It seems that Husserl's theory takes consciousness for granted, just as physicalism does. He suggests that consciousness is unanalyzable - a brute fact. That's not explaining anything. Physicalism (in conjunction with neuroscience) attempts to analyze consciousness and explain it. You focus on the gap in that explanation, while implying Husserl's theory is a worthy competitor (or perhaps you think it superior) in spite of it explaining nothing. Rather, it raises even more questions that it can't answer — Relativist

Wayfarer is trying to give a taste of Husserl’s view of the relation between consciousness and the physical. Given that the OP topic isnt about Husserl, this isn’t the place to flesh out what Husserl meant by consciousness, but I can assure you he doesn’t simply take it for granted. He wrote thousands of pages explicating what it is, what it does and why it is fundamental to the understanding of concepts like the natural and the physical.

↪ssu There hasn’t been a progression in high art particularly, just an expansion into the depiction and expression of subjects and ideas that weren’t previously represented, for whatever reason, in the medium. — Punshhh

If you’re going to argue that, you may as well add that there hasn’t been a progression in science and technology either.

Why they call it "Renaissance" should be obvious to everybody. — ssu

The Middle Ages and the Renaissance are categories encompassing many forms of art, including literature, poetry, architecture and music. Given the fact that Gothic architecture and polyphonic music were both born in the high Middle Ages, it is difficult to justify the claim that art as a whole ‘had fallen back’ during that period.

There’s also a strong Platonic or idealist undercurrent in Husserl’s later thought—his notion of eidetic reduction suggests that essences are real and perceptible to intuition, and not merely empirical generalizations. So while he doesn't affirm metaphysical or spiritual doctrines, his work provides a space for them.
— Wayfarer

Yes, this would seem to be the case... although maybe it's others who, rather eagerly, seek to fill this space.

I wounder what Joshs would observe here — Tom Storm

I’m not sure how much of a space Husserl provides for metaphysical and spiritual doctrines. He is very clear that what one uncovers at the end of a long chain of eidetic reductions is the irreducible essence of the living present. There is no room here to insert a spiritual content since the only content of the living present is its structure as pure self-affection. Not the presence to self of a feeling or knowing substance, not an ethical vector but idealization in its barest form, as the immediacy of the voice that hears itself in the exact same moment of its speaking. Any particular substantive sense we attempt to assign to what is within the living present will always be a higher order constituted product, merely subjectively relative and i. need of bracketing and reduction, with no metaphysical justification in itself. This runs counter to the aims of religious forms of phenomenology.

But I also think the Heidegger passage is more combative than that. He writes:

such thinking, in its truth, must be prevented from becoming “familiar” and “understandable” to contemporaries.

"Prevented" is very strong, especially when coupled with "in its truth." If he'd said, "in its misunderstanding" or "in its misapplication," that might be different. But H seems to want it both ways: "What I'm saying is true, but don't you dare claim that it is 'understandable.' That would be to turn it into a technology — J

I know it sounds like he’s celebrating obscurity for its own sake, as critics of postmodern writers have a field day accusing them of doing. But what he’s trying to say is that, as Wittgenstein would agree, to understand anything in a fundamental sense is to understand it in a new way, in a fresh context. To treat what is understood as already familiar as a derivative of a pre-existing scheme or picture is to render it meaningless, to fail to understand it in Heidegger’s primordial sense. We do of course comport ourselves toward things in this everyday way all the time, but in doing so we fail to recognize this mode of interpreting the world as derivative and secondary.

Is Williamson "blind to his philosophy's historical situatedness? Does he need to take that into account? If he tried to do that would not his accounts of our historical situatedness be themselves historically situated? Then we might need an account of the historical situatedness of the account of historical situatedness. Easy enough to see where this is headed. It seems we inevitably must begin from where we are and we cannot attain a "god's eye" view of our situatedness, and nor do we need to to begin to inquire into whatever it is we wish to inquire. — Janus

Exactly, we must begin from where we are. But if we take where we are in a traditional way that understands temporality in static terms as an endless series of punctual ‘nows’ , where the past and future are interpreted on the basis of an already fixed present, then taking historical situatedness into account would seem to involve an infinite regress. By contrast, if beginning from where we are is beginning from a more radical notion of temporality and history, where our past and present come to us already remade by where we are headed, then thinking historical situatedness is thinking past, present and future together as the ‘now’, and thinking from within the ‘now’ as the event of transit.

