice that the ideal of eternal or atemporal knowledge only ever appears within the context of seeking, striving, preferring and desiring, which mark the instability and difference-with-itself of existing in time.
— Joshs
Note your own intention to articulate an atemporal structure — plaque flag

It is a radically temporal (or omni-temporal) structure. ‘Only ever’ self-differentiating, like ‘ always already’ in motion, has self-reflexive transformation built into its sense. It is not a view above difference but its performance.

Relatively atemporal knowledge is what philosophers tend to seek, no ? [ And we prefer the totally eternal kind if we can get it. — plaque flag

Notice that the ideal of eternal or atemporal knowledge only ever appears within the context of seeking, striving, preferring and desiring, which mark the instability and difference-with-itself of existing in time.

n. We can't completely reject the publicity of concepts without absurdity. But we need not reduce meaning to this structure — plaque flag

I guess what I’m asking is whether something like a public concept has any existence at all outside of the way it is changed ( used) in discursive interchange. To be it must be performed , and in this praxis its sense is freshly, contextually determined.

Wittgenstein showed that meaning is largely social and structural. People born blind can know about color. Why ? Because knowledge is essentially inferential, founded on the norms governing justification in “logical space.” — plaque flag

But it is not the norms and rules. that found knowledge. Rather, what is associated with a rule, a norm, a category is nothing that strictly belongs to , is encompassed by any framework. There is nothing common to all language games or particular applications of a rule. Wittgenstein's metaphor of “spinning a thread we twist fibre on fibre” shows the difference between language use as applications of pre-existing categorical , normative and rule-governed frames and language use as a subtle or not-so-subtle re-invention of the sense of norms, rules and categories. Family resemblance is the continuous overlapping of fibers altering previous patterns of language use via fresh contexts of use, rather than the churning out of a new instance of a superordinate theme or rule.

As Joseph Rouse argues:

“…normative conception of social practices does not identify a practice by any exhibited regularities among its constituent performances or by their accountability to an independently specifiable rule or norm… we cannot appeal to social regularities or collectively presupposed norms within a practice: there are no such things, I have argued, but more important, if there were they would not thereby legitimately bind us. Any regularities in what practitioners have previously done does not thereby have any authority to bind subsequent performances to the same regularities. The familiar Wittgensteinian paradoxes about rule following similarly block any institution of norms merely by invocation of a rule, since no rule can specify its correct application to future instances (Wittgenstein 1953). Practices should instead be understood as comprising performances that are mutually interactive in partially shared circumstances.”

If Wittgenstein is in fact either an anti-realist or idealist, where there is no mind-independent world, then as for Wittgenstein the meaning of a word is in its relation between mind and world, and as for Wittgenstein the world exists in the mind, then it follows that for Wittgenstein, the meaning of a word must also exist solely in the mind. — RussellA

There are other ways of thinking about the relation between mind and world than in terms of the binaries realist vs anti-realist or empiricist vs idealist. One need not post mind as having an ‘inside’ that can be distinguished from an outside.

Where do family resemblances exist - in the mind or in the world — RussellA

Neither and both. For Witt, these are not categories in the sense of boxes within which the particulars fit. If that were the case, there would be something common to all the particulars. But there is nothing common to all the words that share a family resemblance.

67:“ Why do we call something a "number"? Well, perhaps because it has a—direct—relationship with several things that have hitherto been called number; and this can be said to give it an indirect relation ship to other things we call the same name. And we extend our con cept of number as in spinning a thread we twist fibre on fibre. And the strength of the thread does not reside in the fact that some one fibre runs through its whole length, but in the overlapping of many fibres. But if someone wished to say: "There is something common to all these constructions—namely the disjunction of all their common properties"—I should reply: Now you are only playing with words. One might as well say: "Something runs through the whole thread— namely the continuous overlapping of those fibres.”

Furthermore, the existence of the particulars is neither strictly in the mind (which is not a box) nor in the world. It is in the relational practices that make linguistic meaning dependent on the enacting of material configurations through our engagement with the social and non-human world. Think of mind though the 4EA moniker: Embodied, Embedded, Enactive, Extended, and Affective.

