But what I'm highlighting is that there are also sadists. And it's possible to set up a social world where those who get off on kindness go to the kind spaces, and those who get off on violence go to the violent spaces — Moliere

i have the same problem with the label sadist as I do with the concept of a motive to kill. Are there Sadists or are there people who cause pain in others on the basis of a diverse variety of motives that we ignore when we slap the label of sadist on them? Do you remember when you were a kid there were a few kids who enjoyed torturing animals? Do you remember anything else about them, like what their family lives were like, whether they seemed to harbor a lot of anger towards the world, for instance? That is an example of a motive the label of sadist hides from view. When we believe we have been unfairly treated by those closest to us, we can manifest it as anger against the world. We believe the world has treated us badly and it deserves to suffer. We justify our actions as making things right. Our ‘sadism’ isn’t so much an enjoyment of the pain we inflict as the satisfaction we get from correcting an imbalance in the cosmos.

Maybe if it were possible for us to step back far enough we'd clearly see the Truth of Eternal Recurrence. Everyone's experienced déjà vu, after all. How much more proof do we need? — praxis

Except that Eternal Recurrence for Nietzsche is the recurrence of the absolutely different. Kind of the opposite of deja vu.

I think what I see, from the advances of science, is an increase in ability to do exactly what we want -- and what we want isn't always non violent. So, contrary to a decrease, I'd say we have an increase in violence because we're better at it — Moliere

Violent: violate. Do we want to violate? Is that a motive? Can we be motivated to violate ourselves, or is that an incoherent idea? One might jump in here and mention suicide, self-harm, masochism. But is pain and destruction the motive in these case or a means to an end which is the very opposite of self-destruction? Many psychologists have explained one central motive for suicide as an attempt at self-affirmation. If we establish that want, need, motive, desire is always in service of the prevention of a loss of personal integrity, and is itself the pursuit of self-validation, then the question becomes how we we understand the separation between self and other. If we don’t want to destroy self but are motivated to kill others, is this not in fact our need to kill or destroy what we see as alien within the other? Isn’t our perception of the alienness of others directly correlated with our motives of altruism, kindness and selflessness vs desire to punish, harm and kill others? We sacrifice ourselves for loved ones and go to war against those we demonize as the dangerously alien.

It seems to me assuming the existence of a motive to kill misses the central issue here, which isn’t about desiring violence for its own sake but about the challenges we face in recognizing the value in others different from ourselves, and in thus avoiding the tendency to see malevolent motives (like the desire to kill) in the struggles of others to protect themselves and the community they identity with from what they perceive as harmful ideas and behavior.

How is it that this increase in puzzle solving leads to a decrease in violence? If science enables us to do, and what we want to do is kill, then we have some pretty obvious examples of science helping us to do exactly tha — Moliere

The critical issue here is the origin and nature of motive: what we want to do and why we want to do it. If we explain motive on the basis of arbitrary mechanism( evolutionarily shaped drive, reinforcement, etc) then we’ve lost the battle before it’s begun. We just throw up our hands and say motive is arbitrary and relative. If instead we make motive a function and product of sense-making , and understand sense-making to be a holistic process of erecting, testing and modifying a system of constructs designed to anticipate events with no ulterior or higher motive or purpose other than anticipation itself, then we can unite motive and intelligibility.

... assumes the aim is merely to solve puzzles. What if the aim were to increase human welfare? In what sense does merely finding the solution to a puzzle guarantee progress? Not all scientific investigations are ethical, but their results would have solved problems, so if solving problems equates to progress then why do we shy away from unethical investigations? — Isaac

Kuhn’s assumption that one could separate off the aims and methods of science from the rest of culture made it impossible for him to answer this question. Rorty critiqued Kuhn for trying to seal off science in its own hermetically sealed epistemological chamber m, with its own ethics of goodness in puzzle solving. Rorty realized that empirical puzzle solving is a subset of wider cultural sense-making motives that organize the world in terms of whether , as well as the way things are intelligible, recognizable, assimilable.
The worldviews we erect to organize our sense-making define the nature and boundaries of what is ethically permissible or unjust.