The historiographical, as the word itself is supposed to indicate, refers to the past insofar as it is explored and presented, either expressly or inexpressly, from the perspective of what happens to be the present. Every historiographical consideration turns the past as such into an object... It is now clear that happenings and history are not what is by- gone and what is considered as such, i.e., the historiographical. But just as little is this happening the present. The happening and the happenings of history are primordially and always the future, that which in a concealed way comes toward us, a revelatory process that puts us at risk, and thus is compelling in ad vance. The future is the beginning of all happening.

The historical does not denote a manner of grasping and exploring but the very happening itself. The historical is not the past, not even the present, but the future, that which is commended to the will, to expectation, to care. This does not allow itself to be "considered"; instead, we must "reflect" on it. We have to be concerned with the meaning, the possible standards, the necessary goals, the ineluctable powers, and that from which all human happenings begin. These goals and powers can be such that they have already come to pass -in a hidden way-long ago but are precisely therefore not the past but what still abides and is awaiting the liberation of its influence. The future is the origin of history. What is most futural, however, is the great beginning, that which-withdrawing itself constantly-reaches back the farthest and at the same time reaches forward the farthest. (Basic Questions of Philosophy)

↪J I think Heidegger is referring to his distinction between between vorhanden "present at hand" knowledge and zuhanden "ready to hand" wisdom. I see that distinction as being basically similar to the distinction between "knowing that" and "knowing how". — Janus

Yes, good point. But the ready to hand can itself reify experience. My response to J focuses on Heidegger’s critique of technology, which turns everything into order-able standing reserve, including human beings.

…the standing-reserves do not possess constancy in the sense of a steady, unchanged presence. The kind of presencing of the standing-reserves is orderability… The transformation of the presence of what-is-present from objectiveness to orderability is, however, also the precondition for the fact that something like the cybernetic way of representation can emerge and lay claim to the role of the universal science at all.”

for me both Marxists and Randians are ideologues like the dogmatic religionists just because they posit some old "one way for all". It seems to me we all inhabit the same world in the empirical sense of "world"―but on the other hand beyond that we each inhabit our own worlds, which are microcosms, along with our family, friends, acquaintances, colleagues and so on. — Janus

Are you comfortable with an approach to philosophy which takes as its subject matter not claims for universally true content (a dogmatically correct way the substantive world is , whether ethically, epistemologically, or ontologically), but the sorts of content-free general descriptions that you have offered (“there is a sense in which everyone practices philosophy, even if they unconsciously adopt presuppositions about how they ought to live”, “we each inhabit our own worlds”). This is a way of using philosophy to speak generally of the utterly particular.

The bolded statements are kind of criticism-proof, aren't they? Reading them as a literary editor (which I am, partially, IRL) they also seem defensive and self-consoling in the face of lack of acceptance. Why couldn't he just say, "My stuff is hard. It'll take a while," instead of making it a hallmark of "essential thinking" or "genuine philosophy" or whatever — J

You have to appreciate these remarks in the context of Heidegger’s critique of technology. When he says that the “immediate effectiveness must remain foreign to all essential thinking, because such thinking, in its truth, must be prevented from becoming “familiar” and “understandable” to contemporaries”” , he equates the the familiar and immediately effective with the technologizing instrumentalism of empirical science as well as the Cartesian metaphysics that grounds it.Philosophy cannot be the mere putting into practice of a pre-conceived plan.

But is that admirable? It could also be seen as a mere dog-whistle to those who would think of themselves as part of an intellectual elite, pretending to understand words that were hollow.

Is he a radical voice ahead of his time, misunderstood because of the profundity of his insight? Or is he a clever ironist, whose appeal to future generations flatters the vanity of self-anointed "deep thinkers," regardless of the actual content? — Banno

The point isn’t whether Nietzsche is right about the status of his work, it’s the very idea that concepts aren’t bits of data and we arent data-processing computers. Interpretation of the sense of particulars is dependent on their role in a wider framework of understanding, which as Wittgenstein shows, is discursively produced. But different discursive communities can’t rely on good will to overcome incoherence in interpretation between groups, even of procedural issues as seemingly benign as the one Williamson discusses.

Except . . . do you really believe he didn't want to be understood by his contemporaries? that, indeed, if he had been, he would have felt he hadn't done worthwhile philosophy? That doesn't sound like him, except when he's in a very bad mood.

For that matter, Heidegger did not exactly shy away from praise, or conversation with peers. — J

Neither Heidegger nor Nietzsche said they did not want to be understood by their contemporaries. They wanted desperately to be understood, tried every way they could to be understood, but also knew that fundamentally new ways of thinking are not commodities whose communication is guaranteed by use of the right words. This is a mentality shared by analytic philosophers, technologists and the corporate world. If one spends one’s whole intellectual life surrounded by conventionalized and communized ideas, then one assumes that anything worth saying can be summarized in a good sound bite or logical formula.