I think the distinction here is between a notion of the real as bolted down , recalcitrant facts that one must abide by, and real constraints on one’s wandering that are responsive to one’s interpretive frame of reference
— Joshs
Yes. Imagination vs reality — Vera Mont

No, a moldy philosophical model of what reality is (bolted down facts) vs a more contemporary way of thinking about the real (intra-action that creates material phenomena rather than interaction between pre-existing objects) that has made its way from philosophy into the social sciences.

No, they're not examples at all. They don't ditch school at 14 and go off whistling down the road. But private tutor is another occupation that will provide travel if you manage to latch on to a family that gets posted to various places around the world. The real world, mind - you can't go wandering, willy-nilly in somebody else's kid's imagination — Vera Mont

I think the distinction here is between a notion of the real as bolted down , recalcitrant facts that one must abide by, and real constraints on one’s wandering that are responsive to one’s interpretive frame of reference. I think the concept of travel implies that one will be affected , shaped, surprised and constrained by what one encounters on one’s travels. After all , if surprise and discovery were not intrinsic to what it means to take a journey, there would be no point to it. The OP wants to outrun reality , seen as the bolted down facts of conventional society, by constantly changing locations. In other words, it would be a matter of continually swapping out one set of bolted down conventional redirections for another.

The problem with trying to outrun social entanglements is that it becomes very lonely , not to mention that one deprives oneself of the creature comforts of modem life.

Not quite the same as a nomadic life in the real - actual, physical, material; place where the body needs sustenance, protection from extreme temperatures and disease, sleep and waste-relief - world. — Vera Mont

My original response to your comment about the real world was focused on your emphasis on social convention. You wrote:

“In the real world, society sets limits to personal freedom and imposes obligations on its members.”

When I said there was no one real world, I meant that even within the status quo of societal rules and conventions, there are multiple realities at work, in the sense that individuals must interpret rules and conventions as they apply them, even when they believe that everyone in their community is following the ‘same’ legal and moral
code. The person who is aware of this can use this to their advantage. If one bureaucrat on the phone says no, hang up and try the next one. There are all sorts of ways to maneuver one’s way within and manipulate a system by remembering that the system doesn’t exist until it is put into practice by individuals, who all have a slightly different take on what it is, how it is supposed to function, what their role is, and what motivates them to particulate in it. Yes, there are real limits and constraints that one must contend with, but these are mobile constraints that respond to the ways we learn to engage with them.

If philosophy is unable to mention one single thing that it has been able to understand about the world, I don’t think that assessing my competence will be a help to fill this gap — Angelo Cannata

If I mention innumerable ways in which contemporary approaches in Continental advance our understanding of the world, and you have no competence to grasp the substance of that understanding, because you haven’t read the work of these authors well enough, then I’m not sure how I could convince you.

What is this ‘real world’ you speak of? I’ve never encountered it
— Joshs
So, you've been living in Narnia or Oz maybe? I'm pretty sure the societies there also place limits on individual freedom and obligations on their members. — Vera Mont

No one can place limits on the freedom of thought, especially when it comes to creative thought that is invisible to conventional society. You can’t limit what doesn’t exist to you. You can put only put limits on bodies. I know the OP puts the issue of freedom from convention in terms of physical travel, because they see physical escape as the only way not to become sucked into conformity. I’m pointing out that one doesn’t need to flee one’s physical environment to do this.

Only the person who orders their life in terms of many special and inflexible convictions about temporary matters makes themselves the victim of circumstances.
— Joshs
Yeah, like I said, most people. Not ascetic hermits, yogis on the verge of Nirvana or Ayn Rand — Vera Mont

I think Spinoza and Kant are better examples, or anyone in any creative endeavor who manages to see things differently from the status quo. Kant apparently never travelled outside of his hometown, and yet defied the conventional thinking of his time and place. Are these people hermits? Well they certainly have to be comfortable with endless hours of solitary thought.

Is there at least one single thing that philosophy has been able to understand of the world, able to withstand criticism? — Angelo Cannata

What contemporary philosophy are you familiar with, other than analytic?

if philosophy carries on going through this way of looking for strong things, then it is dead, it has no reason to exist; science is much better at doing this job. — Angelo Cannata

What do you mean by ‘strong things’? Understanding the raw truths of the world?