I really like what Kuhn is saying. Is that from "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions?" Maybe I should get around to reading it. — T Clark

Yes, it’s from the Postscript that he added to the book 10 years after it was originally published. It was designed as a response to the charges of relativism leveled at his approach.

For me, though, I always ask: progress for whom?

And generally the person performing the analysis in favor of progress is measuring progress in terms of what's good for themself. — Moliere

I guess that I can only speak for myself but I’m not optimistic. Apparently, not even my ultimate authority (Pinker?) can convince me to believe in inevitable betterment over time — praxis

So it’s quite possible to say that progress is an irrational faith and a myth, and also accept steady scientific advance — Jamal

Thomas Kuhn said there is progress in science. What he meant wasn’t that there is a cumulative, logical or dialectical advance that for the most part includes the context of older theories within. the newer ones , but rather the ability to ‘solve more puzzles’, even as the meanings of the scientific concepts which define these puzzles change with each shift in paradigm.
What if we were to assume for the sake of argument that science is inextricably intertwined with the rest of culture, and that if Kuhn is right about scientific progress as development of puzzle solving, then cultural progress as a whole is a kind of progressive puzzle solving.

What does it mean to solve a puzzle? Let me offer the following definition. Cultural problem solving is not about accurately representing an independent world. It is about construing and reconstruing our relation to the social and natural world from our own perspective in ways that allow us to see the behavior and thinking of other people in increasingly integral ways. Progress in cultural
problem solving is about anticipating the actions and motives of others (and ourselves) in ways that transcend concepts like evil or selfish intent. It is not that we become more
moral or more rational over time (Pinker’s claim is that the formation of the scientific method made us more rational). We were always moral and rational in the sense that we have always been motivated to solve puzzles. What progress in puzzle solving allows us to do is to see others as like ourselves on more and more dimensions of similarity.
So I think Pinker is right that there is a trajectory of development that leads toward less violence and conflict, but he is wrong to define it in relation to conformity to a certain Enlightenment and Eurocentric-based notion of empirical rationality.

John Gray, who has been criticizing the idea of progress for years and is probably much more pessimistic than I am, accepts that there is progress in science, but only in science. Elsewhere, it’s a matter of gains here and losses there, because, he says, there is no general moral improvement over time.

So it’s quite possible to say that progress is an irrational faith and a myth, and also accept steady scientific advance. — Jamal

The problem I have with that thinking is that it is impossible to separate science from the rest of culture. Changes in scientific thought run parallel with changes in ideas in the arts, politics, philosophy, moral theory, because they are all inexo intermeshed. If we’re going to argue that progress occurs in science and technology, then we have to concede that it takes place as a general feature of cultural history.

Let’s start with technology and science. Do you think we can reasonably say there has been progress in either of these fields?
— Joshs

There's been change. How would you measure 'progress'? — Isaac

Kuhn said “In its normal state, then, a scientific community is an immensely efficient instrument for solving the problems or puzzles that its paradigms define. Furthermore, the result of solving those problems must inevitably be progress.”

He goes on to ask “Why should progress also be the apparently universal concomitant of scientific revolutions?”
After all, “the member of a mature scientific community is, like the typical character of Orwell's 1984, the victim of a history rewritten by the powers that be.”

His answer is the following:

“Later scientific theories are better than earlier ones for solving puzzles in the often quite different environments to which they are applied. That is not a relativist's position, and it displays the sense in which I am a convinced believer in scientific progress.”

“Imagine an evolutionary tree representing the development of the modern scientific specialties from their common origins in, say, primitive natural philosophy and the crafts. A line drawn up that tree, never doubling back, from the trunk to the tip of some branch would trace a succession of theories related by descent. Considering any two such theories, chosen from points not too near their origin, it should be easy to design a list of criteria that would enable an uncommitted observer to distinguish the earlier from the more recent theory time after time. Among the most useful would be: accuracy of prediction, particularly of quantitative prediction; the balance between esoteric and everyday subject matter; and the number of different problems solved. Less useful for this purpose, though also important determinants of scientific life, would be such values as simplicity, scope, and compatibility with other specialties.”