Indeed, and this requiers agreement, convergence. This is Williamson’s minimalist prescription: no methodological revolution, just a re-commitment to being explicit. What logic are you using? What counts as evidence? What assumptions are you allowed to make? These are, in a sense, procedural constraints, shared norms that allow for adversarial argument without descending into chaos.
Williamson isn’t pushing a single method (e.g., scientific naturalism or conceptual analysis), but calling for transparency: if you’re doing verificationist semantics or paraconsistent logic or metaphysical grounding, say so. And make it intelligible. — Banno

All this assumes procedural constraints and shared
norms can be willed into existence on the basis of some imagined neutral playing ground. I can play your game according to your rules only if I can relate to that game and those rules. William doesn’t think he is pushing for a single method but he is doing exactly that.

immediate effectiveness must remain foreign to all essential thinking,

It's an . . . unusual claim. Does anyone know whether another philosopher besides Heidegger ever said something similar? Reminds me of Beethoven saying that his final music was "for a later age." — J

Nietzsche was known to say his philosophy was for the thinkers of the future.

From "On the Genealogy of Morals"
"The man of the future who will redeem us not only from the hitherto reigning ideal but also from that which was bound to grow out of it, the great nausea, the will to nothingness, nihilism; this bell-stroke of noon and of the great decision that liberates the will again and restores its goal to the earth and his hope to man; this Antichrist and antinihilist; this victor over God and nothingness—he must come one day."

In Beyond Good and Evil , Nietzsche frequently refers to "philosophers of the future”, positioning his philosophy as preparation for those who will come after. He writes about philosophical "free spirits" who are precursors to future philosophers who will create new values.

In Ecce Homo, Nietzsche explicitly states that he writes for posterity, not his contemporaries, famously declaring himself "a man of tomorrow and the day after tomorrow."

Nietzsche consistently positioned his philosophy as being ahead of his time, written for future generations who would be capable of understanding and implementing his ideas about value creation, self-overcoming, and the rejection of traditional moral systems. He saw himself as preparing the ground for future philosophers and cultural creators who would build new foundations for human flourishing.
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If we're going to begin the task of figuring out what's important to think about, I think we would want to do a good job of it, so we would begin by thinking about how we could figure out something like that. Right from the start you have to face the challenge of thinking well, and reflecting on how that can be done.

Maybe too many philosophers never quite get past that. They become absorbed entirely in the matter of thinking itself. But philosophy is a communal project, so the fruits of their labor are available to others ready to get to issues of more "relevance," as kids in the sixties are supposed to have said. — Srap Tasmaner

How well is a philosophy thinking if its results are of immediate practical relevance to a wider community?
As a certain German philosopher wrote:

“…a philosophy is creatively grasped at the earliest 100 years after it arises. We Germans are now precisely beginning to prepare ourselves to grasp Leibniz… But why could I never have felt this process to be “painful”? Because I knew obscurely, what I now know more clearly, that indeed precisely this misinterpretation of all my work (e.g., as a “philosophy of existence”) is the best and most lasting protection against the premature using up of what is essential. And it must be so, since immediate effectiveness must remain foreign to all essential thinking, and because such thinking, in its truth, must be prevented from becoming “familiar” and “understandable” to contemporaries. For that would mean what is to be disclosively questioned in thinking had been degraded to something Already commonplace. So then everything is in the best possible order—i.e., everything is well hidden and misinterpreted and withdrawn from rough fingers and from being rubbed away by the common understanding.

And besides, just cos it feels good, doesn't mean it is good — J

Not so fast. Seems it would first be necessary to determine the origin and structure of affect and its relation to values, knowledge, ethics and will. Some will argue that answering this question reveals affective valuation as primary and grounding.

So for instance, Stein recognizes the need for metaphysics to complete the description, Jean-Luc Marion recognizes that giveness exceeds the subject and must come from without, Ferdinand Ulrich probably extends this the furthest, countering the forgetfulness of being with an understanding of being as gift. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes, the religious phenomenologists (and we could include Henry, Scheler, and perhaps even Zahavi and Levinas in this group) believe that to exceed the solipsistic self-givenness of the subject requires metaphysics. But why? How does the transcendence of the subject toward a substantive in-itself (the Goodness , Height and Righteousness of the divine other) not represent a backsliding away from Husserl’s content-free ground towards an arbitrary substantive beginning? How does it not end up reifying both subjectivity and alterity? If we want to critique Husserl’s ground of pure presence as excluding Otherness, we can follow the path set by Nietzsche, Deleuze, Heidegger and Derrida, who don’t fall into the trap of imprisoning transcendence with a substantive divine content.