We could say that philosophy worked so much on “how to understand things” and this made it forget its being an experience more than a science. Let’s leave to science the task of understanding things and let’s restore to philosophy the task of exploring understanding as an existential human experience.
So, let’s discuss philosophically about metaphysics, language, morality, criticism, any philosophical topic, but not with the purpose of understanding it; rather, with the purpose of experimenting the pleasure, the depth, the seductive attraction of exploring connections between ways of understanding and human existence — Angelo Cannata

I couldn’t disagree more. Philosophy at its best is absolutely about directly furthering an understanding of the world It is in this sense a more comprehensive and through going science than empirical research.

I think Wittgenstein (both versions) has a fundamentally flawed conception of language. Ordinary language is clearly flawed, whereas the later Wittgenstein makes too much of the distinction between language and other elements of experience. We understand language through experience, and have the innate ability to develop linguistic skills due to the same selection effects that shape the rest of our biology… — Count Timothy von Icarus

I think you have it backwards. We don’t understand language through experience de, we understand experience through language.

it seems to me like he, and those who followed him in the "linguistic turn," make the mistake of making language too distinct, too cut off from the rest of experience. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I think you’re right that some who claim to follow Wittgenstein are carrying forward Kant’s split between conceptualization and the non-human world. Rorty made this point about the linguistic turn. But Rorty and others would argue that this is not what Witt was doing. Thinkers in physics (Karen Barad), biology(Stuart Kauffman, Lynn Margolis), the social sciences and philosophy extend Witt’s work on human discourse to the non-human world in order to show that reciprocal interaction within a field or configuration applies not just to human discourse but to the biological and physical worlds in themselves.

in the real world, society sets limits to personal freedom and imposes obligations on its members. — Vera Mont

What is this ‘real world’ you speak of? I’ve never encountered it, only a popular conception that there is such a singular thing, and a multitude of notions of what this universal reality consists of.

Most people grow out of that adolescent rebellion, either because there are things they desire and want to accomplish, or because circumstance forces them onto a path not of their own choosing — Vera Mont

Only the person who orders their life in terms of many special and inflexible convictions about temporary matters
makes themselves the victim of circumstances.

Ideally, if you're of a nomadic disposition, you should train for a mobile occupation: join the Red Cross or Doctors Without Borders; be a surveyor, salesman or long-distance trucker. — Vera Mont

Or any job involving remote work that can be done from a laptop anywhere in the world where there’s a cell or wifi signal.

I should add that what constitutes travel is not just a function of where and how far you travel in a geographic sense, but HOW you travel. I hike 5 miles every day, mostly in the same woods, but the trees, flowers and wildlife are constantly changingd. I am also writing while I am walking, and my changing ideas meld with the changes in the environment. One has to learn how to look. Anyone living in a large cosmopolitan city has inexhaustible worlds within worlds at their disposal, if they learn how to see them. This is the most effective sort of nomadism, the kind that can be achieved by staying in place.

. I have little interest in discovery or searching — Tom Storm

And yet you’ve been active on this site quite a while, asking searching questions, especially of those who opt for bedrock truths in science, philosophy or religion. I suspect at heart you’re a Bilbo Baggins, and if a wizard and band of dwarves came knocking at the door of your hobbit hole , you’d find yourself off on an adventure.

So, why do some of us want to be nomads, and is it a better life (interpret better how you want)? — Ø implies everything

When I was in school and didnt hand in assignments on time, or deviated in any other respect from the demands of the conventional structure, my teachers would say “In the real world, you can’t get away with shirking your responsibilities.” It was always about this alleged ‘real world’. Even then, I never bought into the idea of a ‘real world’. I’ve lived a nomadic life ever since college. Not in the sense of constant physical travel, which can end up just as conventional and constraining as not travelling. My nomadism is a creative wandering. I think we all want to be nomads in this sense. We all want to expand and enrich our sense of value and meaning. Physical travel can achieve this, but only if done in the right way.

We all want to be Peter Pan, if that means retaining from childhood the passion for enchantment and adventure. But each of us must do it in our own way. How aggressively we are able to wander is a function of a balance between structure and novelty. If we try to wander into new territory that isnt structured enough, that is so alien to our previous experience that we can’t find any familiar landmarks to navigate by, then our experience will not be one of magical delight and wonder, but of fear and confusion. That’s why most of us need the familiar structure of externally imposed conventions and institutions (social, corporate, legal, educational, governmental).