The cause of the upward trend is technological advancement... People invent something like a wheelbarrow... it boosts their productivity and becomes common use because it was useful. Then someone figures out a new farming technique that further boosts productivity, and humans are able to store knowledge and teach future generations about this improved technique. It's an inevitable consequence of our ability to learn and teach. — Judaka

Are you familiar with the changes that have taken place over the past few hundred years on how philosophers of science have treated the concept of progress? For instance , the change from inductive to deductive understanding of scientific method , and from cumulative-additive to Popperian falsificationist progress. And then there’s the Kuhnian view of scientific progress, which abandons linearity in favor of the idea that to understand better is always to understand differently.

Give us a good single example from this 'mountain of evidence' you think best proves 'general progress in history' — Isaac

Let’s start with technology and science. Do you think we can reasonably say there has been progress in either of these fields?

I think there are individuals out there who have been in the depths of despair, a bit of motivational quotes here and there and the think positive thinking and they’re back to their normal self-esteem…some however forget their despair and turn into arrogant fools once more only for the cycle to repeat. — invicta

Here’s how the cycle goes. Only the person who struggles with constant deep-seated doubts about their self-worth evinces to the world behaviors associated with what we call a ‘big ego’. In other words, ‘big ego’= fragile ego.
Many of us who have to deal with such bullies , narcissists and egotists don’t understand this about them and assume they just enjoy being that way or are in ‘self-denial’. This makes us angry, we let them know we are angry, and this reinforces the egotist’s self-doubts, causing them to need to become even more boastful. Thus the self-reinforcing cycle.

T Clark I thought to answer that Clarky is my philosophy teacher in this site. But I didn't want to get scolded by Eugene again — javi2541997

Eugen may get scolded by the mods.

Those are not ''my terms". — Eugen

This is not a philosophy forum dedicated to a narrow subset of thinking within analytic philosophy , it is a general forum. Concepts like emergence, qualia, functionalism and materialism can take on entirely different meanings depending on which branch of philosophy , and which particular philosopher, is using them. How about giving us names of philosophers who you are aligning yourself with so we have a context Whose thinking do you feel overlaps most closely with the claims of the OP?

But, even aside from how controversial his evidence is (which someone else might address), this is precisely the blindness of the narrative of Progress. Those conditions are not characteristic only of primitive or scientifically unenlightened societies. — Jamal

Think of primitive as another word for embryonic. Key here is the assumption of a necessary hierarchy of stages of progress, in which the end stage is prefigured in the beginning stage via an algorithm of change.

. Of course he is acknowledging that those conditions exist in the present, but for him this is first and foremost because they are relics. — Jamal

They are on their way to becoming us, the enlightened West.

Another interesting wrinkle in regards to the progress narrative is the role the Muslim world played during the middle ages, while Europe was mired in the "dark" ages. — Noble Dust

I think it goes something like this. In its heyday between 700 and 1000 A.D. , Islamic culture thrived by discovering and reinterpreting Greek philosophy. As these readings made their way into Europe along with Islamic innovations in various other domains, Europe began to catch up with the Middle East. The Enlightenment and Reformation, unmatched by a comparable movement in Islamic countries, secured Europe’s global hegemony with its arrival at the rational telos of historical progress.

↪Joshs I think beyond Nietzsche by bypassing him. — Jamal

But you’re still a moralist, not yet beyond good and evil.