The worst part is, it's all true... Modern man is an inverse Oedipus. He is born free, master of his own fate, and then tears out his own spiritual eyes, fating himself to wander the wilderness, unable to answer the Sphinx's queries. Jacob saw a ladder stretching down from heaven, angels ascending and descending, but modern man is more like Balaam, stuck on his path, hoping blindly in the better judgement of his ass to avert technopocopypse — Count Timothy von Icarus

If it is true of Modern man (and I include among this group Nick Land and Mencius Moldbug, despite their superficial aping of postmodern philosophical tropes), is it also true of Postmodern man?

↪perhaps Wasn't Alain Badiou largely motivated by a strong critique of postmodernism and a concern about the rise of relativism and the disappearance of any commitment to truth? He was certainly critical of thinkers like Derrida, Lyotard, and Foucault, whose work he saw as contributing to a loss of faith in universality and radical politics. In other words, Badiou had his own philosophical vision to sell, which as at odds with the above thinkers. Should we trust his assessment? — Tom Storm

What you say about Badiou’s disagreements with French postmodernist philosophers is true. The shared features of their thinking he highlights here are cherry-picked to be consonant with those he endorses. I wouldn’t say , though, that these features are at odds with the postmodernists, just that they are broad enough to encompass a very wide range of contemporary thinkers.

↪Joshs OK, I'll be the one to ask the obvious question: The idea that there is something that "philosophy should genuinely be concerned with" -- how does that enter the story? — J

That notion only begins to make sense when we have a way of peering within what is taken for granted as an irreducible basis for philosophy. In Williamson’s case, what is taken for granted is a set of abstractions common to mathematics, formal logic and empirical science. For him this is a genuine beginning for philosophy, because he fails to see the ‘plumbing’ making it possible. Now of course, this is just my assertion… that is, until you see what I see. Then Williamson’s efforts become a perfectly respectable superstructure. Not wrong, but not grounding questioning and thus not genuine philosophy, just the regurgitation of an unexamined technical method. Williamson is aiming to improve a technology, but technology is not philosophy.

↪Joshs To be sure, progress is a normative notion. So modal logic is an improvement on predicate logic, despite modal logic being in a formal sense reducible to predicate logic.

So nothing need "guarantee the fixity" apart from our own preferences. If we agree that modal logic represents an improvement on predicate logic, what more is needed?

You (or Tim) may argue that we need something external or absolute or a platonic form or some such to fix the judgement. But that there is such choosing to abide by such a thing is itself a normative judgement. And yet we judge. — Banno

We don’t need anything external to our preferences to fix them. While the analytic methods Williamson chooses to apply to world are considered as external to that world, this is not the case when we submit formal logic , mathematics and empirical methodology to a Wittgenstienian or Husserlian analysis. We can find the ground for analytic methodology from within the structures of our use of preference, judgment and norms, as what is being concealed, forgotten , ignored and flattened over.
Williamson illustrates how the distinction between analytic and continental is more than geographic. He believes we have made progress in understanding our analytic methods; we know much more about topics like modal logic, possibility and necessity, and the technical aspects of truth than previous generations.

In Wittgenstein’s sense , Williamson champions improvements in precision, clarify and integration in what for Witt is a picture theory of judgement. Williamson takes for granted methods derived from the natural sciences, mathematics and formal logic and uses themes as his starting point, but it never occurs to him to inquire back to the basis of those methods. Doing so allows one to take account of the possibility that those methods may at some point be replaced by a different set of methods without disturbing their ground.

Wittgenstein, Husserl and Heidegger would all agree that All three would likely agree that Williamson's "progress" is actually regress** - a movement away from what philosophy should genuinely be concerned with. They would also agree that mathematical/scientific methods are inappropriate for philosophy's fundamental questions, and that the problems philosophy addresses require a different kind of approach than the one Williamson advocates.
Williamson's critique of "continental" philosophy misses the point* the apparent obscurity reflects the difficulty of the phenomena being investigated, not methodological sloppiness.

Each would argue that Williamson's paper represents a fundamental misunderstanding of what philosophical thinking involves and what kinds of problems it legitimately addresses.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

So too for reason. It is oriented outside of itself. We have come to see logos as a finite tool, the creation of man and his culture, but it is rather, I would argue, that man participates in Logos. The nature of logos is to transcend; it is always already past its limits and with the whole.