, I don't think he believed we can't know whether, e.g., socks are real or that there's something real we can't know, but rather that our use of language can "trick" us into striving to know what's "really real. — Ciceronianus

He believed language can even trick us into striving to know what’s only provisionally real. The point isn’t whether we can know what’s real. Whenever we use the word ‘real’ we know what it pertains to. But like all words, there are infinitely many usages, and therefore senses of meaning, of ‘real’. So the fundamental truth of the ‘real’ for Wittgenstein has to do with what we are trying to do with other people when we use the word in any given context.

Consider though that, if you could teach a fly that it is a fly, that it is in a fly bottle, and what a fly bottle is, you might be able to help the fly stop flying back into the same fly bottle over and over.

In any event, it seems to me like Wittgenstein's influence on metaphysics has really waned. Scientific realism seems more the default position than his anti-metaphysical stance — Count Timothy von Icarus

But that wouldn’t stop the fly from remaining trapped in the grammatical fly-bottle of propositional truth statements (this IS a fly, this IS a bottle , the fly is IN the bottle).

Didn’t scientific realism precede Wittgenstein? I’d like to think that New Materialism and Enactivism are beginning to catch on , at least in the social sciences, and certainly in science studies.( it’s always a slower process for the natural sciences). Wittgenstein is enormously important to their thinking.

already contains within its relational dynamics the precursors of language, consciousness and thought
— Joshs

Is it animism? Is it panpsychism? Something else? — Pantagruel

Animism and panpsychism tend to begin from the Cartesian dualist split between inner subjectivity and outer materiality and simply inject the outer with the stuff of the inner. New Materialism doesnt do that. It rethinks the nature of human subjectivity and empirical objectivity along the same lines, so that relational process becomes more fundamental than the steric identities of intrinsic inner subjectivity and material substance.

Are we pieces of matter that learned to think? Or has thought learned to cloak itself in matter? Is one of those options inherently less improbable than the other? — Pantagruel

Another option, expressed in the work of New Materialists like Karen Barad, is that material does more work than the old notion of materiality assumes. Rather than passive, static substance, matter is creative, intra-active and agentive ( not in the sense of pan-psychism), and thus already contains within its relational dynamics the precursors of language, consciousness and thought.

Are you sure we are disagreeing ? Is the target bad or do you just think we'll never hit that target ? Because I don't think we'll hit the target often or at all. But I've never drawn a perfect circle either. Yet the concept of the circle helps make those imperfect circles circles to begin with. I grasp the failure of a communication structure in the light an ideal or telos — plaque flag

I don’t think there is a single target to hit. As Gallagher writes:

The postmodern idea is not that there is one overarching conversation, but that there is a plurality of conversations, some constituting relative differends in relation to others. It is still possible that fusions can happen between conversations, not in the sense of unifying or reducing different conversations, but in the sense of creating new and different conversations by linking one to another; or again, not in the sense of a fusion of horizons, but in the sense of a creation of new horizons.

He imagines a dialogue like the following between Gadamer and Lyotard:

Gadamer: That I, as an individual, find myself always within a hermeneutical situation, a conversation, signifies that I am not alone. Even if I am only talking with myself, my language is something that I have inherited from others, and their words interrupt and make possible my conversation. Even if there is no universally shared human nature as a basis for Romantic trust, within the hermeneutical situation there is still some shared aspects, a certain range of background knowledge, some limited common ground which enables the particular conversation to happen. Otherwise communication would be impossible. Neither the common ground, nor the communication it makes possible, will necessarily guarantee community, consensus, or a resolution of differends. We are not focused here on outcomes, a particular consensus to be reached, but on what is anterior to (as a condition of possibility for) conversation. This anterior common ground may only be the battlefield on which our conflicts can be fought. Isn't the principle something like, no differends without a battlefield?