The truth is that nothing can absolve humanity of its crimes and nothing can make up for the suffering of the past, ever. Nothing and nobody will redeem humanity. Nothing will make it okay, and we will never be morally cleansed. We certainly ought to strive for a good, free society, but it will never have been worth it. — Jamal

My temptation is to think beyond Nietzsche and say: one day we'll get it right. This would not be to endorse Progress, only to admit that we can find better ways of living. — Jamal

I wouldnt exactly call this ‘thinking beyond Nietzsche.’ More like bypassing Nietzsche. If you haven’t read it already, I’d recommend Graeber and Wengrow’s Dawn of Everything. It is a critique of Darwinist progressive accounts of anthropological change as seen in Pinker, Diamond and Harari. Graeber shares your moralist individualism, asserting that each culture in each era of history makes valuative choices ( equality-inequality, hierarchy- nonhierarchy, statist- non statist) above and beyond geographical, technological and other material determinants.

I'm wondering if anyone knows any good resources on this topic? — Count Timothy von Icarus

You might enjoy ‘Consciousness and the Computational Mind’ by Ray Jackendoff, a critique of computational approaches in psychology. Other critiques of computationism in cognitive science can be found dani. the work of Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson and Shaun
Gallagher.

"The world is an egg, but the egg itself is a theatre: a staged theatre in which the chickens dominate the actors, the spaces dominate the chickens and the Ideas dominate the spaces — bert1

Sounds a like a scene in Pink Flamingos

Is there egg before chicken? — fdrake

Yes, according to Deleuze.

The world is an egg, but the egg itself is a theatre: a
staged theatre in which the roles dominate the actors, the spaces dominate the roles and the Ideas dominate the spaces.

, being is prior to consciousness in the order of events. Or, if you will, being itself. — fdrake

Is there being before becoming? Is there identity before difference?

When is something in evolution a difference in kind and not just a difference in degree? — schopenhauer1

For Deleuze, there is no difference in kind without a difference in degree, and vice versa, either with regard to biological or psychological phenomena. The challenge he presents is how to rethink natural structures and organizations starting from this basis.

In general, I think this requires subsuming the subjective and objective into a larger whole, not one subsuming the other, as in physicalism and many forms of idealism.

However, assuming the primacy of one or the other is certainly pragmatically useful (see most models in the natural sciences, phenomenology, some aspects of psychology, etc.). — Count Timothy von Icarus

Phenomenology may appear to subsume the objective within the subjective, but it redefines subjective such that it becomes merely one pole of an indissociable interaction. It is this interaction which is primary, not a pre-constituted ideal subject.

↪Wayfarer Yep. So we need to be clear as to whether we are talking of existence or being. — Banno

We may want to include the idea that existence and being point to the same concept, that of becoming as difference.

A non-conscious being is not actually 'a being' but an object or a thing
— Wayfarer
So while sleeping or comatose, a person is just a "thing", and not a "being", like a sofa or toilet? — 180 Proof

Does it count that I once dreamt I was a toilet?

. The human sense of touch allows each of us to 'learn' the difference between rough/smooth, sharp/blunt, soft/hard, wet/dry, pain etc.
The attributes of rough/smooth are in the main, down to the absence or presence of indentations and/or 'bumps' on a surface. There is also the issue of rough/smooth when it comes to textures like hair/fur/feathers, when rough can be simple tangled or clumped hair, for example.
An automated system, using sensors, can be programmed to recognise rough/smooth as well as a human can imo. So if presented with a previously unencountered surface/texture, the auto system could do as well, if not better than a human in judging whether or not it is rough or smooth.
The auto system could then store (memorialise) as much information as is available, regarding that new surface/texture and access that memory content whenever it 'pattern matches' between a new sighting of the surface/texture (via its sight sensors) and it could confirm it's identification via it's touch sensors and it's memorialised information. This is very similar to how a human deals with rough/smooth — universeness

According to enactivist embodied approaches , bottom up-top down pattern matching is not how humans achieve sensory perception. We only recognize objects in the surrounding spatial world as objects by interacting with them. An object is mentally constructed through the ways that its sensory features change as a result of the movement of our eyes, head, body. Furthermore, these coordinations between our movements and sensory feedback are themselves intercorrelated with wider organismic patterns of goal-oriented activity. These goals are not externally programmed but emerge endogenously from the autonomous functioning of the organism in its environment. Key to meaning-making in living systems is affectivity and consciousness, which in their most basic form are present in even the simplest organisms due to the integral and holistic nature of its functioning.