The relevance to the larger topic here is that modern philosophy is defined by its move to "bracket out" all sorts of considerations as irresolvable by reason, or beyond the limits of reason. The boundaries vary, it can be the phenomenal, the mind, language, culture, etc., but in each instance the bracketing involves a methodological move that assumes much about the world and reason. — Count Timothy von Icarus

For Husserl reason returns to itself in the self-affecting presence to itself of the present moment, the speaking that hears itself speak in the same moment that it speaks. Once we bracket off all that consists of reference to all that which is not present and can never be present ( the idealizations of logic and empirical science) , what is left is the presence-to-self which grounds reason as pure self-identity.

Physics without thought has no order; thought without physics has no meaning. — ucarr

Thought without physics still has the substrate for physics, which is experienced phenomena. Thought is always about something, always has its object. The physical is just a hisotricallycontingent abstraction constructed out of our experience with phenomenally perceived objects. Two hundred years from now our sciences may no longer need the concepts of physics or the physical object, but they will still be about phenomenal objects.

↪Joshs I
I'll have to leave you to it.

Thank you for the example. — Banno

I admit that Husserl’s work is extremely arcane stuff without a proper introduction, but let me ask you this. Williamson is concerned with progress in method. What does a progress of anything presuppose? Doesn’t it assume that what it is that is presumed to undergo a progress be held still over the course of its development? I’m referring to the qualitative sense of meaning of the substrate for the progress. A progress implies the ability to to count differences of degree in something which doesn't undergo change in kind over the course of the counting. What would you say guarantees the fixity in qualitative sense of meaning of concepts and methods that we make use of, such that something as assured as a progress can be assumed?

All brute facts about things in the world are subjective, relative and contingent.
— Joshs
Is this to be read as a stipulation? It doesn't correspond to, say, Searle's use of 'brute fact" as mind-independent, non-institutional and (at least usually) physical — Banno

It does correspond if we follow Husserl in taking concepts like mind-independence, non-institutionality and the physical as subjectively constituted idealizations. Understood naively in their non-reduced forms, in the way that Searle does, brute facts and subjectivity are external to each other. But when we bracket the presuppositions of the naive attitude, we reveal the genesis of brute facts in processes of subjective constitution. The same method of bracketing reveal Williamson’s analytic method to be mired in naive presuppositions concerning the logic of progress in analytic method, which when reduced reveal its genesis in subjective syntheses.

Personally, I think a dose of Doctor Witt's therapy is a very good thing for all of us from time to time, especially when we get a strong hunch that our terminology is backing us into implausible corners. As I said to Banno above, I don't think all the important philosophical questions can be treated and dissolved in this way, but it's a fantastically useful technique to have at the ready — J

Understanding Witt’s ‘therapeutic’ project in the context of consonant efforts in phenomenology and poststructuralism allows us to see that he doesn’t so much dissolve all philosophical questions as shows us that scientific , logical and mathematical domains are not self-grounding but instead are contingent and relative products dependent for their grounding on an underlying process of temporalization. Unlike writers like Husserl, Heidegger and Deleuze, Wittgenstein was reluctant to call the questioning that uncovers this process philosophical. He thought of philosophy as the imposing of metaphysical presuppositions (picture theories) on experience but not the self-reflexively transformative process of experiencing itself.

I'm unconvinced. Mostly because I don't quite see what you mean. We might start with the brute fact of bread, presumably, and work from that. No need for Plato. — Banno

All brute facts about things in the world are subjective, relative and contingent. Even so, they rely on idealizations. Where does the conceptual category of bread come from, if not an abstractive construction? Whether I cite Husserl and talk about the fact that the moment to moment perception of a spatial object reveals continuously changing sense of phenomena which we idolize as ‘this self-identically persisting object’, or the sense of bread within a Wittgensteinian language game, one is dealing with the contingent and relative. To stabilize it for self-reflective analysis is to idealize it. The only aspect of experience which ‘escapes’ ( because it is presupposed by) the changeable and relative is the temporalizing process itself ( the synthetic structure of pat, present and future). This ‘general’ origin is at the same time utterly particular, because it is not itself outside of time.

I have to admit I fall into the camp that tends to dismiss 1960s French philosophy as a postmodernist dead end. Not because I'm hysterical about it, but because I haven't been convinced of its intellectual worth. I say this as somebody who isn't afraid to engage deeply with obscure thinkers when necessary. So I would be genuinely interested to hear what it is you think made that time so creative, and I guess the second question is how you think about the balance "creativity" in philosophy against other desiderata such as having good arguments and evidence for your theories — FirecrystalScribe