Lyotard: You know yourself how even "the battlefield" is open to conflicting interpretations. This was a favorite example used by Chladenius in his Enlightenment hermeneutics. Differends are not fought out on the battlefield; they remain outside the circumference of the battlefield, unable to enter the conflict within. So we must define many small battlefields, each of which might be called a community of difference, which is not presupposed but accomplished in and through conversation which remains dialogue without ultimate synthesis. Conversations, in such cases, always remain incomplete, imperfect. In them the we is always in question, always at stake, the consensus always local and temporary, community always deferred. Perhaps, within these conversations, a trust which is not good will is required; a trust that we are different and for that very reason require conversation to create a we. This is not a trust in a preexisting we, but a trust in the promise of a we, a not yet we which will always remain not yet, defined by our differences. I have stated elsewhere, "the true we is never we, never stabilized in a name for we, always undone before being constituted, only identified in the non-identity between you ... and me ..."A conversation "could do no more than put the we back into question"

In Husserl’s phenomenology of embodiment, then, the lived body is a lived center of experience, and both its movement capabilities and its distinctive register of sensations play a key role in his account of how we encounter other embodied agents in the shared space of a coherent and ever-explorable world. — plaque flag

Is corporeality is fundamental to transcendental subjectivity? What then do we make of Husserl's analyses of the primordial stratum of constitution in which no body has yet been constituted?

In Ideas II, Husserl points to a pre-bodily stratum in which consciousness is possible without a body: He identifies a lowest level stratum of constitution of the sensuous thing, wherein sense perceptions exist prior to the construction of a corporeal Body (“no dependence on the Body has yet been taken into account”(Ideas II, p.319)).

“If we think of monadic subjects and their streams of consciousness or, rather, if we think the thinkable minimum of self-consciousness, then a monadic consciousness, one that would have no "world" at all given to it, could indeed be thought - thus a monadic consciousness without regularities in the course of sensations, without motivated possibilities in the apprehension of things. In that case, what is necessary for the emergence of an Ego-consciousness in the ordinary sense? Obviously, human consciousness requires an appearing Body and an intersubjective Body - an intersubjective understanding.”(Ideas II, p.303)

Again, in a note , Husserl speculates

“It is thinkable that there would be no Bodies at all and no dependence of consciousness on material events in constituted nature, thus no empirical souls, whereas absolute consciousness would remain over as something that cannot simply be cancelled out. Absolute consciousness would thus have in itself, in that case, a principle of factual unity, its own rule, according to which it would unfold with its own content, all the while there being indeed no Body. If we join it to a Body, then perhaps it becomes dependent, though in the first place it still retains its principle of unity and does so not just through apriori laws of consciousness in general.” (Ideas II, p.3)

Note that you write we can’t use the ‘reality’. Who is this brainless we ? I think it's Feuerbach's 'we' of 'Reason.' It floats 'above' (independently) of any particular embodied human subject, but it is simply not intelligible as independent of all such flesh. — plaque flag

For Husserl, the pre-bodily ego is utterly particular in its mineness, even though it has not yet constituted itself as a human subject.

I agree, but we don't want to smooth out the actual personal subject too much, because rationality seems to be normative on the personal level. I can disagree with you but not with myself — plaque flag

If we take a page from self-consistency theory in psychology, we can say that the self is a continual achievement of the anticipatory construing of events, and among the most important event is one’s own self-reflections. Thus the self is no more internally integral than the events the person is able to construe intelligibly. Examples of a disordered self include emotional distress. Emotions such as guilt, threat and anxiety can represents situations which put into question the coherence of our core sense of self. Put differently, these are situations in which the basis of my rationality crumbles , I attempt to ride off in two directions at once, and I end up disagreeing with myself.

I take Appel to be sketching a minimal foundationalism, relying primarily on the exclusion of performative contradiction. This is not so far from Brandom's coherence-aspiring subject. Behind it all is a quest for autonomy. — plaque flag

Have you read Lyotard’s The Differend? For Lyotard a differend is “a wrong or injustice that arises because the discourse in which the wrong might be expressed does not exist. To put it another way, it is a wrong or injustice that arises because the prevailing or hegemonic discourse actively precludes the possibility of this wrong being expressed. To put it still another way, it is a wrong or injustice which cannot be proved to have been a wrong or injustice because the means of doing so has (also) been denied the victim.”

As Shaun Gallagher explains:

“What we have in these instances are what Lyotard calls differends, and it is precisely differends that are excluded from the conversation of mankind which operates on the basis of shared vocabulary and "civility" (Oakeshott, Rorty, and Caputo all use this word). The conversation of mankind reduces deprivations to negations. As Lyotard puts it, "to be able not to speak [= a negation] is not the same as not to be able to speak [= a deprivation].