Here’s Evan Thomason’s description of an enactive system:

“…traditional neuroscience has tried to map brain organization onto a hierarchical, input-output processing model in which the sensory end is taken as the starting point. Perception is described as proceeding through a series of feedforward or bottom-up processing stages, and top-down influences are equated with back-projections or feedback from higher to lower areas. Freeman aptly describes this view as the "passivist-cognitivist view" of the brain.

From an enactive viewpoint, things look rather different. Brain processes are recursive, reentrant, and self-activating, and do not start or stop anywhere. Instead of treating perception as a later stage of sensation and taking the sensory receptors as the starting point for analysis, the enactive approach treats perception and emotion as dependent aspects of intentional action, and takes the brain's self-generated, endogenous activity as the starting point for neurobiological analysis. This activity arises far from the sensors—in the frontal lobes, limbic system, or temporal and associative cortices—and reflects the organism's overall protentional set—its states of expectancy, preparation, affective tone, attention, and so on. These states are necessarily active at the same time as the sensory inflow (Engel, Fries, and Singer 2001; Varela et al. 2001).

“Whereas a passivist-cognitivist view would describe such states as acting in a top-down manner on sensory processing, from an enactive perspective top down and bottom up are heuristic terms for what in reality is a large-scale network that integrates incoming and endogenous activities on the basis of its own internally established reference points. Hence, from an enactive viewpoint, we need to look to this large-scale dynamic network in order to understand how emotion and intentional action emerge through self-organizing neural activity.”

As long as we are the ones who are creating and programming our machines by basing their functional organization on our understanding of concepts like memory storage , patten matching and sensory input, , their goals cannot be self-generated. They can only generate secondary goals derived as subsets of the programmed concepts , which we then respond to by correcting and improving the programming. This is how our appendages and organ systems function.

Can we ever ‘create’ a system that is truly autonomous? No, but we can tweak living organic material such as dna strands enclosed in cellular-like membranes so that they interact with us in ways that are useful to us. Imagine tiny creatures that we can ‘talk to’. These would be more like our relationship with domesticated animals than with programmed machines.

↪Joshs

I think you overstate the case. It is not simply a matter of style but of philology and context. We need to be aware of how key terms were used and how they have changed over time. With regard to context, the beliefs and arguments he is directly and indirectly responding to as well as political constraints — Fooloso4

Alrighty then. Can we not say that the beliefs and arguments , philology and context Wayfarer is directly and indirectly responding to are being reinterpreted by him from a post-Cartesian perspective even when he thinks he is reproducing a context of thought from 2,000 years ago?

You are capable of learning, what would you list, as the essential 'properties' or 'aspects' or 'features' of the ability to learn? — universeness

Learning is the manifestation of the self-reflexive nature of a living system. A organism functions by making changes in its organization that preserve its overall self-consistency. This consistency through change imparts to living systems their anticipative , goal-oriented character. I argued that computers are our appendages. They are like organ systems within our bodies. Just like the functioning of a liver or heart cannot be understood apart from its inextricable entanglement in the overall aims of the organism, the same is true of our machines with respect to our purposes. They are not autonomous embodied-environmental systems but elements of our living system.

*. I agree that Aristotle's hylomorphic model is vastly superior to the Cartesian, and also note that Aristotelian metaphysics is enjoying a comeback in the biological sciences. — Wayfarer

How would your respond to the suggestion that to return to Aristotle from the vantage of the 21st century is to filter his ideas through the entire lineage of Western philosophy that came after him and transformed his concepts? The implication is that for someone who has assimilated the insights of Descartes and those philosophers who followed and critiques him, to prefer Aristotle over Descartes is to re-interpret Aristotle from a post-Cartesian perspective. In this sense your ideas are much closer to Descartes than to Aristotle even as you draw on an Aristotelian ‘style’ of thinking generated from within that post-Cartesian framework. One might say that to return to Aristotle is to move farther away from him.