I’m sure you would agree that in order to justify dismissing the intellectual worth a philosophy, you have to first demonstrate that you have read it effectively enough to be able to offer a detailed summary of it. I know firsthand how difficult this can be. As someone brought up in anglo-american culture, I had no exposure to continental writers up through my graduate school studies in psychology and treated them with enormous skepticism, believing that the only kind of ‘evidence worth its salt was that which scientific empiricism relied on. It was only later, on my own, that I introduced myself to contemporary Continental modes of thought through Heidegger’s Being and Time. It threw me for loop. I had never encountered a method thought so rigorous, dense and compressive in its unification of history and domains of culture. I went from Heidegger to Derrida, who it would have been impossible for me to understand without my prior background in Heidegger. In mastering Nietzsche and Husserl, I came to see how Heidegger, Derrida, Focault and Deleuze were all the heirs of Nietzsche and phenomenology ( as well as Marx and Freud). Most anglo-American philosophy only pays attention to Kant and, if one is lucky, Hegel, so they offer one no exposure to the influences or modes of thought I have mentioned.

When you say ‘evidence’ do you have in mind the match between theoretical prediction and observation? I assume that when you say you are not afraid to engage deeply with obscure thinkers, that this includes philosophers of science like Thomas Kuhn. I tend to find that those who prefer Popperian falsification over Kuhnian paradigm shifts not only are not convinced of the intellectual worth of 1960’s French philosophy, but also reject those thinkers who follow in the wake of Kuhn, but are themselves still a fair distance away from the radicality of the French poststructuralist writers. Therefore, it is probably a waste of time to directly debate the merits of writers like Foucault, Deleuze and Derrida when we may need to focus on a preliminary debate concerning realism , the realism-antirealism binary , and positions put forth by anglo-american writers that critique both realism and anti-realism. In the U.S., that latter group includes new materialist philosophers like Joseph Rouse and Karen Barad, and phenomenological-influenced cognitive science writers like Evan Thompson (who does not consider himself to be a postmodernist).
So I need to know who are the paragons of contemporary philosophy for you, so I can fine-turn my response to what you are familiar with.

My response: Those who jump too quickly to an answer to "what are things made of?" fall; not water, not fire. The doubters have it right: we can intelligibly ask what bread is made of, but not, at least amongst the presocratics, what everything is made of. It is a step too far to ask what things in general are made of. — Banno

Whether we like it or not, and whether we intend to or not, we cannot will ourselves to confine our method to the study of bread rather than the world in general without already presupposing as its condition of possibility a general and primordial origin, that which is always and for everyone the case, regardless of how relative, subjective and contingent the experience. Subjectivty , relativity and contingency only emerge as what they are due to this ‘ general’ and primordial origin.

I do think that something happened around the beginning of the 20th century, roughly the 1920s, possibly as a result of disillusionment from World War I, possibly because we hit a cognitive bottleneck. But it does seem that even though creative new philosophical ideas were still being invented, the academic and wider social community stopped digesting them. This, in turn, may have led most academic philosophers to stop trying to create "big theories" and focus instead on micro-analysis. After all, what's the point of putting forward a big new theory if so few people are going to read or understand it? — FirecrystalScribe

Big new philosophical theories came pouring out of Germany for 200 years, until they destroyed their intellectual infrastructure through world wars I and II. The torch of post-war European philosophy was passed to French thinkers , beginning with Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Lacan, Levi-Strauss and Levinas and culminating in the Parisian scene in the 1960’s and 70’s ( Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault, Nancy, Badiou, Ricouer). Paris in the 1960’s was a very fertile intellectual environment, comparable to Germany in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and nothing comparable to either of these milieus exists for philosophy anywhere in the world in the 21st century.The digestion of these French ideas by the general public has been slow, to say the least, with liberals and conservatives alike in hysterics over the ‘wokist’ and ‘postmodernist scourge’ they beleive is to blame for everything rotten in society.

It sounds like you’re talking about the kinds of general social know-how that allows us to navigate in interpersonal situations without having to have in-depth knowledge of other persons’ motives and beliefs. Ordering in a restaurant, driving in busy traffic, dancing the tango or strategizing against enemy soldiers are all examples of this skillful coping. Blame would seem to mark the limit of the anticipatory usefulness of such coping, the point where a more in-depth understanding of the other’s perspective becomes necessary. Deceit would not appear to trigger blame unless it could not be accounted for as an element of the social practice. Misdirection is an expected strategy in football and war, but not in cooperative ventures. The enemy general who pulls off a successful subterfuge ( D-day) is to be admired, whereas the friend who betrays one’s trust triggers rage and blame.

Another observation is that “being at cross purposes” seems to play a fairly significant role in dismissal. Some kind of communal short-circuit occurs. For example, if someone tries to exterminate Jews and another tries to stop them, they are not at cross-purposes in the deeper sense, because they are engaged in a common pursuit of practical execution. Similarly, when two football teams face off, they are not at cross-purposes given that they are both engaged in the same genus of activity, even though they are opposed within that genus.