The conversation of mankind fails as a model of postmodern hermeneutics not only because it is a metadiscourse and worthy of our incredulity, but because it hides exclusionary rules beneath a rhetoric of inclusion. The overarching conversation of mankind aspires to resolve all differends. But by requiring what is genuinely incommensurable (i.e., incommensurable with the conversation itself) to be voiced within the conversation, it denies it expression and helps to constitute it as a differend at the same time that it disguises it as a litigation. The very attempt to include something which cannot be included makes the conversation of mankind a terrorist conversation.”

I get that, and often refer to it, but I think to deny the reality of agency is a slippery slope towards nihilism. I mean, given that there may be no 'ultimately defineable' subjects or objects, there are still subjects and objects. — Quixodian

Does the reality of agency require persistent self-identity? Can’t relative self-similarity over time do the job of providing a perspectival point of view, a way continuing to be the same differently?

Even Husserl recognized that the ego is nothing but an empty zero point of activity, harboring no intrinsic a priori content. This empty ego is not a person, or a human, or a subject.
— Joshs

So are there subjects of experience? — Quixodian

For Husserl there is a subject pole and an object pole for every act. These are inseparable aspects of experience. For Heidegger there is the in-between, neither subject nor object. For post-structuralists like Deleuze there are processes of subjectifcation, of which a subject is merely a contingent effect.

As I see it, a phenomenological direct realist is more willing to grant the reality of the brain than most. For it is not an illusion paradoxically created by itself. — plaque flag

For Husserl, the brain is indeed ‘real’, but then he analyzed the real as a higher level construction of intentional acts, just as real spatial objects are constituted out of correlated perceptions. The object, whether brain or rock or atom, is not an illusion, rather it is an achievement of subjective and intersubjective idealization that is never completely fulfilled. All facts of nature for Husserl are contingent and relative. Consequently, we can’t use the ‘reality’ of the brain as an explanatory grounding for the constitutive process out of which it emerges as an ideal object. The real for Husserl is only ever a secondary and derived grounding.

I make the structuralist point that, call it what you will, we engage as human beings in some analogue of fundamental ontology, albeit more or less seriously in terms of openness to criticism — plaque flag

Care to opine concerning the level or mode in which this openness to criticism takes place? What criteria have to be already in place in order for scientific criticism to be intelligible within any given community of researchers? And what sort of discipline is best suited to question and replace these criteria within which normative questions of truth and falsity, and correctness of method, gain purchase?

We know nothing of reality as it is apart from its being given to and through personality. Those who imagine otherwise are of course personalities using their imaginations, dreaming of serene landscapes without a trace of angsty primates. — plaque flag

Even Husserl recognized that the ego is nothing but an empty zero point of activity, harboring no intrinsic a priori content. This empty ego is not a person, or a human, or a subject. Heidegger was not a humanist, and poststructuralists like Deleuze and Foucault ground the person in something that is pre-personal and pre-human.

Does anyone still believe a “method” of science really exists, and that it essentially defines and differentiates science as a sui generis human endeavor?

Shouldn’t we abandon this idea? Is it not both old and obsolete? — Mikie

Or, to quote @Pantagruel, it’s ‘quaint’.

I do feel philosophical studies form part of the balanced project of the advancement of human knowledge, but that has to be ratified on an ongoing basis by collective will and consensus. What hope is there in a shattered milieu of alternative facts? — Pantagruel

What better field than philosophy to deconstruct concepts like collective will and consensus in order to reveal the necessity of a shattered milieu of alternative facts?

I know this is a bit different than what you are getting at, but there is an important sense in which philosophy was never relevant. — Leontiskos

Good point. The fringe role philosophy played with respect to establishment culture may also be marked by the fact that so many notable philosophers worked outside of academia.

Are you saying that there are fundamental philosophical principles that are "built-in" to sciences, for example? — Pantagruel

Yes, and as those principles evolve, so do the grounding assumptions of the sciences, including what the scientific method is, whether there is one method, whether it is unchanging, whether there is any way to tease out what is purely empirical from what is philosophical, etc.