Processing speed is akin to the speed of anything and memory capacity is really just how much space you have available to store stuff along with your method of organising what's stored and your methods of retrieval. These concepts have been around since life began on this planet. — universeness

First generation cognitive science borrowed metaphors from cognitive science such as input -output, processing and memory storage. It has evolved since then. The mind is no longer thought of as a serial machine which inputs data, retrieves and processes it and outputs it, and memory isn’t stored so much as constructed. Eventually these changes will make their way into the designs of our thinking machines.

not much is known about human intelligence, so to speak of the intelligence of something that isn't even biological should make one quite skeptical. Something in our thinking about these issues has gone wrong. — Manuel

:up:

The moment of 'singularity' will happen when the system becomes able to 'learn' in the way we learn. That is the moment it will be able to program itself, just like we do. But it will have a processing speed and storage capacity way, way beyond humans and will also have the ability to grow in both of those capacities. That growth may well become exponential. That's the point at which I think it may become self-aware and humans will not be able to control it — universeness

I disagree. Concepts like processing speed and memory storage are artifacts of Enlightenment -era Leibnitzian philosophy, which should remind us that our computers are appendages. They are physical manifestations of our scientific and technological models of a particular era. At some point , as we dump reductive concepts like ‘speed of processing’ and ‘memory storage’ for more organic ones, we will no longer design our thinking appendages as calculating devices ( exponentially accelerating or otherwise, since human creativity is not about speeds but about the qualitative nature of our thinking) , but use wetware to devise simple ‘creatures’ which we will interact with in more creative ways, because these living appendages will not be based on deterministic schematics. Currently, our most complex machines cannot do what even the simplest virus can do, much less compete with a single-called organism.

Even the computerized devices we now use , and the non-computer machines before them, never actually behaved deterministically. In their interaction with us they are always capable of surprising us. We call this bugs or errors , but they reflect the fact that even what is supposedly deterministic has no existence prior to its interaction with us interpreting beings, and thus was always in its own way a continually creative appendage

Machines that we invent will always function as appendages of us , as enhancements of our cognitive ecosystem. They contribute to the creation of new steps in our own natural evolution, just as birds nests, rabbit holes, spiders webs and other niche innovations do. But the complexity of webs and nests don’t evolve independently of spiders and birds; they evolve in tandem with them. Saying our machine are smarter or dumber than us is like saying the spider web or birds nest is smarter or dumber than the spider or bird. Should not these extensions of the animal be considered a part of our own living system? When an animal constructs a niche it isnt inventing a life-form, it is enacting and articulating its own life form. Machines, as parts of niches , belong intimately and inextricably to the living self-organizing systems that ‘we' are.

Aquinas says that we cannot know essences (including our own) directly, but infer them from the actions flowing from them. Nietzsche (or maybe his sister) seems to want to do more, saying that there is nothing out of which what we observe to be dynamically continuous flows. I think that is metaphysically impossible, as potential acts are not yet operational. So, they cannot operate to make themselves actual. Consequently, something already actual must be the source of our phenomenological acts. — Dfpolis

I know this is straying off-topic, but I would love to know how your readings of Aquinas and Aristotle influence your political leanings. This, and the moral philosophy that goes along with it, is where one’s views really matter in the world. Would it be fair to say you sympathize with social conservative perspectives on many matters?

It appears to me, that what's coming out in this thread, is that there is a form of scientism within which the practitioners attempt to reduce all forms of causation to a single determinist form. This is the manifestation of an urge to reject dualism for monism, and dispel the spiritual woo-hoo. The common method of procedure is to conflate formal cause with final cause, and represent final cause as a type of formal cause, instead of as a distinct form of causation. Ultimately this renders the whole of material, or physical existence as somewhat unintelligible, because the two are fundamentally incompatible — Metaphysician Undercover

I’m wondering how this relates to phenomenology, which it seems to me attempts to reduce all forms of causation to a single non-determinist form, thereby dispelling the spiritual woo-hoo without falling into materialist determinisms.