“Writing off” or dismissal seems to occur when the actual genus of activity differs between two people. For example, if someone comes to TPF to advertise their newest invention, they will literally be dismissed by the moderators because they are not engaged in the requisite kind of activity. Or if a musician aims only to make money rather than art, then her fellow musicians will dismiss and ostracize her in a way that they wouldn’t dismiss or ostracize a technically inferior musician who possessed the proper aim. Or if one person is engaged in a practical activity such as anti-racism, and another is engaged in a speculative activity such as studying racial characteristics, they will tend to dismiss and oppose one another. Other examples include the philosopher and the sophist, or the pious and the charlatan. It would seem that in order for moral indignation to fully flower the genus of activity must differ subtly, and in such a way that the second genus could be reasonably mistaken for the first. — Leontiskos

I am thinking of situations where, as you say, two gensuses ( genera) differ subtly enough that the second can be reasonably mistaken for the first. Your characterization of such situations seems to assume that nothing stands in the way of our recognizing and properly interpreting the meaning of the second genus, save for circumstances where the other intends to mislead. But what I have in mind are genera informed by conceptual systems that are not readily recognized and understood. Do you not believe that there are ideas floating around us which we are not prepared to assimilate because they are too alien relative to our background concepts? In the situation where someone tries to exterminate Jews and another tries to stop them, can we really say that they are engaged in a common pursuit of practical execution before we understand WHY they are doing what they are doing f from their own perspective? Opponents in a football game can easily switch sides because the game is understood in the same way by all. But the rescuer and exterminator of jews are not on opposing sides of the same game. They are playing different games, and neither side’s position appears justifiable to the other.

The thing is, my point holds in an even broader sense than you are interpreting it. As long as one separates the reasoning process from the conclusions/beliefs that are held, and also recognizes correctness and incorrectness with respect to reasoning processes, then what I say holds. Thus to, "Understand the other's reasons," is to understand the reasoning process being used, and to deem it at least partially correct — Leontiskos

I don’t have any disagreement with this. What I have in mind are situations where the other is ‘not even wrong’, where the opponents are talking past one another, where it appears as though the other has ‘changed the subject’. This may seem like an inconsequential circumstance, easily remedied by a careful clarification of the substance of the topic. But I suggest that such gaps between parties in construal of the nature of the topic are responsible for the lions share of social conflict, because they are difficult to detect. Before we can separate the reasoning process from the beliefs that are held, we first have to be able to recognize the underlying perspective on the basis of which those beliefs get their sense. If we mistakenly assume we both are interpreting the meaning of the concepts seeding the reasoning process the same way, we will pre-emptively move to looking for faulty reasoning in the other rather than making sure we are actually talking about the same thing.

I see science as a product of philosophy and I believe philosophy's power lies in creating disciplines. I’m not religious but for the sake of the analogy: it’s as if God tried to become more human. I don’t mean to say science is inferior, but that it does very different things. Copying the standards of science to apply them to philosophy makes no sense to me because I don’t believe philosophy’s goal is to understand the world around us, but to provide various tools to do so. — Skalidris

Which philosophers are exemplary in this regard, in your opinion? The philosophers I am most influenced by provide tools (a method) which presents a world strikingly different from the one we may take for granted. For instance, Husserl discusses how the transcendental-phenomenological reduction discloses a "new field of being".

In the *Crisis of European Sciences* he describes the reduction as leading to "a complete personal transformation, comparable in the beginning to a religious conversion" .
In *Ideas I Husserl writes that the reduction opens up "a new way of experiencing the world" by bracketing all natural assumptions and focusing on the *how* of givenness rather than the *what*. He states:
*"The phenomenologically reduced perceptual experience is not just a method but an *existential shift*—what he elsewhere calls "the philosopher’s genuine rebirth" .

Wouldn’t it be predicable that if each fails to be persuaded to cross over to the other’s stance, they will also have a great deal of difficulty in accepting the logic behind the opposing view?
— Joshs

Only if they cannot rise above post hoc rationalization, where reasoning is irrelevant and it's only assertions that matter. Anyone who understands what valid reasoning is should be able to see how a position possesses validity, coherence, and rationale, even if they do not agree with the conclusions. Anyone who cannot do that is more interested in ideology and "material positions," rather than true reasoning — Leontiskos

Isnt there a danger of relying too heavily on the validity of the other’s reasoning and too little on the possibility that the other is making use of conceptual senses of meaning you are u familiar with? Don’t many situations of breakdown in communication result from a confusion between reasoning that lacks validity, coherence, and rationale, and valid reasoning anchored to unfamiliar concepts?

That's cool, and you very well may be right, that enactivism is the way forward, but our present biological understanding of organisms actually saves lives on a daily basis. I'm not casting shade on enactivism at all. I'm just saying it's got a ways to go to supplant the scientifically rooted view that presently prevails — frank

What exactly is this scientifically rooted view of biology you claim prevails?

Let me characterize the most recent thinking in biology as I understand it. The endosymbiotic theory of Lynn Margulis showed that eukaryotic cells arose through bacterial symbiosis, challenging the traditional gene-centric view of evolution and emphasizing cooperation over competition as a driving evolutionary force. This connects to several broader shifts in biology that overlap significantly with enactivism, post-Cartesian thought, and free energy principles:

Modern biology increasingly views organisms not as discrete individuals but as ‘holobionts’ - integrated communities of host organisms plus their microbiomes. This dissolves the classical boundary between self and environment, much like enactivism rejects the subject/object distinction. Your gut bacteria aren't just "in" you - they're part of your extended phenotype, affecting everything from mood to immune function.

Researchers now emphasize that biological properties emerge from dynamic interactions rather than being reducible to component parts. This mirrors enactivism's emphasis on cognition as enacted through organism-environment coupling rather than internal representation.

Biology has moved beyond genetic determinism toward understanding development as emerging from gene-environment interactions across multiple timescales. This aligns with enactivism's rejection of pre-given structures in favor of enacted meaning-making.

Karl Friston's free energy principle suggests all biological systems minimize surprise by maintaining their structural integrity through active inference. This provides a mathematical framework for understanding how organisms maintain their organization while coupling with environments - a core enactivist insight. The organism doesn't just adapt to a pre-given environment but actively shapes its niche while being shaped by it.

All these developments dissolve classical Cartesian dualities: mind/body, organism/environment, gene/culture, self/other. They point toward understanding life as fundamentally relational and processual rather than consisting of discrete, bounded entities.

The convergence suggests biology is moving toward what some call a "process ontology" where identity emerges from patterns of relationship rather than essential properties - a view that resonates across these philosophical and scientific frameworks.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

The better question to ask is, “How do we come to agree to disagree?” I want to say that if two people are to agree to disagree, then there must first be earnest dialogue, there must be honest irreconcilability, and each party must understand at least in part the reasons which prevent the other from agreeing. It is easy enough to see why such a thing is not possible where dialogue at all, much less earnest dialogue, is refused. — Leontiskos

Let’s say that two parties who embrace sharply opposing philosophical, political or religious positions are bought together to engage in earnest dialogue. Wouldn’t it be predicable that if each fails to be persuaded to cross over to the other’s stance, they will also have a great deal of difficulty in accepting the logic behind the opposing view? If I tell you that I understand the reasons for your disagreement with me, but in the same breath I find those reasons to be irrational and logically faulty, am I really understanding those reasons?

I was referencing the fact that we model the world and react to the model prior to reacting to the world, but more physiologically, the most powerful driver of emotion is dopamine. Activation of dopaminergic pathways starts within the organism, most fundamentally in architecture contained in DNA. — frank

Right. The idea that we only have indirect access to the world through internal representations is a cartesian, reductionist view of emotion, and stands in direct opposition to the enactivist claim that we don’t represent the world via internal schemes but are in direct contact with it by way of our patterns of activity and interaction.

I don't think there is much flesh connecting any philosophical outlook to an explanation for consciousness because there presently is no explanation for it. All we do is speculate. — frank

What matters isn’t whether you call it an explanation, the god’s eye truth or mere speculation, but what you can do with it. Today’s iron -clad scientific truth will be tomorrow’s superstition anyway, so what counts is how a perspective aids in guiding the understanding of oneself and others in real-life situations. There are an enormous variety of practical ways in which an activity-based view of affect can do this. Numerous theories of personality and psychotherapy are based on them.

↪Count Timothy von Icarus Or we could argue that for the most part emotions are the mind interacting with itself. Realizing that has the benefit of a kind of freedom. — frank

The key thing about affect is its character as change of disposition, as a being exposed to the world in a fresh way. That doesn’t seem to be adequately captured by the solipsistic connotations of a mind turning inward towards itself. Affect does the precise opposite, throwing us outside of ourselves by the way it affects us.

↪Joshs I talked to Pierre-Normand once about embodied consciousness. It's an interesting idea, but far from fleshed out enough to make assertions. You would want to frame it as a possibility that emotion can't be extricated from the organism-environment entity. That's certainly not the only way to view it. — frank

The relation between affect and cognition has been my thing for a long time, and I’ve collected so much ‘flesh’ for the enactivist view it would make Buffalo Bill proud.