And then there’s Nietzsche’s take on causation:

If I have anything of a unity within me, it certainly doesn’t lie in the conscious ‘I’ and in feeling, willing, thinking, but somewhere else: in the sustaining, appropriating, expelling, watchful prudence of my whole
organism, of which my conscious self is only a tool. Feeling, willing, thinking everywhere show only outcomes, the causes of which are entirely unknown to me: the way these outcomes succeed one another as if one
succeeded out of its predecessor is probably just an illusion: in truth, the causes may be connected to one another in such a way that the final causes give me the impression of being associated, logically or psychologically. I deny that one intellectual or psychological phenomenon is the direct cause of another intellectual or psychological phenomenon – even if this seems to be so. The true world of causes is hidden from us: it is unutterably more complicated

Basically the problem was that this particular mod hated my guts and would initiate or join any pile-on concerning myself. All water under the bridge — Wayfarer

If you miss him you can find him on Discord now. I had a little exchange with him there concerning Deleuze. The mod had to step in to keep him civil. Plus ca change…

Why is it an example of the Enlightenment instead of an expression of Scholastic philosophy? — Paine

I don’t know what DPolis would say, but I like the way Rorty articulated the stakes. Rorty argued that Descartes “opened the floodgates to an entirely new conception of the difference between mind and body” compared with Scholastic and Greek thought. In other words, he didn’t invent dualism , he redefined its terms.

The novelty was the notion of a single inner space in which bodily and perceptual sensations ("confused ideas of sense and imagi­nation" in Descartes's phrase), mathematical truths, moral rules, the idea of God, moods of depression, and all the rest of what we now call "mental" were objects of quasi-ob­servation. Such an inner arena with its inner observer had been suggested at various points in ancient and medieval thought but it had never been taken seriously long enough to form the basis for a problematic. But the seventeenth century took it seriously enough to permit it to pose the problem of the veil of ideas, the problem which made epistemology central to philosophy.

Once Descartes had invented that "precise sense" of "feel­ing" in which it was "no other than thinking," we began to lose touch with the Aristotelian distinction between reason-as-grasp-of-universals and the living body which takes care of sensation and motion. A new mind-body dis­tinction was required-the one which we call that "be­tween consciousness and what is not consciousness…Once mind is no longer synonymous with reason then something other than our grasp of universal truths must serve as the mark of mind.”(Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature)

What type of philosophy most exemplifies what philosophy is or should be to you?

Logical, analytical, linguistic - e.g. Frege
Phenomenological-existential - e.g. Sartre
Social-Ethical - e.g. Dewey
Metaphysical - e.g. Whitehead
Empiricist - e.g. Russell — Pantagruel

I think these categories are too broad to do justice to the authors you associate with them. How about putting forth a grouping of philosophers based on family resemblance?
For instance:

Hume
Locke
Spinoza
Leibniz
Descartes

Russell
Frege

Hegel
Schopenhauer
Marx
Kierkegaard

Zizek
Lacan
Freud
Badieu
Butler
Adorno

Davidson
Quine
Sellars
Rorty
Putnam

Dewey
Peirce
Meade
James

Heidegger
Merleau-ponty
Sartre
Husserl

Deleuze
Foucault
Derrida
Lyotard
Baudrillard

Now that I’ve complied these, I see that they fit rather
easily into categories:

Enlightenment
Analytic
Hegelian-Post Hegelian
Structuralist-Critical Theory
Post-Analytic
Pragmatist
Phenomenology
Poststructuralism

↪Joshs
After setting my previously expressed peevishness aside, I became curious about your thinking in terms of periods of time. Why is it an example of the Enlightenment instead of an expression of Scholastic philosophy? — Paine

You could be right. I was giving him the benefit of the doubt.